Top Fives: Top Five Times When Angel Was a Dick and Top Five West Wing Friendships

[sunclouds33]

My latest batch of Top Fives. I chose to tackle local_max Top Five Moments Where Angel Was a Dick and lokifan Top Five West Wing Friendships. More lists later!

Per local_max and my brief conversation here, I struggled a bit on how to define "dick". I ultimately came down on the side that "dick" is a diminutive term used to describe people or occasions where people are

Comments

[sunclouds33]

This bothers the shit out of me. I feel like it's Angel trying to push and exercise his dominance over Xander and Spike at the same time? To see if he can play Spike in front of Spike's guys, or failing that, to show Xander how little Xander's life is worth to him. Dick move, Angel!

I agree. Good point about dominating Spike. Much of BtVS acts like Angel is long past his old Scourge of Europe mates and the jockeying for power and control there and he's moved on- but AtS disproves that pretty thoroughly.

SUCH a dick! Particularly since he's playing that card specifically so he can manipulate Buffy. ugh.

Ick. It makes me wonder whether a part of Angel thinks that *Buffy* is as dumb as a post since he definitely thinks he can manipulate her and he openly relishes it when he's soulless. ("And you fall for it every single time!"; "What did you expect, a choir of pretty little birdies?") And since we know that Buffy is definitely no dummy but Angel manipulated her, it really calls into question whether this gypsy girl was about as sharp and clever as Buffy but found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I almost feel like that was how Angel acted precisely because he knew he bore some responsibility for Fred's death in some ways and he didn't want Wesley to catch him out about it, so he pulled rank while Wes was still destabilized by grief. He didn't care one way or another about Gunn abandoning them because Gunn was beating himself up too badly to throw stones at Angel, and then took himself out of the picture before he could cause trouble.

Good point. Plus, Angel was already cooking up his NFA plan- it's the interest of Angel's hairbrained scheme to make sure that Wesley couldn't properly grieve and heal and just stayed in a spiral of destablizing depression and then shame for feeling that way to be malleable to Angel's ambitions.

Angel's easy acceptance at leaving Gunn in hell to rescue Lindsey because Lindsey's girlfriend who's been lying to them all season said that Lindsey is the ULTIMATE EXPERT on a Senior Partners (which I saw no evidence of in S1-2 or for that matter, S5) is also disgusting- even though it's not as classically a dick move in the diminutive way that I mean it.

(Although to add to Angel being a dick in terms of Lindsey v. his friends, my Honorable Mention was Angel hanging around to beat the crap out of Lindsey and kick him while he's down in Epiphany KNOWING that Cordelia and now Wes and Gunn are in big danger with the Skilosh demons and it's right after Angel supposedly committed that he's going to give up the hurt W&H pointlessly vanity project to focus on actually doing some good and stop leaving his peeps in the lurch.