There goes my hero... (Essay-type Thing)
While musing about my fic ideas for the upcoming Month of Buffy, I found myself bursting at the seams with Buffy-love. Here is my attempt to articulate the hows and whys of that.
For a long time, my love of Buffy the character went unnoticed by me. It was transparent-something that I never dwelled on.
And I think that this is because for me, the experience of watching BtVS involved identifying with Buffy as the center of the narrative, and so as a result she became the invisible conduit to my experience. I remember how it somewhat troubled me early on that in spite of the “feminist and proud” label I might as well be wearing on my head, the characters I was most drawn to were Spike and Angel (although I would argue that, in the case of Spike especially, their gender performances are of great interest to feminists). That is until I realized that I was seeing them through Buffy’s eyes.
Now let’s get it straight, I don’t personally identify with Buffy as in that she’s anything like me (were I molded from the stuff of Jossverse, I’d probably be some bizarre amalgam of Faith, Willow and Giles).
However, Buffy was the first heroic female icon that became imbedded in my consciousness. And this is important to me both politically and emotionally. Woman as Hero, much less Girl as Hero, is a very rare occurrence in the landscape of our cultural imaginary.
In 1975, a film theorist named Laura Mulvey rocked the world of academic media criticism when she published an article entitled, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she applied psychoanalytic theory to the experience of viewing Classical Hollywood cinema and argued (controversially) that these films structured the “Gaze” as male. She proposed that dominant cinema at large locked the spectator into a forced position of identifying with male characters, at the expense of the female characters’ full humanity and three-dimensionality. Female characters did not act- they were there as a function of spectacle: “to-be-looked-at.” In relationship to this paradigm, Buffy and her numerous appetites, foibles, follies, and triumphs are revolutionary.
Fast-forward a few decades and we have Buffy, a young woman, physically similar to the fetishized women on Mulvey’s silver screen, except that this girl acts; she wants, desires, saves the day, screws things up royally sometimes, and generally propels the narrative-it is hers.
Buffy is not perfect but she is powerful. She learns and grows. And she could kick your ass.
All the best heroes are flawed; it makes them human.
There are other, less nerdily worded reasons that I love Buffy. She’s funny. She loves her friends and her mom. She’s willing to sacrifice herself for the good of the world but don’t try and fuck with her shoes.
But in the end, the moments when I am most deeply drawn into my love of Buffy are when she’s kicking ass and taking names. I am a weirdo who almost never cries at movies or TV, but when women are getting empowered, the waterworks come out like nobody’s business. Documentaries about suffragettes are my kryptonite-that and the end of “the Gift,” or the montage in “Chosen” when all the potentials become Slayers. In the case of the second example, it is the Buffy voice-over that sends me over the edge, because for me her action in sharing her power was the perfect end to the series thematically and structurally. And it takes a hero not only to give like that but also to lead and to teach, which is what happens next in own personal Buffy fanon.
Naturally, some of this general sentiment and affinity has found its way into my fanfic (porny as much of it is, and as lousy as I am at writing action sequences). When I did my end of the year fic round-up, I discovered that I tend to write Buffy POV fic. Of course, the part that didn’t even occur to me until just now is that I have never written a BtVS fic that Buffy wasn’t in.
She’s my girl.
As for my shipping tendencies, I primarily ship Buffy with Spike and/or Faith. This is because I see them as her doubles/others-the characters most capable of challenging her and forcing her to grow. And they are strong enough for my girl. (No, it’s not just because JM and ED are the hotness!) They are dark where she is light and light where she is dark. Part of this also has to do with how I see relationships between people as being most interesting/fulfilling in their complexity and capacity for mutual growth. This goes for relationships between men and women, women and women, as well as men and men (which is why I ship Angel/Spike but that’s another story).
However, that’s just me. There are a million ways to ship (or not ship) in the ‘Verse, which brings me to why I love Buffy the show-because Buffy may be my hero, but she’s got friends. And all of the relationships on BtVS have the potential for some kind of meaningful exchange. ::resists quoting Joss and his B-Y-O-subtext tagline::
I’m using this icon against my rules-I have no idea who made it (credit is love!). But when I saw kita0610 using it, I had to snag it and, like her, put a row of question marks in the comment line because I want someone to tell me who made it. I want to shake her/his (cyber) hand, because it’s true…
There goes my Hero. Her name is Buffy.
For a long time, my love of Buffy the character went unnoticed by me. It was transparent-something that I never dwelled on.
And I think that this is because for me, the experience of watching BtVS involved identifying with Buffy as the center of the narrative, and so as a result she became the invisible conduit to my experience. I remember how it somewhat troubled me early on that in spite of the “feminist and proud” label I might as well be wearing on my head, the characters I was most drawn to were Spike and Angel (although I would argue that, in the case of Spike especially, their gender performances are of great interest to feminists). That is until I realized that I was seeing them through Buffy’s eyes.
Now let’s get it straight, I don’t personally identify with Buffy as in that she’s anything like me (were I molded from the stuff of Jossverse, I’d probably be some bizarre amalgam of Faith, Willow and Giles).
However, Buffy was the first heroic female icon that became imbedded in my consciousness. And this is important to me both politically and emotionally. Woman as Hero, much less Girl as Hero, is a very rare occurrence in the landscape of our cultural imaginary.
In 1975, a film theorist named Laura Mulvey rocked the world of academic media criticism when she published an article entitled, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which she applied psychoanalytic theory to the experience of viewing Classical Hollywood cinema and argued (controversially) that these films structured the “Gaze” as male. She proposed that dominant cinema at large locked the spectator into a forced position of identifying with male characters, at the expense of the female characters’ full humanity and three-dimensionality. Female characters did not act- they were there as a function of spectacle: “to-be-looked-at.” In relationship to this paradigm, Buffy and her numerous appetites, foibles, follies, and triumphs are revolutionary.
Fast-forward a few decades and we have Buffy, a young woman, physically similar to the fetishized women on Mulvey’s silver screen, except that this girl acts; she wants, desires, saves the day, screws things up royally sometimes, and generally propels the narrative-it is hers.
Buffy is not perfect but she is powerful. She learns and grows. And she could kick your ass.
All the best heroes are flawed; it makes them human.
There are other, less nerdily worded reasons that I love Buffy. She’s funny. She loves her friends and her mom. She’s willing to sacrifice herself for the good of the world but don’t try and fuck with her shoes.
But in the end, the moments when I am most deeply drawn into my love of Buffy are when she’s kicking ass and taking names. I am a weirdo who almost never cries at movies or TV, but when women are getting empowered, the waterworks come out like nobody’s business. Documentaries about suffragettes are my kryptonite-that and the end of “the Gift,” or the montage in “Chosen” when all the potentials become Slayers. In the case of the second example, it is the Buffy voice-over that sends me over the edge, because for me her action in sharing her power was the perfect end to the series thematically and structurally. And it takes a hero not only to give like that but also to lead and to teach, which is what happens next in own personal Buffy fanon.
Naturally, some of this general sentiment and affinity has found its way into my fanfic (porny as much of it is, and as lousy as I am at writing action sequences). When I did my end of the year fic round-up, I discovered that I tend to write Buffy POV fic. Of course, the part that didn’t even occur to me until just now is that I have never written a BtVS fic that Buffy wasn’t in.
She’s my girl.
As for my shipping tendencies, I primarily ship Buffy with Spike and/or Faith. This is because I see them as her doubles/others-the characters most capable of challenging her and forcing her to grow. And they are strong enough for my girl. (No, it’s not just because JM and ED are the hotness!) They are dark where she is light and light where she is dark. Part of this also has to do with how I see relationships between people as being most interesting/fulfilling in their complexity and capacity for mutual growth. This goes for relationships between men and women, women and women, as well as men and men (which is why I ship Angel/Spike but that’s another story).
However, that’s just me. There are a million ways to ship (or not ship) in the ‘Verse, which brings me to why I love Buffy the show-because Buffy may be my hero, but she’s got friends. And all of the relationships on BtVS have the potential for some kind of meaningful exchange. ::resists quoting Joss and his B-Y-O-subtext tagline::
I’m using this icon against my rules-I have no idea who made it (credit is love!). But when I saw kita0610 using it, I had to snag it and, like her, put a row of question marks in the comment line because I want someone to tell me who made it. I want to shake her/his (cyber) hand, because it’s true…
There goes my Hero. Her name is Buffy.