Despite what the icon says, I find that mostly I just don't care much about Xander. I find his icky oversexualization way disturbing, but I'm similarly disturbed by just about every other guy of comparable age on TV, so I'm not sure how meaningful it is.

Mostly: he's a nice flavor in the narrative soup. He carries important weight as comic relief (yes, even when he isn't actually funny) and the person most likely to freak out at freaky things (so, kind of like Wash that way). He's useful.

However, I'm not interested in him as either a protagonist or an antagonist (which Spuffy fics occasionally like to cast him as); I'd really just rather ignore him and focus on the interesting characters.