The Mezzanine

I agree with Barb. I've noticed Spike shippers in particular (mostly because that's what I've read by far the most of) of whom this entire post fits to a T if we just substitute the character names. In particular the elements of "Spike is the Best Friend Ever and ~deserves romance with the fic's person of choice" and of being not so much a Spike/Character A shipper as a Spike/everyone shipper.

I think partly this is just a sign of a writer not being very good, of them following the impulse to smoothe over the messy specifics of a character for some sanitized version. (At least, I call that bad writing.)

All that said, I avoid Xander shippy fics because I don't like Xander, and fic about him very rarely interests me. So. :)