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Morning and I'm weirdly not upset by any of this going on. I feel like crap physically, but emotionally okay. The thing is, doctors have suspected my thyroid was responsible for a number of my weird medical issues for years and years, long before even the goiter popped 4 years back. The problem is that my blood tests kept coming back at normal levels, which I gather is actually pretty common for a slowly self destructing wonky thyroid. Levels tend to fluctuate while it eats itself alive, so even with symptoms it makes it difficult to monitor or treat until it goes into a death spiral. Which mine is apparently now doing. And while there's nothing fun about that, it also means they can finally do something about it. So that will be interesting.

And possibly even really good? Like, I am now wondering how many ucky symptoms I have been dealing with for years will just...maybe go away if they can actually treat it? I dunno, I'm so used to having stuff piled on that I just have to deal with making things worse overall, I'm not entirely certain what to do with a medical problem that might be able to be treated to actually make things better in the long run. Could be fun.

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Anyway, in non medical related stuffs...since I ran out of Buffy I am now rewatching all of Angel, something I haven't actually done since it finished, though I have rewatched bits and chunks here and there.

The thing is, I forgot just how damn good season 2 of Angel really is. I've been going through a bit of a revival of my Angel the character love, and this is kicking it up hard core. And first time through this is really when I got invested in him as an individual too.

The thing about Angel is...okay. Angelus is vastly entertaining and interesting, though I suppose not for people on the inside of the show dealing with him. But, y'know, for me at home, GOOD TIMES. Pre season 2 AtS, though...Angel is. He's sympathetic, I feel for the dude and his burden of guilt, I really do! I especially feel for him in relation to his attempts to pull himself out from under the weight of it all with Buffy, only to have that lifeline snap like the necks of his victims. Sympathy is not the problem.

But, it's like. Okay, the thing that is fascinating to me about Jossverse vampires is not the human parts that go away with the soul, but the ones that remain. Which is kinda why Spike is such a delight to me, because there is never a point where the two aren't out on the table, soul or unsouled. But that's a tangent. Angel, understandably, does not want to deal with this. He just walls it off into souled/unsouled and in a lot of ways it kind of immobilizes him in terms of growth. He can brood and feel all guilty, but he can't really move forward in a lot of ways because he's insisting to some level that it's not really him who did those things, ya know? I'm not surprised he spent a hundred years eating rats and sitting around feeling sorry for himself.

And the thing is, even with Buffy, and that first year of Angel, he's still in that holding pattern. And then. Then. Here we are in season 2 and all those walls come a crumbling down and he's got to deal with that shit. And it is amazing.

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Yes, I'm spamming, but I don't feel good so I'm wallowing in fannish thoughts to distract.

Specifically now I'm thinking about the differences between Spike and Angel and how that plays out. Like, Angelus completely shuts down and rejects anything of his humanity and Angel does the opposite, and then theres Spike who embraces both on either side of the soul divide, the primary difference being which way he's oriented, which is more of a practical difference than anything else.

And..in a lot of ways it makes Angel a better champion of both evil and good, because his obsessive devotion is, I dunno...purer? More absolute? But then Spike is better able to live in both worlds, which makes him a better tool (I'll pause a moment for those of you who are so inclined to run with that opening)...for either good and evil. Angel is the idealism, and Spike is the pragmatism. Or something? I'm babbling and my brain is fuzzy.