The fifth volume of Buffy Season Eight is patched up from several different short stories, collated together to illustrate a world where vampires are the latest-hottest trend, all thanks to the most clueless, blondest, and shallowest vampire to have ever been undead – Harmony Kendall.
Remember Harmony? She was Cordelia’s best frienemy back in high school. Then on graduation day, suddenly a vampire. Then for a while, Spike’s lover. Then LA, where she met Cordelia again, only to prove herself as inadequate a friend and creature-of-the-night as ever. And finally in this volume, a reality show star in the becoming.
While vampires’ popularity is on the rise, slayers suffer from a real bad case of bad publicity, as they are portrayed by the "media" as a bunch of dangerous haters. Could it be that people don’t always get who the good guys are? Do Reality shows really show reality, and are these shows evil? I could think of several real life parallels to those not-so-fictional dilemmas, so the volume’s cute sarcasm did not go unappreciated by me.
The first story of the volume (called “Harmonic Divergence”) lays out Harmony’s road to famedom. How exactly did she become our vamp of the hour? It actually happened by literally sinking her teeth into someone famous, so you could say she blood-sucked her way into fame, only in an empowering way. After receiving enough attention from the biting incident, she sells her idea for a show to MTV (nobody really remembers what these letters stand for… it’s just a popular reality channel now) and the rest is fictional history.
While Harmony is leading her Vida Loca in LA, Buffy fails to recruit a newly discovered slayer. This young slayer doesn’t seem to fall for the somewhat frayed recruitment speech of “together-sisterhood-duty-honor” that Buffy tries to convey by phone. Later on, this slayer tries to answer her calling all by herself, and sadly ends up being killed by Harmony — live on TV — and even presented as the bad-guy who attacked beloved and famous Harmony.
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