Post by stargazer1682 on May 29, 2020 14:17:03 GMT
I noticed the sign for Sunnydale as Andrew and Jonathan enter the city in Conversations with Dead People. I'm sure I'd read it before, and this probably isn't the first episode it came up in either, but I have to say I'm rather impressed by there being almost 33,000 people in Sunnydale. Since the population of UC Sunnydale is probably not reflected in that, the actual physical presence of humans in Sunnydale is probably well over the 33k mark at any given time.
Admittedly it's still smaller than some of the cities in my area, which actually kind of surprised me (more that when I looked up the other cities, just how big they were; almost 67k and 43k respectively); whereas my own hometown is nearly a fifth the size of Sunnydale. It, not unlike Sunnydale, is also a college town, albeit hosting a small, private liberal arts college and not a state university like UC Sunnydale.
So it's not exactly a "small" town, but also not necessarily huge either. You'd think it'd be big enough to probably need more than one high school though; certainly when you figure the size of the original school library, if it were accommodating a particularly large number of students.
This kind of underscores one of the things I find dissappointing in season 7, which is the way they just kind of gloss over Sunnydale being deserted by everyone who isn't living in the Summers house. Roughly 33,000 people up and leave and it's thrown in casually in pretty much one scene - two, if you count Buffy kicking the apparent only straggler who didn't have the drive to leave on his own out of his house; by all account everyone else fled without much of a second thought.
It's not so much that I don't think they wouldn't leave, but that it just kind of seems anticlimactic that everyone's just gone so abruptly; and we don't really see their motivation. We know what the Scoobies and Potentials have been going through, but in comparison to the last seven years, to say nothing of the history of the city as a whole, it's maybe slightly above par for what the vast majority of its citizens had lived through and never before decided to flee en mass. I feel like we should have seen a specific event, the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back and made everyone and their grandmother say, "Yeah, this is some messed up shit; we're out of here." I mean think what would spur the (new) mayor of Sunnydale and the entire police force to up and leave. The police seemed to be at full strength when Faith came back to town, then suddenly everyone's gone.
On top of that is the logistics of approximately 33,000 people trying to leave at once should also probably warrant more than a brief traffic jam scene. There would invariably be people who simply didn't have the resources or luxury to abandon their homes, pack most or all of their belongings and leave; and there probably would have been people left behind.
In more recent years, whenever I watch season 7, I can't help but think it might have been interesting to see Buffy band together with the dispossessed; especially after being kicked out of her house (or just generally instead of bringing the annoying Potentials to town in the first place) and she rallies together the people left behind in Sunnydale to fight in the final battle against the First.
Admittedly it's still smaller than some of the cities in my area, which actually kind of surprised me (more that when I looked up the other cities, just how big they were; almost 67k and 43k respectively); whereas my own hometown is nearly a fifth the size of Sunnydale. It, not unlike Sunnydale, is also a college town, albeit hosting a small, private liberal arts college and not a state university like UC Sunnydale.
So it's not exactly a "small" town, but also not necessarily huge either. You'd think it'd be big enough to probably need more than one high school though; certainly when you figure the size of the original school library, if it were accommodating a particularly large number of students.
This kind of underscores one of the things I find dissappointing in season 7, which is the way they just kind of gloss over Sunnydale being deserted by everyone who isn't living in the Summers house. Roughly 33,000 people up and leave and it's thrown in casually in pretty much one scene - two, if you count Buffy kicking the apparent only straggler who didn't have the drive to leave on his own out of his house; by all account everyone else fled without much of a second thought.
It's not so much that I don't think they wouldn't leave, but that it just kind of seems anticlimactic that everyone's just gone so abruptly; and we don't really see their motivation. We know what the Scoobies and Potentials have been going through, but in comparison to the last seven years, to say nothing of the history of the city as a whole, it's maybe slightly above par for what the vast majority of its citizens had lived through and never before decided to flee en mass. I feel like we should have seen a specific event, the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back and made everyone and their grandmother say, "Yeah, this is some messed up shit; we're out of here." I mean think what would spur the (new) mayor of Sunnydale and the entire police force to up and leave. The police seemed to be at full strength when Faith came back to town, then suddenly everyone's gone.
On top of that is the logistics of approximately 33,000 people trying to leave at once should also probably warrant more than a brief traffic jam scene. There would invariably be people who simply didn't have the resources or luxury to abandon their homes, pack most or all of their belongings and leave; and there probably would have been people left behind.
In more recent years, whenever I watch season 7, I can't help but think it might have been interesting to see Buffy band together with the dispossessed; especially after being kicked out of her house (or just generally instead of bringing the annoying Potentials to town in the first place) and she rallies together the people left behind in Sunnydale to fight in the final battle against the First.
