As everyone else has said, this was a very good and insightful essay, and I have to agree with you about many points of it. However, I think you've left out an important aspect of Andrew's character; his seeming total inability to grow up and take responsibility for his actions. When he suddenly became a member of the scooby household I was appalled. It certainly wasn't the first (or last) time a murderer became part of the gang, but when Willow, Anya, Faith, Giles, and to a certain extent Buffy herself, killed people or did bad things they were able to acknowledge that and feel remorse. Yes, in Storyteller, Andrew cries over what happened, but Buffy was literally holding a knife to his throat at the time. On the other hand, the other characters were able to feel crappy about what they'd done without being threatened by an outside authority, even if it took them awhile to do it. Riley was not a good Buffy boyfriend, although, in my opinion all of them sort of sucked as boyfriends, and Kennedy was an irritating bully, but Andrew was genuinley abhorrent.