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Buffy the Vampire Slayer
From Outcyclopedia, the free and queer encyclopedia. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an American television series loosely based on the 1992 movie of the same name. The show's title is often abbreviated by fans to Buffy or BtVS. Buffy the Vampire Slayer first aired in March 1997 on the Warner Brothers network; after five seasons it transferred to the United Paramount Network (UPN) for two more seasons, and the final episode aired in May 2003. The series was created by Joss Whedon, who also wrote the screenplay for the movie, and produced by Mutant Enemy Productions. The series follows the adventures of a young girl, Buffy Summers, chosen by fate to battle against the forces of evil, usually with the help of her Watcher and her loyal circle of misfit friends. In addition to its critical success and cult appeal, the show functions as a contemporary parable, using supernatural elements as metaphors for personal anxieties, particularly those associated with adolescence and young adulthood. Genesis, plot and formatSpoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow. The show's creator, Joss Whedon, has stated that one of his aims was to depart from the usual horror film formula. In a "traditional" horror film, a diminutive blonde girl would take a shortcut through a graveyard and either meet an unpleasant end, or be rescued by a handsome well-armed male hero. By casting that ostensibly "dumb blonde" as his heroine, and then turning that cliché on its head, Buffy presented a fresh paradigm which has been embraced by many as an emblem of female empowerment. In Whedon's narrative, Buffy's male friend Xander Harris is more likely to need rescuing. Buffy is more than capable of looking after herself, though her personal life is as confusing and painful as any teenage girl's. This combination of empowerment and empathy has earned Buffy a passionate following among fans. The show is set in the fictional California town of Sunnydale, whose suburban high school rests on the site of a "Hellmouth", a gateway between our world and the darker demon realms. The Hellmouth serves as a nexus for a wide variety of evil creatures and foul misdeeds. The most prominent monsters in the Buffy bestiary are vampires, who are presented in the show in a variety of ways, selectively following traditional myths, lore, and literary conventions. Buffy and her companions also fight a wide variety of demons, shape-shifters, ghosts, gods, trolls and zombies, and are so frequently called upon to save the world from annihilation (usually at least a couple of times a season) that they quickly find themselves, as the character Riley Finn puts it, "needing to know the plural of apocalypse". The mythology of the show is often inspired by traditional supernatural sagas and other cultural, fictional, and religious sources. In its seven-year run, the series also developed an extensive contemporary mythology of its own. The supernatural elements of the show almost always have a clear metaphorical or symbolic aspect. Buffy (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar) is "The Slayer", one in a long line of (often short-lived) young girls chosen by fate to battle the forces of darkness. This calling also mystically endows her with dramatically increased physical strength, endurance, agility, intuition, accelerated healing, and a limited degree of clairvoyance, usually in the form of prophetic dreams. Buffy fights under the direction of her "Watcher", Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), who begins the series as the high school's librarian. Giles is a member of a London-based order of mystic scholars, descended from the sorcerers who created the first Slayer thousands of years ago, who guide and train each new Slayer. Buffy is also assisted by several friends, who later in the series are nicknamed the "Scooby Gang" because of their distant resemblance to the teens in the Scooby Doo cartoons. Ironically, Gellar played one of the actual Scooby Gang, Daphne, in the movies Scooby Doo and Scooby Doo 2. The Scooby Gang battles demonic forces using a combination of physical combat (usually undertaken by Buffy), detective work, various forms of magic and sorcery (usually performed by Willow Rosenberg, whose magical prowess begins to blossom in the third season), and the extensive research of ancient and mystical texts (chiefly the preserve of Giles). The show is noteworthy in part for its agile blending of genres, including horror, martial arts, romance, melodrama, farce, and witty comic banter. Unlike the movie, which, for the most part, was poorly received (and practically disowned by its author, Whedon), the TV series achieved great popular and critical success, appreciated equally by middle-aged TV critics and its primarily teen/twentysomething audience. Many attribute the show's success to the smartly written scripts and inspired vision of Whedon. The show and characters inspire an unusually strong emotional connection with fans. Buffy has also been noted for taking artistic risks in both format and content. The 1999 episode "Hush" included 26 minutes without any spoken dialog, and received an Emmy Award nomination for best teleplay. The 2001 episode "The Body", which revolved around the death of Buffy's mother, Joyce Summers, was included in over 100 major critics' Ten Best lists that year. The fall 2001 musical episode "Once More, With Feeling" has also received many plaudits. Many Buffy stories are thinly-veiled metaphors for the anxieties and ordeals of adolescence or young adulthood. In "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" invisibility is used as a metaphor for being ignored. In "The Pack", Xander and other teens become possessed by hyena spirits, which allegorizes the pack mentality that often results from negative peer pressure. Perhaps the show's most celebrated metaphor occurs after Buffy and Angel consummate their love: Buffy loses her virginity, and Angel loses his soul. As Sarah Michelle Gellar puts it: "That's the ultimate metaphor. You sleep with a guy and he turns bad on you." The show has also garnered criticism for this and other ostensibly "puritanical" subtexts. The episode "Beer Bad", in particular, has aroused controversy among both fans and critics of the show for its apparent endorsement of conservative American norms for teenage behavior. Whedon has denied this charge. Rather than endorsing a particular moral stance, Whedon argues that the show is much more concerned with consequences and the role they play in gratifying the audience's emotional investment in the story - though this gratification is seldom a simple matter of wish fulfilment. While fans may joke about characters being punished for sex, Whedon has insisted that the show must earn its emotional moments; to this end, his characters are generally - often painfully - obliged to answer for their actions. For instance, when Buffy's friends resurrect her in season 6 after her death at the end of season 5, they accidentally conjure a demon as a sort of cosmic debt. In the long run, as a result of her resurrection, Buffy spends most of season 6 depressed; worse, because of the magical mojo wrought on the Slayer by Willow, The First Evil is able to wage war on the slayer lineage in season 7. Whedon has noted that it was always his desire to have a gay character on the show. As Buffy's main premise involved characters who were stereotyped as weak outsiders becoming strong and powerful, he initially wanted to have a gay male character. Eventually, however, it was decided that Willow would discover her sapphic destiny (at the very time she was awakening to her Wiccan superpowers), and in season four she began a romantic relationship with the character of Tara. This created some controversy in the media: the producers and the network received criticism, both from those opposed to gay characters on television, and from some pro-gay viewers who felt that the initial physical tepidness of the relationship, as well as the fact that the gay characters were both "witches", reinforced negative stereotypes. Others accused the writers of tokenism and sensationalism. The show's creative team insisted that their intent was not to sensationalize or exploit the gay relationship, and displays of physical affection between the two characters were introduced very slowly, eventually becoming a natural part of the show. The culmination of this conflict occurred with Tara's death at the end of season 6, which was a catalyst for Willow to turn evil, ultimately killing Tara's murderer and bringing the world to the brink of yet another apocalypse. Some fans bemoaned the death of the "best" lesbian relationship on TV, and others criticized what they viewed as a clichèd resolution to a topic TV rarely gifts with a happy ending: Tara's death, some argued, reiterated a long and hackneyed tradition in which doomed or damned lesbians are apparently punished for their "sins" by a brutal and untimely demise. Willow's subsequent relationship with another lesbian character, the potential Kennedy, may have been an attempt to defuse this criticism. Even before this development in the series, Buffy often presented gay themes in a positive manner. In the second season episode, "Phases," hulking campus jock Larry Blaisdell, who routinely sexually harasses the female students and bullies those male students who don't fit the macho image, is revealed to be gay, and not a werewolf as Buffy's "Scooby Gang" suspected. Posturings of the sort performed by Larry are in fact common among many closeted gay teens. Larry comes to terms with his sexuality and becomes a better and well-adjusted person as a result. In the second half of the two-part episode "Becoming," Buffy's mother learns of her role as the Slayer, and the conversation that follows is all too reminiscent of that which ensues when young gay people come out to their parents. Joyce Summers at first tries to convince her daughter that she only thinks she is a Vampire Slayer. Buffy counters by asking her mother how she could be blind to all the signs, "the fights, the weird happenings, all the times you had to wash blood out of my clothes - how could you not know something was going on?" Joyce even resorts to forbidding her daughter from being what she is, issuing the threat, "If you go out that door, don't even think of coming back." Eventually Mrs. Summers reconciles with her daughter, and comes to accept the life Buffy lives and the friends she has. She even accepts Willow's relationship with Tara. Sadly, relationships between parents and their gay children in the real world do not always work out as well. Whedon has stated that he is a fan of serialized fiction, and to this end each season, rather than being purely episodic, tends to follow a largely self-contained story arc, with its own unique villain. This "Big Bad" is often preceded by a "Little Bad", a minor villain introduced to throw viewers off-track. Buffy is credited (alongside the teen drama Dawson's Creek) with playing a key role in the success of the Warner Brothers television network in its early years, which begs the question of why the network dropped the popular television show. Whedon has often noted the impact that comic books have had on his work. He is currently writing for the Astonishing X-Men series and has credited X-Men character Kitty Pryde (aka "Shadowcat") as a significant influence on the character of Buffy. Works inspired by BuffyBuffy's perpetually tragic, doomed love for the vampire-with-a-soul, Angel, played by David Boreanaz was a recurrent theme in the first three seasons of the show. Angelus, as he was originally known, had his human soul restored by a gypsy curse, plaguing him with guilt over the two hundred years of murder and mayhem he had inflicted on a slew of innocent victims. The Angel character was so popular that a series featuring him, Angel, was spun off from Buffy; there were occasional "crossovers" between the two shows and these continued into the final season of Angel even though Buffy was no longer on the air. Angel and Buffy have both inspired several comic book adaptations, magazines, companion books, novelizations, video games, and a card game, as well as several spinoff proposals (including a cartoon series and a BBC drama centered around Giles), and countless websites, online discussion groups, and works of fan fiction. There have also been two soundtrack albums (Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Album and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Radio Sunnydale - Music from the TV Series), as well as a CD (and, in Europe, DVD single) of the "Once More, With Feeling" musical episode. The 2004 video game City of Heroes features a villainous gang called the "Hellions", inspired by monsters from the sixth season of Buffy. The show has inspired several academic books and essays, including Reading the Vampire Slayer, edited by Roz Kaveney, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy edited by James B. South. Academic courses known as "Buffy Studies" are being offered at an increasing number of universities. Fans of both Buffy and Angel often use the term "Buffyverse" to describe the rich universe the shows share. As well as these extracurricular offspring, Buffy has exerted a marked influence on TV and film, with shows such as Smallville and Charmed as well as movies such as The Faculty and Bring It On owing something in their verbal style and (in the first three instances) thematic concerns to the show. In addition, many Buffy alumni have gone on to write for or create other shows, some of which bear a striking resemblance to the outer reaches of the Buffyverse. Such Whedonesque endeavors include Tru Calling>, Wonderfalls, Still Life, and Jake 2.0. Moreover, the fall of 2003 saw a number of new shows going into production in the US that featured strong girls/young women forced to come to terms with some supernatural power or destiny while trying to maintain a normal life. These "post-Buffy" shows include the aforementioned Tru Calling and Wonderfalls, as well as Dead Like Me, Birds of Prey, and Joan of Arcadia. In the words of Bryan Fuller, the creator of Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls:
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Entry revised 12 January, 2005 using material from the Wikipedia article, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." All text is available for use under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (see Copyrights for details). DISCLAIMER: This is not an adult site, and does not contain any pornographic images or material. Any references to sex or other adult material or behavior is made from a purely academic standpoint. Images used on this site are credited whenever possible, and any whose copyright status is in dispute will be gladly removed or credited upon request. Not all persons listed on this site are or were openly homosexual, but reasonable conclusions about their sexuality may and has been made from diaries, letters, and other writings and accounts made by them and/or those who knew them. Several others are heterosexual and are included here for the impact, whether positive or negative, they have made on queer culture and history. |
