Academic life has a lot of hard endings and beginnings. Finite markers. Here is where one thing ends and another begins. There’s something gratifying in that because you are given a definitive point at which to pause and process. “You have completed the thing,” says life. “Full stop. The thing is done and now you may reflect and then decide what comes next.”
Some parts of the world beyond academic life mirror that. Some don’t.
We’ve just posted the final of 144 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode recaps over on The Snark Squad. We’ve finished a thing!
This week we have nine wrap up posts lined up and a big live-tweet-the-Buffy-movie party planned for Saturday. (#snarkathon March 8 @ 5pm EST ) Then it’s done. I’m sure we will find ways to dust it off later. Update shifting rankings, check in on these beloved characters. The equivalent of looking at a high school yearbook and remembering the good there.
(That’s a terrible analogy. I only have a yearbook from one of my four years of high school. I never look at it because I hated high school. The little I did love can’t be found in those pages, short of, perhaps, the pictures of a few beloved teachers and even that doesn’t inspire the same nostalgia that actually thinking about their classes does.)
Only a few months ago, the blog was nearly dominated by Buffy and Fifty Shades recaps. I still get the occasional Facebook message from a friend alerting me to some absurd Fifty Shades related thing that they stumbled across. After this week, we’re done with both of those things.
Except it’s more complicated than that. There aren’t the same hard endings. We’ve still got a final season of Buffy’s tragic magic vagina spinoff. And, of course, the blog lives on. The blog lives on with a slew of other posts, including occasionally revisiting the stuff that started this journey in the first place.
On top of that, there are the people who are sticking with us. The little community that maybe came for one of those two things and has ventured out into other territory with us. They’re still there and we will all surely still be referencing our beloved vampire slayer elsewhere. It sounds so silly, but blogging this show really has been a big part of my life. When you consider the couple hours it takes to write a recap and the countless additional hours spent discussing the show with others?
That process was always much bigger than the show itself for me. That process was part of my life. In a sense, that’s not going anywhere. New things will fill that space.
But still, I watched season 6 Buffy grapple with how little she wanted to be in this world at a time when I was feeling more or less the same. I watched horrifying displays of how consent doesn’t work as my sister was telling me the sordid details of her friend, hallmate, and rapist. The show became personal.
And now we’re done. We’re done blogging. It’s done occupying this large space in my life. We are posting all these things in some weird quest to give ourselves that closure, that graduation moment. We’re talking to the only people who might get it about how and why this show that’s been off the air for over a decade now is somehow so important to us. I love the show dearly, though I wouldn’t consider it my favorite TV show. I probably have to concede that it’s the show that’s had the biggest impact on my life.
That impact is layered. It’s in the fact that I spent nearly two years creating something from it with two people who are now among my best friends. It’s in the amazing group of people who have supported our little blog and had long, thoughtful conversations with us. This show helped give me those things.
Even the moments where I became a hot mess of burning rage because I didn’t yet have the right to explain just how personal it was to have someone tell me that there was no significant consent violation taking place in an episode like Dead Things were important. They were life moments. (Life moments I already ranted about separately.)
For anyone who doesn’t live in the internet, who doesn’t spend so much time tied to a computer, maybe that doesn’t make sense. But that was a life moment. It fueled this fire in me that made me realize just how important it was to take an honest, critical look at my media messages. It highlighted — in a very personal way — how important it is not to let my love of a thing cause me to turn a blind eye to its problems.
So there was growth, too. In addition to all the friendships which have added real, true value to my life, there was that growth, too. For better or worse (I think better) blogging that show has had an actual impact on the way I engage with the world. There are clear, identifiable differences from then to now.
The endings aren’t so cut and dry, though. It’ll be a long time before that experience stops being part of how I discuss and frame that change, for example. There’s the inevitable months that follow in which friends of mine send me any Buffy related thing they come across. There’s the way it filters into other aspects of the blog.
I suppose that’s true of the rest of life, though. A graduation ceremony doesn’t mean that you wash your hands of everything that came before. When you close a book you don’t — if it was any good — immediately forget its contents. The powerful stories stick with you. They meld with you, sometimes in imperceptible ways.
It has been an exciting two years. I’m ready for it to be over, but I regret none of it. I’m grateful for all the wonderful people and lessons that entered my life because of it. Thank you for that, Ms. Summers.
Another thing is done. Another achievement unlocked. Time to find some new ones to chase down.
