Oh! Wow! Eee!

[butterfly]

Brilliant Buffy essay by superplin here.

Excerpt:

There are a few reasons why I see this Buffy as a far, far more powerful and hopeful icon than the three-dimensional hero (which is fun, but not really paradigm-altering). For one thing, this kind of model goes beyond the standard morality play model, in which the character make a mistake, learns a lesson, and then moves on in the new and improved version. That's so linear, though (and you all know how I feel about linearity), and doesn't match up at all with real life. We real people not only backslide, we sometimes take petulant nose dives into meanness and pettiness. Sometimes, we do like to roll in the dirt. We are spiteful and sometimes violent and sometimes say and do exactly the wrong thing, without even realizing it. Or, hey, even deliberately. We're not just flawed, we're a mess.