The course “Interpersonal Relationships in the Buffyverse,” taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Spring 2004, had as its primary goal to understand—“make sense”—of interpersonal relationships in Buffy. To accomplish this goal, three broad approaches to interpersonal relationships were used—social support, dialectical tensions, and the development of friendships and relational intimacy.

Students completed four major pieces of work. First, working in dyads, they applied both the theoretical writing and empirical research for each of the three approaches to relationships in Buffy. Second, each student wrote two short stories—the first about her or his own best example of what is social support and the second about a personally important dialectical tension—and related or connected the example to a relationship, scene, or moment in Buffy. And fourth, working in triads, students analyzed in depth one dyadic relationship in Buffy, with the goal of contributing to the research and scholarship on the show.