World of Emotion

Listen: I love the concept of the demon fighting teenage fantasy blonde kicking vampire booty with her beloved (not so teenage looking) puzzle solving friends, but I realized a big thing that turns me off about this kind of show and lots of shows like it is the dialogue. The concept and execution is great. I like blue demon monsters exploding in malls and vampires sucking smoke from women's wind pipes. What bugs the hell out of me, however, is the snappy, sarcastic, pseudo-Han Solo wit and banter that comes between these great sections of fighting evil. I haven't taken good enough notes yet to provide passages of dialogue for you that bother me, but next go around I'll try to gobble up some examples so I can state my claim more clearly. In the meantime, I just want to address that I understand why they've adopted this style of writing for the show.

The Buffy story is epic, there's no denying that. It's a story that I feel is coming straight from a comic book, and for all I know maybe it started out as a comic. But my beef stems from the fact that although comics in many instances have fantastic plots, their dialogue seems to be vomited out of the mind of a twelve year old. This is why I've been hesitant, even as a twelve year old, to get into comics. Recently I've found some that are brilliantly written, like most of Frank Miller's Batman graphic novels and basically every work by Alan Moore, but for every good comic out there there are four-hundred more that contain dialogue comparable to a child finger painting trying to paint a house and tree under the sun, but ultimately creating some hellish nightmare collage of browns, greens, and a splotchy spot of yellow in a corner.

I love witty banter when it has a purpose that drives a character's development and is able to focus that style of humor on one or two characters while giving other characters different speaking styles and balance, but I feel that Buffy is just chock-full of character after character providing some cute, witty, chuckle-worthy dialogue while charming the pants off people and ultimately making everyone seemingly fun yet all the characters, as I see them after two episodes, are just kind of 2-D and naive. That candle line at the end of "Innocence" was way deep though and took me off the guard, so I can't rag on the writers too much. I just like more realism in my fantasies.