Willow Rosenberg: Mouthy Witch
Willow putting a black eye on witchcraft. See what I did, there?
Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) was ultimately the resident gay witch sidekick in Joss Whedon’s popular BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER series. Willow originates as a fairly shy sort of character. But, she evolved into a more complex character. I won’t even try to recap her various twists and turns across 144 episodes of the show, when Wikipedia does it so thoroughly.
But you do get “Dark Willow” when her girlfriend Tara is killed, and she’s a daunting force. From Wikipedia’s entry on her:
Dark Willow proved to be exceptionally more powerful than Buffy. She changes visually when she walks into the Magic Box, a store owned by Anya and Giles, telekinetically retrieves dozens of dark magic books from the shelves, and leeches the words from the pages with her fingertips. As the words crawl up her arms and soak into her skin, her eyes and hair become black and her posture “aggressively aware and confident”.[39]
Through all of her character’s twists and turns, Alyson Hanigan did a great job bringing Willow to life as a character, in classic Whedonesque fashion (compelling female characters, snappy dialogue, wry situations).
Wicked Willow Quotes
“It’s just in high school, knowledge was pretty much frowned upon; you really had to work to learn anything. But here, the energy, the-the collective intelligence, it’s like this force, t-this penetrating force, a-and I can just feel my mind opening up, you know? A-and letting this place just thrust into and-and spurt knowledge into… that sentence ended up in a different place than it started out in.“
For More Witches, Wicked and Otherwise
Can’t get enough of witches? Be sure to order our anthology, Wax & Wane: A Gathering of Witch Tales, for 30 spellbinding witch stories!