Charisma Carpenter Just Shared Some ’90s Con Photos, and the Seth Green One Requires Some Explanation

There is a particular genre of celebrity Instagram post that exists purely to delight: no agenda, no promotion, no carefully staged product placement. Just someone opening a drawer, finding an old photograph, and deciding the world deserves to see it. Charisma Carpenter has become, quietly, one of the finest practitioners of this art form.

Last week she posted a set of photographs from early convention appearances — the kind that took place in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when Buffy and Angel were genuinely new, and the cast were still slightly bewildered to find themselves objects of this particular variety of devotion. The pictures are exactly what you would hope for: slightly washed-out colour, lanyards of improbable length, name tags that are somehow both enormous and illegible.

There is one with Seth Green that has already generated a not-insignificant amount of discussion in the comments, and I am not going to describe it in detail here because that would deprive you of the experience of finding it yourself. What I will say is that it captures a very specific energy — the energy of two people who are at a fan convention for the first time, have just signed roughly four hundred photographs in a row, and have decided that whatever happens in this photograph is what happens.

Carpenter has always had a gift for the nostalgic post that does not feel performatively nostalgic. There is no “can you believe how young we were!” energy. Just the photographs, a caption that manages to be warm without being saccharine, and the implication that she found this genuinely funny and thought you might too.

Cordelia Chase, as a character, spent a great deal of time being the most competent person in any room while everyone around her failed to notice. Carpenter herself seems to have settled into something similar: a woman who knows exactly what she is doing, is quietly excellent at it, and does not require anyone to make a fuss about it.

The Seth Green photograph is genuinely something. Go and look at it. You will understand immediately why it requires some explanation, and you will also understand why no explanation could possibly be adequate.