Posts tagged: Willow Rosenberg
Willow and Warren come from similar beginnings, two kids branded as nerds and bullied until they crave control, crave power over people after years of powerlessness- and they find that in magic and in technology, in their ability to create facsimiles and alter the things they want. It’s in wiping Tara and Katrina’s minds, forcing them to be perfect only in their approval of their [ex-]lovers, it’s in how they resent Buffy when given a taste of power, it’s in how that power is a drug that brings them to greater and greater extremes until they’re willing to rape and kill without giving it a second thought.
And that’s why Warren is the perfect warmup band to Willow’s main act in Season 6, because contained within him is the same dark resentment for past injustices and the same gleeful embrace of disregard for those who care about him. Willow becomes Warren as the season progresses, Willow gets in touch with that same power and is drunk on it, and Willow’s reproof of Warren’s treatment of Katrina is a commentary on the wrongs she herself had committed re: Tara.
It’s vital to her arc that she recognizes this darkness, that she comes into contact with it again and sees that she isn’t all that different from Warren after all. And that’s what The Killer in Me does, more than anything- Willow literally turns into Warren and faces her own demons there and the person she’d very nearly become. And only once she can actually come to terms with those similarities can she overcome them at last.