That leaves 130-200 to wrap up 9, 10, 11, and 12.

The Tara Maclay of this AU does duplicate a few of Willow’s canonical notes, namely the equivalent of Something Blue, and resurrecting Willow in the same way that canon Willow resurrected Buffy. I also, like in my other works, use the gift that Amber Benson left of the evil Tara with Andrei Kurgan’s grimoire but in a way more like what canon thought it did but didn’t quite.

Instead of the magic addiction thing Tara goes on the same power trip I treat canon Willow’s Dark Willow phase as and from her POV she’s a victim of physical abuse who gains the power to actually hurt Glory instead of being hurt by her (there’s a bit of a theme that the two villains that hurt her worst in this canon actually vehemently dislike her AU counterpart because she actually literally hurt them and made them feel it). As with canon Willow her worst traits are the results of Black magic corrupting her and less as addiction and more like the One Ring.

This AU’s Dark Willow, by contrast, is a long-standing problem of suppressed rage and a combination of multiple hits with a trauma nailbat for someone with reality warping powers which is an explosive combination….and in each case the idea that there ever really WAS a Dark Willow or a Dark Tara is rejected by both Willow and Tara for very similar reasons but staunchly believed by their friends.

And since it’s an unreliable narrator effect here each is equally right and wrong. Black magic really is innately corrupting because it grants the power to twist reality on a whim without any concern for the consequences and as power tends to corrupt, absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. Does this have the equivalent effect of DID or Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk?

At least in my stories at a Doylist level, no, but in that Watsonian level the contrast between a very powerful sorcerer in full ‘My Precious’ mode with the One Ring and their ordinary selves is so much like it that people without the arcane knowledge to understand it can be easily forgiven for believing that’s what they’re seeing.

It’s also that good old fashioned Scooby double standard, too. Amy Madison in particular is 'Willow if reality handed her only the bad cards and none of the good ones’. This AU’s Willow recognizes that and has sympathy for her within limits and keeps trying to appeal to her good side, which is a note missed with the canon Willow where they just forgot that Amy was one of her closest friends who turned to evil. And until the Twilight war Amy is seen in-universe through Willow’s eyes but after it she’s seen through the eyes of other characters and she’s a murderous evil witch who tries to wield human sacrifice, blood magic, and is every bit as power hungry, petty, and jealous as her canon counterpart.

Equally since this AU’s Willow is invincible unless she’s facing foes capable of using her weaknesses (which naturally I tend to do precisely to add creative tension) her standards of threats are skewed and what to her is a nuisance is an existential threat to everyone else. Amy and Tara, unlike in other cases, are by no means weak, they are exceptionally powerful. Since Willow is the most powerful being in the *universe*, mystically, everyone else is second rate. Second rate to the most powerful being in the infinite expanse of a single universe allows massive amounts of leg room and Tara is the second most powerful sorceress in the entire setting and Amy the third.

And Amy, if she’s not facing Willow or Faith with a friendly weapon that nullifies magic like the Scythe or Olaf’s Hammer, is a murderously creative juggernaut who can and does steamroll multiple enemies at once with trivial ease. This is for the villains is Buffy on hard mode, the villains that last are more badass than their canon counterparts by default.

And where canon only hinted at the worst things Willow did indirectly and in a way where people can ignore it, which was IMO one of the most foolish things it did, because if you’re going to go there, go all the way or not at all, this show makes it explicit and in a way that parallels Faith and Tara just as canon pairs Faith and Willow.

And just as with canon Willow these particular aspects are explicitly a case of 'Dark Side brain rot’ and very directly NOT what the actual Tara would do, and it’s one of the things that haunts her most. Where canon Willow never really had to face the consequences of her actions due to the bullet (and that too is one of the best reasons for the Tara resurrection storyline) , this AU’s Tara very much does face them and grows into fully being the person she could have been. Much like how canon Tara made major mistakes and was the rare Buffyverse character allowed to actually grow and become wiser from them.

This is also why a couple of my other AUs hinge on 'Willow looks into the future, sees her canon path, goes 'Hell no’ and rejects it and it turns out that rejecting it works but there are some steep prices for trying’. Essentially when the characters look at canon Season 6 they balk and go 'gross, no thank you’ but this setting being what it is, it fucks them up with a different nailbat because it’s the Whedonverse and his characters only get yea tier nice things.

Glad y'all are admitting that you’re as much a revolutionary as a puffin is a penguin and you’re afraid to go near the fash because they might hurt you. If you wonder why I laugh at you, refuse to take you seriously, and refuse to humor your delusions, this mentality, which y'all are now bluntly saying, is exactly why. Anti-fascism that never goes near the fascists is just fellow-traveling with a red veneer.

President Nehemiah Scudder Malloy is not an expy of Donald Trump, he’s an expy of Jake Featherston with Joanna Wise as his Ferdinand Koenig…..and with the reality that his taking over in the wake of the Twilight War and the reforging of magic adds yet another bit of chaos to everything Adam did. Adam set the world on fire, Joanna Wise, Malloy, and Pandora essentially start a second American Civil War .

The Pandora Project equally replays a lot of similar notes to the Initiative much like canon but is essentially a somewhat smarter and much more dangerous successor that completely does what the Initiative did so partially and is intentionally modeled on my OC very similar organization, the Architects of Fear.

The Initiative’s goals were cruder and reliant on various assumptions reflecting older Cold War-style logic, the Pandora Project is a much more 21st Century vision and Nehemiah Scudder Malloy (since Buffy doesn’t give people entire names I’m having a bit of fun with this) in turn is a Harry Turtledove reference down to calling his Administration the Freedom Party and using the inverse Confederate Battle Flag symbolism.

This is also one of the longer-term effects of both the death and reforging of magic and everything unleashed in the Twilight War, which is what makes N.S. Malloy’s bid for absolute power viable in the first place. The Fimbulwinter and the explosive revelations that the government knew about the things in the darkness and made them worse enables the demagogic Missouri Senator to do a Santa Anna and all else follows.

I get to a point that will be one of the central themes of Seasons 8 and 9, namely the obvious factor that superpowers are a crapshoot and some people who get them go down very bad paths. This will also affect Season 11’s big bad as a kind of nod and potshot to how I see Season 11 as a lazy redo of the Initiative Plot. Season 11 will lean most firmly into the superheroic tropes with Pandora Rosenberg as the Ursa/Faora Ul to Willow’s Kara Zor-El.

And illustrating ultimately why the superheroic elements here in a world whose tropes run fundamentally differently both work differently and where Dark Willow was Brandon Breyer with an axe to grind, Pandora Rosenberg is both Faora, Johnny Bates (inevitable with the superhero horror) and essentially a Warhammer 40K Primarch analogue down to being invented in a vat, designed to conquer the world, and the people who do this finding out the hard way you can call this up more easily than you can put it down.

For Seasons 8 and 9, however, it’s less superheroic and more of a broader exploration of Slayer archetypes, which come in threes. The Buffy-Faith genuinely heroic kind, the Kennedy-Satsu pragmatic soldierly type, and the Simone-Genevieve Magneto archetype who think that they’re innately superior to the common herd and should be free to dominate them and the world at will.

And in line with other takes on supremacists in fiction Simone and Genevieve are cowards who fail to adhere to their own ideas and their awareness of this makes them worse, not better. Simone is the archetypal bad slayer in universe, much as Kendra is the archetypal good one, and part of the fun with her is making her ‘I am the natural superior of the human race’ mentality subject to the same potshots I’d do with Magneto, much like how the movies had him talk a good game about how people should die for his cause while always ensuring other people did it and being entirely ruthless about sacrificing his own kind to his own ends.

And extensions into a world of the fantastic of how bigots in general are treated, with the Friends of Humanity equivalents treated just as poorly. After all, in this world instead of having Angel in charge of the Twilight War they put a being that’s a literal apex predator that kills gods and worlds in charge of it and undermined the whole 'humanity first’ narrative and find out the hard way that the being that is in charge is doing things to her own tune and nothing and no-one can control her.