Vampire Veek
The thirst is real.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
This story was first published in March 2017.
Were republishing it in honor of Vultures Vampire Veek.
There are certain days that separate our lives into befores and afters.
For me, one of those days is March 10, 1997.
It opens on an empty high school at night.
The camera careens through the shadowy halls and classrooms, beneath neatly aligned desks.
The quiet is broken by a young couple breaking in.
Of course, its the woman youre worried about at first.
Shes a bundle of blonde anxiety, her eyes roving through the darkness.
The man teases her nerves.
Theres no one here, he assures her.
Shes actually a vampire, and hes dinner.
It crystallizes what madeBuffyso fresh 20 years ago and still fresh today.
And its Buffy, the wonderfully complex lead character, who communicates these ideas time and again.
Gods represent the gargantuan responsibility of grappling with adulthood and losing autonomy.
Doppelgangers are the roads you never traveled, but still think about at night.
In the world ofBuffy,words dont just matter, theyre everything.
The series excelled at using language as a form of empowerment and character development.
Take Buffys dynamic with the Watchers Council, which oversees every new slayer.
Conversations on the show were similarly evocative.
Take season fives Fool for Love.
Death is your art, Spike begins.
Where does it lead you?
Now you see thats the secret.
Its not the punch you didnt throw or the kicks you didnt land.
Every Slayer has a death wish.
Dialogue shifts between cutting to tender and back again.
Characters reveal more of themselves than theyd like in their clever quips and bitter comebacks.
It treasured playing with these tropes until these characters became full-fledged people.
Adulthood for Buffy was marked not by romantic entanglements, but her relationship with her own identity and destiny.
For many, Buffys journey was at its strongest during her years in high school.
The ugliness of adulthood was elegantly wrought over the course of these seasons.
Season six, perhaps the shows most divisive, sees Buffy return from the dead against her will.
None of this would work without Buffy herself.
As much as I love the series, its imperfections were never lost on me.
RewatchingBuffyas an adult is a study in how much Ive grown and what I expect of television today.
Its larger cultural influence is inarguable.
The show spawned a generation of leather-clad, crime-fighting virtuosos who delivered comebacks between roundhouse kicks.
Yet, Buffy was never merely a Strong Female Character.
She was too complex, too flawed, too human for that.
