Thorns

This vid, Origin Stories, is made of awesome. It's a Buffy Angel vid (mostly S7 Buffy) which perfectly captures some of the serious problems I had with the show, especially Spike. (It focuses largely on race while I personally had more noticed the issues with gender, but that's probably an issue with me not the vid :))

Basically, we are expected to sympathise with Spike above all else, because he is pretty and he is sad, and that is much more interesting than all the boring grumpy people who just had their mothers killed in front of them or whatever. To see anything he's done wrong primarily as a source of Pretty Woobie Angst and to despise anyone who goes against him as a Big Meanie. This despite the fact that unlike Angel there is no clear cut distinction between souled Spike and unsouled Spike, in fact (imho) they deliberately kept him a "bad boy" because it was cool, despite the very negative message this sends about him not making any real effort to distance himself from the mass murdering would-be rapist he used to be (the scene in the vid? Where he takes back his coat? Guh!)

(In my mental version of season seven, Spike is dead, and we have the new character William, who is not the same as pre-vamped William, in the same way that Liam =/= Angelus =/= Angel. But I could have lived with a less problematic Spike-as-Spike-but-with-a-conscience.)