Buffy rewatch: 3.02. Dead Man's Party

[boot_the_grime]

This is a not very exciting, but necessary episode that deals with the fallout from the last season before the real story of season 3 starts. Buffy is back home, not wanted for murder anymore since the police have eliminated her as a suspect in the meantime, but she’s still expelled from school and Snyder is refusing to let her back, and her

Comments

[itsnotmymind]

Is Snyder a OTT evil character? Yes, but I don’t care, he’s really someone you love to hate

Snyder's charaterization works for me because we're seeing him through Buffy's eyes. He is someone who doesn't like teenagers, and shouldn't be working with them. I'm sure Snyder has some redeeming charateristics, but they don't show when he's dealing with his teenage students, especially someone like Buffy whom he sees as a troublemaker.

There’s another reason why it’s good that the show ditched the “she alone can stand against the vampires and the forces of darkness” intro. Which never actually made sense, when you think about it - if there’s just one Slayer in the world, who takes cares of all those vampires around the world?

And don't forget the hellmouth in Cleveland!

I tend to try to ignore the part where the premise of this show makes no sense, but it really does make no sense. Why doesn't the Watcher's Council focus on training watchers to fight vampires, rather than leaving it all to a single super-powered teenage girl?

I wonder

[boot_the_grime]

Yeah, he's probably not always like that - but he just hates the students so much and makes no secret of it. To be fair, I've known some teachers who seemed to have this kind of hatred for the students, they just weren't as open about it as Snyder.

You know I never thought of that, how Shimerman would feel about physical appearance-based insults. Which is a sort of a lousy thing to do, insulting someone's physical appearance because you don't like them for other reasons.I have no problem with the characters on the show insulting each other, and in real life I think many of us tend to insult the appearance of people we dislike for other reasons... Me and the people I know have certainly, in private conversations, occasionally mocked the ugliness of certain politicians that I deeply despise for their harmful politics, lack of morals, criminal behavior and involvement in crimes. It's like, since you have all the reasons to despise that person, they don't get the courtesy that other people get. So I can certainly see Buffy and Joyce

[itsnotmymind]

I know I've insulted people based on their looks (not to their faces, but like you say, when talking about them to other people) when I was mad at them for other reasons. I'm sure most people have done it. But it's still kind of lousy thing to do, because physical appearance has nothing to do with it (and really, aren't you also insulting anyone who happens to look like them?). But I never really thought about it in terms of a character being played by an actor who has the exact same appearance.