Thank you all for the welcomes! I really appreciate it!
Welcome to the boards
@WhyCantiStay
Are you more a Fred fan, or an Illyria fan? Or are they equal?
I've went back and forth throughout the years! They're soooo different and awesome for completely different reasons. I probably identify with Fred more because she's kind of bookish, yet very strong in her own way. I always feel amazed when I think about her surviving on her own for years in that cave. Illyria, on the other hand, I find extremely compelling. I love the concept of a God-King being reduced to basically nothing; and plus she's just very fun to watch on screen, her movements. Illyria feeling more and more human is one of my favorite arcs in the Buffyverse, so that's why I'm so hard on the most recent seasons for their handling of her.
That said, I still can't pick one over the other, overall. I think Illyria has the potential to be more interesting when she's written well, but she's really been reduced to a plot device for everyone and everything but herself lately. Her powers are limitless, when she's most interesting when they're extremely limited. When she was "killed off" in season 9, I would have given anything to have her back, but given what we've been given, I wish they'd just resurrected Fred and left Illyria gone. It was the perfect sendoff for Illyria's character, for better or worse.
I feel like Fred's death is cheapened, also, by her resurrection in season 10, but there were so many rumors of the same thing happening in the hypothetical Angel season 6 that I kind of expected it to happen at some point, especially once we saw Illyria in Fred's form near the end of season 9. I'm just not into this whole sharing a body thing, with what it's done to Illyria; it also feels like it's already been done before in AtF, right? (And better...)
So if I was given the question "Who would you prefer to be in the comics at the moment?" I would say Fred. While it does cheapen her death a good bit, I'm GLAD Fred has a chance to live on. It wasn't written extremely well, but it's how it is, and since she's back keep her back. I also love that she's really the only connection Angel has to his past adventures since the writers like to ignore Gunn and Connor. Their dynamic and friendship is really close to my heart. Illyria is a shadow of what she used to be (like in AtF or Illyria: Haunted, even if it isn't seen as 100% canon), and it feels like she should be put out of her misery which makes me revert to the "she should have stayed dead in season 9" argument. But it would feel repetitive to kill her off again now.
So there's my essay that answered tons of questions you didn't ask! In short: I love them both for super different reasons, but Amy Acker's performance as both is what makes them still so lovable.
