#would the PTB have let her do it? Would Willow? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lightdancer1 · 13 days

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Now that I think about it:

It really is striking given everything with that one episode that there's no plotline where Tara accidentally kills off her love interest with that blindness spell early in Season 5 and Glory steamrolls everyone because the big gun went missing. It's basically one of this 'so this is how we done fucked up, don't do that shit' storylines that's seemingly begging to be written and.....nobody actually has. It'd be a perfect knife twist and it's not like the Scoobies would let Tara just leave with her obviously evil family even after that because they'd not want to lose someone ELSE after it.

So what does happen if they have to go through the Glory arc but there's no Willow (especially twistedly funny given later seasons if the Powers That Be cough her up again at the start of the equivalent of Season 6)? Would the butterfly effect mean she'd even brain-suck Tara, which was a pretty clear bit of her power boost that made her as formidable? If that never happens and they just use the hammer sooner, does anyone actually have to die?

I can also see if the PTB did decide 'oh wait, no, this one DOES have a destiny and she needs to get on with it' that a resurrected Willow after all that would be in the usual situation most of the 'Tara comes back' fics go of having entirely valid trust issues and having the 'wait HOW much time happened oh holy God WHAT is Glory and wow' reactions to a normal year on the Hellmouth.

Canon-wise Willow's an unkillable, fanfic exists precisely to do what canon wouldn't. And ultimately Tara was, after all, meant to be the replacement goldfish for Willow's old niche, so one can very easily see the Scoobies acting at a meta-level like that and creating something of the same dysfunction from a different route because she is very much NOT Willow in any of the ways that define her. She has a rigidly defined sense of ethics, she gets a backbone that has a more consistent sense of 'happens to me bad, happens to you because I'm traumatized nobody ever remembers it for the rest of anything ever'.

It would also be a suitably ironic knife twist given the 'big gun' thing that the very expectations here that set up the ultimate Dark Lord Rosenberg thing never happening lead to the Gang winning because Buffy beats the shit out of Glory with a magic hammer when she never gets her mitts on Tara because there's no Willow for her to argue with that one day and the butterfly effects are big, she never dies....and then the PTB have Willow turn right back up in the Magic shop alive, well, and utterly ocnfused at the end of the equivalent of that season going "What the Hell was that."

I would admittedly have the Dark Willow thing happen anyway as a result of overcompensating for realizing she was killed as result of relying on someone else's wisdom with magic and it's more Dark Lord Rosenberg, as I mentioned, rather than its canon aspect and Tara gets to be the replacement Willow and it does not spark joy while Willow in turn quite reasonably has major trust and communication issues and doubles and triples down on increasingly powerful magic sans magic crack analogy until she's full-scale Dark Phoenix and people belatedly have the 'oh shit we probably should have tried talking before now' reaction.

This may well end up the one other Buffyverse fic I write, though I'd basically breeze through the rest of Season 5 in the first chapter from Tara's POV and then at the tail end Willow comes back and the hilarity ensues.

Then again it's also equally possible for Willow to simply go 'nah, fuck magic, magic killed me, y'all already got a witch, computers it is' and then the Hellmouth Hellmouths and her destiny won't be denied and the paranoia of living on the place makes her take the same path while actually struggling against it when she gets a Monkey's Paw version of her own desire to be the big damn hero, but to be able to do that she has to be able to reach the power to do so and since she is who she is, it's impossible to have the power to abruptly start being capable of making reality do what you want without it going to her head.

And given that she did at least seem to be easily replaceable (with Willow and Tara equally unreliable narrators and the truth not quite matching up with what either of them think here and the two narrative POVs here) Dark Lord Rosenberg gets to be as much a case of venting that she in a sense was the replaceable sidekick on a television show and not a main character.

Almost every other canon possibility here has done this and having 'the person I love cannot see the demon for who she is' and then 'wait, she died, I didn't mean that' because the magic misfires a little harder in a laser-guided fashion and having Tara meet her intended niche a little harder than otherwise is....surprisingly under-used.

#willow rosenberg #tara maclay #buffyverse fanfic #ideas to be written #basically 'Tara does an oopsie and has to fill someone else's shoes and realizes how unpleasant that actually is'#Willow comes back at the start of Season 6 because the PTB need her to resurrect magic and she's golden until she does #this sparks even less joy as there WAS an intended resurrection spell and it failed because she was already alive #and thus everything turns into an equally glorious trainwreck from a completely opposite angle #meanwhile Tara's basically haunted with guilt as she was never a demon but boy did she FUBAR that one spell #also leads to an inversion of usual dynamics because she *really* doesn't do damage control well #and Willow might either be very interested or very indifferent or deciding to ring up Oz and fuck off from Sunnydale entirely #if she was an actual human instead of a character it'd be the third I think #but since she's a character in a story and indifference is more wounding than malice indifference it is #I freely admit that season 9 leaves me considering the irony that Willow gets to be the chosen one once #and utterly hates it and everything about it and this is where her arc actually ends up #why does she hate it when it actually gets to be her for a change?#LBR ol' girl didn't do well with substituting for being the person driving events #she would handle being the one that actually has to do it by repeatedly trying to skip out on destiny #the irony would not be lost on her in the bigger picture but at the time Buffy would probably be 'so what's the big deal here'

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drivebyanon · 6 years

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Romanogers swirling thoughts

Warning. This is going to be LONG.

After watching Infinity Wars, the Romangers little bonzai that was rooted in my head decided to take some miracle grow and become a huge Willow tree. I can’t seem to stop thinking about the Cap and Black Widow. They were just so damn awesome together in the few scenes they had. Now, I spent a lot of time pushing any OTP feelings down after Ultron. I felt like my Romanogers heart was crushed and didn’t want to go there again because it basically sucked seeing everything built up from the Winter Soldier completely ignored. It was downright disorienting how fast they turned things around in Ultron. Or maybe I was just short-sighted to see the B & N coming?

And it was so hard for me NOT to like those two crazy kids after TWS . Think about it, in the fiction world the signs (pitfalls) for romance were all there for viewers to pick up on in The Winter Soldier:

Quippy fast humor between the two

Revealing conversations on a road trip

Pretending to be a couple

Having to kiss to avoid detection

“Trust Conversation” while looking deep into each other’s eyes

Trying to setup the other person with someone else (while ignoring your own feelings)

The Long Goodbye at the end

UST all over the place

The typical romance plot tropes were all over the place so of course so many of us were ready and willing to travel down the Romanogers road. It was practically paved for us! I mean that’s basically the plot of It Happened one Night without the quirky ending where the Walls of Jerico fall! (If you haven’t watched It Happened one Night with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert then you gotta, it’s soooo good). And then came The Age of Ultron and everything was turned upside down. I was so confused where the Bruce & Nat relationship came from. There was not enough there in Avengers to even make me consider it. I thought it would be more Nat & Clint if anything. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner. What a great decision to replace him in the movie instead of Ed Norton. Everything just clicks with Mark and he is an adorable hunky dork. But if Joss Whedon had plans on going there to begin with, he needed to work harder to set it up, create the UST between the two. And it didn’t help that the Russo Brothers seemed to have a completely different plan altogether.

The disorientation didn’t abate with Civil War either. Because we had the weird (and I’m sticking to it!) and I mean WEIRD romance with Sharon Carter. Just….no. But then we also had gems like Natasha showing up at the funeral to be there for him AND turning to help Cap? Just like WTAF? What do you want me to feel? What do you want me to root for? Just tell me, because the back and forth is really confusing.

Which brings me to Infinity War, all that duo bad assery & the Romanogers baby James theory which makes me fall happily down the rabbit hole. Now, I have my serious doubts that the Marvel Powers That Be would actually have this happen because they are intent ignoring any of the chemistry Natasha and Steve share and flub every other romantic storyline they roll out (Like what even happened to Thor, Jane Foster, and Lady Sif slight tension?). The only relationship that is on point is Tony and Pepper. But even so, it is definitely easy to go down the road of Romangers baby for a couple of reasons:

The clumsy attempt at bringing Natasha’s fertility into the movie series. Why do that? There was no reason for it. She could have easily told Bruce “We both have darkness in us”. Boom! That’s it. But instead we get a backstory of how she can’t have a baby so she’s a “monster” to explain why they’re compatible? Joss firmly decided to put it in there (for questionable reasons), but once it was said, it enters the brain and how we look at the character of Natasha Romanoff. Before Ultron not once did I look at Natasha and think of her as a mother or non-mother. She was just a kick ass female character. But afterwards, and with the debate that followed, it was hard to separate her from the concept of “motherhood”.

At the beginning of Infinity Wars Tony is talking to Pepper about dreaming of a baby and wondering if it’s prophetic. So it automatically starts off down a “Huh, an Avengers baby” road. And that conversation really seemed to come out of nowhere. Papa Stark has come a long way from the playboy he was in Iron Man. But right there in the beginning of the movie it sets up the idea of “baby” and it lingers there. Where are the filmmakers going with it? Is it something to just show Tony’s growth or was it put in there as a plot device to hint at the possible ending?

So I don’t think we’re too crazy for our brains going down that way. Whether intended or not, there is a path for it that was built. My only issue is that it feels a wee bit tainted because of that “monster” conversation with Bruce. Even if unintentionally, it set up motherhood almost as a “redemption” quality which is frankly annoying, because her redemption is more than that. Joss did such a disservice to the character by so clumsily inserting that line into the movie. If by supreme miracle the Marvel PTB actually let there be a baby James Rogers, my god it would be pretty amazing, and it deserves not to wrapped up in the debate mess Joss created.

So those are the thoughts that have been swimming around my head, and I’m ready for the complete heartbreak that Avengers 4 will bring because knowing my luck with OTPs they’ll kill off our Cap (although I’ll keep praying). But at least we always have fanfiction.

And just because I love gifs, Romantic Tropes:

Quippy Humor: