Yeah...it wasn't just that Willow needed time to recover from Tara's death, it was also that WE needed time to recover. There was a "well, she's dead, time to move on" element to the whole thing. It was like "What? WAIT! You told us to love her for three years! Don't tell us to just forget about her now!"
There's also the element that Willow was, for lack of a better word, out "personal connection" character. Xander is the entry one...we see the supernatural world through his everyman eyes, but Willow is the one the show always set up for us to feel the greatest emotional connection with, even moreso than Buffy. While they sometimes took things a bit too far with that, IMO, they put her forward as the one whose pain and fear we were supposed to feel, so her losses-Xander who never loved her the way she wanted, Oz whose nature forced them apart, and Tara, the "great love" who was taken from her-were the ones we were meant to feel the strongest. When you set a character up so that her pain is the pain we're meant to feel the most, it's going to be harder for us when she moves on. And, honestly, by the time Kennedy came along, I think we just didn't want to see Willow get hurt again, or in a position to be hurt like that again.
Another reason Ithink it's easier with Buffy is simply the fact that we expect the main character to have a love interest at any given time. It's just built into our minds to expect it. Plus, all Buffy's relationship just went really, really bad in the end, to the point where Buffy probably was better moving on. Willow's romances were the opposite...with both Tara and Oz, you could seethem together forever, if something hadn't separated them. And really, if Buffy hadn't come along, and Xander hadn't fallen for her, and then(after Willowwas with Oz) Cordy? They probably would have gotten together, and stayed that way.
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timeasmymeasure
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There's also the element that Willow was, for lack of a better word, out "personal connection" character. Xander is the entry one...we see the supernatural world through his everyman eyes, but Willow is the one the show always set up for us to feel the greatest emotional connection with, even moreso than Buffy. While they sometimes took things a bit too far with that, IMO, they put her forward as the one whose pain and fear we were supposed to feel, so her losses-Xander who never loved her the way she wanted, Oz whose nature forced them apart, and Tara, the "great love" who was taken from her-were the ones we were meant to feel the strongest. When you set a character up so that her pain is the pain we're meant to feel the most, it's going to be harder for us when she moves on. And, honestly, by the time Kennedy came along, I think we just didn't want to see Willow get hurt again, or in a position to be hurt like that again.
Another reason Ithink it's easier with Buffy is simply the fact that we expect the main character to have a love interest at any given time. It's just built into our minds to expect it. Plus, all Buffy's relationship just went really, really bad in the end, to the point where Buffy probably was better moving on. Willow's romances were the opposite...with both Tara and Oz, you could seethem together forever, if something hadn't separated them. And really, if Buffy hadn't come along, and Xander hadn't fallen for her, and then(after Willowwas with Oz) Cordy? They probably would have gotten together, and stayed that way.