I will get teh earlier seasons when the coffers refill. They're a long way down the list at the mo though.

I suppose I was not blown away by the whole 'blonde teenager' is the hero and saves people rather than the victim because by the time I watched Buffy other heroine's have stepped up in fiction and film, I'm past identifying with teenage angst overly much, I probably don't like to be reminded that I still haven't grown up (though I have decided that I'm not) and because I thought that the show went too far the other way and portrays all the male charachters as almost needing rescue themselves.

Society is so very good at righting wrongs by going overboard and reducing someone or something else's power. It's my problem with feminism. Don't get me wrong, I know that women are the most discriminated against because every race and religion is into it. But women are not empowered by decreasing the power of men. We will only ever be empowered when we stand side by side. Course that is way easier said then done but I guess it is happening slowly, except when we look at history the progress of women in the last decades of last century into this century has been quite enormous.

I'm kinda hoping that the internet is going to take us forward in all manner of discrimination so that we don't need laws to stop discrimination - they really don't work in the long term - we just expect to treat everyone the same.

I'm glad you love Buffy. I like her. I like her with Spike. I like them as partners. I like them as equals though I kinda think she will always run the show. Experience has taught me it is so. I've never found my equal - is that a bit of a big head? Hubby and I confer but for some reason he almost always defers. I'm the handy one. I'm the planner. I'm the one who is supposed to do it all. God now I'm off rack and whinging.

Anyway, Buffy had heaps of shit to deal with that her friends simply were to busy with their own shit to deal with. I've read fic that rewrote such things but I kinda like the arcs that played through the show because I kinda like that Spike eventually got a soul for a very right reason. I don't think he could be redeemed until he got back that little shit that sits on your shoulder and says 'it's wrong'. He really was, in the Jossverse, a leashed bad demon. Now I'm quite happy to go off canon for a vampire story but I like the story arc that Spike went through. It's what brought me to the show and kept me there.

Buffy got to grow as well. They all did though story space restricted the telling of a lot of that which is why it is great to have fanfic to fill it in. I do a lot of angsty stuff with Spike because there is a ton of angst there. I always wonder what he is doing when he is not on screen. Buffy has a hard enough time dealing in S6 and she has friends who do offer some distraction and a tad of support.

Apart from Clem, who we see from time to time, Spike really is on his own. Rather like we often are while we are trying to get by.
Anyway, I gotta go feed the horses. :D