Willow Rosenberg (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
guiltapalooza) wrote2013-05-24 07:02 pm
guiltapalooza) wrote2013-05-24 07:02 pm
Entry tags:
Character History
Willow was born in Sunnydale, California to neglectful, rarely present parents. She went to school and got amazing grades, became best friends with Xander and Jesse, and was generally a social outcast that was relied on for homework help. She was shy, Jewish by heritage and not devotion, had a lightly sarcastic sense of humor, and had a long-held crush on Xander.
Then Buffy Summers, the Slayer, transferred in from L.A., and Willow and Xander found out about the supernatural underbelly in their hometown. Jesse was shortly turned into a vampire and killed, and after seeing this, they knew they couldn't go back to their old way of living. They both decided to help Buffy in fighting the undead - an unprecedented decision objected to by her Watcher, Giles (who nevertheless came to see the merit in it years later, to say the least). Willow takes her place as the assistant researcher of the group and the computer person, hacking into school records, police databases, and morgue files to help them solve the monster mystery of the week. Although initially hesitant to break rules, she soon comes to do it without thought due to her desire to save lives. Buffy defeats the Master and fulfills a prophecy at the end of the season, and the structure of the group is further cemented.
In season two Willow's character undergoes several changes. She finally decides to move on from her unrequited crush on Xander and starts dating Oz, a mellow lead guitarist in a local band, who turns out to be a werewolf. They met while being scouted by the government for a job. She also develops an interest in magic after seeing what Giles and computer teacher Jenny Calendar can do with it, and when Angel loses his soul, performs the spell that re-ensouls him, a hefty bit of magic. Buffy, coping with everything else that happened that year, leaves Sunnydale for the summer; while she's gone, Willow and Xander try to keep a lid on the Hellmouth in her place.
Eventually she returns and season three finds the Scooby Gang seniors in high school. Faith, the next Slayer, arrives in Sunnydale and kicks off the major plot of the year with her involvement with the demonic, immortal mayor. Willow and Xander kiss at the homecoming dance despite both of them already dating someone else, and Spike, a lovelorn villain from the previous season, returns and kidnaps Willow, threatening to kill her and Xander if she doesn't perform a spell for him. While he goes out to get supplies, Xander and Willow make out again, and are caught by their respective boyfriend and girlfriend trying to rescue them. Oz eventually agrees to forgive her.
Other exciting things in season three include the wish-granting demon Anyanka playing havoc with alternate realities, Willow meeting a gay, vampire version of herself, and joining a local coven only to be persecuted by her own mother. The Scoobies' high school graduation is interrupted by the aforementioned mayor turning into an enormous snake, and them blowing up the school to get rid of them.
Despite being accepted at several Ivy League colleges, Willow enrolls at University of California Sunnydale alongside Buffy. Spike returns again and is captured by Initiative, a group of government-run commandos that are trying to keep a lid on the demon population in Sunnydale. They put a microchip in his brain that prevents him from harming humans, thus starting his long and arduous transition to the white hats. Meanwhile, Oz becomes attracted to a singer from another band, and discovers that she's a werewolf. The other werewolf attacks a jealous Willow, but is killed by Oz in his wolf form - Oz, convinced he's too dangerous to be around, leaves without expectation to return.
Heartbroken, Willow tries to cast a spell to have her will be done and make the pain go away, but only ends up causing problems among the Scoobies. She joins the group of Wiccans on campus and discovers that they're all propaganda and no magic. However, she does meet Tara there. The two fall in love very quickly and end up the iconic lesbian relationship of television pretty much to date. Oz does return later on in the season having gained control of the wolf, but Willow rejects him based on how she feels for Tara, and he loses control again based on his jealousy and decides to leave once more. The season closes with the final confrontation with the Initiative.
The overarching plot of season five is based on Dawn and Glory. Glory is a hell goddess determined to go home, but do it she needs the Key, a mystical ball of energy that ancient monks placed in the modern day in the form of Buffy's sister to ensure that she would feel motivated to protect it, and her. That takes a while to come out, though, and in the meantime Tara's family visits on her twentieth birthday and tell her that she will turn into a demon and needs to come home. This turns out to be a lie meant to control the magic-wielding women of the family, and the gang defends Tara from them and uncovers the secret. Willow also starts to grow protective of Xander as he and his girlfriend, Anya, are now engaged, and accidentally summons a troll while having an argument with her. The episode ends with them reassuring each other that Anya won't hurt him, and Willow doesn't want to date him anymore.
The plot picks up again with Glory trying to interrogate Dawn for, ironically, information on the Key's whereabouts - but Dawn herself doesn't know that she's the Key, so she finds out nothing, and Willow and Tara jointly perform a spell to teleport Glory away. Shortly afterwards Tara confesses to her that she's afraid of how powerful Willow is becoming, and not only does she feel left behind and unworthy, but she's legitimately afraid of her as well. The fight goes unresolved, and Tara walks off to have time to herself, only to be found by Glory and interrogated on the location of the Key. Tara does know, but refuses to give in, protecting Dawn, and in retaliation Glory drains her mind of sanity.
Willow finds her and takes a nonsensical, unstable Tara to the hospital, where she swears vengeance. She gathers dark magic from Giles' magic shop and attacks Glory directly. She does hurt her, which is more than anyone else had done previously, but in the end is seriously injured. Buffy, aware of what she'd planned, shows up to help and they escape. In the end Glory finds out Dawn is the Key, and they try to run away and hold her off, but to no avail - Dawn is taken. Overwhelmed, Buffy retreats inside her mind and goes into a fugue state right at the height of the crisis. Willow performs deep telepathy to 'wake her up' and tells her forcefully that it's not over yet and they can still save Dawn. Almost immediately after, though, Giles reveals that the only way to stop the ceremony Glory's performing once it starts is to kill Dawn. At the final fight, Buffy realizes her blood would stop it as well, and sacrifices herself in her sister's place.
Willow and Tara move into the Summers house to take care of Dawn in Buffy's absence. Believing that Buffy was sent to hell because she jumped into a portal when she died, Willow convinces her friends to help her resurrect her, keeping it a secret from Giles and Dawn. They actually succeed, but in reality Buffy had been in heaven, something she keeps to herself as well so as not to make her friends feel more guilty. Giles calls Willow a rank amateur and tells her that she has no idea what she's doing, that what she's done is incredibly dangerous, but Willow is arrogant enough to not only ignore him but insult him back.
This is a prelude for the addiction to magic that will herald the rest of the season for her. Tara, who saw this coming the year before, warns her again that she needs to stop using magic for every little thing, and Willow erases her memory of the argument altogether. The next day Tara finds evidence of the spell and threatens to leave her if she doesn't change, and challenges her to go a week without any magic at all if she wants her to stay, but Willow almost immediately casts another memory spell. This one goes awry and causes everyone to lose their memories entirely. After the spell breaks, Tara realizes what's happened and breaks up with her, moving out of the house and leaving Willow crying in the bathroom.
Without Tara's influence, her addiction worsens. She turns Amy, a minor character from seasons before who had been stuck as a rat, back into a human, and they go partying, high on their magic and using it recklessly. They get a kind of magic hangover and are completely drained. Amy suggests the next day that they visit someone called Rack, a warlock who can enable them to use spells without any recovery time at all, and they visit him. She achieves an extraordinary high and wakes up the next morning in her own room, only to cry in the shower, revealing that she's covering up her pain with the magic. Willow shapes some clothes that Tara left into an invisible body and curls up with it on the bed.
Yet that pain makes her seek it out more - despite having promised to take Dawn to a movie that night, Willow takes her instead to Rack's, where she gets extremely high again and very nearly gets Dawn killed. Once things have been sorted out, Willow, sobbing, tells a furious Buffy that she's terrified and needs help. She agrees to give up magic for good and fights the withdrawal on her own.
Despite having broken up with her and moving out, Tara remains in Willow's life and is devoted to her recovery. After the incident with Dawn, Willow has learned her lesson, and stays away from magic; several episodes later finds her and Tara chatting more or less amiably on a coffee date. Eventually Tara states that repairing their love would be a long process, and she'd just rather skip it, and the scene cuts on them kissing.
In the background of all this addiction and relationship drama has been the rising threat of the Trio, who are three college age boys, immature and deeply nerdy. Nevertheless, their attempts to become a threat to Buffy have been gaining more traction, and Willow discovers that they've been spying on Buffy's life with hidden cameras at her house, her job, her classrooms, and the local bar. As Buffy starts to close in on them, the ringleader of the Trio, Warren, decides to take things directly to her, and goes to her house with a gun. After shooting Buffy, he shoots again and accidentally kills Tara through a window, directly in Willow's arms. Willow tries to resurrect her but is told by the gods that it can't happen, as Tara died a natural, non-mystical, death. Enraged, she vows to kill Warren.
Willow walks directly from the house and is informed by Xander on the way out that Buffy's been shot. As he leaves in the ambulance, she makes her way to the magic shop, where she freezes Anya in place and sucks the black arts directly out of the books. She goes immediately to the hospital where Buffy is and heals her instantaneously, lifting the bullet out of her chest and telling her that they need to go after Warren. Xander and Buffy try to convince her to stop using magic, but she ignores them entirely, and the rest of the episode she pursues a terrified, running Warren.
Once she finds him, he strikes her with an axe, but she heals instantly and overcomes everything else he's brought. She magically ties him in place and, as he begs, realizes that Tara wasn't the first person he's killed. She tortures him viciously and repeatedly, finally killing him by flaying the skin from his body and setting him on fire. Then she disappears into thin air, intending to kill the other two members of the Trio.
Xander and Buffy regroup with the rest and force Jonathan and Andrew, the other two of the Trio, to stay with them in order to protect them. Willow catches up after recharging at Rack's and they prove no match for her implacable determination, even when Giles returns from England, empowered by an entire coven of witches. She absorbs the energy from him, but it coincides with a powerful burst of emotion, exactly what she's been avoiding feeling, and she decides the world is too terrible to go on. Teleporting to the ruins of a Satanic temple, Willow uses it to start draining the energy of the Earth itself, and back at the shop Anya informs the rest that nothing supernatural, including Buffy, can stop her.
Xander runs off to try to stop her anyway, conscientious that he can't physically do anything, and though Willow batters him with magic he refuses to budge and says that he loves her. If she's going to destroy the world, he wants to be right there beside her. Willow suddenly falls into his arms and breaks down sobbing, the dark magic draining from her. Giles tells Anya elsewhere that the magic he had was intended for Willow to steal in order to remind her of her humanity.
For the duration of the summer Willow stays with a coven in England, near where Giles lives, to learn how to live with and use her magic responsibly. The time does come for her to return to Sunnydale, but her fear that he friends won't want to see her or forgive her is potent enough to render her invisible to them. Even after that's cleared up and it's made obvious to her that they still love and support her, Willow fears she'll lose control and attack them again or otherwise become a threat once more. This worry persists throughout the season.
Despite her worry the real big bad of the seventh season is the First Evil, who has been rising up to balance the good that was brought into the world when Buffy was resurrected. It plans on terminating the Slayer line for good and ending the world. Potential Slayers, in danger from the First, gather at Buffy's house to train for the fight against it. One of the Potentials named Kennedy pursues Willow romantically, despite her still grieving for Tara. It takes time and an activated curse for Willow to come to accept the guilt she feels for considering moving on after Tara's death, but she does come to reciprocate Kennedy's affections, though they aren't near as close as Willow was with Tara.
In the last episode of the show, Buffy asks Willow to perform a spell to make all of the Potentials in the world into real Slayers, the most powerful thing she's ever attempted. Her hair turns white in the moment, and the spell succeeds, the First defeated and the Scoobies escaping safely as Sunnydale sinks into the ground. The show was continued officially in an "eighth season" in the comics.
Then Buffy Summers, the Slayer, transferred in from L.A., and Willow and Xander found out about the supernatural underbelly in their hometown. Jesse was shortly turned into a vampire and killed, and after seeing this, they knew they couldn't go back to their old way of living. They both decided to help Buffy in fighting the undead - an unprecedented decision objected to by her Watcher, Giles (who nevertheless came to see the merit in it years later, to say the least). Willow takes her place as the assistant researcher of the group and the computer person, hacking into school records, police databases, and morgue files to help them solve the monster mystery of the week. Although initially hesitant to break rules, she soon comes to do it without thought due to her desire to save lives. Buffy defeats the Master and fulfills a prophecy at the end of the season, and the structure of the group is further cemented.
In season two Willow's character undergoes several changes. She finally decides to move on from her unrequited crush on Xander and starts dating Oz, a mellow lead guitarist in a local band, who turns out to be a werewolf. They met while being scouted by the government for a job. She also develops an interest in magic after seeing what Giles and computer teacher Jenny Calendar can do with it, and when Angel loses his soul, performs the spell that re-ensouls him, a hefty bit of magic. Buffy, coping with everything else that happened that year, leaves Sunnydale for the summer; while she's gone, Willow and Xander try to keep a lid on the Hellmouth in her place.
Eventually she returns and season three finds the Scooby Gang seniors in high school. Faith, the next Slayer, arrives in Sunnydale and kicks off the major plot of the year with her involvement with the demonic, immortal mayor. Willow and Xander kiss at the homecoming dance despite both of them already dating someone else, and Spike, a lovelorn villain from the previous season, returns and kidnaps Willow, threatening to kill her and Xander if she doesn't perform a spell for him. While he goes out to get supplies, Xander and Willow make out again, and are caught by their respective boyfriend and girlfriend trying to rescue them. Oz eventually agrees to forgive her.
Other exciting things in season three include the wish-granting demon Anyanka playing havoc with alternate realities, Willow meeting a gay, vampire version of herself, and joining a local coven only to be persecuted by her own mother. The Scoobies' high school graduation is interrupted by the aforementioned mayor turning into an enormous snake, and them blowing up the school to get rid of them.
Despite being accepted at several Ivy League colleges, Willow enrolls at University of California Sunnydale alongside Buffy. Spike returns again and is captured by Initiative, a group of government-run commandos that are trying to keep a lid on the demon population in Sunnydale. They put a microchip in his brain that prevents him from harming humans, thus starting his long and arduous transition to the white hats. Meanwhile, Oz becomes attracted to a singer from another band, and discovers that she's a werewolf. The other werewolf attacks a jealous Willow, but is killed by Oz in his wolf form - Oz, convinced he's too dangerous to be around, leaves without expectation to return.
Heartbroken, Willow tries to cast a spell to have her will be done and make the pain go away, but only ends up causing problems among the Scoobies. She joins the group of Wiccans on campus and discovers that they're all propaganda and no magic. However, she does meet Tara there. The two fall in love very quickly and end up the iconic lesbian relationship of television pretty much to date. Oz does return later on in the season having gained control of the wolf, but Willow rejects him based on how she feels for Tara, and he loses control again based on his jealousy and decides to leave once more. The season closes with the final confrontation with the Initiative.
The overarching plot of season five is based on Dawn and Glory. Glory is a hell goddess determined to go home, but do it she needs the Key, a mystical ball of energy that ancient monks placed in the modern day in the form of Buffy's sister to ensure that she would feel motivated to protect it, and her. That takes a while to come out, though, and in the meantime Tara's family visits on her twentieth birthday and tell her that she will turn into a demon and needs to come home. This turns out to be a lie meant to control the magic-wielding women of the family, and the gang defends Tara from them and uncovers the secret. Willow also starts to grow protective of Xander as he and his girlfriend, Anya, are now engaged, and accidentally summons a troll while having an argument with her. The episode ends with them reassuring each other that Anya won't hurt him, and Willow doesn't want to date him anymore.
The plot picks up again with Glory trying to interrogate Dawn for, ironically, information on the Key's whereabouts - but Dawn herself doesn't know that she's the Key, so she finds out nothing, and Willow and Tara jointly perform a spell to teleport Glory away. Shortly afterwards Tara confesses to her that she's afraid of how powerful Willow is becoming, and not only does she feel left behind and unworthy, but she's legitimately afraid of her as well. The fight goes unresolved, and Tara walks off to have time to herself, only to be found by Glory and interrogated on the location of the Key. Tara does know, but refuses to give in, protecting Dawn, and in retaliation Glory drains her mind of sanity.
Willow finds her and takes a nonsensical, unstable Tara to the hospital, where she swears vengeance. She gathers dark magic from Giles' magic shop and attacks Glory directly. She does hurt her, which is more than anyone else had done previously, but in the end is seriously injured. Buffy, aware of what she'd planned, shows up to help and they escape. In the end Glory finds out Dawn is the Key, and they try to run away and hold her off, but to no avail - Dawn is taken. Overwhelmed, Buffy retreats inside her mind and goes into a fugue state right at the height of the crisis. Willow performs deep telepathy to 'wake her up' and tells her forcefully that it's not over yet and they can still save Dawn. Almost immediately after, though, Giles reveals that the only way to stop the ceremony Glory's performing once it starts is to kill Dawn. At the final fight, Buffy realizes her blood would stop it as well, and sacrifices herself in her sister's place.
Willow and Tara move into the Summers house to take care of Dawn in Buffy's absence. Believing that Buffy was sent to hell because she jumped into a portal when she died, Willow convinces her friends to help her resurrect her, keeping it a secret from Giles and Dawn. They actually succeed, but in reality Buffy had been in heaven, something she keeps to herself as well so as not to make her friends feel more guilty. Giles calls Willow a rank amateur and tells her that she has no idea what she's doing, that what she's done is incredibly dangerous, but Willow is arrogant enough to not only ignore him but insult him back.
This is a prelude for the addiction to magic that will herald the rest of the season for her. Tara, who saw this coming the year before, warns her again that she needs to stop using magic for every little thing, and Willow erases her memory of the argument altogether. The next day Tara finds evidence of the spell and threatens to leave her if she doesn't change, and challenges her to go a week without any magic at all if she wants her to stay, but Willow almost immediately casts another memory spell. This one goes awry and causes everyone to lose their memories entirely. After the spell breaks, Tara realizes what's happened and breaks up with her, moving out of the house and leaving Willow crying in the bathroom.
Without Tara's influence, her addiction worsens. She turns Amy, a minor character from seasons before who had been stuck as a rat, back into a human, and they go partying, high on their magic and using it recklessly. They get a kind of magic hangover and are completely drained. Amy suggests the next day that they visit someone called Rack, a warlock who can enable them to use spells without any recovery time at all, and they visit him. She achieves an extraordinary high and wakes up the next morning in her own room, only to cry in the shower, revealing that she's covering up her pain with the magic. Willow shapes some clothes that Tara left into an invisible body and curls up with it on the bed.
Yet that pain makes her seek it out more - despite having promised to take Dawn to a movie that night, Willow takes her instead to Rack's, where she gets extremely high again and very nearly gets Dawn killed. Once things have been sorted out, Willow, sobbing, tells a furious Buffy that she's terrified and needs help. She agrees to give up magic for good and fights the withdrawal on her own.
Despite having broken up with her and moving out, Tara remains in Willow's life and is devoted to her recovery. After the incident with Dawn, Willow has learned her lesson, and stays away from magic; several episodes later finds her and Tara chatting more or less amiably on a coffee date. Eventually Tara states that repairing their love would be a long process, and she'd just rather skip it, and the scene cuts on them kissing.
In the background of all this addiction and relationship drama has been the rising threat of the Trio, who are three college age boys, immature and deeply nerdy. Nevertheless, their attempts to become a threat to Buffy have been gaining more traction, and Willow discovers that they've been spying on Buffy's life with hidden cameras at her house, her job, her classrooms, and the local bar. As Buffy starts to close in on them, the ringleader of the Trio, Warren, decides to take things directly to her, and goes to her house with a gun. After shooting Buffy, he shoots again and accidentally kills Tara through a window, directly in Willow's arms. Willow tries to resurrect her but is told by the gods that it can't happen, as Tara died a natural, non-mystical, death. Enraged, she vows to kill Warren.
Willow walks directly from the house and is informed by Xander on the way out that Buffy's been shot. As he leaves in the ambulance, she makes her way to the magic shop, where she freezes Anya in place and sucks the black arts directly out of the books. She goes immediately to the hospital where Buffy is and heals her instantaneously, lifting the bullet out of her chest and telling her that they need to go after Warren. Xander and Buffy try to convince her to stop using magic, but she ignores them entirely, and the rest of the episode she pursues a terrified, running Warren.
Once she finds him, he strikes her with an axe, but she heals instantly and overcomes everything else he's brought. She magically ties him in place and, as he begs, realizes that Tara wasn't the first person he's killed. She tortures him viciously and repeatedly, finally killing him by flaying the skin from his body and setting him on fire. Then she disappears into thin air, intending to kill the other two members of the Trio.
Xander and Buffy regroup with the rest and force Jonathan and Andrew, the other two of the Trio, to stay with them in order to protect them. Willow catches up after recharging at Rack's and they prove no match for her implacable determination, even when Giles returns from England, empowered by an entire coven of witches. She absorbs the energy from him, but it coincides with a powerful burst of emotion, exactly what she's been avoiding feeling, and she decides the world is too terrible to go on. Teleporting to the ruins of a Satanic temple, Willow uses it to start draining the energy of the Earth itself, and back at the shop Anya informs the rest that nothing supernatural, including Buffy, can stop her.
Xander runs off to try to stop her anyway, conscientious that he can't physically do anything, and though Willow batters him with magic he refuses to budge and says that he loves her. If she's going to destroy the world, he wants to be right there beside her. Willow suddenly falls into his arms and breaks down sobbing, the dark magic draining from her. Giles tells Anya elsewhere that the magic he had was intended for Willow to steal in order to remind her of her humanity.
For the duration of the summer Willow stays with a coven in England, near where Giles lives, to learn how to live with and use her magic responsibly. The time does come for her to return to Sunnydale, but her fear that he friends won't want to see her or forgive her is potent enough to render her invisible to them. Even after that's cleared up and it's made obvious to her that they still love and support her, Willow fears she'll lose control and attack them again or otherwise become a threat once more. This worry persists throughout the season.
Despite her worry the real big bad of the seventh season is the First Evil, who has been rising up to balance the good that was brought into the world when Buffy was resurrected. It plans on terminating the Slayer line for good and ending the world. Potential Slayers, in danger from the First, gather at Buffy's house to train for the fight against it. One of the Potentials named Kennedy pursues Willow romantically, despite her still grieving for Tara. It takes time and an activated curse for Willow to come to accept the guilt she feels for considering moving on after Tara's death, but she does come to reciprocate Kennedy's affections, though they aren't near as close as Willow was with Tara.
In the last episode of the show, Buffy asks Willow to perform a spell to make all of the Potentials in the world into real Slayers, the most powerful thing she's ever attempted. Her hair turns white in the moment, and the spell succeeds, the First defeated and the Scoobies escaping safely as Sunnydale sinks into the ground. The show was continued officially in an "eighth season" in the comics.