No8: “High School is Hell”

Before I started reading this article, I was glad that it deals with something that I have watched and have had some basic understandings about already. Then I started the reading.

I have to say, this article is a good analysis on the episodes. It only focuses on one thing in the episodes, which is “metaphor”, and develops the thesis deeply and widely. The author stated that all metaphors in horror stories are actually reflections of real life situations. Then he collected the scenes from a bunch of episodes and discussed how they were related to things happened in real life. He also stated that the reason of the creation of monsters was based on people’s fears. However, I don’t quite agree with some of his explanations. For example, the vampires in our imaginations today have beautiful and graceful figures (although in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they don’t). The reason for that is probably that humankind admires beautiful and graceful things, so they create a kind of nonhuman creature with these traits.

OK, back to the topic. In his analysis, the author made reference to a lot of the episodes, like quoting dialogs between characters, to support his thesis as well. This made the article more persuasive. As for the “irony” part of the metaphor, I can only say that sometimes things are not what we think they are. A lot of the times we only focus on one aspect, but ignore the others. And that will cause some misunderstanding.

This is a chaotic blog, I admit. Sometimes I was talking about the structure of the article, but changed into the content of the article suddenly. I’m sorry about that.