OK, look. I personally would rather see a spinoff featuring a brand new Slayer of color and her friends (a la Discovery) than a reboot which recasts the original characters (a la the reboot Trek movies.) But so many of the arguments I see against the latter idea boil down to “Buffy can’t be black! Buffy’s supposed to be the pretty blonde suburban WHITE cheerleader who’s the first to die in a slasher movie! Anything else isn’t subversive!”
O.M.G., people. Who else is the first person to die in slasher movies? Rona (not Xander) called it in S7. Do people even hear what they’re saying? Black girls can’t be cheerleaders? Black girls can’t be pretty, or suburban, or hell, even blonde? Even SMG isn’t a natural blonde. Buffy Summers is not a white icon, for God’s sake.
Protip for my fellow white people: If you find yourself starting a sentence with “I’m not racist, but…” stop right there and reconsider the rest of it. Hard. There are legit reasons to prefer a spinoff to a reboot, but the idea that Buffy Summers could not possibly be imagined as other than white is not one of them.
In the early/mid-90s the idea of a petite, pretty (white) woman actually being the action hero slaying monsters was subversive. In 2018 there’s barely a genre franchise that DOESN’T have someone who fits that description and subversiveness for a BTVS reboot is going to require other ideas.
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Supurblychaoticdragon 