Livre d'Or

Interesting thoughts. I do think the high points of Buffy are very strong indeed, so I'm not surprised it has a lot of soppy fans who are extremely willing to forgive its flaws. My feeling after 1.5 seasons is that the gender stuff is interesting, it generates discussions with dozens of comments, it's good in some ways and terrible in others. But the racism is just gratuitous and awful and there really doesn't seem to be any way to justify it. What's making me consider giving up, even though it means missing out on the development of the story, is the combination of Kendra + Gypsy curse + general background racism.

That makes sense seeing Buffy as an adult actress rather than a teenaged character, I think my mind just doesn't work quite like that. (I get squicked by a lot of HP fandom which has the characters, who are kids in the books, that's the whole point, in porn situations.) You have a good point about sexy vampires being part of the trope; I think it's interesting that Buffy continues the gender-flipping theme here, with a female protagonist and a sexy brooding male vamp. Cos in a lot of earlier vampire stuff the male vampires are just scary monsters, it's always the female vampires that are sexy.