29-year-old white woman, demisexual, possibly bi, definitely LGBTQ+ supportive. Tory is my NAME, not my political affiliation, don't worry. I'm an English teacher/teaching assistant in England, originally from the US. I reblog a range of stuff with no sideblogs, no queues, no tags (except tws), so I'm very chaotic, sorry. Maybe one day I'll get my act together.
During the ongoing Buffy rewatch we've been talking about and around a few interconnected issues.
The fact nobody outside the core gang seems particularly worried about all the signs of vampire activity (even if you don't jump to 'vampires' as your explanation, surely the number of students who just go missing or the times the school or the Bronze is attacked by PCP-abusing gang members with sharp teeth should worry people much more than it seems to?)
The fact that Willow and Xander never talk about Jesse after The Harvest, and Cordelia never talks about her dead boyfriend Kevin after Prophecy Girl, and nobody talks about Buffy's fellow teen delinquent Sheila after School Hard, and nobody talks about the fact Angel killed Theresa after Phases, and nobody seems to have noticed when Harmony became a vampire, and so on.
The general lack of preparation for vampires on the part of people who really should know better (whether that's the gang continuing to meet in the school library despite it being attacked by vampires multiple times in the show's first fifteen episodes, or Buffy not doing anything about the fact a vampire came to her house and attacked her mother in Angel except hunting down that one specific vampire, or characters who know vampires are real repeatedly walking around Sunnydale at night without even carrying crosses with them...).
As I've argued, I don't think there's a particularly strong in-universe justification for any of this. I think it's just baked into the show's premise to a pretty large extent (Buffy can't juggle an ordinary life at school and her destiny of fighting demons and vampires at night unless she's allowed to have a fairly regular school life, which significantly limits how much the mundane world can be allowed to react to signs of the supernatural) and that some of it is just of the consequence of the show being a loosely serialized work of network television (Sheila exists within School Hard but not beyond it: they only signed the actor up for one episode and they don't want to confuse casual viewers by mentioning her later). The show itself doesn't really want to dwell on the fact Xander and Willow had a close friend who died, because that's not the sort of story the writers are interested in telling. So we get a quick line in The Harvest from Giles to the effect that "people have a tendency to rationalize what they can and forget what they can't", and we're just not meant to think too much about the fact that regular attendees of the Bronze will have witnessed multiple vampire attacks and lost several friends there and yet kept coming back to the Bronze night after night.
I think it would be interesting, though, to imagine a slightly different version of the show. One which leaned a little harder into the horror elements all of this implies. What if, instead of just appealing to some supposed human instinct to rationalize the inexplicable away, the show told us that the Hellmouth itself was the reason people kept acting like this? What if, just as the supernatural energies of the Hellmouth attract vampires and demons and impossibly giant insects, they also have a corrosive magical impact on people's memories? (We know, after all, that this sort of thing is not something the show would later shy away from: Jonathan in Superstar, Dawn's whole deal in Season 5 and beyond, whatever the mysterious and largely unexplained connection was between Ben and Glory, ...)
Imagine a version of the show where Giles told us in The Harvest that the Hellmouth itself was actively trying to make people forget about vampires. As the Slayer, Buffy is immune to this effect, and with careful preparation and training (which is what the Watchers do) or just a bit of luck combined with some very traumatic experiences ordinary humans can also fight off the effect to some degree, but most people on a Hellmouth will:
Forget about seeing any vampire's true face minutes after seeing it
Forget about seeing anybody turn to dust (and not think too hard about what that person was doing before or why they suddenly aren't around)
Have very vague memories of anybody who is bitten by a vampire: they don't necessarily forget about them completely, but they definitely don't remember seeing them bitten and (unless talking to the vampire they became) they generally don't think about them at all anymore (no funeral, no wondering where the body is, no wondering what they're up to and why they're not around right now)
What if Willow and Xander (and eventually Cordelia, and Oz, and a few other people like the members of the vampire-worshiping Sunset Club) were -- because of a combination of sheer luck, and their repeated close escapes from vampires, and people who knew the truth being at hand to explain right away -- mostly (but not entirely) immune? What if Buffy tries bringing up Jesse's death at the end of The Harvest, to tell her new friends how sorry she is she couldn't save him, only to be met by puzzled looks, or a vague recollection from Xander that ... oh, yeah, Jesse was a kid he used to know when he was younger, but he must've moved away at some point and Xander hasn't thought about him in years? What if Buffy does remember Jesse, and Kevin, and Sheila, and Theresa, and every other classmate who was killed by a vampire, but she doesn't ever talk about them because she knows from experience that nobody else does. (She doesn't know if Giles forgot about Jesse too and she's too afraid to ever outright ask.)
What if the Hellmouth itself is always exerting a constant pressure on people who should know better that makes them forget about crosses and holy water and not staying late after school? What if that's part of the reason vampires come to Sunnydale: even if you're not interested in ending the world, it's a great place to be a vampire because the Hellmouth is aware and (in some sense) actively on their side? What if the reason that only the Slayer can stand against the vampires and the demons isn't just a question of physical strength: what if it's not just carelessness that means people other than Buffy regularly walk around Sunnydale in the dark without even trying to protect themselves? What if, after he loses his soul, everyone but Buffy starts to forget about Angel too? What if the reason Giles needs to keep consulting his books for details on Angelus or Drusilla and Spike and never seems to have the information to hand is that the Hellmouth is constantly trying to make him forget everything he knows? What if the reason the Initiative start collecting vampires and demons in their underground base isn't to construct some ridiculous super-soldier: what if until they started doing that, they'd go out patrolling, fight several vampires each night, then all march back to base and confidently report that they'd had no encounters that night? What if Sunnydale's police know they're covering something up but can't ever remember exactly what it is, or that some of their fellow officers went to investigate reports of gang members hanging out in the cemetery one night and ... well, don't seem to have been around much since then? What if Joyce can't even remember the time a vampire attacked in her own house, so Buffy knows there's no point telling her mom the truth because even if she staked a vampire in front of her she'd forget all about it the next day?
To be clear, this isn't a headcanon as such: I don't think this is what's going on in the actual show at all. But I think this version of the show -- a version that leaned into the episodic nature of the early episodes and the absurdities imposed by the need to maintain the masquerade, and deliberately amplified the horror aspects of that and how it contributed to Buffy's increasing sense of isolation -- would have been pretty interesting.
A year or so ago I went to wood carving club with a bruised eye from my dog slamming his nose into my eyesocket and like every old lady there pulled me aside at some point to ask if my partner hit me here are some of the solutions they had in case he did.
-Replacing his vitimens with poision
- getting her brother to invite him out onto his boat and then killing him and dumping him in the ocean and saying he got drunk and fell off.
- get tboned with him in the passenger seat and then once he was in the hospital theres all kinds of easy ways to kill him like not washing my hands after a poop and then touching his wound casually.
-replacing his drink of choice with moonshine!?
- take him on a hike thats locally notorious for a rapid otter attacking hikers and once he had rabies I could just kill him any ol way and say self defense.
-One lady just cheerfully informed me she had a gun and only a few years left anyway
staring at the dessert menu and twirling my hair and going "should I be baaaaddd" until the autistic girl I'm eating with says "there is nothing bad about eating dessert. it is a morally neutral action"
“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”
i know the way people talk about their pets now is probably how we’ve been doing it for all of history. a cat owner in ancient rome saw their cat lounging on the dining pillows and commented “he thinks himself to be the senator claudius 🤣”
are twinks who go to bear-related events the "straight boyfriend at pride" of the bear world? i don't go to enough irl bear events to know for sure but i am curious if that discourse exists at all in real life, cause it's really funny to me.
"sorry Richard but your boyfriend Miles has to stay in the car. i don't care if there's a heatwave, his bmi is under 23 he should of known better than to come here, he'll just have to deal with it"
Why does it feel weird and intimate to mention that someone was in even the most innocuous of your dreams? Sorry my subconscious decided to think about you for a second. You were a curator at an ice cream museum that was also my second grade classroom. If you even care.
@everything-you-feel-is-real I know by tumblr tradition that I'm to say "impossible, my posts never blow up like that," or "please don't do this to me."
But I feel in my bones that you are right. If this is to be my wife's moment of glory, I am willing to suffer notification overload, that the world may know she is funny. #MyFunnyWife
