10 Most Depressingly Realistic Lessons From Buffy The Vampire Slayer
It was never just about the vampires.
Buffy is essentially a bildungsroman, a coming of age tale. At its core, it's not about vampires or demons, but about the trials and tribulations of a teenage girl transitioning to adulthood. Like a good zombie flick, the vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer were just window dressing, and the real story involved character growth and overcoming personal trials and tribulations to arrive at a point in life where the character (or characters, really, as Willow and Xander, her best friends, were right there as well) was happy and adjusted in life. The show didn't always get this right, and sometimes strayed from the path, especially towards the end, when the seventh season of the show became more about spectacle, and speeches, and trying to salvage a main character who was no longer the most well-liked character on her own show. Despite the odd misstep, however, there are some things - really, many things - Buffy got right in a way that was almost depressingly real: the death of a parent at a young age, the annoying college room mate that nearly everyone experiences at some point, the fact that first loves are rarely the ones that last the list goes on and on. With seven seasons worth of episodes, it's impossible to look at every show, or every moment, where Buffy got it right, so we're going to focus on ten moments from the series that were pretty much spot-on to real life - depressingly so.