Why I like Buffy

When I still looked forward towards NaNoWriMo I wrote a couple of posts in advance. this one didn’t quite satisfy me. But now I know why I like Buffy. The German blogger USA erklärt (that’s explaining the USA) writes:

Dieses Blog geht von seiner Natur her selten auf andere Blogs ein, aber manchmal passieren dort schockierende Dinge, die man einfach nicht ignorieren kann. Dazu zählt das erschütternde Geständnis von Anke Gröner in der vergangenen Woche, dass sie noch nicht Buffy the Vampire Slayer gesehen hat, bekanntlich die intelligenteste TV-Serie in der Geschichte des Mediums. Ja, die Anke Gröner.

Well there is a renowned German blogger who wrote that she still hadn’t seen Buffy. And the author of “USA erklärt” posted something about an episode of Buffy. And he wrote that Buffy is “the most intelligent TV series in the history of this medium. There you are. I often wonder why I bother with thinking myself. For everybody who remains interested here’s my try:

I promised to post as soon as I could say why I like “Buffy – the Vampire Slayer” so much. that’s not the only TV series that I like; there even has been a time when I was addicted to sitcoms, especially “Roseanne”. I love Star Trek. I love it so much that I even watched “Voyager” and the not so inspired episodes of the new “Enterprise”-series. But when it came to Buffy I was really irritated. My husband then helped me getting it. He came into the living room while I was watching Buffy (one of the better scenes with Buffy, her mother and Spike). I told him what I was thinking about and he said:

“Maybe you like Buffy so much, because it’s just good.”

So I could just stop here. I don’t want to convince the whole world. But I was really irritating that I like a show that’s geared towards teenagers. (When my husband first met me he said I had the same taste in movies as a 14-year-old boy. Since then we have found that my taste is a little broader than that. (And he converted to Star Trek.)) So, after seeing the first three seasons of Buffy in non-chronological order I can say this:

• Even if most stories are about high school they don’t stay there.
• The show became more complex and interesting the longer it ran.
• There are stories longer than an episode.
• There’s great love of detail.
• Characters are multidimensional.
• Everything is possible. (Imagine finding a way to make plausible how the main character can die twice and come back again without losing me.)
• Everything has a twist. Love scenes turn funny, horror scenes turn funny, there even is a musical episode without getting ridiculous. (And yes, there are love scenes turning horrific too. And it’s seldom un-funny. But always suspenseful.)
• There are a lot of puns.
• There is a lot of symbolism but the stories function anyway.

Now you know why I never could do this type of thing in school. There is a lot of details but nothing really conclusive. So I come back to my first argument:

I’ve seen the show for four and a half times and I still can’t wait to see the next episode.

And I’ll have to wait for that a little since I have a date with my husband who likes his movies a little more artsy, we’re going to watch the second half of “Down by Law”. That’s how far you come when you have children (and when you’re sensible): You have to watch a movie in two installments. (And sometimes it just takes three days to translate your blog-post from German to English. Sorry.)

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