Xander Harris: Late S6

[itsnotmymind]

Since I first watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I've had an understanding of Xander's arc at the end of S6 that I've never seen acknowledged by anyone else. In some ways, this post could be seen as part of the feminist analysis of Xander I discussed here, but that was not my intention upon writing it. This is just me trying to put into words how I felt about Xander when I first watched Entropy through Grave.

Despite insecure masculinity and the usual teenage angst, Xander was a very competent member of the Scooby gang in high school. Upon reaching adulthood, Xander's status downgraded. He lived in his parents’ basement while his two best friends were attendomg college, following the expected path to success. His fellow Scoobies, Willow in particular, gained power while Xander became less and less relevant. In season five, he finally got out of his parents' basement and got a job and an apartment, but his main success was his relationship with Anya. Naturally, this lead to a marriage proposal.

And to a wedding that he didn't go through with. Xander was simply not ready for marriage, and the shadow of his father and his parents' miserable marriage was enough to keep him from actually marrying Anya. Anya, unsurprisingly, didn’t appreciate being dumped at the altar and then told, in essence, “We can still date." That relationship was over.

While Anya’s attempted murder of Xander in Entropy is one of the most horrifying actions of any character on the show, Entropy also marks a low point for Xander. He tried to kill Spike, simply because Spike slept with the woman Xander left at the altar. Then Xander reamed Anya out in needlessly vile terms: “You let that evil, soulless thing touch you. You wanted me to feel something? Congratulations, it worked.[...]I look at you ... and I feel sick. 'Cause you had sex with that.”

And then he found out that Anya wasn't the only woman in his life who had slept with Spike.

When Buffy reached out to Xander in Seeing Red, his initial reaction was all about himself. His intense hypocrisy (telling Buffy he never forgot who Spike was when he let Spike take care of Buffy's little sister; telling Buffy off for sleeping with a murderer who refrains from killing due solely to outside forces as if he hadn't just almost married one) has literally made me swear at the screen on at least two different watches. Buffy and Xander's conversation ends on a bitter note.

And then Xander encounters Warren in a bar.

I knew from the first time I watched this episode that this scene with Warren was significant, but I've never been able to quite put my finger on why. I think it's a weakness of Xander's late S6 arc that this isn't clearer. In the scene, Warren's being the bad guy, and Xander tries to play the hero. Warren slut shames Anya, which provokes Xander into hitting him. The whole exchange is a mess of macho man insults (“You hit like a girl.”) and mocking each other’s ability to make it with the opposite sex (“See now, I think it's the daddy thing that's throwing her. 'Cause incest , not that sexy.”). As one would expect, powered-up Warren defeats Xander the super-power-free Scooby. The only thing that saves Xander from getting a serious beating is Jonathan, who has enough of a conscious and connection to Xander to convince Warren they have to go.

But Xander, for all his insecure masculinity, has one thing going for him: His respect for Buffy as the most badass person in the room. And, as Anya criticized him for in "I'll Never Tell", his first response to trouble is to make sure Buffy knows the story.

When Xander shows up at Buffy's, and sees Spike’s coat on the stairs, his first response is macho anger. “This what you call not seeing Spike anymore—” When he finds Buffy in the bathroom and realizes that Spike tried to rape her, his first instinct is to hunt Spike down, and presumably beat up and/or kill the vampire.

But Buffy says, “Please, just…don’t.” And he doesn’t. And that, to me, is the moment when Xander really starts to turn around.

At the end of the episode, Buffy and Xander hug and make up. Xander admits that Buffy might have told him about Spike “if I hadn't given you so many reasons to think I'd be an ass about it.” When Buffy observes that they’ve “all done things lately we’re not proud of”, Xander says, “I think I’ve got you beat,” a contrast to his nasty comment earlier about having not slaughtered half of Europe.

Then, Tara dies. Willow goes dark side, kills a man tries to destroy the world, and for the first time in a long time, Xander and Willow's arcs combine.

Xander and Willow have always loved each other. That never went away. The kiss on the forehead in The Body is one quiet remind of that. But by season 6, they’d drifted apart. Willow was a lesbian witch attending college. Xander was a solidly working-class guy living with a demon. But when Xander was just starting to crawl out of his dark hole, and Willow’s fell headfirst into hers, it’s him who brings her out of it. Buffy, fresh from her depression, not yet entirely out of it, a depression caused in part by Willow’s actions (“You're trying to sell me on the world. The one where you lie to your friends when you're not trying to kill them? And you screw a vampire just to feel? And insane asylums are the comfy alternative? This world? Buffy, it's me. I know you were happier when you were in the ground. The only time you were ever at peace in your whole life is when you were dead. Until Willow brought you back.”), was unable to do it.

But Xander and Willow always had a bond that even Buffy couldn’t quite touch. They’ve known each other longer than anyone save their families--and both of them have less-than-positive feelings about their families.

I don’t think Xander ever actually said the words “I love you” to a wide-awake Willow prior to Grave. The moment in Becoming Part 2 when he realized it himself is powerful--but I don’t think he ever said it directly to Willow.

Xander has loads of issues with masculinity. His life has fallen apart because he can’t play the stereotypical male role he thinks he is supposed to play. A role he can't fully embrace because he’s afraid of being a toxic macho man like his father. Telling his best friend that he loves her is the exact opposite of macho masculinity. He’s not being like his father. And furthermore, instead of being worthless and useless as he fears he is, he saves the damn world. And not with masculinity, but with love—an emotion generally categorized as feminine. He is useful by playing a more passive role. By being the peaceful person who talks the violent person down from their violence.

Comments

[baphrosia.livejournal.com]

This is an enjoyable, thought-provoking read.

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much!

[local-max.livejournal.com]

I really agree. I think that the Xander-Warren scene is important for the reasons you state, and I hadn't given thought before to how Xander tries to be the tough guy with Warren and fails. That gives more weight to the way he blames himself for failing to stop Warren ("I saw the gun..."). Xander's end of s6 arc always read to me this way, and that Xander becomes the hero by doing the exact opposite of what he had conceptualized as heroism is huge.

Xander actually has said he loves Willow before, but it's very rare, and the instances are fraught. In "Hell's Bells," they have this exchange, which I think is circumspect enough not to ruin the impact of "Grave" while still foreshadowing it:

WILLOW: Do you know how much I love you?
XANDER: Mmm ... 'bout half as much as I love you.

The one time I believe Xander outright says "I love you" to a conscious Willow is actually in "I Robot - You Jane," and it's very telling. In the teaser, Willow has a few more books to scan in, and says:

Willow: Xander, you wanna stay and help me?
Xander: (in disbelief) Are you kidding?
Willow: (taken aback) Yes, it was a joke I made up.
Xander: Willow, I love you, but bye! (leaves)
Willow: (calls after him) See you tomorrow!
Xander: (ignores her) Buffy, wait up!

Ouch. "Willow, I love you, but bye!" is as far as I'm concerned the definitive summing up of Xander's attitude toward Willow in the first two seasons; the major turning point comes with his "I love you" in "Becoming," but she's unconscious. Willow overhears Xander's telling Buffy he loves Willow BUT she's not a friend whose lips you think of in "Inca Mummy Girl." So "I love you, but" -- "I love you, but I don't want to be around you"; "I love you, but I don't find you attractive." There is always a "but," which indicates why Willow can never believe his love is unconditional until "Grave" (and ties in with why she does not believe that she deserves unconditional love from *anyone*).

In some ways, I wonder if "I love you. You know that, right?" from Buffy to Xander is really important for Xander to get to the place he needs to be with Willow. Because the initial Buffy/Xander/Willow triangle never goes away, it just gets transmuted -- by season six, the romantic angle has mostly fallen away, but Xander's fear that Buffy doesn't care about him and Willow's fear that Xander doesn't really care about her are still there.

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

I had forgotten about the other two times Xander tells Willow he loves her! But yes, the season 1 example is not, actually, the loving. The Hells Bells example does do a good job of foreshadowing Grave, I think. Also it shows them in a certain place that promptly gets derailed by Xander leaving Anya at the altar, Willow getting Tara back and losing her again, etc. etc., but then the end of Grave brings their relationship back on track.

Good point about Xander and Buffy. If the two of them had been in the place they were in at the beginning of Seeing Red when Tara died, things might have have gone very differently.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

I have a meta somewhere (not posted -- on my hard drive; I wrote it to a friend in PM) about Willow/Xander up to "Grave," and I'm never quite sure how much it's intended -- I do feel like there is an actual gulf between them that gets somewhat resolved in "Grave," but other people seem to interpret things as "they are always best friends," which doesn't quite seem right. I mean, they certainly are "best friends," and they say that, but I think that there is an emotional disconnect for a while. Certainly it surprises Willow that Xander is there for her in "Grave," and not without cause. She cares about him a lot, but I think she still feels his rejection years later, like "The Pack"!Xander is how he really feels about her, in spite of everything. I think Xander mostly doesn't know that, because even though he knew Willow was into him I don't think he really can process the idea that he can mean that much to anyone.

Which I think is still true post-"Hell's Bells"; that Anya really is more hurt by Xander leaving her than she is angry that he screwed up abstractly doesn't really occur to him, I think. It's a particular kind of self-centredness (not, I think, selfishness, at least not at this point). He knows he screwed up, because he is a screwup. But he really believes that he will hurt Anya by *hurting* her -- like, with violence, or at least with something like infidelity (ala Cordelia). I think that's part of why he jumps to the idea that Anya slept with Spike to punish him, because he knows he "deserves" to be punished. (One reason Anya is not *that* mad at Xander over the end of "Entropy" specifically -- she's mad over the not-wedding, but she doesn't really hold Xander's behaviour at the end of "Entropy" against him afterward IMO, is because she went to Spike with the intent of punishing Xander, so he is "right" that she wanted to hurt him, and she can't fully deny it, even though she genuinely was not trying to punish Xander with the sex itself (she had given up on punishing him by that point).) It's like Anya can't *really* have hurt feelings about Xander's abandoning her, because how could someone actually love him, so Anya must really just be purely vindictive. Which, you know -- his self-centredness at this moment is also such that he really does believe that the only reason someone could sleep with Spike is to hurt Xander, a bubble which finding out about Buffy/Spike bursts.

You know, I think people are down on Xander for being upset about Buffy/Spike, and understandably. But I think that emotions themselves are kind of value-neutral. It upsets Xander viscerally that Buffy slept with Spike. Why? Well -- Spike is a killer. Spike is not Xander. Xander has Buffy on a pedestal. Buffy didn't tell Xander about it. Xander felt foolish for thinking Spike was just crazy. Buffy was engaging in risky behaviour by sleeping with another vampire. The last time she was with a vampire the vamp nearly killed all of them. Lots of reasons, some nobler than others. But the point is it really bothers him -- and he can't actually help that. The problem is that Xander's initial reaction is to try to believe that his feelings are justified -- "I am upset, therefore I must have reason" -- but he also knows that he doesn't really have a moral high ground, hence some of the ambivalence and undirected anger and sarcasm at Buffy in "SR." In a weird way, the most important thing is to be able to recognize that it's okay to have feelings, even "wrong" feelings. Which is the same lesson Buffy is learning as well. When Xander says "It hurt" to Buffy at the episode's end, I think he's being as honest as possible -- he is trying in his way not to say "You hurt me by doing this and you are wrong," but "I felt hurt and I was a jerk as a result. I still hurt." And that is a step forward, because the feelings don't go away just because they shouldn't be there.

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

I think part of what makes Grave so powerful is that there has been that gulf between Willow and Xander. Yes, they love each other, they are best friends, etc., but there has also been drama and distance and it's not something that they are entirely sure of. And relationships change as we become adults. I think in S6, Xander and Willow are still the process of figuring out who they are, who they're going to become, and what their friendship will look like.

I remembering someone complaining about that first conversation between Xander and Buffy in Seeing Red, and Buffy tells him her personal life is not his business, and he says, "It used to be." And this fan was horrified that an adult would feel that his friend's personal life was his business.

And I disagree.

The way Xander reacted to finding out Buffy had been sleeping with Spike was very wrong. And he played a huge role in Buffy not wanting to tell him in the first place. Both of which he later acknowledged.

But feeling hurt because someone you are close to and seeing on a regular basis is not telling you about their relationships is not wrong, not in and of itself. Grieving lost closeness is not, in and of itself, a bad thing.

Xander is ugly in Entropy and the first part of Seeing Red. But I can totally see where he's coming from, and I love that he's so ugly and yet still so sympathetic.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

Agreed about Grave. And it's affecting because their lives have so totally collapsed at this point -- in a way that is actually somewhat similar when you step back from the differences. Xander only just found out that Anya was a demon again in "Villains," after all, and -- well, I doubt he's fully conscious of it now, but Anya's becoming a demon again might actually mean Buffy will have to kill her. Like Willow, Xander badly hurt a loved one, and now her human life is seemingly over. And it really does viscerally *feel* like it's all their fault, even though that's not wholly fair. (As badly as Xander hurt, I don't think it's really fair to pin D'Hoffryn's making Anya a demon again on Xander, and I don't think Tara's death is a natural consequence of Willow's abuse either.) A whole series worth of running from their fears stretches back.

And yeah, I agree with you. I guess we could say that Xander is simply *wrong* in saying "It used to be" -- that Buffy's personal life was never Xander's business. But I think Buffy and he were much closer before the gradual distance of this year, and it is fair to note that, to mourn it, and to *hope* that they can repair some of the damage. That he thrashes around angrily, grasping onto whatever he can think of that justifies his sadness as rage, is another story. But I really agree that he's really ugly in these eps in a recognizable and ultimately (to some!) sympathetic way.

[rebcake.livejournal.com]

I don't think Tara's death is a natural consequence of Willow's abuse either.

I always felt that Tara's death was the "price" for Buffy's resurrection. That the fawn was not considered payment enough for a Slayer, karmically speaking, so that somebody would have to die eventually to even the scales. Somebody of importance to the person asking the favor, most likely. Warren is the person responsible for Tara's death, no question. It was an unintended consequence of his sloppy attempt to kill Buffy and I think there is a case to be made that it was also an unintended consequence of Willow trying to cut corners on the resurrection spell.

That's a detour from the subject of Xander, though. I think you guys have highlighted some very interesting points. I definitely second the "feelings are neither right or wrong, they just are" statement. Here's a link to a discussion about Entropy, which is only part of the discussion here:

http://fantas-magoria.livejournal.com/354235.html

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link to that discussion! I think I'd read it before--some of it looks familiar--but it's nice to see it again.

I've heard that thought before, that Tara's death was a consequence of the resurrection spell (possibly from you? who knows!). It's not one of that really works with my worldview, so I tend to not incorporate it into my analysis of the show. I don't think it necessarily contradicts Buffyverse world building (such as it is), but it's not a fanon that I hold onto.

I think my discomfort from it comes from several different places, but here are two:

1. Willow was in charge of the spell, but Tara and Xander and Anya were full participants. They may not have known about the fawn, but they knew perfectly well that they were messing with reality, and they were not coerced. I guess they did all end up paying with Tara's death--it was something that affected all of them. But it just feels to me that it is something that should have more directly affected all of them.

2. Even if Willow is the only one who needs to pay...then why Tara? It's a problem I also have with the idea that Tara's death was payment for Willow abusing her. It's actually even worse if it's because Willow abused her--Tara needs to die to pay for her own abuse? It seems like if there is some kind of karmic force punishing Willow, it wouldn't take the form of killing Tara. Why not have Willow herself die?

[local-max.livejournal.com]

I have similar discomfort. That said, I think the theory makes sense if it's not karmic in the sense of "punishing for wrongdoing," but karmic in the sense of "Osiris requires one human life for one human life!" I currently don't believe the price of the resurrection thing literally, but I sometimes do, and in that case the forces which exact payment are amoral and disinterested in guilt -- it's a transaction, nothing more. As such it hardly matters who dies, except maybe that the death is linked to the resurrection somehow -- and one of the participants dying as a result of a bullet meant for Buffy qualifies.

My personal take is that "going against the natural order" is not intrinsically wrong and deserving of punishment; what is "the natural order" anyway? So the idea of a punitive death really rubs me wrong. However, I can see the case for an amoral, abstract power "exacting payment," because we don't have to believe this is somehow deserved, only a consequence. It's more about the unintended consequences of actions than the just deserts.

I still don't think I buy it as explanation right now though. I go back and forth.

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

I completely spaced on the fact that Tara was killed by a bullet meant for Buffy! And Willow was standing right next to her, so maybe in the grand scheme of things the bullet was supposed to hit Buffy and then it didn't so it was supposed to hit Willow and then it didn't so since Tara was there...?

But there's still such a distance between Buffy getting resurrected and Tara getting shot that I can't quite make a Watsonian connection.

On a Doylist level, I still tend to see it as more about the randomness of life than any kind of karma. Willow resurrects Buffy and then she just gets unexpectedly shot and killed a short time later anyway...oh, wait, she doesn't. Tara does. It's just cruel chance.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I mean, I agree. I had never thought of the fact that Tara stood in front of the path of the bullet -- which adds resonance to the idea.

Really though I think that the "price of resurrection" thing is most useful as a psychological element. I won't get into why right now, but I think her brain processes Tara's death as her fault, and that much of her freakout is an effort to make sense of/deny this instinctual reaction. Leftover guilt and uncertainty about the resurrection, which Osiris (or his representative, whoever) certainly makes a point of twisting the knife on, is a big component of that.

On the Doylist level I'm with you. The key is that saving Buffy did not take away the existence of death -- or even catastrophic, horrible, young death. Willow built up an arsenal of power to counter loss -- most recently upped considerably by the power required to restore Tara from Glory's mindsuck and then the power required to restore Buffy to life. And yet it still is not enough, and will never be enough. There is no ironclad defense against the senseless suffering of life.

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

I can see Willow thinking that way, perhaps not fully consciously. Tara was on her case about messing with nature, and Willow brought Buffy back anyway, and then she violated Tara and Tara left her, and then Tara came back to her and promptly died--killed by a bullet meant for Buffy. Factor in Willow's implied identification with Warren.

I can definitely see her thinking that Tara's death is her fault. It's almost the way a child thinks, but sometimes even the most grown up of adults think like children. And I don't think S6 Willow is the most grown up of adults.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I mean, maybe Tara shouldn't have forgiven her. Tara said something similar -- "You can't just have coffee and expect...." She'd still be alive if she hadn't gone back to Willow. Ghost Katrina summoned by Willow pleads to Warren, "You could have just let me go." And some of it is not even direct guilt but a sense that there is something unfair in the universe that Willow is still there and Tara isn't. "Now the one person who should be here is gone, and a waste like you gets to live." OK, said to Warren, but I don't think it's a big stretch that Willow is talking about herself....

Ironically, I think part of the reason Tara does get to the "Can we just skip all that?" stage with Willow is because death and loss is looming over everything. She starts her "Entropy" speech with "Things fall apart, they fall apart so hard," after all; two episodes ago Xander/Anya split maybe permanently and more significantly one episode ago Buffy unexpectedly nearly killed them all (which Tara had even less warning for than Willow, Xander and Dawn since she didn't even know about the demon poison/mental hospital hallucinations thing). Willow may well have died in that basement in "Normal Again" if Tara hadn't arrived (we don't know exactly on what schedule Buffy's turnaround would have happened with no outside interference). Forgiveness happens on a faster timetable when you or your loved ones could die any day, and you're reminded of that. The order is reversed; the message is not quite "Tara died suddenly because she went back to Willow," which is mistaking causation and correlation, it's (IMHO) "Tara went back to Willow because she realized they could die suddenly."

Anyway, that Willow blames herself for the events of "Tough Love" is pretty clear -- she yells "I'm so sorry" after Glory mindsucks Tara. And I think this is one of the signals for how to interpret later parts of the story. Willow failed because she a) got into a fight with Tara, b) left Tara alone, c) failed to come up with the right spell to clear the crowd, was too incompetent magically to get through to her in time. She won't make those mistakes again! Oops, it turns out avoiding all fights / keeping Tara close / ensuring she is magically hyperproficient didn't work out either.

Of course, it might actually be that I'm making this up as a way of compensating for the Willow-is-a-sociopath, Willow-has-no-guilt reads. Not that irrational guilt is an admirable trait.

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I've actually readings of Willow where she doesn't experience guilt. That does not fit with my understanding of the character. To put it mildly.

And I'm pretty it's explicit canon that Willow does feel guilty for Tara's death? (Unless she's faking! Mwahaha!) But I'm not sure it's ever made explicit that her guilt is linked to the mind wipes.

I had never thought about that as a motivation of Tara going back so quickly, her seeing people die around her. It would make sense, though. I have to admit I don't analyze Tara a lot because I'm not a huge fan of hers.

My problems with how Tara's return to Willow is handled are more Doylist than Watsonian. I know memory wipes don't happen in the real world, so it's less of an issue than, say, Seeing Red. But still, Willow did something horrible to Tara and it was never dealt with explicitly after Smashed (Or maybe Wrecked? All I know is that Will was still in the total denial phase.). We can debate about whether Willow-in-story understands what she did and/or regrets it, but the show itself never addresses the issue.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

I did partly write that at a time where I was more than a standard deviation away from my usual background levels of uncertainty. I do think most people believe Willow feels some form of guilt. But there's also a common interpretation of Willow as largely faking it. In my interpretation, it has some basis in fact -- she wants very badly to be good, sometimes more than she actually is, and feels a need to project a version of herself slightly more. It's a bit like the point you made about Buffy.

But anyway. I agree on the Doylist problem. I do think that Willow's "Wrecked" breakdown is meant to signal acknowledgment that she did wrong in the memory spell. But it mashes different issues together. Tara left because Willow did magic on Tara, which means it's true that "it started before she left, it's why she left" re: excessive magic use. But it's also a very specific issue. They were arguing about Willow's magic use and Willow made the argument go away. Willow conflates the two, as if without using magic she is no longer capable of manipulation. And it's not wholly wrong -- first of all because her primary tool of manipulation is magic, second because if Willow's intense psychological reliance on magic is addressed in some way she doesn't need to hide from Tara. But it's also an issue about how Willow deals with conflict.

It seems to me that Willow's denial-ish lesson from "Wrecked," as is typical, is Willow being too hard and too easy on herself. By identifying magic as the problem, she is letting herself off the hook for what she did, of course. That's way too easy. But by giving up magic she is also implicitly giving up her entire side of the argument with Tara, and implicitly changing everything about herself in order to get Tara back. In order to avoid the evils of mindwiping Tara to avoid an argument, Willow will now avoid an argument by capitulating entirely.

Now, I don't want to overstate the "capitulation" case, because actually she almost got Dawn killed through selfish hedonism magic (instead of the usual "magic which is at least rationalizable as being for a greater good") and that really is the primary thing that changes Willow around, and I do tend to think that she would have tried to fix herself and make herself better, and probably ditched magic, without the argument with Tara. But it is also, like, Willow on some level retreats from angrily defending her right to make whatever party decorations she wants to more of a supplicant position to Tara, which still hasn't dealt with the issue that she has built up no coping mechanisms for actual conflict.

I do absolutely wish the show had dealt with the mindwipes more explicitly. But I also see the advantages of the way the show played it Watsonianly. And I think that it does give some payoffs. I do think that ghost-Katrina's taunts to Warren are meant to reflect Willow's guilt about Tara --

KATRINA: How could you say you loved me, and do that to me?
TARA: How could you, Willow? How could you after what Glory did to me?

And while s7 drops a lot of balls, I do appreciate the way Willow lets Kennedy go at the end of "Get It Done" without panicking or insisting that they need to resolve their dispute or appealing desperately to her (ala the way she needily hangs off Oz looking for forgiveness in "The Wish") or sulks away with end-of-the-world thoughts ala "Tough Love" (or, obviously, violates her), nor does she completely rebuild her whole identity in an effort to make up for wrongdoing (ala "no handholding ever" rules with Xander in "The Wish" or some of her cold-turkey self-makeover in s6).

[local-max.livejournal.com]

Anyway. The mindwipes should have been dealt with on a Doylist level. They shouldn't be forgotten. And yet, most of the time I am okay with the show's strategy of prioritizing mythic elements, and paying off arcs in unexpected ways. The part of Willow that hasn't taken responsibility for the mindwipes is the part that is repressed and comes out in her Dark self. Which I am okay with, except on days where I'm not.

Anyway, I don't ultimately know if it was a bad decision for Tara to go back to Willow. Probably. Willow still hadn't "learned," but then they couldn't have anticipated that bullet, and the risk seemed to be gone. Tara admits that it's skipping important steps, so I do think that it's implied that it's the wrong decision, but I think that the show is a little more hands-off and ambivalent about it, which I mostly appreciate. Willow's rampage undermines the happy ending in "Entropy," but it does not necessarily mean that it was wrong. So I go back and forth between "the show is demonstrating that Willow is dealing with a symptom and not the cause" and "the show is demonstrating that incremental progress can be followed by extreme backsliding," both of which are true, but which imply different readings of Tara's going back to Willow. I tend to think that Willow and Tara might have muddled through if a period of sufficient calm, without intense tragedy, had passed, and Tara did wait until Willow had demonstrated serious willingness to change her behaviour and to remove the temptation to abuse power, which is something, if it's not everything. So I don't know. I think that the show itself is pretty ambivalent -- the optimism of their reunion is incomplete, but it's not wholly a lie.

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

I wonder how Willow's relationship with magic would have developed if Tara hadn't died. I really can't imagine she would stay off it altogether forever, even if she and Tara had been able to maintain their relationship. I wonder if Tara would have tried to stay off magic to keep Willow away from the temptation?

That's a really interesting point about Willow avoiding a fight by capitulating entirely. I have vague thoughts about that at the corner of my mind, but they are not articulateable at this time.

Tara going back to Willow: The risk Tara is taking is just huge. Willow could starting wiping her memory at any time and who knows when and how she would realize? All she was going on was the fact that Willow had refrained from using magic for, how long? A few months? Less than a year, right? Tara does acknowledge that at the end of Entropy, that she's moving to fast. But she's jumping into jet black pit with a sputtering candle. Any acknowledgement by the show of the enormity of this decision is avoided by Tara's death.

Once Tara died, it would have been pretty hard for the writers to deal explicitly with the mind wipe spell. Especially since it hadn't been mentioned in episodes. There was just too much going on with Willow, and too much going on with the show. It would have been interesting if she had told Kennedy about it, actually, but I'm not sure how that would have worked. And by then there was the potentials and First Evil and blah blah blah.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

It is definitely true Tara is taking a huge risk. That Willow can erase her memory means that if Willow goes back to these strategies, Tara can't even know what the reality on the ground is. I think that the reason "a few months of not doing magic" is convincing to Tara is because Willow managed to keep her resolve on magic through actual life-and-death crises. Actually I'm not so sure it's a good thing to take abstinence so far, but "Older and Far Away" makes a big point of Willow resisting the call to use magic throughout the crisis and then "Hell's Bells" shows her avoiding it further during a pretty crisis-y wedding, and then in "Normal Again" there's not using magic when Buffy is literally about to kill them all. (There is a line in the shooting script where Willow blinks her eyes and pushes away the urge to use magic, which doesn't seem to be in the episode. I'm of two minds about it -- it would be nice to get a reminder of the enormity of power that Willow is *not accessing* even in incredible crisis times, but it also maybe works even better that it doesn't even seem to *occur to her* to access magic at this moment.) It's a pretty crazy crucible. And that ties in with what I said above. Things are accelerated because people are tested harder and the risks are higher. And really it turns out that after she ditches Amy in "Doublemeat Palace," Willow is seemingly un-triggerable, despite what is thrown at her. Except Tara's death. Which. Yes. (I don't think she's really un-triggerable -- I think another death, not Tara's, would probably totally destabilize her, though not as extremely all at once.)

Broadly, while erasing memory is a particularly unsettling and invasive action, there are lots of instances within the show of people realizing how much power someone else has over their body or their knowledge of reality, and taking the leap of faith to trust that they won't abuse that trust again. So for example, there are other cases where people find out that big, *really important* secrets are being kept from them -- that Buffy has been hiding Angel away, for example. Or, well, that Tara believed herself to be a demon, kept that secret for months, sabotaged a spell to find Adam while he was out killing children, and did a spell on the gang that nearly killed them to cover it. Or that Giles has access to slayer-power numbing drugs and the willingness to use them to put Buffy in a room alone with a vampire to kill them. In Tara's case, at the last moment she undid the spell -- which makes her more trustworthy than Willow after "Tabula Rasa," I will grant. In Giles' case, he "came forward" after Buffy already almost died, and then he...got fired, which, yay, except that as we find out in "The Gift" (with Ben) and then in "LMPTM" he's not above taking his own initiative in secret dealings. In Buffy's, her secret...was found out by Xander stumbling upon it. And Buffy continues to keep important, life-and-death secrets from her loved ones for years (Dawn is the Key Glory is looking for and might kill them over, Spike who can hurt Buffy is back in town and she didn't mention it). Plus in Buffy's case, there really *is* the possibility that if Buffy got sick again she could kill them all in a heartbeat, post-"Normal Again." Which is to say that the risks are always pretty great, and there are big chances that lots of important information that can affect their decisions will be withheld, and that they might die. That they trust each other at all is I think related to the particulars of their situation.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

I agree that it would have been difficult to address the issue after Tara's death. In fact, it's something that I think is even hard to address in fic. I think the thing they *could* have done is to have Willow more openly wonder, in s7, if Tara should have not come back to her -- "The Killer in Me" would probably have been the place for it, because it's pretty close to some of what Willow actually says. And acknowledge then that Willow abused her. But it is difficult because of the abstractness of the memory-spell as metaphor. I'm imagining Willow trying to explain the memory erasure to Kennedy in a way that would make clear to Kennedy the seriousness of it, and I think literal-minded Kennedy would totally not get it unless she went through it herself.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

All that said... I do go back and forth on it, but I mostly think that, short of leaving the Hellmouth (which I think might do some good), Willow was probably going to abuse magic again at some point in the future. I think Willow was pretty genuine in her desire to stop it and be better. But the fundamental issue at the heart of it is that Willow can't stand herself and doesn't think she's worthy of love, and yet needs love to make her feel worthy of living. She's a brilliant rationalizer. Mindwiping Tara was above other reasons an effort to rewrite reality so Willow didn't screw up, and so was in a way giving up magic. Eventually I think Willow was going to screw up sufficiently badly that she would either have a total meltdown or start manipulating those around her / reality / whatever to make it "as if" she hadn't. I suspect ultimately Tara didn't quite recognize how deep that self-loathing went, partly because Willow did put a lot of effort into hiding it. The question is whether the relapse(s) would be "manageable" or not -- the type of lies or whatever that happen in every relationship and are sort of accepted. It might actually be that without the right triggers Willow would spend the rest of her life vacillating between attempting to be self-consciously good and wanting to rebel and then erase evidence of her rebellion, but in ways that are sort of human-scaled and not particularly worse than "average". People can go their whole lives without confronting their core issues or fears, and can be happy and unhappy and sometimes good and sometimes bad but basically not do anything so bad that it needs action. Still, I think Willow's total breakdown post-"SR" is a signal that the issues leading to the mindwipe hadn't been resolved, just displaced. So, it probably was the wrong decision on Tara's part, as I said earlier, beyond the question of a moral imperative (whether there's a moral argument about whether Tara should have forgiven her).

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

Part of the reason I think Willow would have eventually returned to magic even had Tara lived is that the magic use isn't really the problem. As Giles says in Lessons, "This isn't a hobby or an addiction. It's inside you now, this magic. You're responsible for it." I'm not sure if he was referring to power she sucked up during her S6 rampage, but she had power before that. It's not something she can just ignore.

And, yes, it is reassuring that Willow in S7 does some to have a much healthier attitude towards her power and towards her relationships. Maybe that would have happened even if Tara had lived? But may it was that summer in England, her training with the coven, that helped her get that balance.

Have I ever told you my theory that Willow would never have gone darkside if she'd had Jenny Calendar to mentor her? I had this whole thought that every time a character on BtVS or AtS goes dark in some way, it can be traced back to Angel. Angel is the source of all evil in the Buffyverse.

My point about Tara taking a huge risk in returning to Willow isn't just about Willow being untrustworthy. Although, yes.

But for example, even when Buffy is untrustworthy, people are usually safer around her than away from her. If Xander had decided to stop being friends with her because she hid Angel and then decided to befriend her again with the whole Angel issue unresolved, he wouldn't actually be taking much of a risk. Which is to say, he's in danger from Angel either way.

I would say your mention of Giles is a good one, though. He had the power to really hurt Buffy, and she didn't know what was going on. The fact that he is her mentor and in many ways her father gives him even more power over her. I think for me personally it helps that there is a very clear recognition of what the problem was. It's been awhile since I've see Helpless, so correct me if I'm wrong, but this is my understanding: Giles betrayed Buffy because he believed it was his duty to obey the council. He did what he was told. He realized he was wrong, and backed Buffy up against the council, and continued to do so.

But yeah, Buffy probably should have been more careful about trusting him. No matter what the circumstances, he still chose to do that. It makes perfect sense in terms of characterization, but still. But I don't feel the same narrative dissatisfaction that I do with Willow and Tara.

With Willow it was more like she and Tara had a fight, she did something terrible to Tara, Tara called her on it, Willow insisted she was in the right, Tara left, and then Willow said, "You were right about what we were originally fighting about," and that's it. It's never explicitly addressed.

I feel like these interesting ideas were brought up and then the show chose to focus on the less interesting aspects of Willow's story. Specifically, the addiction, which I do think was an addiction, but was far from all that was going on. And then Tara came back and died and by that point addressing these issues wasn't doable. If Tara had lived, I think it probably would have been dealt with in some point in some way that might have satisfied me. But, well, she didn't.

I guess in the space between Tara coming back and Tara dying there wasn't really time to actually deal with the implications of the risk Tara was taking in returning to Willow.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

I see what you mean and I have some of the same issues. I often try to make peace with the narrative as it is, because I really do care for it a lot and think it does so many things right.

To continue the Giles comparison, here's some of what I think. Giles has the problem that he will follow the Council's orders even if they are immoral. But the deeper problem isn't actually that he's a sheep following the Council -- though that is a problem. The deeper problem is that he basically *does* agree with Council logic, which is that moral rules can be bent or ignored in the service of the Greater Good, and that it is important to impart "lessons" in at times even hurtful manners to achieve this. In "Helpless," Giles quits the Council, and that is enough for Buffy, and in a way it should be. Giles really never *does* betray Buffy, in the specific manner of "betraying Buffy by siding with the Council's orders," ever again. But the core issue is still there, and he does betray Buffy again in "LMPTM" in an extremely Council-y way, this time not under orders but because the core philosophical conflict has not been resolved. Giles just decided in "Helpless" that he didn't agree with the Council on that particular issue and so stopped following their orders; he didn't stop being ruthless.

Along those lines, Willow giving up magic is the equivalent to quitting the Council. She has removed the source of the recent violation, but not the underlying psychological/philosophical impetus. Even there, though, the thing is, Tara's argument in "Tabula Rasa" *did* accurately sum up what Willow's problem was, and linked Willow's *general* overuse of magic was to the *specific* crime of Willow's violation of Tara's mind -- "fixing things to your liking, including me." The argument in "All the Way" was about whether or not it was okay to pop people into another dimension temporarily (answer: no), and the underlying assumptions -- that it's okay to do whatever to anyone if there is no permanent damage, that any action taken against someone is entirely reversible -- are the same as the underlying assumptions behind the memory spells. Tara doesn't remember that one, I'll grant. So for Willow to say "Tara was right" actually is agreeing that the mindwipes were wrong. Especially since Willow says "It's why she left" regarding Willow's abuse of magic, which, the reason Tara left is because Willow mindwiped her, not the original argument, even though there is some overlap. In any case, once Tara dies, Willow goes back to "using magic" but, more properly, goes back to abusing power, ignoring boundaries, using excessive means to fix her mistakes in increasingly twisted ways, etc., which again are manifestations of the same thing that led to the mindwipes.

The other thing is, some of the problem is that Tara herself conflates the different issues. Besides sneaking Dawn the book in "Forever" and lying about it afterward, which I don't think Tara had figured out (or if she had, it was only suspicion), Willow hadn't done much during the run-up to "Tough Love" for Tara to have an actual reason to specifically say that Willow's magic frightens her. OK, maybe if we count pre-Tara things like "Wild at Heart" and "Something Blue," but those weren't issues for Tara in the beginning of W/T and I don't think they're the reason for her "it frightens me how powerful you're getting" discomfort in "TL." That Tara retroactively was proven right that Willow is scary doesn't necessarily mean that she had a fair, coherent reason to be afraid about Willow's power level. Now a lot of people interpret these as writerly failures, and I can see the argument...but I think a case can be made that Tara really *is* uncomfortable with Willow's being too powerful magically in and of itself, and sees Willow's magic power and Willow's abusive actions as pretty intrinsically linked, to the point where she was starting to be scared before Willow did much of anything.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

I agree that things would have been better if Jenny had mentored Willow! Though it's also an open question of how much responsibility Jenny would have wanted to take. Still, Angel ruins everything, yes. (I like Angel and part of his tragedy is that he inadvertently destroys everything even when he's trying, so I don't mean that entirely in a bad way.)

And I do agree that there was an addiction but it isn't the main problem, and isn't the most interesting problem. I more or less like "Wrecked" these days, though I didn't in the past.

I want to add that I did in the past take the hardline position that it was *definitely* "wrong" for Tara to go back to Willow in "Entropy," not "wrong" as in morally wrong but wrong as in an error of judgment on, like, a narrative level. I don't think that now, because I think that a little more ambivalence is okay. But I do think that the sunniness of their reunion is complicated. Willow's OMWF dress is hanging on the door when Tara reenters. There are a few clues in "Seeing Red" that something is *not right* about W/T all while people are overtly happy. And the truth is it's both -- it's both true love conquering all and a major risk, Tara throwing herself into the lion's den.

Even though Willow did not repeat her violation of Tara, I do think that it is clear to me that Willow disrespects Tara's wishes -- Tara wouldn't want Willow going magic-crazy and trying to end the world, obviously. Willow leaves Tara's body behind, etc. The elements of the mindwipe that are not dealt with are not swept under the rug, IMO, but just come out in another way after Willow freaks out. And more to the point, while SOME of Willow's actions are very far apart from the mindwipe, some of them are a very similar thought process. When she offers to turn Dawn back into a Key against Dawn's wishes or to kill Buffy with dust creatures because Buffy "should go out fighting" and she wants to make up for the fact that she took Buffy out of the Earth when she shouldn't have, or indeed when she decides the whole world would be better off dead, she is taking the decisions out of other people's hands and operating on an extremely skewed picture of what is "good" for others, which is skewed by Willow's deep psychological wounds and dysfunctions. That is the same as the mindwipes, which are manifestations of Willow's guilt, hatred of the world, self-loathing, anger, and inability to handle conflict presented by people. So the issues do come up again (and again), just not with Tara.

In some ways, I have wondered if the resolution with Xander (and Giles, and Buffy) is a little unfair. I mean, Xander tells Willow that he loves her even if she destroys the world, that he loved her even when she was a loser. That is one hell of a thing, and it reveals that, in her heart of hearts, Willow doesn't *really* believe that the world should be destroyed, any more than she *really* believed that she should erase people's memory. It's a psychological defense mechanism spurred on by her self-hatred and anger at the unfairness of the world and pain. But in some ways for Willow to be able to accept and love herself, and recognize that she can accept and love other people too, while extremely important, seems unfair -- I mean, Willow hurt people, guys. She killed a guy! Does she *deserve* to be loved? Shouldn't Willow be able to restrain herself from hurting people even when she isn't loved by anyone, even when she believes she doesn't deserve to be loved?

...

[local-max.livejournal.com]

And, I dunno, I think it's actually kind of true, deep down, that at least in this case (and I'd argue in Faith's case, and Anya's, and Xander's, and I guess Spike's) absolutely believing that she's deserving of love (if only self-love) really *is* the key that makes the rest of the problems...not go away, but makes them possible to handle. It's treating the source rather than the symptoms. But I do also get why Willow expected Giles to kill her, or lock her in a prison for all eternity ("...with the torture"), or at least lock her in prison, because look at what she did! But this actually does get at the central thing. In some senses, Buffy's letting Willow know that Willow doesn't need magic to be special and that Tara loves her in "Wrecked" performs a smaller-scale version of Xander's epic world-saving declaration, and is the thing that *actually* makes Willow get (somewhat) better over the next half-season, with Willow's *ability* to stop doing magic as the signal that she has, somehow, managed to find some strength to get better, even if as it turns out it wasn't enough. So, like, my thoughts aren't sufficiently orderly to explain why I'm mostly okay with the way the story turned out, but I do think that ultimately the story doesn't *ignore* the mindwipes but deals with them in the *immediate* aftermath of Tara's death, demonstrating that the hopes that things would be all better now were dashed, even though IMO there was some incremental progress in the interim.

I do wonder whether things would have been different had Tara died around "All the Way" rather than at the end of the season. It's possible Willow wouldn't have blown up so much, but Willow might also have blown up, uh, more.

[local-max.livejournal.com]

Right, I also sometimes think that about the resurrection.... Right now I'm leaning toward not, but I can see the case. Certainly, I think that the show draws thematic parallels -- Tara dying from a bullet meant for Buffy, that Willow can revive Buffy easily but can't revive Tara, that the resurrection is discussed throughout the finale. I go back and forth on how literal it is.

[lusciousxander.livejournal.com]

Very interesting thoughts about Xander's arc in late S6. It supports Xander's overall arc in the series; finding his true place and strength which is not in traditional masculinity. Xander's arc parallels Buffy's. Both seeing gender norms in the beginning but then embracing who they really are.

[itsnotmymind.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

I think Buffy was better at performing femininity that Xander was at performing masculinity - at least, in her pre-slayer days. But that does seem to have been a part of growing up for both of them: Looking beyond those roles.