Would you like some Angel with your Buffy? Or do you prefer it straight?

When I designed this season, I had flexibility in mind, so you can slide along the Buffy-Angel spectrum and find your happy place. I've set the main events around Farmingham High, but they could easily be moved to an office park, and the Ever After Marketing Agency ranks up with Wolfram and Hart (they're corporate peers, actually, but while W&H works the legal shenanigans, Ever After is all about marketing ... more on that below). If you take your Buffy black, just shrink Ever After into a more minor evil that goes away at the end of the season. You know your group, and you'll give them the right blend.

Identity Crisis

Sophomore year of High School is an interesting time, even if you don't live on a Hellmouth. Typically, during her sophomore year a kid still struggles with fitting in while trying to figure out her identity. And oddly enough, it's not for lack of help. School pushes “finding yourself” books like The Catcher In the Rye and A Separate Peace during sophomore year, but I never found their influence to be very ... influential. There are plenty of forces at work attempting to define us during this malleable time, and this season focuses on arguably the two most powerful: Parents and Marketers.

There's a Handbook?

Maybe for Slayers, but we're talking about parents. Oh, sure, there're a gillion “How To Be a Winning Parent” books, but reading a fortune cookie or rolling dice might be just as efficacious. Maybe if there was an uber-parenting book that covered every child's personality indexed against every situation, but even if someone wrote that monster set of permutations very few would have the time to read it. Parents are largely on their own, especially in the age of the nuclear (hell, sub-atomic) family where the age-old support network of grandparents now lives ten states away. Most parents do their best, and under these conditions that means they screw the pooch a lot. Some are over-protective, some under-protective, some ride their kids hard to perform well academically or athletically. Kids, for their part, sometimes overreact against this parental influence, and make the situation much worse.

The Merchants of Cool

My TiVo loves me, so one night it grabbed me a Frontline documentary titled “The Merchants of Cool,” about the systematic, and highly successful, methods by which marketers manipulate young people into buying crap at a high price (you can watch the entire documentary online). Want to make disgusting amounts of money? Shape the personalities of children in order to profit off of their new buying habits. Yes, middle-aged balding white guys who wear suits and regularly use terms like “target demographic” and “mindshare” produce Cool in a variety of bright colors, and Cool isn't always a good thing. Cool always makes kids poorer ($200 sneakers that a sweatshop slave made at a cost of pennies), often makes them stupid (why do your homework when there are so many other things to entertain and distract you), and sometimes makes them dead (drink and smoke all you want ... you're young and invincible).

Because these marketers can be so downright evil, they get their own special place in Hell's ranks. As those of you who watched Angel are aware, when the Infernal Powers need to sue a homeless shelter into oblivion, their fingers dial Wolfram and Hart, their one-stop law firm. And when they need to sell their new genetically modified corn flakes, they call the Ever After Marketing Agency. Soon shiny boxes of demon-enhanced franken-food appear on the shelves, packaged as wholesome golden brown sugar-flakes with a touch of honey that stay crispy (even in milk) and which are part of this balanced and nutritious breakfast.