The popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with girls and women is readily explained by the depiction of strong female characters with whom these viewers are able to identify.  The fact that the show is also popular with boys and men, however, challenges some traditional understandings of textual theory.  While feminists have long noted that canonical texts provided few points of identification for women readers, shows such as BtVS seem to provide few points of identification for men.  If such an identification is lacking, how is a masculine pleasure of the text constructed?  Clearly, little is to be gained if the male viewer is limited to a textual identification with the male characters who are relatively minor to Buffy.  It seems, then, that the pleasure of the text for at least some viewers is not a straightforward matter of identification with the characters depicted.

We suggest that BtVS operates through the construction of a mimetic universe, the so-called “Buffyverse”, in which the rules of causality, consequence, and existence themselves form the points of identification. It is not, then, the character of Buffy functioning as a figure for self-identification which provides the textual pleasure but the plight of Buffy, as well as other characters, in a universe of knowable but often unknown characteristics. These characteristics govern the morality of violence, the consequences of actions, and provide the raison of the action, and do so within the context of vampires, demons, and constant supernatural threats that can never be eliminated.  Any catharsis provided by the story line is thus short-lived and limited to the immediate situation.

Buffy’s character neatly captures the emotive element of the show, which is not heroism or triumph but a longing and desire for that which cannot exist, is beyond capture, and is incomprehensible. Classically, this emotion is known as pothos. Buffy’s slaying activities often border on the slapstick and ridiculous, but they are what prevent her from sliding into the merely mundane world, and so they keep alive a higher form of longing for the unattainable. In literature, pothos was thought to drive the quest and to provide the longing leading to adventure, but the adventure itself could never satisfy the longing. Buffy, thus, could never finally win, for to do so would remove all her desires. It is this element, we argue, that provides the ineffable quality and potential point of interest and identification for many viewers.