Celebrities
Sirena Bergman
Nov 12, 2020
Gettty
The millions of queer women around the world who spent their teen years reading Buffy fanfic may be having their best day today, and we're kind of here for it.
For a show that featured exclusively straight-presenting characters for its first three seasons, and then made questionable choices regarding how it depicted one of its main character's queerness, Buffy really has become essential watching (and rewatching) for LGBTQ+ women (and some men) over the years. An impressive feat.
Aside from the parallels between Buffy's secret identity as a vampire slayer and the experience of many teenagers coming to grips with their sexual identity, there's also of course the fact that the teen show featured a main female character in a relationship with another woman.
Lesbians for prime time? Actually, kinda *groundbreaking*.
But where perhaps its queer subtext shines the brightest is in the subtext of the relationship between Buffy and her best friend Willow.
And it seems Willow herself (or at least the woman who brought her to life) seems to agree.
It all began when Stacey Abrams weighed in on Buffy's relationship.
Yes, that's Abrams who ran for governor of Georgia in 2018, Abrams whose tireless activism saw around 800,000 new voters register in Georgia, a state which Joe Biden won in the election earlier this month after it spent almost 30 years as a Republican stronghold.
Never underestimate the multifaceted interests of a political icon.
Anyway, after a Buffy fan learned that Abrams is actually a huge fan of the show, she did what we would all do were to be so bold and tweeted her:
In response, Abrams weighed in on her view of Buffy's choices for romantic partner.
For the purposes of telling you what happened next, we'll leave aside the analysis of whether we want to stan a relationship between a teenage girl and a vampire who is 240 years old – or, if we want to assume vampires cease to age emotionally as well as they do physically, a 26-year-old man. The long and short of it is that Alyson Hannigan, who played Willow, had other thoughts.
We can only assume she saw Abrams' tweet and decided to offer her perspective:
If Hannigan wasn't intending to break queer Twitter, she just got very very lucky. Suffice to say, fans were seriously into it.
Hannigan, being as she is our newly crowned queen, didn't even stop there, commenting on what that would have meant for Willow's relationship with Tara.
And whether it would have affected their friendship.
And just generally being awesome on the internet.
So does it actually make sense for Buffy and Willow to enter dateville?
Well, kind of. Maybe.
Buffy is famously not straight. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, a graphic novel continuation of the seven-season TV show run, Buffy dates a woman – a slayer, no less.
The series was overseen by Buffy creator Joss Whedon, so it's safe to assume that Buffy is not exclusively into men..
And there are hints in earlier seasons that Willow is somewhat drawn to Buffy, although this never really sees any follow-though, and it's actually Xander who Willow is depicted as having a crush on in earlier seasons.
Further, in case anyone missed the memo of 2002 discourse, two queer women can have a platonic relationship. That's totally fine and cool and normal in the real world.
That said, Sunnydale isn't the normal world. If we're able to suspend our disbelief to allow for vampires and demons and impossibly self-assured 16-year-olds with an unlimited clothing budget, we can certainly reach far enough to see a world in which Willow and Buffy are living their best life together right now.
And it seems Alyson Hannigan can too... sorry Mr Whedon, we're going to say that's definitely enough to call it canon.
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