Well, we've got the word from the man himself

[conuly]

Boy, you kill someone, everyone makes a fuss! Yet I still feel differently about this than what I've done before. It's a tragedy, classically structured. Usually death is meaningless and arbitrary in my work, to reflect life, but this is the old brew. And yes, I have issues. This will come up again, I'm sure.

Issues is putting it mildly.

Comments

[conuly]

He killed Buffy twice, to my knowledge, and also set her up in another world where maybe she's insane. That's not counting the Mirrorverse episode.

He killed Buffy's mom, of course, of a random aneurysm, and Giles' girlfriend, remember her?

He killed Willow's girlfriend, causing Willow to turn dark and evil and homicidal.

He causes undue angst and pain for his alive (or undead) characters, too, of course.

And that's just Buffy! Apparently, he'd intended to even *start* the series by killing off Xander's best non-Willow friend!

Never watched Angel, but I'm assured the death-and-misery toll is quite high in that one. TVTropes gives me three main characters (one of whom is a Buffy character) and any number of less main ones.

In Firefly he didn't kill *anybody* off because the show didn't even make it a full season, but in Serenity, to make up for it, he killed off two characters, one (everybody's favorite, and mine as well) in a particularly meaningless way. (He seems to have problems with happy, healthy couples, and will stop at no end to break them up. That's what he did here.)

This comic more-or-less sums it up.

[peebs1701.livejournal.com]

In Angel he killed off Cordelia (eh), Fred DDDD: , and in the last episode Wesley for sure and it's implied pretty much everyone else dies too except for Lorne and Connor.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Don't forget Doyle and also the girl in the first episode Angel tries to save. And then in Buffy the last episode also kills off Anya.