Once More, With Feeling

So, I have been re-watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Alright, let’s get a few things out of the way right now. I rarely watch TV as it is being released. It is even more rare that I watch TV that isn’t, at minimum, sci-fi adjacent. Yes, I have a Star Wars Lego collection. Yes, I still have comic books in my mother’s basement. No, I don’t live there. Yes, my necklace has a robot on it.

As I was saying, I have been re-watching Buffy. My relationship with this show is interesting. I was starting high school when Buffy Summers transferred to Sunnydale. Like many of my friends of a similar age (and degree of nerdiness), I felt like I grew up with the Scoobies (Buffy and her demon-slaying friends). There has been more than one time in my life when I’ve said, “Well, it worked out for [insert Buffy character], it could work for me.” Of course, anyone who is familiar with any of Joss Whedon’s work knows that in two episodes it would stop working and we’d be back to square one. Only this time slightly closer to the Apocalypse and with less of an idea of how to stop it.

Prior to coming out (as an Athiest, LGBT person, progressive), I went on a Buffy hiatus for a while. Some of the topics were hitting too close to home and I wasn’t quite ready to deal with them. I just turned it off and pretended like if I just didn’t talk about it it would go away (cue Xander and Anya for I’ll Never Tell).

Willow, one of the constant members of the Scoobie gang, and I ended up coming out at roughly the same time. I didn’t watch those episodes until later on in life. What really struck me in re-watching the show is how much of a non-event Willow’s coming out was. Even when previous characters come back later on in the series and see their high school friend into girls, there is practically no dramatic response.

The most emotional reaction from a recent episode is something I think is worth taking note of. (OK, second most emotional reaction). But I don’t think the whole getting pissed-off, being taken over by a dark magic force and trying to destroy the world counts. I mean, it was a Tuesday...what else would you expect?

When a same-sex relationship rekindled in the series, a straight friend, a decade younger than the couple and a few months away from high school, literally jumped for joy. And I thought to myself, “Once again, Buffy shows us the world as it should be.”

Tyler Richard