LadyLavinia
Scooby
From "By Whose Authority? The Magical Tradition, Violence and the Legitimation of the Vampire Slayer" by Bruce McClelland:
"Early Slayers
(7) Whether or not the creator of BtVS, Joss Whedon, or the show's writers are aware of it, the tradition of the vampire slayer has a long history.
(8) In southeastern Europe, where folklore about the vampire originated (in Bulgaria, not Romania, by the way), certain classes of people were, like Buffy, chosen, marked, to become the natural enemies of vampires. Vampires, according to the stories of Balkan villagers, were only about at night and often had no visible form, although it was also claimed that if they survived detection and destruction for a period of a year, they took on the appearance of a local villager. (Indeed, even today, there are Bulgarian villages where the residents are willing to provide the phone numbers of known vampires.)
(9) As corpses terrorizing the living at night, vampires could not be destroyed except by ritual means immediately before or after burial. Vampires that could not be detected became the objects of pursuit of certain vigilantes with the power to identify and destroy them. A sà¢botnik, who was someone (almost always a man) born on a Saturday (sà¢bota being the Bulgarian word for Saturday, the sabbath), or a vampirdñia, the offspring of a woman and a vampire, could detect and destroy ambulatory vampires. So useful were these people at times of vampire epidemics that they might even make a decent living as fearless vampire killers.
(10) The tradition of vampire killers is a topic worthy of investigation, but it is cited here merely to suggest that long before Buffy there was a tradition of investing selected individuals with the magical perceptions and skills necessary to confront the demonic head-on. But since this aspect of vampire folklore is less well-known in the West even than the Balkan vampire itself, there is no point in attempting to deduce some historical continuity between late medieval Bulgarian and late twentieth-century American understanding of the vampire motif.
(11) What is of significance, however, is that the village vampirdñia or sà¢botnik was, in a sense, chosen. To become one of these seers (and note again the connection with watching and seeing), one had to have predispositions that were the result of conditions that obtained before or right at birth: physical abnormalities, day of birth, vampire paternity. So even in the old village tradition, one did not choose to become a Slayer. One was chosen."
Could Connor be considered any of these?
"Early Slayers
(7) Whether or not the creator of BtVS, Joss Whedon, or the show's writers are aware of it, the tradition of the vampire slayer has a long history.
(8) In southeastern Europe, where folklore about the vampire originated (in Bulgaria, not Romania, by the way), certain classes of people were, like Buffy, chosen, marked, to become the natural enemies of vampires. Vampires, according to the stories of Balkan villagers, were only about at night and often had no visible form, although it was also claimed that if they survived detection and destruction for a period of a year, they took on the appearance of a local villager. (Indeed, even today, there are Bulgarian villages where the residents are willing to provide the phone numbers of known vampires.)
(9) As corpses terrorizing the living at night, vampires could not be destroyed except by ritual means immediately before or after burial. Vampires that could not be detected became the objects of pursuit of certain vigilantes with the power to identify and destroy them. A sà¢botnik, who was someone (almost always a man) born on a Saturday (sà¢bota being the Bulgarian word for Saturday, the sabbath), or a vampirdñia, the offspring of a woman and a vampire, could detect and destroy ambulatory vampires. So useful were these people at times of vampire epidemics that they might even make a decent living as fearless vampire killers.
(10) The tradition of vampire killers is a topic worthy of investigation, but it is cited here merely to suggest that long before Buffy there was a tradition of investing selected individuals with the magical perceptions and skills necessary to confront the demonic head-on. But since this aspect of vampire folklore is less well-known in the West even than the Balkan vampire itself, there is no point in attempting to deduce some historical continuity between late medieval Bulgarian and late twentieth-century American understanding of the vampire motif.
(11) What is of significance, however, is that the village vampirdñia or sà¢botnik was, in a sense, chosen. To become one of these seers (and note again the connection with watching and seeing), one had to have predispositions that were the result of conditions that obtained before or right at birth: physical abnormalities, day of birth, vampire paternity. So even in the old village tradition, one did not choose to become a Slayer. One was chosen."
Could Connor be considered any of these?
