Ok, look away now

This is so so silly, but now, having watched the last episode of Buffy, and knowing there are no more, it feels a tiny bit like a light has gone out. Sad. In a different way to Six Feet Under being over, or even The Flying Doctors when I was a lot younger. Because there was magic in Buffy, literally and in the very fabric of the show. Not to mention the seriously amusing dialogue.



And I cannot believe how appropriate this song would have been for Buffy. Or was it even used in it sometime?

If I could tell the world just one thing
It would be that we're all OK
And not to worry 'cause worry is wasteful
And useless in times like these
I won't be made useless
I won't be idle with despair
I will gather myself around my faith
For light does the darkness most fear

Seriously, if you ever enjoyed Buffy, close your eyes and let the montage happen. Tearfulness.



Maybe I'll grow up now.

Tricky

So for Halloween we are not answering the door, closing the curtains and ignoring rings on the doorbell from hooligans asking us for money. I really wish we had little kids coming around with their parents and we could give them sweets, but alas, not in this part of north London. I should have realised what Halloween in London would be like when I lived in Ealing and a kid at a bus stop, a few days before Halloween, asked me for a pound. I asked her why and she said, ‘For Halloween’. She didn’t blink when I said it wasn’t even Halloween yet. Eventually the lack of movement of my hand to my purse alerted her to the fact that she should probably ask someone else.

While closeted in our dark house, we will very appropriately be watching the final two episodes (ever! sob!) of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'. Actually, she hasn’t been slaying too many vampires lately. She should probably be known as ‘Buffy the Slayer who investigates creepy demonic situations with her friends and sometimes slays vampires too’.. Maybe there will be some vampires in the final big battle for the world, because the poet gets bored when there’s no fighting. I get a bit antsy when there’s no Anya.

Also, I will be psyching myself up for NaBloPoMo – The Return.

I have never really seen the point of Nanowrimo unless you already want to write a novel. Maybe I do, maybe one day. For now I'm sticking to short stories. But hey, it keeps all the wannabe novelists off the streets, and creative endeavour can only be a good thing compared to crime, substance abuse and other popular pursuits. But would someone somewhere please share the draft novel they have produced during Nanowrimo? I have never seen one, which only reinforces my suspicion that they are all really crap. (Except for my friend Shari's, of course, because she is a writer).

Gratuitous Anya post

Yes, I am actually a 14 year old girl living in 2003. And proud of it.

The Buffy Project - part 2

The poet is still addicted (less so than me, he gets bored with the non-fighty episodes) and I am starting to get sad because we have only one more disc to watch of the entire series. Three, maybe four episodes and it's all over. Is it just me, or when you really enjoy a television series, does it become like an alternative universe to you - the characters you love or hate do actually exist out there somewhere?

Sigh. Soon, no more Anya to adore from the wrong side of the DVD player. No more Buffy's clothes to study and sometimes covet. No more camp Andrew - how amused am I that he's become a regular character? No more occasionally irritating Willow and increasingly chubby Xander. No more Giles.... but wait! Do I detect the stirrings of a BBC television film (please let it be a series) in the wings? Or will I be reduced to starting the whole process over again with the Angel series, in hopes that Buffy characters will make regular visits, or that Cordelia will remind me of Anya?

And my lovely lovely favourite character dies, apparently. This is the problem with watching series years after they ended. The internet knows these things and tells you when you're not ready to know.

However, despite my fantastic ability to suspend disbelief, and in an attempt to distract myself from the upcoming series finale, I'd like to highlight two Buffy anomalies for the record:

1. All vampires turn to dust when staked, even those who only died very recently. It's a great visual effect, but surely only those who died so long ago that their original bodies would actually be dust should dust? Of course, that would mean that the very term 'dusting' would have to be reconsidered.

2. Vampires with souls, i.e. Angel and Spike (much prefer Spike, btw) feel remorse for their killings and cannot kill humans due to the emotional pain. However, humans, who supposedly had souls all along and are demon-free - kill all the time and some of them don't seem to feel much remorse. So does the reintroduction of a soul into a soulless creature make them better than human? Or was it just not thought through very well.

The Buffy Project - part 1

When we got back from Australia at the end of May, and life in London seemed dismal and drab, as it often does, but PARTICULARLY WHEN THERE WAS NO SUMMER IN SIGHT, I decided it was time to finish something that was set in motion some years ago.

I was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. When I first moved to London in 1998 I stayed in on Friday nights to watch Buffy on Sky One. I watched Angel too, because it was on afterwards, but it never grabbed me so much. When I moved in with the poet in mid 2000, much of my concern at living in a house without a television was that I wouldn't be getting my regular fix of Buffy. I wasn't sure I could do it, and my mother was convinced I had a secret television hidden in a cupboard somewhere, but I grew to appreciate and enjoy not having a television. Buffy got left behind, and it was ok.

My brother had a couple of seasons on DVD which I watched back to back one December I was in Brisbane, when it was too hot to move and the rest of the city languished inside with their air conditioning. It was the last time I saw my father, and he watched many of the episodes with me. Somehow it became a bit of a bonding experience for us, not that you could have predicted my dad enjoying a show about a teenage vampire slayer.

But otherwise my life was Buffy-free. Perhaps it was the lack of sun turning my thoughts towards those who dwell in darkness, or maybe it was just silliness, but I decided to watch the entire series of Buffy this year - seasons 1-7 - to see what I had missed out on. It helped that the poet and I had just bought a portable DVD player so we could watch films (my pc was pretty old and slow and mangled most DVD viewing experiences).

And so began the great Buffy Project of 2007.

To be continued...