Vampires are all the craze now, with all the frenzy from Twilight, but let’s not forget our favorite chosen one, aka Buffy Summers, part-time high schooler trying to survive the perils of cheerleading trials and boyfriends, part-time hardcore vampire-slaying machine.  Buffy represented girl power to the extreme, but the type of girl power that could include her worries over the right  prom dress and her occasional feelings of vulnerability (though her job as slayer often prevented her from showing it).  In a lot of ways, she was exactly what post-feminists at the time wanted, a female heroine who could have it all–brains, beauty, superhuman strength, and a hot boyfriend,  too!  It was like battling evil vampires and demons every week was really a symbol for fighting patriarchy.  Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly), Buffy the Vampire Slayer spawned a lot of scholarship, including a collection of essays in the book Undead TV.   A lot of it is on Google Reader, here, and there’s some fun stuff in there like “At Stake: Angel’s Body, Fantasy Masculinity, and Queer Desire in Teen Television,” or “Buffy and the ‘New Girl Order’: Defining Feminism and Femininity.”  If you’re curious, there’s a whole Joss Whedon Studies Association, which includes Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies, and you should go check it out!

Other reasons I love Buffy: her Buffyisms (like vampirism = a whole big sucking thing, among others), the outfits she wears while doing things like slaying vampires and killing demons, and her non-chalance about the current upcoming apocalypse.  Of course there are lots more things I love, but those are a few!  On a fun note, here’s a great mash-up (that you may have already seen) with Twilight’s very own Edward Cullen and Buffy!  Enjoy!