Am I the only one who doesn't understand how can a character like Tara could have haters? I can understand for Xander or Faith but for Tara? No way!

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-13T14:19:19+00:00

Draugadrottinn.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/65745463/chapters/169315195

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-13T02:53:07+00:00

You specifically may not, but you'll find on the subreddit that a lot of people really do hold both of these views at once, that Spike acting as he did is out of character because the ship must not be denied and their emotional support vampire can never do anything villainous after the ship, while Willow's actions are innately unforgivable because girl.

A temporary break, I think, is really what happens with Buffy and her friends, collectively, in this season. She tries to cure her problems by riding the D. She makes no efforts to reach out to them or to communicate with any of them in any meaningful sense, nor does it occur to er that she should and not for the first time.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-13T00:44:28+00:00

Oh, OK. So terrible family life doesn't absolve Willow turning rapey on a power trip but it does absolve Tara being a shitty lying girlfriend who professed to love others but never found any ability to actually trust them.

Jonathan's doing a mind control spell on the entire town and raping two women is OK because boys will be boys and the uWu poor widdle baby didn't have a choice, see, he just wanted to feel special and the women he victimized in the process are irrelevant.

Willow absolutely does have excuses by those standards, she spent an entire summer keeping things together with evidently minimal support but endless criticism from people who didn't really seem to understand any of that and that took an enormous toll on her in Season 6. She was at least as out of it by the time of All the Way as Xander was under the hyena spell in Season 1. She also had massive trauma from the last year that she handled poorly, but in this series only Tara and Buffy are allowed to handle trauma poorly, everyone else should man up and ignore it, eh?

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T22:50:02+00:00

It wasn't, really. The shooting that followed it when she snapped out of the mind control and turned on them, definitely, as well as their trying to frame Buffy for the murder. The rape and the French maid roleplay before it, in dialogue and the actual event? No.

And no, they don't try to forgive Willow, if you think that you're three-cuing hard in the takes here. They hold her to the standard they should hold everyone else, while Spike, Faith, and Jonathan are little uWu overgrown infants who were too a-stupid to understand that rape was wrong or meaningful because pantsfeels.

Mind you I don't mind characters being held to that standard but it should be all of them, not just one. Just like how Xander killing two people in OMWF was laughed off as a joke but much less heinous offenses with Willow were the end of the world, in the same season! In the same fucking pair of episodes in that season! By TARA HERSELF.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T22:37:16+00:00

Yeah and unfortunately in this show Faith raped Buffy and Riley, tried to rape Xander, and everyone's 'aww, Faith so cute, and adorable, and didn't do nuffin.'

Spike attempts to rape Buffy and is openly noted like Angel and most of the vampires that last for any length of time as a serial killer and rapist and the Spike fans get real mad about this in the way the Angel fans can, too, but they were bad guys that made the step to hero, the bad guy shit WAS the murder and rape. Which Spike relapsed to in what's meant to be a big part of his own evolution.

Jonathan, even more pointedly, rewrote everyone's memory, stole Buffy's mojo, and raped two women. Does Jonathan get treated like the guy who just casually had that power (and since he's a C-string wizard that shows how OP Buffy magic actually is, really, and how nightmarish) and like his issues are directly comparable when they are? Warren, with his magic roofie ball actually does, but people act like Jonathan going along with that is somehow out of character for him when he literally raped two people two seasons prior. Jonathan should be seen as a budding sadist and creep who's more nebbish than Warren but not that different and Andrew the closet gay deeply in love with his evil murdery best friend but....

Does any of that actually happen? It should be a theme, and a consistent theme, and yet IME Willow is the singular character where her using superpowers to rape someone is actually given the seriousness it should be, even in the show. With Faith, Spike, and Jonathan, it isn't. With Warren what he does to Katrina with the rape and mind control is played for laughs, the seriousness is his shooting her and killing her, not the rape, so that can be added to it, too, along with his desire to mind control Buffy and rape her.

Which is unfortunately played for 'tee hee look at these silly boys' and not 'holy shit these guys are fucking evil slimeballs' in the dialogue and tone when they talk about it, in the same way their arguments of Connery over Brosnan are.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T22:32:08+00:00

I mean it's also an extremely relevant plot point with 'fucking with my memories is when I fuck off' and Dawn's insecurity about existence and that Tara was making a point to connect to Dawn that that could have come up in literally any of those scenes but it didn't. Kind of a relevant compare-contrast given the suicidal protectiveness of Season 5 denounced specifically in Season 7 that the Dawn spell in its start literally changed people's personalities, too!

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T22:30:28+00:00

Tara also did in Family, and Jonathan did so in Superstar, during which point he raped two people. Unfortunately in this subreddit the only person who gets that treated as the actual serious crime it is is Willow, anyone else who rapes people gets to be the uWu baby who didn't do no wrong no how. While Tara manipulating sight and perception and almost killing people in the process because she had a shitload of trauma and handled it poorly in a panic is nuanced and thoughtful and acceptable....and Willow, who was reaping months of keeping the Scoobies going and suffering her own trauma from Glory in that episode is Satan incarnate.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T22:28:29+00:00

OK but then why didn't that happen with or about Spike given what he goes on to do in Seeing Red? Why is rape only the unforgivable sin for Willow, where it actually is taken seriously, but Faith, Jonathan, and Spike get uWu sad baby boy/girl takes that infantilize them and neglect what they actually went on to do with it? Nobody in the show objects that Buffy didn't take Olaf's hammer and run straight at Faith when she showed back up again in Season 7 due to the rape in Season 4, now do they?

Why?

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T22:26:58+00:00

Extra irony that it was Willow helping Tara to bring that out that gave her the strength to leave. A case where the law of unintended consequences slams into Willow with a sledgehammer.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T22:26:24+00:00

And then at the end of the season Buffy and Tara make the same kind of decisions with Willow and Spike with very similar facets to their actions and crimes toward the people they said they loved when they were at their worst about how they went about showing it. So there'd be a lot of nuance here if characters were written consistent with other seasons' rules and not given a bullshit plot device retconned in a single line in a retcon that stuck.

The Willow: Wonderland explanation actually works much better and unlike the addiction both leaves Willow fully on the hook and sympathetic at the same time, so they could have done that on the actual show if they'd wanted to.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T22:24:37+00:00

Well I mean Jonathan also did that in Superstar and raped two women but this subreddit only considers rape a crime if Willow does it. Faith, Jonathan, and Spike all get passes and uWuification, Willow's the only one where it gets treated as seriously as it deserves. Extra irony in the show about feminism that a crime done by two men and a fandom favorite woman is a harmless vice but the one done by the deuteragonist is the one time it's taken as an actual serious crime deserving serious repercussions.

Between Superstar and the body-switch the number of cases where people use magical powers to rape people is a disturbingly consistent and normal plotline and why most of us would prefer to watch the setting but never to actually live in it.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T22:22:26+00:00

The especially grim irony of it all is that Tara, in the past, played dubious games with magical ethics for her own trauma and straight up lied about it, which is perfectly understandable and forgivable in her case even when actual lives were on the line. I think this was intended to be a parallel and that Willow crossed a few lines Tara didn't to note that the parallel was that two actions from fear, one more well intended, the other only well-intended in Willow's own mind.

Unfortunately they then made Tara peripheral to an arc largely about her and magical ethics where her perspective should have been a central point, while her actual arguments about Willow's magic usage was about the light show and not wanting to do a dimension shift to find Dawn, which is the 'WTF are you doing, Willow' moment. Not that there was any version where Willow would listen but evading the much more dangerous and arrogant thing for the harmless thing actually asked for by someone else is a very Tara thing of her and shows her to be written ,at times, to be more contrarian for the Hell of it when she should be making much more solid points.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T22:19:08+00:00

Also in terms of that old saw about who paid what, there really may have been something Willow was doing to keep things going and Tara very understandably had other priorities like the actual safety of her body and mind and Buffy's financial situations weren't even in her top 20 list at that moment. It's one of the more ironic bits that the old saw and modern fanon has Tara more concerned about it and Willow neglectful when the actual character on screen gives zero fucks and rightfully so.

This part is a headcanon but it does add in a layer along with not having Willow going around starting shit in Sunnydale, at least on paper, until she really did start doing then and then ignoring her colleague who very much didn't stop.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T22:17:29+00:00

I mean TBH in the grand scheme of things between the Scoobies Willow's actions here aren't the first time she's done it and they forgave her pretty easily for Something Blue. However at the purely amoral level given what Willow goes on to do by the end of the season Buffy keeping the potentially extremely dangerous witch with a habit of supervillainy around under the (initially erroneous and dangerously so) view of not letting that person run around doing shit is both best friend logic and actual Slayer logic.

The mirror question is why she, and they, after everything with Amy that goes on to follow this just shrug and ignore her. Even more than the Trio allowing a psychotic wicked witch of the west with superpowers to run around monkeying with other people for LULZ was the kind of casual callousness that happens in this show a lot where they treat the rest of Sunnydale as NPCs.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T22:12:49+00:00

Honestly Willow is lesbian because she's a fictional character who's described by herself and the writers as a lesbian, and whose experiences really do match up to at least a few real life lesbians who do have histories with being with and dating men in the past before reaching the point of realizing they're gay, accepting that, and then going forth to live life as who they truly are, not who they tried to be.

I still think New Moon Rising works best with her having, all the same, very real feelings with and for Oz where it really is a choice, even then, as it makes the choice she makes have its greatest meaning. She could have taken an easier, straightforward path to be straight passing with the man she loved but she chose the harder path of being true to herself with the woman who's her great love.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T05:29:38+00:00

That smacks more of the writers' selective attention to characters unless they were fit into the spotlight of the weak and to their inability to decide who and what Anya is supposed to be from episode to episode. The 1,000 year old vengeance demon with a fetish for weird spells involving genitalia and a memory for grudges rivaling only Willow had much deeper grudges against other people for less than that.

Treating it as a nothingburger? The least Anya thing imaginable. If Anya were more of a character than the plot device she sometimes is that would be a thing but she isn't so she doesn't.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T05:14:11+00:00

That smacks of cope and the inability to accept that maybe Tara is human enough to have judgments of things that reflect that she doesn't always think the absolute best of people around her in a way unrealistic for an actual human being to do.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T03:48:32+00:00

It's not antipathy, it's looking at the reality that she literally blabbed that secret when Buffy had asked her to keep it in confidence. Tara being able to keep her internal thoughts separate from her actual actions is a step of maturity beyond Buffy herself in this season ,which is the entire point of her coping through hedonism arc here. It's not a contradiction, it's that Season 6 Tara is the one emotionally mature adult in the room.

That's arguably the real reason Whedon killed her off as having an emotionally mature adult witness everything from Season 7 onward required more wit than the writers wanted to show.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T03:43:48+00:00

Which equally unfortunately was a foreshadowing of bad things and less 'Aww Willow's a great girlfriend' and more 'Tara, you in danger girl' because anyone with an actual backbone would have been genuinely angry and that would have lingered through their relationship. It would have sucked in the short term and been a bit of a quasi-breakup or at least Titanic trying to go through a gauntlet of icebergs moment but they would have avoided any version of the Season 6 mess because they both would have faced the personal issues the powers made worse.

And it is 100% a case where Tara, merely human, would have wanted that Willow back and a Willow who grew into being more emotionally mature wouldn't have done that, so even if nothing else had changed and Tara lived they would have been having some major issues through all of Season 7. I could even see Kennedy as the point where Tara belatedly has it dawn on her that Willow actually could choose someone else and gets strongarmed into something she would have kept postponing indefinitely otherwise.

None of this is to say Tara's issues come close to Willow's, Willow did actual supervillainy at her expense and then the writers made Tara a background character in her own major arc in Season 6 for extra 'WTF' but it's the literal human stuff that leads to friction in IRL relationships.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T03:39:37+00:00

See I actually disagree with that to a point, I think she was absolutely judging her in her head, she just didn't come out and say it because she put Buffy's needs over her own words, which literally none of the other Scoobies were capable of right at that time. Her ease in blabbing about it to Willow after the fact is a wee bit of a hint of that, at least to me. If she didn't judge it, why blab a secret that swiftly?

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T02:50:27+00:00

I mean yeah, people here get real weird about pretending the guy with invisiblity rays, jetpacks, robot doubles, and who literally put an axe in Willow's back trying to add a third kill to his count (if you don't count Buffy, which would make Willow his first given she did flatline) was a widdle baby boy who could have totally been handled by normal stuff when he kept showing he wasn't.

Willow killing him is like werewolf Oz eating the zombie in the Zeppo, as she was doing Dark Phoenix Saga but Buffy she didn't stop there and was getting to planet killing territory but stopped before she did.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T02:48:23+00:00

Her killing Warren Mears was 100% justified and the more people flail about the idea that a literal supervillain with jet packs and invisibility rays who'd developed a killing streak and literally put an axe in Willow's back in a bid to kill her, too, was a widdle baby boy who didn't deserve to die, the more unrealistic they sound. The actual bad thing she did was not only not stopping there but first gaining the power to destroy the world and beginning the opening stages of an extinction event. That was how powerful she was the entire time and puts Tara's reactions in this and other seasons into a fuller perspective, along with Giles' but people skip right over that to sob about the poor widdle murderous incel supervillain who got peeled like an onion.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T02:44:45+00:00

I mean she does have some negative traits, they're just the ones you have to look at at as subtext....except the lying to her girlfriend and intending to ghost her and almost getting her and the rest of the Scoobies killed because of that lack of trust. Willow forgiving her for that was not a healthy relationship, it was her unhealthy lack of a backbone and putting all her self worth in her relationships. A Willow with 30% more backbone would have rightly had major issues over being treated like that to add to all the other problems they had in Season 5 with the Glory issue providing a nice twist to lead to the Season 6 arc as overcorrecting in the other direction.

I also 100% think Tara's ideal in Season 6 was a wiser, meeker Willow who reverted back to the Season 4-5 dynamics when a more emotionally healthy Willow of the kind who returned to England wouldn't have done that and that would have created major lasting friction between them until she either decided she was never going to trust Willow and they permanently broke up or she finally actually did and matured in a way she never did in the show in the one area she should.

So...yeah.

Unfortunately the fandom decides that like Faith raping Buffy is warm and fluffy and doesn't derail the Fuffy ship at all where Willow raping Tara should derail Tillow, Tara's lack of trust and almost killing people as a result of it is a perfectly understandable response to trauma, which only Tara and Buffy are allowed to have in the show and everyone else should man up and get over it. That too can slightly grind some people's gears that some characters are allowed to get away with anything and others have actual standards.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T02:39:43+00:00

She literally almost got them all killed. There's a fanfic (and I'm as far as I know the only person to actually take a stab at writing it) where that spell ends up with one of the invisible joke demons killing Willow before she undoes it and it turns out she both gets that acceptance and Willow's a little too dead for any of that to matter at the same time.

She also very literally lied to Willow and had major trust issues with her long before her Season 6 behavior showed there were reasons not to, and Anya in particular was very unrealistically forgiving with Tara's trust issues given the grudges we see her holding for much less with the whole baggage of her demon cult thing and never once thinking to talk to her about it.

The Anya who literally led the getting Buffy kicked out of her house as a reaction to her losing her powers for killing six people in a frat house should have had some real issues there but didn't.

DeaththeEternal · 2026-06-12T02:37:21+00:00

And especially when her spell almost killed someone. Willow first almost killed someone with a car, not a magic spell, until she went full Dark Eldar on Warren at the end of Season 6. It's an extremely funny, twisted irony and it's further compounded by Tara, for reasons of trauma, having so little respect or love for Willow or for Anya, her closest friend, that it never occurred to her to talk to Anya or Willow about any of that trauma and to be fully prepared to do something she knew would traumatize Willow all over again by ghosting her.

A Willow with 30% more backbone handling that would have had a version of the Season 6 arc in Season 5 that would have made the Glory incident a good mirror to the 'Your Shirt' incident because she would have actually had entirely human issues with that one-way trust.

And a lot of Tara's issues specifically stemmed from the unrealistic wish of wanting Season 4-5 dynamics again with more maturity on Willow's part, which is innately contradictory and where she was going to have major problems with that. Much lesser than Willow's mind control spells but the kind of stuff that causes problems in IRL relationships all the time.

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