Buffy Reboot With "Black Lead"
- Thread starter Nikkolas
- Start date
- TV
- Location
- Patriarchova
"I hope they try to actually capture the spirit of the times instead of just blandly rehashing something from decades ago."
Unfortunately, blandly rehashing stuff from decades ago IS the spirit of the times.
Unfortunately, blandly rehashing stuff from decades ago IS the spirit of the times.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Honestly I'm not even a big fan of the show (didn't like it that much really) but I find this whole "This sequel will clearly be a total rehash" incredibly tiring.
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
Considering how fucking good a lot of TV is now compared to the 80s-90s-early 2000s, the idea that that a Buffy remake is doomed to be a shitty rehash of a great show is laughable to me.
We can make a better Buffy the Vampire slayer, people. Because there is simply more talent flying around in the medium than there was twenty years ago.
Now that doesn't mean its going to necessarily blow anyone away. But I bet you hard money that an average to middling episode of a B-list similar genre show on Netflix is atleast as good if not better on an execution/production/acting standpoint (writing is a different story) than your average to middling episode of BTVS.
The main problem I see happening to it is it becoming Game of Thrones-i-fied, where it's all dark and brooding and lacking in charm. Which is an issue, but OG Buffy kinda did that first.
We can make a better Buffy the Vampire slayer, people. Because there is simply more talent flying around in the medium than there was twenty years ago.
Now that doesn't mean its going to necessarily blow anyone away. But I bet you hard money that an average to middling episode of a B-list similar genre show on Netflix is atleast as good if not better on an execution/production/acting standpoint (writing is a different story) than your average to middling episode of BTVS.
The main problem I see happening to it is it becoming Game of Thrones-i-fied, where it's all dark and brooding and lacking in charm. Which is an issue, but OG Buffy kinda did that first.
Last edited:
I agree a lot with this. I binge stupid shit on Netflix a lot, and as you say, there's a noticeable spike in quality from trying to watch old classics. Usually what the new stuff lacks is heart.
- Location
- Texas, US
Buffy but all dark and brooding and lacking in charm was called Angel.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
- Location
- Texas, US
It was good. I thought Buffy was better though. And any way you look at it, Angel WAS a much darker show full of brooding on how dark everything was. They had to introduce amnesia magic to make everyone less miserable. Or well I think it was reality warping at the end of Season 4
Shanejayell
Yuri Fan without a Pause
- Pronouns
- He
Sorta related: with reboot starting Fox is ending licences for Buffy comics.
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/joss-...-takes-buffy-firefly-licenses-from-dark-horse
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/joss-...-takes-buffy-firefly-licenses-from-dark-horse
This reboot stuff is news to me.
Very sad hearing about Whedon's meltdown and much much worse to realize he was yet another media big shot who could't be bothered to refrain from abusing the power over women.
It is a great big deal to me because I discovered Buffy (and Angel) pretty late, years after the final episode of Buffy, at a time of severe dislocation in my life, and I fell really deeply into it. I wonder how many times more I will watch the episodes, because in the past few years when I do I feel they've worn a track in my head.
One form of praise I had for the show--how many people are familiar with the myth of Innana more widely known as Ishtar, a Sumerian/Babylonian goddess? I was deeply moved by some classes I took at Pasadena City College in my mid-twenties, from the best teacher I have ever met bar none, about Mythology. The first course of several I took from Dr Betty Kovacs I thought I would just sleepwalk through for an easy grade, figuring I knew plenty about Greek Mythology already. But...I knew jack crap, because what the class was about was taking it seriously...not, not for me anyway literally but thinking about why this stuff deeply mattered to millions of people for hundreds of years, and coming around to the idea that this kind of storytelling is about a different way of thinking, about processing deep stuff that doesn't all go into words. Fundamentally mythology is about the deep ideas that motivate civilizations, that define people as who they think they should be, that explores the deep values people have. In reality, even I suppose for people who consider themselves Christians or some other great world religion primarily, the mythology of our modern culture is not really the stuff we label that, or for many people the formal religions--to a great extent our mythology is our pop culture! Star Trek fans, Warsies, etc are outliers expressing it more literally and expressively, but the kinds of movies we like, the TV shows, the comic books--this is our true Iliad and Odyssey nowadays,
So a later semester of the class was focused on "Near Eastern Mythology" and this really was playing with some fire since of course it overlaps the Hebrew and hence Christian canon. The Descent of Inanna was a major focus for some weeks.
The story of that goddess struck me as a deeply feminist alternative to our classic modern American mythos, and for decades after that, my personal gold standard of a really cutting edge work of art for the modern world would be if someone could retell that myth, or aspects or resonances of it, really well, in a fashion that fits in seamlessly with our modern sensibilities and yet opens the alternative doors of an alternative approach to the mythology of death and resurrection, a feminist counterpoint to the dominantly patriarchal mythology we inherit.
Well, when I got deeply into the Buffy'verse, especially getting into the more arty later season episodes, largely peaking in Season 5 but I found plenty good in the often disparaged Seasons 6 and 7 to, at some point, maybe not on my first viewing but on second or third, I realized---hey, Buffy does the Inanna thing! She does the whole Inanna myth--the funloving girl, the bold seizure of power and usurping of authority, the going gaga over a guy or two, the "turning her ear to the Great Below," turning away from ease and comfort to confront horror--and not just creepy bug faced demons or slimy things or cruel mean beings...the show juxtaposed these external manifestations with the horrors and terrors that really hurt and maim because they come from the people closest to us. She goes down to the Great Below, not once but many times, and comes back transformed and older, stronger. So do others around her. It's kind of her day job.
So yeah, I took it very very seriously. Naturally it is troubling to me that Joss Whedon was at the time being exactly the kind of casual power abuser the mythic Inanna cycled through the underworld and encountered her dark shadow self to return to chastise and set right. I wonder, was he a great artist with the all too common dark side of his own? Was he just a cheap impressaro who gathered women like Susan Espenon and Marti Noxon around him and either wisely or complacently let them tell the story?
Mind for me it was not just Buffy; Angel too hit some very profound notes; Firefly was just genius in my view and I still think of it that way. I could see plenty wrong with Whedon's influence too if I wanted to find fault and imperfection--for one thing on all of these shows everyone was just too damn pretty, Hollywood style. Could Whedon not handle people of less than glamorous perfection?
So--between his failure to find his footing in a respectable way since the early 2000s, I actually might have a better feeling about a Buffy continuation he was not involved with than one he is, and his not being the showrunner is definitely good news.
I am pretty glum about the prospects of a new show being anything close to the legacy of the old one, but perhaps there are people who can pull something off. I'd be reasonably happy if it does not disgrace the old show, and have some hope that I can be as surprised and impressed again.
Very sad hearing about Whedon's meltdown and much much worse to realize he was yet another media big shot who could't be bothered to refrain from abusing the power over women.
It is a great big deal to me because I discovered Buffy (and Angel) pretty late, years after the final episode of Buffy, at a time of severe dislocation in my life, and I fell really deeply into it. I wonder how many times more I will watch the episodes, because in the past few years when I do I feel they've worn a track in my head.
One form of praise I had for the show--how many people are familiar with the myth of Innana more widely known as Ishtar, a Sumerian/Babylonian goddess? I was deeply moved by some classes I took at Pasadena City College in my mid-twenties, from the best teacher I have ever met bar none, about Mythology. The first course of several I took from Dr Betty Kovacs I thought I would just sleepwalk through for an easy grade, figuring I knew plenty about Greek Mythology already. But...I knew jack crap, because what the class was about was taking it seriously...not, not for me anyway literally but thinking about why this stuff deeply mattered to millions of people for hundreds of years, and coming around to the idea that this kind of storytelling is about a different way of thinking, about processing deep stuff that doesn't all go into words. Fundamentally mythology is about the deep ideas that motivate civilizations, that define people as who they think they should be, that explores the deep values people have. In reality, even I suppose for people who consider themselves Christians or some other great world religion primarily, the mythology of our modern culture is not really the stuff we label that, or for many people the formal religions--to a great extent our mythology is our pop culture! Star Trek fans, Warsies, etc are outliers expressing it more literally and expressively, but the kinds of movies we like, the TV shows, the comic books--this is our true Iliad and Odyssey nowadays,
So a later semester of the class was focused on "Near Eastern Mythology" and this really was playing with some fire since of course it overlaps the Hebrew and hence Christian canon. The Descent of Inanna was a major focus for some weeks.
The story of that goddess struck me as a deeply feminist alternative to our classic modern American mythos, and for decades after that, my personal gold standard of a really cutting edge work of art for the modern world would be if someone could retell that myth, or aspects or resonances of it, really well, in a fashion that fits in seamlessly with our modern sensibilities and yet opens the alternative doors of an alternative approach to the mythology of death and resurrection, a feminist counterpoint to the dominantly patriarchal mythology we inherit.
Well, when I got deeply into the Buffy'verse, especially getting into the more arty later season episodes, largely peaking in Season 5 but I found plenty good in the often disparaged Seasons 6 and 7 to, at some point, maybe not on my first viewing but on second or third, I realized---hey, Buffy does the Inanna thing! She does the whole Inanna myth--the funloving girl, the bold seizure of power and usurping of authority, the going gaga over a guy or two, the "turning her ear to the Great Below," turning away from ease and comfort to confront horror--and not just creepy bug faced demons or slimy things or cruel mean beings...the show juxtaposed these external manifestations with the horrors and terrors that really hurt and maim because they come from the people closest to us. She goes down to the Great Below, not once but many times, and comes back transformed and older, stronger. So do others around her. It's kind of her day job.
So yeah, I took it very very seriously. Naturally it is troubling to me that Joss Whedon was at the time being exactly the kind of casual power abuser the mythic Inanna cycled through the underworld and encountered her dark shadow self to return to chastise and set right. I wonder, was he a great artist with the all too common dark side of his own? Was he just a cheap impressaro who gathered women like Susan Espenon and Marti Noxon around him and either wisely or complacently let them tell the story?
Mind for me it was not just Buffy; Angel too hit some very profound notes; Firefly was just genius in my view and I still think of it that way. I could see plenty wrong with Whedon's influence too if I wanted to find fault and imperfection--for one thing on all of these shows everyone was just too damn pretty, Hollywood style. Could Whedon not handle people of less than glamorous perfection?
So--between his failure to find his footing in a respectable way since the early 2000s, I actually might have a better feeling about a Buffy continuation he was not involved with than one he is, and his not being the showrunner is definitely good news.
I am pretty glum about the prospects of a new show being anything close to the legacy of the old one, but perhaps there are people who can pull something off. I'd be reasonably happy if it does not disgrace the old show, and have some hope that I can be as surprised and impressed again.
Sabertooth
Currently on a road trip with Magnus the Red
- Location
- Portugal
Same here.
Shanejayell
Yuri Fan without a Pause
- Pronouns
- He
The comics are moving to Boom.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Stakes Out a New Home at BOOM! Studios - IGN
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Stakes Out a New Home at BOOM! Studios - IGN
IgnusDei
Promethean Phantom
- Location
- The Amala Network
Poe Dameron is going to kill vampires?! Sweet! Dreams DO COME TRUE!
- Location
- Home
A male Slayer, in a world all about gender equality this would cause a shitstorm
- Pronouns
- She/Her
"One girl in all the world"
Flipping the premise of an entire show on its head, especially an established show, will piss off a lot of people. Buffy got away with the mass slayer deal with ending.
Now, if you had a few more seasons, and then made it a plot point, you could possibly pull off a male slayer in a good way.
But off the bat and not handled well? It's begging for a shit show of fan anger.
Ass pulls tend to piss off fans.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I actually completely agree- like, Buffy had its problems, but one thing it did have going for it is that a female character having a show like that was a pretty huge deal at the time. And at this point Buffy and her title has some cachet; I think that in many respects a male Slayer at the very least would be disorienting and I could definitely see being uncomfortable with the prospect, especially since Buffy is a main female pop culture icon now; to shift that role to a man... not a great look. Also, related to my first point, Buffy's premise was actually kind of new, and a male lead with that same setup is hardly revolutionary and brings little to the table.
Given the way the post was framed and phrased, I was more curious what Cambion specifically thought the issue would be.
There have been male vampire hunters before, just not Slayers. It's depicted as hard mode leading to broken, unethical people. Presumably because the stated life expectancy of a Slayer is already quite short (Buffy lives as long as she does by a mix of skill, breaking rules and, well, getting over dying) so a male trying to do it without being a magic girl is going to be even worse. Buffyverse in general is grimdark once you scratch the surface.
Promoting a male to Slayer would either offend universe cosmology or be some ham-fisted commentary on gender.
A black lead in a setting different than Sunnydale/Sunnydale clone OTOH is smart. Don't directly compare to hit originals, it won't look good.
Promoting a male to Slayer would either offend universe cosmology or be some ham-fisted commentary on gender.
A black lead in a setting different than Sunnydale/Sunnydale clone OTOH is smart. Don't directly compare to hit originals, it won't look good.
Last edited:
In my own expanded head canon, a "male slayer" is impossible. I believe (in head canon still of course) the wizards shown in Season 7 who initiated the Slayer line and pretty much founded the Watchers tried that first, as their "natural" preference.
In terms of real world materialistic sociology, I actually believe that evolving as gatherer-hunters, our species completely lacked gender dominance. Not gender polarization; all the anthropology I ever learned affirms that the roles of pragmatic day to day economics of gatherer-hunting were quite rigidly divided. Grown up men were not supposed to gather--maybe some casual plucking of vegetables of various kinds, nuts and so forth, for self-sustenance, but not to bring any surplus for others home; similarly women did not systematically hunt; one account of some young girl in a southern African desert society stuck with me, of a girl who boasts of killing a "dik-dik" (a very small kind of deer) dispels any notion that GH society had fierce and violent enforcement of these divisions; it was perceived and experienced as a pragmatic thing. In general there is little sign of humans terrorizing each other prior to the development of cultivation and new stressful dependencies on constraints that did not apply to our ancestors. (This was possible for them because they lived in small numbers). So I believe that in the materialistic real world, there is no sharp line, just a spectrum and a highly overlapping one at that, and that societies benefit from both men and women being regarded as equally well able to do anything.
But the Buffy'Verse is a different place. In it magic and mysticism are fundamental, material if you will, realities. Per what Buffy and Angel canon eventually revealed and guided by Giles's Watcher trained exposition, it seems plain that there is a metacosmology, which Giles in an early Season One episode, perhaps even Welcome to the Hellmouth part one, expresses in terms of Earth alone, but I take on a grander scale. The meta-Cosmos was originally a multiverse of "hell dimensions" inhabited by "demons" of unknown origin, perhaps eternal, who by nature are creatures of Will. Our species as I interpret it is a kind of subspecies of "demon" that as it were migrated from the central zones of contention of raw power, being defeated as weaker, and sought refuge in a "crystalline" sort of hedge of increasing lawfulness. We increasingly submit to grand and abstract laws we conceive of as inherently beyond our power to alter, regulating all, and that true demons have trouble navigating in. They can use raw power to batter their way in as it were, but it is increasingly difficult and unrewarding for them; they don't "belong" here and successful demons can't be arsed to try, the pickings are slim for them. Metaphysically, we as a species have been migrating away from the power of raw will and so have been, in terms of parallel universes, into timelines where an increasingly materialistic reality is developed at the same time as we evolve elaborate societies based on increasingly impersonal social laws.
This is why magic is so dangerous and increasingly rare. Fundamentally, using magic surrenders some of our advantage and has us playing more on demon turf. The Slayer has the mission of standing at the rear of our species's advance away from the chaos of raw will into the realm of ever more rigid law, posting a guard against demonic forces that would seek to draw us back. We have behind us a comet trail as it were of various hybridized demons in zillions of alternate realities that are either snapping at our heels or also co-adapting. The Slayer is the keeper of the border.
Note that in Buffy/Angel canon, witches who are basically benign or anyway decent are pretty common, though as Tara told it, they need a lot of collective communal guidance and grounding and have strong codes of morals and ethics to guide them. But you almost never meet a male wizard who is decent; Giles is a creature of great self discipline and restraint. Projects like The Initiative, trying to mix a bit of magical fudging with dominant power structures of human society, are doomed to go wonky, in great part because again people are playing on demon turf and the demons have the advantage. But also, dominant human power structures tend to be patriarchal.
In the Buffy'Verse, a lot of propositions that deem questionable and even dangerous in our actual world are simply factual. There is such a thing as "male energy" versus female energy. The Watcher's Council is predominantly male-patriarchal in governance and mindset, and is therefore somewhat corrupt, along similar lines to the Initiative.
I think it should be plain, or anyway a reasonable supposition, that the all-male and quite ruthless council of primordial wizards who raised up the Slayer line by incorporating a "male energy" type demon into a Chosen girl, essentially violating her as Buffy perceived it, would have attempted to raise up a male Champion for the role first. It is my supposition that they tried this many times, trying their best to fix problems, but always found they had created a Frankenstein's Monster in doing so. Either the male "Slayers" had to be forcibly separated from their demon imbued powers at great trauma and possibly generally fatal in itself, or hunted down and destroyed, one after another, like so many Skynets. Only as a last resort did they fall back on the desperate expedient of trying it with girls, and much to their annoyance, this worked--eventually anyway. The wizards resent this and wish it were otherwise, but they remain ethically grounded enough to accept it as unfortunate but true. It was as much in jealous spite as anything else they decided on the One Slayer, She Alone rule--there may have been other considerations, but I think the fact Buffy gets away with breaking it, at least apparently, suggests there was no real reason there should not have been lots of Slayers at a time.
So, I think any attempt on any man's part to become a Slayer or for anyone, man, woman, a pangender team, to make any man a Slayer, is doomed to lead to catastrophe and regrets in the same way the Initiative was so doomed. A sane and moral man would seek to reject the graft despite the abject misery being desolated of their stolen demon power would cause, and more typically we'd just dive right into it and be consumed much as Dark Willow was, only with essentially no road back we could be expected to survive, and if by some miracle one of us survived we'd be quite wretched and wrecked. More typically the Slayer or an army of them would have to destroy us or we'd do great damage to humanity.
Obviously other people have other notions, but this is the canon as I have come to understand it. No male Slayers!
In terms of real world materialistic sociology, I actually believe that evolving as gatherer-hunters, our species completely lacked gender dominance. Not gender polarization; all the anthropology I ever learned affirms that the roles of pragmatic day to day economics of gatherer-hunting were quite rigidly divided. Grown up men were not supposed to gather--maybe some casual plucking of vegetables of various kinds, nuts and so forth, for self-sustenance, but not to bring any surplus for others home; similarly women did not systematically hunt; one account of some young girl in a southern African desert society stuck with me, of a girl who boasts of killing a "dik-dik" (a very small kind of deer) dispels any notion that GH society had fierce and violent enforcement of these divisions; it was perceived and experienced as a pragmatic thing. In general there is little sign of humans terrorizing each other prior to the development of cultivation and new stressful dependencies on constraints that did not apply to our ancestors. (This was possible for them because they lived in small numbers). So I believe that in the materialistic real world, there is no sharp line, just a spectrum and a highly overlapping one at that, and that societies benefit from both men and women being regarded as equally well able to do anything.
But the Buffy'Verse is a different place. In it magic and mysticism are fundamental, material if you will, realities. Per what Buffy and Angel canon eventually revealed and guided by Giles's Watcher trained exposition, it seems plain that there is a metacosmology, which Giles in an early Season One episode, perhaps even Welcome to the Hellmouth part one, expresses in terms of Earth alone, but I take on a grander scale. The meta-Cosmos was originally a multiverse of "hell dimensions" inhabited by "demons" of unknown origin, perhaps eternal, who by nature are creatures of Will. Our species as I interpret it is a kind of subspecies of "demon" that as it were migrated from the central zones of contention of raw power, being defeated as weaker, and sought refuge in a "crystalline" sort of hedge of increasing lawfulness. We increasingly submit to grand and abstract laws we conceive of as inherently beyond our power to alter, regulating all, and that true demons have trouble navigating in. They can use raw power to batter their way in as it were, but it is increasingly difficult and unrewarding for them; they don't "belong" here and successful demons can't be arsed to try, the pickings are slim for them. Metaphysically, we as a species have been migrating away from the power of raw will and so have been, in terms of parallel universes, into timelines where an increasingly materialistic reality is developed at the same time as we evolve elaborate societies based on increasingly impersonal social laws.
This is why magic is so dangerous and increasingly rare. Fundamentally, using magic surrenders some of our advantage and has us playing more on demon turf. The Slayer has the mission of standing at the rear of our species's advance away from the chaos of raw will into the realm of ever more rigid law, posting a guard against demonic forces that would seek to draw us back. We have behind us a comet trail as it were of various hybridized demons in zillions of alternate realities that are either snapping at our heels or also co-adapting. The Slayer is the keeper of the border.
Note that in Buffy/Angel canon, witches who are basically benign or anyway decent are pretty common, though as Tara told it, they need a lot of collective communal guidance and grounding and have strong codes of morals and ethics to guide them. But you almost never meet a male wizard who is decent; Giles is a creature of great self discipline and restraint. Projects like The Initiative, trying to mix a bit of magical fudging with dominant power structures of human society, are doomed to go wonky, in great part because again people are playing on demon turf and the demons have the advantage. But also, dominant human power structures tend to be patriarchal.
In the Buffy'Verse, a lot of propositions that deem questionable and even dangerous in our actual world are simply factual. There is such a thing as "male energy" versus female energy. The Watcher's Council is predominantly male-patriarchal in governance and mindset, and is therefore somewhat corrupt, along similar lines to the Initiative.
I think it should be plain, or anyway a reasonable supposition, that the all-male and quite ruthless council of primordial wizards who raised up the Slayer line by incorporating a "male energy" type demon into a Chosen girl, essentially violating her as Buffy perceived it, would have attempted to raise up a male Champion for the role first. It is my supposition that they tried this many times, trying their best to fix problems, but always found they had created a Frankenstein's Monster in doing so. Either the male "Slayers" had to be forcibly separated from their demon imbued powers at great trauma and possibly generally fatal in itself, or hunted down and destroyed, one after another, like so many Skynets. Only as a last resort did they fall back on the desperate expedient of trying it with girls, and much to their annoyance, this worked--eventually anyway. The wizards resent this and wish it were otherwise, but they remain ethically grounded enough to accept it as unfortunate but true. It was as much in jealous spite as anything else they decided on the One Slayer, She Alone rule--there may have been other considerations, but I think the fact Buffy gets away with breaking it, at least apparently, suggests there was no real reason there should not have been lots of Slayers at a time.
So, I think any attempt on any man's part to become a Slayer or for anyone, man, woman, a pangender team, to make any man a Slayer, is doomed to lead to catastrophe and regrets in the same way the Initiative was so doomed. A sane and moral man would seek to reject the graft despite the abject misery being desolated of their stolen demon power would cause, and more typically we'd just dive right into it and be consumed much as Dark Willow was, only with essentially no road back we could be expected to survive, and if by some miracle one of us survived we'd be quite wretched and wrecked. More typically the Slayer or an army of them would have to destroy us or we'd do great damage to humanity.
Obviously other people have other notions, but this is the canon as I have come to understand it. No male Slayers!
*Spits drink*
Say what now? Pretty sure as far back as we can find 'human' bones, we can identify cause of death as 'took a rock to the fucking head'. Did they have a magical Friendship contract from the Gnomes or the Fairies?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
IIRC Buffy's schtick was fundamentally that it was supernatural metaphors or exaggerations of the concerns, interests, and problems of American teenagers, in a way that didn't talk down or dismiss them as lesser.
In turn there is obvious synergy in a black as a Slayer protagonist with regards to the omnipresent supernatural predators and exploitation inherent in the Buffyverse setting and cosmology. In fact remember that the teenagers of today are Gen Z and they are majority-minority, probably even moreso in a setting like a typical modern California suburb. The generation gap has been abnormally high these days, there's lots of material you can pull from the anxieties of modern youth who fear that generations past have mortgaged their future and see them as nothing but ungrateful cheap labor or unwelcome foreign others poisoning their nostalgic 50s vision of America. The mood and outlook for youth these days is not nearly as sunny as was the case when the 90s series came about.
In turn there is obvious synergy in a black as a Slayer protagonist with regards to the omnipresent supernatural predators and exploitation inherent in the Buffyverse setting and cosmology. In fact remember that the teenagers of today are Gen Z and they are majority-minority, probably even moreso in a setting like a typical modern California suburb. The generation gap has been abnormally high these days, there's lots of material you can pull from the anxieties of modern youth who fear that generations past have mortgaged their future and see them as nothing but ungrateful cheap labor or unwelcome foreign others poisoning their nostalgic 50s vision of America. The mood and outlook for youth these days is not nearly as sunny as was the case when the 90s series came about.
Not according to my anthropology studies at two different colleges.
Armchair theorists tended to assume that given how nasty we are to each other today, naturally we had to assume that more primitive people would be even worse. But in fact the conditions under which gatherer-hunters live make hostile contact a rare event. To be sure they are not totally innocent of killing, but this would take the form of stalking intruders into the range a given band claimed that neighboring bands tacitly respected as though they were dangerous wild animals like a rouge man-eating wolf or tiger. No manly man war cries and honor challenges, no duels--no ritualism or glorification, just taking out a dangerous creature. And this would be rare. Different bands bordering each other would know each other and know the boundaries not to intrude on, and it would be difficult for some random wanderer, let alone a whole hostile band, to just barge in.
I am also largely referring to the sort of systemic terrorization that establishes social classes and subordinates some classes to others we are so familiar with in our daily life.
I strongly suspect you are just projecting the assumption that people are just crazy mean the way we are used to now. What you are suggesting contradicts everything I was taught about gatherer hunter anthropology, and yes of course being a child of our society I quite naturally questioned the professors involved about whether these were highly atypical GH societies we were studying. They assured me no, this is the evidence.
Others also flatly contradict your implication having brains bashed in or other obvious signs of deliberate murder of one human by another shows heavily in the fossil record of modern human types, ie the past 50,000 years or so. When someone in our class asked Dr. Thayer Scudder, anthro professor at Caltech, what the leading cause of death among gatherer hunter peoples was, his answer was "accidents." A crippled member of a band, even if the disability would heal eventually in more settled society, simply could not keep up with the relocation the band would make from one campsite to another every few weeks or so, and would be essentially left to die.
So no one is saying they are blessed elves. The rationality of the gatherer-hunter lifestyle produced different social imperatives, and did not foster warfare or murder apparently, per the testimony of these professors who every year would of course encounter incredulity at these claims, especially at a school like CalTech in the 1980s. I suppose "no murders whatsoever" was probably an exaggeration, but certainly it seems reasonable they'd be rarer than we expect. No organized warfare.
And I've also read accounts of archaeological anthropologists scratching their heads over the apparent paradox of a lack of just the sort of evidence you are suggesting is ubiquitous. "Gosh, we keep expecting to find the tomb of the Big Man with all his mighty weapons but it seems all we ever find is bones of various Joes and Janes broke a leg or simply dropped dead of old age. Where are the barrows of the mighty tribal warriors and their harems? There just had to be mighty tribal warriors and their harems, these people haven't invented civilization yet after all!"
Exactly! They have no economic substrate for surplus, there is no basis for class separation, and everyone lives in little communities of 80-200 people they were mostly born in and grew up in; why should we expect evidence of violence?