beccaelizabeth (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccaelizabeth) wrote2025-03-13 10:05 am
beccaelizabeth) wrote2025-03-13 10:05 am
Entry tags:
On witches and plot bunnies
I haven't written anything for a while again, so, thought I'd sit down and type up some plot ideas I've been having, and why I haven't used them.
(The Paperwork Thing may have worked? Which would be nice? But then I read the newspapers and end up staring at the ceiling going over old tv plots on my head again again again, so, stress persists.)
I have a recurring plot idea of the sort where first everyone turns against you and then they have to admit you were right all along and secretly the bestest, so already it has both appeals and embarrassments.
It's about me vs Willow Rosenberg. Because it's really easy to take Willow and spin her as the bad guy. And not just by reverting her to one specific episode. The problem with the magic addiction arc wasn't just that it took something that had layers of religion and metaphorical sexuality and power and freedom and just flattened it out into a drug addiction hide the magic bongs answer. It was that Willow's actions raised questions that addiction never answered. Sure she got carried away with spells, but, that was an ethical problem, until they dropped addiction into the metaphor. She never seemed to establish many ethical boundaries about it, just that murder is possibly a bad thing, when it's a human being. Seems like there were just a few more boundaries to be thought on, you know? So you can walk her down a lot of paths that way.
But. Do I want to make Willow, Jewish Wiccan Lesbian, the bad guy?
No. No I do not. That seems like an entirely bad idea.
So maybe the story needs, like, shadow Willow, who had the same problems without the same identity stuff.
And there is Amy. Penance maledictions and all. Could be one story element.
But. The bit I keep circling back to is about stealing magic. She took Rack's and Rupert's, though Giles survived in the end. And the story had that bit about Good Magic washing away the Bad Magic she'd stolen from the books in the restricted section. Buffyverse magic has alignment? For the first time? But combine this theft with some things from unrelated fic in other verses, like I think a Teen Wolf fic where someone was stealing the Spark from people who might have magic. Well you end up with Willow having stolen Sparks, stolen magic. But in the comics she also gives a chunk of her own magic to Buffy. So she's generous with her friends. And Giles survived so he probably possibly got his magic back? Buffyverse magic theft seems to be of a finite resource, but stealing Sparks is stealing the capacity to make magic, so you'd get more powerful with more. They're just a really significant chunk of a person, possibly lethal to remove.
There's a Pathfinder adventure path where a magic user gets divided up into undead ba body, ib heart, and ka mask. The mask let other people use their necromantic magic, with a risk of take over. The heart more so, memories and emotions in there. So people tried to walk off with the magic and got parts of the soul, trapping the magic user in undeath and having to deal with their intelligence.
There's an intelligent magic item in one of the Pathfinder books that lets you add multiple sorts of metamagic, one at a time, from one rod, but it does it by
https://www.aonprd.com/MagicIntelligentDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Metamagician%27s%20Apprentice
transferring a wizard's apprentices into the rod.
So now imagine advantages of doing that to your enemies. Powerful yet complainy items there.
Or not needing an item, because you keep them closer than that.
There's story in having the people you kill start talking to you. Just, again, not story I want to do to Willow. So I'd have to establish someone else with the remarkably similar backstory.
Willow does work well in a group, so why do this kind of damage to the group?
It's sort of a dark side version of the spell they did to empower Buffy at the Initiative. They know how powerful a group can be. But they don't do it again because First Slayer. Which doesn't actually explain why they don't try with a different group, but, plot.
That spell put all the magic into one person for one fight. For Buffy to control alone. Which is an interesting approach that you can dark side real easily. Just up the desire for control and oh hey why let anyone walk away...
There's also the way Willow went to the campus wicca group and decided they were a bunch of 'wanna blessed bes'. Willow wasn't treating magic like a religion or a community. I reckon she was treating it like hacking, like a programming language, a set of if then that happens to have god names in, like calling up worker programs. But with a group that wasn't doing that and couldn't give her new spells or be useful to her? She lost interest. Rather than, for instance, teaching.
So you have a road not taken compare and contrast. And that late season 7 glimpse into a group that is doing glowy stuff. Which Willow only finds out when she needs them.
So if I was designing a bad guy from scratch they'd usually end up less interesting than Willow, because you don't tend to layer up 7 seasons of back story in the big bad. But there's elements of coercive control in how she approaches others, times she's using people even in season 7, it's quicker, it's easier, and yet she has some solid reasons about defending the world most of the time. So that's interesting.
In Pathfinder you get Thassilonian sin magic, where they decided there were 7 schools of magic for the 7 deadly sins, and concentrating on one sin would make you more powerful. That's how you get Runelords. But pursuing that kind of magic means there's no chance to be a uniersalist, and you plain can't cast your opposition spells. It's not a great match for what Willow was doing, but, it's a solid reason for employing wizards with different specialities. Or enslaving them.
Willow's magic doesn't match, but, if you were picking a Sin and therefore a School for her, you could work backwards from what she can cast. She does memory spells and spells that manipulate souls, so she can do both enchantment and necromancy, which actually narrows the list a lot.
https://www.aonprd.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Wizard%20Thassilonian%20Specialist
Envy (Abjuration): The art of suppressing magic other than your own. Prohibited Schools: evocation, *necromancy*.
Gluttony (Necromancy): Magic that manipulates the physical body to provide for an unending hunger for life. Prohibited Schools: abjuration, *enchantment*.
Greed (Transmutation): Magically transforming things into objects of greater value or utility, and enhancing the physical self. Prohibited Schools: *enchantment*, illusion.
Lust (Enchantment): Magically controlling and dominating other creatures to satisfy your desires, and manipulating others’ minds, emotions, and wills. Prohibited Schools: *necromancy*, transmutation.
Pride (Illusion): Perfecting your own appearance and domain through trickery and illusions. Prohibited Schools: conjuration, transmutation.
Sloth (Conjuration): Calling agents and minions to perform your deeds for you, or creating what you need as you need it. Prohibited Schools: evocation, illusion.
Wrath (Evocation): Mastery of the raw destructive power of magic, and channeling those destructive forces. Prohibited Schools: abjuration, conjuration.
Specialising in either necromancy or enchantment would mean being unable to do spells from the other school. So that means under this non matching scheme she does a lot of spells from her non specialist college.
I don't think there's any case for Sloth as Willow's sin, and she doesn't do Conjuration by Pathfinder standards, I think. Nothing summoned, not beings or acid or icicles. Which leaves Pride and Wrath.
... narratively there's a pretty good case for Pride, but there's no Illusion magic I can think of in her story.
Which leaves Wrath.
... she does get pretty powerful when she gives in to Wrath.
Wrath would leave her unable to do shields, resistance, some pretty basic protective stuff, without assistance (and she teamed up with Amy and Michael to do protective magic one time). Also it would block conjuration, which would block what little healing wizards can do. Hmm, doesn't quite work though, Same Time Same Place, or that time she pulled a bullet out of Buffy.
... actually those were both after she killed Rack. And Rack demonstrably summoned something when Willow was tripping. So that works better? Huh.
Willow calls herself a Witch though, not a Wizard. In Pathfinder a Witch makes a deal with a power she knows not, one with a theme but not a name the Witch can be sure of. Clerics pray to a specific deity and can't get lied to about who answers. Witches take what they're offered or reject it, but can only guess who it is from by the signs. Buffyverse magic doesn't fit that paradigm really, but, as an angle on Willow: Vengeance or Ancestors. The spell lists and levels are never a great match for the Buffyverse, but the themes? Willow's first big spell did a Vengeance with the help of her teacher's Ancestors. The tension of wondering which theme really fits her helpers eould make productive story. Are they more interested in making their enemies suffer, or making their inheritors learn? ... they're maybe just a collective of people, they can have moods and not be sure on that front themselves. Story.
But gathering together other people's magic could do for either, if they make a collective of advisors, that are really not having a good time.
Willow in canon did a bit of a mind wipe so she wouldn't be having an argument any more. The memory spell went wronger later so her friends know about that one. So, what would it take for her to try it again? Or is a memory spell an ethical boundary she has noticed now?
Dark side Willow can see the clear bright line between where she is and what she needs. Ruthless is following that line, ignoring all else. What would she need before she'd ignore her friends?
If her friends are her most important people, she'd need to keep them safe.
... if she couldn't do protection spells, maybe she'd decide she needs to badly enough to recruit someone who could. Someone who couldn't be allowed to stop...
But her friends are also the people who talk her out of this stuff. If they notice...
And then there's getting Buffy back from the dead. We know how far she would go for that. Under what circumstances would she do it again?
Dark siding people is easy.
But the main reason I'd do that for my plot bunny is so Mary Sue can warn everyone and then turn up at the last minute, win the fight, and be all I Told You So.
... not ideal, really, as something to invite others to read...
You'd be compare and contrasting a group who always agree with their one and only powerful magic user, with a group who argue, a lot, with their handful of magic users who learn from each other but don't match.
Actually probabky with seven sin themed magic users, if you're having fun with Thassilon.
Like sure the Runelords were bad, but there were matching Virtues sitting right there, charity, generosity, humility, kindness, love, temperance, and zeal. So Sin themed heroes are actually struggling to counter their own strongest sin with it's Virtue. They just know themselves enough it's not easy.
... try being a non Greedy adventurer. Not simples...
The patron opposite of Vengeance could be Mercy or Endurance. Their spell list goes up to True Res or Miracle. Pretty nifty. But starts non flashy. Vengeance has a bunch of offensive spells, Mercy and Endurance just ways to survive them. But you can get a contrasting pair of Witches with a lot else matching.
I see some easy yet effective ways to dark side much of the story, and a final confrontation in the genre of I get by with a little help from my friends.
And the finale needs such a lot of characters you'd have to build up a lot of interesting people to get there.
Plus have had a lot of interesting 'bad guys' for the dark sider to steal from.
I just don't so far see enough of a story to write it.
The characters need a lot of constructing if I'm going to get them away from canon that doesn't need this story at all.
And the cast would go mega crossover. Partly to have a lot of different styles of dealing with power. Different hierarchies or lack thereof.
So the bunny isn't there yet.
... but I do keep on having the final battle in my head, where everyone notices Willow is ill of hoarding too much magic, and I was right all along, and I can use sleep spells and healing spells to fix it.
I don't know, if magic is being a metaphor, then having grabbed powers from your enemies and they're making you ill by fighting in your mind... something something tools of the enemy something something problem?
It's not coming together yet.
I mean you can't enslave your enemies and aim them at your other enemies and end up with a better world for it, but, do we need magic to say that?
I think I've written bits of this down before and I haven't got much further except to clarify who needs to turn up as friend in the finale: people who help each other but seldom agree, yet can get things done anyway.
(if they finally listen to me)
(yes the dark side bit is really really easy to understand. just one teensy make listen spell...)
(but noooo, doing things the hard way, with social skills, works better...)
Idea still stewing.
(The Paperwork Thing may have worked? Which would be nice? But then I read the newspapers and end up staring at the ceiling going over old tv plots on my head again again again, so, stress persists.)
I have a recurring plot idea of the sort where first everyone turns against you and then they have to admit you were right all along and secretly the bestest, so already it has both appeals and embarrassments.
It's about me vs Willow Rosenberg. Because it's really easy to take Willow and spin her as the bad guy. And not just by reverting her to one specific episode. The problem with the magic addiction arc wasn't just that it took something that had layers of religion and metaphorical sexuality and power and freedom and just flattened it out into a drug addiction hide the magic bongs answer. It was that Willow's actions raised questions that addiction never answered. Sure she got carried away with spells, but, that was an ethical problem, until they dropped addiction into the metaphor. She never seemed to establish many ethical boundaries about it, just that murder is possibly a bad thing, when it's a human being. Seems like there were just a few more boundaries to be thought on, you know? So you can walk her down a lot of paths that way.
But. Do I want to make Willow, Jewish Wiccan Lesbian, the bad guy?
No. No I do not. That seems like an entirely bad idea.
So maybe the story needs, like, shadow Willow, who had the same problems without the same identity stuff.
And there is Amy. Penance maledictions and all. Could be one story element.
But. The bit I keep circling back to is about stealing magic. She took Rack's and Rupert's, though Giles survived in the end. And the story had that bit about Good Magic washing away the Bad Magic she'd stolen from the books in the restricted section. Buffyverse magic has alignment? For the first time? But combine this theft with some things from unrelated fic in other verses, like I think a Teen Wolf fic where someone was stealing the Spark from people who might have magic. Well you end up with Willow having stolen Sparks, stolen magic. But in the comics she also gives a chunk of her own magic to Buffy. So she's generous with her friends. And Giles survived so he probably possibly got his magic back? Buffyverse magic theft seems to be of a finite resource, but stealing Sparks is stealing the capacity to make magic, so you'd get more powerful with more. They're just a really significant chunk of a person, possibly lethal to remove.
There's a Pathfinder adventure path where a magic user gets divided up into undead ba body, ib heart, and ka mask. The mask let other people use their necromantic magic, with a risk of take over. The heart more so, memories and emotions in there. So people tried to walk off with the magic and got parts of the soul, trapping the magic user in undeath and having to deal with their intelligence.
There's an intelligent magic item in one of the Pathfinder books that lets you add multiple sorts of metamagic, one at a time, from one rod, but it does it by
https://www.aonprd.com/MagicIntelligentDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Metamagician%27s%20Apprentice
transferring a wizard's apprentices into the rod.
So now imagine advantages of doing that to your enemies. Powerful yet complainy items there.
Or not needing an item, because you keep them closer than that.
There's story in having the people you kill start talking to you. Just, again, not story I want to do to Willow. So I'd have to establish someone else with the remarkably similar backstory.
Willow does work well in a group, so why do this kind of damage to the group?
It's sort of a dark side version of the spell they did to empower Buffy at the Initiative. They know how powerful a group can be. But they don't do it again because First Slayer. Which doesn't actually explain why they don't try with a different group, but, plot.
That spell put all the magic into one person for one fight. For Buffy to control alone. Which is an interesting approach that you can dark side real easily. Just up the desire for control and oh hey why let anyone walk away...
There's also the way Willow went to the campus wicca group and decided they were a bunch of 'wanna blessed bes'. Willow wasn't treating magic like a religion or a community. I reckon she was treating it like hacking, like a programming language, a set of if then that happens to have god names in, like calling up worker programs. But with a group that wasn't doing that and couldn't give her new spells or be useful to her? She lost interest. Rather than, for instance, teaching.
So you have a road not taken compare and contrast. And that late season 7 glimpse into a group that is doing glowy stuff. Which Willow only finds out when she needs them.
So if I was designing a bad guy from scratch they'd usually end up less interesting than Willow, because you don't tend to layer up 7 seasons of back story in the big bad. But there's elements of coercive control in how she approaches others, times she's using people even in season 7, it's quicker, it's easier, and yet she has some solid reasons about defending the world most of the time. So that's interesting.
In Pathfinder you get Thassilonian sin magic, where they decided there were 7 schools of magic for the 7 deadly sins, and concentrating on one sin would make you more powerful. That's how you get Runelords. But pursuing that kind of magic means there's no chance to be a uniersalist, and you plain can't cast your opposition spells. It's not a great match for what Willow was doing, but, it's a solid reason for employing wizards with different specialities. Or enslaving them.
Willow's magic doesn't match, but, if you were picking a Sin and therefore a School for her, you could work backwards from what she can cast. She does memory spells and spells that manipulate souls, so she can do both enchantment and necromancy, which actually narrows the list a lot.
https://www.aonprd.com/ArchetypeDisplay.aspx?FixedName=Wizard%20Thassilonian%20Specialist
Pride (Illusion): Perfecting your own appearance and domain through trickery and illusions. Prohibited Schools: conjuration, transmutation.
Sloth (Conjuration): Calling agents and minions to perform your deeds for you, or creating what you need as you need it. Prohibited Schools: evocation, illusion.
Wrath (Evocation): Mastery of the raw destructive power of magic, and channeling those destructive forces. Prohibited Schools: abjuration, conjuration.
Specialising in either necromancy or enchantment would mean being unable to do spells from the other school. So that means under this non matching scheme she does a lot of spells from her non specialist college.
I don't think there's any case for Sloth as Willow's sin, and she doesn't do Conjuration by Pathfinder standards, I think. Nothing summoned, not beings or acid or icicles. Which leaves Pride and Wrath.
... narratively there's a pretty good case for Pride, but there's no Illusion magic I can think of in her story.
Which leaves Wrath.
... she does get pretty powerful when she gives in to Wrath.
Wrath would leave her unable to do shields, resistance, some pretty basic protective stuff, without assistance (and she teamed up with Amy and Michael to do protective magic one time). Also it would block conjuration, which would block what little healing wizards can do. Hmm, doesn't quite work though, Same Time Same Place, or that time she pulled a bullet out of Buffy.
... actually those were both after she killed Rack. And Rack demonstrably summoned something when Willow was tripping. So that works better? Huh.
Willow calls herself a Witch though, not a Wizard. In Pathfinder a Witch makes a deal with a power she knows not, one with a theme but not a name the Witch can be sure of. Clerics pray to a specific deity and can't get lied to about who answers. Witches take what they're offered or reject it, but can only guess who it is from by the signs. Buffyverse magic doesn't fit that paradigm really, but, as an angle on Willow: Vengeance or Ancestors. The spell lists and levels are never a great match for the Buffyverse, but the themes? Willow's first big spell did a Vengeance with the help of her teacher's Ancestors. The tension of wondering which theme really fits her helpers eould make productive story. Are they more interested in making their enemies suffer, or making their inheritors learn? ... they're maybe just a collective of people, they can have moods and not be sure on that front themselves. Story.
But gathering together other people's magic could do for either, if they make a collective of advisors, that are really not having a good time.
Willow in canon did a bit of a mind wipe so she wouldn't be having an argument any more. The memory spell went wronger later so her friends know about that one. So, what would it take for her to try it again? Or is a memory spell an ethical boundary she has noticed now?
Dark side Willow can see the clear bright line between where she is and what she needs. Ruthless is following that line, ignoring all else. What would she need before she'd ignore her friends?
If her friends are her most important people, she'd need to keep them safe.
... if she couldn't do protection spells, maybe she'd decide she needs to badly enough to recruit someone who could. Someone who couldn't be allowed to stop...
But her friends are also the people who talk her out of this stuff. If they notice...
And then there's getting Buffy back from the dead. We know how far she would go for that. Under what circumstances would she do it again?
Dark siding people is easy.
But the main reason I'd do that for my plot bunny is so Mary Sue can warn everyone and then turn up at the last minute, win the fight, and be all I Told You So.
... not ideal, really, as something to invite others to read...
You'd be compare and contrasting a group who always agree with their one and only powerful magic user, with a group who argue, a lot, with their handful of magic users who learn from each other but don't match.
Actually probabky with seven sin themed magic users, if you're having fun with Thassilon.
Like sure the Runelords were bad, but there were matching Virtues sitting right there, charity, generosity, humility, kindness, love, temperance, and zeal. So Sin themed heroes are actually struggling to counter their own strongest sin with it's Virtue. They just know themselves enough it's not easy.
... try being a non Greedy adventurer. Not simples...
The patron opposite of Vengeance could be Mercy or Endurance. Their spell list goes up to True Res or Miracle. Pretty nifty. But starts non flashy. Vengeance has a bunch of offensive spells, Mercy and Endurance just ways to survive them. But you can get a contrasting pair of Witches with a lot else matching.
I see some easy yet effective ways to dark side much of the story, and a final confrontation in the genre of I get by with a little help from my friends.
And the finale needs such a lot of characters you'd have to build up a lot of interesting people to get there.
Plus have had a lot of interesting 'bad guys' for the dark sider to steal from.
I just don't so far see enough of a story to write it.
The characters need a lot of constructing if I'm going to get them away from canon that doesn't need this story at all.
And the cast would go mega crossover. Partly to have a lot of different styles of dealing with power. Different hierarchies or lack thereof.
So the bunny isn't there yet.
... but I do keep on having the final battle in my head, where everyone notices Willow is ill of hoarding too much magic, and I was right all along, and I can use sleep spells and healing spells to fix it.
I don't know, if magic is being a metaphor, then having grabbed powers from your enemies and they're making you ill by fighting in your mind... something something tools of the enemy something something problem?
It's not coming together yet.
I mean you can't enslave your enemies and aim them at your other enemies and end up with a better world for it, but, do we need magic to say that?
I think I've written bits of this down before and I haven't got much further except to clarify who needs to turn up as friend in the finale: people who help each other but seldom agree, yet can get things done anyway.
(if they finally listen to me)
(yes the dark side bit is really really easy to understand. just one teensy make listen spell...)
(but noooo, doing things the hard way, with social skills, works better...)
Idea still stewing.