Buffy and kids

Last weekend we (the whole family) wrapped up watching all seven seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, in a little less than 365 days. Yay us! So I'm now qualified to write a very long winded post about how Buffy is a mirror on life, or an allegory for the Bible, or whatever. But I'm not going to do that. It's been done. People have been awarded PhD's based on it. However, I do want to touch on whether or not the show is appropriate for kids. And by kids, I mean young teens.

In a word. Absolutely. I could probably make a case that not letting a 13 year old girl watch Buffy is very poor parenting. Every guy Buffy sleeps with tries to kill her. What a great abstinence message :)

More seriously, the message of the show, from my point of view, is that growing up is hard. High school makes that hard thing an absolute living hell. (Literally, in the case of Sunnydale High!) That isn't so far from the truth.

Yet through it all, the Scooby Gang has to figure out how to survive. They have to figure out what their place in the gang is, and learn to not be envious of the others. They have to work together to solve really big problems, like how to save the world. Again. They have to decide when to break the rules, and when to follow them. They learn that some things are worth sacrificing for, and some things are worth dieing for. They learn that some people are worth the effort, and some aren't. In short, they have to grow up. In the end, Buffy simply changes the rules of the game. OK, the ending was a little lame, but Joss wasn't really involved in season 7, so we will, as Buffy would say, deal.

I will say if you are squeamish about sex (network TV sex, so mostly just implied) you might skip seasons 6 and 7, as they amped up the sex in the plot lines a bit in the last 2 seasons. And really, the final 2 seasons are not quite up to the quality of the first 5 anyway. Except for Once More With Feeling in season six. Don't miss that one, no matter what.