Right, that's what confuses me when season 3 is never brought up when it comes to Ats ~ruining~ Cordelia's character, because it seemed like that was the time when they started radically altering her into Saint and Mother figure, and then Cordelia herself never came back in season 4
in BtVS/AtS fandom there seems to be a big base that very much rooted for Cordelia and thus saw her as Morally The Best amongst the secondary characters (and specifically, Morally Superior to Willow and Xander)
LOL I haven't heard the arguments about Cordelia being Buffy's one true friend, but it is interesting how fans will call a character a favourite, and yet whitewash so many of their character traits. I.e Joss very clearly DID mean to frame Cordelia as a bully who would pick on weaker members of her class like Willow for wearing the wrong clothes, but somehow that gets spun into Cordelia wasn't really being mean, she's just a straight talker and says what she thinks. I mean sure that's a part of it, but I don't see the point of denying that the character of Cordelia on Bts actually could be a bully as well, and she could lash out at others with very little justification. The character herself deals with that very issue in Room With A View when she fears that she's being punished for the way that she once treated people because she knew that she could get away with it, yet fandom just focuses on quotes like "Tact is just not saying true stuff" as summing up Cordelia's attitude to life...
The bitchier characters with the quick one-liners do seem to be the fan favs today, I guess they make for the more memorable tv characters, and I've unashamedly loved a few of them myself like Blair Waldorf (and Cordelia of course, in spite of what I'm saying here I did very much enjoy her character on Ats up until the mid season 3 changes). I just don't get why fandom seems to feel the need to justify their love for those characters by whitewashing them and painting them as secretly being better and more deserving than the characters around them.
Cordelia as a character did develop hugely on Ats, but I'd argue that I don't think that she ever did lose her sense of entitlement, she still had that attitude of them being special Champions and having a special status, and she was awfully quick to buy into being a "higher being" and ready to ascend from the mortal plane after only a few months of passing her visions on to Angel. I'm not denying that she was doing an awful lot of good for the mission, but she was also surrounded by people since high school who were equally ready to do battle, so IMHO it says a lot that the powers knew that they could get her to swallow that she was that amazing that she was ready to go to heaven and become a literal Saint. The retcon of how they were really playing her is actually pretty brilliant when you watch the season 3 finale in retrospect
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in BtVS/AtS fandom there seems to be a big base that very much rooted for Cordelia and thus saw her as Morally The Best amongst the secondary characters (and specifically, Morally Superior to Willow and Xander)
LOL I haven't heard the arguments about Cordelia being Buffy's one true friend, but it is interesting how fans will call a character a favourite, and yet whitewash so many of their character traits. I.e Joss very clearly DID mean to frame Cordelia as a bully who would pick on weaker members of her class like Willow for wearing the wrong clothes, but somehow that gets spun into Cordelia wasn't really being mean, she's just a straight talker and says what she thinks. I mean sure that's a part of it, but I don't see the point of denying that the character of Cordelia on Bts actually could be a bully as well, and she could lash out at others with very little justification. The character herself deals with that very issue in Room With A View when she fears that she's being punished for the way that she once treated people because she knew that she could get away with it, yet fandom just focuses on quotes like "Tact is just not saying true stuff" as summing up Cordelia's attitude to life...
The bitchier characters with the quick one-liners do seem to be the fan favs today, I guess they make for the more memorable tv characters, and I've unashamedly loved a few of them myself like Blair Waldorf (and Cordelia of course, in spite of what I'm saying here I did very much enjoy her character on Ats up until the mid season 3 changes). I just don't get why fandom seems to feel the need to justify their love for those characters by whitewashing them and painting them as secretly being better and more deserving than the characters around them.
Cordelia as a character did develop hugely on Ats, but I'd argue that I don't think that she ever did lose her sense of entitlement, she still had that attitude of them being special Champions and having a special status, and she was awfully quick to buy into being a "higher being" and ready to ascend from the mortal plane after only a few months of passing her visions on to Angel. I'm not denying that she was doing an awful lot of good for the mission, but she was also surrounded by people since high school who were equally ready to do battle, so IMHO it says a lot that the powers knew that they could get her to swallow that she was that amazing that she was ready to go to heaven and become a literal Saint. The retcon of how they were really playing her is actually pretty brilliant when you watch the season 3 finale in retrospect