the girly who shall end all girls

got into a conversation on a locked post about when and how we cancel creators, led me to to do a bit of personal spelunking.

i used to be a big fan of Joss Whedon, at one point he was even my stated answer to the "free pass" question. (i was over that by at least ten years ago, recent news was sad but no surprise.) i noticed two things via that search: Whedonesque is just gone (i had heard, but i forgot how many times i used to link it), and you can't view LiveJournal with an ad blocker enabled.

there's something scary here - since i couldn't load it directly, i thought i would look up what was a public ElJay post about why Xander Harris is horrible on the Wayback Machine. and i discovered that the Wayback Machine crawl of ElJay is very shallow and broken. i'm sure it's too late to rescue that content now :(

at least The Secret Life of Dolls is archived elsewhere.

there was a question posed in my comments back in 2007 that's still valid:

migraine today, only able too look at a screen for the last hour or so.

in that time an internet rabbit trail led to this: "Do you hate Xander Harris? This is the post for you."*


*and it's totally for me, even though i disagree with the passing comment about Oz.

i woke up with a tummy full of snot and was dizzy in the shower. so i'm home on the couch with Buffy; the last set of eps is in syndication on FX. the last season has some great lines, and i love Wood, but i don't really care for the doom-mongering or those whiny teenage girls.

i never liked Dawn.

i am not a Xander fan either. it's not that they're the only non-superheroes on the show; i loved Willow before she got into witchcraft, and i loved Oz before he was a werewolf. i appreciated Cordelia's presence as a foil. i never liked Angel either, but that's a whole other story. i suppose that my feelings about Xander stem from the fact that Willow was my touchstone (at least as the brilliant but socially inept hs student) and he just had to be a stupid man, and continued to be a stupid man. i guess that means he's really well written :)

yesterday morning on the way to work C and i had a long discussion about Xander's complicity in Anya's actions as a vengance demon. we agree that he caused her to turn with the wedding thing. C believes that she had the choice to just not do the vengance thing, and i think that she's a demon and it's as much in her nature as bloodsucking for a vampire. my feel is that once the step was taken she was in a situation that couldn't be escaped without external help, and faulting her for acting on her nature is like feeding a dog vegetarian food (that's another rant entirely). so is Xander ultimately responsible for the deaths and torture that resulted from her return to demonhood? i say hell yes. C thinks that there's a point where it's not his fault anymore, but i don't understand how it starts out being his fault and then suddenly he's absolved of further guilt. no catalyst, no demon, no deaths.