How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Buffy the Vampire Slayer

My youngest son has a lot of ambitions, and he’s pretty good at achieving them. Very determined in quite a praiseworthy way when he’s aiming at living and studying for a year in London and gets waylaid at the last minute by ulcerative colitis that put him in the hospital with IVs pumping blood back into his nearly bloodless body, yet makes it to London the next year. It’s more like stubborn when his goal is to drag me kicking and screaming into 21^st-century popular culture.

I stopped watching television back in the late 1980s because I was a working (and going-to-school) single mom and needed to find time to write somehow without taking time away from my kids. I stopped keeping up with pop music earlier sometime in the *shudder* disco age. After I grew up enough to stop wearing bell-bottoms and mini-skirts, I stopped paying any attention to fashion. I’ve always been a person who danced to my own drum, one who lived in books and on paper, very introverted and introspective. And then I was a workaholic. So American popular culture passed me by.

My older two kids seem just fine with that. Of course Mom is just out of it and doesn’t know what’s cool. *eloquent shrug* But the youngest, who’s over twelve years younger than his brother and sister, decided somewhere along the road that it was his duty to bring me current with the world of movies, music, TV, celebrities, all the trivia that a normal American would just know.

This started when I had a demanding job running a combined campus and community women’s center at our local university. I was always understaffed and had to raise all the money for our programs myself. My son, Joseph, became my right-hand computer geek. When something went wrong with our computers, Joseph fixed it. When I needed our computers to do something that they couldn’t do, Joseph managed to get them to do it. When our website needed updating and I had no money to pay for IT, Joseph updated it and even redesigned it. He was a lifesaver, but he had a price.

For each of these jobs and others, I had to watch so much TV, animé, or video game with him. First, it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We went through all of his boxed DVDs, and I became a fan—Spike!!!—who watched the last couple of seasons as they were broadcast with him to my husband’s confusion and dismay. (Did I mention that my husband is like me? And that Joseph eventually talked him into going to a Communiversity class on feminist agency in Buffy the Vampire Slayer?) 

Once Buffy was covered, he insisted on Marmalade Boy, a popular Japanese animé adapted for TV from an even more popular manga. (Animé are Japanese animated films and TV series while manga are Japanese graphic novels/comic books, usually with outlandish premises like a boy turned into a girl or a girl who’s also a fox demon or something much more bizarre.) I would never have believed I could become fond of an animated TV romance about Japanese teenagers whose parents were divorcing and marrying each other—with English subtitles. Altogether, albeit it was during the time when Joseph was so very ill, we watched all 76 episodes of Marmalade Boy. I call that true motherly love myself.

Then, there was his insistence that I watch as he played Final Fantasy 10 all the way through for probably the seventh time so that I could see the “wonderful character arcs” and the “great storyline.” I did not ever take him up on his offer to use the controls. After that, there were lots of others, including Firefly, Dr. Who, Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog, and Glee.

Now, Joseph has moved back in with us for a while, and he’s already started—Orange Is the New Black and the Dr. Who audiodramas. I draw the line at American Horror Story, however. Stay tuned to see how this battle of wills plays out. (He whispers, “Hint: Joseph wins.” *evil laugh*)

Note: Blogger will still not allow me to post comments on The Stiletto Gang or my own blog (though I can post on other Blogger blogs). So I will respond to your comments on our Facebook page, so visit us there at https://www.facebook.com/stilettogang.

 
REPLIES TO COMMENTS:

I'm going to try responding to comments here since I know everyone isn't on Facebook--there are some people even more out of it than me it seems. :-)

Ramona, you--and Joseph--are right. buffy has great story and character arcs. And Spike! he inspired a whole sequence of my poems, "Coyote in Love." Some of my most popular poems with women.

Kristopher, yeah, Joseph's a pretty amazing young man. He just took a job teaching at Haskell Indian Nations University and made me the proudest mom in the world. I do like Orange is the New Black, but I'm drawing the line at American Horror Story, though I love Jessica Lange and Kathy Bates.

Katreader, yes. Buffy seriously rocks.

Sally, didn't you love the musical episode, "Once More With Feeling"?

Mary, Joseph and I have always shared tons of interests. He loves to write, to read mysteries and fantasy/sf, loved opera, has read and loved the classics I adore (and has taught them), loves to knit and bake. Consequently, it's natural that he'd want to share his interests with me. It's a fair trade--except forAmerican Horror Story.

One More Blog About Twilight

or  I Know, I Can't Believe We're Still Talking About It Either

by Bethany Maines

A friend of mine and I were comparing notes on the Twilight series, which she loved and I mildly enjoyed enough to make it through the first book and then wikipedia the plots of the others so I could find out what happened in the end.  Our discussion centered on the fact that much of the media portrays Bella as a passive, whiny person who contrasts poorly with the likes of Hermione, Buffy, Katniss or Leia.  My friend thought that since Bella didn’t have super powers that she would never compare well in any competition with Buffy et all.  I thought that while some of the media interpretation of her whininess is undeserved, that Bella, super powers or not, just isn’t much of a strong feminist role model.  The argument eventually concluded with, “Yeah, well, you know what’s feminist? Writing whatever you want and not having to censor yourself because feminists won’t like it.”  Oh, snap. Point and match. 

But I think there’s another reason that Bella isn’t an apples to apples comparison to Buffy, Hermione, or Leia.  Each of those three happened upon love while pursuing a greater cause.  They had epic events with some love.  But Bella flipped that around – she fell in love and then had a few epic events. And of those two scenario’s, which sounds more likely to happen to your average teenager?  I don’t wonder that Bella resonates with a generation ­– falling in love, getting depressed, getting back together, it’s all part and parcel of being a teen. 

But… I just don’t like the decisions that Bella made. As a kid I thought Eowyn (LoTR), Esther (Bible), and Leia (Star Wars) were awesome.  Smart, strong, sexy women with a rebellious streak and a thing for royalty (except for Leia, who of course, liked scruffy looking nerf herders).  My parents went out of their way to point out good role models because they wanted me to know that women could do whatever they wanted.  But what if I had wanted to be married at 18 to my on-again off-again boyfriend like Bella did?  That would not have gone over well with anyone in my family except for my really sexist grandmother. If my best friend in high-school had been Bella, I would have been fairly horrified at her decision making skills, and chalked it up to an a broken family and low self-esteem.

I know, I know, Twilight is just a fiction novel – not a how-to manual for life.  It’s a romantic story that features star-crossed true-love and a happy ending.  But if I ever have any offspring of the female persuasion I won’t be pointing out Bella; I’ll be pointing at Stephenie Meyer and saying, “Look how she wrote a book that touched the lives of millions of people – you can do that to!”  

Bethany Maines is the author of Bulletproof Mascara, Compact With the Devil and Supporting the Girls.  Catch up with her at www.bethanymaines.com or check out the new Carrie Mae youtube video.