Bathroom Story Time

Going off of what Kim just said about the tradition of oral history, I think what is neat about the episode is the way that Andrew imagines himself telling the story versus how he actually tells it. In the episode, Andrew is seen in a leather chair beside a lit fire telling the history of Buffy the vampire slayer. He uses a melodramatic tone to enhance his rehearsed rhetoric. For Andrew, this is how vampire stories are supposed to be told. They are supposed to be traditions passed down through the generations so to inform people about the mysteries of the world. His exact words are, entertain and educate. Yet, in reality, Andrew is sitting in the bathroom with a camcorder. Anya makes clear how weird Andrew is and asks him why he can't just masturbate like the rest of us [while alone in the bathroom]. This implies that the bathroom is not a suitable place to be doing any storytelling. Yet, this is troubling for me because I think we all have a dramatic vision of how vampire stories are supposed to be told. I imagine a group of people hovering around a campfire while one person with a flashlight below his face is trying to be spooky. In actuality, I suppose that gothic stories could be told anywhere. Transformations, as we talked about in class, is similar to a tall tale in that it explains how things are how they are. I could easily see one of my parents telling my this story as a lesson if I was acting up as a child. Whedon does an excellent job of depicting our misconceptions about how to tell a story. It doesn't matter if Andrew is telling the story in a lounge or in a bathroom, the point of the gothic is to entertain and inform.