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Watching Buffy for the First Time

Kay

So I’ve finally been getting around to watching Buffy — the original vampire obsession. Well, maybe not quite the original. I think that would be Dracula. All the feminists (and feminist dudes) I know have been telling me I’ll love it. So far, I’m only up to season two, but I’m really enjoying it. I’m kind of amazed that Stephenie Meyer says she’s never seen it (although maybe she has by now), since the whole “girl falls in love with a vampire” thing seems eerily reminiscent of her own work — with Buffy making a far more complicated character than Bella. Overall so far I’d say Buffy is Joss Whedon through and through, balancing camp and larger themes well.

Since I’m pretty sure this hasn’t happened at Feministe in a while, I’m officially declaring this open thread on the Buffy series. Have at it.

56 thoughts on Watching Buffy for the First Time

  1. Buffy is my favorite TV show. The end of season 2 is the best, imho. It’s just amazing.

    Some people will say that it’s not worth watching after season 3, but I personally loved season 5.

    I’d say more, but I hate to give anyone spoilers šŸ˜€

  2. Buffy is my favorite TV show. The end of season 2 is the best, imho. It’s just amazing.

    Some people will say that it’s not worth watching after season 3, but I personally loved season 5.

    I’d say more, but I hate to give anyone spoilers šŸ˜€

  3. I tended to roll my eyes a lot when I would see all these Buffy references in various gender discussions a couple years ago. From what I could discern, it all sounded very, well, soap opera-y and stupid, frankly.

    So about a year or two ago, after discovering Hulu and burning through some other series I always wanted to watch, a mix of boredom and academic interest prompted me to check out this whole Buffy phenomenon. I figured I could force myself to watch an episode or two so I could at least get a sense of what people were talking about. I figured if I watched it with a kind of social anthropologist’s perspective, I could tolerate a couple hours of idiocy.

    As a Buffy fan might have guessed, I got hooked, and ended up being annoyed that Hulu only posted the first three seasons of it. (I think the Willow doppelganger episode in season 3 is one of the classics of network series television.)

    And now I’ve just discovered my local library carries the remaining seasons ā€¦

  4. I missed out on so many great TV shows by not having cable as a teenager in the 90s. Lately I’ve been watching Daria. Buffy I’ve been saving for when I really have some time to waste.

    Also, Nosferatu so did the whole vampire thing before Buffy.

  5. I love Buffy so much. This love developed long ago before I had the wherewithal to act as a critical television consumer or even knew what a feminist lens was. Nowadays I’m happy that even oblivious me had good taste.

    On the other hand, my elder sister–who is fairly traditional and conservative–had previously refused to watch Buffy on the grounds that she thought it was stupid (having never seen an episode, of course). However, recently she’s watched and read all (ALL) the source material for Twilight, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries, so I’m making her watch Buffy. I am horrified to report that she keeps telling me that Buffy pales in comparison to The Vampire Diaries, providing further grounds for me to question our genetic link.

  6. Weird. My roommate and I just started watching Buffy for the first time too. The first season is, I think, the most problematic as far as presenting a real world-Sunnydale was an almost exclusively white/straight/wealthy town- but it got consistently better. That said, the feel of high school is unbearably realistic, and Whedon’s sly use of various monsters and baddies to lovingly parody the life-or-death feel of HS is both dramatically entertaining and consistently funny. (Also, Willow is one of my two or three favorite characters in television ever. The brainy and personally confused kid was basically the entirety of my friend circle in HS.)

  7. Buffy was on the air for five seasons. Anyone that tells you different is trying to break your heart.

  8. The whole series is available on Netflix Online now, for anyone interested.

    I think one of the best things about the show (even if the quality declined in later seasons) is its ability to keep the power with the female characters. Buffy, Willow, Anya and Tara had the supernatural powers while Giles and Xander hung back offering mostly advice and moral support. Buffy’s various love interests often fought alongside the other Scoobies, but they never took the spotlight.

  9. Too weird! I also started watching Buffy for the first time last week. Somewhere along the line I had gotten the impression that the series was just another gross LOOK!BoOBz!!! sort of thing (mainly because the only person I knew who watched it was a total ignorant womanizer). But since it is referenced so often on feminist blogs, I finally decided to give it a chance. So far, I am glad I did.

  11. Uh, I disagree re: the Buffy jumping the shark thing. Season six was mostly ehh, but Once More with Feeling was awesome (read: I bought the soundtrack when it came out), and season seven was really pretty good. The end of season seven was incredibly empowering, IMO.

    The Buffy rape scenes/the Willow-magic arc I could have done without.

  12. I love Buffy, all of it, from the teenagers just trying to make it through high school in one piece in Season 1 to the weary soldiers facing apocalypse in Season 7. It’s one of the few shows in which I truly identify with and love the main character, whose character development never ceases to amaze.

  13. I love Buffy, too – I did manage to eventually convince my little sister that if she liked Twilight, she’d like Buffy even better (as she was usually very strong, independent, and had no use for boys who tried to pull any kind of crap with her, so who knows why she liked Twilight even for as long as she did). She started watching Buffy, and within months the Twilight books were gathering dust, and by now we just laugh at them.

    I’m trying to decide whether or not I should also recommend True Blood to her – it’s not through a feminist lens from what I’ve seen so far (partway through season 2), but it’s high-quality and still sometimes brings up some interesting points. Although she’s still in high school so I wonder if she’s ready for a show that mature, but it’ll probably take her at least a year to finish Buffy, so maybe then…

  14. Oh, and since I have both seen Buffy and read the Twilight saga (out of curiousity about what they were about, then morbid curiousity about how far downhill they’d go), I have to say I’m not surprised at all that Meyer hasn’t seen Buffy. The “girl falls in love with vampire” trope is as old as the hills, and other than that there are NO parallels between the two.

  19. I love Buffy and count season 7 as my favorite (and am kinda surprised that so many people don’t like it very much). I also think Whedon wrote one of the best series finales ever, especially after experiencing considerable heartbreak and disappointment with Carter (X-Files) and Moore/Eick (Battlestar Galactica).

    I think I get to teach Intro to Women’s Studies again next spring, and look forward to using season 3’s Jekyll and Hyde episode to talk about abusive relationships/the cycle of violence. Whedon had a few missteps and all, but he did most things so well that it’s absolutely my favorite series of all time.

  20. I LOVE Buffy. I disagree with the people who said it dropped off in later seasons…my favorite seasons are probably 3-5, with the Willow-doppelganger (the 2nd one) being my favorite episode (<3<3<3), but I liked season 7 a lot too, and I even liked Dark Willow ok…my least favorite season was probably season 1, but it had a few good episodes. Season 2 had some good episodes too.

    (and add me to the list of people who wishes she had seen it…and Dark Angel…when she was a pre-teen and teen when they aired!)

    Have you ever seen Dark Angel? Its another campy late 90's show, and if you love Buffy, you would probably love Dark Angel just as much if not more. Cheesy dialogue, and no vampires, but an awesome show with bad-ass women (with lead character Max played by Jessica Alba).

  21. Yay, Buffy! I spent around 6 months watching it in the last year. I don’t have any channels it plays on, so after watching a couple my best friend recorded for me I bought all 7 series (which should all definitely be counted. Half of season 6 had me sitting with my WTF face on and season 7 produced some strange stuff, but all the seasons have awesome episodes.) on video from charity shops.

    I really think Anya is the most interesting character on the show. Her frankness is pretty eye-opening a whole lotta the time. Also she gets to sing a rock ballad about bunnies. Although there were very few characters I had no particular feelings towards.

  23. I loved Buffy. Actually, the 6th season was my favorite, in part, because I found it to be complex in terms of both gender dynamics and good/evil dichotomy compared to previous seasons. (And “Once More With Feeling” is one of my favorite episodes of any show, ever). It was certainly a dark season, but I was a bit surprised to find out that so many people dislike it.

  24. Buffy made me realize that I was a Wiccan lesbian! Wow, the visibility! I know, not a lot of black on the show, a little disappointing! I am not Wiccan anymore (more of a Witch) or a lesbian (I am bisexual/queer), I still love the show. I just saw D. Horrible, made by Joss Whedon, good in the sense it was fun, bad that is was kinda un-feminist.

  27. I’ve always kind of felt that Buffy started to fall off after they left high school because they lost the allegory that made the show so appealing in the first place: high school and hell aren’t so different. After that the show had the incredible strengths of great dialogue, consistently compelling characters, and (mostly) good actors but it could only sporadically recapture that fire it had in the first few seasons. Still, even at it’s lowest points Buffy outclasses the vast majority of what makes it onto television.

    Also, if theres anyone who doesn’t know, theres an actual Buffy season 8. Joss has been building support in the comics community for years and he actually managed to pull together the creative team and convince them to do an ongoing comic series for Dark Horse that he helms. The art could be a lot better, but the writing is there and wonderful. He did the same thing (through IDW) with Angel and finally closed off that unfinished story too. And, of course, his Firefly comics have been golden (and somehow managed to make Zoe even more interesting and tough than she had been before). I think a lot of it can be bought in trades these days too.

  28. Don’t listening to anyone else–Season 6 rocks hardcore!

    Yeah, after high school, the show kinda loses its footing—but upon viewing Season 4 again, I really enjoyed the college stuff. Unfortunately, they couldn’t sustain that metaphor.

    I dislike Seasons 5 and 7.

  29. @ William – thanks for mentioning this, because I LOVE the comics. I highly recommend them to anyone who hasn’t seen this.

    SPOILER — randomthingssoyoudontreadthisunlessyouwanttobutbuffytotallymakesoutnakedwithacuteslayermorerandomthings

    I hope that worked for anyone who didn’t want to know, but it made me happy that it occurred with a lead character. Unfortunate that it wasn’t on TV.

  30. I just started watching the series (and Angel) on IMDB/Netflix streaming this year, myself. Was such a mega-fan of the movie, and tv spin-offs of movies are always bad, why would I want to sully my memory of the perfection that was the movie with a knock-off tv show? Don’t recall exactly what changed, other than a decade of reading about how awesome Buffy is, with nary a mention of the movie. Realization that I’ll watch anything that Seth Green is in, regardless of how trivial the role. Enjoying Dollhouse thoroughly, and realizing anything anything Joss Whedon does is probably worth at least a watch. Reading over and over that it was the show, not the movie, that he felt worthy of putting his name on, etc.

    So, at one point, I asked the man, “Are we going to have to watch the TV Buffy now?” He didn’t want to take on a ten season commitment (not even an exaggeration when you include Angel), so I tried a couple eps on my own. And yeah, hooked quickly. Angel is even worse, have found myself forcing myself to catch up on the Buffys to match where I am in Angel for the crossovers. Up to Season 5 Buffy/Season 2 Angel now.

    But yes, Kristy Swanson beating off the baddies while Luke Perry, at the height of his fame, cowers and is barely better than useless is one of my absolute favorite movie moments.

    Crap, need to make sure he knows that James Marsters is one of my tv boyfriends now. Was delish on Torchwood, but I’m really loving where they’re taking Spike in season 5. I keep referring to stuff from the show so often, I’ll probably have to force him to watch at least a couple episodes, so my references to these characters and actors isn’t completely lost. Buffy will always be Kristi Swanson to me, but the other characters are definitely much more interesting in the series. (As much as I relate to Hilary Swank’s character’s saying that the most important environmental horrors are dirt and bugs, they were mainly forgettable as characters, just remembered for their lines.)

  31. Meh, “Girl falls in love with vampire” is hardly something Joss Whedon made up on his own.

    I’m very, well, meh about Buffy. I like the first two seasons a lot, but I felt extremely underwhelmed by the show’s attempts at being epic. The First Evil, for instance? Yawn. Still, I do love seasons one and two. And the musical.

  33. stonebiscuit: Meh, ā€œGirl falls in love with vampireā€ is hardly something Joss Whedon made up on his own.

    It might be worth noting that one of my pet peeves is when people romanticize Dracula and Lucy (Lucy? It’s been a year since I read the book) and their relationship. If you read Dracula, it’s pretty clear that Dracula essentially metaphorically drugs and rapes Lucy. I like that Buffy and Angel didn’t have that issue at all.

  34. PrettyAmiable, I think you mean Mina. I’m not sure if it is Fred Saberhagen in “The Dracula Tape” who first made that explicitly romantic, but that was the first time I saw it.

    I am going to agree with William that the show was an allegory about high school and so drops off after season 3 rather drastically, because they never found their feet for what it was about after that.

    Mind you, seasons 4-7 have some of the best individual episodes EVER, so it isn’t like it completely tanked. It just never had all cylinders clicking. (Also, sometime then it became a franchise and so there were lots of times when you could see them shying away from a bolder choice.)

    As someone mentioned above, though, the way seasons 2 and 3 especially parallel classic high school angst and stories in monster allegory is fantastic.

    The finale was perfectly fine, if not truly as epic as it could be. I think the reason it doesn’t fall into the black hole of Lost or BSG or X-Files is that Buffy never promised an epic mystery/plan arc to reveal and so didn’t have to half-ass an explanation the writers never bothered to care about.

  36. @Gaslight – I heart you!
    Buffy is one of my all time favorite shows! Tara is my dream wife. [My real wife and I have an agreement to share!]
    I once had a guy try to break into a rehearsal room I was in, inside an empty theatre department. I have no flight mechanism, sadly, but I did chase him off. Coming out of my (safely locked inside of) room – I took off after him at lightening speed screaming all the way, ‘I watch Buffy m-f’er – do NOT think I won’t kick your ******* ***!’
    Joss Whedon inspires me!

  37. I love Buffy! I own the DVD set, the omnibus comics, AND the season 8 comics. I have to say though, the TV show if FULL of race fail.

    As someone who watched the show on DVD only, I tend to prefer the later seasons. I’ve heard that this is something common in ppl who watched only DVD as opposed to ppl who watched it on TV.

  38. I’ll preface this by saying I watched buffy, all seven seasons, and saw seasons one through three twice. It was a good, enjoyable show. Season 3 and the early part of Season 4 – the Faith story arc – was quite good, and the episode where Faith switched her body with Buffy blew me away. 5 was good and heartwarming and the finale was a tearjerker, but not quite up to season 3. Six was odd; I had a love/hate relationship with it. The Willow/Tara story was heartbreaking. I disliked 7 except for the last two or three episodes. Sorry, but Buffy morphed into a tinpot dictator, and I was cheering Dawn on when she kicked Buffy out of the house! Dawn was the sleeper character, morphing from a silly kid-sister tag-along to a strong woman in her own right.

    That being said: I absolutely positively LOVED Firefly and Serenity.

    The thing I don’t understand is how much fawning there is over Whedon as if he’s some feminist hero. He’s a dude who is a *little* better than a lot of other dudes, but I think he found his “feminism” to get in the way of making money, and the latter won out. There’s a freakin hell of a lot of racism throughout Buffy, and in Firefly, Zoe was the only character of color AND actor of color (there was some speculation that Kayla – I think? was supposed to be Asian, but she was played by a white woman), and her submissive relationship to Mal, a white man, creeped me right out. Not to mention the wholesale of Chinese trappings of culture to lend an “exotic” air to many of the outer planets, and the spectacle of throwing out Chinese phrases at random, like that’s supposed to give some special cachet to their Angry Moments.

    Furthermore, Dollhouse was / is execrable. I watched about one and half seasons before I was so triggered by the rape imagery and the wipe-and-upload shit that I just had to stop. But then again, it is Fox. Eliza Dusku’s acting was pretty bad too, but I don’t think that’s her fault: she was hamstrung by a fucked up sexist premise and crappy scripts.

    Angel had its moments: Lorne and Fred come to mine, and Illyria is one of my favorite villains / anti-heroes. But overall, pretty much standard testosterone-fueled action fare. And the Conner / Cordelia incestuous really turned my stomach.

  40. Buffy is my all time favourite tv show. My brother got me watching it just after season 1 started and it was my happy show from then on. The angel spin-off started out kinda rubbish but really got good in the later seasons and I was devastated when Angel followed by Buffy got cancelled. Was stoked when the comic books came out continuing both series and have actually found the comics to be almost better than the tv show. I also love Firefly and Dollhouse and pretty much everything Joss Whedon does. Every now and then I get out the dvds and watch the entire buffy and angel seasons again. It takes forever but I become just as obsessed as I would with a show I’ve never seen before, I will never get sick of it.

  41. I enjoyed Buffy, but I watched it sporadically as reruns, so I never have a good sense of time or seasons with that show.

    That said, I’m not sure if I would watch it through again. I feel so blah about shows where large parts revolve around romantic relationships because…I’ve never been romantically attached, and I really don’t get the drama. When I first watched, I enjoyed it because of the humor and parody of horror tropes. I think it was good that I watched it the way I did since I didn’t need to care about the actual romance and ensuing drama (Willow’s love life never made any damn sense to me, and some of Buffy’s choices seemed like they were put there for the sake of not having to add a new character).

  42. I started watching Buffy (I rent the DVD’s -appropriately 90’s) recently at the recommendation of about a hunderd million feminist sites/blogs and a new friend I made. Oh, and Syfy is broadcasting Angel here, so that helped.

    I was in doubt whether to start season 6, I thought the final of season 5 was perfectly acceptable. But now I’m curious. So, I’ll go pick it up.

  43. Oh god, Dollhouse. I think making it through a season and a half is pretty impressive. I couldn’t make it through a single episode without (hours of) freaking the fuck out.

  45. @LC, it depends on which Dracula adaptation you’re looking at. The musical romanticizes both Lucy and Mina (even including a nude seduction scene with Lucy) and it irritates the hell out of me. Rape is not a seduction. Bah.

    Roxie: As someone who watched the show on DVD only, I tend to prefer the later seasons. Iā€™ve heard that this is something common in ppl who watched only DVD as opposed to ppl who watched it on TV.Ā Ā 

    I imagine there’s a couple of reasons for this. People who are watching it on DVD now are largely feminists who are aware of these issues. When I first watched Buffy, the first season was airing when I was in sixth grade. I wasn’t aware of anything then. But yeah. I think they started doing a little better with the slayerettes in season 7, but that’s not really sufficient, I agree. It could have been so much more.

  46. I like that Buffy and Angel didnā€™t have that issue at all.

    No, but doesn’t Spike attempt to rape her at some point?

    Anyway, “girl falls for vampire” isn’t necessarily Dracula-specific. A lot of the older vampire-or-vampire-like myths involve the monsters secuding their victims, whether male or female. The Lost Boys involves a boy falling for a half-vampire, who is with and presumably fell for a vampire at some point. Maybe Buffy was the first to adapt the Beauty and the Beast motif to the degree that the human and the vampire actually fall in honest-to-goodness love, but this is otherwise not new.

  47. I still haven’t managed to get into Buffy, but I plan on trying soon. Now that it’s available on the Netflix instant queue, it’s easy to do so!

    I did, however, finally give in and watched Firefly. LOVED IT. Highly recommended if you haven’t already seen it.

  48. stonebiscuit: No, but doesnā€™t Spike attempt to rape her at some point?

    Oh, I’m sorry. I meant the relationship between Buffy and Angel the characters – not the entire shows themselves. I mention the rape scenes in my comment at 11.

  49. I actually love the whole show. The funny metaphors of the early seasons, epic moments of season 4-5 (the dream episode is my favorite).

    Much hated season 6. I actually stopped watching first half of it because it was hitting too close home at the time, later I did and is probably one of my favorite parts of the whole series, topped by Once more with feeling.

    I like Buffy as a character mainly because she is a character who is smart, resourceful and strong while not being a “geek”. Nothing wrong with being a geek mind you, but it is refreshing to see that it doesn’t have to be one or another when you are a woman.

  50. I too, am in the midst of watching Buffy for the first time and, OMG, I’m in love. It’s a good mix of camp and drama, and while it isn’t perfect, I feel like that’s actually a good thing. Life isn’t perfect, nobody is perfect, so why should Buffy and her show be perfect? When so many shows have only one strong woman, if any, it’s nice to see a show full of them. Besides, I think “Hush”, “Once More, With Feeling” and “Tabula Rasa” are all freaking GENIUS.

    It’s painful how whitewashed the show is, though. I mean, com’on, Sunnydale is in California. (Plus, has anyone else noticed that just about any time a black man shows up in a Whedon show, he’s guaranteed to be a bad guy? That really bugs me.)

  51. I have trouble taking Whedon’s feminist cred seriously after his Astonishing X-Men run that centered on Emma Frost as a psychic train wreck of a fetish object and resolved 30 years of sexual tension between Peter and Kitty only to stuff her in a fridge. Simultaneously in Runaways, he smashed through Vaughn’s complex relationship development in a single issue that gendered Xavin and had Nico inexplicably tortured.

    But hey, Firefly.

  53. @PrettyAmiable – now I have to find the musical Dracula. šŸ™‚

    I am curious about this “the later seasons are better than the earlier on DVD” because I always found the failing of the later seasons to be that they didn’t hold up as season-long arcs. (I remember 4 does, but 5 loses its way; 6 is a wasteland of missed opportunities, with only the set up through the musical and the last few episodes working; and 7 quickly derails from what could be an awesome discussion of the nature of power and uniqueness to lots of Buffy whining. Of course, that’s my memory and now I am curious if watching it on DVD will reveal something new.)

  54. My love of the Buffyverse came of ridicule. On paper it reads like a preposterous premise and I remember razzing my friends for even mentioning it publicly. That is until I happen to be sat down in front of the television during one of the mid-series 3 episodes. I promptly shut up. It had everything I like in a series: Strong female characters, snappy dialouge, great fight scenes, and sci-fi goofiness. And Cordelia Chase, despite her prom queen superiority was deliciously prickly and snarktastic. It wasn’t long until I was watching both Buffy and Angel religiously.

    I fully admit that I came to like Angel better as a series after a while, but I think the characters and the themes both series played with were handled with more cleverness and insight than is approached on television very often.

  55. I loved Buffy with an unholy passion in the late 90s. I wrote reams of fanfic.

    I identified with Giles and Willow and Joyce. I had a daughter teetering on the brink of adolescence and jr. high was more hell than Sunnydale ever dreamed of being.

    Buffy was oddly reassuring in the first three seasons. Of course, it said. Of course High school is hell. Of course her first breakup will create a monster. Of course her nice boyfriend is a werewolf. Of course the nastiest people aren’t the ones who drink your blood, they’re the popular clique. Of course. Of course. Of course.

    The later arcs got problematic in the watching, since the WB went off the air, so we were a little sporadic.

    Willow and Tara helped my daughter come out of the closet. And they may be part of the reason our household is pagan today.

    My favorites were the minor characters. Ethan Rayne. Andrew. (and we will not speak of the geeky Xandrew fic) Caleb. Oz. Oh man, Oz.

    There were problems. There are always problems. Bisexual erasure and other things. But on the whole, a watchable, entertaining show that made me think and talk and got me writing again after a dozen year hiatus.

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