"Why do you hate Angel?"
"Hi Buffy, are we friends again? Is that why you're barging into my home without knocking and demanding information as though you think you have a right to do any of that?"
"Emma says you hate Angel for a good reason. You say you hate Angel, both of you say jealousy has nothing to do with it. So what else could it possibly be?"
"It can't possibly be that he did something wrong? It has to be about the fact that I once had a crush on you and asked you on a date and behaved immaturely when you turned me down? As I recall you told Giles it was okay for you to act immaturely because you'd yet to mature, so why wasn't it okay that I acted immaturely? That one act seems to have been the basis of every excuse you had after to disregard anything I said or did. Unless I was encouraging you of course, you're always eager to hear that. Interesting how you're allowed to be something, but I'm not. Or just the opposite. During your Cruciamentum you told Giles you couldn't be helpless, but kept trying to force me to be helpless."
"Just answer the question, Xander. Why do you hate him?"
"You know if I really was jealous, like you'd like to believe, I would have told you back then why I hated him. Because I hated him long before I saw the fact that he stalked you for a year before making contact with you in his head. And I didn't need to see confirmation of the fact that he's a pedophile in his head too. I knew that already."
"Is that why you hate him? Because of my age? If I'm old enough to die fighting to protect the world, then I'm old enough to make my own decisions on who I date, Xander!"
"Which is why I never stopped you from making your own decisions, Buffy. It took a long time for me to understand why you couldn't see the extremely obvious clues. But then you've walked into every trap ever set for you. You simply don't want to see."
"Just answer the question, Xander. Why do you hate him?"
"Character is what you do in the dark where no one sees you. When no one is watching you."
"I don't understand, Xander. What does the dark to do with anything? Vampires live in the dark. It's not a reason to hate him."
"But what he did in the dark is."
"What did he do in the dark, Xander?"
"Nothing, he did nothing."
"You're not making any sense, Xander. If he did nothing, why do you hate him?"
"Because he didn't help, ever."
"Yes, he did. He saved me from Darla, he helped me with the Three. He saved me from the reptile demon at the frat house. He found the Pergamum Codex, it's not his fault it had a prophecy about me in it."
"He helped when he knew you were watching. He didn't help when he knew you weren't watching."
"What are you talking about? When did he just watch and not help?"
"The Harvest. While you were fighting the Vessel and Giles and Willow were getting people out of the Bronze and I was pulling the thing wearing the face of the closest thing I thought I had to a brother off of Cordelia and holding a stake to its chest, he was standing in the shadows."
"What was he doing that was so bad, it made you hate him, Xander?"
"Nothing, he was doing nothing."
"I'm still not getting this. So he wasn't doing something evil, he has a soul, he's not going to be acting like the other vampires that were there that night. He wasn't helping the Master!"
"He wasn't helping you either."
"What?"
"The day before. Just the day before, he told you he came to Sunnydale to help you. He warned you about the Harvest."
"Yes he did and Giles researched it and we stopped it."
"He stood in the shadows and watched the entire time. He didn't dust vampires, he didn't get any people out. He just stood in the shadows and watched."
"Maybe he thought we had it under control."
"There were more then a dozen vampires and we had no idea they'd break and run when you defeated the Vessel. Tell me truly, Buffy. Do you think you could have beaten them all?"
"It was one time, that's not enough to hate him."
"It wasn't one time, Buffy. It was just the first time. He did it over and over and over again. He stood in the shadows and watched. But that wasn't the worst thing he did. That wasn't even the most cowardly thing he did."
"There's more? What else did he do?"
"More nothing, Buffy. While you were marching into the Master's lair, he was sitting in his apartment reading a book, with his shoes off. When I asked him why, he said he was too afraid. Thing is Buffy, he didn't have to even try to deal with the Master. If I'd have found him out in the street dealing with regular vampires, that would have told me he was at least willing to try. He couldn't even be bothered to do that. All that strength as a Master vampire and he couldn't be bothered to help anyone unless you were watching him."