miss atrophy

I'm talking, of course, about what Xander says to Willow in the hospital.

"Come on, Will. Look, you don't have a choice here. You gotta wake up. I need you, Will. How am I gonna pass trig? And who am I gonna call every night to talk about what we did all day? You're my best friend, you've always. . . I love you."

I've read a couple of pieces now that seem to think we're meant to read Xander telling Willow he loves her as a confession of romantic love. And, well, maybe that is the intended reading -- we know what will happen early next season, after all -- but I don't think it is. I also don't think it needs to be, for Xander to feel weird about the fact Willow says Oz's name rather than his when she starts to wake up.

One of the most consistent bits of how Xander is written across the show is that Willow is the person he cares about most in the world. Certainly Willow is more important to him than any of the girls he has crushes on or even dates, something that Cordelia and Anya both remark on regularly. See, for just a handful of examples, his reaction to Willow being kidnapped in When She Was Bad (telling Buffy that "if anything happens to Willow, I'll kill you"), or the fact Cordelia complains he keeps "babbling about poor defenseless Willow" in Phases, or any number of examples in later seasons. Consider the fact that Xander explicitly describes Willow here as "my best friend", a term he will repeat again in Season 6's Grave (when he tells her that "you've been my best friend my whole life").

The implicit thesis seems to be that if Xander "only" has platonic feelings for Willow then he shouldn't be bothered by Willow being in love with Oz. But I don't think that follows at all. I don't agree at all with the implication that platonic love is somehow inferior to romantic love, or that there's no tension or jealousy possible between platonic and romantic love. (We've all seen the "I hate all my friends' boyfriends. Give back my friend." post, right?)

And of course, while Willow is Xander's best friend -- and crucially, I think -- Xander is not Willow's best friend. That's pretty clearly Buffy by this point of the show, even if I don't think Willow explicitly says that until next season's Dead Man's Party [maybe she does say it before, but I couldn't find any examples]. Buffy and Willow are friends in a way Xander can't quite manage. And that's a divide that's only going to grow as Willow starts dabbling more with magic and the supernatural and moves closer to a part of Buffy's world that Xander isn't in.

But even so, Xander and Willow are still extremely close, close in a way that Xander really isn't with Cordelia. We know (to quote Phases again) that Xander is worried about Willow's relationship with Oz ("what could she possibly see in him?" he asks Cordelia). We know that, from earlier this episode, that when Willow was hurt Xander didn't think to tell Oz: Oz is not somebody Xander thinks of as important (unlike the way he obviously thinks of somebody Buffy as important; perhaps Xander has noted how little Oz appears this season).

The anti-Xander take on this is that Xander is aware (either consciously or not) that Willow has a pretty serious crush on him and resents the fact that she's starting to move on to somebody else. I've been pretty exasperated by Xander throughout these first two seasons -- he's said and done some pretty objectionable and entitled things -- but I don't think that reading is particularly fair: Xander does not owe Willow a romantic relationship just because she has a crush on him, anymore than Buffy owes Xander a relationship (and, indeed, the show has deliberately been paralleling these two things since as long ago as the third episode: in Witch we had a scene of Xander cheerfully telling Willow she was his "guy friend who knows about girls" deliberately contrasted with a later scene in which Buffy told him that she loved him [again, non-romantically] because he was "not like other boys at all [...] you are totally and completely one of the girls"). And I don't think Xander's love for Willow is made any less by the fact he isn't interested in her romantically or sexually [except, of course, for what happens later in the show ... well, we can discuss that misjudged plot arc when we get to it I suppose].

The more sympathetic take, and I believe the reading we're meant to have, is that Xander is afraid that Willow is going to eventually outgrow him completely. Yeah, they were friends growing up and yes, they have a lot of shared history nobody else does. But she's very clearly got a bright future ahead of her with all sorts of academic and career opportunities that aren't open to him. At the recent career day he got assigned the role of "prison guard" and she got headhunted by "the world's leading software concern". Earlier this season he was being summoned into school on a Saturday for remedial lessons in a class she's now officially teaching. Since last year she's has a best friend who isn't him; she now has a boyfriend that isn't him; she has a future that might not have him in it at all.

I think the reason Xander acts a little ashamed to tell Willow he loves her -- and the reason he looks nonplussed when her first words on waking up are to ask for Oz, not him -- is simply that he's worried that she doesn't love him. That there's now one more person in Willow's life that she's going to care about more than she cares about him. (Both of them, in fact, people Xander agrees or will agree are better people than him.) And that soon enough there'll be a third, and then a fourth, and so on and so on. That when Willow gets over her crush on him she might realize she just doesn't like him very much.