#taraandwillow

spoilers for season six of both Buffy and Justified 

Undeniably, it was best for the story of Buffy that Tara died.  It catapulted Willow into becoming season six’s real Big Bad, it showed the viscerally dangerous costs of Warren’s entitled misogyny, and it successfully broke all of our hearts.  But it also rehashed the tired old Dead Lesbian trope.  This trope, played out again and again particularly in older media, only allows for queer characters if they are punished by the end of the show, either with death or the death of their partner.  In 2015, if a queer female character dies, there are many other shows that people can tune into if they were watching to see themselves represented.  But in 2002, the death of one of the only queer female characters TV was supremely devastating.  A year after the episode aired, showrunner Joss Whedon said this about the strong positive reaction the the queer representation on Buffy: “We’re very conscious of our responsibility, but you can’t make stories based on it, because stories are by their nature irresponsible.”  I think this is some grade A not cool stuff.  While I think he’s totally right that stories should absolutely not exist just as examples of social responsibility, I think that there are a million ways to tell the story that you want to tell while taking into account your social responsibility.  Stories on TV don’t actually exist by themselves; people create them, and people can change them.

Take, for example, the next step in the continuing saga of me freaking out about the back half of the final season of Justified.  In this week’s episode, Katherine Hale died in a spectacularly beautiful and bloody scene.  (Side note: if anyone else is watching, did Michael’s “hold me” read as more filial or more queer to y’all?)  I was pretty upset when she went.  I get so excited when there are kick-ass women on screen, and Katherine Hale was fucking amazing, and I will miss her dearly these last two episodes.  But there was no outrage there.  I felt like something had been taken from me, but not unfairly.  This is a show with some pretty spectacular women, and Hale’s death didn’t mean that I no longer had the ability to see awesome women on the show.  Had Whedon had a larger number of queer female characters on Buffy, he would have been able to have the amazing plot point of Tara’s death without taking away one of the only instances of representation that queer women had at the time.  

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I have a 2 year old godson and a 4 month old goddaughter.

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