Whedon very baldly addressed what every teenage girl fears will happen if she sleeps with her boyfriend -- the same anguished fear that the Shirelles sang about in "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" That once she sleeps with her boyfriend, he won't want her anymore -- he will wake up another person. And that's exactly what happened with Buffy and Angel.

And through it all, it's clear that Whedon's sympathies are almost completely with Buffy. In fact, he's always most attuned to the thoughts and feelings of his women characters. At the end of last season, Whedon and his writers drew some fire from certain members of the gay and lesbian community, who felt betrayed that he had killed off Tara, Willow's lover.

But I think what that really tells us is that Whedon has an ear for tragedy that draws from some of the most classic examples, from ancient Greece through Shakespeare and beyond. The characters that he loves (and we love) the most are also the ones who suffer the most. I don't think it's a coincidence that most of those characters are women. Since the beginning of the show, Whedon has reserved the richest and most troubling complexities for his women characters. No one escapes suffering in Whedon's universe, but we're made to identify most with the women: both with minor characters like Joyce Summers, Buffy's mother (who was almost always an annoyance and yet whose death left an unimaginable void), as well as, of course, the two women who pump more blood into the show than anyone else -- Buffy and her best friend, Willow.

Whedon showed boundless compassion for Buffy when she lost Angel. He shows just as much compassion for Willow, but he's keenly aware that Willow is very different from Buffy, and that she's been harboring more rage and frustration than she'd ever admit to. Willow watched as Tara, the person she loved best in the world, was struck by a bullet fired by the nerdy but unconscionably evil Warren. The bullet had been intended for Buffy. Buffy lived, but Tara died in Willow's arms, inciting a propulsive grief in her that couldn't be contained even by obsession: It couldn't flower into anything less tropically blood-red than rage. Over the years Willow had become a powerful practitioner of magic, but she gave up magic after realizing she had been seduced into a dangerous dependency on it. With Tara's death, it became her only ally -- her grief was so great that she couldn't bear the company of humans.

Willow's tirade begins with a plea to the great god Osiris to restore Tara to life (a plea that's refused) and ends with nothing less than the orchestration of the end of the world (which is aborted, but just barely). In between, she avenges Tara's death by torturing and flaying her killer but not before summoning, to taunt him, the woman he'd earlier nearly raped and then murdered. And, in her ever mounting wrath, she practically destroys every one of her remaining friends.

What's wrenching about Willow's behavior -- and Whedon knows it as well as anybody else -- is that it cuts against everything Tara ever stood for. She was one of the show's gentlest and most sensible characters; when Buffy confided to Tara, in shame, that she was involved in an obsessive sexual relationship with Spike, Tara's response was bracingly sympathetic. You could argue that of all the characters on "Buffy," Tara was the one who stood most clearly for the right of human beings to live and love as they choose without having to explain themselves, and to make their own mistakes if need be.

As viewers, we couldn't not love Tara, which is why it hurt so much to lose her. But obviously, that was Whedon's point: The greatest kinds of love always entail the biggest risks. Whedon isn't afraid to deal with sorrow or disappointment in love. The best episodes of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" have always been the ones brushed with melancholy -- of the four humors, that's the one Whedon finds the most interesting and worthy, and it's the thing that's given the series so much juice and depth over the years.

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" has always been steeped in a lush, overtly sexual romanticism that isn't always pretty; Whedon and his team of writers have never been afraid to confront the messiness, and sometimes the danger, of sex. Even so, the show also revels in a deep appreciation of sensual beauty that's unabashedly pagan. (Think of the scene in the musical episode of "Buffy," "Once More, With Feeling," in which Willow and Tara turn levitation into a metaphor for the bliss of oral sex.) We may think we live in a modern, enlightened age when it comes to sexuality. But by exploring sexual issues that are as old as humankind itself, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" reminds us that we can't tame or corral sexual desire as easily as we might think. Each human heart (and libido) has to find its own direction, and that goes for vampires, too.

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