Some papers would start out droning and ponderous, and you'd find yourself looking anxiously for the exit (even as you knew that, out of politeness, you really shouldn't leave a room with only 30 or so people in it to begin with). But if you listened for five or 10 minutes, eventually a dazzling insight of some sort would emerge -- somehow, something would catch fire.

Many people used brief clips from the show in their presentations, and you could feel ripples of pleasure and recognition pulse through the audience as they watched those clips -- we hadn't come to sit around and watch TV all day, but no one wanted those clips to end. The experience of TV watching, which is usually a fairly private one, suddenly became a communal one, more like being at the movies.

"Buffy" watchers fancy themselves something of a secret society, and in some ways they are: The show hasn't had particularly good ratings for its past several seasons, which means it isn't finding a wide audience. But its relatively small audience is fiercely loyal, and fiercely interested, not just in the plot developments of the show but in its sheer artfulness.

Maybe you could say the same about Trekkers or "Star Wars" fanatics -- but if you stacked up the intelligent articles, papers and water-cooler conversations that "Buffy" has generated in just a little more than six full seasons, I'd venture to guess they'd leave the equivalent "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" discourse in the dust. "Star Trek" fans are interested in cataloguing the minutiae of individual episodes; for "Buffy" fans, it's all about working through the show's emotional complexities. And -- in Norwich, at least -- it has nothing to do with getting into costume.

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That said, just how much is there to say about "Buffy"? And more significantly, how many people are interested in saying it? According to Claire Thomson and Carol O'Sullivan, co-organizers of the conference, 60 speakers were chosen from the 120 abstracts submitted when the call for papers went out -- the response was more than double what they had expected.

"Blood, Text and Fears" attracted some 160 participants altogether, and looking around the room during the various sessions, I found it hard to group them into easily identifiable categories: The majority may have been in their 20s and 30s, but you wouldn't have noticed any strict demarcations between young and old. The attendees seemed to be mostly of indeterminate age and unmitigated enthusiasm, from spiky-haired bohemians to tweed-jacket types. (Although there were so few of the latter that John Briggs, a charming librarian and independent scholar who presented a paper called "Unaired Plot or Bad Quarto: Textual Problems in 'Buffy' and Shakespeare in an Internet Age," looked down woefully at his own very Giles-like herringbone garb and remarked, "People are going to think I'm in costume.")

The first day's papers were grouped into four sections, each consisting of three sessions running concurrently, with anywhere from one to three papers being presented per session. Sixty papers, even when each is under 20 minutes long, are a lot to schedule over two days. With short breaks in between for coffee and lunch, you might find yourself dashing from "Cultural Identities" in Session 1 to "Language I: Tropes of Translation" in Session 2 to "Death Duties: Theology and Destiny" in Session 3.

If you have to ask what cultural identities, not to mention theology or destiny, have to do with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," then you've probably never seen the show. "Buffy" began, in 1997, as a midseason replacement; it was a spinoff of an allegedly not very good movie of the same name (which I confess I have never even seen). But series creator, director and chief writer Joss Whedon seemed to have something different in mind for the show.

Its lead character, Buffy Summers (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar), was a trouble-prone teenager who, after burning down her old high school, had just relocated with her mother to the virginally named town of Sunnydale. As it turns out, Sunnydale happens to be located smack-dab on the Hellmouth, a convenient gateway for all sorts of supernatural troublemakers. But Buffy learns she has a mission: She's a vampire slayer, which means she's just one in a long line of fit and feisty warriors -- they all happen to be women -- who are specially called to kill vampires and destroy demons.

Like any other teenager, Buffy has a group of friends she leans on: The core group consists of her best friend Willow (Alyson Hannigan), a nerdy computer whiz who later becomes a powerful witch; the sensitive, vaguely awkward Xander (Nicholas Brendon), who's nevertheless possessed of uncommon good sense; and Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), the school librarian and Buffy's "watcher" -- in other words, a guardian appointed by the mysterious organization known only as "the council" to offer training and guidance to the slayer.

But those are just the human characters: The other significant figures in the show's labyrinthine mythology (it's now in its seventh season, and numerous minor characters have come and gone), are Angel (David Boreanaz), an evil-turned-good vampire with a soul, who was Buffy's boyfriend until she turned 17, and Spike (James Marsters), a wisecracking Anglo bleached-blond poster boy of a vampire who used to be Buffy's nemesis -- until she actually started sleeping with him sometime during Season 6, when all hell (of a different sort that threatened to spew from the Hellmouth) broke loose.

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