Mal ,'Heart Of Gold'
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I think a lot of the imbalance in the ep comes form the fact that RILEY fucked up pretty seriously and for not much of a reason, yet Buffy takes the blame. And it is weird and wrong and stinks of someone else's issues.
Wordy McWord with a heaping side of Word Sauce.
And Xander speech, I think, was more a reflection of his relationship with Anya than Buffy's with Riley.
Plus a big dose of Riley being the only boyfriend of Buffy he ever liked.
Did he even meet Parker?
I think a lot of the imbalance in the ep comes form the fact that RILEY fucked up pretty seriously and for not much of a reason, yet Buffy takes the blame. And it is weird and wrong and stinks of someone else's issues.
Buffy never told anyone about the suck jobs. Spike knew, Buffy knew. No one else was clued in. This is my recollection. And it would be Buffy's issues (pride? inferiority?) that would account for this.
Parker wasn't a boyfriend, though.
Elena, it's a fair point that Xander didn't have full knowledge. He could have figured it out from Buffy's freakout over the idea of consensual biting earlier that day, but he may not have.
Did he even meet Parker?
More to the point, I don't think he was ever told about Parker - not even after Beer, Bad. But I don't think Parker = boyfriend, either.
He could have figured it out from Buffy's freakout over the idea of consensual biting earlier that day, but he may not have.
No one else did. Not Giles. Not Willow. I think that it's unfair to blame her friends for not being able to read Buffy's mind and basing their actions only on what they'd been told and seen.
Buffy never told anyone about the suck jobs. Spike knew, Buffy knew. No one else was clued in.
The audience knew, and I don't see any reason to assume the characters weren't told offscreen. Giles, at least, should have been able to connect the dots. I can't remember if it came up one way or another during AYW.
Edit for X-post: Elena, it sounds like it's ambiguous. I tend to assume characters know everything that happens onscreen unless it's made clear they do not or could not. YMMV.
I don't see any reason to assume the characters weren't told offscreen
That description works for Xander's big lie too, though.
I always assume that if we're meant to think, if some interpretation hinges on it, person A knows fact X, it will be explicitly presented to us, one way or another. Especially with Buffy, who's bad at communicating.
I didn't assume the other characters knew, but it wasn't their perspective that bothered me, it was the show's--IOW, on some level I can't quite articulate, I feel like the show itself was too hard on Buffy and not sufficiently hard on Riley throughout ItW and AYW.