During my freshman year of college, I’d quietly sit in my twin XL bed or at my desk, headphones on, and stay up a few extra hours to binge Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My sleep schedule was anything but healthy. Those few hours I had between me and Buffy Summers and her Scooby Gang were a comfort to me, even if I probably should have been sleeping.
A few weeks into the semester, my roommate Megan discovered the show via a class analysis and in no time at all had caught up to my binge. It became like a race, a push and pull, waiting to see who could get to the end the fastest. We’d talk for endless hours about our favorite characters or our favorite episodes and moments. When Meg finally made it to The Body–maybe television’s best episode of all time but certainly the best episode of Buffy with very little disagreement among fans–I ordered ice cream from a delivery service near by, and we sat down together and watched it in her bed and cried for hours.
With anniversaries and milestones piling up for both Buffy and its possibly superior spinoff series Angel, I’ve been revisiting my favorite moments from both, and I find myself struck by a lot of the things that never really hit me before and some that certainly hit my stupid crying 18 year old self right at the time. It could all be summed up with a relatively simple sentence, and stop me if you’ve heard this one. Actually, don’t. I’m going to write about it anyway.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer made high school seem scary, and Angel made the real world even scarier, and somehow, as a college freshman, I found all of this comforting. I think I still do.
Buffy Summers is a 15 year old high school student by the time she’s called the be the Slayer, the one girl in all the world who is meant to rid the Earth of its supernatural demons. Every day spent at Sunnydale High shows Buffy and her gang of misfits another villain, but most of the time, they look just like everyone else, and they’re all dealing with something everyone understands.
A famous example of this is an episode from the very first season, “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” where a student played by Clea Duvall feels so invisible to all of her classmates that she literally turns invisible–proceeding to use that power to take revenge on those who hurt her. Maybe the metaphor is a bit too on-the-nose as compared to so many of the others, but it’s one that so many young people experience everyday. It’s a feeling of being powerless, like no one knows you even exist or that you have important thoughts or feelings.
The first time Buffy falls in love with strapping, sexy, smoldering vampire Angel and the two of them sleep together, he experiences a moment of true happiness (…ew) and returns to a centuries-old evil form of himself. It’s a sort of gross metaphor for the fact that sometimes you get the things you want from another person and those relationships don’t have a happy ending.
Even Buffy’s college years became a comfort for me in their metaphors and morals. In the show’s sixth season, Buffy clearly struggles with depression. It isn’t the kind that many television shows portray, where the girl’s friends notice immediately and “understand” and take action to make things better. It is a realistic portrayal of mental illness in a fantasy show.
It’s an all-consuming problem for our heroine, and it’s clear that, even on her good days, the slayer feels like she’s drowning. I’ve always had a much easier time understanding my own problems when I have a means of seeing them laid out in front of me, and to see someone so strong, even on a television show, go through something that I had felt? Everything started to make a little more sense.
One of the most powerful metaphors for me came from Angel, where Buffy’s high school adversary (and eventual friend) Cordelia Chase became a main staple of every episode. Cordelia, early in the series, receives the power of supernatural visions, the kind where she can see and experience the pain that someone else feels. Her initial viewing of these visions is that they are a curse to her, something she will painfully live with for the rest of her life. Soon, however, she realizes that her pain can lead to something good, and she uses those visions as a way to help the helpless by giving the information to Angel, who is tasked to end the suffering of another.
This is the one, above all, that tends to stick with me. Maybe I’m not getting visions and terrible physical pain, and maybe I can’t see the bad things that are happening to everyone all over the world, but I have pain. We all do. That doesn’t mean that I can’t take that pain and make it into something better. It’s one of the things that makes me strive for creativity. Taking the thing that you know and experience-like pain-and turning it into something better has always been a goal of mine.
Make the pain something new and good.Even in the silliest metaphors, I’ve found something comforting, and it’s maybe the thing I love the most about both Buffyverse shows. Everybody has demons, and high school may be hell. The real world is scary, but everyone, even those who aren’t the slayer, has the power to defeat those demons.
