The Fandom That Sucks: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

The Fandom That Sucks: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BTVS) fandom is alive and thriving despite the last episode of the show airing fifteen years ago. Created by Joss Whedon and based off a movie of the same name the showed aired from March 10th 1997 until May 20th 2003 with a total of 144 episodes. The fandom is one the most popular on fan writing sites such as Fanfiction and Archive of our Own while also holding quite a large base on Tumblr, where fanart and fans opinions live in spades. The shows fandom remains very vocal on platforms throughout the internet and the actors and actresses who participated in the show still bring fans to tears when they “happen” to post a photo of themselves together. This fandom is

The way in which I observed the fandom is an aspect of media convergence, taking a type of entertainment that was made to be shown across televisions and using that media to write stories and fanart. As Jenkins states in Democratizing Television? The Politics of Participation, “convergence represents a paradigm shift -a move from medium-specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communications systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content.” This method is being used more and more by companies to help promote ideas of involvement within the network and the fandom, but BTVS is no longer an on air show, and the convergence continues. Media convergence is one of the ways in which members of the fandom stay active and involved with each other, creating new art work or fan videos or updating a fanfiction. Fanfictions are constantly updated- throughout the course of the audience study there was always new material to look at every day because the fandom incessantly updates and creates new

To start with, Whedon’s show is based off another creator’s idea, the Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie which aired in 1992. The idea for the show itself was not new or original but taken from another. One of the reasons that season six was so strongly disliked by fans was that it moved away from the norm of storytelling as Joanna Robinson writes, “The slayer had died dramatically at the end of Season 5 […] long before resurrections were all the rage in genre TV.” (Robinson) The show is heralded as being “ahead of [its] time when it came to the frustrated, angry young men of the social-media age.” (Robinson) The storytelling in season six is described by one fan as “Nonsense that no one wanted or was prepared for.” (fanfiction.net) Season Six of BTVS was not ready to be accepted by fans who wanted to continue to see the same type of storytelling they were accustomed to. As Gerbner proclaims, “Formula-driven, assembly-line-produced programs increasingly dominate the airwaves.” (Gerbner 176) The Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom was not ready for a new line of storytelling to emerge from the usual product they were presented with. Fifteen years later and the fans are still writing fanfiction to correct to season six because they feel it was outside of the norm. This stubbornness makes it hard for shows to evolve and grow- especially if a