May 24, 2024:

I want to live in Giles' library.

Bi-level, where the downstairs is like the "conversation pit" living rooms which were so popular in swinging 1965. I'd have couches there, a good stereo, with a flatscreen on the wall facing. Maybe a mini-fridge flush with smaller bookcases. Upstairs we'd collect and organize the thousands of volumes which today are distributed wherever they'll fit all up and down my three-story row house.

That library is the most anti-television space possible on a television show. Analog, archival, slow, textual. Leatherbound, niche-y, lamplit, occult. Dependent on memory, while constructing it.

Works for me.

May 23, 2024:

First register: the actors struggle to enunciate through their cheaply-done false fangs, like makeup from the Halloween store.

Second register: female empowerment is granted to someone who would have been fine under the old rules regardless.

Third register: the stagey candlewax tries too hard.

It fails as art, yet it was commercially and culturally exactly right for its moment.

May 22, 2024:

Although Buffy's tonal in-betweenness is celebrated as "genre-blending", it might better be described as not quite landing in any register.

Camp is committed, self-aware excess, where you delight in its dedication to artifice. Kitsch is sincerely unaware bad taste, where you laugh at its unconscious self-parody. Buffy is half-aware, winking at its genre tropes while asking you to accept its emotional stakes realistically, yet too cheaply done to evoke real investment. It never completely lands, probably because it tracks as failure to commit.

The show's feminist reputation never quite addresses a central contradiction. Female empowerment is granted to someone who would have been fine under the old rules regardless. She's exceptionally beautiful, essentially perfect in highschool terms. Empowerment in a body that's already maximally valued by exactly the highschool hierarchy the show postures at critiquing.

Claude responds: "That's the 'mixture of tropes' problem at the character level. Buffy is the strong-female-lead trope and the beautiful-popular-girl trope and the reluctant-chosen-one trope and the relatable-teen trope, layered, and the layers don't resolve into a person so much as a deliberately-assembled demographic-pleasing composite. Which is maybe why it 'never completely lands'. Not just tonally but at the center, the protagonist is a stack of appeals rather than a unified thing, and you feel the assembly."

Does it matter? Does its foundational logic have to fully cohere to be enjoyable? Perhaps we like it for its flaws.