[Charmed Slayer Angel]

Her eyes

[starryeyesxx]

That was a pretty shot of her

[Charmed Slayer Angel]

Agreed!

[starryeyesxx]

Do you like that episode for her?

[Charmed Slayer Angel]

I enjoyed it, yes

[starryeyesxx]

I don't think the storyline was the best, but I guess it was a rite of passage for her

[Charmed Slayer Angel]

It was It's far better than having nothing

[starryeyesxx]

Yeah, it was nice to see her first kiss & kinda first boyfriend

[Charmed Slayer Angel]

Indeed Character development!

[Tech Noir]

I tried to mentally prepare myself for Dawn when I reached S5 in my rewatch. I know it’s a pop culture cliché to rag on poor Dawn, but even with that in mind, I found it painfully haaaarrrrd to not find her annoying. I think for me it was two things: one, she behaved waaaaayyyy younger/babyish than her age; two, I could empathize with Buffy’s frustration in that everybody was coddling Dawn, enabling her to be a helpless damsel that was going to get people injured or killed; also, I wasn’t down with how everyone kept asking Buffy to cut Dawn some slack, especially when Buffy had good reason to be upset.
Though, Buffy does seem to soften up on Dawn after she finds out she is not her real sister, that Dawn is the key.

I’m half way through s5, so I'm going to try my best to be chill as I watch more of Dawn’s scenes, but I can’t make any promises!

[Charmed Slayer Angel]

Nothing wrong with finding her annoying honestly I think a good many of us found her to be like that. With time, some of us have come to understand why she was written that way (realism/behind the scenes changes). I didn't really enjoy her character early on, but she's grown on me

A lot of people don't know that Dawn was supposed to be much younger than she was on the show in Season 5. By the time they'd changed that, the scripts had already been written, and the writers admitted later on they had issues doing rewrites of it.

[starryeyesxx]

I agree that they wrote her as younger than she is & that definitely was a problem with her character in the first half of s5....I think the other part of the problem was that obviously a lot of people who watch this show love Buffy, then suddenly Dawn shows up & is ragging on her all the time....not many characters introduced that way are going to be very popular!

[Tech Noir]

Thanks. I just didn’t want to inadvertently offend any Dawn fans since this is an appreciation thread. Also, thanks for the background info about the character and the writers. That helps!

As I continued my rewatch of s5, there were moments where Dawn was all right, but then I was back to “Really?!” It’s like I was on a little roller coaster ride with her. But I did find myself easing up on her, especially during the S5 finale, where she was willing to die in order to close the portal and thus save humanity.

[Charmed Slayer Angel]

I'd like to think we're all pretty level headed here

Yeah. Honestly, post-Season 5, the writers truly didn't seem to have much of an idea of where to take her character sadly

[starryeyesxx]

I think that they lost their way with her too, it's like sometimes they wanted her to be like a Buffy jr. but then they'd go the other way & wanted her to be completely different. I liked her role in s7 though, as a watcher in training