Thursday, August 13, 2009

Buffy vs. Firefly vs. Harry Potter

So I have gotten through half of season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to the show "Doppelgangland" where VampWillow is brought into Sunnydale from the alternate universe shown in "The Wish."

In this episode the insecure, fuzzy sweatered Willow of our world is contrasted with confident sexy VampWillow and it highlighted for me the reason why I still prefer Firefly.

Firefly is set in an adult world and Buffy is set in high school, and I'm just not into high school shenanigans. BtVS is about high school and insecurity, with demons and vampires as metaphors for growing up. I'm already grown up and don't want to have to go through that again.

I'm not sure why that's an issue for me since I love the Harry Potter books, which is set in a school too. I think with HP, it's in a book form, which allows for more exposition about the big themes, like human rights and the rights of sentient beings not to be subjugated because they are the "wrong" caste or "wrong" species.

With Buffy, since it's an action adventure teen TV show, there's not the same amount of room or format for that kind of discussion.

What I like about the DVDs is that I can fast forward through the fight scenes, and there is a fight scene, every episode, and fast forward through the Buffy/Angel angst scenes. In this way, I can watch an episode in about 30 to 35 minutes instead of the 45 minute run time. Pretty efficient.

The Firefly verse seems more real to me. The issues are more salient for me. I identify so much with Zoe: I'm married to a great guy, we have a happy marriage, no angst unlike the love triangle/quadrangle/dodecahedrons going on in Buffy, I'm a strong sexy woman, heck, I'm a woman of color (leaving aside the fact that the Firefly verse is supposed to be a merge of Chinese and US cultures, yet none of the main characters are of Asian descent).

I identify with Mal: I have a disparate group of people I'm supposed to be leading and trying to keep flying. However, with much, much less violence, not that I'm not tempted now and again.

Still, I'm enjoying Buffy and the teen angst certainly didn't stop me from devouring all the Twilight books.

1 comment:

Cassandra said...

Hi not sure you can compare Buffs and Firefly in a straightforward way. Buffs was something of its time. At least we got 7 seasons of that though unlike Firefly! Weep.