“I love you. I love crayon-breaky Willow and I love scary, veiny Willow. So if I’m goin’ out, it’s here. If you wanna kill the world, well, then start with me. I’ve earned that.”

“You think I won’t?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll still love you.”

When I first started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, my expectations were not particularly high. I was bored, I liked the no-frills descriptiveness of the title, and I had a relatively high opinion of Joss Whedon from what I’d seen of him. I expected to enjoy it as I had enjoyed Firefly and the few episodes of Dollhouse I’d watched with my brother, but I did not expect that it would become my favorite show of all time by the second season.

Ah, friendship.

When it comes to entertainment, I’m the kind of person who values strong characters over a gripping plot. Buffy has both, of course, but the characters are what makes it. They develop beautifully and dramatically, but realistically. So much of my love for Buffy was character-driven. I loved Giles, his fatherly love for Buffy, his conspicuous English-ness in a Southern Californian setting, his seldom-yielding stoicism. I loved Anya for all her strange literality, Tara for her supportiveness and pure ability to love, Spike for the way he evolved from a hardened criminal to the Slayer’s sole confidant. And of course, I loved Buffy herself- she’s strong, creative, and brilliant (not to mention stylish), and she wields her power well. But it took me until the end of Season 6 to realize who the best character really was. You can rave all you want about Buffy and Angel and Willow, but none of them holds a candle to Xander Harris.

Throughout most of the show, Xander’s bright shining moments of glory are pretty few and far between. More on that later, but for now I want to talk about what was, for me, the most powerful scene in the entire show. It’s the end of season 6 and I’m alone in the dark in my living room. Willow, turned mad with magic and grief after the death of her lover (R.I.P. Tara, I cried a lot when you died), is so close to destroying the world that the apocalypse seems inevitable. Even Buffy has pretty much given up all hope of defeating her best-friend-turned-power-crazed-witch—and then there’s Xander. Xander, Willow’s friend since kindergarten, stands right up to her and saves the world by over and over again repeating the words “I love you.”

He just saved the world from doom.

I watched that scene over and over again. What amazed me about the scene was not that it illustrated the power of love to save the world. It was that I don’t think Xander was even trying to save the world by telling Willow he loved her. If anything, he was trying to save Willow. His goal was to remind her that, no matter what she did, he would love her unconditionally. If she killed or died, he didn’t want her to go out without the knowledge that she was loved. I don’t think Xander expected his love to prevent the apocalypse—and that, I think, is why it worked. Had Xander given his love to Willow with the intent to break her or defeat her, it wouldn’t have been effective. But his motives were utterly selfless. Because that’s how Xander is.

I’ve recently started rewatching Buffy, and it’s easy to see why it took me so long to notice Xander. His glorious moments, as I said, are brief and infrequent, but it’s more than that. Xander’s moments get buried. In the season 1 finale, who saves Buffy from drowning? Xander. But then you forget about that because of all the dramatic bits afterwards where Buffy kills the Master and saves the world. In season 2, he awakens Willow from her unconsciousness following a head trauma (again by saying “I love you”), but then there’s spell-casting and vampire-killing and world-saving and Buffy flees town and the last character on your mind is Xander. But if it weren’t for Xander, Willow would never have been awake to cast the spell that restored Angel’s soul and the season 2 finale wouldn’t have been so heartbreaking.

But oftentimes, it’s what Xander doesn’t do that makes him so special. At the beginning of the season 3 episode Beauty and the Beasts, the jaded Faith cynically declares that “all guys are beasts.” This theme is not-so-subtly illustrated throughout the rest of the episode in the form of 3 male characters. First, we have Oz. He’s an all-around nice guy, but he does happen to turn into a giant wolf around the full moon. Then there’s Angel, who is feral after having returned to Earth from a hell-dimension. Finally, we have Pete. He’s only around for an episode, and all we know about him is that he’s a physically and emotionally abusive boyfriend with a Hulk-like tendency to become a super strong, veiny monster when he’s angry. On the surface of the episode, the message seems to be that Faith was right about men, that they all have ferocious animals inside of them.

But Faith was wrong. Xander was there all along, being unobtrusively supportive, cracking the occasional sex joke, and acting distinctively non-beastly. I didn’t notice the first time I watched the episode, because it really isn’t about Xander. But in the midst of an episode about the sort of “toxic masculinity” that gets talked about so much today, he’s still there: strong, non-toxic, and wonderful.

Look at him not abusing anyone or turning into a fantastical creature!

Another remarkable thing Xander doesn’t do is break. Let’s talk for a second about Xander’s unfortunate series of love interests. First we have a man-eating insect and a mummy who sucks life from people. Then we have Cordelia, a narcissistic cheerleader who makes his life hell both before and after their relationship. There’s Faith, who doesn’t harm him directly but does turn evil shortly after their brief and rather aggressive sexual encounter. And most notably, there’s Anya. Xander dates, falls in love with, and becomes engaged to a former vengeance demon. It’s a complicated relationship in which Xander becomes her best friend, confidant, lover, and even her coach in how to conduct herself as a human. But, while Buffy is frequently in tears over Angel, Willow breaks down when Oz leaves her and later nearly destroys the world after losing Tara, and Spike goes to absurd measures for both Drusilla and Buffy, Xander consistently grits his teeth and moves on with his life. I don’t mean this as a dis on Buffy, Willow, or Spike. It’s simply a testament to Xander’s solidity and emotional maturity.

Of course, he’s not a perfect angel either. He does his fair share of dumb shit. Trying to cast that love spell on Cordelia was a little skeevy. He was pretty callous toward Buffy when she lost Angel. And leaving Anya at the altar was definitely not such an admirable move. But he is unyielding in his loyalty to his friends, and he doesn’t expect anything in return. He doesn’t ask for credit after he saves the school from being blown up by a reanimated corpse in “The Zeppo.” He does not expect Buffy to return his unrequited affections in the earlier seasons, even after he saves her life. He doesn’t desert when he is overlooked, or upset, or jealous, or even when he has an eye gouged out. Not even Giles had the same track record of standing at Buffy’s side, and that was Giles’ career. And I’m not sure I mentioned this before, but he saved the world by telling Willow he loved her. That’s badass.

He looks pretty great in an eyepatch, too.

On the surface, Xander Harris is the character without powers. He’s not a Slayer, a witch, a vampire, or an extremely learned British man. He was never a demon and his blood doesn’t open a portal into another dimension. He was not the Chosen One or the Class Protector, but without him, the title character wouldn’t even have made it through the first season alive, Anya would have known only bitterness for her whole human life, and who knows what would have become of poor Willow? From the moment he bumps into Buffy in the hall in Welcome to the Hellmouth to the moment he gets off the bus to leave his burnt hometown behind, Xander Harris is always there. And that’s a power all by itself.

This is the best song in “Once More With Feeling.” “Something to Sing About” be damned.