Willow: Buffy, earlier you agreed with me about Thanksgiving. It’s a sham. It’s all about death
Buffy: It *is* a sham. But it’s a sham with yams. It’s a yam sham.
Willow: You’re not gonna jokey-rhyme your way out of this one.
I am not a big TV watcher in general. I read a lot. I scribble a lot. I watch old movies a lot. I have a job. It doesn’t leave me much time for TV. There are shows that I enjoy, but i don’t typically have strong feelings about them.
Back in the 90’s, one of my friends got me hooked on the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is one of the few TV shows I am completely nuts about. I have seen every episode. I own the series on DVD. It’s queued on all of the streaming subscriptions I have. It is my go to whenever I am depressed, or sick, or just feel like binging on TV. Like on a rainy post-Christmas day when I don’t feel like doing any of the things I am supposed to be doing.
So, I lit a fire, put a pot of soup on, and had a bit of a marathon.
Other people have already written everything that needs to be said about what makes Buffy so great. The clever writing. The excellent cast. The genius of the show’s creator, Joss Whedon.
One of my favorite things about the show is that it will often take a feeling and “what if” it into a whole episode.
People often feel like they are invisible. What if they really were?
In Season 7, one of the main characters, Willow, has gone through an Evil Witch phase, but gets sent off to England to be rehabilitated. She returns to town from Evil Witch Rehab, and both she and her friends have reservations about if she is really ready. No one, including Willow, is quite sure she can be trusted.
Willow has always tended to feel invisible. She’s the show’s awkward smart girl, the most socially invisible type of teenager. In this episode, she really becomes invisible, at least to her friends. She can’t see her friends and they can’t see her. It leaves her both emotionally and physically vulnerable.
Throughout the episode, Willow is looking for her friends (who are trying to figure out why she never got off her plane from England) and assumes they are still mad at her about the Evil Witch thing.
The show takes the vulnerability you feel when people don’t see you on an emotional level and plays it into the actual physical danger that occurs at least in part because people can’t see her. In this case, Willow is captured by a skin-eating demon. Her friends don’t see her, so they don’t know she’s in danger.
Eventually, they kill the demon and are all able to see each other again. Although they are all still a little unsure if Willow is completely trustworthy, they realize that they still love her and want to be supportive.
So what?
Well. Do I have to have some sort of theory about everything? Can’t I just like the show?
Yeah. There really should be some sort of connection to something, shouldn’t there…I suppose the connection is just how much I have been thinking about trust lately. How much I think about feeling invisible in general.
It’s always good to know that my issues are the same ones that every 15 year old has.
I’m not 15?
Well, fuck.
Does that mean I have to get new and improved adult problems???