#today we have an unexpected departure from triangles (mostly)

[robo-dino-puppy]

horizon forbidden west | patterns & effects 3/?

[ettadunham]

A Buffy rewatch 5x11 Triangle

aka buddy comedy Buffy style

Welcome to this dailyish text post series where I will rewatch an episode of Buffy and go on an impromptu rant about it for an hour. Is it about one hyperspecific thing or twenty observations? 10 or 3k words? You don’t know! I don’t know!!! In this house we don’t know things.

And today’s episode has a bit more to it than I remember, but at its core, it’s still a classic premise of two characters at odds being forced to work together and grow and bond along the way. Well, maybe “bond” is a strong word for it. “Tolerate each other more” is probably slightly more accurate.

I have fond memories of Triangle for all of those scenes between Willow and Anya, which is why I was slightly thrown off by the fact that this episode actually has other storylines going on as well. Shocking, I know.

There’s Buffy dealing with the fallout of her break-up with Riley, and latching onto Xander and Anya’s relationship as her last hope in romance for some reason (even though Willow and Tara are also… right there). There’s Giles’ offscreen trip to England, and having Dawn overhear their discussion at the end about her being the Key. And then there’s also Spike’s whole deal.

That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy those things about the episode though. On the contrary, it’s always an unexpected treat to re-discover moments like the early scene between Joyce and her daughters, and then Dawn following Buffy into her room just to lend her an ear to talk about her feelings about the Riley departure. It was such a sweet sisterly thing to do, and I love that whole exchange - even if it somewhat clashes with the more outrageous comedic elements of the episode when it comes to portraying Buffy’s state of mind.

It should also come as no surprise that I absolutely love that we see a lot of Buffy and Tara in this episode as well. (They’re taking a class together and talking about where they’ll sit next time. Someone please link me to some quality Buffy/Tara college fics, thnx.) I also just generally love how Tara is integrated more into the group, and we see her playing a slight buffer role between Willow and Anya and then between the two and Xander too. There are unfortunately still moments though where I feel like the writers just don’t know what to do with her, like in that last fight scene, where she’s just standing around in the background.

And it hurts my soul, because I love Tara, and she’ll have many strong moments throughout the show, but imagine how much more we could’ve been given still? They wouldn’t even put Amber Benson in the credits until her very last episode, the absolute cowards.

Anyways. Willow and Anya.

I’ve been talking about Willow’s jealous streaks in the past. She appears to be especially hostile towards Xander’s love interests throughout the show, but with Bad Girls, we also see that the same type of emotions can arise when it comes to Buffy’s love interests.

(Yes, I am just going to keep calling Faith Buffy’s love interest without any quotation marks or whatnot and you can’t stop me.)

She’s even self-aware of this in Consequences. “I kind of have an issue with Faith sharing my people.” And in this episode, Anya calls out the same thing:

ANYA:  You don’t want anyone else to have [Xander].

And yet, as frustrated as Willow was in season 4 about Buffy ditching the gang for Riley, she never really took that out on Riley. Part of that must have been that she had her own stuff going on with Tara for sure, and maybe the other part is that by season 5, Buffy really wasn’t all that focused on Riley in the first place. There was no reason for Willow to feel slighted or replaced.

That’s sort of one of Willow’s core fears I believe. Being replaced or becoming less special in her friends’ lives. And maybe that fear is more potent when it comes to other women than with a male love interest, because Willow feels less threatened by those? There’s probably a lot to unpack there.

But remember too, Willow is self-aware of this about herself. So maybe that’s why she didn’t have it in for Riley, because she didn’t really have any other reason to hate him; whereas Faith betrayed Buffy and assaulted Xander right around the time she started to resent her.

Faith is probably the best case example for Willow’s jealousy, not just because it relates to both Buffy and Xander, but because we can actually see her getting along with Faith before her heel-turn. (Unlike with someone like Cordelia, who they pretty much were in a feud for all of high school apparently.)

It’s not that Willow and Faith had tons of scenes together, but they were fine with the other. And even with Bad Girls, we don’t really see Willow taking out her feelings on Faith. She’s only confronting Buffy about it in Consequences. Her being openly hostile towards Faith comes after what Faith did to Buffy and Xander in that episode.

Which is why I like the reading we get in this episode; that Willow’s main source of dislike for Anya comes from her fear of Anya eventually hurting Xander.

I still think that there’s more to it though. Willow has been making snide and cruel remarks about Anya ever since early season 4. It feels personal, not to mention that it started way before Xander and Anya’s relationship became serious enough to lead to one of them seriously hurting the other. So… the jealousy is probably still a factor.

But also, there is actually some personal history here too with Doppelgangland. Anya used Willow for a spell that ended up bringing her evil vampire alterego to their world, so there’s a whole lot of trust issues and baggage there to begin with. (And that’s without using the later metaphoric interpretation of magic from season 4. I mean… “It did get a little sexy, didn’t it?”)

We’ve also just got a classic setup of two characters with similar and opposite traits in ways that will never allow them to bond above a certain level on the show. Where Anya is blunt and forward, Willow is self-conscious and cagey. While Willow tiptoes and calculates, Anya just bulldozes through everything.

And yet as Anya points out, both of them have also been approached by D’Hoffryn to become vengeance demons, proving that they both have the potential for great destruction. They feel things very deeply, are not especially good at dealing with strong, negative emotions, and are prone to lash out with them. They will also both have a complex relationship to their power eventually.

So I like that this is the conflict that we’re still left with. They mostly resolve the part that involves Xander, but these are still two very different and yet similar characters who will continue to have trouble relating to each other. And that can be okay.

When Anya confronts Willow about her own fears, regarding how Willow might poison Xander against her, we’ve also got what I believe is our first confirmation from Willow regarding her sexuality. I’ll just bookmark that line and its exact wording (“Gay now!”), and put it away for now. I might get back to it before the end of the season. Because I don’t know what’s good for me.

One thing’s for sure, I really enjoyed the episode, and having Willow and Anya work together by the end to help Buffy to defeat Olaf.

Good job, team!