I continue on my background-Buffy watching spree as I work on a more utilitarian tool for better-organizing my DA2 play-through.

I think I've come up with a vague idea for the fic, but it's a kick that I'm sure I'll get off in a while.

BtVS is one of those things that I forget about completely for a long time but then really enjoy it when I start watching it again.

I have fuzzy memories of watching large swaths of the canon but never all the way through. Part of this is probably owing to the fact that I was most-interested in the series in the days well before Netflix did anything but mail DVDs to people. I have several boxsets of Buffy DVDs, and I vaguely remember using them. I also remember my mother forbidding me to watch it at one point because she overheard the characters talking about sex too much or something.

So it's been around a while in my consciousness. I think I was introduced to it around age 11 or 12 by a friend who was a couple years older.

I'm saying all this to talk about how different one's perspective becomes on high school fiction as one travels through teenager-hood and the 20s decade. Of course, I don't speak for everyone, but it is something that I think about given that (when I am employed) I am an educator sort of person. In theory.

Of course, in BtVS, there is the canon Angel/Buffy ship, which I just watched culminate and sink again tonight. Then, there is the niche and undying ship of Buffy/Giles. One involves an apparently-fairly-young-adult man who is over 200 years old, and the other involves Buffy with her assigned Watcher, a man in a guardianship position who is at least two decades her senior. And honestly, I can't bring it in me to judge people who ship either with any sort of passion, but I guess I also feel compelled to think about my stance on it - both the meh-whatever and the discomfort with them.

Now, I actually like the December/May-fly thing involving human/supernatural creatures. Doctor Who primed me for that, and in an earlier post I talked about how I am definitely seeing some stuff RTD tugged away from the Buffyverse and reused, thematically. My opinion that this definitely happened only increases as I watch more.

However, I don't really know what the point is for Angel being so obviously 5-ish years older than Buffy is, in terms of optics. When they spoke about his past, they mostly talked about when he was Buffy and pals' age - around 18 or so. So unless I have forgotten some plot-specific detail that made them decide to justify casting the character this way, or if they just really wanted David Boreanaz, I think this only exists to portray the visual of a girl in high school with an early-20s man in terms of the ~feel~ of their relationship to ground it back to reality. The thing that makes it feel less creepy, on a scale of creepy, is that it is obviously written in such a way that it was meant to appeal to a largely-peers-with-Buffy audience.

One unqualified positive thing I would like to say about the series is that it starts out being about kids finishing high school but that it actually allowed the characters to mature at a roughly realistic rate. They went to college, and they stopped being in college at some point, and some of them had jobs, and so on. A lot of similar media creates an inertia where high school lasts for eight years for some reason.

Recently, someone on my twitter feed went through a sudden Buffy/Giles phase, too. I think maybe it was their first time with the series, and that was what caught their eye. And to be honest, I think I am not entirely off-board with Buffy/Giles if it developed after he was a guest star on the show. Like, it's a bit weird that they met when she was in high school, but it isn't weirder than Buffy/Angel in the grand scheme of things. It's just a difference of optics, right? Both of them have a significant margin of life experience over her, and I think there is some general consensus with speculative fiction that at some point we stop counting cumulative life experience, because a person just sort of is what they are. Perhaps they are impacted by when they were made ageless or if they were always ageless, but that's a different discussion.

Anyway, I was just thinking about how Angel/Buffy, the canon of these two age-gap ships I see around, is so obviously written to appeal to teenage girls and women who are living through the fantasy of living Buffy's life to some degree or another. Or, if their shipping habits are not quite as self-projection, like mine, then it is still at least Buffy who is more their peer than Angel is. Than Giles would be, had the show gone there.

The other show this brings to mind is Pretty Little Liars, which I went through a binge-habit with sometime around 2014, I think. I really enjoyed it, and I went through a couple of watching-habits with it. I didn't ever finish it, but I did watch a lot of the show. And as far as I know, the show ran for more than four seasons, but the characters never graduated high school until the end of the show? Because I think they did a sequel series where some of them at least went to college. They felt the need to end the show in order to let those poor girls get past age 18 even though the show had gone on for much longer than that. I even remember a meta-joke about it in one episode where one of the characters said to another, "Face it, we're never graduating high school," in response to another's hope that they survived to pass their final exams or something.

Of course, the canon ship in mind there is Aria/Ezra. Since I'm assuming you might be conversational about BtVS from osmosis if you're reading this far, I haven't described the relationship dynamics that much, but to give a brief explanation of Aria/Ezra:

Aria is the daughter of a college professor and they live in a New England college town or suburb of a college town or something. She had been out of town for a year, and shortly after moving back home she stops - alone - to buy herself a cheeseburger at an all-ages pub sort of place near campus. She sits at the bar. An attractive young man walks into the bar and sits down. He sees her, and he's smitten. They get to talking, and some little bit of conversation misleads Ezra into believing that Aria is a sophomore at the college instead of in the high school. I don't remember if she intentionally started the deception, but when she realized it she definitely intentionally prolonged it. They end up in the bathroom where they make out.

Come the first day of school, Ezra finds that this girl is a sophomore in high school. He is her English teacher. Then, the show paints them as star-crossed lovers. They fight it for a while, but they keep getting closer and closer until they give up fighting. It takes a long time before they actually sleep together or anything, but as far as I'm aware Aria is still presented as being about seventeen when they do. They go through this whole process of getting found out by her parents and then trying to make the parents understand. And the narrative does a good job making it compelling, as I recall in wispy memories, but I remember that when I revisited the series a year or two after my initial interest, my hackles were raised where they hadn't been before.

Like, I know that it's just fiction. And I am 100% against censoring the ability to write these sort of stories, especially in a T-rated medium like a TV show of its kind. However, I can't help but think that it's not that the content changed. It's that I'm no longer the intended audience.

And it's completely fine if a person continues to enjoy something when they have outgrown its target demographic. I'm still a fan of several things that are aimed at teenagers, and on a shallow level I even like things like Sesame Street character designs. But I guess over the past few years I have really experienced the shift in perspective in a noticeable way.

Prior to about age 25 and going to grad school to become a teacher - and honestly I could not say which was the bigger influence - I didn't have a hard time continuing to relate to the High School Girl character.

I think a lot of people can relate to teenage characters way up into their 20s and beyond. Particularly if one is invested in "genre fiction," one may find that a lot of available media in those genres has protagonists which skew young. And while I don't want to delve too deeply into why I think that is right now, I think it makes perfect sense, and it rarely has anything to do with someone being abnormally attracted to teenagers or something. Rather, I think it has to do with the fact that cultures in both the "West" and the "East" (I'm thinking about anime as well as genre fiction from western media) tend to glorify youth, if for somewhat nuanced and different reasons.

What I think it boils down to is that being in one's late teens is the first time a person really defines who they are as an individual, yes, but more importantly, they define themselves in terms of their social and communal identity. Being in school forces a person to have a community-identity or to experience the trauma of not having one in a communal setting. And I think that's a very human experience that a lot of people who are going through the motions of having a job in a capitalist society don't experience. In a lot of ways, capitalism and the bullshit culture of professionalism serve to intentionally alienate people from their coworkers because there is always an implicit competition between two people on the same "rung" of the ladder. It is in schools' best interest to foster at least some sense of social contract, decorum, and mutual-care among its students, for crowd control if nothing else, and people who move past that stage in their lives look back and wonder why it felt like the best time to some of them.

Of course, I know a lot of people who hated high school with a burning passion. Maybe they hate teen/high school fiction, or maybe they cling to it as a way to rewrite what hurt them in their minds. In any case, I think that the continued appeal of high school-ish stories is rooted in this.

If a person is watching one of these stories, the real touch-stone characters are the teenagers, no matter what age the viewer is, and that's one thing that made Pretty Little Liars so astounding to me. The first time I watched it, still a bit younger than 25, I was completely enthralled with the Aria/Ezra storyline. It didn't bother me at all.

Now, let me say, even back then I would have been completely opposed to the same thing happening in real life. I would have taken one look at the imbalance of power and reported it to everyone I could think of. But for the purposes of fantasy and suspension of disbelief, I could still let go so completely that I was rooting for them.

If I watch a lot of their scenes now, though, I cringe. I can't help but wish someone would do one of those score-swapping scenes, and then it would be a horror movie where Ezra was 100% a predator taking advantage of Aria over and over for years (however many years this stupid story takes place over). If he weren't polished and wearing a sweater vest and a pressed shirt, it would be one of those things on true crime documentaries where some guy married a 17 year old when he was 30 and kept her prisoner for years.

And I think the show did ultimately end with them together.

I think one thing the show did that really broke the camel's back for me, in my admittedly-dim recollection, is that they did a subplot where Ezra was A. Honestly FFS, I never found out what they were going with after S1, and I guess I will never know now. If it turned out it was the core cast all along, though, I'm calling bullshit.

Anyway, I bring this story up because that was presented in a much more "realistic" space than BtVS is in. And it was entirely through the eyes of the core girl cast. It makes it a lot eerier to me to even imagine that canon ship, now. Having worked as a teacher, it makes my skin crawl.

And the thing is, a lot of Fantis will rail on all the time about Teacher/Student stuff in fiction or anything similar, even if there isn't the issue of one of them being underage, without any experience in that environment from the perspective of the adult. One thing that stands out to me from this lady who was one of my professors in grad school was that she did an entire class on precautioning us against inappropriate Teacher/Student involvement and, in particular, statutory rape. I think she even used a sort of local guy as an example in the form of a newspaper article. She warned us that as long as she was alive, if she found out any of us got in trouble for this, she would shame us in her class, too, or something.

And she proceeded to give a really blunt, realistic talk about it. She focused on the men, but she made sure to say that the women weren't exempt. She talked about how it can be hard as a younger teacher, because your students may be closer in age to you than your established coworkers, and you spend most of your day in a room with kids/teenagers. Now, of course, if the issue is with non-teen kids, then there is a much, much bigger problem, but she talked about how with teenagers and very young teachers, it actually isn't that weird for there to be one-sided or mutual attraction between them.

The thing that I was surprised and impressed by was that she said it wasn't weird or wrong in and of itself to look at a student and think, "That's a handsome young man," or "That's a beautiful young lady." Because teenagers mature at different rates, and teachers are human beings, and our brains and eyes aren't programmed to recognize age-first. The issue is that when one is the adult in the situation, it is one's constant, vigilant responsibility to remember the power disparity and to push away the attraction not from a place of rage and disgust but from a place of caring about your students as people, if that ever happens to you.

Of course, as a teacher gets older, the likelihood that the brain will go "Oh, attractive human," at a teenager lessens exponentially unless there is some kind of maturation issue with the teacher. Again, this can be a minefield. But I guess what I'm saying to even bring all this up is not to ~justify teachers being attracted to students~ or something creepy but to say that there is a means through which to understand "the teacher's point of view" or "the older person's point of view" in a fictional situation like this, for the purposes of escapism.

But as one gets older, particularly when one is in a role of actually being a teacher or other authority figure over young people, one develops a revulsion instinct, I think. And it doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't necessarily need to completely change a teacher's opinion on fiction, either.

Like I said, I'm not convinced I'm off the former-Teacher/Student train if a ship I liked had that dynamic for some reason. But I guess I just want to say that while I completely understand the reason teenagers and very early 20-somethings like he idea of Teacher/Student, it's developed a sour note for me in a way that other age-gap ships have not, realistic or otherwise.

And while I don't even know if I'm into BtVS enough to ship for more than two minutes at a time, I think another thing that I like about the canon is how it is not so focused on that mystical era of high school that can never be moved beyond lest our main characters shrivel and die that it fails to make its Grown-Up Characters people. I really enjoy Giles as a character, but at this point not as a shipmate for Buffy. I know that I have seen this ship brought up before, and like I said I think I might even have felt some feelings back when I watched it and he showed up again a bit toward the end of the show.

But I think that one thing I find interesting in the bit that I'm watching (S2) is the way in which I have a whole new perspective on Giles - a man in his 40s? - hanging out in a library with a bunch of sixteen/seventeen year olds, utilizing their brains and brawn to fight the forces of evil while trying to referee their social interaction responsibly. It's absolutely hilarious to imagine now that I know, from a teacher's perspective, what wrangling teenagers is like.

Even though I'm mentally Old Now and mostly relate to the teacher role, though, that doesn't mean that I don't still plug myself in to teenage protagonists, and it doesn't mean that I'm suddenly attracted to teenagers unlike some of the current Discourse suggests. Instead, it is relating to a headspace that I think all of us remember, at least a little, and it is - more than that, possibly, for me anyway - about looking at the world as a place that was not governed by avoiding ruining one's economic prospects. Of course, being unemployed and not knowing what I'll ever have a real job again probably impacts this a lot, but I know that if there is anything appealing about the fantasy of being a teenager again, it is the fantasy of being able to 'go back' and experience a time where those pressures of capitalism and professionalism simply hadn't crystallized yet. Then, maybe, I would grow into an adult who was better-equipped for them.

Or maybe, if I was a superhero teen, I would bring the whole rotten system down.

I think that's one reason I like The Society, as a teenage fantasy, because since it establishes that every single person around is between 16 and 18, it sort of removes some of the current trappings of society only to place new ones on them. They have to figure out trial and error with systems of government and self-management, and they are recognizing that they are "just kids," but also recognizing that they are "the adults now." And honestly, I think there are whole fields of study, or at least whole fields of think-piece articles, about how Millennials have kind of never been allowed to stop feeling that.

Anyway, I'm really sad that Netflix retracted The Society's renewal.

What as I saying?

Challenge #3: Canon Recommendations

While I tend to think I have a pretty healthy balance of live action and anime/animated fandoms, I tend to be into slightly more mainstream live action canons. I often find that people who generally get into live action stuff are (understandably) put off by some stereotypes about anime and its fandoms, both justified and not particularly justified. Because of that, I get the feeling this list might be a little bit slanted toward anime, especially with a mind to recommend some anime to people who generally do not give anime a second thought but might if given a nudge. However, I will start with the one live action rec that is on my mind lately...

The Society

Netflix Original - Just Renewed for Season 2



The Society is a Netflix original series (like actually, not just the lies they tell about Netflix Originals to mean 'just exclusive in this region actually') that I started to watch one Saturday here in Japan just to kill some time. I did not mean to get hooked, but I watched S1 in two big chunks and then started on a second watch. It fits into a particular niche that I enjoy a lot of the time: stories about young people suddenly trying to cope without the benefit of the societal structures that have both protected and governed them all their lives. Of course, this kind of thing always gets compared to The Lord of the Flies, but personally I blame Digimon for instilling this interest in me when I was a baby fan. This story feels mythological and it is unclear if it is magical realism, science fiction, modern fantasy, or some mix of those things. For the most part, it is an everyday life drama with the extraordinary circumstances dumped on top of it, and I really enjoy that about it.

The story begins in a suburban New England town where nearly everyone is the product of middle class monotony. However, there is a strange, bad smell that has plagued the town for some time. Apparently, the powerful adults in town had paid someone to deal with and remove the smell and it had worked. However, it seems that there was a disagreement about payment for this service, and the smell comes back. While they try to deal with this situation, the high school students 16 and up are put on a bus (literally) to go on a camping trip at a national park. However, there is a sudden "change of plans" and the students are brought back home. Then, the bus drivers abandon them there without an explanation despite the fact that there are no other people to be found in the town whatsoever. Upon further investigation, they learn that they are not only alone but they are isolated in this carbon copy of their cities - the roads just stop with walls of untamed forest. There is nothing but forest around them for miles, and they seem to be the only people who exist. The older teens are then faced with the problems caused by absolute freedom to do whatever they want and what to do about the fact that some people will take advantage of that fact. Some of them are game to build a society from scratch, some are followers, and some range from selfish to truly insane.

This is primarily a character drama, and while the pilot episode had some fairly wooden-feeling acting, by the third episode I feel like I was definitely hooked more than just curious. There are some decent attempts at representation, including some canon gay characters. I would give people a warning that there is a very realistically portrayed abusive heterosexual relationship and an implied animal death related to it that made me pause the thing and go to DoesTheDogDie.com. However, there is not any SHOWN graphic animal violence, and there is some hope that the dog lived. The abused girlfriend, though, is shown to experience a lot of the things that battered women go through. I think that it is a particularly honest portrayal of the problem. I also like the varying viewpoints of other characters. One thing that is particularly meaningful to me is that there is a particularly vocal and devout Christian girl who is not presented as insane or cruel on that basis. I think she is a flawed character, but she struggles with a lot of the things I do as a Christian, and it is nice to see it neither idealized nor degraded.

Check it out on Netflix and let me know if you do!

Type Moon: Fate/stay night & Kara no Kyoukai

Many Fate series available on Netflix, Kara no Kyoukai available on Crunchyroll last time I looked



Type Moon is the name of the company and franchise, but Fate is the most mainstream of the properties within the franchise, so it ends up being used as the shorthand or even only-known name a lot of the time. This is a fandom that has taken a lot of my life and a lot of my love, for better or for worse. Some of the absolute worst fandom experiences and participants I have ever experienced or known have been in connection with trying to participate in this fandom. However, I could say the same of some of the best. If you get into Type Moon/Fate/Kara no Kyoukai, then I would highly recommend carefully curating your fandom experience. I would love to know morep eople who liked these series and wanted to discuss them. I wish there were more fic contributors. However, I will warn you that because this is a somewhat old and complicated franchise universe that you will end up running into mean, misogynistic gatekeeper types if you are not careful.

Also, because of the nature of this shared universe, it can be hard to understand how it works or where to start. I want to give you a very brief bird's eye view of the structure of each of these two properties then my personal thoughts on how you might get into them.

Fate/stay night is the name of a Visual Novel turned several anime adaptations. For those who do not know, a Visual Novel is a type of interactive novel played like a video game. If you want to, you can begin getting into Fate through the VN. Many purists will tell you that you have to do this. However, I think that if you are not sure about the format that this might be a daunting task. To be honest, I still have not read the entire thing. However, one important thing to understand about FSN is that there are three distinct "routes" that are like canon AUs of each other. Given the original genre of the VN, these routes - in some ways - centered around which of the three female protagonists the male protagonist would fall in love with and bang during the course of the story. However, that is far from all there is to them. Even if you do not like a particular ship, there are plot-related things that one learns by understanding the events of all three of the routes. It is an interesting storytelling structure, but it certainly has its barriers for entry.

So far, there have been two complete adaptations of two of the routes. The first was the first DEEN-produced Fate/stay night anime. This was based on the "Fate" or first route of the VN while borrowing a couple of things from the other routes from time to time because they never imagined adapting all three at the time I suppose. I believe that this anime was released in 2006. I have never seen it, and it is certainly a product of its era and as such gets a lot of undue criticism for being ugly or poorly produced. However, I have heard a lot of sensible people say it is a useful adaptation if nothing else. The second route "Unlimited Blade Works" was adapted into a 24+1 anime adaptation in 2014. This is the anime that got me into the series, and it is my favorite route. Finally, the third and final route "Heaven's Feel" has been being adapted into three theatrical release movies because of the very NC17 nature of some of its plot-relevant content if nothing else. The second of these movies came out this year, and there is one more remaining.

Apart from that, there are many different spin-offs. There is a prequel called Fate/Zero. There is a series called Fate/Apocrypha. There are other series that even I cannot name at the moment. There is something for everyone, and there are also abominations that I am not sure should exist. I am far from being well-versed, but I just know that I really like this universe.

A very basic summary of the premise of the original FSN VN and route adaptations is: Every 50 years for the past 150 years or so, there has been a magical ritual held in the magecraft backwater city of Fuyuki Japan. This ritual has been corrupted over time until finally it resembles something like a magical Hunger Games Proxy War between seven magi who fight using the Servants they summon. Servants are copies of the souls of the Heroic Spirits which have been so exalted through the adulation of mankind, though there are also infamous, evil "heroic" spirits who should not exist but do. The Servants are summoned into vessels resembling RPG classes: Saber, Lancer, Archer, Rider, Caster, Assassin, and Berserker. While it would seem that it is a magical battle royale in which one must fight to the death, it is not as it seems when the protagonists - Emiya Shirou, Tohsaka Rin, Matou Sakura, and Saber all have their own stories that may change the future of this too-early and corrupted iteration of the already bloody Holy Grail War.

To get into Fate, I would suggest reading the VN if you really love to read. You can do so through the lp-archive website or by getting your own copy and playing it. If you would prefer to watch an anime, you might want to watch the adaptations in the order of their release, but if you are like me then you might want to watch UBW first. Then, you might watch Fate/Zero, but I would suggest not watching Fate/Zero first. While I enjoy it, I think it often gives people disappointing expectations of the series if it is their entry point.

As I mentioned, Fate is not the only aspect of the Type Moon universe. Another much less complicated part of the shared universe of these stories is a series of Light Novels and anime films called Kara no Kyoukai. I would highly recommend that you watch the movies as I do not think that all the light novels have been successfully translated into English.

The story is told in a nonlinear format, and it follows the character of Shiki Ryougi, often through the eyes of her friend/admirer/possible lover Mikiya. It would seem at times that Shiki is a serial killer, repressing her urges. On the other hand, perhaps there is something even worse going on. There is magecraft involved in this story, but it also involves complex themes of people with psychic abilities both inborn and developed and the existential desires of people and where they come from. It is a very difficult to describe story, and I would warn that it is full of fairly graphic animated violence, but I am not a person who enjoys gore or horror for their own sakes. I would highly recommend these films anyway.

Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes

Robotics;Notes VN and its sequel recently received localization announcements at long last.
The Steins;Gate VN is already available on Steam.
Both series' anime have EXCELLENT dubs if you can find them to purchase or stream.




Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes are the two most recent constituent parts of a slightly larger shared universe called Science Adventure (SciAdv). Personally, I am unfamiliar with the other series that are a part of it, but I cannot recommend Steins;Gate and Robotics;Notes enough.

Steins;Gate has received the most mainstream success and critical acclaim. However, both stories are connected in a shared universe involving a Hidden Hand sort of organization (connected to the fabled Committee of 300) controlling the world from the shadows and shaping the growth of our technologies and how we behave with them. Ultimately, the Committee's goal seems to be to cast the world into chaos from behind the scenes, reducing the total population to about one billion. However, they want to do so in a way that will not implicate them, and they want to them control the forthcoming fate of those who survive to "save" the world and reshape it in their own image.

So... what are a bunch of nerds to do about it? That is basically the key question of any SciAdv series.

Steins;Gate involves time travel and a lot of questions about found family and friendship which are both contrasted and echoed in Robotics;Notes. While from an objective point of view, Steins;Gate is largely regarded to be the "better" and more mature of the time, I cannot recommend giving Robotics;Notes a chance after you finish Steins;Gate and digest it for a few days. What is so beautiful about Robotics;Notes to me is the way in which it is both sort of a breath of fresh air after the ongoing emotional intensity that Steins;Gate eventually reaches and a way of showing that even a happily ever after isn't perfect and that there is still a world to keep on fixing and saving, no matter what.

The series have great characters and great friendships. This is a great series for people who like their ships with a healthy side of gen where every character seems to have a unique and meaningful dynamic with every other one. One thing I will warn for is that Steins;Gate has a character in it that most fans perceive as trans in a positive way. However, the source material itself does not handle this as well as the fandom does, and I think that you kind of have to go in with a mind that you will take the good that is there and disregard some of the culturally enforced homophobic and transphobic undertones (or even undertones) that are not malicious but which exist. However, there is a lot of good not to be thrown out because of these issues in my opinion.


If anyone chooses to check out any of these series or has further questions about finding them or comments or ANYTHING ELSE, I would love to hear from you!!!