#RPGaDAY2020 BUFFY 15B: FRAME

#RPGaDAY2020 BUFFY SEASON

15B: FRAME

“Sometimes when I’m sitting in class, y’know, not thinking about class ’cause that’d never happen, I think about kissing you, and it’s like everything stops. It’s like, it’s like freeze frame. Willow kissage.”
Innocence

As well as the framing of the scenes, so that we can look one way, then the other, then back and hey there’s a vampire in frame now, we also get things like Buffy being framed for a killing...

But being an urban fantasy sometimes horror show, we also have things in frames, like pictures and mirrors.

Mystical objects come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, but pictures and mirrors are good for visual media for obvious reasons.

I have the real Dorian Gray as one of the characters in a PBP game right now!

The first M.R. James ghost story I came across was The Mezzotint, where something starts to get closer every time you look back at a picture...

Issue 8 of the original Buffy comic had a movie vampire escape from an old film reel - something also done with photographs in Sapphire & Steel and film in a Torchwood episode by its creator PJ Hammond.

Mirrors of course have significance as a tell for vampires. Old silver-backed ones make good improvised weapons against werewolves as well, as Andy discovered in The Watch House when he got thrown into one hanging over a bar.

And just as they can not show things they should, they can show things they shouldn’t as well. (I recently learned that mirror has the same Latin root as miracle.)

The mother of all haunted mirrors is in Dead Of Night, where it starts to show the room it was originally hung in - over a century earlier.

I stole that plot for TWH with a mirror uncovered after a century and the century it came from starting to leak out of it...

Poltergeist and the Evil Dead films have wrong reflections as well, Mirrors has a building full of them all connecting to a parallel world, and Oculus makes one an active antagonist.

So anyway, mirrors...

2.03: Ps and Qs

Someone just used an enchanted mirror to call forth a duplicate Shelly.

“So is the evil mirror you left-handed or something?”
“I’m ambidextrous.”
“Oh. Does she at least part her hair funny?”

Or photographs...

2.03: You’ve Been Framed

Willis is showing some of his pictures at a college art show. The photographer getting most attention is using an old camera that can also photograph ghosts...

“This series is great, the shape coming towards the viewer.”
“What shape?”

Or art...

2.03: Frame It And Hang It

Borrowing from the Buffy novel Doomsday Deck: A landscape painting of a creepy old ruin, if exposed to moonlight at the same phase as in the painted sky will let you enter. And somebody just threw Shelly through the painting into it...

“And now I’m stuck in a haunted castle. Bet I’ll have to fight an empty suit of armour or something...”

Or to be very modern, video calls...

2.03: I See You

A format-bending episode done as a group video call, when the gang are supposed to be planning a new issue while the office is shut but there’s a mysterious sixth caller...

“If I get attacked by an emoji I’m blaming you.”