Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing

Tools

Toys

Narrative

Genre

Media

Topical Tropes

Other Categories

Custom Search
1 reviews
Buffy The Vampire Slayer
alt title(s): Buffy; Bt Vs

"In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer."

In 1992, Joss Whedon wrote what turned out to be an amusing film with a central idea he was so attached to that he jumped at the chance to re-visit it on television.

In 1997, with an abbreviated first season, Buffy The Vampire Slayer was raised from the dead as a new Nineties Adventure Show on the fledgling network The WB. At its core was a subversion of the horror movie trope of the fragile and doomed Southern Californian cheerleader in a dark alley (there's an actual scene like this in the original movie) — Buffy was a snappy, petite, blonde and when a vampire grabs hold of her and drags her into a dark alley, she turns around and kicks their ass. (Often literally; the alley behind the Bronze saw so many stakings that it was a wonder any vampires were willing to go within a mile of the place by season three.)

The show itself took the first movie as originally scripted as canon, not the film that resulted. The show quickly established Buffy moving with her Mom to an isolated city in Southern California called Sunnydale. Initially wanting to escape the responsibilities of being The Slayer, she forms a tight-knit group of friends. But the Watchers Council (An Ancient Conspiracy who has been responsible for training Slayers for millenia) sends her a mentor named Giles to prepare her for some nasty things that are going down in Sunnydale, which happens to be the location of a Hellmouth.

Joss and his team of merry writers at Mutant Enemy took many standard teenaged issues ("high school is hell", "why is my boyfriend acting weird now that I've slept with him?", "now we're at college, and all my best friend wants to do is hang out with her boy/girlfriend"...) and explored them with a supernatural, self-knowing but emotional, eye. Most people miss this entirely, and think that the supernatural events are meant as near-literal moral consequences, rather than metaphors.

While not a smash hit at first, critical acclaim was rampant and by the second season a devoted fanbase developed. Part of its success is the very clever writing that involves what is now famously named Buffy Speak. The characters were also prone to subvert a wide variety of tropes as being at least partially Genre Savvy and there is very clear and deliberate Character Development for everyone.

In 1999, Buffy's Love Interest Angel was spun off into his own series set in nearby LA. Crossovers and cross-references between the two shows persisted until Buffy ended in 2003. In many ways the Angel series provides a contrast to Buffy themes as Angel was about dealing with past mistakes in comparison to the "growing up is hard" notes hit by Buffy over its seven season span.

In 2007, "season eight" began, in a series of comics produced by Joss Whedon and declared as official series canon.

The influence of this show on later TV, within its genre and elsewhere, is plain to see. Modern Myth Arc and Story Arc based television owe at least some inspiration to this series, as well as the Superhero Teenager in High School theme. As several commentators have observed, Russell T Davies had at least one eye on this show when he revived Doctor Who.

This series is one of the single most Trope Overdosed and Lampshade Hanging shows in existence (the term Lampshade Hanging was invented by the show's creators), with over a thousand references strewn across this wiki. This series also has its own Analysis page, Character Page, Fetish Fuel Page, Crowning Moments of Awesome, Wild Mass Guessing, Ho Yay and (or course) Just Bugs Me pages. Sadly, it has no Congressional pages. (That we know of.)

A new film of Buffy was announced in spring 2009. It will be a Continuity Reboot of the franchise, unsurprisingly, but it will also be directed by Fran Kuzui, the director of the original movie, and Whedon is not on board, meaning it will have even less to do with the show than the first film did. No, we don't get it either.

Archetypes include:

Buffy is the Trope Namer for:

Character tropes include:

Tropes:

Buck Rogers
« Series »
Bullseye
Transformers
« Trope Overdosed »
The Legend Of Zelda
new edits
forum
page history
edit page
view source
discuss
Creative Commons License
This wiki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.