Blood Relations: Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel

The TV series Buffy and Angel revolve around radical conceptions of family. Indeed, their coherence depends on the establishment of nontraditional families that admit vampires, demons, witches, werewolves, and other bizarre characters without censuring them for their peculiarities. This work argues that what makes these characters enduring and engaging is their critical family connections - for their most involved struggles occur not within the graveyard, but around the dinner table, just as the most challenging adversarial forces that they must face are not demons or vampires but the stuff of everyday life.