Is it her intellect you think less of or her morals? Buffy had sex with Angel, she didn't knowingly sign up to any consequentialist or material world-ending philosophies, she didn't knowingly rip a hole in the fabric of reality to create a brave new one. Maybe what she did was reckless or foolish or ill-considered (and now I'm getting flashbacks to the end of Innocence which may be just what Joss intended all along).
Whatever, "you became a figure head for the forces against me, organized them so they'd thoroughly defeat me, stood by while they killed hundreds of my girls, all so that you could get me to become what you wanted to be" is just another way of saying crazed villain and hence not what I think Buffy is thinking. It looks to me as if what she's focussing on is the sense making part of Angel's account of himself where he says what he was doing was making himself a figure head for the forces already ranged against her in order to divert them from making the 206 a round 500 and much sooner. True she's not pushing him on why he didn't do a better job of it but my reading is that she's more consumed by the godawful mess she's made of her girl's lives (and I've pointed out too many times where that's textual). The allusion he makes to "while I push" gets lost in the confusion over not pushing her to soak up power from her dead friends. The bottom line is that none of this makes intellectual sense. Not to the readership but we have the luxury of being able to wait and see what the full back story is. The characters don't and rather than trying to figure out why two plus two now equals the square root of minus one they make decisions based on what does add up what makes emotional sense since intellect is no help. Who knows what the hell Angel's plan was but he's not talking like a big bad, he's not trying to persuade her that killing those girls was necessary for some greater good, he's still talking about it as an unavoidable evil, he's still talking like someone who cares that the world got messed up (apparently) by her changing it and was trying to do something, however cockeyed, to fix it. Towards the end, he's talking like someone who's just as confused and at the mercy of unholy forces as she is.
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Whatever, "you became a figure head for the forces against me, organized them so they'd thoroughly defeat me, stood by while they killed hundreds of my girls, all so that you could get me to become what you wanted to be" is just another way of saying crazed villain and hence not what I think Buffy is thinking. It looks to me as if what she's focussing on is the sense making part of Angel's account of himself where he says what he was doing was making himself a figure head for the forces already ranged against her in order to divert them from making the 206 a round 500 and much sooner. True she's not pushing him on why he didn't do a better job of it but my reading is that she's more consumed by the godawful mess she's made of her girl's lives (and I've pointed out too many times where that's textual). The allusion he makes to "while I push" gets lost in the confusion over not pushing her to soak up power from her dead friends. The bottom line is that none of this makes intellectual sense. Not to the readership but we have the luxury of being able to wait and see what the full back story is. The characters don't and rather than trying to figure out why two plus two now equals the square root of minus one they make decisions based on what does add up what makes emotional sense since intellect is no help. Who knows what the hell Angel's plan was but he's not talking like a big bad, he's not trying to persuade her that killing those girls was necessary for some greater good, he's still talking about it as an unavoidable evil, he's still talking like someone who cares that the world got messed up (apparently) by her changing it and was trying to do something, however cockeyed, to fix it. Towards the end, he's talking like someone who's just as confused and at the mercy of unholy forces as she is.