This piece by Lady T previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on July 24, 2012 as part of our Women in Science Fiction Theme Week.
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| Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) on Buffy the Vampire Slayer |
Joss Whedon is known for creating and writing about strong female
characters in his science fiction shows. One of the most popular and
complex of these characters is Willow Rosenberg from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Willow speaks to many people and quite a few have named her their favorite character on the show, from Mark at Mark Watches to Joss Whedon himself, who put the most Willow-centric episode of the series (“Doppelgangland”) on his list of favorite episodes.
Another thing that makes Willow so appealing is the fact that her
character arc over seven seasons can’t be described in only one way.
Some see Willow’s story as a shy, brainy computer geek embracing her
supernatural power in becoming a witch.Others relate to her arc as one
of a repressed wallflower who explores her sexuality and finds more
confidence in coming out as a lesbian. Still others are fascinated with
the different ways she handles magic, and her recovery after drifting
too far to the dark side.
What story is told when those three arcs are put together? For me, the
story of Willow Rosenberg is the story of a woman who spends years
defining and re-defining herself, rejecting roles that other people have
chosen for her – for better and for worse.
From the very first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow
has been presented as a shy, sweet, helpful friend to the titular
heroine– and from the very second episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
Willow has shown herself not to be as sweet or innocent as everyone
thinks she is. When she meets Buffy for the first time, she’s eager and
friendly, bubbling over with information, in awe that this mysterious,
cool new girl is talking to her, but also wanting to help in any way she
can.
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| Willow (Alyson Hannigan) talks to Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) |
This eager beaver persona is the one that Willow adopts for most of
seasons one and two.She becomes the Hermione to Buffy’s Harry, using her
computer hacking skills to assist whenever Buffy needs more research
for demon-fighting and she can’t find the answers in one of Giles’s
books. And for these two years, Willow is notonly content in this role,
but she thrives in it. Like her best friend Xander (my favorite
character on Buffy), she’s found a place where she belongs. She’s found a
purpose in fighting the good fight against the forces of evil, and she
doesn’t seem to mind that she’s a second banana to Buffy. As long as she
can put her skills to use and she’s fighting the bad guys, she’s happy.
This changes when Willow discovers magic.
Near the end of season two, Willow begins exploring supernatural arts.
She doesn’t do much beyond research and reading, but despite her lack of
practice, she thinks that she has what it takes to perform a spell that
will restore Angel’s soul.
Watching the season two finale with the perspective of hindsight is more
than a little uncomfortable, because we know how much Giles turns out
to be right when he tells Willow, “Challenging such potent magics
through yourself…it could open a door that you might not be able to
close.” It’s also uncomfortable because we can see that Willow is more
interested in proving her skills in magic than doing the right thing.
She wants to help Buffy, obviously, but she also wants to prove to
everyone – and to herself – that she can do the spell.
And she does.
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| Willow possessed as she performs the spell |
Angel’s spell is restored several minutes too late, and Buffy has to
kill him anyway. But Willow doesn’t think about this potential
consequence. She excitedly tells her friends, “I think the spell worked.
I felt something go through me.”
After that,Willow becomes less meek, less shy, and more risky with her
use of magic. She tries to use magic to make her and Xander fall out of
lust with each other (in a plotline that I hate and always will hate, by
the way), and is angry with him when he confronts her for resorting to
spells. She becomes even angrier in season four when she, Oz,Buffy, and
Xander are trapped in a haunted house and Buffy criticizes her aptitude
in magic, saying that Willow’s spells have a 50% success rate. Willow
responds with a flustered, “Oh yeah? Well – so’s your face!” but then
follows up with a bitter, “I’m not your sidekick!”
Shortly afterwards, Willow tries to perform a spell that winds up
failing. This is in an episode entitled “Fear, Itself,” where each major
character confronts his/her major fear. Oz is afraid of the werewolf
inside him, Xander is afraid of being invisible to his friends, Buffy is
afraid of abandonment, and Willow…seems to be afraid of her spell going
wrong?
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| Willow's spell goes wrong |
Compared to her friends’ worries, Willow’s fear seems a little
superficial. At the end of the season, though, we learn that Willow’s
fears are about much more than simple experiments going wrong.
By the end of season four, Willow has gone through a few pretty
significant changes. She’s become more focused on magic and less focused
on her scientific, “nerdy”pursuits. She’s farther apart from Buffy and
Xander than ever, despite loving both of them. She’s entered a romantic
relationship with a woman. Most significantly of all, Willow is
confident. She has a life that is fully her own, where she has two
things (Tara and magic) that are hers. She’s entered a new phase in her
life.
Or has she? After watching Willow’s dream in “Restless,” we can’t say
that this new Willow is any more confident or self-assured than the old
one who couldn’t stand up for herself when Cordelia Chase insulted her
by the water fountain.
Joss Whedon’s writing for Willow’s dream is clever and filled with
misdirection. Characters talk about Willow and her “secret,” a secret
that she only seems comfortable discussing with Tara. Dream-Buffy
constantly comments on Willow’s “costume,”telling her to change out of
it because “everyone already knows.” We’re led to believe that Willow is
afraid that her friends will judge her for being gay and being a
relationship with another woman…but this isn’t the case at all.
Instead, when Dream-Buffy rips off Willow’s costume, we see a version of
Willow that is eerily reminiscent of season one Willow: a geek with
pretensions of being cool.
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| Dream-Willow delivering a book report |
In her dream,Willow is dressed in schoolgirl clothes, delivering a book
report on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.Anya and Harmony are
snarking at her from the audience, Buffy is bored, Xander is shouting,
“Who cares?!” and Tara and Oz are mocking her and flirting wit heach
other.
This sequence is haunting, heartbreaking, and foreboding. Those of us
who watched Buffy for the first four years know that Willow’s
perceptions are far from accurate. Buffy was supportive of Willow far
more often than not and Xander defended Willow against anyone who
threatened her. As for her love interests, well, Tara practically
worshiped the ground Willow walked on, and Oz admitted that Willow was
the only thing in his life that he ever loved.
But none of that changes the way Willow feels. Despite the friends she’s
made, despite thechanges she’s had, she still thinks that everyone will
eventually discover her secret: that she’s an uncool, childish, awkward
geek.
I think that this fear, more than anything else, is what motivates
Willow’s actions over the second half of the series. The show talks
about magic addiction and getting high off of power, but ultimately,
Willow wants to change who she is. She doesn’t want to be the nerdy,
lonely bookworm that defined so much of her childhood and adolescence.
She jokes to Tara, “Hard to believe such a hot mama-yama came from
humble, geek-infested roots?” and she might as well be pleading, “I’m
not that geek anymore, am I? Tell me I’m not.” She says to Buffy, “If
you could be, you know, plain old Willow or super Willow, who would you
be?...Buffy, who was I? Just some girl. Tara didn’t even know that
girl.”
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| Willow talks to Buffy after coming down from a high |
Eventually, Willow confronts her addiction and power issues with magic.
Her arc in the last season of the show is largely about the way she
learns to be more careful with magic, her steps forward and her steps
back, until she handles her power more responsibly. But one thing she
never does is confront her deepest issue: her fear of being an unlovable
geek.
I could write for another two thousand words about how Willow’s
insecurities made her dangerous to people around her, and how her arc
paralleled the arc of the three misogynistic sci-fi geeks who provoked
terror all throughout season six, and how her fear of abandonment turned
her into the abuser in a controlling relationship, but that’s an essay
for another day. I will probably write that essay in the future, but for
now, I want to talk about how Willow’s insecurities affected Willow.
A part of me feels truly sad that Willow could never find it in her to
reclaim the geek label. I look back at the cute, eager computer nerd
from the first two seasons and feel nostalgic for her Hermione
Granger-like enthusiasm. I wish she had felt comfortable enough in her
own skin to realize that being smart and knowing a lot about computers
is a good thing, dammit!
At the same time, I wonder if there’s another lesson in Willow’s story.
Audience members like me might yearn for the days when Willow was more
interested in computers than she was in magic, but who’s to say that
hacking and breaking into government files was the best way for Willow
to spend her life? Sure, she was good with computers, but did she had to
let that skill define the rest of her life? Isn’t it positive for her
to branch out and explore that she has talent in other things in more
than one area? After all, even if we’re nostalgic for Willow’s nerdier
days, doesn’t she have the right to explore other sides of herself, even
if she makes mistakes along the way?
To this day, I still don’t know how I feel about Willow’s arc. I’m glad
she discovered another side to her personality, but I’m disappointed
that she couldn’t reclaim her geeky days and make it a source of power
instead of embarrassment and loneliness. Ultimately, I would have liked
to see the show address Willow’s “geek-infested roots” in the last
season of Buffy,so we could have seen her make a choice about that part
of her life and her identity, instead of seeing that part of her
character fall to the wayside.
Lady T is an aspiring writer and comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at The Funny Feminist, where she picks apart entertainment and reviews movies she hasn’t seen.
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