Sometimes,Being the Pice Guy Isn't Worth It

Male characters in Joss Whedon shows usually come in one of two varieties; good, or bad. There is some variation within this spectrum, but the average character fits into one of those two things. Bad male characters are nasty, cruel, often intelligent, and are usually racist or misogynistic. Good male characters, on the other hand, are unsurprisingly the opposite: sweet, intelligent, kind, and accepting of gender, race, and class. Most of Joss Whedon’s male characters break the norms in some way (think Dr. Horrible) and are very reminiscent of the cool, kind of dorky guy you once knew in college. But if you like being alive or happy and in a relationship, you do not want to be a nice male character in a Joss Whedon show. Nice male character never live happy lives or have happy, healthy relationships.
    Joss Whedon has produced several TV shows over the course of his career, namely Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse. Of the main male characters, only one in all of these shows manages to have a relationship that ends happily. In Buffy, the major male characters are Giles, Xander, Angel, Oz, Spike, and Riley. Giles is Buffy’s mentor and Watcher, and is the librarian at the High School she attends. He has a romantic relationship with Jenny Calendar, the computer science teacher at Sunnydale High School, but she is brutally murdered by Angel in season two. Xander is Buffy’s best male friend, and has a series of romantic relationships which go nowhere. This is understandable early on in the series, since Joss Whedon has since admitted that he was originally planning to reveal that Xander was gay, but was unable to do so because the channel airing Buffy refused. Later, however, he is involved in a long term relationship with Anya, a vengeance demon turned human. Their relationship is far from stable; Xander proposes to Anya in Season 6, but leaves her at the altar. They get back together, but in the final episode of the series, Anya is literally split in two by a sword. Angel is Buffy’s first romantic interest, but he is cursed so that he can never be truly happy and still have his soul. This means that even though he loves Buffy and wants nothing more than to be with her, he cannot be with her. If he does, he will turn into a monstrous vampire that kills all of his friends. Oz is Willow’s first romantic interest, and he loves her dearly. But he is a werewolf, and cannot control himself when he changes. He breaks up with her to try and master his curse, only to return a season later to find her questioning her sexuality and beginning a romantic relationship with someone else. Spike is a vampire who has a long-term (read: centuries long) relationship with a vampire named Drusilla. She is mentally unstable, though, and leaves him repeatedly throughout the course of the show. He eventually gets the hint and leaves her, only to fall head over heels for Buffy. She isn’t keen on the relationship at first, but eventually they get together. She breaks up with him after about a season, though, and he spends the rest of the series trying to regain her trust. In the last episode, he burns to dust as Buffy tearfully tells him she does, indeed, love him. He responds by saying, “No you don’t, but thanks for saying it” and then dying. Finally, Riley is another of Buffy’s paramours. She meets him while at college, and they have a short and unmemorable relationship. He is an army guy that feels she will never love him, and simultaneously begins to let vampires feed off of him. He eventually annoys Buffy enough with his military-guy nonsense that she leaves him, and he stops showing up on the show.

Angel is a spin-off of Buffy, and the characters all follow the same trope. Firefly at first glance appears to be different; Wash, the aviator of the ship, is married to Zoe, the second in command. However, in the movie Serenity, Wash dies rather abruptly by getting stabbed through the chest with a giant piece of metal shrapnel after successfully landing the ship in the middle of a flesh-eating space zombie (called Reavers in the show) attack, and saving the rest of the crew. One of the characters in the show, Dr. Simon Tam, ends the movie on a romantically positive note (he has sex with the woman he’s pined the whole show over), but there is no talk of a relationship and it takes both of them getting horribly shot to admit their affection for one another.
There is an exception to every rule, and Joss Whedon is no exception. In Dollhouse, the character Victor/Anthony manages to have a lasting relationship with the character Sierra/Priya. However, this is only possible after Victor/Anthony leaves after Sierra/Priya has a child and she is left alone in a post-apocalyptic world for five years.