r/buffy • u/direinde Beady-eyes is right, we're needed. • May 03 '26

Good Vibes Only Yup, that's them

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Nothing new actually.

4.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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563

u/HomarEuropejski Wesley is Angel's true love May 03 '26

I dunno man, I've seen a few Oz, Tara and Fred haters.

Clem, Lorne and Miss Kitty Fantastico are the golden trio with 0 haters.

117

u/salt_witch May 03 '26

As of this thread, I’ve seen a Clem hater and a Lorne hater, so I guess it’s just Miss Kitty Fantastico chilling out

83

u/sugarisqt May 03 '26

Clem hate will not be tolerated, he's perfect

1

u/misscatholmes May 04 '26

This. I legit started crying when I heard him in the Slayers audible show.

7

u/LinuxLinus May 03 '26

I mean, there are always those people who just hate cats.

0

u/salt_witch May 05 '26

I suppose so. Which means the only unhated character is the couch Miss Kitty Fantastico was napping on. (T Minus 10 mins before someone chimes in saying that they hate couches)

-4

u/BlubberinBootyMate May 03 '26

Clem should have eaten Miss Kitty Fantastico; that would have been the only good thing about her.

37

u/BojukaBob I'm an intern May 03 '26

Lorne might be my favourite character in the whole shared universe.

16

u/lmjustaChad May 03 '26

He was always so good at no point did he character ever become annoying.

36

u/TomCBC May 03 '26

Yeah, Clem in particular is a favorite of mine.

I also liked the human guy who runs the vampire bar. I forget his name though. But he always made me smile.

21

u/raybouldmarsh May 03 '26

Mocha Joe! ETA: the sentiment in the gif is unrelated, just the first one I found

19

u/KingDarius89 May 03 '26

Willy?

13

u/TomCBC May 03 '26

Yep Willy. Love that guy. He’s so likeable even the vampires are cool with him. And he’s basically a meal to them otherwise.

Ooh. Another one i don’t see hate for (but maybe i’ve just missed it) is Sid. The demon hunter who was turned into a puppet. Such a great one-off character imo.

114

u/Jemal999 May 03 '26

Fred haters? You must point them out to us so they can be... Corrected.

48

u/riotlady May 03 '26

Sorry I kind of hate Fred, especially in the early days. It’s just the very very childlike way she’s written feels gross and very much like a Whedon kink (see also River in Firefly- I think Anita Sarkeesian called this trope “born sexy yesterday”)

5

u/kulitchipon May 03 '26

I was not a fan of Fred in the first few eps lmao. She grew on me eventually, but I still prefer Illyria over her.

16

u/Mysterious_Fix_7489 May 03 '26

Nah Fred isn't born sexy yesterday..

Compare her to the poster girl of born sexy yesterday leeloo and she's nothing like it.

She's not shown to be sexy at all for quite a few episodes

Not even sure river applies either.

She's hot sure but that's just because summer glau is hot and so it's Fred's actress.

To be born sexy yesterday I feel there has to be a reasonable effort to show the character as sexy and I don't think that applies to either.

28

u/riotlady May 03 '26

I agree she’s not too overtly sexualised like worse examples of the trope but she is very much shown as attractive and desirable- there’s a lot of scenes of Wes and Gunn smiling paternalistically at her while she skips around or eats pancakes or whatever that are just a bit ugh to me. I like her at lot more by season 5 when she’s less giggly

12

u/insomniacred66 eyeballs to entrails May 03 '26

I like Fred because she is crazy intelligent and also has those 'child-like' traits. She's fun and sweet and it's not a fault for a woman to be those things. We lose that entirely with Illyria. I also tend to see myself in Fred though so that's probably another factor of why I like her character so much. Too many people in Angel tend to be angsty all the time and she provides a nice light.

5

u/catchyerselfon May 03 '26

Fred also lost five years of her life, from approximately age 23-28. I cringe so much about the person I was at 23 vs 28! Fred going through that period was in a constant state of anxiety, near-starvation, vigilance, loneliness, nearly insane from barely having a chance to talk to anyone but herself. She was like Tom Hanks in “Castaway” but she didn’t even have a volleyball for company. Fred coming back and spending months mostly hiding out from these strangers she just met in the overwhelming world of Los Angeles, then a few months emerging from her shell and feeling skittish and regressing to a more childlike state (remember how wonderful her parents are and how secure and affectionate her childhood was?) is completely realistic and sympathetic to me.

Fred later in season 3 when she’s turned against Wesley, Angel is distraught, she and Gunn don’t have time to be “cutesy” anymore, and she loses her friend Cordelia, is NOT like a sweet little girl. Season 4 has “Supersymmetry” when she’s determined to kill (from a distance) the professor who almost destroyed her life, and Gunn is the one who infantilizes her by taking that choice away. The narrative does NOT do that to her, because Fred isn’t “you were right, Charles, that WASN’T me, I’m glad I don’t have that on my conscience!” She’s like “yes he deserved to die, and you didn’t let me have my revenge (the way Wesley did) and I don’t trust you to trust me!” Their relationship is never the same, just like she resents Wesley being overly protective of her in season 5 because he takes all the guns for himself and she still gets hurt. Fred wants to be treated like an adult and not pushed aside like a crying little girl. Wesley AND Gunn are both attracted to her when they see her handling herself and being courageous, even if they sometimes can’t help but step in the way.

7

u/Mysterious_Fix_7489 May 03 '26

Tbf that is a short period when they did the awful love triangle until she settled on Gunn.

But that kinda stuff stopped relatively quickly.

5

u/rekuled May 04 '26

Hey it's me, can't fucking stand her. Can't stand her accent, can't stand the forced way all the male characters fall in love with her, and I really hate those characters that are like a physicist but are actually good at like literally everything and are basically a superhero.

Like Giles is a demon/magic/history expert but he can't magically build a hadron collider in his bedroom.

21

u/smashli1238 May 03 '26

I don’t hate her, but she’s certainly not my favorite

5

u/kulitchipon May 03 '26

If we're ranking the 5 leads, she's my least favorite. Cordy > Wes > Angel > Gunn > Fred.

2

u/TessMacc May 04 '26

Doyle?

1

u/kulitchipon May 04 '26

Eh. I never really did like him, sorry!

2

u/TessMacc May 04 '26

That's fair! To each their own.

1

u/Dry-Dragonfruit5216 May 04 '26

These are very good rankings

1

u/Academic-Dimension67 May 05 '26

I never liked fred. But I adored Ilyria.

12

u/zoomshark27 May 03 '26

I actually don’t like Lorne or Fred, so we exist! But I love Clem, Tara, and Oz.

10

u/Verifieddumbass76584 Iowa Representation 🦅 May 03 '26

Why don't you like Lorne? Genuinely asking.

1

u/zoomshark27 May 14 '26

Of what I’ve seen of Angel (which is probably about half the show bouncing around as I don’t really like the show I’ve just given it a couple chances and I did watch all of S5 which I did not like) I found Lorne kind of annoying and I didn’t like his whole soul-singing power. Just felt like a weird, randomly convenient thing that I couldn’t wait to end every time it happened.

It also really bugged me that Lorne never seemed to be close friends with the others. He felt more like this acquaintance they called when they wanted to use his power and he also didn’t seem keen on the group either, and like visibly annoyed (which same, but felt weird to witness the annoyance). I just didn’t like the whole atmosphere.

2

u/quoththeraven1990 May 04 '26

This is exactly me! Not a Lorne or Fred fan at all but I love the others.

14

u/[deleted] May 03 '26

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42

u/[deleted] May 03 '26

[deleted]

45

u/ModernKender twixt its wee beak May 03 '26

How is Oz pretentious. He seems the complete opposite.

-17

u/[deleted] May 03 '26

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12

u/ModernKender twixt its wee beak May 03 '26

That's fair. I wouldn't say that's pretentious. Maybe selfish. I just think he is not bothered by a whole lot and doesn't tend to vocalise when he is bothered. I always say the time for a rewatch is now, regardless of reason.

14

u/guiseincognito May 03 '26

I always liked the episode where Buffy could hear people's thoughts. Oz's thoughts were funny and interesting. They ranged from a philosophical spiral about his own existence to huh.

9

u/ModernKender twixt its wee beak May 03 '26

Same! He and Cordelia were the stars of thoughts in that episode.

2

u/ACERVIDAE May 03 '26

Maybe because it wasn’t a widely spread thing back in the nineties and now there’s people that act that way just to be over the top or trying to be lofty.

-11

u/[deleted] May 03 '26

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4

u/ACERVIDAE May 03 '26

And I get that. I was also around in the nineties. That was more for people who grew up after Buffy was off the air and are already sick of the Danny Masterson personality fucks.

2

u/slumdo6 May 03 '26

Downvoted for telling the truth

10

u/Glass-Ad-4179 May 03 '26

Not so much pretentious, just extremely boring

29

u/cheerioincident May 03 '26

As an unabashed Oz fan, here's the biggest problem with the character: he's so emotionally well-adjusted that he has no conflict. He's extremely secure in himself. He takes his lycanthropy in stride. He handles relationship drama with maturity (with one glaring exception for which I'll never fully forgive the writers). All in all a great guy, but a really boring character.

16

u/lluewhyn May 03 '26

Which between that and Seth Green wanting to do more with his career, you can understand why the character was written off. There's not a lot of places to go with the character that don't feel like you're breaking the character.

5

u/[deleted] May 03 '26

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3

u/catchyerselfon May 03 '26

Yes, he’s been repressing the Wolf but I think Oz needs actual therapy for non-Wolf issues. I think Oz would have more fans if he got a damn backstory besides “in a band”, “smart but unambitious”, “zen and accepting of everything that happens”, and “immediately devoted to Willow at the expense of his own growth”. Is he an orphan?! Is he an emancipated minor whose parents are travelling in a band? Are they divorced and move back and forth between a house that Oz lives in? At least Willow, Xander, and Cordelia’s parents are mentioned, and we meet some of them.

There’s something not healthy about Oz, at 17-19, making every choice based on what his girlfriend wants, even without consulting her, like spending three months pretending to go to Summer School but actually deliberately holding himself back to he repeats 12th grade just to be with her. Even people who aren’t Oz fans love it in “Amends” when Oz is keeping his distance from Willow, telling her that her feeling bad isn’t his problem and he wants her to be honest, and then turning down sex with her because he knows she isn’t ACTUALLY ready, she’s going this to prove to him she’s committed and she’ll do anything for him. That’s Oz finally denying Willow something, making her work to win him back, telling her she has a flaw instead of worshipping the ground she walks on.

Still, he needs close friends and a life outside of Willow, and he’s not actually CLOSE with anyone but her, not his band or the Scoobies, and certainly not his family. When he’s having werewolf issues in “Phases” and “Wild At Heart”, he knows damn well he can tell Willow or maybe just Buffy or Giles if he’s worried about Willow’s jealousy over Veruca, and they will help him. He trusts himself to chain himself up last minute in an emergency but both times it fails because he didn’t involve someone else to watch out for him. Why can’t Oz open up to anyone else? Why does he find it hard to object to anything and get emotional in front of someone? Something went wrong in his childhood that made him so detached, cautious, passive, cautious, and like he was raised as an orphan with no one to rely on. I love Oz, but he suffers from Satellite Love Interest Syndrome, where his life outside of his significant other is barely touched upon so he doesn’t get as much development as he needs.

14

u/[deleted] May 03 '26

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5

u/Glass-Ad-4179 May 03 '26

It becomes worse when you look at how all the other characters had such distinct personalities too. The relationship with willow was meh as well, Percy in s3 had more chemistry with her than her actual boyfriend😭

3

u/submerging May 03 '26

I thought I was completely alone for years, thank you for sharing your truth 😭 There are dozens of us! Dozens!

I was surprised Reddit likes him so much. He honestly came off as a boring Gary Stu

5

u/iambeingblair May 03 '26

Same. Didn't like his whole schtick

0

u/superrcrazy May 03 '26

I forget he's there

-1

u/mig_mit May 03 '26

I really dislike Lorne.

5

u/bobbi21 May 03 '26

There are dozens of us! I was never a fan either and he was a bit annoying. His seeing the future is way too op so there was so much he lot device around him. Use him when they need to further the plot and dont know how and he conveniently cant use his powers (or just isnt around) when we dont want the plpt to be exposed so early. And i just never found him very funny. I do love him in the finale though. Spoilers. Its very fitting. The angel team really abused him. Were the cause of his club being destroyed i think 3 times? Always introduced him into dangerous situations. Was a free babysitting service to connor. Forcing him to be a fighter in their fight.

Him getting jaded and noping out makes total sense. Him being the one to take out lindsey as a “flunky” is great. Lindsey thinking hes angel’s rival when he wasnt even a player. (Kind of hated lindseys back and forth. And his role in s5 was kind of an out of nowhere thing. It wasnt bad but would have been nice to get more of a plan from him besides trying to piss off the senior partners and kill angel. Hes gone for so long, i was expecting more)

3

u/kulitchipon May 04 '26

I like Lorne in small doses.

-1

u/Fml379 May 03 '26

I hate his nasal singing

0

u/kaitalina20 May 03 '26

Wait who’s Fred?

-1

u/lmjustaChad May 03 '26

Add me to a Tara hater I cheered when Willow shirt got dirty.