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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.

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Yeah but I'm not doing that for a single one of the baboons who saw everything heading down the line and mistook the light at the end of the tunnel for anything but an oncoming train. We tried compassion for people like that, they voted for the person who wants to hurt them and while it'll hurt everyone else too? Fuck those guys and the horse they rode in on.

I'm certain this is on Tumblr somewhere, but I haven't seen it around, so I'm sharing it myself

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This goes quadruple for the people he dumped buckets of shit on since 2016 whose votes for him went UP THREE FUCKING ELECTIONS IN A ROW. Women, collectively and particularly white women, Arabs, Latinos? You stupid fucks voted for the whirlwind, when the wind starts a howlin', well....

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So there's something I want to say re: intentionally withholding your vote, and I want to do it without coming across as condescending or dismissive.

I've worked as a field organizer in two campaigns, 2010 and 2012, and my job was to help turnout the vote for Democratic candidates up and down the ticket. Technology may have changed, but people are still knocking on doors for specific voters the way they were 12 years ago.

If you say you're not voting/voting 3rd party, the campaign volunteer is supposed to mark that and move on. Their job, in the final month of the election, is to make sure the campaign's supporters have all the information and resources they need to cast a vote.

They aren't collecting data on why you're withholding your vote. They aren't submitting opinion polling results to the campaign. Something like 155 million people voted in the 2020 election, and if you say you're not voting, the campaign is not going to waste a volunteer's time and morale begging you to vote when there are literally millions of other voters to turn out.

Let me repeat that: The campaign does not track why you're not voting. They simply note your vote is not a priority for turnout and move on.

I say this because I see a lot of promotion of non-voting like that's a boycott, when the function is not the same. A boycott is a coordinated mass refusal to engage with an institution—which sounds similar if you see a vote as a good or service to withhold. Unfortunately, it's not.

A vote is a choice you're making as part of a community hiring committee. Your abstention doesn't prevent someone from being hired. It just lowers the threshold for the worst candidate to succeed.

All this to say: In my direct experience as an organizer, abstaining from the vote sends a message. That message is not "You need to try harder to win my vote." It's "Don't waste time on me."

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Goyim love to say things like, “How did people let the Holocaust happen?” And there are a lot of possible answers to that question. Some believe that the average citizen of the Nazi Empire simply didn’t know about the camps. Others say that the average citizen opposed the regime, but they were deterred by their government or the fear of being killed. And some believe that it was some kind of perfect storm or one-time-glitch, that those people from that place just happened to be uniquely predisposed to evil, and that it can never happen again.

This is almost always accompanied by some variation on the phrase, “If I had been there, I wouldn’t have.”

Not even a hundred years later, Jews across the world are being targeted for destruction by both White Supremacists and Jihadist Islamists. Both weaponize the same ideologies and tactics that the Nazis used, and both happily embrace the Nazi legacy. Both are emboldened, not disgusted, by the nearly unprecedented increase in antisemitic hate crimes. They are openly calling for our death in our streets and our subways and our political offices.

And yes, in some countries, they are met with opposition by the average citizen. In some countries, decent and caring and inclusive people stand up for us. And in some countries, they win. But not all the time. When they lose, you have to reconcile with the truth:

The Holocaust didn’t happen because the average person in Eastern Europe failed to stop the Nazis. The Holocaust happened because the average person in Eastern Europe was a Nazi. And if the average person is a Nazi in any other nation, at any other time, it will happen again.

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We’re going to hear a lot of stupid bullshit over the next few days/months/years about how Harris/the Democrats failed to win over men, or young people, or uneducated voters, or those worried about the economy, or whatever….but the truth is this: this country hates women and minorities; its citizens understand fuck all about the economy; and the people are incredibly susceptible to outright lies, scams and fascist values

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“We won’t be able to organize/ protest under Trump”.

People in the Global South have been organizing and protesting under dictatorships that America has installed as puppets for decades. You will be fine.

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Speaking of that bigger discussion:

One of the elements that makes Buffy simultaneously superb when it's good and mediocre to awful when it isn't is that each of the main characters goes through very different arcs. Spike is the Anne Rice vampire, Angel is a heroic version of Konrad Curze, Buffy has the classical hero's journey, Giles is the Obi-Wan who never quite dies, Dawn is the Lovecraftian monster who's equal parts adorable and annoying (so the ultimate little sister), Xander has the reliable and unfortunately human aspects of being the normal guy who normal guys. Anya is the unrepentant murderous sadist who's charismatic and effective with her powers and a dork among dorks without them.

Willow, OTOH, has the arc that is at the most radically divergent with everyone else. Everyone else to a point fits in neatly with the genre conventions here, Willow fits straight into the DC or Marvel kind of setting of higher-powered superpowered being who had to be downplayed in Season 7 for the same reasons the DCAU struggled to write Superman. Everyone else leads a horror-comedy where the two poles of their lives grind against each other like icebergs in the Arctic or Antarctic Sea.

Willow lives an arc rooted in a much more direct superhero element, but where other people might expect Superman or Batman (and Angel is closer to Batman than anyone here, hence the Konrad Curze joke), she is unknown to herself living Jean Grey going Dark Phoenix and being both easily forgiven and avoiding the Dark Phoenix problem thanks to the comics of being given a pass by her actions being completely separated from her.

Each of the main characters in Buffy has at least three major genres overlapping and shaping their lives. Giles, Faith, Buffy, the Potentials turned Slayers, and the monsters they fight, as well as Tara and Amy Madison are all living the life of urban fantasy, deeply rooted in that old order as direct embodiments of its ideals (The Master and Kakistos for the villains, Kendra and Quentin Travers for the heroes), or rebelling against it (Buffy and Tara), or going down the hero to villain path, either with a way back or not (Faith and Amy Madison).

Xander is living the most direct Kolchak the Night Stalker kind of urban fantasy life. Perfectly normal dude in a world of demonic monsters out there trying to erase all human life and even demonic life as well, who goes out there to fight the good fight.

And then there's Willow, whose life is straight out of the X-Men arcs.....including the one where the hero went nuts and tried to kill a bunch of people and had to be brought down by her own side. As characters in a work don't know the genre they're in, this is IMO the ultimate reason some form of Dark Willow was always inevitable. Willow being who she is and what she is, with her brilliance and all, was pretty much assured to go straight into magic as soon as she knew it existed. With her brilliance she would grasp power without understanding precision or all the nuances of using it.

Insofar as the characters know they're living any kind of genre experience, it's urban fantasy. All the trappings of modern life with vampires and dragons in the shadowy alleys of a modern urban region. So when one of them is living an iconic superhero arc and perhaps under the impression it's one of the more classical goofy Silver Age ones, failure to understand that or how swiftly things go wrong is perhaps the biggest single reason why Willow's path to the dark side, even temporarily, is likely to happen.

Almost nobody human would take access to the kind of power she discovers she has well. As she's the most powerful sorceress on Earth, at minimum, her capacity for fuckups are correspondingly bigger. And as long as her friends just thought of how cute she was it was never going to occur to them that her small fuckups which are humongous deals by the standards of other sorcerers might one day be less handwaved and funny and more 'bring the brown pants' tier terrifying.

Admittedly this is why 2020s me likes Willow even more than 2000s me did, woman gains enormous power but is entirely human about wielding it is my jam, writing-wise, and it makes writing Willow a lot more fun as she's one of the few canon characters that comes closest to the kind of vibe I like to work with.

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Since I feel like lighting a firebomb under the fandom today:

One of the things that shows you exactly why the events of Season 6 at least to a point were almost guaranteed to happen is one of the most heartwarming moments of the entire series. In particular because as written Willow Rosenberg alternates between extremes, and her love for her SOs is very much in that category. it's a Platonic ideal where she gives selflessly, and where she needs to be devoted to someone else like this to feel like parts of her life have meaning.

In the case of Family it was clear that Tara spent about half the sum total of their relationship lying to her. She did so as a cult survivor, a victim of both emotional abuse and gaslighting and at least some physical abuse from her brother and likely from her father as well. She spent that time under the view that she was a demon, that her magic was rooted in an innately evil source and never once bothered to note to her magically empowered girlfriend that in taking those lessons from someone doomed to disappear or become an evil monster she might be taking a very big risk. Nor did she trust that her girlfriend and her friends would accept her WELL after getting to be friends with Anya, who is never quiet about the ex-demon thing, or Spike.

That's not a criticism of her, that's how deeply rooted that cult survivor trauma was. Willow is also a human being whose girlfriend lied to her for the entirety of their relationship thus far and at least some residual anger over that would have shown she had more of her own views of her own worth outside magic and outside the relationship with the person she adored and put on a pedestal.

The Scoobies collectively forgiving a magic misfire that unlike all of Willow's to this point almost turned lethal for all of them is also not surprising, the Scoobies all get a pass for at least once trying to kill one of the other of them or all of them, LOL. Willow not even admitting to herself that no matter how justified her reactions Tara's actions were worth at least some anger shows an unhealthy set of expectations of herself and Tara.

And that in turn meant that some form of rough patch is inevitable not least because nobody human can measure up to those expectations, and it would have been a very necessary part of both of them growing as people. Add to this what Buffyverse magic is really capable of, with episodes like Superstar showing just how horrifyingly powerful it can be in the right contexts, and with Willow's own darker elements manifesting in a control streak exacerbated by power over reality to make its tenets objectively and not subjectively true, something akin to what happened with the memory spell was a fixed point in time.

Other people in real life might imagine something like that or mistake their imagination for reality, in the Buffyverse magic enables people who wield it to make that imagination real. As adorable and necessary as the fluffier fics are, it doesn't do these characters justice to note that their reality, like everyone else in the show, is conditioned by having all the usual issues of people in high school and college figuring out what to do when they have very literal 'pissed me off, now you're a frog' power that can make that process much messier.

Pedestaling people is dangerous IRL and has had no shortage of dangerous effects and is an understated element of putting unhealthy expectations on people. Add to that literal reality warping sorcery and the realization that the pedestaled person and oneself are merely flawed humans after all, and well.....

Of course it also doesn't help that Tara's living the normal life of a Buffyverse witch with the magic family that knows magic is real and Willow is unknown to her Jean Grey careening to her version of the Dark Phoenix Saga, with the most X-Men derived storyline of a main character in a series that Whedon himself admitted has some inspiration from those comics. But that's a somewhat bigger discussion, LOL.

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To me the biggest single plot hole in the entire Buffyverse:

Is that in Season III the First Evil's the monster of the week that had the power to teleport Angel out of Hell for the express purpose of driving him to dust himself by sunrise.

And yet in Season 7 it's supposedly awakened ONLY because of the Slayer resurrection spell Willow did. So what the Hell happened in that Season 3 episode, then? How was the First Evil running around then? Why did it never occur to it if Willow was supposedly the great big threat it feared or if Buffy was to just shunt one of them into another dimension and leave the Scoobies scrambling to find them while leisurely raising an army of fully powered Turok-Han to curbstomp them flat?

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The worst things we see Death do are connected to flightiness about a job where she's clearly unhappy with it and has no alternative but to be what she is and never has tried to find one. We see Dream on screen doing things like locking Nadia up for 10,000 years in Hell because she dared to tell him no and the kind of creative sadism he visits on people match anything Desire and Delirium do.

He is more terrible than Death because Death is impartial and has the morality of the Greek mythological Hades. Everyone goes to her so active malice isn't necessary. Dream will Wishmaster you because you dared to speak to him at all. Dream is the POV character but too many people tend to identify with him, so they soften his edges and the Dreamling part of the fanbase lets their horny pantsfeels lead to them being especially bad about it.

Of course the most dangerous Endless of them all is sweet little Delirium who might or might not turn you into glass and shatter the glass or be aware of it or what she's doing when she does it.

Perspective Requires Being Anchored in Reality

These thoughts were brought on by discussing "The Sound of her Wings" in our community…

I absolutely think Death is worried and tries her best as a sister (that she can’t be anything else than her function is a deeper layer that resurfaces many times over the whole run, and that’s of course also a valid discussion to be had).

It’s the reason why I personally don't think it’s warranted to give her a hard time over the tough love approach (but we all see things differently, and maybe that's not a bad thing).

Do we always find the right words? I���m sure most of us are guilty of not being perfect that way, but I also think she made a very valid attempt at trying to refocus him. It is what he needed to hear (sometimes, it is contraindicated to pussyfoot around stuff, and sometimes, we need to word things in a way that is uncomfortable to hear. And of course that can backfire, but so can sugarcoating everything and hanging on to the illusion that if we only find the right words, or don’t speak at all, we’re helping, or by extension, we’re never going to hurt or trigger someone. It’s a harmful kind of concept creep that’s taken hold of what supposedly constitutes “safe” communication, but I digress).

But what we need to hear doesn't always land right, neither is it not prone to being misunderstood, because we are the ones who filter it through our own cognitive bias.

There are no guilty parties in this conversation, neither Dream nor Death. They both are who/what they are. They say what they say and hear what they hear because of that.

Connection

Death reminds Dream of the true value of connection, and he *does* hear it, and he *does* try. It’s just that he is not grounded in reality as she is, because it goes counter to his function. If you’re the personification of all that’s not real, HOW are you holding on to reality? And true connection needs that, and that is the very root of his dilemma…

Death and Dream relate so differently to humans because of this (and they to them), and doorway man is a bit exemplary for that.

gif by @athousandyearstime

Dream is far more “terrible” than Death. Which is half-joke, half-truth. There is probably something about him that is “uncanny valley” to most mortals (plus: being confronted with all that’s darkness and not just light in ourselves is terrifying, but also necessary). They brought that out masterfully in the comics, but we tend to forget about it in the show because, well, he’s played by a human. But it’s still there, and we shouldn’t forget about it. Dream is *not* human, and all the deeper contact he ever has to humans (bar very few) is when they aren’t lucid. Unlike his sister, who literally walks in reality all day, every day, and is there for you when things are as real as they get.

Meeting Dream in reality must be… weird, or potentially unsettling depending on who you are, what your inner world is like. At least judging by the reactions of the people we see in that alley (not just doorway man, the school kids as well). Maybe it’s not like that all the time, but I certainly think he feels it acutely all the time—it’s not that he doesn’t long for connection (it’s so obvious in everything he does) but rather that he can never take it as far as he probably wants to.

In this context, it’s certainly interesting to think about Dream seeing most of his lovers in dreams/the Dreaming—at least most of the time. And that’s also where he has some of his other closest relationships (Lucien/ne and Fiddler’s Green in particular spring to mind, if he were ever to admit he feels close to them). And while one could argue it doesn’t make these relationships any less valuable, they have one thing in common: They don’t play out in reality, and they are failing as soon as they get taken there. And more crucially: The ones that are taking place there have the capacity to hurt him and/or also don’t save him (if we assumed he needed saving—I personally don’t).

The Onslaught of the Collective Unconscious

But there’s another thing: Dream holds the subconscious of every sentient being. He is constantly bombarded with dreams and hopes, with ideas of romantic love and friendship and all that makes us who we are (just talking about humans now because I can’t speak for cats 🤣). But he can’t have it in the same way despite so desperately wanting it (he is the reason the no mortals rule was introduced—let’s not forget that). It must be like dangling that carrot in front of your nose, and the more you try to catch it, the more elusive and frustrating it gets. Because he knows what it’s like without ever being able/allowed to have it. And I think in certain ways, that’s a similar conflict to the one that Death has with life, only that she made peace with it (maybe?) by experiencing mortal life every 100 years.

But what’s the alternative for him?

Give himself a relationship every 100, 1000, 10000 years (insert random interval here)? He does that, but it doesn’t work.

Surround himself with sentient beings in the Dreaming so he’s not so alone (he’s the only one of the siblings who does this, if we don’t count Despair’s rats. Now there’s another thought about Despair, but this is getting too long already)? He does that, but it doesn’t work.

And now we can say, “Dude, you’re lacking perspective!” Yes—yes he does in a way. But that’s the whole point.

Because perspective requires an anchor in reality. And it’s impossible for him to have that perspective, or hold on to it, due to who and what he is—unreality. All the Endless are outliers compared to their siblings in one way or another. And this is unfortunately his outlier status 😩

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Though now that I think about it:

There really is a stealth foil people have been missing for a while with Tara Maclay and Amy Madison. Two people who have a very specific familial background of magic. Two people who get bodyjacked in specific ways, Amy by Catherine, Tara by Glory.

Two people whose lives are permanently marked by Willow Rosenberg's growing power in magic and in different ways to the negative. Tara in the end is mentally and emotionally abused by Willow who well, goes into lines of SA, too in canon and that is a reality that very much does happen and has to be faced. Amy turns herself into a rat, gets stuck as a rat, and is a key part of the corruption arc Willow goes through in Season 6 even if Season 7 junked the magic arc.

Both Tara and Amy are products of emotionally abusive backgrounds with the difference that it's Amy's mother who's the abuser and Tara's mother who was the ideal parent who died for unexplained reasons in canon (which can either be her father murdering her or illness, depending). Both Tara and Amy are fully aware all along the supernatural exists, it crashes into Willow when a vampire picks her up in the Bronze and prior to that she had no idea it existed at all.

Ultimately Tara and Amy, with Willow, form the three faces of magic. Tara is the Good Witch, Amy the Bad Witch, Willow the When She's good She's Very Good and When She's Bad She's Horrid Witch or more precisely the morally neutral/grey witch. Any and all views of what abuse did and didn't do with power and the wielding of power for Amy and Willow should factor in that for Tara it didn't do any of this. She too was abused, but she controls her power, rather than becoming a standard evil witch archetype or living the 'if you have powers the ideal is that you control them, not they control you' arc that Willow does.

And yet you don't see a lot of use of Tara and Amy as foils and it's a reason Amy could work just as well as a villain for Tara as for Willow, especially if Tara survived. It'd be the sense of 'she also survived bad things but if she's good, then my inevitable destiny is a set of bad personal choices and rather than risking even that prospect BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD.'