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Dear Buffy:

First of all, may I call you Buffy? I didn’t mean to be presumptuous. Anyway, I know you’re busy being a fictional television character who has been off the air for over ten years, but I had sort of an epiphany. It made me realize that I owe you an apology for criticisms that I made of your show, especially the first three seasons.

I’ll be honest: I didn’t really start enjoying your show until about mid-way through the fourth season. That’s the point when the show took on a “darker” tone. It became more about exploring the characters and their motivation, and less about vampires and demons as metaphors for high school angst.

I had a hard time relating to your character during those first three seasons, which might be called the “high school seasons,” if you were so inclined. Oh, you’re not so inclined? Okay, seasons 1-3 it is, then. Anyway, the main reason I had a hard time relating, and it seems awful now that I say it out loud, was all the crying.

Seriously, it seemed like you cried at least once per episode. You probably didn’t, but I’m not going to go back and check right now. My thoughts, when watching those seasons at a younger age, was to wonder why you cried so dang much. I mean, you’re the Slayer!!! You’re stronger than that, right?

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Then I learned a bit more about Strong Female Characters, and how that’s almost the only trait that most female characters even get to have. That made me realize how wrong I was; that during those later seasons, when I found you more relatable somehow, you were probably quite deep into some serious PTSD and other emotional turmoil, and maybe I found you more relatable because you were suppressing quite a bit. Maybe during those early seasons, you were responding to the events around you the way a teenager might reasonably be expected to respond. Not a teenage girl, mind you, but any teenager thrust into such an otherworldly position. Hell, I cried all the time during high school, and I never fought a single demon. I was imposing the Strong Female Character frame on you, and that was completely unfair. You got a pretty raw deal from life, and it’s not my damn business to evaluate how you react.

So I offer my apology to you, and my gratitude to Joss Whedon for creating a character with layers and nuances that I’m still discovering years later.