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This also factors into my takes on the Pandora Project and the Initiative:

Ultimately the Pandora Project is the 'again as farce' version of the Initiative for the world after magic is exposed and a much more blatant bid to weaponize it, but both ultimately stem from a very deliberate and completely unsubtle fascism presentation that is emphatically not allegory. This is also why my stories have Willow, specifically, caught up with the Initiative as she was with the Pandora Project because sometimes you need to hit the audience over the head with a nailbat to get the point across.

It also furthers into the aspects of her journey to the immensely powerful and destructive figure that she can be. Buffy, the supernatural lawman in the Western film tradition, is drawn to the Initiative, at least at first,but immediately realizes how bad an idea the Pandora Project is.

I also opt to outright expand on the magic draining and its lethal aspects with the Safe Zone to eschew all subtlety and make it magic Treblinka. In a time of actual fascism soft-pedaling the fictional versions is soft fascist apologia and under no circumstance is that an acceptable compromise.

Equally, they both deal with my specific set of tropes with fascism, that the fascists are egotistical willfully violent bungling morons who are world-beaters in the arts of murder but shambolic outside it. They are not omnicompetent 'trains on time' people, they are buffoons who set their security passcodes and the C4 they intended to put around the cells to make sure their victims behave to the same easily hacked thing literally detonated with the push of a button (which also ensures Willow in one of these fics is even more a direct target of hate than she already was).

They are fragile thin-skinned petty people, and Pandora Rosenberg herself is a kind of recursive mirror of my broader cosmic horror the Azar and a very direct leaning on Whedon's kind of allegorical approach. She is the fascist mirror of the heroic Willow, a product of Buffyverse super-science and magic much as Willow is, and proof of both nature over nurture in spite of her desperate efforts to believe otherwise, and an allegorical kind of personification of the 'boot on a human face forever' aspects of totalitarianism.

And in the end, very much in the view that fiction is not about noting that there are monsters, but that the monsters are slain, the fictional fascisms unravel not least from their internal contradictions. Adam and Pandora Rosenberg have somewhat distinct roles relative to canon, Adam is explicitly modeled after the novel's version of the Frankenstein monster and does what he wants, not what his creator wants.

Pandora, a very literal extension of the vampire Willow/Dark Willow archetype, is the heroes adopting the more fascist elements of the setting and proof of why paradise over a bridge of corpses is but Hell by another name.

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A note on my take on the Watchers' Council and Quentin Travers in my fics:

It might seem that next to some, or the actual show, that I make the Council a bit better and more heroic than it was in the original canon or make arguments on its behalf. As I see it, in the canon the Council kept humanity around for at minimum tens of thousands of years with its crude and brutal system that kept itself intact until Buffy Summers and company took a great big whack at it and brought the entire edifice crumbling down.

That means that portraying them as entirely incompetent doesn't work. I should also note that the Council when written in its POVs is written from itself, because the bits where it *isn't* a lot of times match 1:1 with the aspects and vibes of it in the actual show.

Quentin Travers I do write as an 'I could reform this but there's only so much you can do' guy where this contrasts with the kind of sweeping power he has in other contexts, because it is always a self-serving lie and is always meant to be. Nobody sheds a tear when the First Evil wipes out the Council, except for all the books.

I do also have them taking the appropriate reactions to my use of Dark Willow as a very early potential theme and reacting like the heroes of a 'prevent the apocalypse even if it's a person' series who rely on moral ambiguity would. Namely that they actually repeatedly try to prevent the prospect of Willow reaching her full power by having her assassinated. Their efforts fail and end up spurring the very thing they hate, and give her a permanent grudge against the Council.

The Council also sees long before any of Willow's friends do that she has enormous power, is unstable in wielding it, and are ultimately entirely right in that this makes her an extremely dangerous and unstable person who can make that everyone's problem, not just hers.

And at least a part of their dislike of and distrust of Buffy and her friends is realizing belatedly that they might be the architects of the demise of their own order and reacting like all conservatives, trying to stand atop history and yell 'Stop' only to realize too late they're Judge Doom hit by their own creation.

Just as I make a careful point never to validate Tara's family under any circumstances in their views of her or their treatment of her, so is it also clear that whatever the Council's rhetoric that it both lies and operates in the real world as a vanguardist security-state cult, with very deliberate parallels to the all-encompassing power of the Initiative (whose infrastructure didn't spontaneously materialize and who have a messier path to getting there because evil vs. evil is always a fun thing to write) or the Pandora Project of Season 11.

That the supposed leaders of the forces of good are functionally very similar to the two iterations of fascism built on demonizing literal demons and witch hunts for literal 'fire from heaven and turn you into a frog' witches is 100% intentional and by design.

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A certain type of Buffy fan:

"Tara Maclay never did anything wrong."

"Willow and Tara freeloaded off of Buffy in Season 6 and it was terrible of Willow to do that."

These two statements cannot both be true at the same time, Tara did at least two big things wrong to Buffy, specifically, and her lying to Willow for that entire first year had the major justification of her cult survivor trauma, while Willow being too forgiving about it is about Willow's emotional immaturity, not Tara herself.

But.....she specifically had a near-lethal magic misfire (and nobody, after continued searching, has ever done the 'Tara gets Monkey's Pawed in Family by Willow dying as a result of the Cadria spell' fic and that's got my fingers itchy for another short one) and she freeloaded off of Buffy just like Willow did...if you take that as what they did.

It's why I think some of the people who take empathy for her in ways that have only gone up in 20 years along with appreciation of her as the best of the Scoobies (which she 100% is regardless of what she did do wrong with her actual flaws anyway) to a point they substitute a character in their head for the far more interesting one Amber Benson actually played on TV.

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One of my favorite ironies of the Buffy fandom going back to the OG forums:

Is that while the show explicitly goes out of its way even then to show that putting Tara on a pedestal and reducing her worth to the relationships around her was literally wrong and an evil demon cult thing was the people doing that, the fanbase has done this the entire time. It's one thing with Willow even when this is literally the reason at both a Watsonian and a Doylist level that the relationship was at minimum going to be sailing full speed into shallow rocky waters.

That, at least, is a case of misguided blends of enthusiasm and that the relationship and the show had that particular bit of its contribution to history and culture precisely from it, which leads people to reflexively defend and extend things from inertia when all things change and we change with them. Even then it is still the healthiest relationship on the show....because all the others, even Willow's with Oz and Kennedy, fail to exceed the bars it set. Everything else is worse more than it is good, to put it simplest.

But the irony there in how much Tara's arc ultimately hinges around her worth being in direct proportion to her being a relationship trophy for Willow, Buffy, or Faith (and back in ye olde days sometimes for Spike, for some bizarre reason, or Xander for predictable but sad ones) is that it is literally the mistake that drives her and Willow both off a cliff in universe.

If she had been asked this in Seasons 4 and 5 she might have agreed with it, not growing out of it was how and why things went badly in Season 6. Leaving her to stay dead from 7 onward meant that her growth arc and Willow's were left half-finished and she never got to complete her own and to re-establish a relationship on her own, better terms. Nor did Willow, who escaped by the cruelest means accountability to her worst deeds with the person she most needed to show it to.

And yet the fandom literally misses the point that even the toxic misogynistic bully Joss Whedon wrote and these are the people who consider themselves Tara's fans when they're more like the Season 6 Willow who rewrote her memories or her family in-universe than the kind of fans she'd actually deserve.

Media illiteracy is unfortunately a lot older than people wish to think, social media might have worsened it but it's been there a very long tim.

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And as I said, I really think that Willow's faults and her virtues are two sides of the same coin:

At her core she is utterly selfless and cares about others far more than she does herself to a point she devotes minimal to no time for herself. It is what makes her great when she's good, and it leads to that slide to being utterly horrid when she's bad. It plays its parts in the inevitable fuckups in her relationship because when it's good Willow is your selfless old reliable dog geyser ride or die even when she bitches about it.

At its worst she can rationalize rewriting your memories for her convenience and can be utterly smothering and in practice completely domineering and controlling, because a slight gear-shift on the mentality of utter selflessness turns it from 'aww' to 'oh holy fucking shitballs'.

It's also why she and Tara work so well together in a way none of her other ships do, Tara is the kind of person who benefits greatly from Willow's utterly selfless love and soaks it up like a sponge....but is also disproportionately vulnerable to what happens if that gear switch happens and that love does its much more malevolent extension.

Tara needs to be loved, Willow loves with that utter selflessness that in turn speaks of a very damaged psyche that repeatedly does actual harm to herself. Even a slightly greater degree of emotional health would have seen Tillow blow up in Season 5 over the realization Tara lied to her for a year even if Willow fully understood why she did, for the simple reason that an emotionally healthy person wouldn't have rolled over like a doormat.

A person whose love is selfless to a fault, OTOH, would do that and would see it as romantic and 'just what someone does' when in reality Tara reacted to the mind-control and its uglier implications in a way not unlike how Willow actually should have reacted to the aftermath of Family after that initial heartwarming scene.

The irony, thus, is that a Willow with even canon Tara's level of emotional health probably would have been so profoundly different as to be unrecognizable, as that lack of emotional maturity and self-esteem is a fundamental part of her character arc to a point that changing it produces an entirely different character.

And would be that way specifically in a way that Tara Maclay would have not had quite the same experience with, at multiple levels, and would not have been in an emotional place either to appreciate the irony in that.

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An understated Season 6 AU idea:

But one I've used twice in two different ways, is the idea that Tara's death is ultimately an equivalent exchange (and that idea, and what gets sacrificed with that spell is why I like the idea of having Tara do the spell as a guidance to what she would sacrifice if it was her instead of Willow, because Whedon already told the Willow story and simply redoing what someone else did with minor revisions is plagiarism with extra steps to me, personally).

So if, in the event, Buffy still dies, and Willow discovers the prospect of that equivalent exchange and that she'd face the choice of her soulmate or her best friend in real time, I 100% think given her self-loathing and lack of value in herself on the one hand and the destructive elements of that selfless love that held the seeds of her darker, destructive elements with Oz, Xander, and Tara in three different ways that she would plunge herself into self-sacrifice and create an equally big mess without really bothering to think of how anyone else would deal with it.

Willow 100% has a dark and sadistic streak on the one hand that is never hidden so much as benefting from narrative favoritism ala Whedon. Willow is utterly ruthless and hides that behind her adorableness when she wants to. I also 100% think if she'd had the slightest idea she might have condemned Tara to that fate that she'd take it on herself instead because Buffy living is important, Tara living her own life on her own terms is important, but Willow herself living?

Why she's not that important at all and if the best thing she could do is march to destruction as a kind of savior figure, well that's just the best of all worlds.

So in short, 'Willow gets shot instead of Tara because Willow knew the entire time the actual consequences of her actions and still has the big blowup with Tara because Tara misreads things and fears the consequences of that spell and is proven entirely right just like she was in canon but in a much more unpleasant way for everyone involved.'

And of course since Willow's both a main character and one that essentially would never stay dead, she gets a plot haxx resurrection angle...but not before the price of her death would lead to a great deal of a mess.

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It's also established as canon by means of the comics that she essentially had an equivalent exchange where she selected 'Tara or Buffy' and chose her best friend over her soulmate, which was ultimately a choice in its own way not unlike what Buffy faced at the end of Season II and it worked equally well for both of them in the longer term.

It's not entirely established that she figured that out until a couple of years after the fact, however. One of my favorite fanfic scenarios is her figuring it out in real time....at which point she takes a third option that's a rather more literal 'life for a life' and elects to have neither.

This is a definite blend of retcon and retroactively justifying some poor writing decisions but it adds to a magnificent Greek tragedy aspect of Season 6.

the thing that's so crucial to me about willow bringing buffy back from the dead is that yes it's because she loves buffy and can't imagine her life without her and wants better for her than a tragically early death but it's also very much about willow wanting to be buffy's savior for once. buffy is always the one saving and protecting willow, and willow has never been thrilled about that - it was why she began learning magic in the first place. willow has always had such a fear of being useless and unworthy of love. by resurrecting buffy, willow not only gets her best friend back, but gets to prove her worth and her skill once and for all and in a very dramatic fashion. for the first time in her life, she gets to one-up buffy. she gets to make buffy see who she really is and what she can do

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Back when I first saw this show I went for 'OK if *I* created this Verse, what would I do with it':

And when the comics came out, I realized I did predict one arc that I did ultimately as a kind of 'Buffyverse meets Timeline-191' as a love letter to one of my favorite authors and favorite genres. Originally Nehemiah Malloy was Jefferson Featherston, and the Freedom Party was 100% a Turtledove riff instead of a 70% Turtledove riff that incorporated elements.

And that was mainly because 'supernatural fully exposed and the revelation the government was lying to people about it and trying to weaponize it allows a genocidal demagogue to rise to power exploiting actual demons and non-human monsters in the shadows' is a blindingly obvious plot point.

But after working on this thing since, essentially, I first started trying to write stories on my own I now have the satisfaction of fully doing 'Buffy if The Lightdancer had written it instead of Joss Whedon.' I'm sure there'd be plenty of stuff that'd be cringy as Hell and that might age poorly in its own ways in 20 years but this is ultimately my own vision, not his, and I am proud to say I've finally taken it from outline to finish.

And it starts and ends on the same note, the two witches whose journey is the lodestar this version of the Verse is written around meeting at the end as they did at the beginning, and an unironic and unapologetic assertion of love as superior to hatred, with the final chapter equally holding to one of my creative focuses with my own work.

Namely that the ends are to a point open ones, because while characters are vehicles to tell a story, the end of a story allows them to feel alive and like their decisions are their own, as an assertion of another truism that freedom and the ability to choose as one wills are innately good and in this small way this too can and should be asserted.

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This is also a factor in Taffy or Mehane fics:

The Tara they write in them has literally nothing of Tara's actual background or character notes, she's an in name only relationship sue which ironically is the precise flaw the canon character evolves out of and is right to evolve out of. She was not, in fact, Willow's perfect reward for magic, and Willow treating her as that to a point was where Willow went to her nadir in multiple ways as a character.

Treating her as that for whichever character she gets set up with instead, and ironing out literally all of her flaws is not 'doing Tara justice.' It's substituting a character with Amber Benson's face and literally none of those motifs. Canon Tara trusted Willow so little she spent an entire year under the influence of the cult that traumatized her keeping a vitally important secret from her about that magic she was doing.

Why would miss "Doomed to be a demon" react BETTER To the literal DEMON SLAYER? This should be a vital motif, Tara should be far more visibly and repeatedly nervous and standoffish around Faith or Buffy PRECISELY because up until Family she thinks she's the exact kind of thing Slayers exist to kill. She'd be even vaguer with them than she would be around Willow. She would have literally every single reason in the world to be. This should be a major point of where their characters grind against each other and grow as it was with Willow and Tara.

Does it even come up in 99% of these fics? Hell no.

Add to this as well that Tara literally is both more emotionally mature than ANY of the other Scoobies, not just Willow, and has her own life OUTSIDE of those narrow channels. None of them, not just Willow, would be entirely at ease with that. These are people who live in a very closed circle who are used to a life limited to that and both badass and less emotionally mature than a random rock in a gravel bed.

Tara is none of these, Tara has her own trauma background but blends that with reaching a level that none of her friends did. This would 100% cause major friction in different ways reflecting the different insecurities of Buffy and Faith, and would rival the 'you loved me but never trusted me enough to tell me you were a demon and I might have to kill you when you turned 20' for entirely normal relationship friction and the stuff stories are made of.

Omitting 99% of Tara's actual motifs and story arcs does not mean you write Tara, it means you want a relationship sue to kiss the Slayers and fix their boo boos and Tara is the closest one that fits, which is true, she is the morally best character on the show. Still means if you want to write that you should actually write her, Willow if written without any of her own far more ambiguous to outright evil moments would be more like the character they think Tara is.

Willow's evils rise out of her greatest virtue, the way she loves her friends so much she renders her own personality invisible on their behalf. Tara is far more guarded of her own person and was always more aware of that than Willow was, even without the Bramble and the rest that was going to cause a big blowup between them at some point where they either get past it and much stronger or it goes to Hell permanently and not necessarily in a way solely Willow's responsibility.

There is an entirely understated and almost never used canonically valid reason for Tara to switch relationships that Willow essentially goes 'I poured out my heart to someone who never told me the truth, how can I ever trust her for anything again' and essentially 'friend zones' Tara as her 'reward' for everything in that first year and goes on to Kennedy or Faith or something like that.

An even slightly more emotionally intelligent Willow would have had serious problems with that, and even the canon version SHOULD have had major issues with what Tara did that entire first year of the relationship and some trust issues. It's debatable canon intended it but it might be its own part in why Willow listens rather less to Tara for the rest of Seasons 5 and 6 as a kind of passive-aggressive retaliation, if her actions are viewed in a purely negative light or even a more cynical one. It's a pre-existing justification for 'everything I do is right and why I don't have to listen if I elect to ignore it.'

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I do want to make one point on how fanon vs. canon Tara has a very direct relevance to where fandom discourse went:

Namely the whole discussion about how Season 6 temporarily went into hard financial realism only to pretend that a town that has its population disintegrate through the entirety of Season 7 would have perpetual access to fresh food, water, electricity, and all that for one house with the only people left. That dog don't hunt. Didn't hunt in the 90s any more than it would today.

Specifically in that, the whole 'Willow AND Tara mooched off of Buffy' thing. While Tara's name is mentioned, the discourse that moved Tara to a pure saint instead of a deeply flawed cult survivor whose arc is growing into defining herself for herself, not even with her beloved girlfriend neglects the 'and Tara' part in every other way. Tara chose the right decision to move out, and to move back to her dorm.

However she was paying for that, she was paying for that dorm and showed herself the one emotionally mature Scooby (which of course is why Whedon killed her off, because an emotionally mature adult made writing histrionic idiot ball grabbers much harder) in the process by having her own life with her own friends and blending that abuse victim background with having powers. What she was NOT doing was helping Buffy with the problems that had her work at Hellmouth McDonalds.

If we hold to this selective 'budgets exist' thing, then Tara Maclay fully deserves just as much blame as Willow for mooching off of Buffy and then adding to that bailing without even considering things. Fanfiction has her showing more responsibility and awareness here because people substitute the character they think existed for the one that actually existed. Fanfiction also forgets the whole 'demon cult' factor and that Tara is far more interesting as flawed yet still the morally purest character than a Riley Finn with boobs.

If we go with both of them mooching rather than admitting that the show tried for something and fumbled the execution here as it did for so many things, why is it when two people do the thing only one gets the flack for what both of them were perfectly happy to do? Let Tara have flaws if you go for the most negative aspects and let her take that claim and say "Yeah, she did mooch off her friend, girl's human and she was beaten as a de facto slave so you go, girl."

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I'm so tired of the Western media publishing an article after an article on the ongoing protests in Georgia where they basically just retell Russian propaganda.

Dear journalists here are some pointers:

- stop calling the despots in power "Georgian government". Their power is ILLEGITIMATE because they RIGGED the elections.

By calling them "Georgian government" you give them legitimacy and make it sound like people protesting in the streets are doing something antidemocratic when in reality people who stole our votes staying in power is what's antidemocratic.

- talking about how protesters are shooting fireworks at riot police without mentioning that this started because riot police is mercilessly beating people up, spraying them from water cannons with cold water mixed with pepper spray (this is forbidden btw) in the height of winter.

A 14 year old boy was stolen from protests last night and beaten up. A 22 year old man is still in coma following the beatings. Not including these points means you are implying that protesters are the violent side here when the very opposite is true.

- stop only covering the "Georgians are protesting because their "government" has put the EU negotiations on hold" angle. The main demand of protesters is that there should be new fair elections so the government will change democratically.

- stop singling out Putin like he's the only evil in Russia. The entirety of Russia is evil, imperialistic and bloodthirsty. Say that.

Honestly, I read articles by the economist, bbc and cnn and just get sadder and sadder because the way these articles are written makes me think that Russian propaganda has truly infiltrated everything and everyone.

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by 銀魚派 ✷꙳

art republished with artist’s permission

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This article title made me laugh so hard for being so absolutely savage

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I couldn't have said it better myself.

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Next few chapters of Witches and Slayers are really the emotional heart of the work:

And it's why i came up with both the character of Pandora and the WMD elements surrounding Willow's powers here. Willow is unambiguously a good person with a dark and sadistic streak like her character in the original show. Pandora has very similar powers and trauma but took them to the point of becoming a fascist aspiring to be the Master of Mankind.

Their confrontations in the Security Zone are a very direct dialogue between a fascist who's desperate to convince her good twin that she's right, because if she had the chance to chose rather than her ideology being destiny then a part of her knows she's an evil person and she turns murderously enraged rather than admit even the prospect of this. Willow in her diaries equally engages in very direct, unsubtle anti-fascist rhetoric of the kind that would have needed to be spoken no matter what but still moreso now.

Besides, as I wrote in the author's note for that chapter, hanged for a sheep instead of a lamb if they get you anyway.

Stories matter, the morals of stories matter. Malloy and Pandora are just my take on the canon Pandora project, which already had a fascist USA locking up literal demons in a concentration camp going on witch hunts. If the canon already went to Imperium of Man territory I'm just dropping a bit of what little subtlety it had. But they are also a take of a fascist who unlike reality lost his election, seized power by force, and is plunged in short order into a brutal civil war that brings massive chaos and finishes a destabilization of the world order that was already well advanced.

The very worst happened, a dark mirror of older values stands in absolute power over one of the heroes, in one of the darkest circumstances. The Fascist against the Orthodox Jew, twin faces of modernity and twin dialogues of the deaf, so to speak. But in the end, fascism loses.

In the end, its strength is weakness and hollow. This is a very, very modest, minor thing, but it is in the small things, in not yielding to fear or to the lies of the worst people who want the worst things, that we retain our own integrity and stand against the collective evils of the human soul.

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Trump supporters. When your taxes start going through the roof and your groceries get even more expensive (thanks to Donald Trump's tariffs policy), when you suddenly have to pay an arm and a leg for medication and basic care (this is thanks to the GOP's plan to take away Social Security and Medicare), when your female relatives are bleeding out on the floor, dying from complications due to a pregnancy (this is because of the abortion ban in some states), when LGBTQ rights are taken away (this is because the GOP hates all minorities, and yes, this includes you guys), when you begin to get deported because you are an undocumented immigrant (this is thanks to Donald Trump's mass deportation plan), and so on and so forth, please do not come crying to the people who voted for Kamala Harris, because we have zero fucks left to give. This man told you time and time again what he was going to do if he won the election and got a second term in the white house. And you cheered. Because you more than likely had no idea what he was talking about. Not that I can really blame the vast majority of you for being stupid, our education system is a joke and has failed a lot of people in this country (but that's another discussion for another day.) So, we have two things to say to you guys:

We told you so

You get what you vote for

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These people have sown the wind, we shall all reap the whirlwind. Thing is they're still fucking morons and evangelicals scared of their own erections, people who aren't beholden to what some schizophrenic hallucination they label as Jesus tells them to say can be more efficiently nasty than they'd ever be.

I can't wait for the leopards to start eating the faces. It's the only joy I'm going to derive over the next four years and I'm giddy with anticipation. I want it to hurt.