When I first watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I found the show to be inspiring. Id watched a young women around my age seriously work the martial arts. Honestly martial arts was something that actually scared me. My interpretation was that you went to a dojo comparatively like Cobra Kai , Daniels nemesis in the 1984 movie "Karate Kid" . That you'd be yelled at constantly and beat up. Buffy in a weird way helped me look at martial arts, boxing in a different light. Instead of scary more empowering of the body and mind. The character over came her own fears for the greater good on a regular basis.
With that being said there is an amazing article in the Atlantic by Katherine Schwab "The Rise of Buffy Studies " She talks about how academics have studied the Joss Whedon cult classic television show at great depths. There are actually hundreds of books that have been written by academia about the Slayer. Please check out this article. If you're a Buffy the Vampire Slayer geek like me you'll just love it. Here is an excerpt from the article click on the links to read the Atlantic Artc
"Douglas Kellner, a professor at UCLA, has written that popular television does a particularly good job of expressing the subconscious fears and fantasies of a society, and that Buffy is an especially useful example. The show’s fantastical elements, he said, provide “access to social problems and issues and hopes and anxieties that are often not articulated in more ‘realist’ cultural forms,” like cop shows or sitcoms. But even popular dramas with similar surface-level conceits like Teen Wolf and Vampire Diaries, which focus mostly on soap-opera romance and teen issues, lack Buffy’s allegorical elements, which elevate the show and make it fascinating for scholars to study." ( via Katherine Schwab/Atlantic " The Rise of Buffy Studies " )
