#this sparks even less joy as there WAS an intended resurrection spell and it failed because she was already alive

[lightdancer1]

Now that I think about it:

It really is striking given everything with that one episode that there's no plotline where Tara accidentally kills off her love interest with that blindness spell early in Season 5 and Glory steamrolls everyone because the big gun went missing. It's basically one of this 'so this is how we done fucked up, don't do that shit' storylines that's seemingly begging to be written and.....nobody actually has. It'd be a perfect knife twist and it's not like the Scoobies would let Tara just leave with her obviously evil family even after that because they'd not want to lose someone ELSE after it.

So what does happen if they have to go through the Glory arc but there's no Willow (especially twistedly funny given later seasons if the Powers That Be cough her up again at the start of the equivalent of Season 6)? Would the butterfly effect mean she'd even brain-suck Tara, which was a pretty clear bit of her power boost that made her as formidable? If that never happens and they just use the hammer sooner, does anyone actually have to die?

I can also see if the PTB did decide 'oh wait, no, this one DOES have a destiny and she needs to get on with it' that a resurrected Willow after all that would be in the usual situation most of the 'Tara comes back' fics go of having entirely valid trust issues and having the 'wait HOW much time happened oh holy God WHAT is Glory and wow' reactions to a normal year on the Hellmouth.

Canon-wise Willow's an unkillable, fanfic exists precisely to do what canon wouldn't. And ultimately Tara was, after all, meant to be the replacement goldfish for Willow's old niche, so one can very easily see the Scoobies acting at a meta-level like that and creating something of the same dysfunction from a different route because she is very much NOT Willow in any of the ways that define her. She has a rigidly defined sense of ethics, she gets a backbone that has a more consistent sense of 'happens to me bad, happens to you because I'm traumatized nobody ever remembers it for the rest of anything ever'.

It would also be a suitably ironic knife twist given the 'big gun' thing that the very expectations here that set up the ultimate Dark Lord Rosenberg thing never happening lead to the Gang winning because Buffy beats the shit out of Glory with a magic hammer when she never gets her mitts on Tara because there's no Willow for her to argue with that one day and the butterfly effects are big, she never dies....and then the PTB have Willow turn right back up in the Magic shop alive, well, and utterly ocnfused at the end of the equivalent of that season going "What the Hell was that."

I would admittedly have the Dark Willow thing happen anyway as a result of overcompensating for realizing she was killed as result of relying on someone else's wisdom with magic and it's more Dark Lord Rosenberg, as I mentioned, rather than its canon aspect and Tara gets to be the replacement Willow and it does not spark joy while Willow in turn quite reasonably has major trust and communication issues and doubles and triples down on increasingly powerful magic sans magic crack analogy until she's full-scale Dark Phoenix and people belatedly have the 'oh shit we probably should have tried talking before now' reaction.

This may well end up the one other Buffyverse fic I write, though I'd basically breeze through the rest of Season 5 in the first chapter from Tara's POV and then at the tail end Willow comes back and the hilarity ensues.

Then again it's also equally possible for Willow to simply go 'nah, fuck magic, magic killed me, y'all already got a witch, computers it is' and then the Hellmouth Hellmouths and her destiny won't be denied and the paranoia of living on the place makes her take the same path while actually struggling against it when she gets a Monkey's Paw version of her own desire to be the big damn hero, but to be able to do that she has to be able to reach the power to do so and since she is who she is, it's impossible to have the power to abruptly start being capable of making reality do what you want without it going to her head.

And given that she did at least seem to be easily replaceable (with Willow and Tara equally unreliable narrators and the truth not quite matching up with what either of them think here and the two narrative POVs here) Dark Lord Rosenberg gets to be as much a case of venting that she in a sense was the replaceable sidekick on a television show and not a main character.

Almost every other canon possibility here has done this and having 'the person I love cannot see the demon for who she is' and then 'wait, she died, I didn't mean that' because the magic misfires a little harder in a laser-guided fashion and having Tara meet her intended niche a little harder than otherwise is....surprisingly under-used.