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Buffy/Tara

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Pairing
Pairing: Buffy Summers/Tara Maclay
Alternative name(s): Tara/Buffy, Taffy
Gender category: femslash
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Canonical?: no
Prevalence:
Archives:
Other:
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Buffy/Tara is an unconventional femslash pairing in Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom between Buffy Summers and Tara Maclay.

Canon

Fandom

Buffy/Tara is a rarepair in the Buffy fandom. Of the 42,000 Buffy the Vampire Slayer works on Archive of Our Own, just 167 are tagged with the Buffy/Tara pairing. Meanwhile on Fanfiction.net there are 161 works with Buffy and Tara as tagged characters, however the majority of those do not have them as a pairing.

That said, a significant proportion of fan activity for Buffy the Vampire Slayer pre-dates Archive of Our Own; many of the Buffy/Tara fanworks hosted on individual fan sites or archives were never migrated to AO3. While they did not become a common pairing, Buffy/Tara fics could be found in Buffy rarepair sites and archives or were requested in bigger femslash events or challenges.

While Buffy and Tara did not have a lot of interactions in the show between just the two of them, of the ones they did there were a number which happened in emotionally charged situations — particularly in season six — and fans incorporated these as part of their shipping fuel.

Part of the appeal for the pairing was also in how non-judgmental Tara was, especially of what Buffy was experiencing after she was brought back from the dead. After Tara's death, there was a story-line where Buffy was ousted by the rest of Scooby Gang and the potentials, and wondering how this story-line would have played out had Tara been alive has been a discussion point many times across platforms.

Common Tropes or Fanon

  • Canon Divergence AU - Rewriting the show's arc to avoid Tara's canonical death is a common route fanworks for this pairing take; alternatively, but less commonly, Tara can sometimes be brought back after her death.

Fanworks

Fanfiction

  • What If...? by KineticKid - A popular canon divergent fic on AO3, based on a number of 'What ifs?', the most notable for the Buffy/Tara pairing being 'What if Willow had gone to a different college?'

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Archives