Discover Top Posts Tagged with #just kidding... unless?

Day 97

#deltarune #mike deltarune #fake mikes #battat #small mike #daily-mike #.gif #pngtuber mikes coming to a stream near you #just kidding... unless?#sniles so sneetly

Obviously Buffy has loads of shadow selves/alternate selves/externalizations of aspects of herself (Faith, Spike, Cordelia, Drusilla, Dawn, etc.) but I think that Willow has a few shadow selves as well. The obvious choice for a Willow shadow self is Amy (a witch who was victimized in high school and whose morals are obliterated when she goes off the deep end with magic use) but I think that Anya also fits the role, at least a little bit.

Anya was somewhat of an outcast in her past life (or at least generally disliked by her peers), pigeonholed into her role in the world (housewife, rabbit breeder), and started using magic to escape it. Just like how Willow was bullied all through school and felt suffocated by her roles in her friend group as "the smart one/the computer nerd" and well, started using magic to escape it. Anya is introduced in an episode that shows how dangerous magic is (something that Willow struggles with a lot) and deals with the consequences of having your will exacted. The obvious point at which Anya and Willow truly start to act as shadow selves is when Willow is offered to become a vengeance demon and declines it, inviting the audience to imagine what would have happened if she had accepted (as Anya had, one thousand years prior). Anya is what Willow could have been.

Their relationships with Xander operate under this framework as well. Before she started dating Oz, Willow always imagined that she'd marry Xander one day. Though Willow is over it by the time Anya and Xander get together, I think that this is also a "what Willow could have been" situation. Willow and Anya are pretty adversarial throughout the show but their huge fallout is about Xander. They both think that the other will hurt him. This is pretty unfounded on Anya's side but I think that Willow is projecting both her previous expectations about what a relationship with him would look like and her guilt about having cheated on Oz with him onto Xander and Anya's relationship. She is both jealous of Anya that she has a (somewhat) happy relationship with Xander and wants Anya to be the perfect girlfriend because Willow couldn't do that.

I also don't think that it's a coincidence that Dark Willow and Anya re-becoming a vengeance demon coincide so closely. Obviously everyone goes down a dark path in season six, but both of these dark turns are prompted by the loss of their partner. Tara dies and Xander leaves Anya at the altar. They are both motivated by exacting vengeance on the person that wronged them (Warren and Xander) and are talked down when they are shown love/affection/appreciation (Xander in "Grave" and Spike in "Entropy"). In season seven, when Willow returns home and is recovering from her near-world-ending crashout, it's Anya that helps her because she is the only main character (other than Spike) that can see (understand) her.

Maybe this is why they could never get along.