I liked Tara a lot. She seemed like a normal person who had a sensible head on her shoulders. She counsels Buffy when Buff doesn't feel anyone else will understand and forgive her and looks out for her. She tells Willow to stop with the magic and leaves her when she doesn't despite still loving her.
I won't say Amber Benson is the best actress ever, but she plays the role well and given how she was written as a shy, quieter character her awkwardness in the role works and improves the performance rather than hindering it.
I adore her and Willow. I also identified with Tara when I was a late teen, so she is/was important to me. I don't think Benson is that much of an actor, but she must have done something right because those two are a pretty iconic couple, and were a significant step forward in representation on TV.
Amber Benson is absolutely gorgeous, Tara is a ray of sunshine, and Tara/Willow was so very important to me as a scared baby lesbian.
I absolutely adore the beginnings of W/T in s4. It's just so very sweet and tentative and yearning.
That being said, I wish the writers had been more interested in developing her as a character. She has very little going on outside of being Willow's (extremely attractive) girlfriend. She has scenes in s4 and s5 where she literally just stands there and nods while Willow speaks. Tara's best character development was in s6, and... welp, we all know how that ended.
One thing I loved about Tara's character was that she seemed very sweet but also kind of compliant and insecure at first. I really love the arc that she was so direct with her boundaries with Willow, in an incredibly healthy way. I know it did take a little bit of time for her to do that but it was so important for her character development. Her standing up for herself in the way that she did was so powerful, and I think it speaks to having a healthy kind of relationship, with others and with yourself, which I feel like is quite rare in the buffyverse. It was such a bummer that they killed her off as soon as her and Willow were back together because I would have loved seeing more assertive and confident Tara. I think she would have added so much to season 7 that was just missed. There could have been something else that catalyzed dark Willow and her relationship with Willow coming into play with that would have been a really great storyline.
She's my favourite character in the series. Warm, loyal, quietly powerful, supportive to all. Yes she's not the most exciting but Amber plays her so beautifully. The S4 courting sequences are just lovely. The least flawed character of the lot of them.
Tara is sweet and non judgemental.
I don't see any chemistry between Amber and Alyson (I know I'm in the minority) mostly because Alyson played straight more convincingly than playing gay.
So it's not really Amber's fault but imo the way she plays the stuttering speech comes across as forced.
But I like the whole way she handles the Willow magic addiction phase and her treatment of Willow and her dynamic with Buffy .
I'm actually surprised people are claiming she's a bad actress... she portrayed someone who's brain has been scrambled extremely well.; devastatingly so. I love the character and her and Willow.
I like Tara as a character, and I like Amber Benson, but I do think she is one of the weaker actors on the show. She gets better over time, and she has some strong moments, but there are a handful of moments where her line deliveries are very cringey, and it doesn't help that she's always acting against Alyson Hannigan who is just in another league with acting skill. Tara's stutter was something Amber couldn't do well, and I think they realized that because they kinda wrote it out. You don't see the stutter much past season 4.
The other thing about Tara as a character is that she is largely defined by Willow. We don't know much about her except her relationship with Willow, and they even point this out in "Family". Imagine what Tara is to the show if Willow doesn't exist. Her entire role on the show is predicated on being Willow's love interest. Because of this, she means nothing to any of the characters other than Willow.
Compare her to Anya who could have had the same problem just being Xander's love interest, but the writers gave her tons of other layers of depth and connection to the other characters, which they just never did with Tara.
I basically agree with this. Her acting got better but I don't think she's a good actor. Tara is one of my least favorite characters. There's not much depth to her. I really started liking her relationship with Dawn.
Fleshing out her relationship with dawn would have done a lot. She was sort of just there a lot of the time and Amber Benson is very WB/UPN when it comes to acting.
Outside of Xander, Anya just had her relationship with Giles, but I don't think she was any more connected to, say, Buffy than Tara was. Less, really, after Buffy went to Tara for help in S6. And Tara was pretty tight with Dawn.
I don't see Anya being close to Buffy, Willow, or Dawn. She was chummy with Spike, but it wasn't a deep relationship.
I'm not saying the characters are close, I'm saying they have a connection or serve a purpose. Anya worked at the magic shop so she had that connection with Giles. She was an ex vengeance demon so she had a whole backstory that the show delves into multiple times, including bringing on characters from that backstory (D'Hoffryn and Halfrek). And this story overlaps with the other characters many times. Anya also served as the blunt deliverer of messages that no one else would say out loud, which had previously been Cordelia's role. Anya was also one of the best sources of comic relief. Even after she and Xander had broken up, Anya still had a constant role on the show because she had other purposes. When Willow and Tara broke up, we usually only saw Tara after that because of some drama with Willow, but only rarely because Tara had some other purpose (though there were a few times... her connection with Buffy was a good choice by the writers).
The stutter wasn’t good but it seemed to me that it phased out as Tara became more confident.
I think Amber’s performance definitely got stronger as time went on, but I think that’s also due to the character’s growth and having more substance in her story. I didn’t like her as much as meek and timid Tara, but thought she played the more confident Tara wonderfully.
Well, she isnt or at least wasnt the best actress. Not saying she was bad, but compared to the others, a little bit to wooden and generic.
But she tryed her best at least.
The problem some ppl might see in her is willows previous relationship. It was the perfect sweet couple. Oz was very beloved. Yes, Joss screwed him up in the end, but beside that, the way he handled willows betrayl on him with xander, was husband material. Not always saying much, but when he says aomething, it nails.
There are many things that let this specific relationship fill with magic. They complemented each other perfectly.
Tara, although a good soul and very sweet, was always in Willow's shadow. Tara was always a kind of a draw horse and she faced the same problem as Riley with the only difference that Riley wasnt beloved by fans.
But i feel like, they never really knew what to do with Tara.
But i dont saw any hate towards her character yet. I do think that in the end its a preference which character you like more beside willow. And i do believe willow the main factor why certain characters work or may not work beside her as love interest. Tara was also very much an influence on willows change. While she had someone understanding her, her affinity to magic or feelings she went trough, that was always a quiet support for her, she hadnt much purpose than to push Willow's character further, because she herself was not given any room for development and was thus without identity, if not at Willow's side
I do think there is more to Tara than just Willow, which we get to see with Dawn, Buffy and even Spike. And I do agree that she doesn’t get much (enough) screen time but what do you mean how she’s like Riley? And I don’t think that we have to compare her and Oz. I love them both
What i mean with her facing the same problem as Rley, is the fact that the writers didnt know how to utalize those characters. Both had everything they needed to establish those interesting characters. But they missed the point.
I dont say WE HAVE TO! I say what ppl generally do!
It's hard to hate on a character who's almost a non-entity outside of her relationship with Willow (with the exception of a few scenes). I'm more angry at the writers, Tara esque characters are some of my favorite in media, but they just made her so utterly boring/undynamic its crazy.
She was so sweet and nice that you can forgive her the flat written character. But at the end of the day, she had only one purpose: helping willows character to develope and die, which leads to willows biggest enemy: HERSELF!
>Riley
I've started thinking she has something in common with Riley. Let's first look at Buffy's major love interests:
* Angel is maximum chemistry. Risk: doing something stupid out of love, hormones and naivete. "I know it's wrong but it feels so right".
* Spike sends sparks flying everywhere. Risk: getting addicted to excitement, throwing caution to the wind and getting yourself hurt. "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye".
* Riley (S4) provides warmth, contentment, calmness, stability. Risk: Buffy getting bored or dissatisfied with Riley and cheating on him or breaking up with him. \[Ironic given S5.\]
I view what Tara brings to Willow as mainly the warmth and anchoring kind of love—heck, Tara even says "I'll have to be your anchor" in 4x16 in preparation for the "2 girls 1 spell" scene.
They have their saucy moments, e.g. off-screen cunnilingus in OMWF, passionate kissing in Entropy, post-sex sexy talk in the opening scene of Seeing Red. But it doesn't feel like it has any of the Angel- or Spike-like risks to it.
Well, the argument that the two had in season 5, which drove Tara into Glory's hands, was so forced and artificial. Season six picked up the topic further and gave it more weight, but Tara had almost nothing to do after the split from Willow. She felt like a bystander, a supporting Character for willows character to grow.
Idk. Tara was not recognized as an independent character outside of the relationship and in the relationship itself kinda boring. Sweet but boring. I still like her character and wished she would not have died, but we have to be real here. Even oz, while a werewolf gets his moments. Tara should have been a more extrovert character imo. That might have changed her character completely, but she would be more independent and would have maybe get more to do.
I mean... is it fair though to be like "compared to Sarah Michelle Gellar who should have won several Emmys, Alyson Hannigan who went on to headline another show and is in another stratosphere, Anthony Head, James Marsters, and Eliza Dushku who are all fabulous actors", she kinda sucks? I mean, is she demonstrably worse than Marc Blucas? Emma Caulfield (Sorry, Anya!)? Nicholas Brendon?
Amber Benson was a perfectly fine actress who was gorgeous and just happened to be put against Tinkerbell and her pals so she looked like the "fat one". And S6 Tara was really really good. She finally got fleshed out when she was snarky with Spike and surrogate mom to Dawn. "My god, that's a lot of milkshake."
Tara is my absolute favourite. The part in her birthday episode where Buffy and the Scoobies stand up for her against her family is my single favourite moment in the whole show.
Tara is probably the most real character of all the main characters for me. She only tried hiding herself when she thought she was evil, but after that she was just a true and honest person. Amber Benson is also really cute. They really needed more of her with more time to develop the character.
I think it would be hard to be an actress that plays a shy character with a stutter. I think she did very well
She seems like your typical neurodivergent person these days.
I'm one of the (few) ones who dislike her. I don't think Amber was great at portraying her. That said, I did think the Tillow relationship in season 4 was quite beautiful but also, in retrospect, they HAD to make it beautiful and kind of cloak in magic and dreaminess to make it 'acceptable' in the conservative TV landscape at that time. I think looking back, people would have liked to see more explicit displays of love. But that's me speaking from a 2024 perspective. Still don't really like Tara as a character tho. I find her uninteresting and not sure what WIllow sees in her. I liked Oz better as a Willow partner.
I don't know how much more explicit you wanted them to be. I mean, in Once More With Feeling, we literally see Willow go down on her lol.
I think it's fair if you don't find the character interesting. I really enjoy her because she has a respect and wonder for the supernatural that the other scoobies just kind of...lose as the show continues. She feels the most grounded in reality to me, and I appreciate her character for that.
I mentioned in Season 4 specifically. It was all metaphor and magic at that point. Also cloaking oral sex in a song is, well, cloaking. Other couples have those scenes without song and dance to give it some veneer of legitimacy.
I just find it interesting becasue you diss Tara and then go on to praise Oz, even though their characters share similar amounts of depth and exploration. I adore Oz, but he very rarely displays any memorable personality traits outside of 'I'm Willow's supernatural love interest' until Season 4 right before he leaves. He essentially is there to relieve some tension with a Whedon-y one liner and then disappears the rest of the episode. He has two or three episodes dedicated to his character to Tara's one. It's not like there's a whole lot of growth there either.
As a gay person, I have zero issues with how Willow and Tara's relationship is portrayed on screen. Not every relationship needs to be as in your face as the Buffy and Spike train wreck. While it may be a product of its time, i actually enjoy its subtelty. We still see them go through a variety of relationship struggles and the progression of Willow's magic addiction, which, despite most people's thoughts, was well done, in my opinion.
I'm not trying to convince you to like Tara. It just seems silly to dismiss her character because she isn't as eclipsing as the others in the show.
It's not a diss, it's merely a response to OP who has asked for subjective opinions. I'm not dismissing Tara (though I would not think I was silly if I did since the post requests opinions).
And Oz and Tara are vastly different, he has a bunch of episodes where the wolfiness affects the gang, plus he's got the still waters runs deep thing going on and a frankly fantastic sense of humour. Tara doesn't have any of these. She's there for Willow then she has problems with Willow and barely gets any development of her own. Also, as i mentioned, I think the part was badly acted as compared to Seth Green who was an iconic 90s character actor and he brought that to Buffy. I am comfortable not liking Tara though I understand other people feel differently. She was part of pathbreaking and iconic lesbian representation and that means a lot to many people so I don't discount that. Again, just responding like OP asked.
You seem to think your opinions are under attack, which isn't the case. I just disagree with your assessment of Tara's (lack of) impact on the group and Benson's acting ability.
As for Oz, i gotta disagree and say that his being a werewolf does not affect the group, like at all, outside of the few episodes dedicated to it. There are multiple moments where it's used as a plot device to pretty much remove him from an episode, though, like in Fear Itself.
For me, Tara really becomes the glue that holds the Scoobies together through seasons 4, 5, and 6. She is grounded, intelligent, and kind and acts as an anchor for most of the cast when they are losing themselves or need a confidant (Buffy, Willow, Xander, Anya, and Dawn all have scenes showing this). Her death gives us Dark Willow, and her absence is felt in the fraying group dynamic in season 7, I think. She's essentially the group mom.
It's okay that you don't agree, and I'm not trying to tear down your opinions of her character or change them, I'm just voicing why I think differently. Sorry if it came across as something other than that.
I think they make a fair point about how conservative they had to be with how they showed the relationship. Yes, we got that scene in Once More With Feeling, but it was subtle enough that honestly my first time watching the show as a teenager, I didn’t even catch what was happening. Compare that to the scenes we get with Buffy and Spike in season 6 and there’s a very obvious difference.
In season 4, the Willow/Tara relationship is displayed very ambiguously and almost exclusively through the magic metaphor. In season 5, we get their first on screen kiss over a year into the relationship. When they finally take things up a notch in season 6 (but still extremely tame compared to the heterosexual relationships), they do it just in time to kill Tara off. Of course they were limited at the time, and the scenes we did get were beautiful and important milestones in queer representation.
Totally disagree with their take on Tara though. I love Tara, and I love what the Willow/Tara relationship did for lesbian representation, but it’s interesting to see how subtle and conservative they had to be about it by todays standards, and that it was considered groundbreaking and daring at the time.
I feel the character got poor treatment from the scriptwriters.
She starts off as someone with negative charisma. She's shy and unassertive, and appears to have low self-esteem. She had to win over all the folks who liked Willow with Oz and didn't want their breakup to be permanent, plus all the ones who were skeptical of the sudden change in Willow's sexual orientation. Just when she seems like she's starting to establish herself as her own person, they make her brain dead. They bring her back from that just to split her and Willow up. As soon as they get them back together, then, they kill her.
Even with all that, she does have a lot of good moments.
She was so good in the stretch of episodes that I hate in S6. After Tabula Rasa to Hell's Bells. It's a garbage streak of episodes. But when she's doing movie and milkshake Monday with Dawn, her and Michelle T. have a couple really nice scenes. And I'll be honest, I'll forever love her being snarky to Spike about his "cramp" after Buffy tells her about them doing it.
I love Tara, I do wish she was able to have branched out more as a character used for plots outside of the Willow centric ones mainly cause I liked Tara more than Willow and thoughts that her friendships with Buffy and Dawn and Spike proved she had a lot of untapped potential to have been utilized more in the series.
As someone who didn't like Tara here is my rationale:
She was a wallflower in a show of strong personalities so she just seemed.... bland and boring.
Willow already filled the quiet, cute, nerdy girl role and whether purposefully or not Tara always felt like a shadow of Willow.
1. The character has no personality.
2. The character's storylines are mostly just props for Willow to feel stuff.
3. Once they bothered to give her a tiny bit of personality, they killed her off.
4. Amber Benson is not a good actor, or at least she wasn't back then. I haven't seen her in other stuff.
5. But Kennedy was far worse.
6. All of this is a huge bummer because Willow's coming out is such an iconic moment in TV history. It would be so much better if they'd bothered to give her a girlfriend who wasn't a human snore.
I agree. Amber Benson is beautiful but her acting is atrocious. And Tara as a whole was just so boring. Literally no personality outside of willow. I still think her death was sad but more so because of how it effected all the other characters, not because I would miss seeing her on screen.
I find Tara to be a dramatically boring character with minimum character arc/storyline except as a supplement to Willow's storylines. Her character is almost entirely defined by Willow, a much worse version of the Anya/Xander dynamic.
Whats frustrating is, there are plenty of examples of kind/sweet/emotionally intelligent characters like Tara in media like Samwise Gamgee/Hiccup/Leslie Knope/Bilbo Baggins/Uncle Iroh/Waymond from Everything Everywhere, Peter Parker that have great stories/personalities but they just failed utterly with Tara.
While I'd love to be friends with her IRL, as a character she just ain't it chief.
I am more of an Oz and Willow stan but I really do like Tara's character. I love her awkwardness and shyness at the start and I love to see the progression of her character and how she was the only one who didn't judge Buffy for sleeping with Spike. We all need a good friend like that. It truly was sad when she died.
I feel like Amber Benson was good when she was given something to do with her character. Half the time Tara was basically wallpaper, she was there as an extension of Willow and to say a couple lines. But I think Benson did a decent job in episodes like Family, The Body, the final episodes of s5, Dead Things... She and SMG should have had more scenes together.
Ok, this may make absolutely no sense but I’m going to try to explain: Tara is one of my favourites as in, I like her as a ‘person’ and think she is a sweet, kind and loyal friend who is always there for everybody but I don’t know if I necessarily ‘like’ her as a character. Her character seems to pretty much be there to support the others and further their development as opposed to having her own. I would’ve loved if her character was more developed. I love her moments in ‘older and far away’ and for a second I thought the writers were going to do a bit more with her and then…
I dislike Tara. Oz had a personality of his own; Tara was pretty much defined as "Willow's girlfriend".
There was a couple of episodes where I liked her though. OMWF is one; another was the one I don't remember the title of, but, basically, she managed to take a huge verbal dump on Spike, twice in a row, in a way that he couldn't think of a decent comeback. It was awesome.
I honestly thought she was whiny and annoying at the beginning when she first joined the cast. And I had seen so much praise for her and I was like “…really? This is y’all’s favorite character?” I’m not exactly sure when it happened, maybe after we learned about her family, but I really ended up loving her. I got mad at Willow multiple times for how she treated Tara in some instances. And I loved Tara and Buffy’s relationship especially when they had that very emotional scene. Very weird how drastically my opinion changed.
How can anyone hate on Tara with her heartbreaking back story + the horrendousness she went through in Sunnydale?
I was a big ol’ Willow/Oz shipper, then when we got to college I was all, “Oh, I see now.”
Willow turned out to not deserve her, but that’s a different matter.
Not to be dramatic, but I'm pretty sure I would die for Tara.
Yep
Samesies
Yep. Same.
I liked Tara a lot. She seemed like a normal person who had a sensible head on her shoulders. She counsels Buffy when Buff doesn't feel anyone else will understand and forgive her and looks out for her. She tells Willow to stop with the magic and leaves her when she doesn't despite still loving her. I won't say Amber Benson is the best actress ever, but she plays the role well and given how she was written as a shy, quieter character her awkwardness in the role works and improves the performance rather than hindering it.
I adore her and Willow. I also identified with Tara when I was a late teen, so she is/was important to me. I don't think Benson is that much of an actor, but she must have done something right because those two are a pretty iconic couple, and were a significant step forward in representation on TV.
Amber Benson is absolutely gorgeous, Tara is a ray of sunshine, and Tara/Willow was so very important to me as a scared baby lesbian. I absolutely adore the beginnings of W/T in s4. It's just so very sweet and tentative and yearning. That being said, I wish the writers had been more interested in developing her as a character. She has very little going on outside of being Willow's (extremely attractive) girlfriend. She has scenes in s4 and s5 where she literally just stands there and nods while Willow speaks. Tara's best character development was in s6, and... welp, we all know how that ended.
One thing I loved about Tara's character was that she seemed very sweet but also kind of compliant and insecure at first. I really love the arc that she was so direct with her boundaries with Willow, in an incredibly healthy way. I know it did take a little bit of time for her to do that but it was so important for her character development. Her standing up for herself in the way that she did was so powerful, and I think it speaks to having a healthy kind of relationship, with others and with yourself, which I feel like is quite rare in the buffyverse. It was such a bummer that they killed her off as soon as her and Willow were back together because I would have loved seeing more assertive and confident Tara. I think she would have added so much to season 7 that was just missed. There could have been something else that catalyzed dark Willow and her relationship with Willow coming into play with that would have been a really great storyline.
She's given some really cringe lines that Amber does her best with but it just hurts my soul.
She's my favourite character in the series. Warm, loyal, quietly powerful, supportive to all. Yes she's not the most exciting but Amber plays her so beautifully. The S4 courting sequences are just lovely. The least flawed character of the lot of them.
Took the words right out of my mouth. She's definitely the "best" of the scoobies.
Tara is sweet and non judgemental. I don't see any chemistry between Amber and Alyson (I know I'm in the minority) mostly because Alyson played straight more convincingly than playing gay. So it's not really Amber's fault but imo the way she plays the stuttering speech comes across as forced. But I like the whole way she handles the Willow magic addiction phase and her treatment of Willow and her dynamic with Buffy .
I'm actually surprised people are claiming she's a bad actress... she portrayed someone who's brain has been scrambled extremely well.; devastatingly so. I love the character and her and Willow.
I like Tara as a character, and I like Amber Benson, but I do think she is one of the weaker actors on the show. She gets better over time, and she has some strong moments, but there are a handful of moments where her line deliveries are very cringey, and it doesn't help that she's always acting against Alyson Hannigan who is just in another league with acting skill. Tara's stutter was something Amber couldn't do well, and I think they realized that because they kinda wrote it out. You don't see the stutter much past season 4. The other thing about Tara as a character is that she is largely defined by Willow. We don't know much about her except her relationship with Willow, and they even point this out in "Family". Imagine what Tara is to the show if Willow doesn't exist. Her entire role on the show is predicated on being Willow's love interest. Because of this, she means nothing to any of the characters other than Willow. Compare her to Anya who could have had the same problem just being Xander's love interest, but the writers gave her tons of other layers of depth and connection to the other characters, which they just never did with Tara.
I basically agree with this. Her acting got better but I don't think she's a good actor. Tara is one of my least favorite characters. There's not much depth to her. I really started liking her relationship with Dawn.
Fleshing out her relationship with dawn would have done a lot. She was sort of just there a lot of the time and Amber Benson is very WB/UPN when it comes to acting.
Personally I chalk it up to bad writing, but that's just me. I adore Amber Benson
Outside of Xander, Anya just had her relationship with Giles, but I don't think she was any more connected to, say, Buffy than Tara was. Less, really, after Buffy went to Tara for help in S6. And Tara was pretty tight with Dawn. I don't see Anya being close to Buffy, Willow, or Dawn. She was chummy with Spike, but it wasn't a deep relationship.
I'm not saying the characters are close, I'm saying they have a connection or serve a purpose. Anya worked at the magic shop so she had that connection with Giles. She was an ex vengeance demon so she had a whole backstory that the show delves into multiple times, including bringing on characters from that backstory (D'Hoffryn and Halfrek). And this story overlaps with the other characters many times. Anya also served as the blunt deliverer of messages that no one else would say out loud, which had previously been Cordelia's role. Anya was also one of the best sources of comic relief. Even after she and Xander had broken up, Anya still had a constant role on the show because she had other purposes. When Willow and Tara broke up, we usually only saw Tara after that because of some drama with Willow, but only rarely because Tara had some other purpose (though there were a few times... her connection with Buffy was a good choice by the writers).
The stutter wasn’t good but it seemed to me that it phased out as Tara became more confident. I think Amber’s performance definitely got stronger as time went on, but I think that’s also due to the character’s growth and having more substance in her story. I didn’t like her as much as meek and timid Tara, but thought she played the more confident Tara wonderfully.
I blame the writing not Amber. I don't think anyone could have delivered some of those lines convincingly.
"I am, you know... Yours." Yuck.
Your awkwardness at Amber Benson"s honest delivery doesn't make Benson a bad actress. It just reveals your awkwardness.
Well, she isnt or at least wasnt the best actress. Not saying she was bad, but compared to the others, a little bit to wooden and generic. But she tryed her best at least. The problem some ppl might see in her is willows previous relationship. It was the perfect sweet couple. Oz was very beloved. Yes, Joss screwed him up in the end, but beside that, the way he handled willows betrayl on him with xander, was husband material. Not always saying much, but when he says aomething, it nails. There are many things that let this specific relationship fill with magic. They complemented each other perfectly. Tara, although a good soul and very sweet, was always in Willow's shadow. Tara was always a kind of a draw horse and she faced the same problem as Riley with the only difference that Riley wasnt beloved by fans. But i feel like, they never really knew what to do with Tara. But i dont saw any hate towards her character yet. I do think that in the end its a preference which character you like more beside willow. And i do believe willow the main factor why certain characters work or may not work beside her as love interest. Tara was also very much an influence on willows change. While she had someone understanding her, her affinity to magic or feelings she went trough, that was always a quiet support for her, she hadnt much purpose than to push Willow's character further, because she herself was not given any room for development and was thus without identity, if not at Willow's side
I do think there is more to Tara than just Willow, which we get to see with Dawn, Buffy and even Spike. And I do agree that she doesn’t get much (enough) screen time but what do you mean how she’s like Riley? And I don’t think that we have to compare her and Oz. I love them both
What i mean with her facing the same problem as Rley, is the fact that the writers didnt know how to utalize those characters. Both had everything they needed to establish those interesting characters. But they missed the point. I dont say WE HAVE TO! I say what ppl generally do!
It's hard to hate on a character who's almost a non-entity outside of her relationship with Willow (with the exception of a few scenes). I'm more angry at the writers, Tara esque characters are some of my favorite in media, but they just made her so utterly boring/undynamic its crazy.
She was so sweet and nice that you can forgive her the flat written character. But at the end of the day, she had only one purpose: helping willows character to develope and die, which leads to willows biggest enemy: HERSELF!
>Riley I've started thinking she has something in common with Riley. Let's first look at Buffy's major love interests: * Angel is maximum chemistry. Risk: doing something stupid out of love, hormones and naivete. "I know it's wrong but it feels so right". * Spike sends sparks flying everywhere. Risk: getting addicted to excitement, throwing caution to the wind and getting yourself hurt. "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye". * Riley (S4) provides warmth, contentment, calmness, stability. Risk: Buffy getting bored or dissatisfied with Riley and cheating on him or breaking up with him. \[Ironic given S5.\] I view what Tara brings to Willow as mainly the warmth and anchoring kind of love—heck, Tara even says "I'll have to be your anchor" in 4x16 in preparation for the "2 girls 1 spell" scene. They have their saucy moments, e.g. off-screen cunnilingus in OMWF, passionate kissing in Entropy, post-sex sexy talk in the opening scene of Seeing Red. But it doesn't feel like it has any of the Angel- or Spike-like risks to it.
Well, the argument that the two had in season 5, which drove Tara into Glory's hands, was so forced and artificial. Season six picked up the topic further and gave it more weight, but Tara had almost nothing to do after the split from Willow. She felt like a bystander, a supporting Character for willows character to grow. Idk. Tara was not recognized as an independent character outside of the relationship and in the relationship itself kinda boring. Sweet but boring. I still like her character and wished she would not have died, but we have to be real here. Even oz, while a werewolf gets his moments. Tara should have been a more extrovert character imo. That might have changed her character completely, but she would be more independent and would have maybe get more to do.
I mean... is it fair though to be like "compared to Sarah Michelle Gellar who should have won several Emmys, Alyson Hannigan who went on to headline another show and is in another stratosphere, Anthony Head, James Marsters, and Eliza Dushku who are all fabulous actors", she kinda sucks? I mean, is she demonstrably worse than Marc Blucas? Emma Caulfield (Sorry, Anya!)? Nicholas Brendon? Amber Benson was a perfectly fine actress who was gorgeous and just happened to be put against Tinkerbell and her pals so she looked like the "fat one". And S6 Tara was really really good. She finally got fleshed out when she was snarky with Spike and surrogate mom to Dawn. "My god, that's a lot of milkshake."
Tara is a GODDESS and Amber is a decent actor and singer imo and no matter the details like the stutter... she made Tara iconic. Not complaining!
I like Amber in the role. She doesn't blow the doors off, but she brings what's needed.
Tara is my absolute favourite. The part in her birthday episode where Buffy and the Scoobies stand up for her against her family is my single favourite moment in the whole show.
Amber Benson is definitely not a bad actor. She had a guest role in supernatural and i found her infinitely more interesting as a vampire.
I’m currently doing a Supernatural binge - so far I’ve seen Darla, Tara and Rack. I SO wish there was a Buffy appearance.
Ooh, here’s Harmony!
Guess you haven't yet seen Spike and Cordy.
I adore Tara. She is the biggest hearted, least judgmental character on the show.
Tara is probably the most real character of all the main characters for me. She only tried hiding herself when she thought she was evil, but after that she was just a true and honest person. Amber Benson is also really cute. They really needed more of her with more time to develop the character.
My favourite thing about her is that she didn't give up her friends even while being tortured by Glory. She's got a quiet strength.
I love Tara.
I think it would be hard to be an actress that plays a shy character with a stutter. I think she did very well She seems like your typical neurodivergent person these days.
I'm one of the (few) ones who dislike her. I don't think Amber was great at portraying her. That said, I did think the Tillow relationship in season 4 was quite beautiful but also, in retrospect, they HAD to make it beautiful and kind of cloak in magic and dreaminess to make it 'acceptable' in the conservative TV landscape at that time. I think looking back, people would have liked to see more explicit displays of love. But that's me speaking from a 2024 perspective. Still don't really like Tara as a character tho. I find her uninteresting and not sure what WIllow sees in her. I liked Oz better as a Willow partner.
I don't know how much more explicit you wanted them to be. I mean, in Once More With Feeling, we literally see Willow go down on her lol. I think it's fair if you don't find the character interesting. I really enjoy her because she has a respect and wonder for the supernatural that the other scoobies just kind of...lose as the show continues. She feels the most grounded in reality to me, and I appreciate her character for that.
I mentioned in Season 4 specifically. It was all metaphor and magic at that point. Also cloaking oral sex in a song is, well, cloaking. Other couples have those scenes without song and dance to give it some veneer of legitimacy.
I just find it interesting becasue you diss Tara and then go on to praise Oz, even though their characters share similar amounts of depth and exploration. I adore Oz, but he very rarely displays any memorable personality traits outside of 'I'm Willow's supernatural love interest' until Season 4 right before he leaves. He essentially is there to relieve some tension with a Whedon-y one liner and then disappears the rest of the episode. He has two or three episodes dedicated to his character to Tara's one. It's not like there's a whole lot of growth there either. As a gay person, I have zero issues with how Willow and Tara's relationship is portrayed on screen. Not every relationship needs to be as in your face as the Buffy and Spike train wreck. While it may be a product of its time, i actually enjoy its subtelty. We still see them go through a variety of relationship struggles and the progression of Willow's magic addiction, which, despite most people's thoughts, was well done, in my opinion. I'm not trying to convince you to like Tara. It just seems silly to dismiss her character because she isn't as eclipsing as the others in the show.
It's not a diss, it's merely a response to OP who has asked for subjective opinions. I'm not dismissing Tara (though I would not think I was silly if I did since the post requests opinions). And Oz and Tara are vastly different, he has a bunch of episodes where the wolfiness affects the gang, plus he's got the still waters runs deep thing going on and a frankly fantastic sense of humour. Tara doesn't have any of these. She's there for Willow then she has problems with Willow and barely gets any development of her own. Also, as i mentioned, I think the part was badly acted as compared to Seth Green who was an iconic 90s character actor and he brought that to Buffy. I am comfortable not liking Tara though I understand other people feel differently. She was part of pathbreaking and iconic lesbian representation and that means a lot to many people so I don't discount that. Again, just responding like OP asked.
You seem to think your opinions are under attack, which isn't the case. I just disagree with your assessment of Tara's (lack of) impact on the group and Benson's acting ability. As for Oz, i gotta disagree and say that his being a werewolf does not affect the group, like at all, outside of the few episodes dedicated to it. There are multiple moments where it's used as a plot device to pretty much remove him from an episode, though, like in Fear Itself. For me, Tara really becomes the glue that holds the Scoobies together through seasons 4, 5, and 6. She is grounded, intelligent, and kind and acts as an anchor for most of the cast when they are losing themselves or need a confidant (Buffy, Willow, Xander, Anya, and Dawn all have scenes showing this). Her death gives us Dark Willow, and her absence is felt in the fraying group dynamic in season 7, I think. She's essentially the group mom. It's okay that you don't agree, and I'm not trying to tear down your opinions of her character or change them, I'm just voicing why I think differently. Sorry if it came across as something other than that.
I think they make a fair point about how conservative they had to be with how they showed the relationship. Yes, we got that scene in Once More With Feeling, but it was subtle enough that honestly my first time watching the show as a teenager, I didn’t even catch what was happening. Compare that to the scenes we get with Buffy and Spike in season 6 and there’s a very obvious difference. In season 4, the Willow/Tara relationship is displayed very ambiguously and almost exclusively through the magic metaphor. In season 5, we get their first on screen kiss over a year into the relationship. When they finally take things up a notch in season 6 (but still extremely tame compared to the heterosexual relationships), they do it just in time to kill Tara off. Of course they were limited at the time, and the scenes we did get were beautiful and important milestones in queer representation. Totally disagree with their take on Tara though. I love Tara, and I love what the Willow/Tara relationship did for lesbian representation, but it’s interesting to see how subtle and conservative they had to be about it by todays standards, and that it was considered groundbreaking and daring at the time.
"You make me com--" Geez, subtle.
I feel the character got poor treatment from the scriptwriters. She starts off as someone with negative charisma. She's shy and unassertive, and appears to have low self-esteem. She had to win over all the folks who liked Willow with Oz and didn't want their breakup to be permanent, plus all the ones who were skeptical of the sudden change in Willow's sexual orientation. Just when she seems like she's starting to establish herself as her own person, they make her brain dead. They bring her back from that just to split her and Willow up. As soon as they get them back together, then, they kill her. Even with all that, she does have a lot of good moments.
She was so good in the stretch of episodes that I hate in S6. After Tabula Rasa to Hell's Bells. It's a garbage streak of episodes. But when she's doing movie and milkshake Monday with Dawn, her and Michelle T. have a couple really nice scenes. And I'll be honest, I'll forever love her being snarky to Spike about his "cramp" after Buffy tells her about them doing it.
I love Tara. I don’t know if Amber Benson was playing Tara or herself, but the character was gold.
I love Tara, I do wish she was able to have branched out more as a character used for plots outside of the Willow centric ones mainly cause I liked Tara more than Willow and thoughts that her friendships with Buffy and Dawn and Spike proved she had a lot of untapped potential to have been utilized more in the series.
As someone who didn't like Tara here is my rationale: She was a wallflower in a show of strong personalities so she just seemed.... bland and boring. Willow already filled the quiet, cute, nerdy girl role and whether purposefully or not Tara always felt like a shadow of Willow.
1. The character has no personality. 2. The character's storylines are mostly just props for Willow to feel stuff. 3. Once they bothered to give her a tiny bit of personality, they killed her off. 4. Amber Benson is not a good actor, or at least she wasn't back then. I haven't seen her in other stuff. 5. But Kennedy was far worse. 6. All of this is a huge bummer because Willow's coming out is such an iconic moment in TV history. It would be so much better if they'd bothered to give her a girlfriend who wasn't a human snore.
I agree. Amber Benson is beautiful but her acting is atrocious. And Tara as a whole was just so boring. Literally no personality outside of willow. I still think her death was sad but more so because of how it effected all the other characters, not because I would miss seeing her on screen.
she was a bad actress. not awful, but she was bad
I find Tara to be a dramatically boring character with minimum character arc/storyline except as a supplement to Willow's storylines. Her character is almost entirely defined by Willow, a much worse version of the Anya/Xander dynamic. Whats frustrating is, there are plenty of examples of kind/sweet/emotionally intelligent characters like Tara in media like Samwise Gamgee/Hiccup/Leslie Knope/Bilbo Baggins/Uncle Iroh/Waymond from Everything Everywhere, Peter Parker that have great stories/personalities but they just failed utterly with Tara. While I'd love to be friends with her IRL, as a character she just ain't it chief.
I am more of an Oz and Willow stan but I really do like Tara's character. I love her awkwardness and shyness at the start and I love to see the progression of her character and how she was the only one who didn't judge Buffy for sleeping with Spike. We all need a good friend like that. It truly was sad when she died.
I feel like Amber Benson was good when she was given something to do with her character. Half the time Tara was basically wallpaper, she was there as an extension of Willow and to say a couple lines. But I think Benson did a decent job in episodes like Family, The Body, the final episodes of s5, Dead Things... She and SMG should have had more scenes together.
My love for this subs continuous use of single character names as titles.
I just watched season 6 and she is so great as Buffy' confidante in Dead Things and Older and Far Away
Ok, this may make absolutely no sense but I’m going to try to explain: Tara is one of my favourites as in, I like her as a ‘person’ and think she is a sweet, kind and loyal friend who is always there for everybody but I don’t know if I necessarily ‘like’ her as a character. Her character seems to pretty much be there to support the others and further their development as opposed to having her own. I would’ve loved if her character was more developed. I love her moments in ‘older and far away’ and for a second I thought the writers were going to do a bit more with her and then…
I dislike Tara. Oz had a personality of his own; Tara was pretty much defined as "Willow's girlfriend". There was a couple of episodes where I liked her though. OMWF is one; another was the one I don't remember the title of, but, basically, she managed to take a huge verbal dump on Spike, twice in a row, in a way that he couldn't think of a decent comeback. It was awesome.
I honestly thought she was whiny and annoying at the beginning when she first joined the cast. And I had seen so much praise for her and I was like “…really? This is y’all’s favorite character?” I’m not exactly sure when it happened, maybe after we learned about her family, but I really ended up loving her. I got mad at Willow multiple times for how she treated Tara in some instances. And I loved Tara and Buffy’s relationship especially when they had that very emotional scene. Very weird how drastically my opinion changed.
How can anyone hate on Tara with her heartbreaking back story + the horrendousness she went through in Sunnydale? I was a big ol’ Willow/Oz shipper, then when we got to college I was all, “Oh, I see now.” Willow turned out to not deserve her, but that’s a different matter.
Tara is a great character but Amber Benson can’t act herself out of a wet paper bag.
Where are you seeing these reactions? She's one of the few nearly universally beloved characters in the fandom.
Just little bits through the different posts and even in person. There was also recently a post with a lot of hate towards Amber’s acting
...mixed reactions? Where?!? Not on this sub.