#vampire willow

Ok so first off, just to define terms. There are clearly other dimensions in the Buffyverse - from the very first episodes, there’s talk of interdimensional portals, the Old Ones being driven out of this reality but wanting to come back, etc. The Hellmouth is explicitly a portal to a "hell dimension"! But these dimensions are clearly fundamentally different from our own. There’s no suggestion that we would find counterparts there of anything in the real world: Hell-Cordelia, Hell-Miami, Hell-MLK, Hell-Shrimp, Hell-Uranus, etc. They’re just other places.

A “parallel” dimension here means one that matches the main world in its basic parameters (Uranus, shrimp, etc.) but has evolved differently from some point of divergence, and exists “in parallel to” the main world - i.e. different events are happening simultaneously and independently in both.

So, compare three interpretations of what happens at the beginning of “The Wish”:

A. Longstanding Parallel Dimension: The world where Buffy never came to Sunnydale already existed, running in parallel to the main world for two and a half years. (Maybe there’s a sort of quantum multiverse - every possible world exists in parallel.) What Anyanka does is simply transport Cordelia and herself into that pre-existing reality. The Cordelia who already lived there is presumably overwritten somehow, replaced by main-universe Cordelia. The main universe is unaffected except that Cordelia (were it not for the eventual destruction of Anyanka’s power center) vanishes into thin air one day?

B. New parallel dimension: The world where Buffy never came to Sunnydale was created by Anyanka granting Cordelia’s wish, appearing with memories and backstory fully-formed even though the events these characters remember never happened. That world then runs parallel to the main universe, except with our Cordelia in place of a Wishverse-appropriate Cordelia. The main universe presumably continues unchanged (except that Cordelia vanishes into thin air?).

C: No parallel dimension: When Anyanka grants Cordelia’s wish, the main universe is systematically changed to the form it would have had if Buffy had never come to Sunnydale - again with memories and backstory fully-formed even though the events these characters remember never happened.

I will grant that all of these are consistent with what we're shown of the early parts of “The Wish”. They put different sorts of strain in our suspension of disbelief: A requires us to accept millions of parallel universes have always been there, potentially accessible with the right magic. B requires us to accept that Anyanka can create entire new universe out of nothing (including new stars and planets and the black hole at the centre of the galaxy etc.). C requires us to accept that the one and only earthly reality that exists can be, at least temporarily, systematically rewritten with false memories for hundreds or thousands of people. They’re all kind of unparsimonious. Not my preferred approach. But that's the show, it does things for fun sometimes.

But ask yourself this: what happened at the end of the episode when Giles destroyed Anyanka’s power center?

On reading C, what we see on screen reflects what’s really happening. The world is reverted to its original version, people who were dead in that version (like the master) go back to being dead, others (like Giles himself) are reverted to a form with appropriate memories. Vampire Willow is reverted from being dust to being human Willow. Cordelia is reverted to being alive. This is a good thing! Lots of people are happier or safer or more alive or otherwise better off than if he hadn’t smashed it. He succeeded! It’s a heroic triumph!

(I was about to write “better off than before he smashed it, but the reversion seems to take people back to the moment of Cordelia’s wish, which might mean that all the Wishverse events exist in a sort of temporal flap off the main timeline, which complicates language like “before”.)

But what about interpretation B? If the Wishverse was created by Anyanka then undoing the wish surely means the destruction of the Wishverse: it and everyone in it ceases to exist.

And if the Wishverse existed parallel to the main universe, then it can’t be that they’re “saved” by going to the main universe, since it’s already full: main-universe Giles is doing fine, thank you very much, and the only effect on the main universe is that Cordelia and (now de-powered) Anyanka return there.

On this reading, the ending of “The Wish” is a tragic failure: thinking to save himself, Giles kills himself and everyone around him. Moreover, it makes the cut shown on screen deceptive: we’re shown Giles’ last moments, and then cut to people being happy in the main universe, as if the one is the cause of the other, but it’s not (except for Cordelia). I think that makes the episode weirdly and stupidly bad and should disqualify reading B.

What about reading A? Well, since the Wishverse existed before Anyanka granted Cordelia’s wish, presumably it can exist afterwards too. Which means that poor Wishverse Giles smashed the power center with great fanfare, and Anyanka disappears, but then… nothing else happens. The Master still kills Buffy, the blood factory is still operational, Giles himself probably doesn’t have long before they find him.

Because, again, on this reading all that Anyanka had done is transport Cordelia from one world to another. Breaking her power puts Cordelia back in the main universe, which is nice, but it does nothing to help anyone in the Wishverse.

Moreover, not only does Wishverse Giles fail, on this reading he was fundamentally wrong all along. He thought that Cordelia’s crazed ramblings showed that his world was "wrong", that things were "meant to be" another way - that the world Cordelia remembered was more real or true somehow than the one he remembered. And on reading A, this is like meeting a lost traveller who is confused and keeps saying “no, this is wrong, we should be driving on the left” and concluding that your society is somehow a distorted version of the homeland they remember, as opposed to just… another country.

So both reading A and reading B are untenable, in my view. And I think if we had never revisited the Wishverse, that might have been the consensus: this particular episode is pretty consistently presented in terms of reading C.

But then there’s S3E16, “Doppelgängland”. My beloved hot mess. Enormous fun, source of one of my favourite characters, but a disaster for clear and consistent world-building.

That’s not because what’s shown happening doesn’t fit with reading C: it does. The problem is that (1) the characters start talking about “worlds” in a very confusing way, and (2) the metaphysics, though consistent, is convoluted and self-concealing.

Because “Doppelgängland” is not a story about parallel dimensions, it’s a story about time travel. But the time travel interacts with Wish-based reality-alteration in a way that disguises many of its weirder or more paradoxical consequences.

Ok so let me first establish that, whatever else it involves, it must involve time travel. This is suggested by dialogue: Anya asks D’Hoffryn to “fold the fabric of time”, and talks to Wilow about making a “temporal fold.” But more basically: we see vampire Willow disappear from a specific time, the battle at the factory, which is only a day or two after she first meets main-universe Cordelia. Since “The Wish” comes just before “Amends”, which features Christmas, let’s say that all happens in November. But “Doppelgangland” is seven episodes later, in something like March of next year. So clearly vampire Willow has been pulled about four months into the future.

And once we see that this is a time travel story, there’s no need to say anything about parallel dimensions. Time travel can already create Doppelgängers: past-Willow brought into the present can meet present Willow (and spark a gay awakening who said that?).

But I said the metaphysics is self-concealing. To see this, imagine that the spell had been just a little bit different, and taken Willow from, say, a couple weeks earlier. Then in the middle of “Lovers’ Walk”, perhaps while talking to Xander, Willow would have disappeared into thin air, finding herself zapped four months into the future but still in a world she mostly recognised. The full implications would depend on whether, in March, they still decide to “send her back”. If they don’t, then Willow is just missing from the world for four months, likely driving the Scooby Gang into paroxysms of confusion and grief, until she reappears… because of a spell cast by Anya and Willow. Except Willow’s not there to cast the spell, so the spell’s never cast, so she doesn’t vanish, so she is around in March and can cast the spell, so she does vanish, so… it’s a grandfather paradox.

Instead suppose that in March, they did send Willow back to November. She turns to Xander and says “wow! I just had a weird experience and I think I know some things about the future now!” That’s already pretty weird, but it gets really weird when March rolls around and Anya approaches her: either she refuses to help with the spell, creating another Grandfather Paradox, or else she agrees, acting now based on knowledge that she only has a result of already doing that action. The gay awakening first conversation is now one in which she knows everything she’s going to say, and possibly says it because she remembers it, and she remembers it because she said it. This is circular causality, which isn’t a paradox but it still fucking weird.

So by contrast, note that none of that applies to vampire Willow. That’s because whatever happens to her can’t affect the Willow she’ll revert back to in November: the reversion wipes away memories, even wipes away death. Potentially (this is unclear) even if they hadn’t sent her back, the destruction of Anyanka’s power center would still have ensured the re-establishment of regular human Willow. (Thus they could have kept vampire Willow around alongside human Willow perpetually. For... reasons.)

So time travel into or out of an altered portion of reality that gets reverted at the end is, to some extent, protected from paradox and weirdness.

(It’s actually my headcanon that time travel like this is only possible into such “temporal flaps”, just because if time travel is possible more generally (and seemingly fairly easy?) you’d think it would be a much bigger deal.)

So that’s one reason, I think, why people get the wrong idea from “Doppelgängland.” The other reason is what the characters say: they talk about getting vampire Willow back to “her world”, as if that’s a place that’s going to exist indefinitely. But actually, even if she didn’t get staked, vampire Willow is doomed. Not to death (in fact, she doesn’t really die) but to becoming human Willow again. She’s sent back to a time where, in just a few minutes, Giles is going to smash the power center and then, just as Cordelia is alive again with no memories of the Wishverse, so is Willow.

I think the root of the issue here is that Anya lies. Anya is the one who starts talking about vampire Willow’s “world”, and she has a clear incentive to do so: she wants to enlist vampire Willow’s help, so she wants to make her think she has more to look forward to than just getting turned back into regular Willow.

(Admittedly it’s unclear what would happen if Anya’s plan succeeded and she saved the power center. If it means that the power center actually never got destroyed, then that means none of this happened, she never cast the spell, we’re back in a Grandfather paradox. So more likely it means that the Wishverse still ends but Anya is walking around at full power starting in March, which… doesn’t help vampire Willow at all. Hence the lying.)

(Also because if she told her the truth - that the last two and a half years of her memories, her entire existence as a vampire, are false memories of events that never happened - that might spark an existential crisis.)

Anyway, that’s my reasons for thinking that Anya lied, and the other characters believed her because they didn’t know any better, and then thousands of fans also believed her because time travel and parallel dimensions and reality alteration are confusing to think about.

Ok but you might say: doesn’t Anya explicitly say there are parallel dimension later on, in S4E17, “Superstar”? Well, not really. Here’s the relevant dialogue:

Buffy: "Anya when you were a demon, you granted wishes right?" Anya: "Vengeance wishes on ex boyfriends. I'd wish he was a dog or ugly or in love with president McKinley or something." Buffy: "But someone could wish the whole world to be different right? That's possible?" Anya: "Sure, alternate realities. You could uh, could have like a world without shrimp. Or with, you know, nothing but shrimp. You could even make like a freaky world where Jonathan's some kind of not perfect mouth breather if that's what's blowing up your skirt these days. Just don't ask me to live there!”

Buffy: "Anya tell them about the alternate universes." Anya: "Oh ok. Umm. Say you really like shrimp a lot. Or we could say you don't like shrimp at all. Blah I wish there weren't any shrimp you would say to yourself." Buffy: "Stop you're saying it wrong! I think that Jonathan may be doing something so that he's manipulating the world and we're all like his pawns." Anya: "Or prawns." Buffy: "Stop with the shrimp I am trying to do something here!"

Note a few things. First, the word “parallel” isn’t used: the word is “alternate.” Anya is saying that she could change the world, thereby making it an alternative to how it is. She certainly doesn’t say that the world without shrimp already exists and has been running in parallel to the main world all along. (And for what it’s worth I don’t think much if any of our biosphere would be unscathed by the sudden removal of all crustaceans that get called shrimp, they are far too integral to ocean ecosystems. Respect shrimp.)

And while Anya does say “you could make a world where...”, that need not mean literally creating a parallel universe: we often talk about changing the actual world as making a new one (“I want to make a world where no child goes hungry” etc.). And the plot of Superstar, which this exchange represents Buffy beginning to figure out, is very clearly a case of altering the one real world - we even see the waves of alteration and reversion when the spell breaks.

We even get Adam being unaffected, which makes no sense if this were parallel universe Adam. (We also get him and saying things which (in a post way back) I took to suggest that these alterations, though magic can make them, tend to be unstable in the long-term. But that's my headcanon.)

Ok and there is one further line to consider: in S5E11, “Triangle”, Willow and Anya are shown completing some sort of “transposition” spell to get rid of Olaf the Troll. Again I will quote:

BUFFY: “Where did you send him? ANYA: “The land of the trolls. He'll like it there. Full of trolls.” WILLOW: “It's hard to be precise, though. Alternate universes don't stay put. Trying to send him to a specific place is sort of like … like … trying to hit a … puppy, by throwing a live bee at it. Which is a weird image, and you should all just forget it.” ANYA: “It's possible that he's in the land of perpetual Wednesday … or the crazy melty land … or, you know, the world without shrimp.” TARA: “There's a world without shrimp? I'm allergic.” WILLOW: “He, he's probably in troll land.”

I’ll be honest: I don’t like this. The phrase “alternate universe” is now being used to mean something like “another dimension”, which strikes me as sloppy given that jn “Superstar” it meant “altered versions of this dimension”. And there is a suggestion that the world without shrimp does actually exist, in the same way that troll land (clearly something like a demon dimension) exists. This is a mess, and I hate it.

At the same time, none of this dialogue is load-bearing for the plot: it could well reflect the characters telling jokes or being confused. Or lying (which I maintain Anya has already done). The plot just requires the troll-demon to be banished to the world of troll-demons. If the characters also have an imperfect in-universe understading of the relationships between the most confusing sorts of magic, that’s not so surprising.

The writers, however, should be shot (with a water pistol or something) because clearly fans and subsequent writers for the comics seem to have picked up this confusion and run with it and honestly I think multiverses are the death knell for any setting but that’s just, like, my opinion man.