Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Details of the Snow

The 1992 movie, starring Kristy Swanson, was alternately criticized and appreciated for its “B-movie” status. Though dismissed by Whedon and many fans of the television show as less exceptional than the series, it set the stage: A blond high school cheerleader in Los Angeles discovers that she is “the Chosen One,” The Vampire Slayer. Under the tutelage of her Watcher, an older man qualified to train her in her slayer duties, she first resists, but eventually accepts her duty, learning to recognize and slay vampires, simultaneously alienating her popular friends, and eventually bringing the fight to a high school dance. Along the way, Merrick, her first Watcher, dies.

When the television series begins, Buffy Summers (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her newly divorced mother have relocated to fictional Sunnydale, California, north of Los Angeles. Having been kicked out of school for burning down the gymnasium (the story was changed slightly from the film), Buffy is hoping to leave her slaying behind and return to a “normal” life. However, she discovers in the first episode that Sunnydale is actually situated on a Hellmouth, where demonic energy is high and regularly interferes with the everyday lives of its inhabitants. Aided by her new Watcher, Rupert Giles, and a mysterious stranger named Angel, she is reabsorbed into her slayer life, particularly when her potential friends Willow and Xander become endangered. As the season unfolds, Buffy again finds herself labeled a “freak” by the popular students, but this time she has her band of outsiders, the self-proclaimed “Scoobies” (referring to the animated television show, Scooby-Doo), including Giles, Willow, and Xander.

In establishing this group, a supportive community that aids her calling, Buffy breaks from the traditions of both the slayer and the cinematic lone hero. As we later learn from slayers Kendra and Faith, the slayer is expected to fight alone. Buffy is at first still a young girl under the direction of the patriarchal Watcher's Council; they expect her to die young but maintain the line. She resists the council and succeeds where previous slayers failed. BtVS challenges hero genre conventions through similar means, using her nontraditional, communitarian methods. Over the course of seven seasons (144 episodes), Buffy graduates from high school; goes to college; loses her mother to a natural death; acquires a younger sister, Dawn, via mystical means; and saves the world many times.

Buffy has a series of genre-busting relationships, defying the usual depiction of teenage girls as romantic, mature, and/or purely sexual. Her first and perhaps most significant relationship is with Angel, the [Page 99]240-year-old “vampire with a soul.” Theirs is the storybook, star-crossed romance: He may keep his soul unless he experiences one moment where he ceases to be plagued by the horrible acts he committed as the soul-less Angelus. In Season 2, after he and Buffy consummate their relationship, his soul is mystically torn from his body, setting the stage for a demonically dramatized version of the “boyfriend-turned-jerk-after-sex.” He wreaks havoc before getting his soul back, 1 minute too late, forcing Buffy to slay him in order to save the world. Thus, their relationship is typical of the hero romances, where they often must sacrifice love for duty and the safety of those around them. Throughout her adventures, Buffy breaks with hero genre traditions by relying on the Scoobies, a cast of additional members, and eventually an entire “army” of slayers. This hero is not alone, and this is where her greatest strength lies— even saving her from death and keeping her committed as the slayer.

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