Twenty-one years ago, the Buffy writers killed Tara Maclay to break Willow, and the fandom has never quite forgiven them for it. The comics have now offered something that approaches, if not forgiveness, then at least a reckoning: in Buffy the Last Vampire Slayer Special #1, Willow and Tara have a daughter. Her name is Thessaly. She is the last Slayer on Earth, and she is extraordinary.
The issue comes from Casey Gilly, Joe Jaro, Maria Keane and Lea Caballero, and it is set in the same post-apocalyptic future that the Last Vampire Slayer series has been building: a version of the Buffyverse decades on, where the world has gone considerably darker and Buffy Summers has spent years thinking herself the final link in the Slayer line. Thessaly changes that. She is being trained by Buffy and Spike, who has rather improbably taken on the role Giles once occupied, and she comes to the work already formidably equipped.
What makes Thessaly remarkable is the particular inheritance she carries. She has the powers of the Slayer and the magic of her mothers combined, which makes her capable of things no previous Slayer could manage. She also has a girlfriend named Iris, and her relationship is given space in the narrative — present, warm, and entirely without the shadow that always seemed to hang over Willow and Tara on the television series.
The “Bury Your Gays” criticism has followed Buffy for two decades. Tara’s death — a stray bullet, mid-conversation, moments after she and Willow had reconciled — was and remains one of the most discussed examples of the trope in television history. The writers gave her no resurrection. In a franchise built on resurrections, Tara alone was not permitted to return.
The Last Vampire Slayer Special addresses this directly. Tara appears in a new, demonic form, present in her daughter’s life even across whatever barrier separates them. And in the issue’s most striking moment, Tara explains to Thessaly that the love between her and Willow has passed down in the form of balance: Thessaly has inherited Willow’s capacity for dark magic and Tara’s ability to control it. Only because the two women loved each other does the world have any defence against the supernatural.
It is a significant rewrite of what the television series did with that relationship. Not a replacement — the grief of Tara’s death is not erased — but a transformation of its meaning. Willow and Tara’s love is not defined by its ending. It produced something. Something powerful enough to carry the future.
Thessaly is, on the evidence of this issue, one of the more interesting new characters the Buffyverse has generated in some time. Whether the broader readership finds her remains to be seen. But as a way of telling Willow and Tara’s story differently, and better, this is a remarkable start.
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