Rebel Without A God – The Anti-Authoritarian Attributes Of Buffy The Vampire Slayer

There are a lot of obvious things you can say about Buffy. In the
show’s first season, a student becomes invisible because no one notices
her; in the end, she’s whisked away by the FBI for training as a
government assassin. In the second, rich frat boys turn out to owe their
wealth to an evil snake god, to whom they sacrifice virgins in the
frathouse basement (Xander: “I guess the rich really are different”).
Slaying the snake sets off a wave of corporate bankruptcies across
America. And sometimes the supernatural element is a simply obvious
mirror for real life: As when Buffy, having run away from home, gets a
job as a waitress and seems headed for a life of drudgery–until she
discovers a band of demons who have been enslaving teenage runaways to
labor in dark satanic mills beneath the earth, spewing them out, broken
and useless, at about the age of 65. Yet in one way it is decidedly
unlike real life: Demon bosses, after all, can be beheaded (though
having Buffy lead the rebellion with a hammer in one hand and sickle in
the other was perhaps a tad much). Real ones can’t.