Trevor week 10

How does Buffy deconstruct traditional literary notions of good and evil?

Traditionally, generally speaking programs that have characters that are good and evil, they were generally one or the other, good or bad and generally speaking didn't deviate too far from the paths that the characters were given. For example the good cowboy that saves every, who goes to church, and enters saloons without having a single whiskey, contrasted against that of the villain who is centrally found in the saloon drinking whiskey, the guy who shot his own mother. (Clearly defined characters of good and evil.) How ever this is not the case in the Buffy series, characters of good and evil frequently have moral dilemmas, and frequently operate outside of the clearly defined black and white lines of good and bad, instead they frequently walk a line of grey with either a silver lining for good, or one of black for bad. An example of this can be observed from the film we watched in class. Buffy the good character commented about how she wanted to make the scientist that set her up to suffer for it. This demonstrated the idea of the good character taking on bad traits briefly. Braum, B.(2000) Explains this idea further "What is interesting about some of these newer representations of the supernatural, however, is the moral ambiguity that permeates many of the characters, icluding both the inhuman beings and other characters. "Evil" is often less fixed in these shows, with many characters demonstrating bot decent and demonic traits accross episodes or seasons. "Good" characters my develop in frighteningly sinister ways;villainous ones may surprisingly reveal complex and even selfless motivations."

Reference

Braum, B. (2000) The X-files and Buffy the
Vampire Slayer: The ambiguity of
evil in supernatural representations.p67.
Retrieved 18 October, 2005 from:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0
412/is_2_28/ai_64688900