What I found most interesting in “Living Conditions” was the way that Joss Whedon took the stereotypical fears of college, such as living with a roommate, and twisted them into an actual monster. Initially, Kathy is portrayed as the most annoying roommate that there could possibly be. I’m not sure that there is a single other human being that could stand her. Buffy does her best to deal with the life hurdle in a normal way, but completely fails. In a normal situation, without vampires and demons, Buffy would have had to continue to deal with her in the ‘normal’ way. However, Joss Whedon takes the ‘evil’ roommate idea and turns her into a true demon, giving Buffy something more tangible to fight. It is ironic, because there are so many times in our own lives when it feels like someone must be evil- perhaps a particularly difficult professor or annoying roommate, but there is really nothing that can be done about it. We can’t really call them evil, because they are only evil from our perspective, but in Buffy’s case, Joss Whedon turned the tables and the roommate turns out to actually be a demon- something that Buffy can easily fight. This concept that something we fear manifests itself into something truly evil plays along the same theme that we discussed with “Nightmares”, where everyone’s bad dreams became reality. Kathy is Buffy’s own personal nightmare of a roommate that then becomes something that is even more tangibly evil. Buffy’s change in mood during the episode, as she becomes angrier with Kathy, is a natural occurrence when dealing with a bad living situation. It almost feels as if the annoyance with the person consumes you, the more it gets to you, the more problems that you find in the person and the more annoyed you become. However, Joss Whedon turns the tables in the same way and attributes Buffy’s ‘symptoms’ to the actual event of her soul being gradually taken by Kathy. Therefore, the symptoms that Buffy was experiencing were really caused by a demon possessing her, rather than the metaphorical demon that takes us over in such situations in real life.
I like what you said about Buffy's annoyance building on itself, causing her to be more and more sensitive to Kathy's behavior. I think Buffy was partly at fault for the bad relationship she had with Kathy because she let herself get too irritated - the self-perpetuating nature of her thoughts and feelings got the better of her. That's probably a hallmark of the gothic tradition - that the things we think and say feed off previous things we've thought or said (but to a radical degree), such that we can't control it anymore.
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