Another side I'm interested in is the way a meta essay plays into all this. I've written some fics that have allowed me to see the characters in new ways, and then I wrote meta about it. Vice versa, I'm sure it's possible to sit down and write an essay about Angel, and come away with a new way of looking at the character that thereafter, goes into and affects all your fics.

I'm glad that you brought up Meta, because I don't really write fic... but I did spend a lot of time meta-ing and eventually putting up a few "Grand Unified Theory" type posts as a way to systematize what my meta was... to basically find framework/template to view the shows as springboard for future discussion and reference points on them.