Amy Madison, as all of my followers must know by now, is a character I’m hugely enthusiastic about – I firmly believe she deserved more screen, she deserves more love in the fandom, et cetera, et cetera.
What I’’d like to talk about here, though, is something I’ve alluded to a few times when talking about Amy, and that is the way that Amy Madison serves as a Dark Mirror to Willow’s Storyline, and a Distant Echo of Faith’s.
Now, what the hell does that mean?
Before I can go into that, I need to talk about the Buffyverse phenomenon of what I call ‘Reflective Trinities’.
What I mean is this – we’re all familiar with the way that Kendra and Faith kind of represent opposite poles for Buffy’s storyline. This has been discussed many times in the fandom – Kendra is all duty, order, rules, restraint. Faith is all passion, desire, instinct, fury. Both end up in bad ends because of their unitary approach to Slaying – Faith’s passion and fury goes dark, and Kendra’s obedient and orderly nature makes her easy prey for Drusilla’s hypnotism.
Buffy is successful because she manages to walk a line between the two extremes, is the implicit narrative of this Reflective Trinity.
One that I haven’t seen any real discussion of, however, is the Reflective Trinity of Willow, Tara and Amy – one that is (to me) so self-evident, I’m sure I’m not the first person to make this point, even if I haven’t seen someone do it.
Willow, being the main character of the three, is at the heart of this Trinity – She’s a witch. Tara represents light magic, selflessness, balanced existence, and restraint on using magic. She’s always trying to get Willow to really respect magic, and not use too much of it, and she’s an incredibly selfless woman.
Amy, on the other hand, when you look at her whole character arc, represents dark magic, selishness, selfish use of magic, unrestrained application of power. What happens when you use magic you can’t control – and then keep using it anyway. Amy uses magic for her own gain, for sheer sake of it. She clearly knew of Rack even before she turned herself into a rat, which means she was probably taking hits of his ‘drug’ for some time before then. Amy didn’t have to turn out this way, but it is the way she went (and I may talk about this more some other time, though it is addressed in my fanfics The Spellbook and The Spellbook: Another Path)
So Willow has the two poles as well. Xander and Giles have Trinities of their own, though they’re slightly less well defined and established than Buffy’s and Willow’s.
Amy, as a character, uses magic. But from the start, she’s using it for her own ends, and using magic she can’t control – she’s messing with minds to get out of homework, she’s turning other people into rats, turning herself into a rat with no way back, and she’s doing all this before Willow can even levitate a pencil. She’s taking the path of quick and easy power, of overindulgence in magic. She introduces Willow to Rack, then tries to get Willow to relapse when she makes an effort to recover from magic, born out of resentment and a desire for revenge on Willow.
Even after she recovers from her addiction to Rack’s magic after his death, after Rock Bottom, Amy remains a petty, vindictive and kind of malevolent woman. She filled with resentment and envy towards Willow, and acts on it. Whether or not she meant for her little hex on Willow to go as far as it did, she used it without any regard for the consequenes.
Amy is, then, a Dark Mirror to Willow. She is what Willow could have been like if she’d started magic too early, and trained herself, unlike having some tutelage. She’s what Willow could have been like without someone like Tara to hold her in check, both in actuality and in spirit. She’s what Willow could have become without friends to help her when she hit Rock Bottom. She’s what Willow could have become if she’d decided she liked the neighborhood at Rock Bottom. She is Willow There But For the Grace of God – and Willow is her, There But For The Grace of God. The two characters are same basic start – witch – taking divergent paths. Willow made some bad choices, but for whatever reason, Amy made all the bad ones.
We don’t know why – there’s so much of her growth that we don’t see, we don’t get just why she’s so hateful and resentful and angry at Willow. We don’t know why she picked up magic or why she started using it so selfishly from the word go. We didn’t see it happen, we just see the result of it. But Amy’s storyline is deliberately, I think, a mirror held up to Willow’s.
With Faith, Amy represents a Distant Echo. Both characters indulge and revel in their powers, and even when they’re using them constructively (such as Slaying vamps for Faith, Amy helping Willow cast a protective spell at the start of ‘Gingerbread’), you get the impression – and in Faith’s case, know, that it’s more about the thrill of their abilities, not the fact that they’re being used for good ends.
Both Amy and Faith get into trouble thanks to their indulgence in their abilities. Both go dark in the aftermath. Both are fueled by intense resentment of their counterpart in their Relective Trinity. (For some discussion of that, including relavent dialogue, see here: (X) Both have to crawl their way up from Rock Bottom.
But there’s a reason that Amy’s storyline is only an Echo, and not something more similar. When Faith hits Rock Bottom, she decides to try and committ suicide by Cop, taking the job to kill Angel, trying to get him angry by shooting him, hitting Cordelia, torturing Wesley, etc, because she wants him to kill her. When she begs him to kill her, she’s at the bottom-est Rock Bottom you’ve ever seen. But Angel is there. Instead of killing her, he helps her. As she says, he’s effectively her sponsor. He helps her up, helps her carry herself away from Rock Bottom and helps start her path to redemption.
Amy never gets that. She hit Rock Bottom sometime between her last appearance in Season 6 and her appearance in Season 7. She even says as much: “
Because you know that’s the crazy thing about hitting rock bottom, you get to relive all the crappy things you did.” She claims she had help from the others in the Wicca circle, but if she did, she didn’t have very good help – because she really didn’t have anyone there to help her.
So she’s not recovered. She’s no long an addict, it seems, she’s no longer an overdosing witch. But she’s come back from Rock Bottom even more angry and resentful than ever. Willow went full dark, tried to destroy the world, killed a man by ripping his skin off and she’s embraced by her friends. Amy does nothing anywhere near as bad, but there’s no one there. No dad, no friends, no anything. Combined with the resentment about Willow’s power, and the whole thing goes overboard for her. She lets that hate and resentment fuel her descent into the dark.
If there hadn’t been an Angel there, is Amy what Faith could have been? Or is she just the Distant Echo? She reaches the same point Faith was at – but with no one there to help her… She’s another one of those what could have been – but the what could have been is what Amy could have been. She could have been the magical equivalent of Faith. Instead, she’s just an echo, a sort of plaintive possibility. Amy’s storyline is an echo of Faith’s, a deliberate almost.
Amy’s character arc is a story of almosts, could’ve beens and what ifs. She exists to hold a mirror up to the story of Willow, and to remind us of Faith’s journey, and how hard it was. How others can falter on that road to redemption, when weight down by resentment, self-loathing, jealousy, hate. Maybe not 100% deliberately, on the part of the writers, but to a degree, it was deliberate, I think.
These parallells to Faith and to Willow are only half of the reason why I love Amy Madison so much and find her fascinating. I hope I’ve helped you appreciate the complexity of the character, who despite only having eight episodes (one of which she was in for all of three seconds), manages to have a very deep story arc. And at some point, I hope to explore the other half of why Amy is so very awesome here on my blog.
If you have any questions about Amy or this Meta, or clarification on some of the ideas discussed herein, or just want to share your own views on Amy, please, please feel free to come into my Askbox. It’s always open, and especially for things related to Amy.
Wow. You made me like a character I (violently) disliked. That’s a first. Congratulations 😄
If you’re interested, then actually in the comics, Amy resurrected Warren after he had been dead for a few seconds. The curse was Warren’s idea. They were dating; that is what fueled her hatred for Willow. I don’t buy that storyline for whatever reason but that’s how they explained it in season 8
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