Buffy vs. Edward
For the Buffy fans in the house, and I know there are a lot of you, a remix. The creator explains it this way:
In this re-imagined narrative, Edward Cullen from the Twilight Series meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's an example of transformative storytelling serving as a pro-feminist visual critique of Edward's character and generally creepy behavior. Seen through Buffy's eyes, some of the more sexist gender roles and patriarchal Hollywood themes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed - in hilarious ways. Ultimately this remix is about more than a decisive showdown between the slayer and the sparkly vampire. It also doubles as a metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21ist century.
Thanks to reader Jerelyn for the heads up.
Posted by Courtney - September 03, 2009, at 11:07AM
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Yeah! I love it!
I know it's not high praise, but: Better than the twilight movie. (No offense intended to Catherine Hardwicke, but you can't salvage source material like that.)
Seriously though, tis fantastic. :) Great job.
An article about the video by its creator Jonathan McIntosh
Subtitled versions
Buffy for the win!!! I freakin loved this!!! I have fantasized about it....oh thanks for posting it. I am going to spread it around to all my friends who love Twilight....and on a side note...kinda...one of those friends loves Twilight. But she loves movies/books with strong female characters....and usually hates those with weak female characters...go figure......THANKS AGAIN:)
My bad....it posted twice, I wanted to change something at the last minute...and I thought it had not posted yet......
I don't *love* "Twilight," but I did enjoy reading it... I, too, usually love strong female characters. The first book I loved as an adult was a Margret Atwood novel. But something about those poorly-written vampire books hooked me and got me to devour all four of them. While reading, I complained about how dumb Bella was (I'm sorry, but after knowing your boyfriend is a vampire, it should not take you half of the second book to put together the clues that your best friend is a werewolf!), and giggled uncontrollably at the ridiculous "romantic" parts (I find wedding proposals in general to be funny, and the one in "Twilight" had me laughing out loud all alone in my apartment). It's my guilty pleasure. Please don't hate me for it.
I have so many guilty pleasures that are worse than Twilight!!! :) It's good to have those!!!:) And I still love my friend even though she loves the series....
I think guilty pleasures are okay (I know I have some I'm not proud to admit) as long as you acknowledge them for what they are and you're willing to analyze them a bit.
I have never read twilight but if one recognizes it as a guilty pleasure, it means one sees its faults.
My real concern is little ten-year-old girls reading this and buying into the hype that possessiveness, obsessiveness, and stalking are "romantic". and then when they start to look for relationships, they look for *that* kind of "romance".
"I have never read twilight but if one recognizes it as a guilty pleasure, it means one sees its faults."
Not necessarily. Someone might just call it a guilty pleasure because they think it's something teen girls are into and they're a mature older woman. Or another reason such as that. They might not call it a guilty pleasure because it does things like supports horrible stereotypes, unhealthy relationships, etc...
Buffy for the win!!! I freakin loved this!!! I have fantasized about Buffy kicking his ass....oh thanks for posting it. I am going to spread it around to all my friends who love Twilight....and on a side note...kinda...one of those friends loves Twilight. But she loves movies/books with strong female characters....and usually hates those with weak female characters...go figure......THANKS AGAIN:)
EDWARD: You're like a drug to me. You're my own personal brand of heroin
BUFFY: Oh my god, are you twelve!?!
Buffy would SO kick his ass. That Cullen boy is like an emo Angel without the bad-ass (well, a more emo Angel without the bad-ass).
Yeah, but what about Buffy's relationship with Spike? Doesn't he kinda mirror Edward? And Buffy ends up screwing/loving Spike.
Buffy never ends up loving Spike. Even when she tells him she does in the last episode to comfort him, he tells her that he knows she doesn't (he says something like, "No you don't, but thanks for saying it"). The closest she ever comes to any sort of love is the respect she has for him by the end of the series.
Furthermore, the whole point of Buffy and Spike's relationship in season 6 was that she was using him in an extremely unhealthy way in order to avoid dealing with life. She finally recognizes that and her choice to stop sleeping with him marks her return to reality. The whole point of their season 6 'ship is that it's unhealthy and not romantic and pretty explicitly abusive - hell, he ends up trying to rape her, and we're meant to be disgusted by him in that scene. All this in contrast to Bella/Edward, which is an unhealthy, abusive relationships presented as a romance we're supposed to swoon over.
Well, but she still gets into an abusive relationship.....
And how about Angel? In that relationship, the audience is supposed to understand that truely, deep down, Angel isn't the bad guy, he's the good.
I suppose ultimately with that, they can't be together....but if they could, they would.
I think Buffy has a lot of unhealthy relationships, but I think they're presented as unhealthy more than they are in Twilight.
The relationship with Spike is really unhealthy. But its presented as such the whole time, its a representation of how messed up she is after coming back from the dead, and he does try to rape her and they take that very seriously. (Its sort of interesting food for discussion that the time he tried to rape her is so much worse than all the times he tried to kill her and all her friends).
As for Angel... I mean, when he has his soul, he IS a nice guy. When he doesn't, he's a completely different person. (Unlike, say, Spike, who seems about the same when he gets a soul, but that's a whole other issue with the buffyverse continuity). But Buffy and Angel *could* have been together if Angel had decided to stay human in that episode of Angel season 1. That one always makes me mad.
I'm rewatching the series right now....I haven't gotten to the spot where Spike tries to rape her, so maybe I'll feel different later. To me, Spike has always been consistent....when he changed his behavior it was a conscienous choice.
But Angel strikes me more as an abuser, like...it's her fault for changing him and then he changes back, he's all Mr. Nice Guy again and he didn't mean. Plus, as Angelus, he's freakin' sadistic. As a vamp, Spike has more caring feelings than Angel does.
But that's my personal opinion.....and I guess you're right, at least in Buffy, the unhealthy relationships are protrayed as unhealthy and unsustainable.
But Angel/Angelus are presented as almost two different people. Pantheon is right that this is handled differently than Spike/Souled-Spike (I always tried to figure out if it had anything to do with who they were before being vamps, if Liam/William had some effect on who they are with souls, but I eventually just accepted that the writers were probably just worried about changing a fan-favorite character too much), but Angel himself isn't abusive. Tortured, fucked up, and brooding, sure, but not abusive. Angel turning into Angelus was a metaphor for every girl who slept with a guy and then saw him change, only done horror-story style.
When he was Angelus, he WAS freaking sadistic. But Buffy never had a relationship with Angelus. She spent all of season 2 trying to get her head in a place where she could kill him. When he stalked her, and left pictures he sketched of her while she was sleeping, that wasn't presented as something romantic. That was presented as really frickin' creepy.
And I don't know if when Angelus changes back to Angel if we're supposed to accept that he's a Nice Guy now and didn't mean it...his whole existance, especially his own show, is about atoning and redemption. I think it's pretty clear Angel feels responsible for what he did as Angelus and doesn't blame Buffy for the change.
I don't think that the clip in the OP is saying that Buffy never had unhealthy relationships, but she sure never thought that the unhealthy stuff was romantic. Prior to using Spike as escapism, she had so much contempt for his infatuated-but-violent feelings about her, kinda like the clip is showing her having contempt about Edward/Bella.
I am 25 and I really enjoyed reading Twilight. It in fact read New Moon and Eclipse too. They were easy quick reads and kept me interested. I quickly identified Bella as a weak female character and it drove me nuts! My younger sister, who is 16, also read the same 3 books in the twilight series. She agrees Bella is a weak female and I could have not been happier. I was so disturbed by the way Bella runs her life around Edward to the point she is a "zombie" when he leaves her. I was also disturbed by Edward's possessiveness. Finally, and to me most shocking, Bella is willing to leave her human life for a vampire life...so she can be with Edward forever!!! WTF! My sister and I discussed the books and she had the same feelings. I was so happy she felt that way.
Although I really love any book that gets kids reading, I really hope that young girls do not see the kind of relationship that Edward and Bella have as true love. I hope young girls don't see Edward as the ideal and are constantly searching for someone like him.
With all of that said, I hope no one thinks I read too much into it...I just get worked up..haha!
MY 14 year old sister read the books and agreed with me about the writing. Although we haven't discussed Bella as a weak character, she did get really worked up in the last book. (SPOILER ALERT, if that's necessary) When Bella's pregnancy is endangering her life, my sister wondered, why didn't she realize that if she aborted the fetus, her life would be saved?
I've had this uber-gratifying video on my FB forever.
The Buffy series is like food for the hungry feminist soul.
I've always seen it as more like food for Joss Whedon's creepy fetish for super-powered teenage girls.
To each their own. Doesn't change how kick ass I find it.
That was really funny.
Any HP fans notice they used a Cedric Diggory clip when Buffy slayed him?
yes! haha
I LOVE Twilight AND Buffy. Sorry.
So do I.
I am not sorry.
I love to analyze them to death though :)
If I took all my cues from Feministing and Bitch magazine, I would probably start to think that hating Twilight was like, the most important feminist action of our time. The horror -girls are reading books and getting ideas! Won't somebody think of the children???
exactly. It's kind of ridiculous. Or maybe I just fail at being a feminist.
Its horrifying that something so poorly written, stupid, vapid and misogynistic is so popular amongst girls and women. Of course I choice to mostly ignore it and whenever it comes up, just offer actual good books to lend.
I'm sure all those dumb womenz are thankful that there are so many 'feminists' ready to save them from books and offer them approved reading lists. Not at all patronizing.
I feel like the issue with Twilight from a feminist standpoint is much like (and not unrelated to) a common feminist stance on work vs parenting: it's not that feminism and feminists are mad at women for choosing to parent full-time, nor even for women who actively choose to become trophy wives (it certainly happens), as long as they made an informed decision.
As long as she was given the choice and presented with all the facts, it's her own choice and no one elses. Where Twilight comes in, is that methinks feminists all hope that young women reading these books (for which I appreciate the term "abstinence porn") understand exactly what messages the text sends. The positive depiction of a fairly abusive relationship, all that: everyone has a right to enjoy or not enjoy what they will, but while we shouldn't be patronizing about it hopefully... we can't just let Twilight pass as a light romp, given the cultural impact it's having.
I think the only "fact" most of the critiques are based on is the "fact" that it's really cool to hate Twilight. Like many texts, there are actually multiple interpretations and having a different perspective doesn't make anyone less intelligent or less feminist.
I also think feminist critics of the series need take a second to examine their own girl hate. How many times during these endless discussions (seriously -- I'd love to see how often Twilight is discussed here vs. actual problems facing women in the world)have we seen people use the fact that young girls enjoy Twilight as proof that there's something wrong with it. Or the virulent hatred of Bella -- a character many girls identify with. What's more damaging to a girl's psyche -- Edward Cullen or the feminist masses saying, "You're weak and pathetic. The things you like and want are disgusting."
Yes. YES
i never got into the buffy thing back in the day, but this is really funny.
(ive been tempted to rent twilight in a "hurts so good" way, but just the clips here? augh. bad bad bad acting!)
wasn't this posted a while back? months ago?
It made the rounds a month or two ago, but I don't think it was posted here specifically--it was on Pandagon, though, among other places.
Love Buffy (and Angel for that matter) I can't get into that Twilight stuff.