Buffy vs. Edward- Would Buffy Slay Edward?

By now, most of you have seen the Edward vs. Buffy fan vid making the rounds.



Edward vs. Buffy, which premiered at the Open Video Conference at NYU Law school, straightforwardly asks and answers the question: is the world of Buffy compatible with the world of Twilight? As we can see from watching the vid, Edward, with his antiquated notions of gender roles, does not survive in the progressive Buffy-verse. For video's author, 'Jonathan McIntosh,' the choice to kill Edward was "only reasonable":

In the end the only reasonable response was to have Buffy stake Edward – not because she didn’t find him sexy, not because he was too sensitive or too eager to share his feelings – but simply because he was possessive, manipulative, and stalkery.

See, I think Twilight's Edward could easily be a character in Buffy. The video in many ways, shows how seamlessly Twilight and Buffy could be integrated into one narrative. As I was watching, Edward reminded me a lot of Angel. Both are handsome, aloof and as McIntosh puts it, "possessive,manipulative and stalkery." Angel never took classes at Sunnydale High but he was always lurking in the shadows, offering Buffy protection from afar. Although in the vid, Buffy seems fairly indifferent to Edward's advances we can remember Buffy's affection for Angel is kind of her Achilles' heel, how Buffy would sacrifice anything for Angel, even her own slayer blood! Not to mention that for both Edward and Angel, sex is essentially the trigger that makes them dangerous and violent. Both Twilight and Buffy romanticize the non-sexual relationship between human girl and vampire man so why are we supposed to believe that Buffy would reject Edward, given that Edward has not crossed any of the boundaries (ie. sex) that made Angel a sizable enemy that needed slaying?

I agree with McIntosh: it is only logical for Buffy to kill Edward because Buffy has to kill all of her vamp-boyfriends whether they are evil or not. Both Angel and Spike died in their most non-threatening Edward-like incarnations. Buffy slays Angel after his soul is restored. Buffy has many opportunities to kill Spike but he actually dies after he has a soul, in an act that saves Buffy, and the world, but mostly Buffy.

Buffy,as a post-feminist icon, has a duty to serve and protect the world from evil that comes before any desire she might have to settle down and get married to Edward. It is interesting though how Buffy vs. Edward highlights how Buffy embraces antiquated notions of masculinity, even if the heroine rejects her prince in the end.