Livre d'Or

Your random thoughts are awesome, thank you for commenting. I think it's a combination of several different things that's made me cross about Buffy and Angel's relationship. If it were just the age difference, or even just that Angel is a vampire but was otherwise emotionally more Buffy's contemporary, or if they were only having sex in not very sensible circumstances but it wasn't Buffy's first time, I'd be less bothered. Or if Angel were just a morally complex character who does some good things and some bad things, I could treat his rather exploitative treatment of Buffy as part of that normal characterization, but it's the framing where he's supposed to suddenly switch from a "good" person who stalks a teenage girl and has sex with her she's not in a situation to give meaningful consent, to an evil vampire, that makes me more inclined to reject the implied morality.

I think the Doomed Love thing is what the show is going for with the Slayer / vampire thing, yes. That's not inherently creepy. I think it's problematic for me because of the combination of the two factors, the power imbalance between the two, and the fraternizing with the enemy aspect. The thing is, you can have a Doomed Love thing where someone falls in love with a solider from the occupying army, and that's not creepy necessarily because the whole point is to show that the people on both sides are human and it's just bad luck they happened to end up on opposite sides of a war. But that's not the case with humanity versus vampires, vampires are inherently evil. So it's a bad idea for Buffy to be in love with a vampire because sooner or later it's bound to make her hesitate and divide her loyalties when she should be slaying. Angel being an evil monster, even if he's an evil monster with a soul, it seems like the thing that's keeping Buffy from getting devoured is too tenuous to rely on, really, though jack and others have been convincing me that I've misunderstood how good and evil work in Buffyverse.

If I take your view of a metaphor for an older guy who's parentally disapproved, I think I do have a problem with that in general. I think 16- and 17-year-olds dating older men is not fundamentally horrifying, but it's a situation I'm really, really wary about. A relationship with a big age gap can be a good relationship, but only if the older guy in the scenario is extremely conscious of the power imbalance and takes extra care, beyond what I would expect from everyone ethically, that he really has genuine, meaningful consent for sexual activities. I agree with you that plenty of society, plenty of media, does valorize rather than repudiate that kind of relationship, so in that sense I'm annoyed with Buffy for going along with what I think is a dangerous trope rather than challenging it.