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lightdancer1 · 5 hours

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And let's be real here about Tara, too:

She as a character has as many nuances, if not moreso, than Oz but both ultimately share the same irony. They are, ultimately, presented as fairly ideal boyfriend or girlfriend in one way while being deeply flawed individuals on another level. Their relationships have some similar dynamics of selective truth in different aspects and in different fashions.

The real Tara, the one that spent her entire first relationship with Willow based on a lie and happily used a memory spell that almost got people killed (there is a very obvious low-hanging fruit plot here that Tara's memory spell aimed at keeping Willow ignorant and the rest of the Scoobies as collateral damage boomerangs in having Willow killed as a specific ironic element as there is at least some canonical view with the Buffy resurrection spell and Tara's death), and who went from abuse victim survivor of a cult rescued by a girlfriend she left rather than tolerate behavior that resembled that of the hellgod that stole her mind and and her biological family is an amazing arc, as is her becoming a vital part of Scooby dynamics.

This Tara also has a rather more belligerent and argument-happy narrative reliant on untruths that work differently with Willow and Oz, where Willow is the one doing more of the lies in that case and in Tara's case it's the reverse. This character is a very fascinating one who deserves her fuller complexities to be a part of things, rather than the more saintly ideal character she gets flanderized into being.

She is not that, she never has been that, and it is the way those things play off with Willow and how their respective darker traits intersect and one character rises above them and one sinks into them that add to the meat of where their relationship leaves off at Seeing Red. Most resurrection fics skip over that or decide to stick to canon and neglect that Season 7 decided the big moral arc (and thus a significant part of Tara's role) was actually entirely wrong on its face. How would she have dealt with that reality had she lived?

Would she have accepted Willow wielding her power on a scale like that of the Slayer Spell at all? Would she have accepted Giles' view that magic was not in fact addiction and that Willow cutting off that magic was the problem more than anything else? How would someone whose magic is her main connection to her dead mother, fellow abuse victim in that cult, have coped with the loss of magic? Probably rather poorly, but in what ways?

These are elements that would matter very greatly in canon vs fanon, with both the show and the continuation comics, and based on the bits with previous seasons I honestly don't see any way she WOULD react well to Willow not only doing magic the ways she does but the ways her power continues to grow. The irony, in turn, would be that she might have as much problem with realizing that her views reflect the limited aspects of her religious fundamentalist background in ways to cope with the more complex elements of the ethics of wielding increasingly powerful sorcery to fight enemies as anything else.

And again it's not like 'Dark Lord Rosenberg' wouldn't have been something or someone she'dve been just as justified to 'nope, sorry, relationship over, I'm-a move out. Y'all take care now, y'all gon' do fine, and I'm-a not tell y'all why I'm moving well outside the blast zone. I want to tell y'all good luck, we're all counting on you.'

#tara maclay #willow rosenberg #daniel oz osbourne #btvs #season 6 #canon tara vs fanon tara #man this does happen a lot in fandoms doesn't it?#about as bad as canon Zuko vs fanon Zuko

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lightdancer1 · 5 hours

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Reminder that jkr basically funds a large portion of the terf movement in the UK and promoting harry potter and actively giving her money is helping fund that movement and is actively encouraging her and her followers because they see this as support

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lightdancer1 · 5 hours

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See the further irony is:

That in using 'Mall Goth Sauron' as the take on Dark Willow over 'misogynist has character randomly killed for LULZ' it also allows for greater accountability on the one hand and for Season 7 to thematically focus on repairing all this damage in the midst of facing an enemy of shadows reliant on lies to further itself. The only way to break the Druj is the absolute Truth in a very Zoroastrian sense. Characters don't get to neatly skip past accountability for their actions, and this would spiral over into further later seasons with the essential reality that in an otherwise lower-level setting this one random girl from California is a Dark Phoenix-tier reality warper and the most powerful person on the planet, or the universe.

And the questions of how that power could and should be employed on the one hand and that Willow is essentially a Doctor Strange type who beats up Gods and Eldritch Abominations for her regular line of work where her counterparts deal with the more 'street level' crises would in turn be the logical conclusion of where the show ends. She doesn't do as much physical fighting for the same reason that Stephen Strange never uses magic to go punch the Hulk in the face, her narrative role is ultimately that of Sorceress Supreme of Earth, with literally nobody in an ancient established war anticipating that this one random ginger from California was and is the new Sorceress Supreme and that if they had had such awareness the realities are that this power would and could have taken worse forms.

Unfortunately for the world, the reality too is that it is a shy computer geek who has a not at all subtle dark side and the usual teenage anxieties and insecurities given the equivalent of being able to reliably actually do things other people might dream of but can never do.

But again as long as Dawn Summers being a good thing is a narrative convention that's established memory magic is a poor choice to show the corrupting effects of reality-warping. It's a case of 'yes as established in canon all of this is true for that one season but then they decided to retcon it, so the fans are not obligated to care about it any more than the canon does about this itself.'

#willow rosenberg #tara maclay #dawn summers #you will never convince me as long as Dawn Summers is a plot device that 'memory magic unforgivable' is anything but bad writing #it was the choice used but there are other equally toxic things that could have been done instead #the basic theme of 'very powerful person decides things for another in an abusive fashion' works just as well without it #Tara's growth arc in refusing to tolerate abuse even from the person who brought her out of her shell can stand perfectly fine #it works even better with a budding Sauron than abruptly deciding 'wholesale memory rewrites good retail unforgivable.'#killing Tara off also denies her any sense of closure or ability to get that closure with the person who does this #the entire element here with the way things went down is bad writing from Point A to point Z #and it's also easily forgotten but Tara wasn't in fact intended to be Willow's love interest #she was replacement Willow for sympathy points #her entire arc as such became Willow X Tara but it was a choice from actor chemistry #So in giving Tara a role besides 'Willow's Girlfriend' it arguably does better by her character #tara x willow #btvs #and yes yes the 'scale changes things' argument is true but only to a point #it's really no different to introduce Dawn than what Willow did #if the retail is wrong so is the wholesale and the decisions to make this that point of no return is an avoidable mistake #plus honestly imagine a Season 7 Tara going 'sweetie no' and a Season 7 Willow dealing with those consequences in real time #equally one can have Tara's cold turkey approach stick exactly as it was #and serve as her role in the time bomb because she's a product of an abusive family and not an infallible moral guide #she rightly sees the problem and at least tries to address it when nobody else did #but unfortunately her solution was pouring gasoline on the fire and then vacating the range where the fire would burn #still further between that and Willow being human enough to resent being told to take that pain and do it going it alone #there'd be plenty of reasons for a surviving Tara and Willow to spend season 7 broken up as is #Tara would not at all be wrong to be wary and not want to touch reformed Sauron with a 400 foot pole #Willow equally would resent someone whose bad advice helped create the problem and who evades any recognition thereof #good old fashioned drama with entirely human motives

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lightdancer1 · 6 hours

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In adapting any version of BTVS the Season 6 problem has to be addressed:

Fortunately it and the rise of Dark Willow has the simplest possible solution: play it straight as a fantasy narrative, particularly coupled with the irony of Season 9. The resentful sidekick goes on a power trip when she becomes an increasingly unstoppable reality warper and the result is less 'random bullet blows girl's heart out' leading to murderous rampage from grief and more Mall Goth Sauron.

It also reflects at a narrative level that Willow Rosenberg by the time of Season 6 is the most powerful Scooby and later on the most powerful sorcerer on the planet. Add to this her future destiny to restore magic and at least in the hindsight of future seasons the entire thing becomes a very typical fantasy narrative.

Novice witch wields increasingly powerful mystical forces under the belief that she can control them, the very reality that the equivalent of 'may it be' leads to 'thus it is' is itself innately corrupting because very few to no people could EVER handle a power like that well. Equally given that future destined role she reaches both the heights of white magic and of black magic in equal measure because her future destiny is to restore all of it, and destiny is a harsh, cruel pitiless, arbitrary thing.

Tara Maclay personally dying is an irrelevant exercise in narrative spite, something happening to her might or might not be the final straw when the One Ring reaches Sauron's finger and the would-be master of mankind goes forth to exercise unrivaled dominion over the Earth. It's also an outside context problem for the Scoobies as only at this point is it clear that in an otherwise urban fantasy setting they have someone who'd be able to stand up well to the most absurdly powerful magic in a high fantasy scenario, without any real context as to how to manage this or what it would require to do so.

It's a perfect storm of multi-tiered failures and people refusing to grasp that the sweet nerd who spent so much time as a hostage has an awful lot of built-up anger for a great many reasons, is utterly terrible at admitting or expressing it....and then has the power to enact vengeance and the most total means of going forth to do so. More to the point it also enables a subversion of the Big Bad formula, there is no elaborate design, there's a breakdown and a set of narrative ethics cost-cutting boomeranging back to haunt people in the grimmest kind of way, and the real villain of the Season 6 equivalent is less the Trio, who are the gasoline to the fire but did not create the fire in question, and more that the Scoobies recklessly encouraged the growth of an increasingly powerful juggernaut without ever reckoning on what the end game of that was.

I do admit that I give Giles something of an advantage here in that instead of being neglectful in quite the same ways he actually does foresee the problem and takes steps to address it specifically, with the problem being that they face an outside context problem that nothing in their prior training has equipped them to face. Between Glory and Mall Goth Sauron Willow Rosenberg there's no contest, Mall Goth Sauron could turn Glory to dust with a flicker of her finger.

They are essentially facing a higher-tier comics-style reality warper in a setting where nobody else can do this, and understanding what was building up all along is a thing they're both slow to grasp and ultimately contributing to the problem by not wanting to die facing the common variety and the higher-tier things that go bump in the night. Something like this IS set up all along in the show and sticking with it and the idea that the price of casually invoking such power boomerangs on everyone would have ultimately kept a lot of the same themes without introducing the addiction arc only to abruptly decide 'nah we were totally wrong', which is also a thing a lot of the fix-fics with Tara Maclay kind of neatly skip over. If you adapt that part of canon she is on record as believing some very erroneous things and playing a part in the final time bomb that goes off just as much.

The easier thing to do is have her, product of an abusive family with cult-like tendencies take one look at the budding Dark Lord Rosenberg on the Dark Throne in the Land of Sunnydale where the Shadows Lie and decide "LOL LMAO I'm just getting the fuck out, y'all do what you want" which is essentially her approach to the crisis as it unfolded in canon. No real effort to express to the rest of the Scoobies the scale of the crisis, entirely sound and rational 'I'm looking after me and mine' arc from someone who has a magnificent growth arc in just those ways.

And that too is Tara's growth arc, from the shy stuttering abuse victim who casually sabotaged demon-detection spells for her own advantage to someone who refused to put up with a budding mirror of both Glory and her own father and took the steps for her own safety, even if they ultimately are a part of the broader debacle. That Tara confronting the equal dilemmas of Season 7 was something ultimately useful not least as a voice of reason both useful and ignored in different ways.

In my takes on canon rather than keeping an arc abruptly retconned anyway, I simply opt for the idea that the bulk of events happened in broad sketches, that Rack is less 'magic drug dealer' and more 'magic parasite feeding off the souls of his victims', but the real arc is the rise of Dark Lord Rosenberg, Mall Goth Sauron, as a result of everything built up in previous seasons and that the Gang never quite admit they were a big part of the problem, with Season 7 very much a case of them having no choice but to do this against Buffyverse Satan who's casually trying to play divide and conquer and exploit their fears. And only by refusing to play the game can the Buffyverse Satan be beaten on his own terms.

And as long as Dawn Summers existing is innately a good thing and not a major source of paranoia fuel waiting to happen, memory magic as the 'you DARE' of choice is idiocy, either Dawn Summers is a collective exercise in cosmic dickery who should never exist, or memory magic specifically chosen as the 'you DARE' was stupid. I incline to the latter and the equivalent spells are more in the line of "God-Empress Willow Rosenberg" and her flexing those powers not against others so much as for her personal convenience, and the slippery slope in that to "making things better on the cheap means I can and should rule the world to fix everything wrong with it as I see fit."

God-Empress Rosenberg in turn is less a conventional villain and more a hero turned to the logical extremes of vast power to address vast problems, with good motivations twisted by immense power exercised with little control and less ethics. The extension, in short of 'just a little more dark magic to smash the Hellgod in the face with a brick' and 'do these extremely dangerous potentially corrupting spells and do them now, consequences be damned'.

That said I'd also play in with the communication failure that the nosebleeds and various elements of continued use of dark magic ARE taking tolls on the one hand, and that dealing with this kind of pain creates a lose-lose Catch-22 pattern where she turns to increasingly powerful physical magic as a means to cope with what is essentially a kind of chronic illness as result of earlier decisions. That would be less the addiction metaphor and more 'magic has a steep price' on the one hand and a sunk cost fallacy on the other. Equally narratively it allows for aspects of weaknesses whether or not the Gang can exploit them or not, on the one hand, and the simple inability to admit they exist plays into people being drawn into their own lives and blind to what's actually happening in front of them.

#willow rosenberg #buffy season 6 #the problem with the 'magic is drugs' metaphor is that it was first introduced and then retconned #they should have either stuck with it or never used it at all #the actual broader plot works very well and it works not least as a case of people used to less powerful foes being poorly adapted #to dealing with the reality that their friend is becoming more powerful than the most dangerous enemy they fought #it would in turn loop back into 'Superman could wield such power well but Superman is a comic book character'#where Willow Rosenberg is a bullying victim given unfettered power over reality itself #in short very much the Dark Phoenix Saga but Buffyverse when nobody in the Scoobies or the good guy side knows how to stop this #in fair DC and Marvel introduce characters like this with a 'well you're fucked' approach too #thing is they also have more awareness things like that can happen #would the Scoobies be able to go from regular variety enemies to seeing a time bomb waiting to go off when they did much to set it off?#in short my take on season 6 is that there is no villain in a more traditional sense #more just that ethical cost-cutting blows up in people's faces #and Willow relies very heavily on 'Dark Willow is a separate person' denial #and then gets bricked in the face through Season 9 that this was a self-serving lie #with that hindsight of later seasons too Willow gets to be the Chosen One for a change #It does not spark joy

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lightdancer1 · 2 days

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lightdancer1 · 6 days

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A math teacher, a gym teacher, and an art teacher die and arrive in heaven at the same time.

God tells them that heaven is full and they will have to trick the devil to be let in. God calls the devil and the devil comes in and introduces himself.

The math teacher tries first and gives him a hard equation. The devil solves it in 10 seconds and the teacher is sent to hell.

The gym teacher asks him to do 1,000 push-ups in a row without stopping. The devil does it without stopping and the gym teacher is sent to hell.

The art teacher then says, “Give me a chair with 7 holes carved in it.” The devil hands him the chair. The art teacher sits down on it and farts. He asks the devil, “What hole did the fart come out of?” The devil replies, “Easy, the third one.” The art teacher then says, “No, my asshole.” And then makes his way to heaven.

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lightdancer1 · 6 days

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lightdancer1 · 6 days

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With this chapter and the one right before it the butterflies have officially reached Mothra swarm territory:

And this is where the story is going to start moving into that dark territory and never really stops, much like the original show did with the second season and where the worldbuilding, also like the original show, starts becoming more elaborate as the world becomes bigger and so do the threats.

Unlike the canon the prospect and fear of Dark Willow is baked in from the start, and this will shape both the equivalent of the Wishverse and have a kind of inversion of aspects of canon on the one hand....and it will also be the point where the entire set of morality and assumptions of the Buffyverse start encountering the continuous Deconstruction Fleet sailing Commodore Perry-style into the bay of narration and will do so to the end.

And yes, the rest of the story will retain this narrative format as it's intended to give it something of the episodic feel of the TV show in a different medium.

#willow rosenberg #buffy fanfic #in the company of witches and slayers

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lightdancer1 · 7 days

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Wrapped up Season I in this AU:

And in line with my usual philosophy with AUs the first season is the one that hews closest to canon, but even here the butterflies are growing to Mothra-scale and they're going to be getting much bigger from this point. And as the tags note, the only canon stations are the sequence of the big bads remaining the same, everything else is going to be different.....

And ultimately the framing here is an effort to experiment with a new kind of storytelling to give this a valid kind of episodic feel in narrative, as opposed to live action, format in a way that's an extension of what I'm already doing with my The Dragon and the Fireball anthology for ATLA.

This work will also explore a theme that's been explored partially and will seek to do some justice by one of the big bads who in canon is the most boring of them all, even next to the fucking incel, while having a similar aspect to my equivalent Sailor Moon fics in that the big bads of future seasons are around with previous ones and their interactions are, to say the least, full of friction and that it wasn't, in fact, that quick or convenient to get the Initiative into the finely honed machine it is in Season IV on the one hand.

On the plus side, it gets past Season I to finally introduce this AU's Spike and Drusilla, Kendra, and where the setting starts properly expanding to come into its own from the smaller first season.

#willow rosenberg #buffy fanfic #in the company of witches and slayers

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lightdancer1 · 13 days

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reminder that digital libraries aren’t owned, also why pirating digital content is a necessity

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lightdancer1 · 15 days

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The last of my three Buffyverse ideas:

I've had these on the back burner for a decade and waited until the Buffy comics were done to avoid having to constantly reinvent the wheel to do the full thing, but it all started with the old-model 'Wish to resurrect Tara Maclay' fics that are the worst part of shipping culture making the ship overshadow the people involved.

These five stories can essentially be said to be 'the last five seasons of Buffy if Tara Maclay came back in Season 8 and got to deal with the death of magic and the magic concentration camps like everyone else did.' They are both a reconstruction and a deconstruction of elements of the Buffyverse idea of soulmates, of a lot of tropes in Tara x Willow fanfics, and simply put an excuse to write Tara Maclay and Willow having their own badass adventures separately and then together and not do the racist thing of throwing the obnoxious Latina under the bus while the obnoxious demon gets a pass because she's played by a white woman.

Also featuring my idea that absent pesky actor contracts the First Evil very much did appear as Tara and that this would be a complicating extra shadow over all the other trauma, and that without the ultimate longer-term effects of the Twilight War.

The irony, too, is that in this case all of Willow's actions in Seasons 8 and 9 ultimately stem from loving Tara enough to want people to remember the actual human and to give her time to adjust to being alive again on the one hand, and loving Kennedy enough to not simply discard her for not being Tara because their dynamic, while vastly different, very much does have its own recommendations.

Also going to feature, along with my series rewrite, the idea that the world of Buffy had at least a bit in common with that of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in that Dracula is not the only classic literary character to have been real (and not just the Cthulhu Mythos ala the Order of Dagon and Yog-Sothoth, aka Dawn Summers). One of them also has some support from the earlier episodes of the show and that one episode with the formula, as the Mk. I model makes its reappearance and with it the full-blown effects.

#buffy fanfic #the witching hour #tara x willow #willow x kennedy #buffy continuation fic #I really don't like how a lot of 'resurrect Tara' fics make Willow shallow enough to drop Kennedy like a hot potato #and Tara in turn either a doormat or basically a fixed point in time who forgets all their other existing issues #they would have lasted five minutes of that and then had actual life stuff happening again #these fics also make her into a 'reward' for Willow when that was the exact kind of familial trauma she grew up in to begin with #so in short Tara and her own issues get to exist #and Willow and hers get to #and both get actual complete healing arcs before their future getting back together does happen #I am also going to enjoy writing Angel getting repeatedly whacked in the nuts

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lightdancer1 · 18 days

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Second Buffyverse fic up:

This one basically is 'What if Tara MacLay actually believed her family's lies, decided to reject the premise even so within certain limits, and teleported to Sunnydale to get the Hell away from her family and became a Scooby in Season 1.' That she's able to teleport and summon fire this early is because she was putting serious thought in terms of getting away and literal firepower and dedicated to it. And if necessary literally lighting daddy and big brother on fire if they tried to press the point.

Also as with any Tara and Willow-centric fic there are explorations of queer themes, including comphet (Willow does end up with Oz and with the whole will she or won't she with Xander and has a lot of internalized homophobia to work through here), the realities of life as a queer runaway (who in this has has very literal 'piss me off enough and you're a torch' powers), and personal growth, all filtered through the Whedonverse and the clashes with all the Big Bads in sequence.

This also takes the broad sketch of each of the Big Bads as the central villains of each separate arc, though the monsters of the week are not necessarily going to be the same, and where bits of 'so where did they get those wonderful toys' like the well-oiled system of the Initiative by the time of the Fourth Season evolve through earlier arcs.

As with my Sailor Moon fics, this benefits from the entire saga being complete and designed from the start as a seamless whole, with individual plot points not necessarily happening in fixed orders, and both literal classical prophecy twists and those of the Buffyverse kind co-existing.

#buffy fanfic #tara maclay #willow rosenberg #willow x tara

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lightdancer1 · 21 days

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New story up:

This story essentially uses one type of Season 6 Fix-Fic to merge its storyline with that of Season 7, using the Buffyverse's own version of the Multiverse and asking the question "So what happens if Willow does not cross the first uncrossable line at a personal level."

Resurrecting the title character of the show by definition is not that uncrossable line in-universe or out of it. This storyline also uses my patented deconstruction element of 'setting that is still true to itself but where, absent narrative contrivance the people are written like actual people and not plot devices intertwined with fetish fuel.'

Also features a multiversal version of Dark Willow who's actually capital E Evil and has gone very far into 'Beware the Superman' territory whose bid is ultimately grander than that of the First Evil and proves the Ganon who hijacks him, because even the capital E Evil Dark Willows are compulsive overachievers who do six impossible things before breakfast.

My first step into a fandom I've long read fanfic for and seen every season of Buffy, even the cringy last two, and my idea of a redo on those last two. Also featuring elements of the comics.

#buffy the vampire slayer #buffy fanfic #tara maclay lives #deconstruction fleet a go go #lightdancer's patented whacking a setting with a nailbat for fun and joy #willow x tara #willow x kennedy #actually making kennedy likeable #look at least some of the dislike is that she's a Latina replacing a white woman #dark willow #also wanted a dark willow who actually IS Evil and not just driven by grief into murderous lashing out #also features some in-jokes referencing Whedon's Avengers films since Dark Willow was Ultron 1.0 in certain ways anyway

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lightdancer1 · 22 days

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