Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale

OK, I'm a diehard Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, and I didn't particuarly like this book. I think you have to be a diehard philosophy fan AND a diehard Buffy fan to like this book. But it didn't do it for me completely.

The first two essays compare Faith & Nieschze and Faith & Aristotle. And they use the exact same examples in the same order. Point by frickin' point. It gets a little old with that sort of thing.

While these essays try to philosophize about the well, philosophies that run through Buffy, they're unsuccessful, dry and unengaging. Remember the body switch episode? Faith uses the line 'you can't do that because it's wrong' over and over again and it evolves throughout the show. Well, someone analyzed that in a paper and they a) missed the point and b) made it sound boring. Poop on them.

They also follow the philosophical episodes which are not the strongest episodes in the entire canon of Buffy. Analyzing Buffy versus the Iniative, while interesting as an idea, is not interesting over the course of a 20 page paper. Or 5 20 page papers.

They did acknowledge Buffyverse's only perfunctory view of religion, which is odd, because it plays a major importance in the idea of the series. That was a good thing.

I think the beauty of Buffy is the subtleness of the philosophy. Yes, sex is bad. Angel = demon after sex. Cordelia gets implanted with demonspawn after a one nighter. Nobody talks about things like this, and instead analyze everything else to death.

Basically, this book tried really hard and missed the point. They're too busy trying to compare to everyone else that they miss what the philosophy of the Buffyverse actually is.