YMMV / Buffy The Vampire Slayer S 6 E 16 Hells Bells

• Creator's Pet: Xander, once again, as the stand-in for Joss himself, gets to leave Anya at the altar in an incredibly hurtful way and get treated as sympathetic because a completely unreliable source made him worried about abusing her in the future. Joss seems to want the fans to accept this as being reasonable if misguided, but many fans do not.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • D'Hoffryn soothes a piqued Halfrek by telling her that he loves all of his girls equally. He'll end up killing her on a whim just to spite Anya, not at all concerned with his minion's passing because We Have Reserves.
  • Xander is shown a vision of himself in the future, in which he loses his temper and attacks Anya with a frying pan. In 2015, Nicholas Brendon was arrested for choking his girlfriend during an argument.
• Magnificent Bastard: Stewart Burns is one of Anya's many victims who desires revenge for her actions. After spending eight decades in a hell dimension due to his philandering ways, Stewart returns to Earth on the day of Anya's wedding and decides to ruin it. After crashing the wedding, Stewart confronts Xander and pretends to be his future self, presenting him with a horrifying future in which Xander attacks and kills Anya after years of an unhappy marriage. Xander then flees the wedding, and as it descends into chaos, Stewart confronts Anya, eventually attacking her. Although he's killed by Buffy and Xander, Stewart's scheme leads to Xander walking out of the wedding, permanently ruining Anya's life and undoing all of her attempts to feel human.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: While many fans do sympathize with Xander's worries about getting married considering his family history, it's almost universally agreed upon that him leaving Anya to announce to the wedding guests that the wedding was off was a major jerkass move.

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