I truly discovered the town of Sunnydale in 2006 during my sophomore year of high school when I casually bought the first season on DVD. I remember catching various flashes of random episodes when a babysitter my parents hired would come and sit for me. Parts of the show had stuck in my mind, eventually making me want to actually watch a full episode. I still get irked whenever Drusilla uses her fingernail to slit Kendra’s throat. It’s amazing how something you see when you are seven years old can still give you the skivvies at twenty-one.
After finishing the entire run of the series in less than a year (I sadly missed out on watching the show when it aired on the WB), I loved it so much that I wanted to go through the whole journey again. I decided then that each year I would watch the season that coincided with my own age. I watched Season 3 during my senior year of high school at age eighteen. Season 5 I watched my sophomore year of college at age twenty, and so on. It always seemed that no matter what situation was going on in Buffy, I could relate to it on every level. Feeling invisible certain days, wondering what my purpose was in life, always feeling like the Zeppo in my group of friends (Xander and I shared a special relationship) . . . No matter what, Buffy was there to help guide me through adolescence. I continued this journey until my freshman year of college when I found a group of friends that would voluntarily sit down and watch the series from the very beginning. Up until this point I had given up on convincing friends to watch the series—my failed attempt at explaining the metaphor and significance of Angel losing his soul after one true moment of happiness had humiliated me enough to not want to open up again.
From then on, Buffy became our way of bonding. The show helped open up conversations that would not be typical of an I’m-a-freshman-desperately-seeking-friends-and-a-sense-of-normality-in-my-life conversation that all freshmen have to go through. What Joss and Co. got so correct with the entire series is that, yes, high school is hell, but college is just as terrifying. Life never fully settles down into a warm, cozy, fuzzy blanket of safe. Your first day of college you may have your arm broken by the leader of a vampire gang, but by the end of the year, you may have channeled the spirit of the First Slayer to succeed in saving the world. Again.
Now that I am in the midst of my senior year of college I don’t have to be sad that once I finish Season 7 my journey will be over. I now have the awesomeness that is the Season 8 comics. What I’ve loved about Season 8 so far is that the scope of “Sunnydale and the Scoobies” has grown by a factor of, like, a thousand and ten percent. The writers aren’t strapped into the confines of a forty-four-minute format with a strict budget. I mean, hello—Buffy flew, Buffy traveled to the future, Dawn blew up to the size of a Holiday Inn, Warren walked the earth with no skin, Buffy and Angel got it on so hard that they ripped holes in the universe, and Buffy is scaling the Golden Gate Bridge on the new Season 9 cover! This is all possible because of the magic that lies in the medium of comics. And speaking of magic, Season 8 has also changed the entire world of Buffy, as we Whedonites know it. There is no more magic! I repeat, NO MORE MAGIC! Buffy the Vampire Slayer without magic is like Star Wars dismissing lightsabers in a battle.
Stripping Buffy’s world of what it knows is going to be an interesting plot device going into Season 9. Just like life, things you know are stripped away; it’s how you deal with what comes next that really matters. And if I know Buffy and her gang, they will make it through. That has always been the underlining message of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—no matter what hell you go through, you will emerge better and stronger than you were before.
Buffy Summers is growing up and so should the stories. I’m growing up and so should my stories. This girl has been with me through the key areas of my life, and with the continuation of her life in Season 9, she will be for a long time to come.
—Zackary Wilburn
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Allison Ferland