Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Twenty-seven years ago today, BTVS aired on the Warner Brothers network. It was the only TV series I followed religiously, and I haven’t found one that interested me as much since then.

Unfortunately, the BTVS demographic has aged out, and Joss Whedon has fallen out of favor. Of the fifteen Buffy bookmarks in my collection, only one — a set of BTVS transcripts — is still active. The others are dead, for sale, or want to sell me bitcoin…

That doesn’t matter. I think I’ll start marathoning the series again this weekend.

Buffy at 25

Twenty-five years ago today, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series premiered on WB TV. It featured a strong story line and excellent cast. The fact that the show’s director, Joss Whedon, has pretty much had his personal reputation trashed in recent months should not detract from the fact that the show itself was pure gold. I see many today denigrating the way it presents its feminist message but you have to remember that while it does not live up to today’s standards, a quarter century ago it was ahead of its time. Many of the critics strike me as being those who would criticise Citizen Kane as being slow and clunky, with cinematographic tropes that are old hat, or those who say after watching one of Shakespeare’s plays What’s all the excitement about? It’s just a collection of old quotes.

The series resulted in a wide range of fan-generated products. Those still active include Buffy Between the Lines, an audio series imagining what happened to Buffy et al. during summer break,  and an entry at Forever Dreaming, which has transcripts of every episode of Buffy, but not of Angel. On a more serious note, Slayage is an academic journal devoted to Buffy studies, it’s now hosted by The Whedon Studies Association, and the original website link features articles on structured settlements finance. Sadly, many of the Buffy-associated links have rotted away ( Buffy-vs-Angel, Buffy Database), have been taken over by others (Buffy News is now a Bitcoin site…in German)  or are woefully out of date (BuffyGuide, a collection of news articles that ended in 2013).

So, what anime am I watching?

I have already done three TL;DR essays this season, on anime that didn’t hold my interest. Having pared down the list, I find that some of the ones I want to watch have a bad case of teh covid — production is paused for an unknown length of time.

While I am disappointed at the hiatuses, hiatusoi, hai… delays, I totally understand the need. Using Shirobako and Anime Runner as information sources, one can see that animators work in conditions that are ideal for spread of the virus, worse than the meatpacking industry. It’s not just that they are packed into their interconnected cubicles (more like MLB player lockers, really) , they work ungodly hours, get little sleep and worse nutrition. I’m surprised that some studio hasn’t come out and said “Half our staff has died, and the other half is on ventilators”. And Kyokyo Daha isn’t an approved anti-viral.

What that means, of course, is that the number of Spring anime that I’m actually watching watching has shrunk alarmingly. In fact, there’s only three: Bookworm, Villainess, and Tamayomi.

Ascendance of a Bookworm is the second season of one of my favorite anime/light novels. Now, Myne has gone from trying to survive in a sh*thole country (c’mon!, It’s a clone of the European Middle Ages, the definition of a place where the lives were like the people — nasty, brutish, and short) to trying to survive in the Byzantine politics of a Church/Nobility cultural intersection. It’s not just that she’s a commoner, it’s that she’s a commoner with Japanese cultural sensibilities.

My Next Life as a Villainess is based on a light novel series that I’m reading on J-Novel. Having been re-born in the body of a haughty, self-centered, mean-spirited noble in an otome game, Katarina (I don’t care how they spell it in the anime, it’s Kataria) fights to avoid her doom, and thereby shows the power of simply being a nice person. It helps that she’s a little dense (highly depleted uranium comes to mind, and the hashtag for the series is #Bakarina) and doesn’t see the impact of her actions on those around her. It also helps that she’s mentally no longer a noble, but instead her approach to the world is that of a commoner with Japanese cultural sensibilities.

Tamayomi is a classic Cute Girls Doing Cute Things…with Baseballs. Very muscular thighs, which you can easily see because they play wearing shorts, as if they were Australians. It’s not Big Windup by any means, but there’s just enough baseball in this baseball anime to make it worthwhile. It’s not American baseball by any means, it’s baseball with Japanese cultural sensibilities.

Meanwhile, I find myself filling in the time between avoiding covid specials with watching, or rewatching, such classics as the Monogatari series, Kotobuki, and, yeah, OK, Mayo Chiki. Not an anime, but I’ve just started a rewatch of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I’d forgotten how great the writing was.