Okay, raise your hand: who else here is a gigantic Buffy fan? . . . Oh, wait, that’s right. We’re not actually personally connected, so I can’t see who is and who is not raising their hands. Oh well, I’m just going to assume that you’re all raising your hands because everyone loves Buffy.
Now that that’s settled, on to the focal point! After the show ended in the seventh season with — spoiler alerts, although at this point if you can’t catch a 15-year-old show on Netflix, you do not deserve fun, unspoiled shows — The Hellmouth closed, and every potential slayer awakened. The show seemed to be more or less wrapped up. But then they decided to continue the series as a comic book, dubbed by fans as “Season 8,” which became part of the canon and introduced new themes and characters that they could never get to on the show. And now, for the first time ever, the Buffy universe is getting a gay male “slayer.”
“Billy is someone who sees a need in his hometown and steps up to fill the void, even at great personal risk,” says Greenberg. “He may not have the actual powers of the Slayers, but he’s determined to be his own kind of hero, one who’s sort of modeled after those who do have the power, and he sets out to make due with what he has. In the process, I think he hopes to follow the lead of all the strong, powerful Slayers who came before him and live up to the standard they set.”
Well, he’s not technically a slayer, so much as he’s a kid who happens to kick ungodly amounts of ass, but still, a self-made slayer is still a slayer.
Also, slightly off-topic here but still part of the Buffy universe: does anyone else wonder if there will ever be a full-fledged male-to-female transgender slayer? At the risk of getting all politically nerdy, I feel like that would be kind of kickass. Anyway, end of personal daydream.
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