Wandering After Willow
Willow from Buffy the Vampire Slayer represented an archetype, but which archetype changed. A nerdy girl, she excelled at school and pined after her oblivious boy pal until Buffy helped her come out of her shell. A hacker, she offered the means to access computer records which, in the 1990s, would convincingly offer a window into any information Buffy needed to combat the Monster of the Week. A lesbian, she came out in college, a cliché now, but not as much in 1999, nuanced with an affinity for witchcraft. The magic turned out to be a problem, though. Willow the addict became Willow the Big Bad, but only for a few episodes.
In short, Willow was whatever Buffy the character and Buffy the series, needed.
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I discovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer the summer after season two. The WB aired consecutive reruns August nights after I’d returned home from sleepaway nerd camp and pined after the connection I’d felt from three-week immersion with fellow geeks, Buffy felt like a balm. I’d always liked shows that indulged in mythology—episodes that built on each other and rewarded diligent viewership. Shows like that were fewer in that era of TV.
Though there were a handful of episodes I’ve come to love better, watching the season two, two-part finale, “Becoming,” felt like a religious experience. Here lay a show that didn’t string along viewers on season-ending cliffhangers but rather paid off the chapter of the story at hand. Here was Buffy, not just stabbing the vampire boyfriend who’d turned evil, but doing so in a magical way that sent him to hell forever. Here was Buffy, boarding a bus to leave town because it was unfathomable to continue existing in the space where she made these choices.
Tuesdays at 8 p.m. became appointment viewing. Buffy saved the world from an evil mayor who turned into a dragon. Buffy saved the world from a cyborg soldier. Buffy saved the world from an evil god from a hell dimension. I left for college the same year Buffy moved to UPN, a network my campus cable didn’t pick up. I had my mom, whom I’d lured into fanhood as well, record episodes on VHS to catch up on when I returned home for breaks.
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That Buffy and Willow would become friends is a contrivance. Buffy starts at a new school, and immediately gets courted by Cordelia, a prototypical mean girl who recognizes Buffy as pretty and cool. The show goes out of its way to show Buffy reach out to Willow, asking for her friendship in ways that suggest Buffy herself is a deep soul who recognizes something profound in this mousy girl. Also, the show suggests that, earlier in life, pre-slaying, Buffy was a lot like Cordelia, so connecting with uncool Willow is a kind of atonement. It’s better to overlook the unrealistic underpinnings of the friendship, though, because once it’s in motion it becomes one of the most potent aspects of the series. While the duo occasionally lingers in obvious spaces of Willow tutoring Buffy in math and Buffy bolstering Willow’s confidence to talk to a boy she likes, the friendship more often feels organic. The women’s mutual affection and respect grows from overcoming each week’s obstacles of the fantastical and coming-of-age varieties alike. This relationship feels emblematic of the heart of the show—regardless of how real one’s demons may be, so too are friends good enough to face them with you.
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My world was very different from the one depicted on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I did not face supernatural threats. Heat and sun are staple components of fictional Sunnydale, California and the lone instance of snow in the Christmas episode “Amends” is heavily implied to be magical in origin. I grew up in Upstate New York, a small city bordered by farm country, buried by snow November through April. In those high school years when I watched Buffy most devoutly, I often caught the school bus before sunrise and only had an hour or two after school before dark, mostly spent inside toiling on homework rather than adventuring with friends. I lived in the same house the first eighteen years of my life, so, though I did make new friends in high school, I never lived the narrative trope of being a stranger who comes to town. I’ve had the same best friend since the fourth grade, but he never liked media that was speculative or fantastical and so could only get on board with my Buffy obsession insofar as acknowledging Sarah Michelle Gellar was hot. He regarded my infatuation with the show, with Willow, as mostly a celebrity crush on the actress who played her, Alyson Hannigan.
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My students taught me the term, “parasocial relationship” in a conversation about what celebrities owe to their adoring public. Psychology Today defines parasocial relationships as “one-sided” connections that entail an individual developing “a strong sense of connection, intimacy, or familiarity with someone they don’t know, most often celebrities or media personalities.” The vocabulary has taken on new resonance in the modern hellscape of social media and a twenty-four-hour news cycle, but is credited to psychologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl in 1956, in response to a phenomenon of everyday people growing attached to television characters as TVs first became available en masse to the general public.
I’ve not been immune to the parasocial. In adolescence, I had a thing for Winona Ryder and, even in adult life, I put too much stock into the time Sara Bareilles retweeted me, imagining we might not so much be lovers as fast friends—but maybe, also, lovers.
I like to think I’ve been level-headed in these one-sided love affairs, even from a young age recognizing they were fantasy, that I was unlikely to meet, let alone build a mutual connection with any of these women. And yet that most unrealistic infatuation—with fictional Willow Rosenberg—may have been most potent of all.
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After season one, it’s a low-key running joke that Buffy has already died. On a lesser series, the fact that she died and was brought back might neuter the show, but deaths to follow for the likes of Ms. Calendar, Joyce, and Tara to name a few—some of the show’s most universally well-liked supporting players—underscore that death is not temporary or comedic fodder in most cases.
Even Buffy’s deaths—at the ends of seasons one and five—are serious business. The first—a one-two punch of a vampire bite and drowning—is downright grim. A big takeaway from Buffy’s first death, though, is that Xander, her least super-powered friend, restores her via human, secular mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—the blunt messaging that, rather than anything supernatural, the power of friendship breathes life back into our hero.
It’s Willow who brings Buffy back the second time. She uses a magical ritual, complete with sacrificing a deer, to make it happen. To be fair, in the season five finale, Buffy died via mystical lightning assault after she dove into a rip between dimensions to save the world.
The nature of the deaths and resurrections are completely at odds. Buffy’s life taken versus Buffy’s life given. Human means of reanimation versus straight up sorcery.
Willow is every one of us who don’t know how to let go. In hindsight, it’s a meta-commentary. Some argue not only Buffy but Buffy died at the end of season five, the series never again attaining the heights it once had. There’s a case the series should have ended right there.
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The Internet—Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, the people who care enough to blog or even podcast about a supernatural teen drama that went off the air twenty years ago—would have one believe that the seventh and final season of Buffy is the worst, and perhaps shouldn’t have even happened. They’re wrong. It was, at the least, better than season one, and the series finale was exceptional enough to compensate for a lot of the lesser episodes that got us there.
I’ll concede it was the worst Willow season, though. She spends half the season recovering from her addict/Big Bad fall from grace, the other half in her second lesbian partnership which feels hollow relative to her bond with Tara. Worse, when Willow turns her back on Buffy—joining a chorus of characters questioning her judgment—it rings utterly false after what the preceding six seasons have taught us.
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I wrote that, at heart, Buffy is a show about friendship, and I maintain that, more than the romantic, familial, violent, or mythical aspects of the show, that element of friendship has drawn me back to rewatch it time and again. I believe in friendship as something sacred.
This belief is at odds with my upbringing. My sister and I remember our parents as almost friendless. In our twenties, we got drunk one Thanksgiving Eve and spoke of Mom and Dad less as role models than cautionary tales for how our lives might have turned out if we’d given into our weirder impulses. And yet, here I am in my forties. Cross-country moves, a busy work life, and my wife Heather and I have become the insular parents, our truest friendships all long distance, conducted over text messages and sporadic phone calls.
We don’t really know our neighbors, but they’ve become their own kind of parasocial figures in our life. We think the house next door hosts three generations living under the same roof. A mother whose work schedule entails she’s often leaving the house at the same time I am, and we wave to each other. An adolescent daughter whom gets sent over to share surpluses of fruit or baked goods. A grandmother we’ve caught glimpses of those times we’ve returned the favor. She lamented losing her Halloween decorations in a house fire. Heather loaned her a string of pumpkin lights, and we’ve never seen it since—neither returned, nor used for exterior decoration. Maybe they hang somewhere inside. There are boys, too. A boy whom a banner over their garage welcomed home after he completed basic training. A teenage boy who stood out on the front porch one night playing a Fender—a cousin/nephew visiting overnight, maybe housesitting. We worried we’d have to ask him to quiet down—our first confrontation with anyone from the neighbor clan—but he had the sense to pack it in himself around ten o’clock.
What do our neighbors understand of us?
He goes to work, but not over the summer. Maybe he works at a school?
The woman is always out walking at night. Maybe she’s part of a neighborhood watch.
Their kid seems sweet. Shy.
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Growing up, my bedroom window overlooked the neighbors’ above-ground swimming pool.
We didn’t have much of a relationship with our neighbors—a couple ten-to-fifteen years older than my parents and their daughter, Jenny, my sister’s age, though the two of them had little in common past that. I remember entering their house in my youth, and my most striking memory was that their home was so similar to ours—built by the same developers the same year, the exterior of their house yellow, ours green, different carpeting, but the inside layouts identical.
I liked looking out my bedroom window, a neurotic indoor kid whose mind would wander. I liked looking at the grass more than I ever enjoyed being in it, with all its buzzing flies.
I won’t deny that I looked sometimes when the pool was occupied, but this was less a pervy young boy activity than sheer curiosity because we did not have a pool and it was interesting to watch people exist in this alternate state, whether it was the father who’d swim laps in the evening sometimes, or Jenny and her friends, merging into their teenage years when they may have been cognizant of their own potential for sex appeal, but also private. When they were, in other words, especially attuned to catching a neighbor boy peeping from his window.
The complaint didn’t come from parent-to-parent, but, little less cringe-inducing, through the teenage gossip pipeline. My sister reported she’d been accused of tasking me with spying on Jenny and her friends. It’s a mercy that my sister was more indignant about being implicated than upset about anything I’d done.
I didn’t find Jenny or her friends attractive, interesting, or otherwise surveillance-worthy, and so, though no parents got involved and my sister didn’t mention the issue again, I went to great lengths not to be seen in the window anymore, going to so far as to keep my curtains drawn deep into mornings I was home and shutting them before the sun had gone all the way down.
Looking back, maybe that’s the point when I focused more intently on the TV.
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Willow spends the first season and a half of Buffy hung up on Xander. Xander spends more or less the same period crushing on Buffy. Both Willow and Xander start new relationships midway through season two, but the specter of their infatuations linger in realistic ways, because feelings don’t disappear even when they’re superseded by other, more actionable ones.
Season three, Willow and Xander start making out. Their affair is a messy, hormone-driven thing that badly damages their existing relationships the moment they’re found out. A lesson: sometimes a person gets what they want but by the time they get it, it may not be what they’d imagined.
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My latest celebrity crush: Taylor Swift. It’s embarrassing, if only for how un-alone I am in falling for one of the best-loved celebrities in the world, not least of all years into my marriage.
Alyson Hannigan is an unabashed Swiftie herself. Her stint on Dancing With The Stars highlighted her love of Swift’s music, an important bond between Hannigan and her daughters.
The 2024 Spotify Wrapped screenshot Hannigan posted to her Instagram identified her as “a top 2% fan” of Swift’s, stating “You spent 4,579 minutes together.” Hannigan’s Instagram also revealed Disney Plus sent her an influencer package of Eras goodies when the Swift concert film launched on the streaming service. With this, an implication that while Hannigan and Swift’s relationship may be mostly parasocial, it also hasn’t gone unnoticed by Swift, or at least her business partners.
I remain fixed in anonymity to both women.
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But Willow? Willow is anything but anonymous. Though, growing up, I didn’t have many Buffy watching friends, after years spent working in nerd camp administration and in academia, it’s altogether common to find fellow Buffy fans. Even some of my students know the series, because though its special effects and showrunner haven’t aged well, a lot of it has.
A lot of Buffy’s lasting appeal connects to Willow. Because she was tech-savvy. Because she’s credited with the first lesbian sex scene on network TV. Because, despite her flaws and a few evil episodes, Willow emerges an empowered young woman. Maybe not the star of the show, but second only to eponymous Buffy, probably the most essential character across seven seasons. Finally, because the character and its actress have remained unproblematic across nearly three decades now; never say never, but it’s unlikely either will get canceled now.
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Buffy, Willow, and their mythology represented something I needed as a teenager. A seminal text of my youth, the series is a lens I suspect I’ll always view the world through.
The mythology continued in comic book form. I had a friend in my twenties who, after she learned of my fandom and that I hadn’t read the comic books, started loaning me copies after she’d read them. I read the first few, but the friend stopped leaving them on my desk and I didn’t think to ask for them, and by the time I did think of them again, years later, the extended mythology was overwhelming—years of content I’d missed that I always think I might catch up on someday, though with each passing year, I’m less sure.
I did see how the comic series ended via social media, though, the last frame depicting a backyard celebration, the caption revealing Buffy and fellow slayer, ne’er do well Faith have joined the police. Published in 2018, this ending beat feels a little tone-deaf, but then, it also feels kind of right for these characters to be locked into a less complicated late 1990s, early 2000s perception of police as well-meaning law enforcement, protectors of the public—an ideologically consistent extension of the ethos slayers have held for ages. This final move is a way of integrating their very specific talents into a practical application in the real world.
Didn’t I choose a similar route? A college professor, I lecture, facilitate discussion, and assign essays about great stories. Maybe I’m not living every romantic ideal I’d held in my youth. But I am living some of them, and the job pays the bills.
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Heather has never watched Buffy all the way through. She’s watched selected episodes with me, though, and will ask about character arcs and rules of the show’s mythology.
It’s also the case that Heather and I got together at the end of a summer, after we’d worked together at nerd camp. She’d identified as a lesbian and was even dating another woman mere weeks before our first kiss. Heather is a witch, too, practicing small spells that involve burning herbs to cleanse each new home, scattering broken eggshells for protection. It’d be too facile to say I married a real-life Willow. Heather is not an archetype. She’s her own person, complicated in three dimensions the way even the best-drawn television characters can’t be.
These TV characters and celebrities, insofar as they exist within a parasocial relationship, require the voyeur to meet them more than halfway, interpreting, projecting, wandering.
I watched Willow transform from nerd to hacker to witch. I watched her kiss her great loves, and I won’t deny imagining myself in any given one of their places. Willow meant so many things to me. Whatever I needed her to be.
But back to Heather. Back to that first kiss. We stood knee deep in the Pacific Ocean at sunset, the end of a perfect day together—one we’d both hoped would, and that did, in fact, turn out to be our first date. She asked what happiness looked like to me. Buffy didn’t cross my mind, and I didn’t speak a word about the joys of immersion in a good story, or childhood, or TV. In this real world, chilled by salt water that lapped up where I’d cuffed my jeans, I squeezed her hand. The last word I said before our first kiss was simply, “This.”
WORKS CITED
Hannigan, Alyson. Screenshot from Alyson Hannigan’s Spotify Wrapped. Instagram, 5 Dec. 2024, https://www.instagram.com/p/DDNFGQevsVO/.
“Parasocial Relationships.” Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/parasocial-relationships. Accessed 1 March 2025.
