Characters in hospital

nightshade

nightshade

Your grandfather is a cat
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Black Thorn
With all the times that someone ends up in hospital, what must their parents think of it. I was watching Lovers Walk yesterday, and thought how would they explain what happened to Cordelia? She was in an area that, with her group of Cordettes she wouldn't go to with a rebar through her. Surely their parents would have to be informed to order for them to receive medical care, and insurances would need to be sorted out.
 
Cordelia strikes me as the type of person whose parents are never going to blame them for anything that goes wrong, but yeah, the lack of parental interest seems apparent in this show.

🙂
 
Well, they do live in Sunnydale where odd things happen all the time so maybe the parents (and hospital staff) just write off all the hospital visits as typical Sunnydale oddities?
 
Yeah, parents are pretty out of it in Sunnydale, most certainly by design. Xander's parents are pretty dysfunctional. Willow's parents are largely absent and preoccupied. Cordelia's parents seem more concerned with appearances than Cordelia's welfare. Any of them would probably believe whatever story was spun to them, even for hospital visits. Parents needed to be a non-issue in the show, so they all seemed to be written as such (with the exception of Buffy's mom).
 
Yeah, it's a bit of a hole for sure. I think it just became cumbersome for Joss to continually write concerned parents into the series (he kind of dithers back and forth with it from time to time), but in the high school years the parents of the core Scoobies are just about the most negligent people on the planet.
 
In a town of 38,500 where dozens of people are killed by vampires every week, there has to be a huge amount of denial going on. So you ended up in hospital skewered by a rebar? Well, at least we know where you are. Seriously, the story has to be written like this or everything in the plot will be swamped by parental concern.
 
Ethan Reigns said:
In a town of 38,500 where dozens of people are killed by vampires every week, there has to be a huge amount of denial going on. So you ended up in hospital skewered by a rebar? Well, at least we know where you are. Seriously, the story has to be written like this or everything in the plot will be swamped by parental concern.
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Yeah, it's like when Buffy was asking her mother why she never seemed to notice all the blood that she was washing out of Buffy's clothes. Sunnydale has to be the greatest case of mass denial in history, and I wouldn't be surprised if the main source of that denial was the result of spells cast either by or for Mayor Wilkins when he first founded the town.
 
As others have said, I think you sort of have to suspend disbelief when it comes to parental involvement. A show like this couldn't take place if the parents acted in ways that most would expect. At the very least, their concern would take up valuable screen time and at worst it'd alter character personalities and even geography.
 
Interesting topic.

As for Cordelia, I doubt her parents even cared/noticed. They were probably busy with dealing with her dad's tax fraud, or whatever. And Cordelia's a great actress-she probably just lied to them.
 
Aside from all the denial and regular dead citizens.

Two high school couple hanging out in an abandoned building - what could they be doing?
From the outside that particular event is actually easy to explain!
 
The 'good folks of Sunnydale sticking their heads in the sand' waiver was used to explain away a lot of things, as was 'it's because we're on a Hellmouth'. It's a part of the fabric of the show that we just accept so we can enjoy it and not worry too much about how silly it would seem if we really stopped to think about it.
 
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