The Shape of Normal
Xander Harris, structural bias, and what stories teach us about who gets to stay in the room—and who has to earn it.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of my all-time favorite shows.
I’ve binged it at least once every couple of years for literally decades. And yeah—it’s far from perfect. A lot of it is peak ’90s: cheesy, episodic, shallow in ways that feel glaring in hindsight. But it grows. It deepens. It starts to fill in the empty spaces with something so human—so raw and familiar and strange and resonant. Over seven seasons, we don’t just follow a story. We grow alongside it. We come to care deeply about these characters. We grow to love them, to cheer their victories, to mourn their losses.
And now, with a new series on the way, I find myself thinking about all of it again—what worked, what aged, what stayed lodged in the cultural bloodstream. And yeah… Xander.
Xander has always been one of the most criticized characters in the series—and for good reason. His behavior hasn’t aged poorly so much as it was already frustrating the first time around. Much has already been written about Xander’s frustrations; I’m not here to rehash those arguments or offer grand new insights. This isn’t a takedown or a defense, per se. Just a reflection—on realism, narrative bias, and what it means when a character like Xander doesn’t just exist in a story like Buffy, but becomes a fixture in it.
Because for all the mockery, for all the justified frustration, Xander is disturbingly familiar. And that might be the most unsettling thing about him. He’s not cartoonishly awful. He’s not villain-coded. He’s just normal. That’s the problem.
He’s insecure, self-centered, loyal in a way that feels territorial more than empathic. He lashes out from his own discomfort and frames it as moral clarity. He judges others harshly while skimming right over his own failures. He positions himself as the emotional core of the group even while regularly acting like a weight around their ankles.
And for seven seasons, he’s never truly called out. Not really. He’s rarely asked to grow. And when he does face consequences, the show softens the blow, rerouting sympathy back toward him by default. Not because he deserves it. But because the narrative—like many narratives—was structured to assume that a guy like Xander should always be understandable, always be forgivable, always be relatable.
And that’s where it gets more interesting. Because Xander’s realism isn’t incidental. It’s the result of direct projection—he was an explicit self-insert by Joss Whedon. Not just inspired by Whedon’s personality, but written as Whedon in younger form, by his own admission. And that makes everything about the character’s lack of growth, lack of accountability, and narrative protection more revealing—not just about Xander, but about the system that kept him centered.
Because when you create a character as a reflection of yourself—your flaws, your charm, your insecurities—and then refuse to interrogate that character over time, you’re not just telling a story. You’re reinforcing a structure that says: this is who gets to be understood. This is who stays in the room, no matter how much damage they cause.
And in hindsight, it’s not just the character who failed to grow. It’s the creator. Whedon’s later revelations—his control issues, emotional manipulation, and fragile, self-justifying image management—don’t just echo Xander. They’re louder versions of the same notes. The real-world behavior is worse, yes. But the root pattern? It was already written. And no one challenged it.
Even Nicholas Brendon’s performance—full of barely restrained anxiety, sharp comic reflexes, and a kind of emotional proximity that reads too close—feels less like performance and more like projection. Not necessarily with intent, but with a kind of automatic familiarity that speaks to a deeper, maybe unconscious, identification.
The irony is thick: two men who both faced very public fallout around issues of control, behavior, and accountability, both filtering themselves into a character who never had to change.
And yet… Xander isn’t a villain. That’s part of why he matters. He’s not written to be malicious. He’s just never asked to examine himself. And because of that, he feels real—not necessarily in the way we idealize, but in the way we recognize. We’ve all known someone like him. Some of us were him. Especially in the ’90s—a time that may have looked more progressive on the surface, but still made it difficult, even risky, to call out behavior that stories like this had already normalized.
He’s the guy who gets a pass because he’s not the worst. Because he’s funny. Because he’s not in power. Because he “means well.” He’s the kind of person who could be in every room, every friend group, every story—and never get flagged as part of the problem.
And maybe that’s part of why this show has always resonated so strongly with me—and with a lot of other autistic people I know. Not because it’s “about” neurodivergence, but because so many of the characters embody a kind of inward complexity and intensity that’s rarely allowed to exist without commentary or correction. The relatability isn’t a spotlight. It’s a quiet undercurrent. A familiarity in how emotion and structure are processed. A recognition.
When you grow up watching the othered characters get treated as unstable, and the unexamined ones get treated as stable, it takes a long time to realize the frame was crooked from the start.
And once you do, it doesn’t stop with that one character, or that one story. You start noticing how many narratives are built around a certain kind of comfort. How often that comfort depends on never questioning the person at the center of the room. How often the system protects them—not out of malice, but because it was built for them. Around them.
It’s not just about who gets to speak. It’s about who never has to explain themselves. Who gets to fumble and flail and still be held. And who doesn’t.
What we call “normal” is often just legacy bias made invisible by repetition. A structure rehearsed so many times it starts to feel like truth. But it’s not. It never was.
And once you see it, you can’t unsee it—not just in the stories you consume, but in the world that built them. And maybe that’s not clarity in the tidy sense. Maybe it’s just the beginning of a better kind of discomfort. ∞