Chosen.. + Tara

[buffffy]

How different do you guys think the final battle with The First would have been had Tara been alive? I know that she was a very powerful person, so would she have been an asset to the Scoobies in the battle? Would she have gotten in the way? Could she of prevented the majority of the battle?

I really have no clue, so I'd love for you guys to sound off in the thread so I can see everybodies ideas!

 

[Evil Angelus 95]

Just gonna say now that I ramble a lot in this post about the idea of Tara-Season 7 combo.

I think that if Tara had lived past "Seeing Red", Willow's 'arc', if it can even be called that, in Season 7 would have gone a lot differently. Willow probably still would have been very afraid to use Magick after the Dark Willow stage at the end of Season 6. Tara would have been trying to help her out through that while trying to figure out where she and her are going to go from what happened.

Tara, in her own right, could have had an amazing arc in Season 7, IMO. I see alot of people claim/say that they didn't like her until towards the end of S6. If she had survived the gunshot wound from "SR", then it quite possible she would have discovered more and more who she was, and eventually just come into her own as a person. I could see the First taunting her with her Mother in "Conversations With Dead People", since that scenario would have been upsetting to her, much like how Dawn is affected in the episode. Not to mention the fact that it could have been interesting to see her interact with some of the Potentials. I could see her acting like a motherly figure to some of them, since she was always kind to everyone. Not to mention that in the episode where the Potential is actually the First in disguise (I forget the episode and the Potential's name, forgive me), she could have actually seen through the First's disguise maybe, considering her ability to see people's auras.

In "Chosen", she herself could have tried to reassure Willow about doing the spell to activate the Potentials. With her and Willow's combined abilties, the Spell might have been more powerful than it was with just Willow doing it. It's quite possible that since Willow would have been doing the majority of the spell-work necessary with the entire Scythe-Magick-Potential combo, she would have been the one to help Willow back to the bus after the spell. She'd, of course, be slightly drained from exerting her Magick in the way that Willow did, but the idea that she and Willow could use Magick on such a scale might have given her reasoning to see that, if guided and with the right motivations, Willow could use Magick on a larger scale. She more than likely wouldn't have done it herself in the same way, but still...

Not sure what you mean by preventing the majority of the battle. The battle was bound to happen. I mean, how else could they have stopped the First?

 

[Blaze]

In "Chosen", she herself could have tried to reassure Willow about doing the spell to activate the Potentials. With her and Willow's combined abilties, the Spell might have been more powerful than it was with just Willow doing it. It's quite possible that since Willow would have been doing the majority of the spell-work necessary with the entire Scythe-Magick-Potential combo, she would have been the one to help Willow back to the bus after the spell. She'd, of course, be slightly drained from exerting her Magick in the way that Willow did, but the idea that she and Willow could use Magick on such a scale might have given her reasoning to see that, if guided and with the right motivations, Willow could use Magick on a larger scale. She more than likely wouldn't have done it herself in the same way, but still...

To expand on that topic, which I completely agree with, how awesome would it have been for the two of them to go back to the roots and see them join powers as we see them do so often in s4. I would have loved to see Willow not doing magick and then the group concluding that they absolutely need her too, Tara decides she'll be there to ground Willow, and then we see the whole rise of "white" Willow in the last few episodes of the series, and we see the contrast with the dark Willow from the previous season. It'd be an awesome feeling to see that Tara is the cause of Willow's good magick to surface.

Of course I love the arc of dark Willow in s6, so I'm torn between all the scenarios, but I think I would have sacrificed just about any arc to have Tara in the final season.