...supporter

Composer: Tonny Eyk

Specifically this post is about Willow Rosenberg from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Budding supervillain with obvious consent issues and a very deeply skewed set of moral values? A little too concerned about proving how clever and special and helpful she can be? Sure. Fiercely protective of her friends in a way that very easily slips into jealousy and possessiveness? Shows some worrying signs of never quite having gotten over high school? Right. Occasionally callous and strange? Correct.

But I keep seeing posts that take it for granted that she's "selfish" or that she doesn't have a well developed "moral backbone" and, I'm sorry, I don't think either of those ideas are supported by canon at all.

Willow is, from the very first season onward. explicitly somebody who "wants" and "needs" to help other people. Definitionally, that isn't selfish! A selfish Willow Rosenberg would have left Sunnydale for any college she wanted, if she hadn't jumped at the earlier offer of a high-paying job as a "corporate computer suit guy": our Willow explicitly stays to help Buffy (in her own words) "fight evil, help people". A selfish Willow Rosenberg wouldn't have (despite the fandom's weird takes to the contrary) moved into her dead friend's house to look after her recently orphaned younger sister. In fact Giles's reaction to Buffy's death -- feeling sorry for himself and planning to head off and leave Dawn alone and the Hellmouth unguarded -- is clearly much more self-absorbed and selfish than anything Willow does. Notably Giles himself accuses Willow of recklessness, not selfishness, when he finds out what she did behind his back. And indeed, a selfish Willow Rosenberg wouldn't have tried to bring her dead friend back to life: she'd have used her power for her own advancement, because that's literally what being selfish means.

You don't have to think that Willow bringing Buffy back was the morally correct course of action¹ to see that "selfish" is a baffling way to describe it. In fact, I'd argue that Willow is probably one of the least selfish characters on the show. That's not to suggest she's some kind of paragon of virtue -- again, she isn't, she has many, many flaws. It's just that being selfish isn't one of them. (Occasionally Willow is self-centered, in the sense of thinking of herself as the world's only moral agent and the person who needs to fix things whenever there's a problem, but I'd argue that that's very different from being "selfish".)

Nor does Willow ever show signs of lacking a clear sense of right and wrong, as some people on here allege. She lacks confidence, sure, and she has trouble standing up for herself sometimes in the early seasons, but she has a clear sense of what the morally right course of action is and she's normally prepared to say what it is. You might not always agree with her takes -- she does, in fact, often empathize with the wrong people or let her decisions be overly informed by who is and who isn't inside her circle of friends -- but just because you don't share her values doesn't mean she doesn't have any!

We see Willow stand up for Buffy as early as the show's second episode. She doesn't do that for any personal gain: in fact Buffy isn't around to see it and never finds out Willow did it. She just speaks up impulsively because she thinks it's the right thing to do. We see her stand up for herself to a possessed Xander Harris in The Pack, a few episodes later. We see her repeatedly call out the rest of the gang when she thinks they're doing the wrong thing from Season 2 on. She's one of the first people to call out the way Buffy is acting in When She Was Bad, she calls out the way Giles and Angel treat Buffy in Reptile Boy, she's obviously not afraid to tell Xander what she thinks about his relationship with Cordelia. She does a spell with (a still evil) Anya in Doppelgangland because, in part, she's upset with her friends' idea of her being boring and reliable, but she isn't afraid to stop and tell Anya what she's doing is dangerous and not something Willow wants to be a part of.

The closest thing I can find to support the idea that Willow doesn't have a "backbone" is the fact she easily lets herself be talked into doing things like covering for Jenny Calendar's IT classes or helping to tutor Percy or helping Giles with research (or helping Cordelia with AV equipment in Prophecy Girl, say, despite her membership of the 'we hate Cordelia' club) when she'd rather do something else. But this isn't something she does because she doesn't have principles. On the contrary, it's because one of her principles is (to quote her again) that "teachers are to be respected [...] because otherwise chaos could ensue". (And, of course, because Willow likes to feel important and to show people how capable and clever she is, sure.)

You can argue, of course, that an innate respect for authority isn't a particular good or admirable principle to have. I'd agree with that. But the fact Willow isn't doing something you think is right doesn't mean she does have her own innate sense of right and wrong.

And, again, to be painfully clear about this: yes, I like Willow. Yes, I recognize she does have many flaws (even if the show itself seems curiously reluctant to explore them properly when it seems that it's about to do that, preferring instead the ridiculous magical drug addiction subplot of Season 6). But selfishness and a lack of firm moral convictions just aren't flaws that Willow has, and it's kind of baffling to me that so many people suggest they are. Willow's flaws are more interesting than that, precisely because they're generally character traits than many people wouldn't necessarily recognize as flaws at all.

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