honestly, i think a huge source of the conflict between btvs fans- especially as it pertains to fucking shipcourse- is the commonality of judging some characters’ morality on a watsonian level & others on a doylist one based on personal bias/convenience, & then acting as though this is fair treatment.
& as stated, this especially applies to shipcourse, particularly as it pertains to angel & spike, but also things like the hypocrisy surrounding how characters like the scoobies or faith, or the fuck ups within the phenomena of various instances magical sex get treated by the audience at large.
for example, if you are claiming to be fair/equitable, & you are going to judge spike for seeing red, you have to judge angel for dating a teen girl while being over 200 years old, or fully examine the issues with consent at play in what willow did to tara in once more with feeling, so on & so forth. & if you judge those instances based how they were influenced by out-of-universe factors, the same applies if you want to claim it is a reading that is not suffering from abject & blatant personal bias.
like, due to both the poor politics behind the scenes, and the era it was written in, Buffy fumbles the ball a lot in terms of its feminist messaging. we all know this. and yet, at a frequency i’m yet to witness in any other fan space, so often whether or not that gets taken into account when approaching character analysis & morality is entirely dependent on whether or not a character is liked by the speaker.
and this, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing. i don’t mean to claim that, in fact it’s quite normal. but so often in the btvs fandom this approach is not only framed as equal, but also as the one true reading of the text as far as the speaker is concerned. and that is a problem because, inherently, judging characters by two different standards is an unfair approach that colours any reading with more bias than would otherwise present itself.
& mind you, i know that no one is obligated to be fair, people can do what they want & explore the text in the way they find most interesting. but i do think the reason so many portions of this fan-base are constantly at each other’s throats is because so many people refuse to just be upfront about that. like admittance that one is being unfair for personal enjoyment isn’t immoral, it’s just honest.
