Oscar Wilde wrote that "Form, which is the birth of passion, is the death of pain," a dictum that privileges style over substance. For five seasons, Buffy and her confederates are nothing if not stylish, especially in their creative, clever, and playful use of the English language. After her resurrection in Season Six, however, style no longer answers Buffy's metaphysical and spiritual needs and, as they shed adolescence, neither does it answer the needs of her friends. The season's pivotal episode, "Once More, with Feeling," is both the apotheosis of slayer style and an example of style out of control. In "Once More, with Feeling," we encounter the limits of style: we don't need songs, but something to sing about, and the song that doesn't have something meaningful behind it, that consists only of Hamlet's "words, words, words," however clever or innovative, but nothing more, is art for art's sake. Form isn't the death of pain -- content is. One might see Season Seven as a quest for that content or meaning, but slayer slang and slayer style are less consistently persuasive than in previous seasons. Content, then, may be the death of style. Newly earnest, the show may have lost something but, in the ascendancy of substance over style, effectively (if somewhat depressingly) imitates coming of age in America.