week ten [rhian]

How do you think Buffy has influenced the contemporary vampire drama “True Blood” and the “Twilight” series of novels and films?


Buffy was probably the first successful modern depiction of vampires being more than bloodsucking fiends that are nothing other than evil murderers. Yes, "Dracula" aimed to do that and "Frankenstein" worked on making the monster seem relatable, but as they were older works of fiction, they haven't truly been accepted into todays society, having a miniscule impact on our feelings towards monsters of the underworld. What Joss Whedon succeeded in doing was breaking the whole notion of evil down and turning it around so that the audience saw not only the bad side, but also the good side in people such as Angel and Spike who, unlike Dracula and Frankenstein's monster, received emotions from the audience that revolved around the good sector - empathy, love, they even had people rooting for them to win.


"True Blood" and "Twilight" are the newest, most popular additions to this romantically evil genre that Buffy has created. Both of them relate quite explicitly to Buffy in both characters and audience response towards those characters.


In "True Blood" there are vampires as well as werewolves, shapeshifters and all of those supernatural monsters that used to keep you awake at night. However, all of the monsters have their own personality. None of them are straight up evil, despite their normal depictions in fairytales and horror movies. With individual personalities comes the audience being able to relate to the characters, even though they aren't generally likeable characters in real life (not that they are real, but when people refer to vampires and monsters, most people are anti them.) The main vampires are:
Bill Compton, who all of the girls swoon over because he is an old school American gentleman in love with a human Sookie Stackhouse, but are also scared of as he is capable of killing.
Eric Northman, who you are never sure about. Sometimes he helps out Bill and Sookie, but other times he opposes them. He is kind of like the trickster in Vogler's character archetypes.
Both of these characters get a lot of positive audience feedback, much like Angel and Spike.


In "Twilight", the characters are much less awesome in the fact that although they are vampires, they don't kill humans, which is kind of a bummer, but better for a younger audience who might still get nightmares over this stuff. But every fan loves Edward, the vampire, and Jacob, the werewolf, because Stephanie Meyer makes sure that they have human tendencies, not just animalistic. The audience relates with them and pities them when Bella, the main human girl, treats them badly because she can't choose who she loves most. It's a love story, kind of like in Buffy, but with much softer details.


There are many more books and movies and television shows coming out based on this popular genre. The teenage fiction section at Borders is proof of this as it's really hard to find a good book these days with all of this love of the undead fever happening. There is no doubt that Buffy was the start of this, as all of them contain components from this original storyline and made it a part of theirs.