Fair warning, author's note. You are, of course free, to skip it or to join the conversation. Just remember to keep your comments polite.
A/N Two reviewers mentioned battle meditation. I'd never heard of battle meditation before but after looking it up on the Star Wars wiki I find the description could be used to describe Xander. As the Heart and the One Who Sees, it was Xander who held the Scoobies and later the Potentials, together. He was the one that saw problems and offered encouragement, very effectively.
Unless Joss tries a third time to bring his vision of what Buffy was supposed to be before pressure from the audience and the network forced him to change his vision, we will never really know what the characters would have been in Joss's vision. Angel was either an actual Angel or always Angelus, never a souled vampire and never Buffy's love interest, same with Spike. Both were only supposed to be on for a few episodes and then destroyed or moved on. James Marsters has even stated that Joss hated how popular Spike was so much he'd take it out on James.
And Xander being 'the voice of reason' never set right with the audience and despite Joss giving interviews insisting that Xander's actions were not based on jealousy but on doing what was necessary, the audience refused to believe it, convinced of their head canon and refusing to hear what the show runner had to say on the subject. But that also means we don't know what Xander would have become if Joss had been allowed to keep his vision going.
Another reviewer noted that the audience saw Angel as a tragic hero, I've seen comments on discussion boards that Whistler brought Angel to Buffy to learn how to be a hero. I agree with the reviewers, the problem with that is that Angel was never a hero, no matter what people want to believe. He just looks good in leather. Angel was a chameleon, an actor in his own life and he played the roles assigned to him by others. As a human Liam's father thought he was a waste and an idiot, so Liam spent his time getting drunk and chasing women. Darla wanted a depraved monster and she got it, she threw him out because of the soul but he went crawling back to her, begging for a chance to prove he was still a monster and as the reviewer noted, if Darla had just been patient, she'd have gotten her monster. Because Angel compromises with evil, instead of fighting it.
It's these comment's that Joss worked into the script that maybe people should take more note of. In School Hard, where Spike attacks the High School, incidentally one of two incidents where Angel nearly gets Xander killed. People rage about Xander and the Lie, claiming it's jealousy and a desire to kill Angel that prompts it (Joss gave several interviews on it, insisting no, jealousy had absolutely nothing to do with it) and they claim he manipulated Faith into trying to go kill Angel when Angel came back from Hell, but Xander didn't know it was Angel yet and tried to stop Faith when he knew it was Angel. These are facts that get ignored, just like the fact that Angel did actively endanger Xander's life, twice, gets ignored. But when Spike attacks the school he says 'people still fall for that Anne Rice routine, what a world!' Joss wanted the audience to see the vampires on Buffy as different from popular culture and unfortunately with Spike and Angel, he failed spectacularly.
Character is what you do in the dark, when no one's watching. When no one was watching Angel, he lived in the gutter and let humans die all around him, for a century. Plenty of time to try be a good man, to help people, to figure out how, but completely unwilling to even try. He convinced himself he was a Champion when he moved to L.A. and when he learned he'd been manipulated for years, that they all had, he had his friend's memories erased and jumped into bed with Wolfram and Hart, he compromised with evil, again. Just like Lindsay said, guess Lindsay had a moment of being 'the voice of reason.'
Why do I write Xander centered stories? Because he was the Heart of the Scoobies, the linchpin. He held them together, literally and figuratively. He grew, he changed, but he was also stalled and because he had so much potential, like all the characters, to be so much more.
Why Cordelia? She got screwed over so badly on Angel, manipulated and destroyed and people point to the timing of the actress's pregnancy as the reason, but Joss made it clear all long, he hated the vampire with a soul concept and if Angel had ended at season four instead of getting a last minute renewal than our last memory of Angel would have been the reveal that she'd been used all along as a means of manipulating Angel. And also, Angel getting his own show wasn't in Joss' plans for the character in the first place, since Angel wasn't supposed to be on for more than a few episodes and Cordelia being moved to the Angel show was a network decision, not Joss'. The character's future would have been much different if she'd been allowed to stay on the Buffy show.
But all the characters would have ended up in a much different place if Joss hadn't been pressured to change so much. Except for Willow maybe, aside from growing very powerful her character stayed very much the same and Joss described her from the very beginning as controlling, manipulative, full of self pity and often cruel. In the Jhe episode (the Zeppo) she stated as much 'occasionally I'm callous and strange.'
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