somniloquence

God, yes, exactly. I was so angry, I wrote tons of what we now call meta, basically screeds in email to my friends, and posted them on my website. I had this kind of constant, inchoate rage that I could never figure out how to fully form into a useful tool. And then a lot of the stuff with Joss afterward really poisoned my feelings for it. I've been talking with someone recently about trying to rewatch the show, to see if we can recover our feelings for it.

I remember David Fury and others with their constant stream of "you can't forget who Spike is and he's evil and terrible" as if we were all starry-eyed girls without the brains to understand that for ourselves. And I was never starry-eyed over him -- of course he raped girls as a vampire, of course he murdered and tortured. None of that was something we were trying to whitewash, we were trying to place that in the same way we placed it with Angel. The big difference was that Angel didn't choose to overcome his past, it was thrust on him, and Spike made a decision to do that for love. How could fans not love that? To have them poison that "for our own good" was just so infuriating, and infantalizing.

Um, not that I'm, you know, bitter about that or anything.