May 06, 2003 - 4:21 p.m.
I’ve been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer since my town first got The WB, towards the end of the first season. I’d read an article about the show when it first came out and became enthralled with it because Sarah Michelle Gellar, “Buffy”, was my favorite star of another show I’d enjoyed watching, Swan’s Crossing.
I loved BtVS because it was so incredibly poignant and hit close to home. I identified so easily with so many of the characters. They made sense to me and felt things I felt I had felt. (D’you follow that?) I graduated high school the year BtVS premiered, so a lot of the feelings the show brought up for me were still really fresh.
For a long time, I was the only person I knew who watched the show. It was a guilty pleasure of mine. Wampa was always working nights, leaving me home alone with basic cable as my only companion. (Yes, because I’m a lazy ass and hadn’t learned to drive at the time.) I relished the wickedly bad make up and costumes and entire low budget feel of the show. The writing was so great and so honest, it made the rest of the show completely believable. It was mine alone to treasure, like having a favorite restaurant that know one knows about. The food is all that much more delicious because no one else gets to share its greatness.
My favorite season will always be season three, season of The Mayor and BadFaith. I know so many people think the character of Faith is just stupid and brute, but I don’t care. I’ve never seen that. I get Faith. She’s the one character in all of the tv I’ve watched that utterly clicks with me. I physically ache with understanding for this fictional character. I wish they could just do a Faith Show with material from S3 and before. I’d watched that all day, every day. Especially if they could have the supporting characters be The Mayor, Clem and Skip.
I guess what I’m trying to get at here, is that I feel I’ve become emotionally invested in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer franchise. Which is what makes watching seasons 4, 5, 6, & 7 so horribly painful. The energy and life fled (running on winged feet) the show after S3. Nothing made sense from there on out. (There have been several episodes that stand out as shining beacons of GreatTV, but they are few and far between.) Nearly every scene in every episode of these last seasons has felt forced and written at gunpoint. None of the characters ring true with their previous season selves. Maybe I’m not prepared to allow the characters to grow and develop, that’s possible, too. The Funny has also turned up missing. We’ve been lucky to catch fleeting glimpses of The Funny in the post-S3 days, but that has made its absence all that much harder to face. One of the few good points I can find about the post-S3, is the costuming department seems to finally have been given a budget. So, yea fashion!
As I’m preparing for this part of my life to come to an end, I feel kind of fortunate to know that I’m not wholly devoted to it like I used to be. I’ve been cutting the emotional bonds that have strapped me to this show since Buffy’s first day of college. (Big eye-roll and a resounding “Whut-evah!”) Its kind of like watching a former friend slowly destroy their life. They did something bad to your friendship so much so that you don’t want to have anything to do with them, but you still care about their welfare. Little by little you’ve watched them whittle away at their quality of life until its little more than a cardboard box near the interstate.
The fact that I’m writing this at all just makes me feel like a pathetic soap opera fan mourning the loss of her favorite oft-married character. While I feel the sharp prick of the needle starting my twin ass-cheeked “Dork” tattoo stinging my skin, this is something that meant a great deal to me during the time I really started carving out my adult life. Its hard to let go, especially when I feel its been slipping away from me for a while.
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