In the final minutes of this "reaction" the Goth kitted RiskPig makes some brief remarks on the differences between Buffy and Firefly which she notes she is watching at the same time as BtVS. According to RiskPig Firefly is more "intense" than Buffy because, she arges, Firefly requires less of a suspension of disbelief. One feels, at any moment she says, that any of the main characters might die even though none of them did through the course of the television show. It would not be until the movie Serenity that any of the major cast of characters in the show would die and those deaths may have been due more to the decisions of the actors not to return to the franchise should a subsequent movie be made, something that never came to pass given the lack of success--something that Hollywood defines purely in monetary terms--of Serenity at the all important box office.
There are major problem with RiskPig's hypothesis. Before I discuss these problems, however, I should note something critically important at least for those of us with an scholarly and empirical bent. At the time that RiskPig offered her observation on "Passion" she had only watched Buffy up to "Passion", the seventeenth episode of season two. Since Buffy ran for 144 episodes and was a show about the loss of innocence as one grew up--it is a bildungsroman--one can compellingly argue that RisPig had jumped the gun at least a bit. Scholars, before they offer analyses of their object of study, prefer to look at all the evidence before they jump over the interpretive cliff. By the way, I should also point out that by the time Riskpig watched "Passion" she had reacted to all but episode 14 of Firefly, the 14th episode being the last episode of the show, a show shown out of order by the braniacs at Fox and a show that was cancelled before all the episodes of season one were completed. A movie, a movie that according to sources was originally meant to be the season two finale of the show before it was cancelled in 2003 by the suits at Fox, followed two years later.
Now back to the problems with RiskPig's hypotheses about the differences between Buffy and Firefly. RiskPig misses the fact that Buffy is, as I noted earlier, a bildungsroman and that this fact matters when comparing Buffy to Firefly The fact that Buffy is a bildungsroman makes Buffy far more structurally, generically, and tonally a more innovative television show than Firefly. Firefly is, like another of Whedon's adult oriented shows, Angel, a more traditional show. Both Buffy and Firefly may play with metaphors. Firefly, however, given that it is an adult show, plays less with metaphors than does Buffy. Firefly's one major metaphor is the one that plays off the differences between the core nations and the modern nations in the late 20th century world. The Alliance, for example, is a metaphor for the core nations of today, the rich Western nations of the contemporary world that design product in the core, manufacture them in the semi-periphery and exploit the resources of the periphery, the global capitalist "frontier", so they can make mass marketed consumer goods relatively cheaply. The frontier planets, the outback planets, the bush planets, the places that want to be left alone by the Alliance but aren't, which is why Captain Malcolm Reynolds, keeps pushing his Firefly class ship named Serenity further and further into the black, further and further into space, in other words, each year, are metaphors for the wilderness. Whedon, after all, it should be remembered, studied with Richard Slotkin, author of a highly regarded trilogy on the history of the culture and mythology of the American frontier, including its culture of violence, from its beginnings in the 1600s to the 20th century. Buffy's metaphors, on the other hand, are embedded in the monsters of each episode of the show and sometimes in its longer season, series, and character arcs. So while both Buffy and Firefly, work several levels--the literal plot and narrative level, the the metaphorical/allegorical level and the mythological worldbuilding level (which includes existentialist and theological themes) Buffy is much more complex because it intersects its metaphors much more extensively with adolescent and young adult life cycles, life cycles that, in turn, intersect with a variety of economic, political, cultural, geographical, and demographic forces.
RiskPig also misses important similarities between Buffy and Firefly. Both, not surprisingly, share similar themes. They are, after all, both authored by Joss Whedon. Both explore issues like chosen families, and existentialist choice. Both are also heavily influenced by Whedon's love of classic cinema, the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Ford in particular. Firefly, for instance, is Ford's Stagecoach in space--a film that was adapted from Maupassant's brilliant short story "Boule de Suif"--and combined with the tough professionalism and chosen family themes at the heart of the films of Hawks. The suspense in both Buffy and Firefly is, of course, quite indebted to Hitch, the master of the thriller who no one working in the industry today can come close to matching.
Finally, what RiskPig, like most of her other amateur fellow "reactors" typically miss is the fact that literature, films, and television, are not real and can never be real anymore than opera or operetta can be "real". Even documentaries are manipulated through the use of editing and music, to note just two ways docs are manipulated by their makers. It is this uninterrogated faith, a faith akin to a belief in resurrection, the virgin birth, or reincarnation, in "realism" or naturalism, a term I have never heard one "reactor" use, that is a major problem in the "reactions" of most YouTube reactors. It is a faith, an almost cult like faith, which has socially and culturally constructed a very narrow and parochial conception of aesthetics, a term I really shouldn't use for "reaction" videos, a conception of aesthetics that deletes other approaches to art--allegorical, impressionism, expressionist, dadaist, surrealist, theatrical--from its approach to art. It is a narrow conception of art which would celebrate a colour photograph of the Rouen Cathedral by a tourist as superior to the impressionist paintings of the same cathedral by Claude Monet because it is more "real". One wonders if these true believing amateurs are even aware of the fact that Monet painted the cathedral in different ways in order to, paradoxically, capture how the cathedral looked like at different times of the day in different light, to capture it more realistically or scientifically, in other words They certainly don't seem to aware of the fact that notions of realism have differed across time and continue to differ in Western theoretical discourses.
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