Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s fourth season saw Alyson Hannigan’s Willow Rosenberg tap into new depths of her burgeoning magical abilities and begin to come into her own as a young queer woman. But looking back on the beloved series, Hannigan now thinks that her character should have become romantically involved with someone else.
This week, Hannigan took to her Twitter feed to suggest an alternate telling of Buffy in which Willow ended up dating the titular slayer rather than Amber Benson’s Tara Maclay. You know, the witch she ultimately ended up with for a period of time before Tara was unceremoniously murdered, a moment that would eventually lead to Willow turning to dark magic. Fun!
Actually Buffy should have dated Willow.
— alyson hannigan (@alydenisof) November 12, 2020
While Buffy never dated women during the Buffy TV series’ run, she did end up dating Satsu, a fellow slayer activated by the events in the final TV season, in the canonical Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight comic series, where she describes herself as “going through a phase.” In Hannigan’s mind, Buffy would’ve dated Willow after the whole Tara deal:
After obviously https://t.co/tmrFJX9G1k
— alyson hannigan (@alydenisof) November 12, 2020
With plans for a Buffy reboot in the works, the new series creative team is undoubtedly thinking of ways to make its take on the slayer’s story unique and definitive, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to build out the show’s cast with an even more diverse array of characters. The original Buffy the Vampire Slayer was already plenty queer for its time, but the franchise could and should lean more into the fanbase’s desire for more robust queer representation going forward.