Don’t Make Fun of the Apocalypse
Life Lessons from Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Episode 2 — The Harvest
At around the age of 15 there is a rift in the universe that suddenly splits the ties between yourself and the people who knew you best in your younger years, a sudden divide forms between yourself and those whom you always trusted to guide you in your darkest hours: your parents.
Read the previous episode’s lesson here
This is usually blamed on the hormonal youth, whose grip on reality and prioritization of wants and needs suffers from the combination of increased rational thought fueled by minimal perspective. But, in episode 2, Buffy teaches us that we are not safe in the assumption that youthful idiocy is to be ignored.
I was at Steve’s house when The Rift formed for me. My dad was trying to get me to go back home for dinner. A simple request, just come home for dinner on a weeknight so we could have dinner as a family for once in a blue moon. He was so reasonable yet adamant, respectful yet firm, and we argued for some time in Steve’s driveway.
I must have seemed insane to him. I was livid, refusing to budge as though he was asking me to do something unthinkable. You see, when me and my friends were at Steve’s house we had a lot of fun, ridiculous amounts of fun, and there was always a story or inside joke that you would miss out on if you weren’t there. These stories would be told for years to come (now decades), like the one about the couch that ate people, or the time we fit twelve people in Steve’s closet-sized bedroom, or the time Kwan yelled at Lawren for sleeping under the table, or the time Peter got the quarter to stick to the Jello on the ceiling so it would fall on someone’s head while they slept, or the time…
You see, being told I had to leave Steve’s house during critical inside-joke-forming hours wasn’t a simple request. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the importance of having dinner with family, or that I didn’t understand how important it was to my father. It was just that going home at that time meant the world would end. My father was asking me to allow an apocalypse to happen and I just couldn’t do that, it was immoral, unthinkable, and wrong on the deepest level.
He didn’t understand. But, unlike Joyce, he understood that he didn’t understand. Eventually, he got back in the car and drove off. There was no yelling, no mocking, no pointing out the obvious, which was that I was completely insane.
I know. You have to go out or it’ll be the end of the world. Everything is life or death when you’re a sixteen year old girl. — Joyce Summers
Joyce points out that she actually understands that Buffy is facing a life or death situation and instead of treating it as such, she mocks her. Tilting her head from side to side when she say’s “end of the world” as though they have some inside understanding together that it isn’t really so.
Of course, if Buffy doesn’t go out it will actually be the end of the world, and since we know this as the viewer, we know that as soon as Joyce closes the door, Buffy is going out the window. There’s no question, there’s no debate, you can just feel the wall go up between them as Joyce makes it clear that she doesn’t understand the severity of the situation.
My dad didn’t do what Joyce did, he understood that there was an iceberg underneath the surface of insanity that really was the end of the world to me and he let me have it. I think he knew that when you’re a teenager the world is smaller, it fits in your hand and it’s fragile and that path to a bigger world forms who you are, determines your stories and your personality.
Since the experiences of your youth form the disposition of your future self by defining your understanding and reactions to the world, interfering with those experiences without understanding their importance, really, actually is, the end of the world. And, making fun of that fact is not likely to generate positive outcomes for any parent-teenager relationship.
The lesson here is that when you notice that your teenager, or any other human being, is experiencing something so important that it has become the end of the world for them, don’t mock their situation, don’t belittle them with platitudes, because to do so, from their side of the relationship-wall, is nothing short of making fun of the apocalypse. And, just as it is with Buffy, when there is an apocalypse at hand, you are either with the Slayer or you are against her.
