There's something weird about needing to sanitize a character for/through shipping generally? Like "this relationship is a prize you get for being a good dog!"
explaining away their faults tends to come across to me as removing part of what makes them who they are. Bringing up the Lie in an unrelated fic looks, from my perspective, like a cross between "Xander loves the colour purple! So he's perfect for Buffy!" and "Xander isn't actually from Sunnydale! And he's not a geek! And his family aren't the Harrises! And his name isn't Xander at all!"
lol! I can't speak to Xander specifically because I have such mixed feelings about him as to end up largely neutral. (Not because of the Lie, though. I have no issues with the Lie.) But yeah, I gravitate toward characters that are challenging, philosophically as much as anything else, and so backing away from character flaws is bizarre to me.
That said, I am way more likely to OTC/everyone-ship than I am to OTP something or other, so I can sympathize with the <3<3Xander<3<3/random person shippers.
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explaining away their faults tends to come across to me as removing part of what makes them who they are. Bringing up the Lie in an unrelated fic looks, from my perspective, like a cross between "Xander loves the colour purple! So he's perfect for Buffy!" and "Xander isn't actually from Sunnydale! And he's not a geek! And his family aren't the Harrises! And his name isn't Xander at all!"
lol! I can't speak to Xander specifically because I have such mixed feelings about him as to end up largely neutral. (Not because of the Lie, though. I have no issues with the Lie.) But yeah, I gravitate toward characters that are challenging, philosophically as much as anything else, and so backing away from character flaws is bizarre to me.
That said, I am way more likely to OTC/everyone-ship than I am to OTP something or other, so I can sympathize with the <3<3Xander<3<3/random person shippers.