Why I never shut up about Buffy the Vampire Slayer
The year was 1998, and at the tender age of five I was occasionally allowed to stay up past 10 p.m. on a Monday night to watch the latest episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my mom. Although doing so probably gave me nightmares, and watching giant, mind-controlling spider-things latch onto people’s necks (see: Season two “Bad Eggs”) probably caused some permanent damage to my imagination, Buffy time with my mom was something that I cherished deeply as a kid.
For those of us who watch a lot of television, we all have that one character that we simply fell in love with and continue to love, even long after we’ve left childhood. They are a character that we could relate to, or we could pretend to be when we wanted so badly to escape our own lives.
At the time that Buffy first aired, there wasn’t anything else like it on television. I was too young to understand how cool Scully was on The X-Files, and Sailor Moon was awesome but her cartoon existence was no match for the “real-life” Buffy Summers. I also watched Xena: The Warrior Princess as a kid, which was the closest I could compare to Buffy, but Xena wasn’t exactly relatable.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer presents the story of a teenage girl that is both a regular 16-year-old by day and a vampire slayer by night. Though vampires are her main reason for slaying, she also slays a variety of other monsters as different ones pop up in each episode. The series takes us through Buffy’s journey as a hero—she starts off feeling untouchable and a little naive, and, realizes as she faces a multitude of different battles that she’s barely scratched the surface on how much she needs to learn. She fights her battles with the help of her best friends, Xander and Willow, and her “Watcher,” Giles—these are the few people that know she’s the Slayer. Like Veronica Mars, each episode plays on two plots—the bigger, more apocalyptic battle that framed the whole season, and each individual battle that was fought by the end of each episode.
The series was a depository of carefully crafted metaphors for teen life. Like being a teenager, being the Slayer was a very lonely gig. She was, after all, the only slayer in the world (most of the time). Much of Buffy’s characterization consisted of the way she dealt with feeling alone.
I once wrote an essay on the topic during my undergrad (the highlight of my English degree)—part of my thesis sounded something like “In being the Slayer, Buffy slays both monsters and the demons of teen life.” One of the characteristics that made the show so great was that Buffy’s role as the Slayer coincided with regular teenage experiences. Before fighting a battle, she often stressed about school, friends, and dating.
Oftentimes, teenage milestones were paralleled with disaster. In season three, when her senior prom was threatened by a pack of Hellhounds, Buffy kills the beasts and goes to prom after, while still mending a broken heart from earlier in the series. At the end of season three, Buffy’s high school graduation happens alongside an apocalypse, and the graduation ceremony quite literally turns into a battle scene. Buffy Summers was a girl, just like me, that had problems that I could relate to. She also happened to be a vampire slayer. She embodied everything I wanted to be: strong, powerful, smart, and beautiful. True, she didn’t get good grades, but she could formulate a plan to stop an apocalypse like no other. She also slayed demons in killer outfits (no pun intended).
My parents separated when I was about the same age that I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy’s parents were divorced, too—she lived with her mom the same way that I did. As I grew up, I quickly understood that divorce was still very taboo at the time.
There were only a few children in my elementary school that had divorced parents, and everyone knew who they were. It was empowering for me to be able to relate to my favourite heroine on that level—especially when it seemed like every other family on TV was nuclear (ie. nobody on the Family Channel had divorced parents).
The summer after grade nine, I bought the full series on DVD and rediscovered my love for the show. This was a few years after the series ended and after Space stopped airing reruns. I spent the summer drunk on nostalgia; reviving my favourite childhood show made me feel like a kid again. The kicker was, Buffy wasn’t a kid’s show to begin with, so I related to her character more than ever at that time.
Adolescence can be a very isolating and lonely time. Like most people my age, I felt like I was the only person on the planet and that nobody could possibly understand what I was going through. I also grew up faster than I would have liked, and, like most teens, I felt a lot of heartbreak growing up. I was self-conscious and insecure, and I also suffered from panic attacks, which made me feel a little more isolated than I already did.
At the same time that I was dealing with a lot of internal angst, my relationship with my mom transitioned from an innocent mother-daughter childhood relationship to a love-hate mom-teenage-daughter relationship. Buffy’s mom, Joyce, didn’t know that Buffy was the Slayer until the end of season two, which resulted in a lot of misunderstanding between the two characters. When Buffy was escaping at night to save the world, Joyce thought she was in with the wrong crowd. When Buffy was stressed because she was about to face an apocalypse, Joyce assured her that being 16 always feels like the end of the world. It was a relationship that was reminiscent of a lot of relationships teenagers have with their parents. And like many young teens, Buffy felt she couldn’t reveal her identity to her mom because she was afraid the news might negatively affect Joyce—the scene where Buffy finally confesses to Joyce that she is the Slayer is often posited as a “coming out” scene.
During my undergrad I faced a whole other set of challenges, some similar to the ones that I faced in high school and others completely new. On those nights that I thought I could spontaneously combust into a burst of over-worked, over-stressed particles, I popped in a season of Buffy and watched her overcome her demons, both literally and figuratively. As dorky as it sounds, I imagined myself as a heroine with similar abilities and escaped into the fictional, Californian town of Sunnydale. The best part about taking comfort in the world of a vampire slayer is: no matter what happens or how bad things get, Buffy always wins.