The thing that annoyed me the most about Buffy was her obsession with being "normal." She would've HATED being normal; it would've suppressed everything that made her unique and gave her strength; yet she never managed to get over this ridiculous obsession with being exactly like everyone else.
You have SO put your finger on exactly what really made my head explode about the way the show ended. Because I'd liked Buffy - that is, before the decision was made to turn her into a boring depressive that for some reason seemed to have no interest in addressing her emotional problems that were later resolved in a way that hardly made for a very workable model for real-life depression (oh, just get over it! the sun's shining already!), and then a tedious speechy leader role, wtf? Buffy's little "normality" obsession in her early years had played as a sort of joke to me - of course she would hate being normal, it was obvious she enjoyed having strength (remember "Helpless"?), and I waited for seven years for the punchline where she realized it. Instead, Buffy's goals were rewritten into a sort of canned fantasy of what a straight male pictures to be a "strong" woman - and as you've observed, she's pretty humorless and no fun, yet simultaneously fascainted by things men don't actually give a shit about, such as shoes and going out with men who wear nice suits. With this kind of female lead to work with - the product of a self-reinforcing chain of show after show all taking cues off each other (e.g., like after Heathers came out, never again could one do a high school story without the requisite bitch clique), female characters get more narrowed down to one-note obsessions or prefab desires, and if they break out of those roles? Smackdown. Yeah, it's pretty sexist.
I really, really think that this kind of thing is an underrecognized cause for the surge of interest in reality TV. Because even in forced situations, these are at least REAL people, not those that writers have contrived to tell us are real.
no subject
You have SO put your finger on exactly what really made my head explode about the way the show ended. Because I'd liked Buffy - that is, before the decision was made to turn her into a boring depressive that for some reason seemed to have no interest in addressing her emotional problems that were later resolved in a way that hardly made for a very workable model for real-life depression (oh, just get over it! the sun's shining already!), and then a tedious speechy leader role, wtf? Buffy's little "normality" obsession in her early years had played as a sort of joke to me - of course she would hate being normal, it was obvious she enjoyed having strength (remember "Helpless"?), and I waited for seven years for the punchline where she realized it. Instead, Buffy's goals were rewritten into a sort of canned fantasy of what a straight male pictures to be a "strong" woman - and as you've observed, she's pretty humorless and no fun, yet simultaneously fascainted by things men don't actually give a shit about, such as shoes and going out with men who wear nice suits. With this kind of female lead to work with - the product of a self-reinforcing chain of show after show all taking cues off each other (e.g., like after Heathers came out, never again could one do a high school story without the requisite bitch clique), female characters get more narrowed down to one-note obsessions or prefab desires, and if they break out of those roles? Smackdown. Yeah, it's pretty sexist.
I really, really think that this kind of thing is an underrecognized cause for the surge of interest in reality TV. Because even in forced situations, these are at least REAL people, not those that writers have contrived to tell us are real.