odanu

Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

One of the reasons I took up knitting is that I have a ton of nervous energy and an absolute inability to sit still for any length of time without a book in my hand. So in social situations, and when I’m watching TV or movies with the family, knitting helps keep me from “wandering away” and finding a book to read. Sucks to be an introvert sometimes.

Anyhow, I missed Buffy the Vampire Slayer

on the first go-round, though I had seen the movie starring Kristy Swanson in the theater. Throughout most of the 1990′s and early 2000′s, I didn’t have cable TV, and my schedule conflicted with being able to sit down and watch it. I watched bits and pieces in re-runs, but it was pretty clear early on that Buffy had a very complex plot with a long arc, and I would be missing out if I didn’t catch it from the beginning.

I live with three male persons. Buffy had been categorized in their heads pretty early on as “girl stuff” (mumble, mumble, rant, patriarchy, mumble), so as we had really only one functioning television for a very long time, and I made my stand on Gilmore Girls (I caught it at the beginning, and loved it until the last season when they lost their best writer). So Buffy had to wait.

Netflix streaming video has been an amazing source of stuff I would otherwise never find, ever since it came out. First, I watched it on my computer, then turned it on with each video game system (we’re up to four televisions now with three latest gen video systems) as it became available. Now, so long as the wireless network holds, each of us can watch something different whenever we want.

I had a fairly severe viral infection early last summer and was home most of the week trying to get well. I started watching Buffy in bed, knitting socks (not the g-dmnd mother-effing socks), and was hooked by halfway through the first episode.

Over the course of the next eight months or so, I have slowly worked my way through the entire series, sometimes in binges of half a season a day, sometimes, a single episode every few weeks, adding in Angel

when I came to that point in the Buffy-verse.

Buffy is great to knit to. It is silly at times (it is silly a lot, actually — that is kind of the point), but smart and full of all kinds of female empowerment and tear jerking and excellent acting and brilliant character development. Watching the characters grow from young kids to young adults, watching them cope with the real life horrors of life in addition to various and sundry monsters, never failed to entertain.

This post isn’t about Angel really, but yes, I love Angel, too. The character is a brilliant self-parody of the Paladin type, and Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia is an example of extremely well written growth of a character in a character that could easily have been one-dimensional.

One warning. If you’re going to watch Buffy while knitting, when you get to the Hush episode in season 4 (major spoilers at the link), you need to set down your knitting and watch closely. You cannot watch this episode with one eye on your lace pattern. Joss Whedon will tick you off, killing off characters you love (as he does in every series he writes, dang him), but you will forgive him. Mostly. And you’ll have a sweater, maybe two, a couple of scarves, some mittens, and maybe a hat or two to show for it.

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