Characters I Care About, Even When I Don't

I got involved in a discussion recently about Angel & Faith, and the other person mentioned they didn't care about the other Slayers Faith is mentoring at all. I found that I sort of agreed with this, but not entirely.

I don't care about any of them as characters, in the way I do about Faith, or even Angel (who I would mostly like to see take a baseball bat to the face repeatedly). Other than Nadira (the Slayer hellbent on finding Angel and killing him), I don't even know their names.

The thing is, I do still care about them, but it's because Faith does. Whether she wants to or not, Faith has assumed responsibility for them. In that sense, I do care about them. Faith struggles with the fact that all anyone ever seems to want from her is wetwork. Kill this, kill that, do the work no one else can be bothered to soil their hands with. The Slayers (and Angel) are Faith's attempt to do something positive that doesn't involve violence. If Nadira gets consumed by vengeance, or one of the other Slayers gets killed by Pearl and Nash (or some random villain), it's going to bug Faith. She's going to feel like she failed again.

I would like to see Faith have some warm, fuzzy success for once, and that means the Slayers need to come through whatever lies ahead largely unscathed. So I do sort of care about them, even if I couldn't pick a one of them out of a lineup.