The rise and spread of new digital media such as social media like YouTube, has provided ethnographers with a somewhat novel "exotic" setting that they can travel to all from the comfort of their "armchairs" in front of their computer screens, an exotic setting that allows them to explore "real" human behaviour in action in the brave new world of digital media. Today's ethnographer, for example, can travel to YouTube land and observe what real people think about television shows, movies, books, or music.
Since the Covid crisis a number of reactors have posted their reactions to the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer which ran on the WB and later UPN from 1997 to 2003. As always the ethnographer has be cautious about ethnographic work in cyberland since informants, which is basically what social media reactors are, aren't always forthright about their reactions to television shows, films, books, and music. They, after all, tend to give positive responses to what the see and hear since positive responses, almost certainly, garner more comments and likes and hence monies, meagre monies it is true, for the YouTube reactor. Additionally, although one can find commonalities in how reactors react to a television show like Buffy, ethnography is not, as quantitative methodologists love to remind those engaged in qualitative ethnography, grounded in a random sample. And while those who react to Buffy do not constitute a random sample of viewers and reactors they do constitute a convenience sample and as such reveal a lot about how those who chose to react to Buffy react to Buffy.
Recently I have been observing and occasionally participating (by responding in the comments section) in the reactions of two reactors to Buffy, Dakara or Dakara Jane and JayPeaKay. Both of these reactors are, I suspect, part of one of the post-baby boom cohorts. Both also hail from England, the former likely from Liverpool and the latter from the Home Counties, though whether this matters in a globalised media world is an open question. Both Dakara and Jay been reacting to the third season of Buffy pretty much simultaneously though Jay is slightly ahead of Dakara in his viewing at this point. Both have also been characterised by a similar reaction to the Big Bad of season three (Buffy has a Big Bad that the Scoobies, Buffy and her friends-allies, fight during each of the seven seasons of the show), Sunnydale's Mayor Richard Wilkins.
It is in season three of Buffy that viewers were introduced to the third slayer in the, Buffyverse, Faith. It also introduces, as Buffy does in each new season, to the newest of the Big Bads, the mayor. One interesting aspect of previous seasons of Buffy and of season three of the show are the parallels it draws between a series of doubles or doppelgängers. In season three, for instance, the show draws parallels between the two slayers, Buffy and
Faith, just as in season two the show drew parallels between slayer Buffy and slayer Kendra. This parallelism and doubling, by the way, allows Buffy to escape the iron cage of manicheanism that characterises so many American television cop, fantasy, and science fiction shows. Season three also draws parallels between the two caring surrogate father figures of those two slayers, Giles, the surrogate father figure of Buffy, and the mayor, the surrogate father figure of Faith after the episode "Bad Girls/Consequences". Season three, it should also be noted, also introduces us to doubles of Willow and Xander, two of Buffy's friends and slayerettes, VampWillow, Xander and VampXander, and reintroduces us to one of Giles's doubles, his friend from his rebellious college years and now nemesis, Ethan Rayne. Parallelism and doublings are central aspects to the Buffy text.
While earlier episodes of Buffy season three foregrounded similarities between the two slayers-- Faith, called to be a slayer after the death of by the book Kendra who, in turn, was called to slayerhood as a consequence of the brief death of Buffy in the finale of season one, "Prophecy Girl"--also foregrounds significant differences between the two slayers, differences that turn out to foreshadow things to come in season three and beyond in both Buffy and its spinoff Angel. Buffy is a less by the watcher book then Kenya while at the same time being a more by the watcher book than the rash "want, take, have" Faith. These differences become particularly apparent in the important nearly two hour long episode "Bad Girls/Consequences" in the middle of the season, the episode in which the rash Faith, despite Buffy's attempt to stop her before she sinks her wooden stake into what turns out to be the Deputy Mayor Allan Finch, becomes a murderer and killer. Faith reacts in Nietzschean fashion to her murder of Finch arguing that slayers are outside of and above the law because of the role they play in preserving human life and human society. We more than balance out the scales, Faith claims. For Faith slayers are thus uberfraus who save the world again and again from seemingly endless apocalypses. Buffy, on the other hand morally wrestles with the death of Finch and grieves for the murder of an "innocent". By the end of the episode Faith, who, the Buffy text has told us and shown us on several occasions has issues, goes to work for the mayor after she kills his right hand vampire man, Mr. Trick, while saving, somewhat ironically, Buffy's life in the process.
Despite the clear parallels between Giles and the mayor in the Buffy text--both, the show repeatedly shows and tells us, care deeply for their charges, Giles for Buffy, and the mayor for Faith--both Dakara and Jay interpreted the textual evidence of the mayor being, like Giles, a surrogate father for their respective slayers, in skeptical if not cynical fashion. Both thought the mayor was simply using Faith, manipulating her, solely for his own personal devilish ends, namely, his plan to ascend to pure demon, something that happens in the last episode of the season.
Why this jaded interpretation of the mayor? Was it the product of the dissonance associated with Faith, someone they repeatedly said they liked, going rogue by taking a job with the mayor? Both Dakara and Jay, after all, mentioned that they didn't think that Faith was evil and that they believed and hoped that at some point she would see the error or her ways and return to the white hated Scooby fold. Was it the product of increasing numbers of sensationalistic media reports since the 1970s about older men (or older women) using young people for their own selfish ends? Was it due to the increasing cynicism of young about politicians, a cynicism that has increased since the 1970s? Was it due to an emotional reaction to the relationship between younger women and older men, one that has become increasingly common since the 1970s? Both Dakara and Jay, after all, had a similar reaction to the romantic interest the 18 year old Cordelia, a sometime Scooby, who, by California law is an adult who can thus marry without parental consent, expressed toward the new watcher of season three, Wesley, a relationship, by the way, played for comedy in the Buffy text. Was it the product of that new life cycle stage, young adulthood with its arrested adolescence, something that can be traced to changes in the economy (globalisation, postmodernism and the dominance of the retail sector with its low paying jobs)? Is it a study diet of manichean Hollywood fairy tale films and television programmes--Buffy is not one of these thankfully--where the villians are pure evil and the good guys are pure good? Is it some combination of these?
Whatever the source or sources of this "reading", what was interesting to me was that the interpretation of the Faith mayor relationship of season three was an extra-textual interpretation that overrode what the text itself actually "said". After all, as the Buffy text clearly and repeatedly shows and tells us, the mayor, who is actually honest and genuine in his expression of family values and fear of germs, is forthright in his love for Faith, a love that Faith needs, a love that the Scoobies cannot provide for Faith, and a devotion that proves to be the mayor's Achilles heel in the finale of season three, "Graduation Day". It is, in fact, the mayor's love for Faith that proves his undoing and allows Buffy and her slayerettes to defeat the mayor in the finale of season three. It is, of course, that fact, the fact that the mayor genuinely cares for Faith, that closes off any counter interpretation of the relationship between the two like the empirically problematic one offered by Dakara and Jay.
Readings of the mayor and Faith relationship are not the only misinterpretations of the text one finds among Buffy reactors. The LexiCrowd and SoFieReacts, for instance, have been waxing apoplectically about Giles's attempt in season six, the, according to Joss Whedon, "oh grow up" season of Buffy, to get Buffy to act responsibly toward her financial and family obligations, an attempt that ultimately results in Giles returning to England since that is the only way he sees of not "standing in the way" of Buffy growing up. Both of these post-baby boomers--GenXers? GenZeders?--have criticised Giles in the harshest of terms on numerous occasions for leaving Buffy. One has to wonder, as one did with respect to those who misinterpret the mayor/Faith relationship, if the reason for this is generational and hence social and cultural, if it is the product, in other words, of generational differences between those who grew up in an era typified by that new life course category of young adult and who are increasingly living into their thirties, in some cases, with their parents and those who grew up in the era of you left home at 18, got a job--which were plentiful and often lasted a work lifetime- immediately became and adult and almost immediately started down the primrose path to having 3.67 children.
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