Human rules don't apply

They bring in two new recurring characters that act as the love interests of two of the main characters. Riley and Tara. And they bring them in as complete oppositions of each other.

Riley being a man and coded masculine

Tara being a woman and coded feminine.

I know Whedon absolutely intended this but it makes me wonder how the season would have played out without the polar opposite coding or switched.

Say Riley was coded feminine instead and Tara was coded masculine... How would Season 4 have played out then?

First we have Riley... Who is majorly considered the most boring of Buffy's boyfriends. Or the most uninteresting just because he is fully human... Or so we're led to believe to a point. But he is easily the most MASC expressed of Buffy's boyfriends due to being associated with The Initiative and the leading Commando guy. Neither Angel nor Spike express that much masculine in their gender identity despite being men too. At least they don't come across that much masculine to me anyway.

And then there's Tara... Well, Tara is, as a love interest, something we haven't seen in the show thus far. She's a lesbian and we know this for fact because she dates women only and seems to be attracted to women only. And lesbianism is coded feminine for the most part. I mean you have butch expression but it's still femme-leaning. But then there's all the other traits to her identity and personality. Sensitivity, gentleness, magical ability, her connection with the Earth and nature. That's all FEMME expressed too.

But imagine if this were switched. Imagine if Willow's love interest expressed masculine but still identified as a female. Imagine if Buffy's love interest expressed feminine but still identified as a male.

I’d always assumed – to the extent I’d thought about it at all – that when Amy talked to Willow about going back to see her dad in Smashed and Wrecked she was just lying. I assumed we were meant to think that she hadn’t been back at all.  (Hence her talk about needing a ‘new place’ in Doublemeat Palace and needing Willow to lend her supplies; she doesn’t have anybody else to ask for help precisely because she’s not in touch with her dad.)  

Why would he even still be in Sunnydale, after all?  In Witch we’re told that he broke up with Amy’s mother when  Amy was twelve and that he left town afterwards.  As far as we know, he only comes back to Sunnydale to take care of Amy, after the events of that episode.  But with his daughter dead or missing – and we know that nobody told him his daughter had turned into a rat who was living in Willow’s dorm room, so what else is he going to think? – why exactly would he want to hang around, years later?

But apparently that’s not the intended reading: the original draft of the script for Wrecked has these lines (just before Amy takes Willow to see Rack):

AMY: God, I’m so glad you called. I had to get out of the house.

WILLOW: Already? So, things with your dad…

AMY: Bizarre. I guess after I disappeared he just decided to start over. He’s, like, this new guy with a new wife and a new baby. And I’m this reminder of all his old stuff.

In other words Amy’s unnamed dad – previously probably in the running for father of the year, given the obvious lack of competition – suffered the gruesome fate that threatens all Sunnydale father figures: he turned into Hank Summers.  Also 'new wife’ kind of suggests he wasn’t in a relationship during Seasons 2 and 3, but Catherine says that he left her for another woman.  So is this wife number three, or did the writers just forget about that?

(I also don’t think I’d realized until recently that Amy must have been going to see Rack before she was a rat, which … honestly I’m not sure what I think of, as retcons go.  It interacts kind of oddly with the whole MOO thing from Gingerbread, doesn’t it?)

More generally, while I know that Amy is only in Season 6 to enable the magic-as-drug-addiction subplot, it’s kind of shocking just how utterly unsympathetic the narrative is to her.   I mean, she just spent years of her life as a rat.  Even if she doesn’t remember much of this … well, from her perspective one minute she’s a high school student being burnt at the stake by a mob, now suddenly she’s twenty years old with no friends and no support system and (given that she’s retroactively a high school dropout) no obvious educational or employment opportunities.  And … nobody seems to care. 

Instead Amy’s presented as straightforwardly villainous for being angry about this, which … well, who wouldn’t be angry, in her position?  Did Willow really try that hard to bring her back?  Did anybody else?  (The viewer knows, after all, that Willow could have turned her back into a human as early as Season 4, if not sooner.)

There are some interesting parallels between S6!Buffy and S6!Amy, actually.  Both unexpectedly thrust back into their normal lives (in both cases because of Willow casting a spell); both struggling and failing to adjust to the change; both with (retroactively) shitty fathers and dead/missing mothers.  But the show sort of half-heartedly gestures at this once and then never comes back to it again.  Which feels like a missed opportunity.