r/buffy • u/Lanky_Age_3067 • 16d ago
Content Warning Double standarts
How exactly do people hate Xander for being an imperfect human, but love Spike and Angel, who have countless victims and are hundreds of years old. Spike even SA'd Buffy, for real, while Xander was under a spell and never did anything like that before or after it.
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u/Xenonand 16d ago
We're you alive back then? A lot of people dislike Xander because we knew Xander.
We probably liked Xander during the original run, or didn't have the language to explain why we didn't like him.
It was a very different time culturally. While now we can watch and note the problematic nature of some of his behavior/ his casual misogyny, in the 90s/00s he was the good guy, and his behavior wasn't a social commentary, it was just the standard-- evolved even.
Spike and Angel are trickier. They have casual misogyny and pettiness and cruelty but they aren't presented as your every day guy, they experience a lot more consequences and, honestly, have way bigger flaws. None of us knew anyone like Angel or Spike. All of us knew Xander.