Gabriel Week 10

I don't think we can ignore the influence that Buffy has had on the traditional constructs of good and evil, especially when it comes to constructing a fantasy storyline. Early stories with vampires and villains always focused on the generic structure of good vs evil, the evil is trying to destroy and the good to protect.

What Buffy did was not only blur the line between good and evil but hop across that line, with characters like Angel who repeatedly help Buffy and are useful to her when fighting the forces of evil, but at the end of the day Angel is a vampire, the very evil that Buffy is protecting the world from. Changing the generic structure, and allowing for flexibility with some of the characters moral conflicts means that the story line becomes less predictable and we begin to see the humanity, not only behind some of the evil characters, who, because the way they are presented appear to be more than just violent killers, but we also begin to see the evil or bad side come out of some of the protagonists.

With a more human representation of the characters, both good and evil, the cult television show draws in a larger audience than say a generic superhero show would, where the good guy is set with a challenge and then he beats the baddy and story ends happily ever after. What Buffy did was throw those generic constructs out the window and give each character a personality so that instead of a clear line between the good side and the bad we have characters that walk freely across that line.


These practices are also what has influenced the likes of the Twilight stories and the True Blood series. These narratives are strongly connected to Buffy, because Buffy combined different themes of television; horror, drama, teenage love and with a strong female lead role, it would appear that this influence is not exactly well concealed when it comes to Twilight (Bella) and True Blood (Sookie), both strong female lead characters who despite the danger they know is present still develop love-relationships with vampires, who are traditionally supposed to be cold blooded killers, (in the case of Twilight) but yet appear to be soft hearted and 'lost' in a human world.