About Buffy the Vampire Slayer

“In every generation, there is a chosen one

She alone will stand against the vampires ,the demon and the forces of darkness,

She is the slayer”[1]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is based on the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer from 1992 starring Kristie Swanson and Luke Perry. Although the movie wasn’t quite a hit, the spin-off serie indeed was. The TV-show casted Sarah Michelle Gellar as its main protagonist. She plays a highschool girl, that obviously is a vampire slayer. She doesn’t stand alone in this battle against demons and other forces of darkness. No, she gets help from her “watcher” named Giles, a typical English man. The watcher trains his slayer and helps her on her mission by finding relevant information about the vampire or demon. Her important friends are Willow, Xander, Cordelia and Angel. Willow is the shy and smart one with a heart of gold, Xander is the funny one, Cordelia is the need, somewhat snobistic one and Angel is a vampire with a soul who’ll lose his heart to Buffy eventually.

         The TV-show has made sure that, there are several types of characters to whom the fans can relate to and identify with. Buffy is someone who’s presented as the average girl next door, except for the fact that she’s really not. She’s beautiful, funny, independent, strong, and has great friends but nevertheless struggles with the same problems as any other highschool girl. This is something where the average female viewer of Buffy can relate to and identify with. The TV-show doesn’t only have female fans, the show’s also very popular with boys, probably because the TV-show is very exciting and adventurous and the fact that the average boy would like to have Sarah Michelle Gellar as his girlfriend.

            Although the TV-show isn’t very realistic for obvious reasons ( I never saw a vampire or demon in my entire life) they’ve tried to make it realistic by writing very out-of-life-taken scenario’s. Almost every episode involves a lovestory or a subject which can actually take place in real life. For instance, the dying of your mother, or someone you love, your heart that gets broken, having difficulties at school, afraid of not fitting in etc.

            The show also takes up society taboos in the episodes. The biggest example of that is the lovestory between Willow and Tara, which are two girls. It was one of the first openly gay relationships on national television in America. The show immediately gained a lot more fans. For the young homosexual youth it’s something they can identify with and find support in. For the people who don’t have anything to do with homosexuality (or even worse are homophobic) it might be a chance to change their point of view on this matter.

Leisure  Time

When thinking of the term leisure time and how it is defined, I think there has been a change over the last years. Leisure time was always seen as time free from obligation or compulsion. Nowadays we speak of leisure time as time not spent at work. In our free time we choose which activities we want to explore, whether that is watching television, doing sports, play an instrument or just sit back and relax, isn’t really important. The important thing is that we choose it ourselves and that it has some sort of entertainment value. Like Vogel says “ free time is used for doing things and going places, and the emphasis on activity more closely corresponds to the notion of recreation” [2] and  ” entertainment is defined as that which produces a pleasurable and satisfying experience. The concept of entertainment is thus subordinate to that of recreation”. [3]  With the shift of free time, that is the definition, there has also been a gain in spare time. “The most gains in free time have occurred between 1965 and 1975 but since then, the amount of free time people have has remained fairly stable.”[4]

With the coming of the Internet there has been a new form of recreation and spending of free time. There even became a whole new way of communicating. People come home from their daily jobs and can check there email, they can start talking to friends through the chatsystems like ICQ or the most famous of them all MSN-Messenger. This is the communicating and functional side of the Internet. The Internet also created a lot of recreation forms like online games, fansites, information-sites about almost everything and the possibilities to create your own site. The main activity is just the surfing on the Internet. One of the biggest features of the Internet for companies is the advertising. There has been a boom in advertising with the coming of Internet. People are surfing and whether they want to or not they see al these advertising. Sometimes this advertising is very aggressive, in that way that when you visit particular sites, the site will automatically change the settings of your internet and change for instance your homepage to one of theirs and give you an extra toolbar. 

There are also a lot of so-called fansites. Whenever somebody wants to create a fansite they don’t need some sort of permission or legislation, they can just build it. They can write, contribute, produce anything they want (obviously not everything, there are some exceptions like for instance kiddypornography) without some institution telling them what they can or can not do. The internet created a lot of tools for people to spread their wishes, their knowledge without having to use the Xerox-machine and a staple machine. Henry Jenkins mentions this topic in his publication Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture, he says “The Web made it possible for alternative media productions of all kinds to gain greater visibility and to move beyond localized publics into much broader circulation.”.[5]

            On these sites you can also find advertising, there are a lot of banners and almost every fansites of whatever icon has a shop where you can buy stuff concerning the particular icon. This is a very interesting facet of the internet. What there is actually happening is that people are making free adverts for companies. For example if it’s a fansite for a particular TV-show and the show is available on DVD, it is very likely you will find a reference on the fansites to for example Amazon.com where you can order the DVD. This is free marketing! This is such an unusual aspect of the internet. The same goes for your personal information.

There are a lot of sites where you can fill in questionnaires, and in exchange you get a little gift or something. People are often not aware of the impact of this sharing of your personal file. For companies it is a very profitable way of earning this information. With the knowledge of people’s spending habits or eating habits or buying habits etc. etc. it’s very easy to start a marketingproject for a particular commodity. Since we’re not aware of this we are actually working for free. Later on in this essay, I will compare different sites of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and examine whether these sites are performing this free form of labor and I will take a look at the gaining influence of the consumer through the possibilities that the internet provides for consumers but I’ll come to that in the next chapter.