Thought I'd log in for the first time in years and saw that my inbox was flooded with hate anons by angry Merlex shippers from years ago because I always insisted that Alex and Meredith were like brother and sister and that their relationship shouldn't be romanticized.
Well, they completely ruined my favorite character with his terrible ending, but I guess I at least ended up being right about him and Meredith? Which wasn't that hard if you know those two characters at all and aren't blinded by some idea that they'd be a good couple.
I just hope that viewers (new or old) will keep being upset about what the writers did to Alex in his last episode. He never would've left his wife the same way Izzie left him, not when that hurt him so much for years. There's so much wrong with his actions in that episode that I could write a whole novel about it and I'm glad that there seemed to be such a big outcry when the episode aired. That shows me most viewers knew him better than I thought.
Yes, I personally liked him most with Jo, but I always expressed my opinions on this blog as an Alex fan, not as a shipper. I still stand by the fact that the writers did a big (in my opinion negative) shift in his characterization after season 10 so he could become Meredith's next Cristina, and that 16x16 is an awful episode that didn't do justice to the man Alex was. Both are examples of the writers thinking more about other characters and therefore sacrificing Alex's character to fit their narrative. If they had done what was best for him and had stayed true to the person Alex was, he probably would've had children with Jo by season 13, making it impossible for Krista Vernoff to send him off the way she did.
I will never understand how the writers managed to write such a complex and interesting character without really caring about him. It was blatantly obvious for years that nobody in the writers' room ever seemed particularly interested in Alex. They either cared more about the characters he was friends with or his love interests. Which is the reason I sadly can't stand behind everything he did or said on the show, because I know a true Alex fan would've never written him the way the writers sometimes did. I still love him so much and choose to pretend the laughable tribute episode for him never happened. But I'm also done with the show. It caused me nothing but annoyance for years, and I genuinely wonder how fans can still be happy with the writing.