GILES: But that’s the thrill of living on the Hellmouth! There’s a veritable cornucopia of … of fiends and devils and, and ghouls to engage. (everyone looks at him) Pardon me for finding the glass half full.

-“The Witch,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1-3)

CORDELIA: If there’s one thing I learned living on a Hellmouth: every day is precious, you never know when it may be your last.

-“Double or Nothing,” Angel (3-18)

ANGEL: I keep saying that. But nobody’s listening.

-“Epiphany,” Angel (2-16)

Angel is wrong. Nearly everybody is listening-and not just to him. We’re listening to all the heroic, fiendish, always complicated characters who populate the universes created by television impresario Joss Whedon. Listening to them is as close as we get to listening to Whedon-and we haven’t stopped listening since that day in 1997 when the premiere of Buffy the Vampire Slayer kicked off a pop culture domino effect that hasn’t yet subsided.

For Love of Joss

Maybe we started listening to Whedon because he was so darn much fun-but we kept listening, and we’re still listening hard, because he forces us to peer into the remotest corners of our own morally capricious, emotively turbulent world. And we like that. We like the scalpel’s-edge intensity of the Whedonverse, the way it mirrors and makes sense of our own treacherous plane of existence. We like confronting our darkness, even if, in doing so, we think we’re still just having fun.

Whedon’s works are compelling, even addicting.  …