Essay – Modern Mellow Yellow: Unfortunate Implications in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

15 June 2017

Modern Mellow Yellow: Unfortunate Implications in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

One aspect of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that has perhaps become more clear in the passing of time is the rather monochromatic depth of its racial diversity. While there have been a handful of appearances of non-white actors in the first few seasons, these were primarily minor characters and often stereotyped. Absolom, Mr Trick, and Kendra, to name a few, are each depicted in a way that underscores their otherness, with the latter being given an infamous accent that Buffy herself mocks (S02E10 “What’s My Line Part 2”, 27:19). While the depiction of black characters is arguably evened out with the non-stereotypical – though brief – appearances of Mr Platt the guidance counselor (S03E04 “Beauty and the Beasts”), Olivia Williams (S04E01 “The Freshman”), and Forrest Gates (S04E07 “The Initiative”), the same cannot be said for the depiction of Asian characters. This essay will talk about each of the Asian characters who appear in the first half of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and their problematic representation. All are stereotypical, or otherwise disposable, in ways that reinforce a number of expected and assumed traits in Asian characters. As there are apparently only four Asian characters in all of Sunnydale so far, it is a short list.

The first character and the character who is technically the closest to being fully developed is Holly Charleston, the Asian homecoming candidate competing against Cordelia and Buffy in their senior year (S03E05 “Homecoming”). A significant amount of Holly’s character is gleaned from the whiteboard assembled by Buffy when measuring her competition. Buffy, on her whiteboard, lists Holly’s strengths as “Debate skills, straight A’s, drill team, good in sports, always studies, nice, sweet” and her weaknesses as “Few friends, new student, no boyfriend, introvert, always studying” (18:11). A number of the listed attributes fall into the stereotypical Overachieving Asian and Shy Asian clichés, and Holly with her brief screen time is not shown in any way to disprove these traits. However, Holly is particularly interesting as there is just enough doubt in her characterization that the blame could be shifted to be “in-universe” rather than existing in the production of the show. This is because, contrary to Buffy’s interpretation of Holly as being an overachiever, Cordelia dismissively describes her as braindead (8:49). Furthermore, while Holly does not do anything to disprove the traits attributed to her on the whiteboard, she does not do anything to confirm them either. If the viewer is to follow this line of thought, by believing Cordelia over the character whose name is in the title, then rather than the show being vaguely racist, it is Buffy herself. That is to say, this allows the possibility that Holly is a much more diverse, independent, and dynamic character than Buffy assumes her to be, and not a rather shallow Asian stereotype like the show initially suggests. However, I don’t imagine having the show’s eponymous character and literal saviour be sort of understatedly racist, rather than the show itself, is much of an improvement.

The next example is the unnamed Asian member of Cordelia’s former clique who appears in “The Wish” (S03E09). While she, unlike Holly, is not given a name nor a distinct personality, she does receive a small number of speaking lines. This is, arguably, good; the show is not othering her or playing into any particular stereotypes. However, the problem arises in the alternate Wish Universe, where she is singled out to be the first and only, with regard to the confines of the episode, person to have her blood gruesomely harvested from her still-living body by The Master’s “killing machine.” The implications of this are many and unfortunate. While the script lists the victim in the scene generically as “Screaming Girl,” a character implicitly separate from the girl in the clique, the choice to have the roles combined into one results in the victimization of one of the few non-stereotypical minority characters of the show. Perhaps this was done with an eye toward the budget. Or perhaps this was done because the girl, being one of the few Asian characters on the show, would stand out to audiences because of her exoticism and allow them to recognize her as the same Asian girl from the clique and therefore illicit a stronger emotional connection to the scene. If the latter is the case, then the show would at best be using her race as a distinguishing feature, making it equivalent to giving someone an eye patch or funny hat, or at worst replicating the trope of the Disposable Token Minority so commonly seen in the horror media Buffy so often tries to subvert. While she is implied to be still alive in the primary reality, she is never seen again after the scene of her death, leaving her character on a rather sour note. Therefore, she is a character of colour who is implied to have existed in the somewhere in the background before as a member of Cordelia’s friends (and the actor previously appeared as effectively the same character in the unaired pilot episode), but in her first actual appearance is summarily executed in an abattoir. While the death does take place in an undone reality, and the character is likely alive again off screen, having a minority character suddenly materialize for a single episode as part of a group before being executed is extremely problematic.

The final two examples are the two unnamed Asian students who separately appear in “Earshot” (S03E18) and “The Harsh Light of Day” (S04E03). In “Earshot,” the student in question is the one who briefly passes Buffy in the halls, identified as a Nerd in the script, who aspires to be a “software jillionaire” and that those who bully him will be less successful in adulthood (12:27). While the episode does deal with the idea that everyone is burdened by their own troubles, and while Nerd himself is not necessarily problematic in isolation, the choice of casting an Asian performer for the role is problematic in that it underscores the cliché of the Studious Asian and that Asians are associated with computers, due to Nerd specifying that his interest is in software.

Similarly, in “The Harsh Light of Day” an Asian character appears on screen barely conscious and chained to a wall in Spike and Harmony’s excavation cave as their shared meal (11:50). He differs from many other nameless victims in Buffy in that he is inexplicably given some characterization. The audience is given three pieces of information about him by Harmony, each equally problematic: he was in Harmony’s math class, she remembers not liking him, and he “tastes funny.” By having Harmony associate him with a math class (or alternatively, casting an Asian performer as someone who would believably be in a math class) again reinforces the Asians Are Good at Math stereotype previously suggested with the “always studying” Holly Charleston. This association could have been avoided by declaring nearly any course other than Math. Similarly, having Harmony presenting her negative opinion of him as one of his three character traits is a bad foot on which to introduce a helpless character who is likely to be dead soon. By characterizing him negatively, rather than something more substantial like him having a family or even eating the same sandwich every lunch hour, Harmony and the show dismiss him as disposable. That is to say that since Harmony did not like him, he is therefore unlikeable, and therefore it is more okay that he is chained up instead of someone more sympathetic. The third piece of characterization, and in fact the first comment Harmony makes about the character, is that he tastes funny. As he is their meal it is hard to not see this as a joke about Chinese take-out and on Chinese food in general. This is underscored by Spike and Harmony arguing over him like a couple would argue about dinner plans. This is, perhaps, one of the more dehumanizing instances of stereotypes on Buffy in part because of how casually it is done. Furthermore, the victim is implied to taste so poorly that Harmony refuses to feed on him. Connecting this to other mentions and depictions in Buffy where a vampire finds a given human to be not worthy of feeding further lowers the victim character and helps categorize him as other. Whereas regular humans are Happy Meals with legs, this Asian victim is apparently a weird box of spoiled Chinese mystery meat.

For someone who would be watching the show during its original broadcast, the show as it stands in what would end up being the middle of its run does not have a very encouraging trajectory in its depiction of Asian characters, and this is not even considering the character Chao-Ahn who appears in the final season (and is therefore not covered in this essay) and in many ways comes from the Long Duk Dong school of comedic minorities. It’s not that the show needs more Asian characters per se, it is that there are so few of them that the ones who do show up inevitably become representations of the whole, and the representation so far seems to be that of a very narrow and stereotypical casting. The British characters, who are also othered to a degree, are depicted fully enough and diversely enough to show various levels of goodness, competency, and attitude so as to present a range of possibilities. For a show that is so often about empowerment it is disappointing that this first half of the Buffy seemingly does not extend that to its Asian characters. While this may be a relic of the time it was made, the other avenues of representation the show does choose to depict, like those characterized by Buffy and Willow, were very heartening to those who identified with them. Buffy showed that a blonde high school girl can not only be something other than a victim, but can be someone who fights back. Willow, too, showed that even a quiet and nerdy wallflower can become a powerful and relatively more assertive witch. Willow pushed representation even further in the fourth season when she begins a relationship with Tara. So with all this empowerment and representation, it is unfortunate the same could not be said of the apparently few Asian residents of Sunnydale. In the same way that Willow and Tara’s relationship was a beacon of representation for their LGBTQ+ viewers, every Asian character seemed to only remind Asian viewers that they’re good at math and and not much else; caricatures in a world of monsters.