Attack of the BtVS/AtS love!
There are two people on my flist who are watching stuff for the first time (one of them has seen BtVS but not AtS and the other is watching both for the first time) and reading their posts has reminded me of how much I love these people.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer! The show that helped me realize I was attracted to girls (thank you, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Amber Benson, in particular). I think, more than any other show, these shows are what have made me define what I look for in television. I said, once, that if you added up all the shows I was currently watching, it would equal the joy of a Jossverse show. This is still mostly true. The closest that I have come to finding a show that has given me as much giddy joy has been RTD's Doctor Who.
Buffy was my first girlcrush. Xander was one of my first boycrushes. Naturally, I shipped them (I still do). While watching the show, there were characters that I took longer to love than others (*cough*Willow*cough*) and characters that I took to immediately (*cough*Tara*cough*) but I've found that the more time passes, the more I really love them all. Even Faith.
These shows have made me cry more times than probably anything else in the world and I have loved them for doing it. The first time I remember crying was "Becoming" when Buffy had to kill Angel (and I did not even like Angel at the time). It was far from the last. AtS made me cry in "Hero", of course. I fell in love with Doyle from almost his first moment of screentime and for a long time I thought I would never forgive the show for killing him off. I even quit watching! But then Wesley... oh, Wesley. He snuck into my heart so slowly and I never realized that I had fallen helplessly for him.
One of the things that I enjoyed about these shows was the dazzling amount of chemistry that the leads had with each other. I cared about the Willow/Xander/Buffy friendship (with Giles always along for the ride). I cared about Anya and Tara and Dawn and Joyce and Robin and Jenny and Connor and Gunn and Lorne and Lindsey.
I wept when Doyle died. When Joyce died. When Tara and Anya and Buffy and Cordy and Fred (oh, Fred) and Wesley (my poor sweet Wesley). I cheered every time that Buffy defied the odds to stand up one more time. When Angel did the wrong thing for the right reasons (people on AtS were forever doing the wrong thing for the right reasons).
I just... I profoundly, deeply adore these people. That's all.
Also! I'm going to go watch "Once More, With Feeling".