Why I Love Buffy and Angel

I have been a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel ever since the shows first aired on television. Buffy is a young teenager chosen to fight evil and battle the forces of darkness to save the world. She is the Chosen One.

Buffy has many troubles of her own to deal with too, such as her relationships which as it becomes apparent, are strongly linked to the darkness itself. For example, Angel, the vampire with a soul who was cursed by gypsies for killing the youngest member of their family. The curse means if Angel was to have one moment of true happiness, then the soul is taken from him and he will be able to kill again.

This is complicated by him falling for Buffy, who only finds this out after a night of passion with Angel, and ends up having to send him back to hell to close the demon Acathla down, who Angel wakes up in a bid to end the world.

Spike is another, Spike or "William the Bloody,"as he was known, killed other Slayers, and besides Angel he is a rather cunning vampire until he gets caught by the initiative who place a 'chip' in his brain, and then he falls for Buffy, and goes in search of his soul to prove his love for her, which develops into a whirlwind romance between Buffy and Spike.

I don't think Buffy actually loves Spike, she becomes lonely after Angel then Riley leave, then she loses her mum, and I think she attaches herself to Spike for comfort.

There is a twist in this plot with the introduction of the 'key' of which just to add to Buffy's troubles, is sent to her to protect in the form of a sister. Buffy must protect this key, and she battles Glory the powerful female God, who is searching for this key which is the portal to her hell dimension and will send her home. Buffy dies during this mission, in an attempt to save her sister Dawn.

However, she is brought back by her best friend Willow who practices dark magic and becomes a powerful witch. There is more to Willow, but as the plot is interesting, I am going to let viewers see for themselves. It is after Buffy comes back to life, she finds her stronger connection to Spike.

Angel, on the other hand, leaves Sunnydale after Buffy and her friends take down the Mayor. He goes to L.A and sets up his own demon fighting business.

Angel has a rival, Wolfram and Heart, of which he ends up fighting with, as they use evil to their own advantage, for power. Angel grows a close attachment to Cordelia Chase, who was originally helping Buffy, due to her close relationship with Xander who is another member of the "Scooby gang," as they become known. This goes wrong, so she teams up with Angel in L.A. The point in Angel's fight, from my own understanding is, he is fighting evil to gain redemption and repair his past.

I cannot go into too much detail in this essay, because explaining everything means explaining the show away, so I am going to end this by explaining why I am a massive fan of both shows.

After Buffy dies, follows more slayers who help her in her final battle of which many lose their lives. Buffy is a story of survival. I describe the demons Buffy and her friends face as not real, they are in fact the "demons of growing up," and they battle the same evil, showing that friends stick together through thick and thin, and that to survive in this world means you have to stick together through the good and the bad in order to live.

The moral in Angel, in my opinion, is that there are consequences to every action, and you can't take back the past, but you can redeem yourself by helping those in trouble.

I can relate to these two shows because in my own life, I have faced many hard battles, and some of them have been alone. Although vampires are fictional, we have never proved whether or not they actually exist.

However, a vampire could be used as a metaphor to describe some of the troubles I experienced in my own life, similar (minus the blood suckers!) to those issues that occurred in my personal life before I became ill. I can relate to the loneliness Angel feels and his broodiness as the difficulties of being a "vampire with a soul" take its toll on impacting everything in his undead life, and Buffy chosen to save the world, then facing life without her mum and bringing up a sister alone, not to mention her whirlwind relationships and the many other challenges she faces as the "Chosen One."

She doesn't have time to be a teenager, she has to grow up fast because of the huge responsibilities on herself, and interestingly some of these affect teenagers growing up today, and that is perfectly played out in her role as "the Slayer."