What I loved and still love about Angel is that everyone involved, from the writers to the directors to Boreanaz himself, almost always saw him clearly and uncompromisingly and were honest with themselves about who he was, what kind of a character he was, and what his good and bad points were. As a result, I never felt that he was being shoved down my throat as a woobie, and I never felt that they were taking him too seriously--quite the opposite, in fact. They mocked him mercilessly, but with love. This meant that we saw him at his worst, again and again, and I believed it--we saw him at his best, and again, I believed it. Unlike a lot of other characters, in this and other fandoms, I never felt that TPTB were forcing a reaction from me, or manipulating me into feeling a certain way about him. They just let him be. As someone who's generally very wary of woobification, I really loved that.