Middle-school was tough for me. My best friend of six years was finding better and ‘cooler’ friends to hang out with, another friend was leaving state, and up until that point I hadn’t put a lot of emphasis into making other friends. I thought that what we had was for forever, and when it wasn’t, I found myself very much alone. I wasn’t cool. Not by any stretch of the word, and I automatically presumed that no one would want to be my friend. I did find people to sit with at lunch and in class, but it just wasn’t the same. They were people who accepted me, but they weren’t friends. And so the dorks pictured below became my biggest support group.
In case you don’t know, the people below from left to right are the characters Willow, Xander, Buffy and Giles from the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I can see that this probably didn’t help my reputation at all, but these characters meant a lot to me, and when I had no one to turn to I would turn to them. They were like a family, and I guess I wanted to have friends like them, and when I found myself without, I just binged on the show.
Of course, the show ended and high school started, and I found myself a more supportive and trusting group of friends to get me through my final years of school. But just for that little while, I found support through fictional characters. I guess in this respect, I get irked when people think less of a show or a film for its average aesthetics or production quality, despite a solid storyline and well-developed characters. Perhaps as a media student this is the wrong thing to think as well, but I can’t help it. I will almost always judge a production based on the quality of its characters, because to me the characters are everything.
“The Scooby Gang” (Source: fanpop.com)
