afterlife of Buffy

In my Mythcon Guest of Honor speech last year, I had occasion to discuss Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Not sure what the moral or social status of that series was any more, I included the following defensive footnote:

Buffy has become a problematic text ever since series creator and occasional showrunner Joss Whedon's vaunted feminism turned out to be a sham, a cover for a typically entitled male egoistic masher. But the work is still there, and if we can read Tolkien and Lewis in disregard of the author, we can read Buffy.

So now here's an article updating the curious on the place of BtVS in popular culture today: it's being reclaimed, or appropriated, by fans and by a number of the secondary actors from the show with the silent consent of the absent Whedon.

The problem is, the article says, that the new material lacks the bite or frisson of the original. It's the result, as I've put it Shakespearantly in another context, of the fans loving the work not wisely but too well. I've noticed that in other cases. I've tried without success to explain to the purveyors of Tolkien adaptations and fan fiction that extend his created world that I'm interested in the created world because of the way that Tolkien wrote about it: I want to know what he had to say about it. Other writers are not Tolkien, and they carry neither his authority nor his interest. (Nor, as the recent Nature of Middle-earth reveals, was Tolkien himself always up to his own standards.)

The article does connect Whedon's hard-headed treatment of his characters with his abusive treatment of his cast, but I don't see that as necessarily required. You don't have to want to punish your actor to kill off her character, and if doing so for that reason is a weakness in the story, it'll show up in the result.

BtVS of course, as a recorded drama was never solely the creation of Joss Whedon, but was a collaboration of many writers, actors, and production personnel, and their work is worth preserving. But the testimony of the writers is that Whedon's hand was in everything they did, even if his name wasn't in the writing credits, and I think that some sort of critical overseeing of this kind is necessary for consistency of result in a many-authored creation.

I'm not even sure I want more of the show. I was rather dismayed at the time at the fall-off of quality in the last two seasons, and I would have favored merging the highlights from seasons 6 and 7 (the musical episode, the psychiatrist vampire) into season 5 and going out with a real bang.

So I'm afraid I have little interest in a soft-hearted podcast sequel show, even with the original cast and with Amber Benson as co-creator. As for the other podcast, the commentary show Buffering the Vampire Slayer, I read the transcripts of a couple of its episode commentaries and found that it said nothing that was worth my time to read, let alone worth the slog of listening through. Which is what I feel about most podcasts that aren't tightly scripted.

So, nice to know the show has been reclaimed, less interested in what's being done with it.