I had been reserving judgement on the Buffy reboot until it actually existed because before that all is rumour
but apparently it is back to Not Existing
so apparently now I have thoughts.
The thing with Buffy is:
We need a theme.
- It has to be a socially conscious theme.
One that reflects the students' growing awareness of...
...and involvement in the world around them.
That's the movie talking about naming the school dance, but compare any given season of Buffy.
We grow up, we notice new and stabbier problems, we realise we are the ones meant to deal with this, however unfair that seems.
And you get that pretty smoothly in the high school seasons, culminating with the theme and practice of Graduation Day.
But there are people who are less impressed with the development of the characters after that.
I read in a screenwriting book that you have to bear in mind that the vast majority of your viewers went to school, but only a majority of the writers room went to college.
The way society is set up for the past few generations we have this unifying experience of sitting in rooms where everyone has to be, being told a bunch of stuff that's meant to get us ready for the world outside school, with varying degrees of success.
But after that everyone's experience fragments, and the viewers reactions cannot be relied upon to come from a similar point of view.
Which, yeah but no but. A, could they ever? And B, Buffy did not spend overly much time in a classroom.
The core shared experience of the characters was
we have all this compulsory stuff to deal with that we're being told endlessly is Super Important
but now there are Things
which are actual life and death important
yet must be dealt with after and around school.
You can build out a lot of experiences from there. Like season six and the quest for more money. There is compulsory stuff, and now, also, Trauma. You somehow have to juggle both.
But part of what makes that heavy is the way even the closest support systems of the main characters simply do not acknowledge the life and death stuff. The trivial and transitory is compulsory, the being attacked by vampires is somehow not a problem anyone needed to prepare you for or admit is happening.
Relatable!
... no really, there is a very light metaphor skin on so much that is super relatable there.
And a lot of that is being prepared for the wrong things the wrong way. There's so much pressure on You, Yes You, Personally, Alone, doing things perfectly right first time Or Else End Of The World.
... exams must lead to the perfect start or life is wrecked forever, etc.
And this is all wrapped up in Patriarchy and how the Important tasks are *somehow* not the ones that Someone needs to do every single day or everyone dies. Home Ec is not a high status set of lessons despite the fact they're actual baseline essentials. You are not expected to make bank by doing the things that keep other people alive. Someone has to clean, cook, care, patrol every night, and hey, look who it is again.
Watchers get paid, Slayers get Called. Patriarchy at its finest, core to the metaphor.
(Making it Patrol, defense safety violence and therefore traditionally gendered and valued differently, is part of the defamiliarisation that makes Buffy work.)
And who can you go to for help?
Actually varies by season, and to some extent having the help crumble out from under you and growing to replace it is a core mechanic.
Parents, teachers, Watchers, government, all the support systems and institutions do what they can, demonstrate why they left the world the way the youngers find it, and crumble out of the way, while the protagonists grow to fill their roles.
Change that and you change the genre significantly.
Horror believes in the injury but not the hospital, in crime but not policing, in the threats but not defenses.
Coming of age stories see all that and say, our turn now.
So you put together all these constraints and you get the framework that the actual plots and characters build out on. You get Giles being slightly useless because he's an older in a story about growing up, you get schools that purport to help but become the source of threat, you get youngers that have to push back and take over.
So what do you do with all that
twenty years later
when you still have *Buffy* the vampire slayer?
It's easy enough to posit a world that still has vampires, but what does that say about *Buffy*? Yes, that the task is never ending, but also, why is someone still in school being Chosen to step up and help with it?
Buffy ended the show by sharing her power, so everyone that can stand up will stand up. Slayers all.
Equals, and within the framework of the show, as grown up as they are getting.
She went from the new kid in school to the general of an army.
What institutions did she set up after that?
How did they fail?
If they didn't fail, why do we have a plot?
And I think this is a fascinating set of questions, if Gen Z ask Gen X about them.
... I just had to look up the likely generation age ranges and apparently Gen Z are the ones who got born after Buffy started saving the world and are at youngest 14 now, so quite the age range there.
What world did they get born into, how did Buffy fail to fix it, who has she become in response to that, who can the youngers go to for help and Why does that fail in such a way we get plot?
Seems like we could look at the world and mine a rich seam for all of that, even if we focus primarily on gender.
If the text looks in the eye the race problems of the original we start getting proper interesting.
And I personally would start with the core concept of Slayer and the assumption that the ability to stake your problems will ever make them go away, but that's because I look at the genres I prefer to read watch listen to and tend to go But What If Completely A Different Thing.
... diplomatic solutions with non humans would change the baseline metaphor so much. but. So many years of BtVS and Angel presenting vampires and demons as basically people? The stabbing gets problematic.
The problem is all this either shifts Buffy into a different character with a non protagonist status, or leaves you running parallel coming of age and middle age stories. Which would be tricky! But the thing Giles had to reckon with in the background where the institution he gave his life to was... kind of sucktastic, and the person he thought he wanted to be in his early twenties turned out to just leave problems for the next generation, well, that's a start.
I think Buffy restarted right now could be fascinating.
But it could not be the same story. Writing the same story already makes it a different story. You would have to grapple with the differences.
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