Staked in the Heart: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

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Recommended: Representation of women in television

Blue and black fog gathers around the scene. There are ruminants of screams and distant howling…pretty typical for a horror film huh? But wait, the starlet of the show is making her entrance! A petite, blond teenage girl enters the cemetery gates with a splintering wooden stake in hand. Her name is Buffy Summers and slaying vampires is her specialty. Of course, vampires do not exist in our world: Neither does Buffy Summers. She is the main character of a formerly wild popular show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. However, in Sara Blevin’s eyes, Buffy is more than a symbol of feminism and altruism.
Sara was in college trying to complete her English major, when her best friend at the time, Todd begged her to take an independent study course with him.
“Even though the show was running while I was a teenager, I didn’t watch it until then. Todd begged me to take the class with him and another friend of ours. That meant I got to watch all seven seasons in just under a month.”
Buffy first made her television debut in March of 1997 courtesy of writer and producer Joss Wheadon. The opening pilot depicts a teenager girl much like every other teenage girl…except that she has been kicked out of school and she has been known save the citizens of SunnyDale quite often. Throughout the duration of the show, Buffy becomes a young woman. With that comes: falling in love for the first time, getting a job, graduating high school, and a whole lot more. Wheadon embraced that women could be powerful and vulnerable both at the same time. Sara, a feminist and human after all, found so much more in Buffy that could be seen in forty five minutes per episode.
“Buffy is in many ways a constant reminder to be my best self. That humans are humans, even when they ...

... middle of paper ...

...n Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It teaches that you can yourself and still be a part of a larger team—together working for a larger purpose. The strong feminism inklings within the show are just one “lesson” to be learned. Buffy may slay in upwards of thousands of vampires, but her biggest victory was slaying stereotypes of females everywhere. Others may have built a sense of vulnerability in young women…Buffy knocked down all of those walls. Roseanne Barr said it best: “The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it.”

Works Cited

Blevins, Sara. “Feminism in Buffy.” Personal Interview. 07 Nov. 2013.
Lang, Nico. "25 Little-Known Facts About ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’." Thought Catalog. The Thought & Expression LLC, 25 Jan. 2013. Web. 12 Nov. 2013.
Fudge, Rachel. "The Buffy Effect." Bitch Media. B-Word Worldwide, 1999. Web. 12 Nov. 2013.

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