Alright, so. This post will only interest those who are familiar with/like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Everyone else that has no interest in this can move along, nothin' to see here...

Okay, first thing, I'd just like to mention how I got into Buffy. After wandering the internet and geek circles for some time now, it's occurred to me that many people were introduced to it the same way I was: through a conversation that went more or less like this:

"Dude, you should totally come over and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I bought the first season on DVD."

"Ahahaha! That's a good joke. I like it when you tell good jokes like that."

"No, seriously. It's good. It's very good. You would enjoy watching this."

"... Er, what? You mean the teen-drama about the girl with a vampire boyfriend?"

"Look, just come over and watch it. If you don't like it, I'll give you a few free punches."

"Deal!"

So after that telephone conversation, my friend ended up not getting punched by me at all. I was hooked and then went on to hunt down and watch the rest of the series.

This was around the time that the seventh and final season was still airing, but it had finished by the time I caught up. All-in-all, it was a very good experience. It taught me not to judge a TV series by its previews, that Joss Whedon was a good writer, and that there was such a thing as soap operas for fantasy nerds.

Just recently, I've taken it upon myself to re-watch the whole series. I'd found a website where you can watch all the episodes for free, but... well, it's technically illegal, and the streaming site was from China, and not all of the episodes were there, so I just borrowed all the DVDs from my friends instead.

Now, this will seem like a tangent but I swear it has a point, when I started doing NaNoWriMo (which I've mentioned in previous posts), I met a girl that was just as geeky as I (well okay, a lot geekier than I... but in the best of ways) who then introduced me to Firefly and other Joss goodnesss. Through her, I met several of her friends who were equally geeky and now I have a solid circle of friends all thanks to my love of writing. But my point was, among her friends is a girl that spends a lot of her time writing Buffy fan-fiction.

Well, rather, Buffy slash-fiction. Slash fiction does not mean the same thing as "slasher film". It means, um, something very different. If you don't know, well, ah... ask around. Be ready to get weird looks.

Anyway. So I thought that was kind of funny. I mean, fan-fiction is not at all unusual... Lord knows I've written some myself. In fact, if you mosey on down to fan-fiction.net and head down to the TV Shows category, you'll see that there's approximately 32,000+ fan fics about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "But," I asked myself at the time, "why write fan-fiction about Buffy? It's been done to death and back and then to death again and probably back."

Then I got an idea for, well... geez... some fan-fiction for Buffy that would damn fun to write. This idea comes from the fact that I've basically been watching between 3 to 5 episodes a night, so I'm very familiar with the source material. Also, I realize this idea has probably already been done probably both officially and unofficially (what with the 32,000+ writers out there, it's hard to tread the unbeaten path). And yes, I am aware there are many Buffy novel spin-offs.

"Just get to the idea already!"

Yes, right, sorry.

I forget which episode it was, exactly, but the character Buffy was gearing up to fight some big monster (gee, that's not vague at all). Or no! Wait! That's not it at all! Buffy had just been in a battle with a regular vampire that had stabbed her with her own stake, so now she was all obsessed with figuring out how the other slayers died. She consulted all the Watcher diaries for answers, but they were of no help; most would say the big battle was coming up and then just stop.

"Hunh," I wondered.

Now there's an interesting read: the Watcher Diaries. I mean, yeah, we learn throughout the series that most of them are really boring and dry, but it'd still make for a really cool series to read: slayers throughout history.

In the show, the legacy of the Slayer starts almost in Pangea. That's a lot of history, and not all of it would be recorded in diaries. In fact, a lot of it was probably lost. How did the Council of Watchers rise to such power? How did the Slayer, the one girl in all the world that could stand against the demons and vampires, fall into obscurity?

This is the fan-fiction I want to write. But it's more than just sitting down and writing some Angel-on-Spike Mary Sue stories... This is a project. This is something I don't actually have time to do... but I really, really want to.

Okay, here's some ideas... The original Slayer is created. She's an abomination because she holds the strength of a demon inside her. Her existence could be seen as blasphemy among the tribe she belongs to... And so the Original Council commits its first terrible crime to maintain the secret of the Slayer (after its proven that making the knowledge of the Slayer public more dangerous than otherwise) and wipes out the tribe.

In later years, during the French Revolution, it's revealed that a Slayer is finally killed not by vampires or demons... but by the aristocracy, for overstepping the line of her caste and stepping on the wrong toes.

Even later, the Council as we know it in the series rises to power through betrayal and backstabbery. The Englishmen that come into the fold with the new English Slayer make a power-play and seize control, making sure to keep all the history, heritage and legacy intact, as well as the immense power.

It would basically be a history of evil, treachery and violence, as seen through the eyes of the men entrusted to teach and guide the most powerful women in the world, and how, in the end, it would always go wrong. One Watcher Diary would end abruptly, with the final outcome ambiguous and vague. It would only be upon reading the diary of the next Watcher that we would learn exactly what happened with the previous one.

Anyway, I don't know if I'll ever get around to doing this... I've been thinking about a lot lately, so it's definitely on my to-do list, but it's a very, very long list... And at the very least, I thought I'd share it with you guys.