It was a hyperbolic but relevant cut and paste from the quote in the top right corner to underscore the "you can't force it, you can't think it, you feel it" POV which I do stand by.

You want anything more on those precise words, you gotta take it up with him.

Let me go ring Spike up and you can have an argument with him.

He's all immature and stuff. And schmoopy.

I think blood is part of it, but not the only part, and probably not the biggest part of it, just the most immediate one.

Like totally, eh? The blood stuff subsides some, and you need to fill it in with other stuff, like affection and respect and shared experiences and interests. Spike wasn't so much with the knowing what the fuck any of that stuff might be, except as a panties-crowbar.

Hey now. Have you had a longer relationship than Dru/Spike?

Hey now. Have you had a longer relationship than Dru/Spike?

Since I was alive for all of mine, I'd have to say yes.

Maybe Spike's right, but that kind of...craving has been kind of outside my experience. To my knowledge, I don't even have a Krakow. But I still think I've been in love. Am I wrong? Was it not the real thing? And this post is kind of Bitchy, huh?

Now dead's against the rules? You've severely compromised my cut and paste rhetorical ability.

same with the Angela and Brian dynamic

I'm realizing more and more that I read that dynamic in a very different way than lots of other people. In my brain, they would've eventually ended up together -- with no guarantee of it working long-term, and definitely not because she was rewarding his devotional pining or realizing how perfect he'd always been, because he was never, ever perfect. Perfect wasn't the point. The close/warring relationship between Angela and Brian and Angela and Jordan seemed to me to be a distorted echo of Patty's relationships with Graham and with her long-lost rebel boyfriend.

The wild, hurting, wounded and physically outrageously attractive bad/good boy with the crazy love can be intoxicating and addictive, and the real person underneath all those signs and signifiers may actually be truly decent and worthwhile (as, IMO, Jordan is); but what Patty realized she wanted was to build a cluttered, mundane, 3-D earthbound life with someone, and the crazy boy and the crazy love were damned hard to build it on. Patty loved her crazy boy but also truly loves, in a non-settling and non-compromised way (though, in the setting of the show, still beginning to unravel from completely other causes). She didn't give in to Graham because he'd been pining after her so faithfully through her beauty queen and his pizza face days, but because as she grew older and knew herself better what she valued and what she wanted changed, and he turned out to be the person who had those qualities. He was her long-haul guy.

And there were hints that Brian, or someone like him, might have eventually been Angela's long-haul guy. She's not just more literate than Jordan, but more intellectually hungry than him; he's bright but lazy, and his functional illiteracy is partly a function of his having slipped through the cracks of the system and partly a function of his not having cared to kick and protest as he slipped. He's interested enough to get by, and he's passionate about the people and things (Angela, music, his car) he truly cares about, but his hunger for the world isn't voracious. Hers is. And he acknowledges it, after his halting Krakow-cued apology, when he says "It's like she was hungry for something." She devoured his words, was desperate for more, said "Now we can finally begin to talk" at just the point when Jordan had run out of steam.

And there were little hints and flashes that Angela has a Krakow-shaped blind spot; he's been the annoying kid across the street for so long that she is brought up short and knocked speechless every time she catches a glimpse of the bits of him that have nothing to do with that annoying kid. And in the end she's stunned entirely speechless because she recognizes that the language, not just the depth of feeling but the eloquence and grace of its expression, that so seduced her in Jordan's letter came out of this person she'd dismissed and written off long ago. She's miles from loving him, but when the show ended she was in a place where it was no longer a total impossibility, where she could see that some of what she valued and craved was in fact in him.

A "Look how faithful he was, and now finally he gets to nail her!" storyline would have been vile (and, actually, I'm not sure S7 Buffy could have pulled off B/X without slipping into that trap), but I don't think that's what MSCL was going for.

t /Angela likes carrots

I think I agree with JZ. But I'd probably use less words than that.

A "Look how faithful he was, and now finally he gets to nail her!" storyline would have been vile (and, actually, I'm not sure S7 Buffy could have pulled off B/X without slipping into that trap), but I don't think that's what MSCL was going for.

Yes, it would have been vile and would have been vile for B/X, too. When I want B/X, that's not what I want. I consider the early X--->B cravings over. This would have been something new, that grew as they grew, and as they realized they really didn't want monster in their (wo)man.