The Essential Buffy?

Here's the situation: a very good friend of mine wants to know what it is about BtVS that I love so much. She's going to watch some DVDs with me. The catch: she's moving (permanently! *sob*) across the Atlantic in about a month. In the meantime, we're both very busy with our jobs. So we probably won't have time to watch more than four or five episodes.

So, what are the episodes to show her to give her an idea of why BtVS is so cool in general, and why Spike in particular must be completely obsessed over?

I'm thinking:

1) The Pilot (because without it, nothing will ever really make sense; plus I think it sets the tone nicely).

2) Lie To Me (I saw a discussion a while ago about how this was a good stand-alone to convince people of the awesomeness of the show; plus, it would serve to intro Spike and Dru).

3) The Initiative (because the chip thing is necessary for understanding the Spike arc)

4) Fool For Love (because it's central to my Spike love; also not a bad standalone).

5) (If we still have time) Hush (because it's just plain awesome).

I'd be tempted to move on to Once More With Feeling next, but I fear the full impact of that one would be lost to someone who didn't know the characters very well (nor any of the arcs playing out there).

What do you all think? Suggestions, changes, agreement?

I bet this has already done the rounds as a meme: Political Compass

I don't tend to make overtly political posts. But aren't you curious what kind of thing I'd say if I did? *g*

According to the self-test at The Political Compass, I am:

Economic Left/Right: -8.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.28

That makes me...pretty darn extreme, actually. Hm.

I guess I'm ideologically extreme, but quite mild-mannered in practice. I won't be leading the revolution any time soon.

My social libertarian orientation may explain the discomfort I feel daily when exerting my authority in a very traditional, rigid power structure.

I like The Political Compass a lot, by the way. The problems it points out with the 200-year-old one-dimensional political spectrum (the whole left/right thing) have been obvious to me for a long time, and I'm not much of a political analyst!

So, hey, anyone else want to tell us where they stand?

Subverted subversion.

Thinking tonight about one of the things that bugs me about BtVS/AtS:

BtVS was supposed to subvert the cliché of the helpless female victim. Right? This is why Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a petite blonde chick. I'm still in love with the way the series opens - with the timid girl going into the empty school with the sexually-agressive male, and we're all thinking "Oh no, honey, don't go in there with him!" and then she kills him. Woot! Not cheering the violence, but the subversion. That was not what I expected.

But how often was that scene repeated? A female vampire with a male victim? Very, very rare. The vast majority of the vamps we see Buffy dust on her nightly patrols are male. The vast majority of the non-human demons she slays are male-shaped. The important villians are female about as often as not, it's true (off the top of my head: Darla, Drusilla, Faith, Dr. Walsh and Glory vs. the Master, Angelus, the Mayor, Adam, and Warren), but the continual parade of fangy, violent masculinity cannot be ignored. Sure, Buffy always dusts those guys pretty effortlessly - but that's only because she has superpowers. It's clear that if a normal chick were wandering through the graveyard, she'd be a midnight snack for the big, bad, male vampire.

And it seems like in AtS, Joss threw out that whole subversion plan. That series opens with Angel (big, strong, manly) rescuing a couple helpless female victims from evil (big, strong, manly) vampires. A disproportionate percentage of the helpless Angel helps are female. Did ME think we wouldn't be properly worried about men in peril? Maybe. I fear that ME chose an anonymous male victim to die in "The Price" (as a result of the moisture-sucking slug beastie that came around because of Angel's spell) because nobody would care very much. If it had been a woman that got killed, even a woman they didn't know, it seems to me like the AI crew would have reacted much more strongly - and maybe the same was expected of the viewers. Now, maybe it's not clear why I'm complaining that valuing the lives of women more than the lives of men is anti-feminist...but it's the women-and-children-first syndrome. Protect the helpless.

The character Fred fought this trend. Remember Fred with the flamethrower, all butch and post-apocalyptic, dealing out firey death to those bugs? Remember Fred getting shot in "Lineage," and then getting pissed off at Wesley for being mad at himself for letting it happen?

WESLEY I should've done a better job protecting you.
FRED (stares in disbelief) What?
WESLEY (sighs)That didn't come out...
FRED Do you realize how patronizing that sounds? Protecting me?
WESLEY I just meant you shouldn't have been there in the first place.
FRED That's not for you to decide.

And then when she got sick with what turned out to be a fatal case of Illyria, remember how she insisted on going into the lab and working on her own cure, not just lying around waiting to be rescued?

When she got too weak to stand, when she was lying in bed with Angel, Gunn, Lorne, Spike and Wesley all standing around swearing very masculinely (and uselessly) to protect her, I realized: this show has completely given up on girl power.

Oh well.

Buffy's still the strongest character in either 'verse, and Spike's still the sexiest.