I know that twenty-five years ago is a long time in the past and I know that Season 4 of Buffy aired in a cultural context very different from today, but I am once again begging you to understand that -- even though neither Willow nor Tara will describe themselves as lesbians anywhere the audience can hear until halfway through the next season, and even though they won't so much as kiss on screen until several episodes after that -- we are definitely meant to understand that Willow and Tara are sleeping together for a large part of Season 4.
They are not friends for a long time first before starting a physical relationship, as I've seen some people claim (largely to compare Kennedy unfavorably with Tara). Tara's decision to describe herself as "yours" to Willow in Who Are You? doesn't come out of the blue at all. Oz smelling Willow "all over" Tara when he comes back to Sunnydale in Bad Moon Rising isn't a strange misunderstanding or leap of logic. Willow and Tara have been "doing spells together" from the very first episode they meet, and it is not even slightly subtle what "doing spells together" is intended to be a metaphor for. Subtle enough to fool a TV network censor, maybe, but the intended audience are not meant to be under any illusions about what's happening.
By A New Man -- Tara's second episode! -- Tara and Willow are meeting in Tara's bedroom late at night to "get together" and Willow is promising Tara they'll "start out slow". Tara even lampshades this by asking "start out slow doing what?" What could it mean? Furthermore, this scene is explicitly juxtaposed with a scene in which Ethan and Giles -- who Jane Espenson, the writer of the episode, is on the record as writing as if they had a shared sexual history -- meet up at a bar to get drunk and discuss their past, with Giles indignant that somebody has recently questioned his masculinity and Ethan ruefully describing the two of them as "a pair of old ... sorcerers", musing that "the night is still our time" and (though it's played for laughs as a misdirection) seemingly telling Giles that he's "really very attractive". We know, too, from something Buffy says later, that Willow didn't go back to her room at all that night after casting a spell with Tara. Where did she sleep? Why is she embarrassed about it enough to lie when Buffy asks her where she was? For that matter, back in Hush, Tara's first ever episode, Willow and Tara do a spell together too. That episode ends with three parallel scenes: Buffy having a conversation with her future boyfriend Riley, Giles having a conversation with his soon to be ex-girlfriend Olivia, and Willow having a conversation with [... well, come on, what do you think this relationship is being framed as?] Tara.
By The I In Team -- only Tara's third episode! -- Tara is very explicitly being written as though she's a girl Willow is regularly hooking up with in secret but isn't ready to introduce to her friends yet. She's trying to gift Willow emotionally significant old family heirlooms and looking hurt when Willow doesn't want to accept them. She's saying suggestive things like "maybe tonight, if you're not doing anything, you could come over and we could ... do something" and getting (justifiably) upset when Willow tells her she's already made plans "with people" whom she's clearly not ready to introduce Tara to ("it's kind of a specific crowd ... you might feel out of place"). And Willow does end up going to see Tara that night, when Buffy in turn brushes her off to go and hang out with her boyfriend (and the rest of the Initiative). What do you think is happening when Willow knocks on Tara's door late that night and asks if she "still want[s] to do something?" and the door closes behind them? Were they staying up late to read a book or play checkers, do we think?
This is the wider context in which we're meant to understand the conversation Willow and Tara have in Goodbye Iowa. Willow wistfully says that she "had so much fun the other night, those spells...". before rushing to reassure Tara that "I hope you don't think that I just come over for the spells and everything. I mean ,I really like just talking and hanging out with you and stuff." Or Tara saying in response she's okay if that's the only thing Willow wants to do tonight and shyly admitting that she's "been thinking about that last spell we did all day." They are emphatically not friends who later fall in love and start a physical relationship. That's exactly backwards. They start off fooling around "doing spells" together, then they quickly develop deeper emotional feelings for each other. The magic -- and everything that represents -- explicitly comes first.
Yes, it won't be until New Moon Rising that Willow tells any of her friends about Tara as a possible rival or replacement for Oz. It won't be until the end of that episode that Willow will tell Tara she loves her (indirectly, at that), and it won't be until the following episode The Yoko Factor that Willow will describe Tara as "my girlfriend". And, as I said above, we won't see them so much as kiss on screen until well over halfway through Season 5. It was the early 2000s -- it was, in fact, literally early in the year 2000 -- and there were very clear limits to what the writers could actually get away with showing on network television. Not only was this fifteen years before gay marriage would become legal across the country, it was three years before Lawrence v Texas. Multiple states still had laws prohibiting same sex relationships. To modern eyes it's all a bit tame and understated, sure, but the writers were trying to be as clear as they thought they could be!
But every now and then I read posts that seem to just ... ignore all of that subtext entirely. That seem to proceed on the basis that Willow and Tara were just good friends who, sure, secretly got together at night and did spells together, but seem entirely unaware of the mere idea that this could be read a metaphor for anything. That assume because they aren't officially a couple until the end of Season 4, they can't possibly have been doing anything physical before that (as if this season isn't full of examples of the rest of the core four Scooby Gang members having casual sexual relationships with people they've yet to formally label as their boyfriend or girlfriend). Posts where people complain that Kennedy and Willow got together too quickly, in contrast to Willow and Tara who -- they seem to think -- had a much longer period of getting to know each other as friends first (when? I always want to ask, when do you think this happened?). Posts where people think Tara's just being weirdly intense when she tells Willow "I am, you know. Yours" in Who Are You?, as if the two of them hadn't been symbolically (and presumably literally) sleeping together for weeks by this point. People for whom the central metaphor of Willow and Tara's relationship -- something the show itself introduces and repeatedly calls attention to throughout Season 4 -- just doesn't exist. People who assume Willow is just randomly awkward about introducing her new platonic friend to Buffy or Xander, in a way she's never been about any other friend she's had (witch or otherwise) and that there's no deeper meaning to it than that.
And, well.
On the one hand: so what, right? People have lots of odd takes on this show. This isn't even the most egregious popular reading of Buffy I can think of. But I guess this bothers me more than some other readings I dislike because it doesn't seem like a deliberate attempt to ignore canon, the way some takes that rub me the wrong way do. People aren't reading the show this way because they want to downplay Willow and Tara's relationship: on the contrary, the people who post this way are fans of that relationship. And yet, to me, it just makes the whole thing feel ... I don't know, kind of chaste and bloodless. I mean, in this reading, Giles and his "orgasm friend" Olivia are having sex throughout the first half of the season and Buffy and Riley are having sex throughout the second half of the season (especially so in one particular episode) and Anya and Xander are having sex pretty much all season and meanwhile Willow and Tara are ... what, holding hands and looking at roses and thinking pure, innocent thoughts? I just find that kind of grating.
Yes, if the show was airing for the very first time now, in 2025, then Willow and Tara could -- and I believe would -- have been a lot more explicit about their mutual physical attraction, right from the start. But the fact that the norms and prejudices of the time meant the writers couldn't show us that explicitly doesn't mean they didn't try to make it obvious. It doesn't mean that they didn't succeed in making it obvious, for the people watching along as the show first aired who understood the metaphor. And I just think it's something of a shame that this point seems to be lost on some modern audiences.
Ok. So. Having lived through this in real time, the OP is right.
When S4 was on the air, one of the big megachurches told the congregation to leave messages on The Bronze, which was the online posting board for Buffy fans, condemning the show for promoting homosexuality. This started well before the "I'm yours" moment so it went on for months. We'd be having a normal day chatting about whatever and them some random post often spewing the most vile shit would show up.
This was before social media as you know it existed. You couldn't just find a public page on the internet to leave a nasty message for a public figure. But it was known that the cast and crew including Joss Whedon not only read the board but would post there. (During breaks in filming Joss would sometimes randomly show up and do the equivalent of an AMA.) So in addition to thousands of letters that were sent to the studio objecting to "glorifying lesbianism," the online community also got bombarded with shit.
For months. Long before Willow and Tara would kiss on screen for the first time. Everyone understood what was happening, including the people who were furious. NOBODY THOUGHT THEY WERE JUST FRIENDS. This relationship was historic for US television. Xena and Gabrielle weren't on a network in the US, but Buffy was. There were multiple firsts for Willow/Tara. There were essays written about the use of magic as a metaphor for discovering that you're queer. This was a landmark moment and a lot of people were very angry about it.
We had a troll come to the Bronze one day, much more erudite than the drive by bigots we were getting. His name was Morgan. He seemed reasonable at first, but he was saying the same thing as the others, just in prettier words. We argued with him for hours to no avail. Someone who ended up becoming a friend of mine delurked for the first time that day and just ripped Morgan to pieces. It was a spectacular piece of writing that I wish I had saved.
Amber Benson (the actress who played Tara) showed up and argued with this guy too. The cast and crew knew about the posts just like they knew they were getting hate mail.
Morgan wasn't deterred though. He kept coming back. No matter how thoroughly he got proven wrong, he wouldn't stop. So finally another friend of mine, who I knew offline, pulled a Spartacus and said, "Well Morgan, I'm gay and I disagree with you." She wasn't, AFAIK, but that wasn't the point. So I posted it too. Then someone else, and more and more people. That wall of solidarity finally drive the asshole away. "Gay for a Day" went down in the history of the Bronze. It wasn't the end of the shit but it was a message to the queer members of our community that we were on their side.
When the "I'm yours" moment happened and the relationship went from being alluded to as subtext to just the text, some of us from the Bronze went a little crazy. We bought Joss Whedon a toaster. (Yes, I know what you're thinking, but we didn't know what was going on behind the scenes back then.) The episode of "Ellen" where she comes out involved a joke about getting a toaster for "converting" enough women into bring lesbians. That episode aired in 1997, the year BtVS premiered. That was another big first for network tv and the Ellen show was cancelled after the following season partly due to the backlash. We had raised enough money that we also got the toaster engraved with the dialogue and the date the episode aired.
After we sent the toaster, Joss posted on the Bronze that his Emmy nomination paled in comparison to the toaster. He showed it to the cast and crew. Another message in the barrage of hate that we all understood what was happened we supported it.
Y'all don't understand how different things are in your media just 20 years later.
