"The first day of kindergarten you cried because you broke the yellow crayon and you were too afraid to tell anyone."
Willow broke it. That detail matters. Xander didn’t take the blame or make himself the hero. He remembered something small and shameful that she did, carried it for years without her knowing, and brought it back at the end of the world as evidence of love. The love is in the remembering.
I have been thinking about that scene for a long time. I have been thinking about it differently since Nicholas Brendon died.
Xander Harris is not an easy character to love. He wasn’t easy to love in 1997 and he is harder to love now. The show built him as the heart—the ordinary human grounding the Scoobies in something recognisable, whose love holds even as everything else fractures. That construction is generous. It is also doing work the show never fully examined.
His niceness is conditional in ways that took me years to see clearly. His love for Buffy contains a possessiveness the show frames as loyalty. He is harder on Angel, on Riley, on anyone who has what he wants. His treatment of Cordelia, whom he cheats on, and Anya, whom he leaves at the altar, reveals someone better at loving people in theory than in practice. Better at the grand gesture than the sustained commitment. Better at showing up for the apocalypse than for the ordinary Tuesday.
None of this was visible to me at fifteen. At fifteen, Xander Harris was the one I recognised. The kid without special gifts who stayed anyway. The yellow crayon scene felt like proof that you didn’t need power to matter.
"You've come pretty far; ending the world, not a terrific notion. But the thing is, yeah. I love you."
Here was the argument for ordinary love.
I still believe that. I believe it more carefully now.
The Writers' Room, 1997
There is a detail in Buffy’s production history that I still can’t sit with comfortably. Early on, one of the Scoobies was meant to be gay. The choice was between Willow and Xander. The show chose Willow.
Willow Rosenberg’s coming out arc is one of the most carefully handled pieces of queer representation in mainstream television. Her relationship with Tara is built with patience and treated as real. That arc mattered. It mattered to a generation of queer viewers. It mattered to me.
But I keep thinking about Xander.
If the show had chosen him, the character reads differently. The possessiveness toward Buffy becomes something else. It becomes a performance of desire because it is the only script available. The “nice guy” grievance, the way he relates to the women around him as objects of protection and potential romance rather than people with their own interior lives, shifts when you read him as a closeted gay man without language for what he is.
"I loved crayon-breaky Willow, and I love scary, veiny Willow."
If Xander is gay, that love goes everywhere because it cannot go where it needs to. The yellow crayon becomes the love letter he couldn’t send, given instead to the one person he has always been allowed to love safely.
I am not claiming this is the true reading. Only that it is available, and that sitting inside it reveals something about what the show was building that it may not have fully understood. On a show about outsider identity and chosen family, Xander is the one who fits least comfortably into his own storyline. The what-if isn’t a correction. It’s a question the show left open.
What I Know
"So if I'm going out, it's here."
What I know about Nicholas Brendon is this: he struggled. Publicly, repeatedly. Addiction. Mental health crises. Legal trouble. The specific difficulty of being fixed in a role that defined him and that he could never quite leave behind.
I also know that he abused women. The women in his life experienced physical, verbal, and emotional abuse at his hands. That is not a footnote. It is not a complication to be weighed against the yellow crayon and resolved in his favour. It is a fact about who he was to the people closest to him.
The grief I feel at his death is real. It is also complicated. There is grief for Xander, for what he meant to me at fifteen, for the yellow crayon and what it gave me about ordinary love. There is something harder alongside that grief: the knowledge that the man who played that scene went home to people he hurt. That the hands that reached toward Willow were also hands that caused damage in private.
I do not know how to reconcile those two things. I am not sure reconciliation is the right frame. What I know is that both are true, and that collapsing one into the other, forgiving the man because of the character, or dismissing the character because of the man, would be a different kind of dishonesty.
The victims of his behaviour are real. They existed alongside the yellow crayon. Before and after it. Any version of this essay that ignores them is not an honest essay. It is a fan letter dressed as criticism.
Both Things
"You wanna kill the world, well then start with me. I've earned that."
What do you do with love that doesn’t simplify?
You hold it. Without resolving it into something cleaner than it is. You let Xander Harris be the heart of the show and the character who gave you something about ordinary love, and you let him also be the character whose niceness was conditional, whose possessiveness was real, who might have been different if the show had made another choice. You let Nicholas Brendon be the man who played that scene with genuine feeling and the man who hurt people who trusted him. You let both be true without using one to erase the other.
The yellow crayon belongs to Xander. The scene belongs to the show. The meaning it made, the fifteen-year-old in Tasmania with the volume down, the queer kid who needed proof that ordinary love could save something—belongs to the people who received it.
Willow broke the crayon. Xander remembered it. He carried it for years and brought it back when it was the only thing left that could matter.
That is still what love looks like at its best. The remembering. The showing up. The willingness to stand in a field at the end of the world with nothing to offer except your presence and the history of your attention.
That still means something.
I am still working out what.