Friday, July 18, 2008

blogging buffy: the beginning

I'm slowly making my way through all seven seasons of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. I say slowly, and I mean it. I borrowed these a year ago, and have only now started watching them (hey, I kind of don't watch TV or movies during the school year). Also, another reason why I'm moving so slowly is that I watch an episode, turn away or do the dishes during the slaying scenes, and then take a little while to recover from it. I know, lame.

But I really am not good with gore, violence, the supernatural, etc. Which is weird, because I love action movies. But gun violence is too quick for me to register. The awesome part about science fiction is that phasers are not even like, real. Blast and incineration! Blast and a weird black scorch mark! Something like that. But anything involving ghosts, the undead, vampires, etc.--freaks the hell out of me. And yet, I'm watching Buffy. It's just too clever, and I can't not have this conversational currency with all of my best friends. I swear, this is the show that all the smartest, smug-est kids at the annual meeting conferences watch. This, and Battlestar Galactica, which I also haven't watched.

So, I have a crush on Xander, which Amber has told me is misplaced because he ends up being a douchebag who is responsible for Angel's death. Angel dies?! I thought he had a whole spin-off show. I am sort of enjoying the Buffy-Angel smoldering, because while I never got that whole bad-boy/vampire complex some women have, I kind of have a soft spot for the tortured soul emo boy. Willow rocks, of course. Buffy is kick-ass, but why is she so dumb? I would be pretty impressed if she also rocked French in addition to slayerage. Giles at first gave me the creeps, but now he is so charming with Miss Calendar. And I vaguely recall from watching that musical episode that Spike ends up being a good vampire who falls in love with Buffy, although right now he's just a really scary asshole with the ego the size of Texas, and has just killed The Anointed One. The Anointed One creeped the hell out of me anyway, since small beautiful but evil children are just fucking scary (cough Turn of the Screw cough The Others cough Poltergeist cough).

Anyway, I'm somewhere in the middle of disc one of season two. I will blog my reflections as they become more informed, and you can then tell me how incredibly late I am on the Buffy train and hopefully not spoil too much my very slowly accumulating insights and discoveries.