#so I am having a blast slowly reading through your entire buffy tag

[pasquey]

To me, those two Angel speeches are pretty easy to reconcile, as him picking and choosing what to tell her that feels most tactful/the most like what she needs to hear in the moment. So the actual Angel arc would be more like: human Angel finds meek, well-mannered women boring, meets Darla (who is conventionally beautiful according to that time but also very *dangerous* in a way that Halloween-costumed-Buffy isn’t), gets intrigued, gets vamped, enjoys Darla’s evil and a lot of other lovers ranging from evil vampires to “bad girl” type humans, gets bored of it, gets souled, falls for Buffy. So “not into that kind of woman while I was human” and “no longer into bad girls” can both be easily true.

The harder part is that I think both instances of categorizing women by type (the “simpering morons,” the “bad girls”) are incredibly sexist in that low empathy way of not bothering to consider the inner lives and individuality of the women involved. The Watsonian response would be either that yeah, Angel’s kinda sexist, or that Buffy’s dealing with a lot of internalized sexism and Angel’s playing along with it as the fastest way to help her feel better. But I suspect that the Doylists win out on this one - I really don’t think the writers were considering the sexism here.

I don't want to bash Angel or Bangel as such -- I've said before that I think Buffy's relationship with Angel is a fundamental part of the show that you cannot really ignore or dismiss without missing the point of lots of the post-Angel seasons -- but it is very funny, I think, that Angel gives Buffy the "you're not like other girls" spiel twice and

it is played as straightforwardly charming and romantic both times; despite

the 'other girls' Angel is disparaging and saying Buffy is unlike being pretty much the exact opposite each time; and

both claims being contradicted by both established canon and later flashbacks.

In Season 2's Halloween, Buffy dresses up like "a princess" because, in part, she's jealous of the relationships she imagines Angel used to have with "the kind of fancy girl [he] liked when [he] was my age". And Angel tells her not to worry, because when he was a lad he was a raging misogynist. Uh, I mean, he says

"I hated the girls back then […] They were just incredibly dull. Simpering morons, the lot of them. I always wished I could meet someone … exciting."

So, to be clear, when Buffy dresses up like this:

She is not reminding Angel of anyone he might have known or been attracted to when he was younger, or followed into a dark alley at night and been murdered by, or had a century-long romance with as a vampire. Not at all.

Then, a year later, in Season 3's Earshot, Buffy is worried that Angel must have enjoyed kissing Faith when pretending to have lost his soul again. Because, well. Who wouldn't? ("To the naked eye it looked like fun", Buffy says. "Not that [Faith] was so bad to have around […] I think she was hurting a lot, and some people -- protective-type people -- might be drawn to that […] the thing about Faith, I'd understand. You know, she has that whole 'bad girl' thing working for her.")

Faith isn't dull, in other words. She's someone exciting. She's very much not the sort of girl that Angel claims to have hated last season.

And yet, when Buffy confronts him, Angel says:

"Kissing [Faith] meant nothing. I don't want a bad girl. I've done that before. I've lived a long time […] I've been with dozens of girls like her. More."

And … okay, but this kind of undermines the Halloween bit, right? "I always wished I could meet someone exciting … and then I did, dozens of times, and got really bored of it" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Also interesting, I think, that this latter quote only makes sense if Angel identifies with Angelus in a way his own show will later insist he doesn't. Because the souled Angel who "lived a long time" was very obviously not getting with "dozens of girls", bad or otherwise, while he was busy eating rats in alleyways and listening to Barry Manilow. And if he's only talking about the things he did as a human, then why even mention that he's "lived a long time"?

(I would like to believe that the tension here is deliberate, and that the audience is meant to be unimpressed by Angel's big speeches, but I'm not sure I can persaude myself that this is true.)