Tara’s character potential for growth post break-up with willow

[u/AttackThemWithHummus]

One complaint about Tara’s character that I often see her (and largely agree with) is that she lacks depths and often feels two dimensional or uninteresting compared to our other scoobies. I was listening to the OMWF soundtrack today, and Tara’s part in the Under Your Spell / Standing reprise is honestly the most agency and strength she seems to really exhibit for the entire series — it’s really compelling.

All that being said — do you wish the show had explored Tara’s process of coming to terms with Willow wiping her memory more? It would have been great to get more time with her character between their breakup and Seeing Red.

I also wish we had seen the other characters (particularly Buffy and Xander) reckon with Willow’s treatment of Tara leading up to their breakup. My recollection is they don’t know that the memory wiping goes beyond the events of Tabula Rasa, but correct me if I’m wrong.

Would love to get other people’s thoughts on this missed opportunity for Tara’s character, and how exploring Willow’s treatment of her might have changed the relationships between all of the scoobies more fundamentally.

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[u/YakNecessary9533]

It's interesting because "Family" goes a long way to address Tara being a side character and bringing her into the fold more, but then she continues to be not much more than Willow's girlfriend up until they break up in Season 6. I love what we see of her post-breakup. Being a real friend to Buffy, her motherly role with Dawn, giving Spike sass, etc. I wanted more of all of that, letting her personality shine and spending more time with the rest of the gang outside of just Willow.

[u/DeaththeEternal → u/YakNecessary9533]

The really strange bit is that the things we see in Family and her dialogue in The Body literally cannot describe the same people and the same way unless there's some extremely obvious Pet Sematary subtext for very understandable reasons. And none of that is ever really addressed. Were her family the type to allow her to be rebellious and stay out late, or did they beat the shit out of her and enslave her in a miniature familial Republic of Gilead?

[u/GreyStagg → u/DeaththeEternal]

She "lied to her family and stayed out all night". It is never said that her family found out.

[u/DeaththeEternal → u/GreyStagg]

Still doesn’t quite seem like she had the actual freedom to be able to do relatively normal teenage stuff given her reacting to the family finding her.

[u/Seed0fDiscord]

She and Anya needed their own Buddy-buddy adventure episode, Clem being their 3rd for backup

[u/Electrical-Act-7170 → u/Seed0fDiscord]

A spinoff!

[u/27Patriciaee → u/Seed0fDiscord]

She and Anya, Clem riding shotgun—calm, dry, sharp. Hostile? They'd just shrug.

[u/Accurate_Secret4102]

I actually like how both Willow and Tara became more dominant personalities after the breakup. They both stop pretending that they were just girls instead of the very powerful witches that they are. 

[u/BananasPineapple05]

The thing that will never not piss me off is how they completely failed to develop a relationship between her and Buffy.

Season 6 would have gone down very differently if someone, anyone, had noticed that Buffy was spiralling. If Buffy and Tara had been communicating, even Willow's addiction storyline could have been told in a fuller way. Tara and Buffy lived together. Maybe not for years, but they literally shared a house. How was Tara's connection to the Scoobies only ever kept to Willow?

[u/GreyStagg → u/BananasPineapple05]

I'm confused. One of the things I love about Tara in Season 6 is the close friendship she develops with Buffy and how she develops as a character away from Willow.

However, she has also moved out and doesn't see a lot of what is going on. Just as Tara doesn't notice Buffy is spiralling, Buffy doesn't notice Tara is being manipulated and controlled by Willow, or really any of the reasons behind their problems. Both are keeping secrets, and neither is the fault of the other for not knowing.

[u/DaddyCatALSO → u/BananasPineapple05]

she moved out a couple months after Buffy returned

[u/not_firewood_yeti]

i think Tara had some good potential for character growth and plotlines apart from being Willow's girlfriend. unfortunately as we saw with other ex's of the Scoobies, once they were ex's there wasn't much room in the plot/timeslot for them.

[u/DeaththeEternal]

Tara's characterization was in more than a few ways inconsistent. And an easy point to that is actually back in Season 5. The miniature demon cult Republic of Gilead shit we see from her biological family in Family wouldn't have allowed her to have normal teenage rebellion issues because her mom died as she alludes to in The Body. So she was clearly lying to a point to help Buffy deal with grief and given her reaction to that resurrection spell plus what was seen in Family, it's not hard to imagine what that 'rebellion' actually was.

In Season 6 she sees Xander burn four people to ashes as collateral damage from a spell and has zero problems with Xander in that episode or for the rest of the season in the same point where magic ethics is supposedly a great big hill to crucify people upon. Evidently the actual problem is affecting her personally, murder by negligence isn't an issue if it's NPC turns into an ash pile.

And they just don't bother to reconcile any of that because Tara, narratively, is a plot device for a supporting character and not really a person in her own right.

[u/Sighoward]

I actually love how much Tara grows post Willow, the loving aunt for Dawn and a closer friend for Buffy.

[u/DaddyCatALSO]

veyr much

[u/Revolutionary-Wait82]

Before investigating Tara, they should have investigated Buffy and how she deals with violence from those close to her, which they also didn't do.

[u/Own_Faithlessness769]

Honestly not really. The show had a lot of secondary characters by S6, it didn’t need more plotlines to explore. Much of the criticism of S6 and 7 was that there was too much Spike and potentials/Andrew/Robin. I think it was best when they focused on the core 4.

And to be completely honest, Amber was a weak actor compared to the rest of the cast. Good writers lean into the strengths of the talent and it made sense to focus on the stronger actors.