It's Giving Me the Wiggins
On vengeful spirits, neurodivergent friendships and grappling with The Big Bad in Buffy the Vampire Slayer!
Spooky season is well and truly over for most of you, but I like my spook all year round! Aaaand it was my birthday on Thursday so as a treat to myself I thought I’d take a look at my favourite series of all time: Buffy the Vampire Slayer!
Thursday was also Thanks Giving for many of you in North America. And who can forget the Buffy episode where the Scooby gang must confront the vengeful spirit of the Chumash people on whose ancestral territory Sunnydale now stands? As the episode recounts the Chumash were all but wiped out, along with so many other indigenous communities, by white Christian settlers.
Welcome to AutCasts, a free bi-weeekly newsletter by writer, Aisling Walsh, exploring neurodivergence through cinema’s oddballs, misfits & rebels!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a supernatural drama television series created by writer and director Joss Whedon which premiered in 1997 and ran for seven seasons. It follows Buffy, one of a lineage of girls chosen to slay vampires and other demons, as she negotiates the demands of her destiny and her desire to be a normal teenage girl. Along with some run of the mill vampire bad-guys, Buffy and her friends, the Scooby Gang, confront a series of ‘Big Bads’ each one increasingly nasty and determined to bring about the end of the world.
The Scooby gang, particularly Willow, are initially sympathetic to Hus, who embodies the Chumash desire for revenge against the descendants of those who massacred their people. Nevertheless, as his vengeful intentions encroach on Buffy’s traditional Thanks Giving dinner the Scooby Gang decide they must eliminate Hus as if he were just another demon. There is no talk of reparations, nor healing, nor any other alternatives for addressing this intergenerational wound than all-out war. Willow’s protests become increasingly feeble and Zander’s mysterious illness (is it smallpox or syphilis, no one knows) becomes the butt of many jokes for the remainder of the series. (Hands up who wishes Zander had died here or in any of the previous episodes?) Buffy sends Hus back to the Spirit world and the Scooby Gang enjoy their pumpkin pie in peace.
This is one of the Buffy episodes which has aged least well in a cannon rife with problematic racial, gender and sexual tropes and the director’s own abusive behaviour. I have neither the time nor (head)space to pick these apart right now, but they have been widely documented in many reliable media outlets.
Despite these, and other flaws, Buffy remains my favourite series of all time!
I’m under your spell
Buffy premiered on BBC in the autumn of 1997, just as I was turning 13 and struggling through my first year of secondary school. The BBC aired teaser trailers over months leading up to its release and by the time it aired on a Thursday evening at 6.30, just after dinner but before my mother’s favourite soap Eastenders came on, I was primed and ready to become obsessed.
My friends and I watched Buffy throughout secondary school, swapping our thoughts about the highs and lows of each episode, Buffy and Willow’s clothing choices or mooning over Angel with unrestrained fervour, every Friday lunchtime. I loved the fantastic world of this near reality full of demons, vampires and witches, the celebration of nerds and outsiders, the balance between the frequent ‘end of the world’ scenarios with the kind of high school drama that teens often believe is the the end of their world. I identified most with Willow: the shy nerd with questionable wardrobe taste (though I dress like her more than ever these days), who nursed impossible crushes and remained oblivious to her own queerness.
By the time season six aired I was on the cusp of adulthood and freedom and it became harder to keep up with regularly scheduled Buffy viewings in an era before streaming.
I reconnected with the Scooby Gang in my mid-twenties, following the death of my mother. I borrowed the complete box set from the library where I worked and binge-watched from beginning to end over three long months of evenings alone in my mother’s house. In those circumstances it was Buffy who I felt most drawn to. The parallels in our stories felt terribly real: the loss of her mother half way through her second year of university, the absent father and being catapulted into the world of adult problems and responsibility with no parent to fall back on.
Over identification with fictional characters is, I just discovered, another autistic trait. In fact, this whole newsletter is a testament to an over identification with fictional outcasts. Obviously, I’m not a vampire slayer, nor a chose one of any kind, but Buffy’s struggles and the profound loneliness she grapples with throughout the seven seasons have spoken to me like few other films or TV shows. Buffy became a source of solace, something I would return to when I needed comfort or to access the grief I was too often afraid to let myself feel. I could write (another) thesis on how loss and grief are handled in the series, but I’ll leave that for another time.
I returned to Buffy during the worst months of the pandemic and it was like reconnecting with a dear friend. This year, my partner and I watched all seven seasons together as I dragged myself through the final months of my PhD. At 38 I saw far more flaws than ever before (Zander was practically intolerable) but I also spotted far more neurodivergence than ever before.
What’s the sitch?
Anya is canonically known as the autistic-coded charater in Buffy: she’s awkward, plain speaking, misses social queues, struggles to show empathy in “approapriate” ways and is calmed by counting money. I would argue, however, that that as well as being a club dedicated to fighting evil, the Scooby Gang is also a classic example of neurodivergents flocking together and staying together.
For one reason or another each member of the Scooby Gang is somehow out of step with the rest of the world: they are ‘The Chosen One,’ geeks, nerds, ex-demons, neutered vampires, ensouled vampires, lesbians, witches and mystical energy keys. But within the safety of the Scooby Gang they can let their literal and figurative masks slip and be themselves. They click in a way I have mostly felt with other neurodivergent people and it was a delight to recognise this and why, as a teenager, this world felt so real to me despite the monsters and demons, oh my!
Buffy and Willow, in particular, share common autistic traits. They are all socially awkward with people outside the Scooby Gang, they consistently break down common idioms into their literal meaning, they are slow to pick up on double entendres or miss them completely, they say inappropriate things at inappropriate times, they are bad at/uncomfortable with lying or keeping secrets and they have a very strong sense of right and wrong.
The Big Bad
My partner’s main objection to Buffy on our most recent rewatch was the way good always triumphs over evil and evil is always so readily identifiable (even with the more nuanced storylines given to Spike or Willow). Yet the persistence of a rigid morality, usually enforced by Buffy herself, also feels terribly neurodivergent.
I have been criticised throughout my life, by friends, family and others, of being too rigid, too black and white about how I see the world and inflexibility of my ethical compass. This has often been written off as ‘naive idealism’ or a ‘blind radicalism’ when I have refused to compromise or back down on a particular issue of ethical significance to me. But the times in my life when I have tried to be more amenable, less rigid and less concerned with justice and ethics, I haven’t felt very comfortable with the person who emerged.
Nor have I grown out of my political convictions or sense of justice. In fact, the more I have learned and understood about the deep, pervasive and historical injustices that mark our world, the less I am able to tolerate. Since my diagnosis I have felt much more comfortable owning this and confident that the ethical rigidity so many people seem to find intolerable about me, can also be a source of strength.
I used to think it was a weakness to get worked up while arguing about issues of importance to me. I believed that the emotion I showed and the distress I felt when faced with someone actively arguing against the humanity of another group of people was an impediment to my cause. What I have begun to realise is that I simply do not have to engage with people who, often from a place of privilege, proudly assume the role of devil’s advocate when it comes to questions of reproductive justice, women’s rights, trans rights, decolonisation or genocide. Those same people are too often the ones who have dismissed my arguments because I dare to show emotion. But there is no room for devil’s advocates when it comes to peoples’ rights to exist.
We are currently witnessing some of the most flagrant violations of international law in contemporary history and an unprecedented distortion of the concepts of rights and justice: a State has a right to exist but indigenous people do not, a State has a right of self-defence but indigenous people do not. Hospitals become military targets while doctors are labelled terrorists. Israeli civilians are victims while Palestinian civilians are “collateral damage.” Israeli’s have children while Palestinians have ‘people under 18.’
It’s hard to maintain any faith in a system of international human rights that has existed as long as the occupation of Palestine. It’s hard to maintain any faith in the institutions meant to uphold international law that refuse to hold certain States or corporate interests to account for gross violations. I’m struggling to fathom how, as we have witnessed 50+ days of the destruction of Gaza and its people, calls for a ceasefire are considered so radical they must be suppressed by our media, our universities, our employers, our political leaders. I’m deeply disturbed how colonising powers continue to deny the devastation of settler colonialism even when it is live-streaming across the world.
This is The Big Bad and it feels very back and white.
Indeed, it feels like there is no coming back from this, not for any of us.
But instead of giving into despair we can keep informing ourselves, join a local protest, supporting the BDS movement, contacting our government reps (Ireland, UK, US, Global) to demand the ceasefire becomes permanent and to call a halt to further settlement of the West Bank and donating what we can:
Verso have a range of free books for download.
NPR have an extensive list of humanitarian efforts in Gaza.
- has put together another extensive reading list!
If you liked what you read, please consider subscribing (for free) or sharing this essay. As an independent writer it’s the best way to support my work!
Dear Mrs Walsh,
This is probably a bad idea, but I'll give it a go anyway...
Well, I'd been checking whether there was any demand for autistic writers recently, and came upon your 2023 article in Publishers Weekly (Does the Booker Have an Autism Problem?). Then I located this Substack and lo and behold, the very first thing I read was that "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was your favourite series of all time.
To explain, I'm a fully diagnosed autistic author (probably washed-up), but got pitched into an incredible series of events involving Drusilla, Juliet Landau, an NAS-sanctioned overland trek across America and a mythic meeting on Sunset Boulevard.
This led to "Dear Miss Landau" (Chaplin Books, 2012), specifically written "to inspire people with autism" and four unofficial novellas about Drusilla and the Buffyverse which developed a lost story arc from the original series but which remain unpublished.
Long story.
"Dear Miss Landau" was wonderfully reviewed on BBC Radio 4's "A Good Read" and the first of the four fanfiction novellas ("Drusilla's Roses") pretty much turned Juliet Landau into a fan.
In brief, a fuller explanation of all this can be found in the most recent blog on my Goodreads page ("Buffy Embattled"), and the first two Dru novellas ("Drusilla's Roses" and "Drusilla's Redemption") are on the website "Archive of Our Own."
But nobody ever noticed. I'm quite satisfied just to have been published, but I wish the full story could come out. Nowadays, if I see a possible opening I give it a try and hope the electric lightbulb will go on.
I'm pretty certain we're at opposite ends of the political spectrum but what the hell, let's give it a go...
Goodreads URL:
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/21351025-buffy-embattled-and-joss-banished-all-is-lost-but-for-the-return-of
Archive of Our Own URL:
https://archiveofourown.org/users/JamesChristie68
Thanks for your time,
James Christie