Mommy Dearest, Sunnydale style
(originally posted in response to some fb, but I thought it deserved a post of its own.)
Buffy as a parent, regardless of who she's paired with, is not an easy sell, nor everybody's cuppa. For every reader who loves the idea, there's another who hates it. And Ghod knows there's enough crappy babyfic out there to float a battleship. Some while back I wrote an essay about babyfic in general, and concluded that for many writers and readers, giving a couple a child is a symbolic device intended to validate the rightness of the pairing. Which is well and good as far as it goes, but it only goes so far, particularly for readers who aren't fans of that pairing. But I don't think that every story with children is it is doomed to follow that pattern.
I decided a while back that if I was going to follow the characters into adulthood, I didn't want to have Buffy's problems at twenty-seven (which I think she is in this snippet), or forty-seven, to be the same ones she had at seventeen. One of the strengths of the show, I think, was that it started out with that underlying "high school is hell" metaphor, which provided a thematic underpinning for the first three seasons. After they graduated, the show kind of lost that. Not that there weren't metaphors in the later seasons, but they weren't a consistent, unifying force any longer, and I think that lack of direction really showed.
One of the main conflicts of the show was between Buffy's desire for a normal life and her duty as the Slayer. She was the Slayer with friends and family, with ties to the mundane world. That, too, became less of an issue as the series progressed, and I note that the comics seem to have dropped it altogether; Comic!Buffy no longer has this conflict because she no longer has any mundane ties. She's a full-time Slayer, living in a secret headquarters. Her friends are all superheroes too, her family is dead or estranged, and she has little or no outside social life.
I wanted my Buffy to achieve some kind of balance between the mundane and supernatural aspects of her life, but I didn't want to go so far as to eliminate that conflict entirely - in either direction. Show!Buffy was a superhero and Everygirl; I wanted to write about an adult Buffy who's a superhero and Everywoman, in a scenario in which the conflicts of adulthood could ground the monster metaphors in the same way that adolescent conflicts grounded them in the show. Which meant a Buffy with a day job, a relationship, and, eventually, a family. The conflicts between work and family which many women struggle with are darn near tailor-made for grounding those metaphors. My Buffy's children really are little monsters.
There's also a lot of other stuff I wanted to play with - on the show, adults are usually either clueless or corrupt. So what happens when the adolescent characters become adults? Plus motherhood isn't portrayed as an attractive proposition in the Jossverse. Mothers are usually either absent or ineffectual (Mrs. Rosenberg, Mrs. Harris, Joyce). At best, they're sacrifices on the altars of their children (Buffy-as-faux-mom-to-Dawn, Darla, Anne Pratt.) Let's not even talk about Cordelia's multiple demonic pregnancies.
And yet... the majority of women are mothers. The implication that adult, sexually active women can't be heroes, only sacrifices, is a peculiar piece of subtext for a supposedly feminist show. It's not solely a Jossverse phenomenon - there's a huge tradition of coming-of-age stories in Western fantasy/horror, but very few being-of-age stories. When characters of either sex achieve adulthood and start families, they're generally shuffled offstage in favor of the next generation of angst-ridden teens. (There are a few exceptions, like The Incredibles or Barbara Hambly's Dragon Knight series. What little I know about SPN makes me think that perhaps it's another example, but I'm not certain if Winchester Sr. is alive or only shows up in flashbacks.) As a culture, we revere parenthood, but we don't seem to know what to do with it in popular fiction.
There's also the simple fact that it's often harder to work children into an adventure story where the protagonists are adults than it is to writer an all-kid adventure or an all-adult adventure. And that it's harder for many writers to write convincing children, period. Still, those are technical problems, and there are ways to overcome technical problems if one's inclined to do so. I don't know if I'll ever have time to write extensively in the later decades of my series timeline. So far, I've only done vignettes, though I do have ideas for several longer and more serious pieces. And I really, really have to get my ass in gear and finish POM. But I like the idea of the characters growing up in more ways than just getting older. While I know it's not something that a lot of readers will be interested in, it seems to me that there's some little-explored fictional territory to be plumbed with a family that slays together.
Buffy as a parent, regardless of who she's paired with, is not an easy sell, nor everybody's cuppa. For every reader who loves the idea, there's another who hates it. And Ghod knows there's enough crappy babyfic out there to float a battleship. Some while back I wrote an essay about babyfic in general, and concluded that for many writers and readers, giving a couple a child is a symbolic device intended to validate the rightness of the pairing. Which is well and good as far as it goes, but it only goes so far, particularly for readers who aren't fans of that pairing. But I don't think that every story with children is it is doomed to follow that pattern.
I decided a while back that if I was going to follow the characters into adulthood, I didn't want to have Buffy's problems at twenty-seven (which I think she is in this snippet), or forty-seven, to be the same ones she had at seventeen. One of the strengths of the show, I think, was that it started out with that underlying "high school is hell" metaphor, which provided a thematic underpinning for the first three seasons. After they graduated, the show kind of lost that. Not that there weren't metaphors in the later seasons, but they weren't a consistent, unifying force any longer, and I think that lack of direction really showed.
One of the main conflicts of the show was between Buffy's desire for a normal life and her duty as the Slayer. She was the Slayer with friends and family, with ties to the mundane world. That, too, became less of an issue as the series progressed, and I note that the comics seem to have dropped it altogether; Comic!Buffy no longer has this conflict because she no longer has any mundane ties. She's a full-time Slayer, living in a secret headquarters. Her friends are all superheroes too, her family is dead or estranged, and she has little or no outside social life.
I wanted my Buffy to achieve some kind of balance between the mundane and supernatural aspects of her life, but I didn't want to go so far as to eliminate that conflict entirely - in either direction. Show!Buffy was a superhero and Everygirl; I wanted to write about an adult Buffy who's a superhero and Everywoman, in a scenario in which the conflicts of adulthood could ground the monster metaphors in the same way that adolescent conflicts grounded them in the show. Which meant a Buffy with a day job, a relationship, and, eventually, a family. The conflicts between work and family which many women struggle with are darn near tailor-made for grounding those metaphors. My Buffy's children really are little monsters.
There's also a lot of other stuff I wanted to play with - on the show, adults are usually either clueless or corrupt. So what happens when the adolescent characters become adults? Plus motherhood isn't portrayed as an attractive proposition in the Jossverse. Mothers are usually either absent or ineffectual (Mrs. Rosenberg, Mrs. Harris, Joyce). At best, they're sacrifices on the altars of their children (Buffy-as-faux-mom-to-Dawn, Darla, Anne Pratt.) Let's not even talk about Cordelia's multiple demonic pregnancies.
And yet... the majority of women are mothers. The implication that adult, sexually active women can't be heroes, only sacrifices, is a peculiar piece of subtext for a supposedly feminist show. It's not solely a Jossverse phenomenon - there's a huge tradition of coming-of-age stories in Western fantasy/horror, but very few being-of-age stories. When characters of either sex achieve adulthood and start families, they're generally shuffled offstage in favor of the next generation of angst-ridden teens. (There are a few exceptions, like The Incredibles or Barbara Hambly's Dragon Knight series. What little I know about SPN makes me think that perhaps it's another example, but I'm not certain if Winchester Sr. is alive or only shows up in flashbacks.) As a culture, we revere parenthood, but we don't seem to know what to do with it in popular fiction.
There's also the simple fact that it's often harder to work children into an adventure story where the protagonists are adults than it is to writer an all-kid adventure or an all-adult adventure. And that it's harder for many writers to write convincing children, period. Still, those are technical problems, and there are ways to overcome technical problems if one's inclined to do so. I don't know if I'll ever have time to write extensively in the later decades of my series timeline. So far, I've only done vignettes, though I do have ideas for several longer and more serious pieces. And I really, really have to get my ass in gear and finish POM. But I like the idea of the characters growing up in more ways than just getting older. While I know it's not something that a lot of readers will be interested in, it seems to me that there's some little-explored fictional territory to be plumbed with a family that slays together.