Meta: Dracula vs Buffy
Mar. 10th, 2008 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beer_good_foamyAlright folks, it's confession time. Ready?
I like "Buffy vs Dracula." I think it might even be the best season opener the show ever did.
There, I said it. Phew. Feels like a weight off my chest.
So anyway, I've had a bunch of thoughts on it knocking around in my head for some time, so given the latest developments of the comics I thought I might as well rewatch the episode and philosophise on them.
Antiquated and Obsolete; Dracula vs Buffy
The episode opens by setting up what will prove to be the central theme of the entire season, that will culminate with Buffy sacrificing herself to save herself: Buffy vs the Vampire Slayer. Buffy's in bed, restless, Riley asleep beside her. Buffy gets up. Without a word, she gets dressed, goes out, hunts down a vampire, kills it, goes back to bed and falls asleep in Riley's arms. The Slayer and the girl coexist – but not without friction. When they try to have an ordinary picnic the next day, their attempt at a normal(ish) life is interrupted not only by Buffy's supernatural strength destroying their means of entertainment
RILEY: Buffy slayed the football.
but also by the arrival of what we soon learn is THE vampire above all others – and as is customary, he arrives in a thunderstorm. (I'm sure if the budget had allowed, we would have seen a ship wash up on the beach with the whole crew dead and rats pouring ashore.) Count Dracula's in town.
In a way, though, that's almost by-the-by in this episode; because BtVS was never a show about the supernatural – it was a show about what it meant to be human, using supernatural elements for illustrations. In addition to the opening scene, there's the scene with Willow and Giles.
WILLOW: No. It's fine. It's just, you've been Mr. Project all summer. You know? Labeling the amulets and indexing your diaries. I draw the line at making giant rubber band balls. That's when you'll just have to get a life.
GILES: That's what I'm trying to do, actually, is, um, get a life.
WILLOW: It might go better if you left the house.
"Get a life" seems like a theme here. Season 5 is the season in which Buffy really starts having trouble with being the Slayer. Throughout the whole season, every character is consistently shown to be at least two seemingly contradicting characters; we have Suave!Xander vs Scruffy!Xander in "The Replacement", we have Spike and William in "Fool For Love", we have Dawn as both girl and key, Giles as both father figure and watcher... and obviously, Buffy as both Buffy Summers and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. It's the season where we hear talk of death wishes, of hearts turning to stone, where even the Slayer is powerless when it comes to saving her mother. It's the season where the clash between the human and the supernatural not only without, but within Buffy seems to become irreconcilable; where the stakes become so high that she'll have to choose one side or the other – and finally does.
BUFFY: I knew ... what was right. I don't have that any more. I don't understand. I don't know how to live in this world if these are the choices. If everything just gets stripped away. I don't see the point.
It may or may not be a coincidence that when Dracula calls her "killer," she's wearing the same red leather pants she wore when she went to murder Faith. Plus, of course, it's a pretty iconic image; two seemingly irreconcilable versions of the same myth meeting up on a graveyeard in California...
DRACULA: We're not going to fight.
BUFFY: Do you know what a slayer is?
DRACULA: Do you?
BUFFY: Who are you?
DRACULA: I apologize. I assumed you knew. I am Dracula.
BUFFY: Get out!
(It's hardly an accident that Timur Bekmambetov's film adaptation (or at least the international cut) of Sergei Lukyanenko's supernatural thriller Night Watch includes a TV playing that very scene of "Buffy vs Dracula" right before the film starts expositioning on the nature of light vs dark and how everyone has to choose sides themselves. Iconic indeed.)
Anyway, "Buffy vs Dracula" is, for all its metaphorical angles (and more on those in a minute), primarily a comedy episode. It's very difficult for it NOT to be one, considering how Dracula comes across when you insert him into the Buffyverse.
Bram Stoker originally published Dracula in 1897 (exactly 100 years before BtVS went on the air) and while it wasn't the first vampire novel, it quickly became the vampire novel. Thanks to the success of the book, the play, and the occasional movie (IMDb lists 167 titles with the word “Dracula” in them) Dracula has pretty much become the definition of a vampire, and his rules (as Spike points out in this episode) mostly apply to all other bloodsuckers too. Every vampire story to follow it – and every adaptation of Dracula itself, from Max Schreck to Elizabeth Kostova - may play with the myth that Bram Stoker established, make fun of it, subvert it, invert it, pervert it, reinvent it, amp it up, play it down, parody it, play it straight, modernize it, take it back to basics, build on it, scale it down, fictionalize it, claim it as historic facts, or even try to ignore it completely – but if you scratch long enough at any Western vampire story from the last century, you’ll find some version of Stoker’s evil count grinning at you, still recognizable despite all the attempts to remake him. (Dracula himself, of course, is a heavily remade version of the real Vlad Tepes – allegedly, Stoker found the name in a book and thought “meh, it’ll do.”) Tvtropes.org calls the phenomenon “our vampires are different” and points out that "a show will usually address the baseline rules even if they're not enforced." That is to say, you’re free to invent your own vampire mythos, but much like Buffy spends a substantial portion of “Buffy vs Dracula” claiming to NOT be under Dracula's thrall you’re still trapped by him, because you're going to have to establish that vampires in your canon don’t fly/are invisible in mirrors/dress in long black coats/talk with a funny generic European accent/lust after English virgins/etc if you want people to accept them as vampires.* Which the Buffyverse did years before Dracula turns up.
BUFFY: I looked around, but soon's they got clear of the graveyard, they could have just, voom!
XANDER: They can fly?
BUFFY: They can drive.
XANDER: Oh.
And vampires in the Buffyverse are different. As monsters go, they’re pretty much ordinary people plus fangs, 86 the soul, with all the same hangups and individual traits as anyone else. They’re not larger than life, the creepy foreigner looking to seduce innocent women and destroy society like Dracula was; they’re very much real, very much IN the world, and the people who still see them as these immensely powerful, mythical, long-lived, lonely Dark Ones... well, they don't fare so well; watch "Lie To Me." BtVS didn’t invent that kind of post-modern vampire - the tag line for The Lost Boys pretty much summed it up 10 years earlier – but they carried it to a logical conclusion far, far away from the castles of Transylvania.
Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire.
And with this change comes a change in those who hunt the vampires. Buffy is as far from Van Helsing – at least the original Van Helsing – as can be imagined, and Giles doesn’t really resemble him much either, at least not by season 5. Funnily enough, while Stoker’s Van Helsing was happy to use what was then the latest in modern science to defeat Dracula, Buffy largely rejects that. IMO, that ties back nicely to the basic idea of the show: if the monsters are metaphors for what you encounter in the daily course of your life (Joss introduced Spike and Drusilla specifically to have vampires that could interact with Buffy on a personal level) rather than the dangerous Other trying to get inside, then all the technological advances in the world won’t help you if you can’t rely on yourself. Buffy fights vampires hand-to-hand because the show is about her, not about them. As Dracula points out, the darkness is within the person fighting the darkness.
Next to your average Buffyverse vampire Dracula looks hopelessly out of place, and even more so since they don't even try to retrofit him to Buffyverse rules but play him almost completely straight. Pompous, snobbish, a relic from a by-gone age of both the human world and the vampire story, he makes The Master look up-to-date - not to mention that he has powers that no other vampire gets to have. And yet Dracula is perfect for this episode, exactly because he’s not a Buffyverse vampire and doesn’t even try to act like one. Being the original source of the creatures Buffy is destined to fight, the very essence of the myth, nobody is more qualified than him to teach her how they (and she) work – and sow the seed that will end with Buffy rejecting/transcending her own myth, the rules of her own verse, three years later. He is Vampire; hear himroar growl. But at the same time, being a vampire, he's shit out of luck in Sunnydale. Putting it in the parlance of our times, Buffy pwnz Dracula. The Buffyverse is so far removed from the Stokerverse that putting the classic Dracula in Whedon's world can never end well for ol' Vlad; there are no victims for him here – just a killer specifically designed to not only to stop monsters like him, but do it with a quip and a pun.
BUFFY: A guy like you should think about going electric. Seriously.
It's to Marti Noxon's credit that she manages to actually make him meaningful - not really as a threat, but as a guide. Because of course, "Buffy vs Dracula" is the flip side of "Restless," the magnificent character study that closed season 4. While having Dracula repeat some of the platitudes that the First Slayer tried to sell to Buffy might get a little heavy-handed
FIRST SLAYER: No friends! Just the kill! We are alone!
DRACULA: We are alone. Always alone.
TARA AS FIRST SLAYER: You think you know ... what's to come ... what you are. You haven't even begun.
DRACULA: You think you know ... what you are ... what's to come. You haven't even begun.
it doesn't so much repeat the "lesson" as reinforce it. It's one thing to hear it from the myth that's supposed to be on your side, but to hear the same thing from the one you're supposed to be fighting – both from the First Slayer and the first vampire: that the monster and the person fighting it so easily can become one and the same (and General Voll in "season 8" would probably agree). Buffy doesn't agree, though; she denies them both - at least for now. It's not the darkness in Buffy, the Slayer fighting alone, that ends up winning the day; it's Buffy Summers and the people around her.
That she can’t kill Dracula – another breach of Buffyverse rules - makes a perverted sort of sense since in BtVS, nothing gets solved easily or permanently just because you learn a lesson; the vampire still exists, the darkness is still there, but you learn to handle it (besides, if you slay The Vampire, you wouldn’t have a show anymore.) If you’re in the vampire business, Dracula will always follow you... but the thing is, and this is something that runs throughout the entire series but especially s5, Buffy doesn’t have to follow him or any old tradition; she can make up her own rules.
BUFFY: You're not the source of me.
BUFFY: That was gross.
The darkness that Dracula speaks of may be the source of the Slayer, but it’s not the sum total of Buffy Summers. Dracula as a representative of that darkness is necessary to set up the season; Dracula as a person is irrelevant once he's said his piece, and he gets soundly Eurotrashed.
BUFFY: How do you like my darkness now?
By contrast, the last episode of the season opens with Buffy fighting a perfectly ordinary vampire, one who's never heard of her or the whole vampire mythology; the absolute opposite of Dracula. That's an archetypical Buffyverse vampire: just an ordinary human robbed of his soul, with no sense of history, no mythical knowledge, no fancy name or title... just the kill. And when he looks at his opponent, he doesn't see another mythical warrior, no "renowned killer" – and so he's dust.
KID: But you're... you're just a girl.
BUFFY: That's what I keep saying.
And over the next 42 minutes of that episode, Buffy will struggle once and for all with the conflicting loyalties of the human and the supernatural, the light and the dark, life and death, and when the sun rises over Sunnydale, she will have figured it out.
No, Buffy can't kill Dracula, any more than any other adaptation of the myth has been able to. But even if Dracula hadn't been done to death over the last 100 years (and he has) it’s hard to see what could remain to be done with him in the Buffyverse after the role he plays here. He never returned to the show, though Angel used some Dracula-type vampires for a laugh in “Why We Fight”, and he rarely appears in fanfic (that I’ve seen). In his appearance in Drew Goddard’s crackalicious comic “Antique” (you know, the one that claims that Xander could spend a year as Dracula’s manservant without anyone caring...) he’s if anything even less compatible with the Buffyverse. Dracula must either be the supreme vampire or not be at all; he can't be just another vamp, or he'll lose that which makes him Dracula. But that kind of vampire hasn't fazed Buffy since "Prophecy Girl."
DRACULA: I’m sure you’ve heard the stories. The tales. The legends. Do try to contain your fears. Would be a shame if terror dulled this extraordinary event. After all, it’s not every day you meet... Dracula. Did I detect a shudder? Please, stifle your emotions. I assure you, as my guests, no harm will come to you. Do not be frightened.
BUFFY: We’re not.
DRACULA: What?
BUFFY: We’re not frightened.
Most of the reactions I’ve seen to his appearance in the new comics seem to take him as comic relief (and possibly a love interest for Xander). Which makes sense; it’s not like Joss hasn’t already dismissed him as a villain, though I suppose it’s quite possible that he forgot that. ;-)
...Aaaaaaaaand yet, we have this little bit from #10:
ROBIN: Oh, that was gloomy; I didn’t mean to be gloomy. The important thing is that you rescue the Prince.
BUFFY: Um… yeah?
WILLOW: Even I didn’t follow that one.
ROBIN: No, it follows you.
Hmmm...?
The tricky thing in the comics is that we’re now given hints that Dracula will not only take active part but also be an ally of Buffy's. Because for one thing, Dracula is not a good guy in any sense. His actions may inadvertently have good results – without him, Giles would have gone back to England and Buffy herself would probably have taken a very different path – and he certainly has a code; but as is made clear in his very first scene in “Buffy vs Dracula”, he’s still a monster, and even in the comics they make sure to point out that he’s accustomed to killing peasants and children for sport. For another, Dracula is the absolute antithesis of BtVS; the victory of traditional values over female empowerment (poor Mina Harker, forever denied that orgasm), of rationality over myth, of religion over sexuality. Does Dracula have anything left to teach Buffy that she hasn't already found out? And is it something she should learn?
Of course, it remains to be seen what their plan is; it might not be that simple. After all, Buffy’s dismissal of the First Slayer in "Restless" turned out to be overly simple too – there was still relevance to that storyline, as s5 and s7 proved. Or it might just all be a big joke. So I suppose the question isn’t so much whether the Buffy comics can defeat Dracula or rescue him from a bunch of Japanese Anne Rice fans, but whether they can rescue him from irrelevance. Whether there’s room, and what kind of room, in a Buffy story for the Dark Prince.
Bator.
* This is true of all classic horror characters, of course; after Night of the Living Dead, filmmakers could still have zombies who behave nothing like the ones in Romero’s movie – but somehow, most of them either do or go to some lengths to explain why they don’t, since that’s what the viewers expect when they hear “zombie.” Or, as they put it in the masterful horror comedy Return of the Living Dead, 20 years before Shaun of the Dead re-heated and repeated the idea:
BURT: I thought you said that if we destroyed the brain, it would die.
FRANK: Well, it worked in the movie.
BURT: Well, it ain't working now.
FREDDY: You mean the movie LIED? Up again
(This is where I'd include a poll on the best portrayal of Dracula on screen, but since LJ hates me it's not going to happen. Personally, I'd say Bela Lugosi by a nose before Klaus Kinski and Christopher Lee.)
ETA: Here's the poll!
I like "Buffy vs Dracula." I think it might even be the best season opener the show ever did.
There, I said it. Phew. Feels like a weight off my chest.
So anyway, I've had a bunch of thoughts on it knocking around in my head for some time, so given the latest developments of the comics I thought I might as well rewatch the episode and philosophise on them.
Antiquated and Obsolete; Dracula vs Buffy
The episode opens by setting up what will prove to be the central theme of the entire season, that will culminate with Buffy sacrificing herself to save herself: Buffy vs the Vampire Slayer. Buffy's in bed, restless, Riley asleep beside her. Buffy gets up. Without a word, she gets dressed, goes out, hunts down a vampire, kills it, goes back to bed and falls asleep in Riley's arms. The Slayer and the girl coexist – but not without friction. When they try to have an ordinary picnic the next day, their attempt at a normal(ish) life is interrupted not only by Buffy's supernatural strength destroying their means of entertainment
RILEY: Buffy slayed the football.
but also by the arrival of what we soon learn is THE vampire above all others – and as is customary, he arrives in a thunderstorm. (I'm sure if the budget had allowed, we would have seen a ship wash up on the beach with the whole crew dead and rats pouring ashore.) Count Dracula's in town.
In a way, though, that's almost by-the-by in this episode; because BtVS was never a show about the supernatural – it was a show about what it meant to be human, using supernatural elements for illustrations. In addition to the opening scene, there's the scene with Willow and Giles.
WILLOW: No. It's fine. It's just, you've been Mr. Project all summer. You know? Labeling the amulets and indexing your diaries. I draw the line at making giant rubber band balls. That's when you'll just have to get a life.
GILES: That's what I'm trying to do, actually, is, um, get a life.
WILLOW: It might go better if you left the house.
"Get a life" seems like a theme here. Season 5 is the season in which Buffy really starts having trouble with being the Slayer. Throughout the whole season, every character is consistently shown to be at least two seemingly contradicting characters; we have Suave!Xander vs Scruffy!Xander in "The Replacement", we have Spike and William in "Fool For Love", we have Dawn as both girl and key, Giles as both father figure and watcher... and obviously, Buffy as both Buffy Summers and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. It's the season where we hear talk of death wishes, of hearts turning to stone, where even the Slayer is powerless when it comes to saving her mother. It's the season where the clash between the human and the supernatural not only without, but within Buffy seems to become irreconcilable; where the stakes become so high that she'll have to choose one side or the other – and finally does.
BUFFY: I knew ... what was right. I don't have that any more. I don't understand. I don't know how to live in this world if these are the choices. If everything just gets stripped away. I don't see the point.
It may or may not be a coincidence that when Dracula calls her "killer," she's wearing the same red leather pants she wore when she went to murder Faith. Plus, of course, it's a pretty iconic image; two seemingly irreconcilable versions of the same myth meeting up on a graveyeard in California...
DRACULA: We're not going to fight.
BUFFY: Do you know what a slayer is?
DRACULA: Do you?
BUFFY: Who are you?
DRACULA: I apologize. I assumed you knew. I am Dracula.
BUFFY: Get out!
(It's hardly an accident that Timur Bekmambetov's film adaptation (or at least the international cut) of Sergei Lukyanenko's supernatural thriller Night Watch includes a TV playing that very scene of "Buffy vs Dracula" right before the film starts expositioning on the nature of light vs dark and how everyone has to choose sides themselves. Iconic indeed.)
Anyway, "Buffy vs Dracula" is, for all its metaphorical angles (and more on those in a minute), primarily a comedy episode. It's very difficult for it NOT to be one, considering how Dracula comes across when you insert him into the Buffyverse.
Bram Stoker originally published Dracula in 1897 (exactly 100 years before BtVS went on the air) and while it wasn't the first vampire novel, it quickly became the vampire novel. Thanks to the success of the book, the play, and the occasional movie (IMDb lists 167 titles with the word “Dracula” in them) Dracula has pretty much become the definition of a vampire, and his rules (as Spike points out in this episode) mostly apply to all other bloodsuckers too. Every vampire story to follow it – and every adaptation of Dracula itself, from Max Schreck to Elizabeth Kostova - may play with the myth that Bram Stoker established, make fun of it, subvert it, invert it, pervert it, reinvent it, amp it up, play it down, parody it, play it straight, modernize it, take it back to basics, build on it, scale it down, fictionalize it, claim it as historic facts, or even try to ignore it completely – but if you scratch long enough at any Western vampire story from the last century, you’ll find some version of Stoker’s evil count grinning at you, still recognizable despite all the attempts to remake him. (Dracula himself, of course, is a heavily remade version of the real Vlad Tepes – allegedly, Stoker found the name in a book and thought “meh, it’ll do.”) Tvtropes.org calls the phenomenon “our vampires are different” and points out that "a show will usually address the baseline rules even if they're not enforced." That is to say, you’re free to invent your own vampire mythos, but much like Buffy spends a substantial portion of “Buffy vs Dracula” claiming to NOT be under Dracula's thrall you’re still trapped by him, because you're going to have to establish that vampires in your canon don’t fly/are invisible in mirrors/dress in long black coats/talk with a funny generic European accent/lust after English virgins/etc if you want people to accept them as vampires.* Which the Buffyverse did years before Dracula turns up.
BUFFY: I looked around, but soon's they got clear of the graveyard, they could have just, voom!
XANDER: They can fly?
BUFFY: They can drive.
XANDER: Oh.
And vampires in the Buffyverse are different. As monsters go, they’re pretty much ordinary people plus fangs, 86 the soul, with all the same hangups and individual traits as anyone else. They’re not larger than life, the creepy foreigner looking to seduce innocent women and destroy society like Dracula was; they’re very much real, very much IN the world, and the people who still see them as these immensely powerful, mythical, long-lived, lonely Dark Ones... well, they don't fare so well; watch "Lie To Me." BtVS didn’t invent that kind of post-modern vampire - the tag line for The Lost Boys pretty much summed it up 10 years earlier – but they carried it to a logical conclusion far, far away from the castles of Transylvania.
Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire.
And with this change comes a change in those who hunt the vampires. Buffy is as far from Van Helsing – at least the original Van Helsing – as can be imagined, and Giles doesn’t really resemble him much either, at least not by season 5. Funnily enough, while Stoker’s Van Helsing was happy to use what was then the latest in modern science to defeat Dracula, Buffy largely rejects that. IMO, that ties back nicely to the basic idea of the show: if the monsters are metaphors for what you encounter in the daily course of your life (Joss introduced Spike and Drusilla specifically to have vampires that could interact with Buffy on a personal level) rather than the dangerous Other trying to get inside, then all the technological advances in the world won’t help you if you can’t rely on yourself. Buffy fights vampires hand-to-hand because the show is about her, not about them. As Dracula points out, the darkness is within the person fighting the darkness.
Next to your average Buffyverse vampire Dracula looks hopelessly out of place, and even more so since they don't even try to retrofit him to Buffyverse rules but play him almost completely straight. Pompous, snobbish, a relic from a by-gone age of both the human world and the vampire story, he makes The Master look up-to-date - not to mention that he has powers that no other vampire gets to have. And yet Dracula is perfect for this episode, exactly because he’s not a Buffyverse vampire and doesn’t even try to act like one. Being the original source of the creatures Buffy is destined to fight, the very essence of the myth, nobody is more qualified than him to teach her how they (and she) work – and sow the seed that will end with Buffy rejecting/transcending her own myth, the rules of her own verse, three years later. He is Vampire; hear him
BUFFY: A guy like you should think about going electric. Seriously.
It's to Marti Noxon's credit that she manages to actually make him meaningful - not really as a threat, but as a guide. Because of course, "Buffy vs Dracula" is the flip side of "Restless," the magnificent character study that closed season 4. While having Dracula repeat some of the platitudes that the First Slayer tried to sell to Buffy might get a little heavy-handed
FIRST SLAYER: No friends! Just the kill! We are alone!
DRACULA: We are alone. Always alone.
TARA AS FIRST SLAYER: You think you know ... what's to come ... what you are. You haven't even begun.
DRACULA: You think you know ... what you are ... what's to come. You haven't even begun.
it doesn't so much repeat the "lesson" as reinforce it. It's one thing to hear it from the myth that's supposed to be on your side, but to hear the same thing from the one you're supposed to be fighting – both from the First Slayer and the first vampire: that the monster and the person fighting it so easily can become one and the same (and General Voll in "season 8" would probably agree). Buffy doesn't agree, though; she denies them both - at least for now. It's not the darkness in Buffy, the Slayer fighting alone, that ends up winning the day; it's Buffy Summers and the people around her.
That she can’t kill Dracula – another breach of Buffyverse rules - makes a perverted sort of sense since in BtVS, nothing gets solved easily or permanently just because you learn a lesson; the vampire still exists, the darkness is still there, but you learn to handle it (besides, if you slay The Vampire, you wouldn’t have a show anymore.) If you’re in the vampire business, Dracula will always follow you... but the thing is, and this is something that runs throughout the entire series but especially s5, Buffy doesn’t have to follow him or any old tradition; she can make up her own rules.
BUFFY: You're not the source of me.
BUFFY: That was gross.
The darkness that Dracula speaks of may be the source of the Slayer, but it’s not the sum total of Buffy Summers. Dracula as a representative of that darkness is necessary to set up the season; Dracula as a person is irrelevant once he's said his piece, and he gets soundly Eurotrashed.
BUFFY: How do you like my darkness now?
By contrast, the last episode of the season opens with Buffy fighting a perfectly ordinary vampire, one who's never heard of her or the whole vampire mythology; the absolute opposite of Dracula. That's an archetypical Buffyverse vampire: just an ordinary human robbed of his soul, with no sense of history, no mythical knowledge, no fancy name or title... just the kill. And when he looks at his opponent, he doesn't see another mythical warrior, no "renowned killer" – and so he's dust.
KID: But you're... you're just a girl.
BUFFY: That's what I keep saying.
And over the next 42 minutes of that episode, Buffy will struggle once and for all with the conflicting loyalties of the human and the supernatural, the light and the dark, life and death, and when the sun rises over Sunnydale, she will have figured it out.
No, Buffy can't kill Dracula, any more than any other adaptation of the myth has been able to. But even if Dracula hadn't been done to death over the last 100 years (and he has) it’s hard to see what could remain to be done with him in the Buffyverse after the role he plays here. He never returned to the show, though Angel used some Dracula-type vampires for a laugh in “Why We Fight”, and he rarely appears in fanfic (that I’ve seen). In his appearance in Drew Goddard’s crackalicious comic “Antique” (you know, the one that claims that Xander could spend a year as Dracula’s manservant without anyone caring...) he’s if anything even less compatible with the Buffyverse. Dracula must either be the supreme vampire or not be at all; he can't be just another vamp, or he'll lose that which makes him Dracula. But that kind of vampire hasn't fazed Buffy since "Prophecy Girl."
DRACULA: I’m sure you’ve heard the stories. The tales. The legends. Do try to contain your fears. Would be a shame if terror dulled this extraordinary event. After all, it’s not every day you meet... Dracula. Did I detect a shudder? Please, stifle your emotions. I assure you, as my guests, no harm will come to you. Do not be frightened.
BUFFY: We’re not.
DRACULA: What?
BUFFY: We’re not frightened.
Most of the reactions I’ve seen to his appearance in the new comics seem to take him as comic relief (and possibly a love interest for Xander). Which makes sense; it’s not like Joss hasn’t already dismissed him as a villain, though I suppose it’s quite possible that he forgot that. ;-)
...Aaaaaaaaand yet, we have this little bit from #10:
ROBIN: Oh, that was gloomy; I didn’t mean to be gloomy. The important thing is that you rescue the Prince.
BUFFY: Um… yeah?
WILLOW: Even I didn’t follow that one.
ROBIN: No, it follows you.
Hmmm...?
The tricky thing in the comics is that we’re now given hints that Dracula will not only take active part but also be an ally of Buffy's. Because for one thing, Dracula is not a good guy in any sense. His actions may inadvertently have good results – without him, Giles would have gone back to England and Buffy herself would probably have taken a very different path – and he certainly has a code; but as is made clear in his very first scene in “Buffy vs Dracula”, he’s still a monster, and even in the comics they make sure to point out that he’s accustomed to killing peasants and children for sport. For another, Dracula is the absolute antithesis of BtVS; the victory of traditional values over female empowerment (poor Mina Harker, forever denied that orgasm), of rationality over myth, of religion over sexuality. Does Dracula have anything left to teach Buffy that she hasn't already found out? And is it something she should learn?
Of course, it remains to be seen what their plan is; it might not be that simple. After all, Buffy’s dismissal of the First Slayer in "Restless" turned out to be overly simple too – there was still relevance to that storyline, as s5 and s7 proved. Or it might just all be a big joke. So I suppose the question isn’t so much whether the Buffy comics can defeat Dracula or rescue him from a bunch of Japanese Anne Rice fans, but whether they can rescue him from irrelevance. Whether there’s room, and what kind of room, in a Buffy story for the Dark Prince.
Bator.
* This is true of all classic horror characters, of course; after Night of the Living Dead, filmmakers could still have zombies who behave nothing like the ones in Romero’s movie – but somehow, most of them either do or go to some lengths to explain why they don’t, since that’s what the viewers expect when they hear “zombie.” Or, as they put it in the masterful horror comedy Return of the Living Dead, 20 years before Shaun of the Dead re-heated and repeated the idea:
BURT: I thought you said that if we destroyed the brain, it would die.
FRANK: Well, it worked in the movie.
BURT: Well, it ain't working now.
FREDDY: You mean the movie LIED? Up again
(This is where I'd include a poll on the best portrayal of Dracula on screen, but since LJ hates me it's not going to happen. Personally, I'd say Bela Lugosi by a nose before Klaus Kinski and Christopher Lee.)
ETA: Here's the poll!
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Date: 2008-03-10 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-10 11:18 pm (UTC)