So over the past couple months I've been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and thouroughly pestering everyone around me with all of my thoughts on it.
I love my girl Buffy with all of my heart and she just can NEVER catch a break. She has spent the past 2 years of her life undergoing nonstop torment and suffering, and she just deserves to REST. On the flip side, I hate just about every man in this show (except for Giles and Oz, love you pookies). Like they are all just so vile. Xander is obvious, but the fandom seems strangely fond of Angel, which I just cannot comprehend, as I have never hated a fictional man with more vehemence than I hate Angel. Number 1, he has the personality of a wet sock when he's not evil, number 2, he's literally a serial predator?? Like the reason he was cursed in the first place is because his MO was targeting and tormenting teenage girls for like. Centuries.
There was actually this one episode in season 2 where he and Buffy get possessed by the souls of a student and a teacher who were in a relationship, and it was sooo mind-bogglingly crazy how it layered these two different imbalanced dynamics, where one person was older and had more knowledge, and the other was both deeply emotionally invested and had the power to kill both of them if anything went wrong. That was definitely the episode that solidified that I would never like Angel as long as I shall draw breath.
In other news, Oz is so nice and I am so scared that bad things will happen to him because he is just so nice.
Also!! It is so sad to me that Ms. Calendar died without anyone knowing her real name. Every time Giles calls her Jenny I just get so sad bc like...she didn't get the chance to tell him D:
Okay so I actually wrote this a few days ago but shhhhh. Without further ado:
*My favorite overall Peter Parker iteration is from a 2019 fanfiction on ao3, and my favorite Spider-Man overall is, of course, Miles Morales from the Spider-verse movies
So obviously I love a good character-driven narrative. I think that having well-developed and fleshed out characters can anchor your audience into the story better than just about anything else, and can deliver the themes and messages of your story really effectively. It's also really satisfying when the arcs of characters tie directly into and are reflected by the conflicts and setting of the narrative, and Adventure Time takes this to its logical extreme like no other show I've seen.
The world of Adventure Time is extraordinarily developed, with history spanning hundreds of thousands of years, and mythology that expands into space, but they never once face the exposition dumping problem that so many fantasy plots with similar worlds encounter, and this is because it almost exclusively shows us history through the eyes of its characters. An excellent example of this is Marceline, who is one of the most beloved characters in the entire show (which says a lot because all the characters are fantastic), and whose backstory is the source of the majority of our information on the period between the Mushroom Wars and the present day of the show's main plot. By tethering the past, present, and future of the world to its characters, it also tethers its audience to that history through the characters we've grown to love, as well as better connecting its themes of change and cycles by directly showing us the witnesses and casualties of these patterns (both on a large, historical scale, and within a mortal lifetime).
Overall I just think the show's worldbuilding is really really cool, and the way they do it ends up coloring every point in time with the memory of these characters that we know and love which is so well done and so in service of the show's messages and so wonderful
