#like in the comics spike and xander were my fav male charas so. watching the show......

[quidfree]

xander harris is a particularly sore spot for me bc as someone too young for the tv show but in the right demographic for the comics i wasn't aware of how blatantly terrible so much of the character is until i recently got into watching the series and it's so very much a product of joss whedon making him a self-insert that it angers me

not that there is a shortage of snarky brunette guys who complain a lot but xander could actually have been interesting because he is one of those few companion charas who start and end the series without any powers or special skills to compensate for the life he leads! and he's explicitly struggling with being poor and neglected/abused trapped in capitalist hellscape americana juggling dead-end jobs whilst his magical friends go to college, and supernatural/fantasy shows so rarely touch on issues of class! like there could have been a lot done with xander and the juxtaposition of his lives and his frustrations if joss whedon didn't decide the only trait worth exploring was uh, being an asshole to women all the time because masculinity or whatever. like even his failed wedding could have been interesting if he'd a) been condemned more for doing that to anya b) actually made amends in some significant way and c) his fear of the picket fence life was made somewhat more profound than 'evil woman trap me'.

it's just so frustrating bc even a lot of the best parts of xander are ruined by this all-consuming need to make him this Nice Guy who simultaneously is into strong women but also literally spends half of his interactions with them not treating them like people and woah wait when did joss whedon cameo on this show? all of his interactions with angel and spike (which, sidenote, spike and xander were my favorite dynamic of buffy comics up there with faith and buffy) could have been kept exactly the same if xander just hated *vampires* to irrational degrees because of jesse instead of very explicitly just being a jealous shithead over buffy.

sidenote on the whedon point but the self-insert is very explicit if you consider that. xander could fully have STARTED the way he is and then gradually lost his macho posturing and turned into the actual 'heart' the way he sometimes is and the show pretends he always is, still maintaining all his proto-stiles-stilinski demeanour without the 90s nice guy bullshit, but he never does, because the show frames him as in the right, constantly. his treating the girls like shit/jealousing over them like possessions is framed as petty at worst and usually as good and correct in an extremely patronizing way, and he literally gets with all of the show's female characters in some way or another- because he's joss whedon's fantasy self-insert.

anyways i hate that i always find myself on the 'xander has potential' camp because tv xander just. is like that. the comics i read were way less with the socially-acceptable misogyny of the era so it's doubly irritating for me to compare the two, but in both there's such a waste of a genuinely original opportunity in the staples of the genre- not the white guy deutragonist but like. a character whose struggles are grounded in the reality of the times, not just the fantasy of the setting. i don't understand why the writers looked at all the actual relatable working class problems facing xander and then chose 'incel' as his cross to bear.

final note- not to follow the fandom school of 'this character is the worst but if they're gay they're good now', but joss whedon explicitly started off the series with the intent of making either willow or xander gay and wrote them both as potentially closeted for the first while, and obviously in the 90s (and even now) you'd never have two main characters who are gay and not involved with each other, but like. having xander's worst traits be confronted as an explicit flaw of his that he overcomes as he fights with the constraints of expected masculinity (especially in his social/home situation) would have been... such an easy, interesting fix. like he could have had so much of the same drama and come out a likeable, relevant character by the end of it instead of. status quo bro'ing it out and having the least character growth of the entire scooby gang. but then again 1) buffy's record with the gays is also less than stellar and 2) joss whedon much prefers writing lesbians than grappling with what it means to be a gay man.