If you follow me on Twitter1 you’ve no doubt noticed that recently I undertook the watching on Netflix Instant of Buffy The Vampire Slayer right from the very beginning.
This tiny factoid demonstrates that at any given moment I lag at least five years behind in “technology” and upward of ten in “pop culture.” Hush. I read books.2
It’s not like I’ve lived in a monastery lo these many years3. Just about everyone I know has sung the praises of Buffy; they’ve told me times without number how much I’d enjoy the show. “I’ve got it all on DVD,” more than one friend has told me more than once. “Why don’t you borrow them?” But I resisted, in large part — and it shames me to admit it — because my exhusband was a Joss Whedon fan from way back.
“You have to watch this with me,” he all but begged after he and a friend spent weeks working their way through a backlog of Buffy and all of Firefly in 2003. I peered around the pages of my novel long enough to ask what it was about. He could have told me it was Jesus on toast and still I would have have rejected it out of hand.
“It’s a kind of Western,” he said. I went back to my book. “But it’s set in space.” I sighed. “In the future!” I rolled my eyes, I’m absolutely sure of it, and kept on reading. My mind was shut to him and by extension to anything he liked.
But the magical summer of 2008 saw my cold little heart cracked open; after hearing it touted by such luminaries as the inimitable Chelsea G. Summers4 I devoted an all-too-brief forty-three minutes to Whedon’s latest project and was instantly hooked. In due time I went to space and am now eagerly devouring tales of Sunnydale High, and all the while I have to wonder if a little more flexibility seven years ago might have saved us.
Would it have made a difference? Would we have helped if I’d laid my stubborn head in his lap and given his stupid shows a chance?
Could the Whedonverse have been the one thing that kept us from divorce?
- And bish plz, why would you not follow me on Twitter, because I am fucking hilarious on Twitter [↩]
- I am only maybe 100 years behind in reading books. Clearly I am going to have to be alive for a very, very long time. [↩]
- Though now that I think about it, how much fun would that be? [↩]
- Do you see what she did there? [↩]
