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Well, I'm gonna duck the rotten tomatoes that will come my way for this, but Spike remains one of my favorite characters in the 'verse. He's extraordinarily complex, and JM plays him with astounding finesse. Was evil Spike admirable? Hell, no! He was a rapist and a child murderer, but that's part of the vampire territory. I can't exactly "forgive" him for that, but the character was not depicted doing those things, it was implied in passing, in references which came much, much later in his career, no earlier than three years after he'd first shown up in the 'dale. I don't have the issues with him that most of the folks on this board have, but don't particularly want to defend the character on this thread, so let's just say that he is not on my "to loathe" list.

Neither is Riley. I despised the B/R pairing, but never Riley. He started out as a very good guy, who should have been perfect for Buffy, but wasn't because her heart was involved elsewhere. Bland? Possibly, but that's no reason to loathe him. The vampire trulls bit possibly was a reason to loathe him, but I did have some sympathy for him. He was in a hopeless situation, wildly in love with a woman who gave him her body and shut him out of her heart, and the important things going on in her life. I didn't admire him for trying to find out what was going on in her head by letting himself get involved with vampires, but I didn't hate him for it.

I did hate Connor for a while. I thought he was wicked cool when he first showed up, I got why he was vulnerable to Holtz' manipulations, and let himself drop his dad into the drink in that locked box. But, there came a point when I'd had enough. No matter what Angel and the gang did for him, he just didn't get it. He continued to walk around with this huge chip on his shoulder, whinning and doing the wrong thing. But, oddly, when he freaked out standing over Cordy's unconscious body in the church, and when he took the hostages...I got him. I began to understand just how horrific his life had been, and why he was so desperately confused. VK did a rather admirable job with the material he was given, and in the end, I felt the compassion and pity I was supposed to feel for Connor, and for his father who was forced to make a perfectly heartbreaking choice for him. So, no loathing here.

Loathing for Kennedy, I had. I feel badly about that for the actress's sake, because she's a cute kid and seems to be a lovely person, but seriously, folks. I wanted to slap her from the moment she walked onto the scene. Her pursuit of Willow was entirely too smug and self-centered. And her attitude towards Buffy, her contempt and TOTAL lack of understanding, or anything even resembling an attempt to understand, just made me want to kick her sorry ass out of the Summer's home, maybe gift-wrap her and send her to the First. But, in the end, my loathing level was pretty low: she was more of a constant, whinning annoyance than a truly loathsome presence on the show.

That honor had to be reserved for Saint Cordufflia. Not Cordy per se. I miss Queen C and would want her back in a heartbeat. But, this creature they turned into a quasi-saint, and tried to tell me was a "higher being" worthy of Angel? "Loathing" is too mild a word. There are two episodes of Angel season three that I have yet to watch (have them on tape, of course) because I simply couldn't abide what they were doing to her character, and what they'd turned her into. I've ranted on the subject in some of the Cordy-bashing threads, so I won't repeat it all here. Suffice it to say that I never despised, detested or deplored a character more than I did the Cordelia who was presented to us after Birthday.

But my true loathing is for whoever decided to take the character down a certain path, butchered the character in order to make her walk that path, and then wrote the character off the show because they didn't know how to fix what they had broken, if that is how it went down.

That said, they weren't in the poll, and, honestly, I never loathed a character the way I did latter-day Cordy, no matter how much I love Charisma Carpenter and the Original Queen C.

MleF