Short Version:
I can argue that one basic foundation of Hollywood-type horror is that "stupid, modern, caucasian people find/summon/create horrors and die from them because people from other races or cultures are less ignorant". For convenience I think of this reason as my 'stupid caucasian victim theory'.
Important: No race-culture-society-whatever is any more or less intelligent-stupid-learned-ignorant-whatever than any other race-culture-society-whatever;
furthermore, racial-cultural-social-whatever prejudices by either individuals, groups, or institutions are wrong. I am
NOT advocating these prejudices. Here, I am writing about
flawed entertainment, created by flawed mortals, in less-than-fully-enlightened (i.e.: flawed)
times & places.
Long Version:
I am watching
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) TV series episodes--for the first time ever--because: I wanted to see what it is about and because it is the most academically studied popular television show, ever. I am just giving the series a chance to present itself to me as entertaining.
Whatever its strengths, it seems that
BtVS is tragically afflicted with 'stupid caucasian victim theory' plots and pretenses.
1. A vast majority of Hollywood-horror victims are culturally ignorant causian people, while they should be the least-affected group.
I have almost completed watching the first two seasons of
BtVS. The Buffyworld situation: There is a small, California city where moderately affluent & educated caucasian people--especially private high-school children!--are regularly dying or go missing for unnatural causes, in unnatural circumstances, in astronimically high numbers, but no parents and no one in authority seems to notice or care.
Example: In the first season of
BtVS at least a dozen students and a couple dozen adults died or disappeared before summer vacation; we are also shown news reports of numerous students and adults missing & dead from recent years. In the real world, if a couple handfulls of students at a single high school went missing or died this way it would be national news and there would be parental mobs with torches and pitchforks from miles around causing political & social witchunts.
2. In reality, unlike Hollywood, people in struggling minority cultures and races are almost always worst-effected by worldly horrors.
Example: In Buffyworld there are virtually no victims of minority racial, economic, or cultural groups. The drunk bums in the city parks aren't even killed by ravenous vampires who regularly walk by them at night!
3. Most of the solutions to Hollywood-horrors come from the older cultures and other races (whose children are not stupidly dying!) which have easily & successfully avoided or contained those horrors for hundreds of years.
This is exactly Buffyworld.
All BtVS plot solutions come from the info in the library of Buffy's high school (which is almost entirely made of a unique, extensive collection of rare and ancient texts--which are all exceedingly accurate and easy to translate--on the topics of magic, witches, vampires, ghosts, and so on; all written by people far away or long ago who were not moderately affluent & educated, modern Californian caucasians) or info from people from minority cultures & races who haven't been bothered by these horrors for generations (like European gypsies who exported a special agent to Buffy's school to deal with a vampire there!). In fact the only place in the world that mysteriously seems to need a Slayer is Buffy's high school, and it only needs one.
Therefore, I believe the only way Buffy and the Buffyworld "genre" could exist is because of my 'stupid caucasian victim theory'.
e.d.
