Places You Wouldn’t Want To Live: Sunnydale
Where everyone is so hopelessly beautiful it’s as if they’ve been bred like show dogs.
Following on from our recent travelogue concerning that most inhospitable of retreats, Gotham City, our intrepid tour guide heads to home of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sunnydale.
Unlike the rain-drenched pain party Gotham City, our next entry into the catalogue of Places You Wouldn’t Want To Live appears, at least outwardly, more like a pleasant suburban idyll than a particularly hairy holiday in Bosnia. It must at least be an easier sell. Sunnydale is a quiet Californian university town with good schools and sun all year, a dreamy iteration of suburbia where teenagers drive four-hundred grand cars and everyone is so hopelessly beautiful it’s as if they’ve been bred like show dogs.
Every city has those best-kept-secrets places, the little delis or bars or pop-up restaurants that only your hipster friends have ever heard of. For Sunnydale, that place is a swirling, cavernous vortex into a demonic dimension that sits beneath the high school library. This is a far bigger thundercloud arriving during your barbeque than Gotham’s menagerie of murderous lunatics, this is a Lovecraftian gateway to a hellish nether-region of pure cosmic evil. It also happens to be a supernatural homing beacon, dragging every blood-curdling supernatural beastie in this earthly realm towards Sunnydale like an enormous turd-magnet. It’s called the Hellmouth. I mean, come on. It’s the mouth. Of Hell
The only people who know about the Hellmouth are a bunch of hormonal kids running around with knives (sounds safe), a shadowy government organisation, and the many hundreds of demonic nuisances that flock to Sunnydale every year like 90s ravers to Ibiza. Given the fact that Sunnydale’s unique roadside attraction contributes to a staggering number of violent deaths, the Hellmouth could be considered the best kept secret in the entire history of human anything.
Even still, you would think potential residents of Sunnydale would take notice of the grisly mutilations that occur with frightening frequency. These aren’t the kind of petty crimes you’d expect of any population centre; Sunnydale Police Department seems fairly non-existent, or at least untroubled by drugs or regular murder. These are the kind of gruesome maulings that only vampires, demons, witches, werewolves, vengeful spirits and personifications of the unrelenting darkness of the abyss can deal out. Given that most of these horrible amateur vivisections occur to people under the age of 25 (which would put the actual cast of Buffy out of harm’s way, natch), either Sunnydale’s residents are dopily unobservant or all terrified, locked-up in their attics not calling or even speaking to anyone lest they incur the wrath of yet another incensed demonic hellbeast.
The people of Sunnydale can at least enjoy the vigilant protection of Buffy Summers herself, a girl who has been handed the job description “the Slayer” and interpreted it as a very open brief. But would you really want to entrust your life (or indeed the safety of your soul) to a group of teenagers who ironically describe themselves as the “Scooby Gang.” Maybe a little less cute, sardonic Whedonisms, a little more HOLY CRAP GET YOURSELVES TOGETHER WE’VE GOT TO STAB THIS TENTACLED HIVE-SPAWN OR A BLACK HOLE OF EVIL WILL COLLAPSE THE UNIVERSE. Take this seriously.
This all overlooks Sunnydale’s biggest failing, which is its lax enforcement of appropriate teacher-student relations. There’s something inherently creepy about the relationship Giles has with Buffy and her gang of attractive, nubile, young friends. Giles is an unmarried middle-aged teacher who secretly meets with students at all hours of the night, training them to stalk the streets at two in the morning like serial killers looking for prey. A man who indoctrinises children with clandestine arcana in cultish afterschool “training sessions” where they learn to handle weapons and fight. This guy is like the Patrick Bateman of academia, the sort of person that makes Daily Mail writers froth at the mouth like rabid dogs. Despite all the malevolent spectral forces that swarm to Sunnydale looking for Green Cards to our material plane, I still think that Giles may well be the most dangerous man there.
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