Popular plotline:

Lovely teenage girl moves to small town. While ordinary teenage boys vie for her attention, she only has eyes for a gorgeous, brooding loner, who is set on avoiding her. Finally the brooding loner confesses his attraction but declares that romance is impossible, as they are too different. Relationship progresses anyway. Lovely teenage girl discovers that her boyfriend is -GASP!- a vampire! But a good, REFORMED vampire, who does not eat people. However, he sometimes confuses his desire to kiss her with his desire to suck her dry, a problem he overcomes with tremendous self-control and a good supply of animal blood.

Does this describe:

a) Stephanie Meyer’s novel Twilight, 2005
b) Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 1, 1997
c) both

I don’t normally follow vampire-type stuff so I don’t know if this is just a common theme in the lit, or if there’s some borrowing going on. Granted the two girl characters are completely different, as are the romantic relationships. The Twilight relationship, though billed as a wonderful chaste romance, actually strikes me as fairly creepy and obsessive.

This plot similarity came to my attention a couple weeks ago. I was reading some review of something or other that, once again, referenced Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a TV show from 12 years ago. They are still mentioning this show? I thought to myself. Maybe I should check it out. It seemed like it might be my kind of thing, given the superheroes, the battles between good and evil, the scripture references, and so on. Turns out hulu.com has seasons 1 and 2 available and I’ve been working my way through. It looks like later seasons might get a little too soap opera for my taste, but the early episodes are quite enjoyable. Most of them take some ordinary aspect of poor teenage decision-making and ramp it up into cosmic doom narrowly averted, a format which I find funny. In one, this girl meets her soulmate in an online chatroom. Her friends all caution her that this guy may not be a sensitive 18-year-old from the next town over; what does she REALLY know about him? She brushes off their warnings. When they meet, it turns out that he is an ancient mind-control demon embodied in a 12-foot robot, out to take over the world. OH NO! EVIL ROBOT! Buffy saves her at the last second. There are also the love triangles, parental and authority figure issues, and friendship quandaries that are de rigeur for teen-focused television (hence the vampire romance between Buffy and Angel). I’m partway through season 2, where the menace level and the complexity of evil both seem to ramp up a bit from snakes, robots, and praying mantises. Still works, though.

The other thing I really like about the show is Buffy herself. She is surprisingly non-angst-ridden for a) a superhero and b) a teenage girl. Sure, she occasionally rebels against the save-the-world duties thrust upon her by fate, but overall she thinks it is pretty cool that she can single-handedly beat up and kill any evil creature that looms up in front of her. She is self-confident, loyal to her friends, nice to everyone else, and an advocate of mercy and compassion wherever possible. She is also VERY cute. Lest we find her too perfect, she does occasionally get moody, sarcastic, and distant. She frustrates her mother to no end. Usually she is out rescuing all of her friends and family from imminent destruction, but once in awhile they get to rescue her. Good times.