, with Feeling
Growing up and moving forward with ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’
The story my parents like to tell is that they started watching Buffy when they caught the season two finale when it aired in 1998. As any fan of the show will tell you, that two-part finale is one of the best Buffy episodes of all time, and my folks were immediately hooked, despite not having had any context for what they’d seen. They went back to the beginning to catch themselves up, and then tuned in every week until the show ended in 2003. Growing up, we would listen to the soundtrack of the musical episode in the car, because of course we had the CD. My mother, the more dedicated fan of the two, owned and has subsequently passed on to me: a Buffy poster signed by multiple cast members and writers, an aluminum Buffy lunchbox, and a plastic Vampire Slayer License that reads ID# — 666, Birth Date — 4/14/77, Expires — Daylight, Restrictions — Bite Me. I keep it in my wallet everywhere I go. Buffy the Vampire Slayer runs in the family.
I was 11 the first time I watched the show. These were the olden days — pre-Netflix — but that didn’t matter because we owned (and still own) the entire seven-season collection on DVD. Every morning before school I would wake up extra early, sneak downstairs, and cram in two 40-minute episodes before anyone else was awake.
It’s hard to overstate the impact Buffy has had on me. It’s without a doubt the TV show I’ve watched the most in my life. In the 11 years since 2010, I’ve watched and rewatched each of the 144 episodes more times than I can say out loud without being embarrassed. It’s also the show I push on every new friend that I make, like some sort of deranged drug dealer who only sells campy teen vampire television. When my family moved to a new state right before I started seventh grade, I convinced the first friends I made to watch Buffy with me. When, at 16, I fell in love with my best friend Rose, I convinced them to watch Buffy as well, and a year later we started dating — a relationship that would end up lasting three years. After I left for college, Buffy was the show Rose and I would watch together over the internet when we were sad about long distance being shitty. It was the show that helped me through my parents’ divorce in the winter of my freshman year at NYU. It was the show that I turned to for comfort as I was struggling to come to terms with my gender identity. And when Rose and I broke up in August of 2019, it was the show I suddenly couldn’t watch anymore.
At first glance, the premise of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is pretty simple — “going to high school already feels like fighting demons, what if those demons were literal.” It’s not even necessarily an original premise — on some level, all high school shows literalize and heighten the traumas of being a teenager through extended metaphor. Whether that metaphor is a murder mystery, a glee club, or the epic highs and lows of high school football, it doesn’t matter — television loves to grapple with the high school experience.
It stands to reason, then, that when I first watched the show at 11 years old some of those metaphors were going to go over my head. Having not gone to high school yet,(or experienced much of the world at all), my first time watching Buffy was a lot more about the cool action scenes and quippy dialogue than the emotional resonance of the writing. In the second season of the show, in a two-part episode titled “Surprise” and “Innocence,” Buffy and her love interest for the season, Angel (played respectively by Sarah Michelle Gellar and David Boreanez, who always have beautiful onscreen chemistry together), have sex for the first time. Up until this point Angel has been “a vampire with a soul,” cursed by magic plot justification to be one of the good guys. Then, in the last few minutes of “Surprise,” he bolts upright in bed, and the audience learns along with everyone else that the curse that gives him his soul is designed to be lifted the moment he experiences true happiness.
Metaphysics of whether sex = true happiness aside, the extended metaphor here is pretty clearly one about losing your virginity to someone who treats you differently afterwards — not exactly a metaphor aimed at preteens. There are plenty of these moments throughout Buffy’s run, when the show would, with varying degrees of success, engage with subject matter that I wasn’t emotionally equipped to handle during my first watch-through. One morning I snuck downstairs to discover a post-it note from my mother on top of the Season Four box, asking me to please skip a particular episode when I got to it. Surprisingly, I listened. The episode in question, “Where the Wild Things Are,” is about Buffy and her boyfriend Riley (Marc Blucas) getting possessed by a poltergeist that makes them fuck like rabbits through the entire episode, something I didn’t discover until years later on my fourth or fifth rewatch — I’d continued to skip over the episode out of habit on earlier rewatches.
More than being just about high school, Buffy is about adolescence and growing up, and so growing up alongside the characters, returning to those moments at different stages of becoming a person, has always been an emotional experience for me. The first time I remember being aware of this was when I rewatched the season three finale, “Graduation Day,” days before my own high school graduation. As Buffy and her friends prepared to leave the safety of childhood and go out into the world, so did I. As they stressed about colleges and finals, I was right there alongside them. What had once been an exciting, premonitory glimpse of what the future held was now a reflection of my own internal experience, projected onto the TV screen. The season ends with the gang blowing up the school with dynamite in order to kill the mayor, who has turned into a giant snake monster. This, too, was relatable — while the mayor of my town didn’t become a rampaging lizard demon, the terrifying, explosive, world-altering nature of graduating high school resonated with me deeply, and I found comfort in watching the characters I’d grown to love not only survive their final fight of the season, but pick up the pieces afterwards and move forward. It felt hopeful, to be able to look towards the future and see the potential for something good.
My parents told my sister and me they were getting divorced less than a year later. It wasn’t a total surprise — they’d spent the preceding months sleeping in separate rooms, and then, when that didn’t work, trading off living in a small rented apartment while the other person stayed at the house with my sister (and the dog). Nevertheless, the news felt like a cataclysmic blow to the stability of my world — the foundations of my life shook, and for a moment it seemed as if everything might come tumbling down. I felt more alone than I had ever felt before, and I reached out desperately for the two consistent sources of familiarity in my life: Rose and Buffy.
Rose and I watched a lot of TV shows together my freshman year (using the now-defunct rabb.it, rest in peace), but none more than Buffy. Rose had gone off to college the year before me, but they’d gone to Penn State, the university that sat in the center of my hometown of State College, Pennsylvania. That proximity had given us a sort of practice run at being long-distance, so by the time I ran off to New York we’d already figured out our favorite ways to handle the loneliness, with Buffy at the top of the list. Like all stupidly in love teenagers, we saw something of ourselves in each of the show’s romantic entanglements — first in the simple, pining love between Buffy and Angel, then in stable, almost-adult love that was Riley (despite Marc Blucas’s boring and widely unpopular performance), and then, eventually, in the complicated and messy love that Buffy and Spike (played by the impeccable James Marsters) held for each other. When my parents divorced, I retreated to the safety of those relationships, mine and Rose’s included. I began to watch the show again — sometimes with Rose, sometimes on my own — and used it to avoid thinking about the real world or any of its consequences.
This time around, I found that I empathized most with characters and moments I’d totally disregarded in previous watchthroughs. Season four is often considered one of the weaker seasons, as the show struggles to find its footing post-high school, but I felt reassured by its unassuredness. There’s something intimate and comforting about watching someone fight to feel less isolated in a much larger world. Of all the characters, it’s Buffy and her mentor Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) who find themselves most clearly in this position. Buffy is navigating college for the first time, and Giles is navigating life without his job as high school librarian (since the school got blown up a season earlier) or the library full of rambunctious vampire hunters, and both are left adrift, unsure of what to do without the stability of their tight-knit group. The answer, of course, is that there’s only one thing to do — keep moving forward. Buffy drops out of college and gets a job, while Giles picks himself up and finds purpose beyond his in loco parentis role in the group. I kept moving forward too, dropping out of Tisch Drama, going to therapy, and figuring out what exactly it means to be “a child of a broken household.”
I continued to find comfort in unexpected moments of the show. Season five introduces Dawn, played by Michelle Trachtenberg — a little sister for Buffy, miraculously magicked into her life. For a long time I hated Dawn as a character (and the fanbase generally agreed with me), but she, like my actual little sister, has grown on me as I’ve gotten older, and by the time of the divorce I was so desperate for welcoming family dynamics that I latched onto her without a second thought. Adding a sibling into the show brought a whole new range of places for Buffy to go, and season five capitalizes on the isolation Buffy and the others felt in season four by taking away Buffy’s last source of stability — her mother. When Joyce (Kristine Sutherland) dies in “The Body,” the music falls away and the camera holds on Buffy in one long, continuous shot as she realizes she is finally, for the first time, truly alone.
My mom isn’t dead, thankfully, but watching Buffy struggle to shoulder the burdens of running a household as they are suddenly foisted upon her struck a chord in me. It had been hard, especially in the early days after my parents split up, to shake the feeling that it fell on me to hold my splintering family together, especially with a younger sister who maybe wouldn’t talk to anyone about her feelings, or maybe was secretly the physical form of an interdimensional key that would allow a hell goddess to regain her full power.
Still, all things pass with time, and just as Buffy rediscovers how to function after the loss of her mom, so too did I learn how to live with separated parents, how to go to school for something that wasn’t musical theatre, and how to manage a long-distance relationship. At this point I was 19, and watching Buffy had become a fundamentally different experience for me. I was older than the characters were, at least in those first three-and-a-half seasons, and full of new experiences. Looking back at those early seasons felt almost like looking at a time capsule of my own life, getting a glimpse of who I’d been before moving, before college, before falling in love for the first time (sorry, Emily Zuris, but I don’t think my elementary school crush counts). It was startling to recognize how much I’d changed over eight years, and how much I’d changed even after only a year of college. More than anything, though, Buffy had become something I shared with Rose — something we would watch together when one of us was feeling down, something we could talk about together, or quote directly without even trying — something we both loved so deeply that in some ways, for me at least, it felt like it was just our thing, and nobody else’s.
Rose and I broke up the summer after my sophomore year. It was not a clean break. By the end, our relationship had become toxic and unsustainable, though it took me almost a year of therapy after the fact to figure out why and how. I was unfaithful — a word which here means “I’m still too ashamed of my actions to type out the word ‘cheated’” — I made my deteriorating mental health exclusively Rose’s problem to deal with (instead of my own, or my friends’, or a therapist’s), I became defensive when Rose (or anyone else) attempted to address my behavior, and I lashed out at the people closest to me, Rose especially, for things that could not possibly have been their fault, and certainly weren’t their responsibility to fix. Neither of us were any good at communicating our feelings (something I’ve since been informed is “very important” in a relationship), and our issues festered and grew beneath the surface, until one day the seal broke and they all came spilling out at once.
After the breakup I found new meaning in the word “isolation.” Rose was gone, along with five of my closest friends from home, who had all justifiably taken Rose’s side and decided to stop talking to me all at once. Stranded in my tiny hometown with no means of getting back to New York, I had nowhere to turn, and, for the first time in my life, my default source of comfort only made things worse. Everything reminded me of Rose that summer — it got to the point where I refused to go downtown out of fear of seeing them or one of my former friends — but nothing more so than Buffy. Too much of our relationship, of our friendship before that, had been infused into the show, and attempting to watch hurt just as much as recognizing that I no longer could.
I would be remiss not to briefly mention Joss Whedon, Buffy’s creator and current-day social pariah. In 2017, Joss’s ex-wife Kai Cole published a series of allegations against her former husband, accusing him of having multiple affairs on the set of Buffy and calling him “a hypocrite preaching feminist ideals.” Neither the first nor the last allegation of such nature to be levied (assorted cast and crew from various Joss projects have all made statements in the intervening years), the article tarnished Joss’s, and Buffy’s, reputation as a feminist cornerstone.
Each accusation broke, and continues to break, my heart. I don’t have too much love lost for Joss himself — his undeniable talent as a writer/director is dwarfed by the empathy I feel for the women he mistreated — but it was painful to see the effect his actions had on Buffy. It felt like a betrayal to have fallen in love with something created by someone who could do such terrible things — Joss’s actions had tainted the show, and robbed me of the uncomplicated safety I had found in watching. It’s a contradiction I still don’t know how to resolve — a contradiction that lots of people, with lots of tv shows (and books and movies and so on and so on) are still grappling with — and it continues to sit with me each time I return to Buffy. I also, eventually, saw in Joss’s behavior something of the way I’d treated Rose — a realization that was accompanied by a deep sense of disgust and self-loathing.
The fall after Rose and I broke up, I moved back to the city, found a new therapist, and began the slow, painstaking process of pulling my life back together and rebuilding myself into someone who wouldn’t make those same mistakes again, who wouldn’t ever treat anyone the way I could already recognize I’d treated Rose. Weeks passed, then months. I came out to my family as trans. I got accepted into my preferred study-abroad program, and made plans to spend the next semester in London studying Shakespeare. I carefully reconnected with some (not all) of the friends who’d cut me out the summer before, and made new friends in the classes I was taking. The next semester, I hopped on a plane to London and spent several weeks in the best mood I’d been in in months.
Then the pandemic hit, we were kicked out of the country, and without warning I found myself exactly where I’d been in August — stuck in a small town, alone with nobody to talk to, and feeling absolutely miserable about myself.
I lasted exactly two weeks into quarantine before I started watching Buffy again.
I binged the entire show in a week. That’s 144 episodes — NINETY-SIX HOURS of television — in seven days. I had it on during class, while I was doing homework, sometimes I had it on on my laptop while watching a different video on my phone. Even though I’d changed and grown each time I’d reapproached the show, the hiatus afforded to me by emotional trauma allowed me to fully realize how far I’d come since the days of sneaking downstairs at 7 a.m., and the weight of that realization hit me like a freight train hitting something really small, like a duck, or a tiny tiny person. I wept straight through the first three episodes, collected myself, and then broke down again when I got to S1E7, “Angel,” in which the audience discovers that the mysterious brooding character we’ve already met is a vampire (though 1996 found David Boreanaz at his twinkiest, so I have a hard time believing anyone was really surprised by the twist).
This time, at 21 years old and with a year-and-a-half of hard-earned personal growth behind me, I felt as if I was truly understanding what the show was about for the first time in my life. Returning to season two, and watching Buffy grieve as she blames herself for something that is not, and could not possibly be, her fault, hurt my heart in a way it hadn’t ever before. Knowing what comes next for the characters felt in a lot of ways like looking back at myself and knowing what came next for me. Growing up with Buffy meant growing up with Buffy and her friends, and now that I’m at least a little bit grown-up, I can look back at these characters and see exactly how they’ve shaped me and my experiences, and how my experiences have shaped how I’ve watched the show. Television characters are static — they don’t actually change between viewings — and yet the reflections of myself I see in them have never stopped moving.
I’m 22 as I write this, the same age as Buffy in the very last episode of the show. The series finale ends with the entire town of Sunnydale crumbling into the earth, and our heroes share a solemn moment before quipping their way offscreen. Buffy ends by radically destroying everything the characters find familiar, down to the literal ground they walked on, and so they’re left again with only one choice — the only choice anyone has, since we can’t ever go back to being who we used to be — keep moving forward.
