30 days of Buffy - Day Five
Sep. 5th, 2010 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
samsomLeast Favorite Female Character
Willow.
As much as I forgive and empathize with Buffy’s weaknesses, I am merely impatient with Willow’s. Underneath her timid exterior is a very arrogant personality, one who believes that if she’s doing something wrong it’s okay, because she’s doing it and she only has good motives. She runs roughshod over the self-agency of her friends and wants thanks for it. She never apologizes for any of it, and three months wallowing in her mistakes with Giles in England is getting off much, much too lightly for the personal destruction she wreaked on Buffy and Dawn during Villains/Two to Go/Grave. But what I most dislike about Willow is her disingenuous aura of “who, me?” that she wears like a costume. Real Willow isn’t wearing tights and a jumper. Real Willow is the girl who mourned Tara because of how Tara made her feel about herself rather than grief over losing Tara the person.
Before s6 she was just Willow, doing magic and making funny remarks. But the demarcation line for me was Bargaining II, when she stood in front of a resurrected and traumatized Buffy and smiled as though she were going to be thanked at any second. And it doesn’t much matter to me that Willow thought Buffy was in a hell dimension, because Willow had already proven in Forever that it was more about whether she could do it rather than whether she should.
That being said, I am very impressed that the show wrote her well enough in her faults (at least until they absolved her by making magic itself the addiction and not power) while keeping her sympathetic (to others, she never had my sympathy simply because her problems were nothing compared to Buffy’s in my opinion) that I had any reaction to her at all.
The end.
Willow.
As much as I forgive and empathize with Buffy’s weaknesses, I am merely impatient with Willow’s. Underneath her timid exterior is a very arrogant personality, one who believes that if she’s doing something wrong it’s okay, because she’s doing it and she only has good motives. She runs roughshod over the self-agency of her friends and wants thanks for it. She never apologizes for any of it, and three months wallowing in her mistakes with Giles in England is getting off much, much too lightly for the personal destruction she wreaked on Buffy and Dawn during Villains/Two to Go/Grave. But what I most dislike about Willow is her disingenuous aura of “who, me?” that she wears like a costume. Real Willow isn’t wearing tights and a jumper. Real Willow is the girl who mourned Tara because of how Tara made her feel about herself rather than grief over losing Tara the person.
Before s6 she was just Willow, doing magic and making funny remarks. But the demarcation line for me was Bargaining II, when she stood in front of a resurrected and traumatized Buffy and smiled as though she were going to be thanked at any second. And it doesn’t much matter to me that Willow thought Buffy was in a hell dimension, because Willow had already proven in Forever that it was more about whether she could do it rather than whether she should.
That being said, I am very impressed that the show wrote her well enough in her faults (at least until they absolved her by making magic itself the addiction and not power) while keeping her sympathetic (to others, she never had my sympathy simply because her problems were nothing compared to Buffy’s in my opinion) that I had any reaction to her at all.
The end.
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Date: 2010-09-06 12:06 am (UTC)And tbh, the magic addiction is such a cop-out. It still gives little Willow a free pass — because it's not about addressing her issues, right, it's about mystical forces using her without her still being in control. (Which in turn makes me think of Angel's assertion, that who you are deep down as a person, rooted in the first instincts and without masks or affectations, is who vamp!you becomes — and hello, boring control-freak vamp!Willow...)
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Date: 2010-09-06 02:32 am (UTC)And honestly, she was under my radar for most of BtVS too, until s6 and the puppetmaster routine she pulled on her friends and her lover. Then it was nothing but rage and contempt.
It's amazing, how fictional people can cause such visceral reactions in me.