Superheroing was meant to be lonely business, because if you’re the Chosen One, all the baddies are coming after you, and that means getting close to anyone puts them in danger.
#Once more with feeling full episode plus#
The set-up for world-savers used to be one hero, plus maybe a semi-disposable sidekick. Making it okay for heroes to have a Scooby Gang The fact that neither of them had a happy ending is actually a point in the show’s favor, when you think about it. Her relationships with the undead were pretty fraught – let’s not forget Angel turned evil after they had sex and tried to end the world, forcing her to kill him, while Spike developed an obsession with Buffy while still entirely soulless – but that’s what made them compelling. Buffy nabbed the idea of a tortured vampire and made first Angel and then Spike into teen pin-ups (yeah, twenty years ago we still bought magazines with pull-out posters inside). The groundwork for Buffy’s take on vamps was laid by Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, which featured a whole set of eloquent, tragic, sexy vampires, but those books weren’t aimed at teenagers. Because yeah, while vampires are generally pretty evil in the show, they’re not straightforwardly so – and there are ways to turn them into almost-acceptable romantic partners. You can argue about whether that’s a good thing or not in the comments, but Buffy The Vampire Slayer definitely changed the way we thought about vampires thanks to the doomed romance between Buffy and ensouled vampire Angel. Turning vampires into sexy bad boysĪnother pop culture phenomenon we almost certainly wouldn’t have had if it weren’t for Buffy? Twilight. Without Buffy, we’d never have had Alias, or Lost Girl, or Underworld, or Orphan Black, or Wolfblood, or the Resident Evil movies, or Jessica Jones, or Shadowhunters, or… you get the idea. Post-Buffy, we’ve seen a lot of other superheroines take centre stage in supernatural stories of their own. If it sounds like I’m being flippant, I promise I’m not: Buffy was a girl, unashamedly so, and far from that being a weakness, it was the source of her strength. And of course she could do it in heels, with impeccably applied lip gloss, without ever compromising her femininity. Of course someone who looked like Buffy could easily overpower a murderous supernatural creature three times her size. It didn’t seem unlikely that she’d win the fight any more. Buffy was the one who could fight back – she was the thing the monsters were afraid of, not the other way around.Īfter seven seasons of the show, though, the incongruity of seeing Sarah Michelle Gellar beating up monsters had turned into something else. It’s well established pop culture lore at this point, but Joss Whedon created the character as a response to seeing so many cute blonde girls killed off in horror movies. The hook of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, at least to begin with, was that Buffy was a pretty unlikely superheroine.
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