Your thoughts on Buffy remind me that there was a real upside to having missed Buffy fandom also. I watched alone and I loved Spike, and Spuffy, and when I got to the season 6 rape and even most of season 7 I got angry in a Doylist way - I was like, NO, you can't suddenly change your mind like that and do that to fans. Because god as my witness, fans were not misreading that character. They let him out on a long leash characterologically and then CHANGED THEIR MINDS and said, oh, wait, ha ha, he's a vampire, he has no soul and everything you saw was a lie. And I was furious at TPTB and I still think its one of the lousiest things about that show, which I otherwise like a lot - the bait and switch to the female audience. That wasn't like a feminist thing like with Angel, where it's "We know that men who seem good can suddenly wake up evil after they've slept with you." That was a much much meaner "your sense of things is wrong and ours is right," and honestly, women have had enough of people telling them that their perceptions of reality are true or not.