Selina Mandrake - The Slayer (Buffy Parody) [possible satire]

Caught between Post-modernism and the New Age

Abstract

Selina Mandrake ( Emma Watson ) was a geeky Anglo-American girl in her high school senior year in 2011 California, who thought that the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer was fictional. However, one day she was approached by a mysterious goth man calling himself "The Guide" ( Wil Wheaton ) who told her that she was none other than Buffy Mageia, The Slayer, a legendary heroine who was destined to slay many notable vampires and demons, culminating in none other than The Master, the vampire with the oldest soul. See how she managed to do so, despite being completely non-violent, and even supportive of the demons she encountered.

This is a parody of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while referencing other pieces of popular culture, and has many ties to my previous screenplay, Star Trek: “We, the Living Dead”. It’s far-fetched, but, on the other hand, conveys some serious messages and insights.

Read Online or Download (Formats)

Information on the Buffy Fan Fiction Wiki

Coverage

FanFiction.Net

  1. Part 1 (with comments)

Mageia Forums

  1. Announcement on the Mageia Forums

On the fxp.co.il forums

  1. Ebook available for Selina Mandrake - The Slayer (Buffy parody)

On the /r/buffy subreddit

  1. Selina Mandrake - The Slayer - a Parody of Buffy and related works

Credits

1d10 Image Credit

1d10 image taken from Wikimedia Commons by User:Krdan under the GFDL/CC-by-sa 3.0.

ebookmaker

Update: I have now written rebookmaker which is a mostly compatible reimplementation of ebookmaker, and which is under the MIT / Expat licence since ebookmaker lacks an explicit licence, and am using it instead of ebookmaker. Git repository.

Ebookmaker is a Python 3 script that allows one to generate an EPUB and was used for preparing the Selina Mandrake E-book. While not perfect, it proved extremely useful and the author (= Marcelo Lira a.k.a “setanta”) also promptly merged a pull request I sent him. Thanks, Marcelo, for your great work!

“20 Websites To Sell Your EBook”

A post about websites that allow you to sell your electronic book / EPUB.

Thread in fxp.co.il about buying d10 Dice

Some people on the fxp.co.il forums helped me with purchasing some ten-sided dice I was seeking (in Hebrew).

Sources of Inspiration

  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series) - main source for inspiration, reference and parody.

  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - provided some fodder for this story.

  • The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.

  • The Muppets (2011) film - I saw this film in the cinema and was impressed by its take on a brutal honesty criticism of various 2010s culture, as seen by the apparently more old fashioned (but still funny as ever) muppets. It also acknowledged the temporary lull in the Muppets' franchise's popularity, and took it to its advantage.

    I eventually decided to adopt a similar approach in writing Selina, both as a criticism of some of our contemporary culture, and more importantly as a way to honestly convey my farfetched imaginary world (induced by a long period of hypomanias and manias) into this screenplay.

  • Sesame Street: “Grover the Waiter - Big Hamburger” - provided some inspiration to the scene with The Three.

  • The film The Princess Bride - some quotes are taken from there.

  • The Harry Potter franchise - I believe now that I drew some inspiration from Harry Potter in the fact that Selina starts as a normal teenager, who just happens to be geeky and knowledgeable enough to be dangerous.

    However, like Harry Potter and his good friend Hermione Granger, she secretly wishes that there was more to this world than meets the eye, only to discover this is the case, to her great apparent dismay. And now she has to find a way to handle the situation gracefully.

    While Harry and Hermione find assistance using supernatural magic, Selina only has her own natural slaying resources of her words and actions, which turn out to be enough.

  • “Sister Act: Oh Maria” - from the 1992 film, Sister Act - on how to make a traditional religious song “alive and dynamic”.

    • Michael Meets Mozart on Eric S. Raymond’s blog - on why most contemporary Classical Music is a bunch of “museum pieces”, and what can be done about it.

  • Labyrinth - a similar film that I enjoyed watching a few times. Both its Sarah protagonist and my Selina are thrown into a strange demonic world, and both are often either nonchalant, caring, or aggravated by that. And both are almost completely non-violent.

    The main difference is that while Sarah in Labyrinth takes the demonic parallel world seriously, Selina finds it ridiculous, needy, and absurd (Quite a weird lot this supernatural underworld seems to be.).

    As a side note, I'd like to add that I feel that Jennifer Connelly's performance there was so touching and believable that in a perfect world, she would have won the Oscar that year (1986).

  • Ozy & Millie "I hate this decade" - inspired the quote this decade royally sucks.

  • Zehu Zeh's reflection on Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" - (from the Israeli Educational Television; in Hebrew) the layman ( cactus pear fruit-selling) father of a high school student, who both have read the Dostoevsky tome and has reservations from it, meets Dostoevsky. The latter says "I am going to write you [= the student's father] into my book". While in the book, he meets and educates Raskolnikov.

    My screenplay similarly references the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is believed to be fictional there, and Selina similarly gets sucked into a ridiculous sub-culture based on it, as a major influencer. Only this time while trying to continue to live her everyday life.

Licensing

Well, since this work is a parody of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (written by Joss Whedon), and contains characters from there, I am theoretically protected by the Copyright’s “right of parody” as part of the ”Fair Use” provision. There are other parodies of Buffy’s works online and possibly offline, and no one was sued yet.

This work also uses other characters and concepts, from other copyrighted works, and those that are already Public Domain.

All the text in Selina Mandrake - The Slayer is original, and as far as I’m concerned can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence Unported (CC-by-sa) (either version 3.0, or at your option any later version), but like I said, the situation is more complicated than that.

I’m putting it here on this site in hope it will amuse or inspire people, and also because it may encourage people to watch some episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or of Star Trek: The Next Generation or Star Trek: Deep Space 9, learn about Jewish culture and some Near East history, read Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, etc. etc. all of which I can highly recommend. I’m not charging people any money to download, build, or view the works. Please don’t sue me.

See Also

  • Summerschool at the NSA - another screenplay with a strong Buffy/Sarah Michelle Gellar theme.

  • Buffy: A Few Good Slayers - a work-in-progress screenplay that is a more traditional Buffy fanfic. Set in a fork of the Buffy universe, and takes place in 2014/2015 Sunnydale, where the Scooby Gang are adults, married men and women, parents, and teachers/mentors.

  • Buffy Facts (also by me) - facts about Buffy Summers, the protagonist of the show.