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Oz’s Love Interests, Veruca, and His Lycanthropy

So, recently I was thinking about Oz and I started thinking about the connections between his love interests (Willow and Bayarmaa), Veruca, and how the nature of those relationships and connections correspond with his lycanthropy and sense of self. Then this long-winded meta happened. Whoops! All images used in this post came from the Buffy Wikia.

Willow and Oz:

First up we have Willow. It’s implied that Willow may not have been Oz’s first girlfriend, or at the very least not the first girl that he had engaged in sex with (Willow: “Do you feel different. Oh, no, you've already, probably, no big change for you.” – Graduation Day Part One), but it does seem like she was his first long term partner and she was his first girlfriend post-lycanthropy.

Now, I do adore Oz and Willow together. They are one of the healthier relationships on the TV show and they are just pretty gosh darn cute together. But when you really look at the relationship and examine it from Oz’s side of things, especially in relation to his lycanthropy, the problems are easier to spot, though at the same time the relationship also becomes far more interesting (to me, at least).

Willow loved the human and accepted the wolf side of Oz. She loved him as fully as she could, but there was a large part of him that she simply could not truly connect to or understand. I feel this was mostly due to the fact that Oz, himself, still did not fully connect to or understand the wolf side of him. That part of him was kept locked up in the cage found in the school library. It was definitely a smart and understandable thing to do. The Scoobies wanted to keep everyone safe from the wolf – Oz included. But that meant that a part of himself was kept locked up and caged not only on a physical level, but on a mental and emotional level as well.

When Oz was with Willow the human Oz and the wolf Oz were kept separate. Willow would watch over him, even read him books at times, but there was still a divide, and that was because there was still a divide within Oz himself. In his relationship with Willow, the focus was on the human side of himself. The wolf was there, but it only popped up for a while and then it would be gone. That was how Willow, Oz, and all of the Scoobies at the time viewed and handled Oz’s lycanthropy. This allowed Oz to deny the wolf side of himself – locking himself up was a way of locking up that part of him and keep it in the dark – unknown and unexplored. All of the scary, raw, passionate, and dangerous feelings that were associated with that side of him were denied in this relationship and largely left unexplored (or not explored nearly to the depths that they should have been). The dark feelings and emotions in that part of himself were just left to build up and up and up…and that was when Veruca snuck in.

(The rest is going under a Read More due to length).

Veruca and Oz:

Veruca came into the picture during college, which made sense. College is the time when people experiment and explore who they are. So it worked well from a character and storytelling perspective that Oz met a character that challenged the way that he was handling his lycanthropy up until that point.

Oz found himself attracted to Veruca and though they do engage in sex, I personally don’t think he was sexually, romantically, or even aesthetically attracted to her. It seemed more like he was simply attracted to the wolf connection between them and the fact that he could likely feel the power and acceptance that she had of her lycanthropy seeping off of her. With Willow he had to deny that, but with Veruca it was the total opposite end of the spectrum – total acceptance of the wolf to the point of carelessness and danger. But that is something I will get back to in a moment.

First I want to talk about the cheating aspects of Willow and Oz’s relationship. Willow cheated on Oz and Oz cheated on Willow. These two wrongs didn’t make a right, but I think the fact that both ended up cheating on each other really underlined the issues that their relationship had (and which allowed Veruca to slip in).

From the onset of the Willow and Oz relationship we were always more privy to Oz’s view of it, rather than Willow’s. It started with Oz seeing Willow, acknowledging his attraction and connection to her, and that is largely how it stays. Oz was always shown deferring to Willow. We constantly saw him accommodating for Willow and listening to Willow. He saw himself getting kissed by Willow, when Willow cheated she made it all about herself, and even when he asked for space, Willow didn’t really listen right away. That isn’t to say that Willow didn’t care or that she didn’t feel bad about hurting Oz, she definitely did, but her way of handling the situation tended to lean more towards her focusing on herself. Even her way of dealing with her lustful feelings for Xander was to focus on herself and ridding herself of the sexual feelings she was having (and Xander by extension).

Of course, Oz never really opened himself up to Willow either. He had some brief moments here and there, but while Oz seemed to be able to read Willow quite well, Willow had a tough time reading Oz. I feel like their love language didn’t quite meet up and that their communication often ended up being one-sided. This was likely due to the fact that both Oz and Willow didn’t really fully understand themselves yet.

Oz caged up the wolf side of himself for so long that when Veruca tempted him that side of him with freedom – he took it. In some ways, Veruca was listening to that part of Oz that Willow had been deaf to. Once again, this doesn’t make Oz’s actions here right or excusable, but contextually that was where he was coming from character-wise. Willow and Oz tried very, very hard at their relationship. But they both took missteps and their communication skills weren’t matching up nor working out all that well for them.

The open and almost flaunting acceptance that Veruca had in concerns to her lycanthropy appealed to Oz. But the reverence that she had for the wolf – to the point of her essentially having been a wolf inside a human body, rather than Oz’s view of himself at that time as a human with a wolf inside of him – scared and alarmed him. Rightfully so, of course, because while Oz’s relationship with Willow caused him to desire locking the wolf away to the point of stifling himself, Veruca tempted him with a reckless freedom that was deadly.

Oz gave into the temptation that Veruca’s freedom offered, but after giving into it and really experiencing it, he didn’t like it. His actions hurt himself and Willow, nearly caused deaths of people, and did result in Veruca dying. She ended up dying by his hands. That ended his brief desire to freely explore his wolf side. The consequences were too scary and great. This also resulted in him ending his relationship with Willow. He went off to try and make things right. Of course, what eventually ended up being right for both of them was to let the relationship go.

Bayarmaa and Oz:

Oz met her when he first went to Tibet after the incident with Veruca. She first interacts with him when he is in a cage. A cage that is more animal-like in nature than the one that had existed at Sunnydale High or at UC Sunnydale. Killing Veruca likely made him feel even more like an animal than he ever had before. At that time he was in Tibet, he had a strengthened desire to suppress the wolf side of him – he wanted to make the human fully in control at all times – always. He was still trying to become someone truly safe for Willow to love.

But when he went back to Sunnydale, he found that Willow had moved on. This made him lose control again and he nearly killed Tara (and was nearly killed himself). Suppressing the wolf wasn’t working and holding onto his relationship with Willow was simply holding him back at that point. So, like with Willow, he let the relationship go and allowed himself to move on.

This resulted in him opening himself up to his lycanthropy again. Of course, this was done in a very different way from what Veruca tempted him with. He tried to hide the wolf for Willow, he gave into the wolf due to Veruca, but with Bayarmaa he accepted the wolf and learned to integrate that part of himself not only into nature, but into the human that he was as well.

In the Season 8 comics, we get shown panels of Oz and Bay spending time together looking over scrolls and ancient texts, talking, and simply soaking in nature. They learn to tame the wolf together. Her being a werewolf like himself also made it so that he didn’t have to hide or deny any part of himself. Bay’s ability to understand the wolf part of Oz and her upbringing having made her very in-tune with nature likely also made it so that Bay could read Oz and his silences, short moments of speech, and nuanced facial expressions in a way that Willow was never able to his. She listened to him.

Oz and Bay learned and shared and acted together as a unit, but they were both still very distinct in their personalities, thoughts, and opinions. In his relationship with Bay, Oz was finally able to find that balance of human and wolf that he was searching for.

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