Intrigued by your idea of faith and willow in s7 - how to you envision that?
So this would be part of a major restructuring of S7 - something I think about a lot. S7 has a lot of incredible and powerful component parts, and sometimes it gets close to putting them together.
First of all, there is no Kennedy. S7 suffers severely from Too Many Characters disease, so to fix that we would fold all the Potentials - Kennedy, Rona, Vi, Molly, Amanda, etc - into a single composite character. You can still bring in the whole army in the last couple of episodes, but I think it works much better for the show to have one single character we can become invested in, to represent the next generation.
(This character could actually be Dawn. That's something I go back and forth on.)
Second, Faith is in the majority of the season. This is a season all about the reconstruction of the Slayer mythos and Buffy learning to share her power. It's absurd that the character most clearly tied to these themes is just shoved into the last five episodes. Again being wary of TMC disease - you probably cut Andrew to make room for her (I like Andrew just fine, but he is just not a necessary character).
So why Willow/Faith as a romance? Well I think at this point in their journeys they have an incredible amount of parallels, and therefore work very well as a character duo. Willow is coming off her spell as a villain and trying to learn how to use magic in a way that helps people, without losing control and hurting them. She doesn't trust her own power. Faith is the same. She has voluntarily imprisoned herself because she doesn't trust herself in normal society. After breaking out, she will have to learn how to be a Slayer and help people without again losing control and falling into darkness. These similarities will inevitably lead to interesting interactions.
Imagine a version of The Killer In Me where instead of Willow-as-Warren breaking down in front of Kennedy - who has neither any knowledge of the situation nor any connection to the themes of becoming a killer or facing inner darkness - she's breaking down in front of Faith. Faith who we know has been haunted by the face of the man she killed. Faith who has intimate knowledge of what it's like to become a killer. Faith who has literal experience of having an emotional breakdown while in the body of her thematic counterpart. Immediately, that scene becomes so much more potent and powerful.
Then there's the Tara thing. A lot of fans have criticised the Willow/Kennedy relationship for feeling disrespectful towards Tara, to have Willow move on so quickly. I'm not sure if this is the exact issue. Willow would hardly be the first character on this show to get a new love interest after the last one dies. Rather, I think the issue is that if Willow moves on from Tara, then it needs to be a story about her moving on. Tara was the love of her life. I don't believe in one-love-for-one-person, but Willow seemed to. If she's going to find someone else, that's going to be a big deal.
Kennedy doesn't work with that story, because she's a character who's completely ready to get Willow in a relationship. Nothing wrong with that in principle - it just means that on a character level it feels like Willow is being rushed.
Faith does work with this story because her arc is also about learning to move on - moving on from Buffy. That can be read explicitly as moving on from romantic feelings for Buffy, but it still works if you keep that to the subtext. Faith has always defined herself entirely in relation to Buffy, which is not a healthy thing for anyone. She needs to move past that, which she can do by recognising her deep similarity to someone who isn't Buffy, and therefore see herself as a complex individual with similarities/differences to many people, and not just an aspect of Buffy. It's the Shadow Self breaking out of their role as Shadow and daring to create their own identity.
There's a glimmer of this arc in S7 as it exists, with Faith handling her jealousy a lot better - both in how she's much less hostile to Spike than she was to Riley or Angel, and in how she is resistant to taking control or handling the Scythe until Buffy offers it to her. She's growing out of defining herself by her relationship to Buffy. But hilariously, the romance given to her actually undercuts this arc, because Robin started as someone romantically linked to Buffy. Faith ends up doing the same thing she's always done - hook up exclusively with people Buffy dated. If she instead ends the series with Willow, then that emphasizes that she has actually grown and moved on.
So yeah, there's a lot of benefit to a hypothetical Willow/Faith story. It streamlines the season, and gives us a romance between two characters with incredible parallels and opportunity to recognise themselves in each other, and so grow and help each other grow. And it becomes a fairly poignant story about Second Loves - which actually, could not be a more appropriate theme for this season. Season 7 is all about tearing down the idea of 'One Girl In All The World'. So what could be more appropriate than Willow and Faith both moving on from their 'One Girl', and finding that love in each other?
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