My take on it is that I like, or perhaps more correctly enjoy, Angelus as a character much more than Angel, despite the first version being essentially irredeemable and the second morally complex and striving for improvement. But were I sharing their frame of reference I'd never want to be within sight range of the one, and probably wouldn't want to spend any time around the other either.

Well, give me a villain. Not some wackass bad boy who feels sorry for himself. That's Sawyer to me. Intolerant asshole who likes to coerce and boo hoos by himself.

I move back and forth between liking and despising Sawyer, which I think is good writing. The "I Never..." game was crackerjack writing and acting.

Except that Sawyer, sweet young thing that he is, was still being dressed by his mother in the '80s.

Angelus is also a much better actor -- more expressive vocally and physically. That really struck me, the first time I realized it wasn't David Boreanaz who was constipated, just the character he played.

I'm always interested in people who don't know they are villains, or don't want to be but can't help it. Angelus is entertaining, but his psychology is pretty dull once you get into it. (His ability to use psychology on others is pretty exciting, but he's not exactly a deep person.)

Well, define evil. Especially in relation to "surviving damage". Sawyer's pretty obviously damaged. That he is also a con man and a twerp -- is that evil in him, or weakness, or a symptom of the damage? Or just habit?

It's what the character does that makes the difference to me -- Sawyer isn't trying to do good. He's had very tiny flickers of it, things like giving the wallets back he stole, but they've been very tiny compared to the assholeness. Assuming they redeem him, I'm sure I'll start to like him a lot better; I do believe in redemption, so I won't say that Sawyer could not achieve a cosmic balance with the shit he's pulled and even the murder. But he has to start trying to do good before I'm going to have much interest in him except as a occasional source of entertaining snark.

ETA: Obviously villians have their purpose, but I don't get the worship of them; in _Manhunter_, I'm far more interested in Will Graham than I am in Hannibal Lecter, even though I think the scenes with Lecter are interesting, and the later adoration and worship of Lecter by so many people I simply do not get.

Sawyer isn't trying to do good. He's had very tiny flickers of it, things like giving the wallets back he stole, but they've been very tiny compared to the assholeness.

The labels on my axis are good and evil. Sawyer is not far over on the good side, but he's really doing absolutely no evil these days.

Which is kinda what I've been bitching about. I suspect the writers think they've done enough -- but they've just made him a bit boring. Less exciting than I'd hoped. Still, when written like last night (quotable lines? what new show is this) he can crackle -- but like my 'redemption' beef in general -- taken over a sequence of episodes, it's just more of the same, with little risk or amplification or change.

I like Sawyer because he's snarky and hot, and he can't do anything right except flirt with Kate. So far, we've seen him fail to pull off a con job, fail to exact revenge for his parents' deaths, fail to give the marshall a painless death, and fail to track a boar. It's not that he's a bad-boy, it's that he's so bad at being a bad boy.

Obviously villians have their purpose, but I don't get the worship of them

Well, there is patent villain worship (and of real life villains too), but if you've felt any indication of that going on here, I think you're misreading people.

Hmmm, I think I really do prefer the evil characters across the board, as long as they're not evil in a stupid or petty way. I just realized I want to see Jack descend pretty far into ruthlessness and hear Hurley say "Dude, you're creeping everyone out!"