General Fandom Musings

I have a paper due in...oh, about ten hours. But I thought "What is more important? A blog or a paper?" And my answer was obviously very clear. Not to mention the huge guilt complex being cultivated by a certain person who shall remain unnamed....

During the Christmas holidays, I fell in love. With a TV show. Buffy the Vampire Slayer to be precise. I always thought that if I ever watched it, I would hate it. It just seemed so cheesy. But I kept getting strong recommendations for it and when I saw the first season for 20 bucks at Wal-Mart, I went ahead and got it. Had to pass the time somehow, right? After I watched the first disc, I was on Amazon ordering the entire series. Less than a month later, I only have two episodes of the series left (and I'm putting off watching them for as long as possible) and I'm halfway through season 2. Again. I'm an addict.

As much as I've loved my entrance into the Buffy fold, I feel like something is missing. I think its being able to watch the episodes back to back. Everyone out there who watched from the beginning is able to connect the episodes with whatever was going on in their life at the moment. And, considering the general age of the Buffy fan, it probably usually coincided pretty closely with what they were experiencing at the time (as far as high school/college goes anyway). And I'll never have that. I just have a month where I dropped everything in order to watch Buffy.

And I'll never have to spend the summer agonizing over who the hell is waltzing around pretending to be Buffy's sister. Or brooding over the death of Angel (so sad...). Because I was able to just pop the next disc in (screw the 9 AM class!) and keep going. There was no anticipation, no agony of waiting. And it did hurt my experience, I think. "The Body" was a trainwreck for me. I was a quivering lump on the couch afterwards. But I was able to just go on to the next episode and let the healing begin. I didn't get to process it. I don't think a lot of it has sunk in just yet: I have vague impressions of what happened in each season (the only way I can really differentiate is by counting the final bosses [and I just turned this into a post relevant to video games] of each season), but nothing has really crystallized for me.

The same thing happened with Firefly. And Queer as Folk. Freaks and Geeks. Beauty and the Beast (ok, I was still a baby when that came on, but still). I find out after the fact, and catch up quickly. Which leaves me where? And all the people who discover the series after me? Somewhere outside the fandom at large. They grew up with these characters. I just met them and received their entire life stories in a single month. It's an odd place to be in.