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kaigouI'm unable to recall where I read the comment that "currently, 90% of all urban fantasy on the market right now can be boiled down to several vamps, a werewolf or two, and a chick with a gun." Alternate versions being: chick with sword; chick is asian (or euro-asian mix); chick falls for werewolf instead of vamp; chick is also witch; chick is also half/whole demon.
Hrm. Yes, well, feminism, all good and well (and I say that as a the former Second Evil of the ATPoBtVS) but I think the whole "badass chick" element is missing what made Buffy -- and, curiously, Superman and Batman -- so much of a subversive element. Stroll through the synopses, reviews, back-cover copy, the stories themselves: I can't think of a single one in which the protagonist badass-chick was once a cheerleader, or any other everyday wholesome all-American middle-class kid.
That is, urban fantasy's filled to the brim with a whole lotta Faiths, and they're running around cheerfully proclaiming they're "just like Buffy".
Err, no. They're not.
What makes Buffy so subversive, in the same subversive way as those two classic superheroes -- is that she's middle class. She's essentially everything the average teenager (or, for Superman or Batman, the coming-in-adult and/or adult) wants to be, as an American: good home, never worries about next meal, nice clothes, circle of friends, popular, successful at her chosen activities/job, etc. Superman? Raised on a farm by two loving parents, now has a nice job in the city as a newspaperman, a girlfriend: he's a good boy. Batman? Not just a well-educated, cosmopolitan young man, but wealthy to an incomprehensible degree, rubs shoulders with all the right people, handsome, charismatic, a little eccentric, but hey, when you can have what you want, you can be eccentric. The point is that none of them, really, began on the fringes. All three began squarely in the mainstream of society, the middle to upperclass mainstream, the place we viewers/readers expect to be when we 'finally make it in the American Dream'.
What brought this to mind was some comment somewhere, a newspaper article, perhaps, asking the old question, "why would he do it? why pay such a sacrifice?" It was about a cop, a pleasant and ambitious young man with 'so much' potential who instead chose to become a cop -- insert subtle, maybe even snide, implication that cop equals "not using potential". And, too, my reaction to reading that contains the innate discomfort, hard to articulate, at the knowledge that the glorification of the person's Greatest Sacrifice (TM) doesn't get slathered across our newspapers and televisions when the sacrificer is poor, black, and from the ghetto. Or poor, ill-educated, and from the reservation. Kids who grew up in trailers, who weren't their high school's quarterback, who didn't get the girl and won't ever have the chance at OCS, who will do their four years as grunts and get out with some skills (if they survive), don't get their pictures in the national papers with bemoaning commentary from talking heads about the horrible price their communities have paid to lose such a bright soul.
Duh: because they didn't sacrifice nothin', obviously. You come from a trailer park, a lifetime of hand-me-downs donated through the church, nineteen years of eating commodity peanut butter, and the army is a step up. You didn't lose a damn thing to sign up; you gained everything. So, if you don't make it, how is this any different from where you might've ended up, anyway?
It's the kid from the middle-class world, who has it all -- or at least a great deal more than the rest of us -- for whom walking away, stepping to the fringes, is so subversive. They're the ones who really push the rest of us -- especially those of us also firmly in the mainstream, middle-class life -- to recognize that we, too, could be asked to put everything on the line, and we know we'd refuse, and thus we know what those kids (or superheroes) risk.
America sometimes boggles me with its contradictions. We're a classless society, truly, and yet also one of the most financially immobile in the Western world; I recall a study looking at couples' incomes compared to their parents', and finding -- to the surveyors' surprise -- that an incredibly small percentage earns even 10% more than either set of parents. The vast majority of the time, apparently, Americans are more likely to earn pretty close to their parents' range, as will their kids and grandkids. The American dream of getting out of the lowerclass income rank is very much the exception to the rule. Combine that immobility with humanity's hypocrisy of Having Stuff: the more you have, the less you wish to lose it, and the more you have, the more you're able to avoid risking it. The less you have to lose, the more likely you are to lose everything, because you don't have enough (money, power, influence, stuff) to protect what you do have. Those who come from the ranks of the Haves, the ones who can afford to say, "I don't have to make that sacrifice," -- but then choose to do so -- are the ones who flip this settled, immobile system on its head. Subversive isn't just a catch-phrase. Those raised with plenty, who choose the fringes or the risky paths or the outerstream lives, are subverting the system.
I'm sick and tired of seeing "if you liked Buffy!" plastered on comments from reviewers (and if I ever see that anywhere near a review on my own work, I will most definitely be irked). I want to tell those reviewers, those authors, and their agents and editors: no, this is nothing like Buffy. Having a female lead with a snarky mouth who can punch well does not make your character Buffy, and it does not make you Joss Whedon. Step away from the comparison, and put down the self-congratulations, and I won't kick your goddamn ass.
See, Buffy wasn't a great character just because she had snap and verve and quick dialogue -- it's what made her snappy dialogue possible: that she was raised in comfortable, middle-class America where she's able to talk back because she arrives with a certain level of entitlement. It's not out in the open, but it's there, above and beyond the average teenage snark. It's the head cheerleader with the nice car who tosses her hair at the teacher who wants to keep her late after class, who knows the teacher will be countermanded by a coach, another teacher, a parent, anyone: because the kid's untouchable.
I'm not saying it's a Cordelia Chase kind of untouchable; it's an assumption on the part of many middle-class kids that they're not subject to the same rules, they don't have to treat authority with the same consideration -- because they aren't, and they don't. As the immobility may prevent them from moving too far up, it also protects them from moving too far down, and I think we all know this, in our bones, being raised in this country; it creates a security of one's place.
More than that, Buffy's irreverence is charming, but it's also the fact that the last person you expect to see stake a vampire is -- a cheerleader. Mom, apple pie, Southeastern-conference football, and cheerleaders! How much more mainstream can you get? How much more fish-out-of-water can you get: a cheerleader wandering through a graveyard (land o' the goths), or hanging out on the docks (street rats, maybe), or any other place other than the mall, the nearby watering hole, the high school gym?
This is my issue with the current deluge of "chick with gun" urban fantasy stories: there is no risk.
A character who now fights The Good Fight, who also grew up in the ghetto, or has had a rough-and-tumble life, or learned to fight at a young age -- these can all be interesting elements to the backstory of an interesting character. No doubt there. But it's not subversive, it's not risky, and it sure as fuck don't make the author no stinkin' Joss Whedon. Because, in a nutshell, the protag has gone nowhere.
Okay, so you've clawed your way from the bottom to, well, the bottom, only now you're all vigilante and bad-ass and defend the helpless or help the hopeless or whatever it is that's your slogan (or, you claim to do it for pay but most books are about the cases you take for free because you're all about doing something about your community) -- but you've gained in this move from "scrappy little foster-kid" or "scrappy little orphaned kid" or "scrappy little ignored kid" to "scrappy adult who uses skills learned in childhood to Do Good". The subset of this is "scrappy little orphan raised by/with/around criminal element who now fights on the side of the law".
Oh, yeah, like that's a frickin' risk.
It's supposed to be; we're told it is. Sometimes. I've read an author or two who tosses out the mild angst of the young adult living the 'straight' life but with relatives on the Other Side. The dad who was a jewel thief, the mom who was a demon, etc., etc. That certainly can happen (well, the jewel thief or junkie parent, not so much the demon, but hey, fantasy, right?) -- I know my share of adults who chose their professions as reaction to something their parents did wrong/badly or neglected/abused. The point, though, is that the protagonist's essential environment has not changed. She remains in the same world, just playing a different role than those around her; the streets are her streets, the city's her city, the ways and etiquette and rules and roles are familiar and easily maneuvered.
I think back to my own time on the streets, and the constant sense -- within me, and from friends -- that I didn't belong. It wasn't my 'place'; I was bound for other things, I would be 'getting out' either sooner or later but inevitably, and I was expected to leave them behind when I did. I was middle-class and raised with big backyards among kids whose parents worked two jobs to pay for a two-bedroom apartment where the big backyard was a rubbled parking lot or a construction site or the back loading dock of a grocery store strip mall. It was never said to my face, but sometimes there was the sideways look or two, like I was 'playing' at being among them, and the sooner I realized I should go back to my side of the tracks, the better it'd be for everyone.
Perhaps that's why I notice these things, having been that fish out of water, myself. That when it's not your environment, not where you were raised, and you don't know the streets like the back of your hand and the alleys and the service roads, that going in as any kind of a force -- for good, or ill -- is treading through waters whose currents you don't know innately and might not grasp until you're already under the surface and drowning. That's when you see the risk, for a protagonist (or a cop, or a military grunt, or a teacher, or anyone else going from a secure/safe world to an unknown, possibly dangerous place filled with conflict and/or confrontation).
That's what made Buffy, underneath the rest, so subversive: because she wasn't just some blonde chick who could kick ass. She was a blonde chick who could kick ass even when she was lost in her environment. It took six and a half years of twenty-two episode seasons for Buffy to truly consider her town to be 'her own', genuinely, I think. People in general didn't listen to her, wouldn't listen -- by dint of age, appearance, gender, whatever -- and she didn't bother speaking up. She might be bad-ass with the bad guys but the rest of the time she was pretty low-key, almost fearful of others discovering the job/role she held.
If I were organized enough right now to really think it through, I could see a list of sorts, for a superhero.
First, raised as a Have, but for the sake of the role, pretends/accepts/acts as a Have Not. Sometimes that's being anonymous/nameless, such as Batman and Spiderman, who hide behind their masks, or Buffy, whose opponents are rarely those with contacts outside their bad-guy circle, assuming there's even any witnesses. (Superman's the oddity in this, in that he puts on a 'mask' in his everyday role -- the glasses, the so-proper 50's-era hat and suit -- as well as a persona of uncertainty, while his real self is much more assertive and charismatic.)
Another: someone for whom not only is the criminal environment foreign to the superhero, but the criminal mind is equally alien; there's no calling up childhood memories of this situation or that person as a means to deal with what's happening right now. The hero can't rely on past experience, only his/her instinct, personal belief in what's right/wrong, and the hope that the choice is the good/right one.
And another: the hero has two faces, the one s/he shows when fighting, and the one s/he shows when blending in. If you didn't know better, you might even think the hero's ashamed of this fight; there's a strong avoidance of being confused with the role, almost a disassociation. Look at the times Batman and Superman both refer to their alter-egos in the third person, even when speaking to people who know who they are. Being a superhero isn't who they are; it's what they do -- what they must do, even. Each of them, though, like Spiderman and Wonder Woman and the Incredible Hulk, would -- if they could -- live without this role. Joss was totally tapping into this with Buffy's complaint, "I don't want any trouble. I just wanna be alone and quiet in a room with a chair and a fireplace and a tea cozy. I don't even know what a tea cozy is, but I want one."
And: the superhero does not posture or pose, or stalk around letting folks know just how bad-ass she is, all the time. The superhero does not have dozens of people fully aware of who she is, what she does, who admire her or assist her -- maybe a sidekick or two, but mostly it's all mum. Who was that Masked Man, anyway? The Masked Man doesn't ride into town to see what's going on (that's what Tonto is for); he makes as few appearances as possible, and even then, is as low-key as possible. Spiderman's lurking on a building window, thirty floors above the street; the Incredible Hulk is hitch-hiking from one place to another, not even taking proper transportation with the rest of the world. They're all self-effacing, even reluctant, to some degree.
Perhaps this movement towards flashy badass characters -- flashy being the key word -- is that it's harder to write a protagonist as a hero, in the classic and/or comic-book and/or mythic sense, when heroes (real and non) insist on saying they're just everyday folk. "I just did what anyone would do," they say, or, "I'm just doing my job." Always, "no need to pay me, ma'am, it's what I do," from the Lone Ranger (echoed fifty years later by Whedon's Mal, "It's what I do"). They don't want the fanfare, are even a little baffled by it, because to them, they're not heroes. They're people trying to do the right thing, no more, no less: so there's no need for posturing, feet up on the desk when the bad guy walks in, cool and collected and moving through the club with people stepping out of their way and taking that as the way it should be.
(Hell, even when Buffy walks into the little demon bar in Sunnydale, no one really jumps. They just look annoyed, mostly.)
Maybe it's just the trend of this decade, the latest rage in urban fantasy (and some parts of SF, too), a wish-fulfillment for female readers and fantasy fodder for male readers: the dark-haired, dangerous beauty with the knife up her sleeve and the long-legged strut and the know-how to cash every check her body and mouth can write. Blame Buffy for the irreverent tone, blame Faith (and Anita Blake) for the sex-on-legs bad-assitude, but don't think the irreverent tone alone is what makes a character like Buffy.
And don't frickin' compare yourself to Joss Whedon, just 'cause you got a chick with a gun in your book, and a handful of vampires and a werewolf or two. You ain't Joss, not unless you're willing and able to let your character not want her role, not want nor need to display bad-assitude except in the few lone moments of fighting when it's part of the role she's assumed, not always dress with utter street-smart style, not always know instinctively who to talk to next or what to do or what she's facing.
This might be part of the reason I like Harry Dresden, to some degree; he bumbles through much of his stories. He's not that keen on doing his job, he's not too hip to what it costs, and he doesn't make a hugely scary impression on the bad guys. (In fact, I can recall more than a few laughing at him; the few times he might scare them, Butcher's quick to do something like put Harry stark naked in the middle of the street with his apartment on fire, and it's damn hard for anyone to be scary when they're bare-assed to the world.)
Thing is, though, I really liked Faith, as a character, but much of what made her a great character was being Buffy's foil, both ally and nemesis, the posturing flashy scrappy fighter who got noisier and noisier the more she lost ground compared to Buffy's growing certainty and security. And then to read yet one more back cover or review or opening chapters of yet one more book with cover art of "lone chick with gun" or "lone chick with sword" or "lone chick with knife" (and don't forget the black leather jacket or the cut-away tight tanktop revealing sculpted pecs or the sleek leather pants and heavy boots) -- I guess I just think of Faith. If that character had been granted, as Slayer, her own series, she would've visualized it being one where she scares off half the bad guys, takes down the rest, and always looks sexy and untouchable and badass and you-know-you-want-me, look at me, watching you, aren't you unnerved because I'm so self-assured and powerful and you're nothing. She would've written herself straight into any of the dozen or so "chicks with various weaponry" urban fantasies and/or SF out on the market now. One big honkin' wish fulfillment of being the baddest dog in the whole junkyard.
Except... I find that boring. Once, twice, okay, but sixth time around, and I'm damn near hoping someone will walk in halfway through the first chapter and smack the shit out of the badass leather-wearing pec-revealing snark-delivering cool-and-collected chick-with-gun. I find it boring when the chick-with-gun reveals a backstory of growing up in the world she now occupies, choosing her role to Do Good as reaction to a childhood surrounded by Bad, as much as I'd find it boring (or should I say, static, even stulifying) to read of someone whose first job out of high school is to go back to the same high school as a teacher. Didn't get very far, didja, kid? I find it boring when the character evinces no reluctance for her role, no uncertainty about being a Have among the Have-Nots, let alone even having that risk in the first place.
And I damn well find it boring -- and annoying -- when the author's ability to insert snappy dialogue into the heroine's mouth prompts an adulating cry of, "if you liked Buffy..."
Don't, people. Just frickin' don't.
And while you're at it? Vampires are the bad guys: Buffy did two, Anita's done who knows how many, and there ain't no way you can spin that top without us thinking of either. That road's been dug down into two deep ruts, one named Whedon, the other Hamilton. Find a new road. Please.
Hrm. Yes, well, feminism, all good and well (and I say that as a the former Second Evil of the ATPoBtVS) but I think the whole "badass chick" element is missing what made Buffy -- and, curiously, Superman and Batman -- so much of a subversive element. Stroll through the synopses, reviews, back-cover copy, the stories themselves: I can't think of a single one in which the protagonist badass-chick was once a cheerleader, or any other everyday wholesome all-American middle-class kid.
That is, urban fantasy's filled to the brim with a whole lotta Faiths, and they're running around cheerfully proclaiming they're "just like Buffy".
Err, no. They're not.
What makes Buffy so subversive, in the same subversive way as those two classic superheroes -- is that she's middle class. She's essentially everything the average teenager (or, for Superman or Batman, the coming-in-adult and/or adult) wants to be, as an American: good home, never worries about next meal, nice clothes, circle of friends, popular, successful at her chosen activities/job, etc. Superman? Raised on a farm by two loving parents, now has a nice job in the city as a newspaperman, a girlfriend: he's a good boy. Batman? Not just a well-educated, cosmopolitan young man, but wealthy to an incomprehensible degree, rubs shoulders with all the right people, handsome, charismatic, a little eccentric, but hey, when you can have what you want, you can be eccentric. The point is that none of them, really, began on the fringes. All three began squarely in the mainstream of society, the middle to upperclass mainstream, the place we viewers/readers expect to be when we 'finally make it in the American Dream'.
What brought this to mind was some comment somewhere, a newspaper article, perhaps, asking the old question, "why would he do it? why pay such a sacrifice?" It was about a cop, a pleasant and ambitious young man with 'so much' potential who instead chose to become a cop -- insert subtle, maybe even snide, implication that cop equals "not using potential". And, too, my reaction to reading that contains the innate discomfort, hard to articulate, at the knowledge that the glorification of the person's Greatest Sacrifice (TM) doesn't get slathered across our newspapers and televisions when the sacrificer is poor, black, and from the ghetto. Or poor, ill-educated, and from the reservation. Kids who grew up in trailers, who weren't their high school's quarterback, who didn't get the girl and won't ever have the chance at OCS, who will do their four years as grunts and get out with some skills (if they survive), don't get their pictures in the national papers with bemoaning commentary from talking heads about the horrible price their communities have paid to lose such a bright soul.
Duh: because they didn't sacrifice nothin', obviously. You come from a trailer park, a lifetime of hand-me-downs donated through the church, nineteen years of eating commodity peanut butter, and the army is a step up. You didn't lose a damn thing to sign up; you gained everything. So, if you don't make it, how is this any different from where you might've ended up, anyway?
It's the kid from the middle-class world, who has it all -- or at least a great deal more than the rest of us -- for whom walking away, stepping to the fringes, is so subversive. They're the ones who really push the rest of us -- especially those of us also firmly in the mainstream, middle-class life -- to recognize that we, too, could be asked to put everything on the line, and we know we'd refuse, and thus we know what those kids (or superheroes) risk.
America sometimes boggles me with its contradictions. We're a classless society, truly, and yet also one of the most financially immobile in the Western world; I recall a study looking at couples' incomes compared to their parents', and finding -- to the surveyors' surprise -- that an incredibly small percentage earns even 10% more than either set of parents. The vast majority of the time, apparently, Americans are more likely to earn pretty close to their parents' range, as will their kids and grandkids. The American dream of getting out of the lowerclass income rank is very much the exception to the rule. Combine that immobility with humanity's hypocrisy of Having Stuff: the more you have, the less you wish to lose it, and the more you have, the more you're able to avoid risking it. The less you have to lose, the more likely you are to lose everything, because you don't have enough (money, power, influence, stuff) to protect what you do have. Those who come from the ranks of the Haves, the ones who can afford to say, "I don't have to make that sacrifice," -- but then choose to do so -- are the ones who flip this settled, immobile system on its head. Subversive isn't just a catch-phrase. Those raised with plenty, who choose the fringes or the risky paths or the outerstream lives, are subverting the system.
I'm sick and tired of seeing "if you liked Buffy!" plastered on comments from reviewers (and if I ever see that anywhere near a review on my own work, I will most definitely be irked). I want to tell those reviewers, those authors, and their agents and editors: no, this is nothing like Buffy. Having a female lead with a snarky mouth who can punch well does not make your character Buffy, and it does not make you Joss Whedon. Step away from the comparison, and put down the self-congratulations, and I won't kick your goddamn ass.
See, Buffy wasn't a great character just because she had snap and verve and quick dialogue -- it's what made her snappy dialogue possible: that she was raised in comfortable, middle-class America where she's able to talk back because she arrives with a certain level of entitlement. It's not out in the open, but it's there, above and beyond the average teenage snark. It's the head cheerleader with the nice car who tosses her hair at the teacher who wants to keep her late after class, who knows the teacher will be countermanded by a coach, another teacher, a parent, anyone: because the kid's untouchable.
I'm not saying it's a Cordelia Chase kind of untouchable; it's an assumption on the part of many middle-class kids that they're not subject to the same rules, they don't have to treat authority with the same consideration -- because they aren't, and they don't. As the immobility may prevent them from moving too far up, it also protects them from moving too far down, and I think we all know this, in our bones, being raised in this country; it creates a security of one's place.
More than that, Buffy's irreverence is charming, but it's also the fact that the last person you expect to see stake a vampire is -- a cheerleader. Mom, apple pie, Southeastern-conference football, and cheerleaders! How much more mainstream can you get? How much more fish-out-of-water can you get: a cheerleader wandering through a graveyard (land o' the goths), or hanging out on the docks (street rats, maybe), or any other place other than the mall, the nearby watering hole, the high school gym?
This is my issue with the current deluge of "chick with gun" urban fantasy stories: there is no risk.
A character who now fights The Good Fight, who also grew up in the ghetto, or has had a rough-and-tumble life, or learned to fight at a young age -- these can all be interesting elements to the backstory of an interesting character. No doubt there. But it's not subversive, it's not risky, and it sure as fuck don't make the author no stinkin' Joss Whedon. Because, in a nutshell, the protag has gone nowhere.
Okay, so you've clawed your way from the bottom to, well, the bottom, only now you're all vigilante and bad-ass and defend the helpless or help the hopeless or whatever it is that's your slogan (or, you claim to do it for pay but most books are about the cases you take for free because you're all about doing something about your community) -- but you've gained in this move from "scrappy little foster-kid" or "scrappy little orphaned kid" or "scrappy little ignored kid" to "scrappy adult who uses skills learned in childhood to Do Good". The subset of this is "scrappy little orphan raised by/with/around criminal element who now fights on the side of the law".
Oh, yeah, like that's a frickin' risk.
It's supposed to be; we're told it is. Sometimes. I've read an author or two who tosses out the mild angst of the young adult living the 'straight' life but with relatives on the Other Side. The dad who was a jewel thief, the mom who was a demon, etc., etc. That certainly can happen (well, the jewel thief or junkie parent, not so much the demon, but hey, fantasy, right?) -- I know my share of adults who chose their professions as reaction to something their parents did wrong/badly or neglected/abused. The point, though, is that the protagonist's essential environment has not changed. She remains in the same world, just playing a different role than those around her; the streets are her streets, the city's her city, the ways and etiquette and rules and roles are familiar and easily maneuvered.
I think back to my own time on the streets, and the constant sense -- within me, and from friends -- that I didn't belong. It wasn't my 'place'; I was bound for other things, I would be 'getting out' either sooner or later but inevitably, and I was expected to leave them behind when I did. I was middle-class and raised with big backyards among kids whose parents worked two jobs to pay for a two-bedroom apartment where the big backyard was a rubbled parking lot or a construction site or the back loading dock of a grocery store strip mall. It was never said to my face, but sometimes there was the sideways look or two, like I was 'playing' at being among them, and the sooner I realized I should go back to my side of the tracks, the better it'd be for everyone.
Perhaps that's why I notice these things, having been that fish out of water, myself. That when it's not your environment, not where you were raised, and you don't know the streets like the back of your hand and the alleys and the service roads, that going in as any kind of a force -- for good, or ill -- is treading through waters whose currents you don't know innately and might not grasp until you're already under the surface and drowning. That's when you see the risk, for a protagonist (or a cop, or a military grunt, or a teacher, or anyone else going from a secure/safe world to an unknown, possibly dangerous place filled with conflict and/or confrontation).
That's what made Buffy, underneath the rest, so subversive: because she wasn't just some blonde chick who could kick ass. She was a blonde chick who could kick ass even when she was lost in her environment. It took six and a half years of twenty-two episode seasons for Buffy to truly consider her town to be 'her own', genuinely, I think. People in general didn't listen to her, wouldn't listen -- by dint of age, appearance, gender, whatever -- and she didn't bother speaking up. She might be bad-ass with the bad guys but the rest of the time she was pretty low-key, almost fearful of others discovering the job/role she held.
If I were organized enough right now to really think it through, I could see a list of sorts, for a superhero.
First, raised as a Have, but for the sake of the role, pretends/accepts/acts as a Have Not. Sometimes that's being anonymous/nameless, such as Batman and Spiderman, who hide behind their masks, or Buffy, whose opponents are rarely those with contacts outside their bad-guy circle, assuming there's even any witnesses. (Superman's the oddity in this, in that he puts on a 'mask' in his everyday role -- the glasses, the so-proper 50's-era hat and suit -- as well as a persona of uncertainty, while his real self is much more assertive and charismatic.)
Another: someone for whom not only is the criminal environment foreign to the superhero, but the criminal mind is equally alien; there's no calling up childhood memories of this situation or that person as a means to deal with what's happening right now. The hero can't rely on past experience, only his/her instinct, personal belief in what's right/wrong, and the hope that the choice is the good/right one.
And another: the hero has two faces, the one s/he shows when fighting, and the one s/he shows when blending in. If you didn't know better, you might even think the hero's ashamed of this fight; there's a strong avoidance of being confused with the role, almost a disassociation. Look at the times Batman and Superman both refer to their alter-egos in the third person, even when speaking to people who know who they are. Being a superhero isn't who they are; it's what they do -- what they must do, even. Each of them, though, like Spiderman and Wonder Woman and the Incredible Hulk, would -- if they could -- live without this role. Joss was totally tapping into this with Buffy's complaint, "I don't want any trouble. I just wanna be alone and quiet in a room with a chair and a fireplace and a tea cozy. I don't even know what a tea cozy is, but I want one."
And: the superhero does not posture or pose, or stalk around letting folks know just how bad-ass she is, all the time. The superhero does not have dozens of people fully aware of who she is, what she does, who admire her or assist her -- maybe a sidekick or two, but mostly it's all mum. Who was that Masked Man, anyway? The Masked Man doesn't ride into town to see what's going on (that's what Tonto is for); he makes as few appearances as possible, and even then, is as low-key as possible. Spiderman's lurking on a building window, thirty floors above the street; the Incredible Hulk is hitch-hiking from one place to another, not even taking proper transportation with the rest of the world. They're all self-effacing, even reluctant, to some degree.
Perhaps this movement towards flashy badass characters -- flashy being the key word -- is that it's harder to write a protagonist as a hero, in the classic and/or comic-book and/or mythic sense, when heroes (real and non) insist on saying they're just everyday folk. "I just did what anyone would do," they say, or, "I'm just doing my job." Always, "no need to pay me, ma'am, it's what I do," from the Lone Ranger (echoed fifty years later by Whedon's Mal, "It's what I do"). They don't want the fanfare, are even a little baffled by it, because to them, they're not heroes. They're people trying to do the right thing, no more, no less: so there's no need for posturing, feet up on the desk when the bad guy walks in, cool and collected and moving through the club with people stepping out of their way and taking that as the way it should be.
(Hell, even when Buffy walks into the little demon bar in Sunnydale, no one really jumps. They just look annoyed, mostly.)
Maybe it's just the trend of this decade, the latest rage in urban fantasy (and some parts of SF, too), a wish-fulfillment for female readers and fantasy fodder for male readers: the dark-haired, dangerous beauty with the knife up her sleeve and the long-legged strut and the know-how to cash every check her body and mouth can write. Blame Buffy for the irreverent tone, blame Faith (and Anita Blake) for the sex-on-legs bad-assitude, but don't think the irreverent tone alone is what makes a character like Buffy.
And don't frickin' compare yourself to Joss Whedon, just 'cause you got a chick with a gun in your book, and a handful of vampires and a werewolf or two. You ain't Joss, not unless you're willing and able to let your character not want her role, not want nor need to display bad-assitude except in the few lone moments of fighting when it's part of the role she's assumed, not always dress with utter street-smart style, not always know instinctively who to talk to next or what to do or what she's facing.
This might be part of the reason I like Harry Dresden, to some degree; he bumbles through much of his stories. He's not that keen on doing his job, he's not too hip to what it costs, and he doesn't make a hugely scary impression on the bad guys. (In fact, I can recall more than a few laughing at him; the few times he might scare them, Butcher's quick to do something like put Harry stark naked in the middle of the street with his apartment on fire, and it's damn hard for anyone to be scary when they're bare-assed to the world.)
Thing is, though, I really liked Faith, as a character, but much of what made her a great character was being Buffy's foil, both ally and nemesis, the posturing flashy scrappy fighter who got noisier and noisier the more she lost ground compared to Buffy's growing certainty and security. And then to read yet one more back cover or review or opening chapters of yet one more book with cover art of "lone chick with gun" or "lone chick with sword" or "lone chick with knife" (and don't forget the black leather jacket or the cut-away tight tanktop revealing sculpted pecs or the sleek leather pants and heavy boots) -- I guess I just think of Faith. If that character had been granted, as Slayer, her own series, she would've visualized it being one where she scares off half the bad guys, takes down the rest, and always looks sexy and untouchable and badass and you-know-you-want-me, look at me, watching you, aren't you unnerved because I'm so self-assured and powerful and you're nothing. She would've written herself straight into any of the dozen or so "chicks with various weaponry" urban fantasies and/or SF out on the market now. One big honkin' wish fulfillment of being the baddest dog in the whole junkyard.
Except... I find that boring. Once, twice, okay, but sixth time around, and I'm damn near hoping someone will walk in halfway through the first chapter and smack the shit out of the badass leather-wearing pec-revealing snark-delivering cool-and-collected chick-with-gun. I find it boring when the chick-with-gun reveals a backstory of growing up in the world she now occupies, choosing her role to Do Good as reaction to a childhood surrounded by Bad, as much as I'd find it boring (or should I say, static, even stulifying) to read of someone whose first job out of high school is to go back to the same high school as a teacher. Didn't get very far, didja, kid? I find it boring when the character evinces no reluctance for her role, no uncertainty about being a Have among the Have-Nots, let alone even having that risk in the first place.
And I damn well find it boring -- and annoying -- when the author's ability to insert snappy dialogue into the heroine's mouth prompts an adulating cry of, "if you liked Buffy..."
Don't, people. Just frickin' don't.
And while you're at it? Vampires are the bad guys: Buffy did two, Anita's done who knows how many, and there ain't no way you can spin that top without us thinking of either. That road's been dug down into two deep ruts, one named Whedon, the other Hamilton. Find a new road. Please.