GO vote at Slayerstillness and VELVETWHIP WROTE ME A BUFFY & TARA GEN FIC, COME SEE!
PLEASE VOTE NOW in three tiebreaker votes for slayerstillness challenge 30! Don't forget to vote and press the button for each tiebreaker individually. Unlike Sister Red here. I make the mistakes so you don't have to. You're welcome. (Most creative is an interesting, um, conundrum for me. I'll explain all when the votin's over.)
LOOK AT THE PREZZIE I GOT!! "The Things You Find in Vending Machines" a season 4 ficlet with my beloved Buffy Summers and Tara Maclay (gen, set immediately post New Moon Rising) from the superb velvetwhip as, of all things, a surprise thank you for the banner I made her for her wonderous "Soft and Pink and Very Sad"! THANK YOU so much. dear! This one is on the humous side of Gabrielle's palette - Buffy and Tara have a brief, awkward conversation in the dorm hallway - but there's a wonderful complexity to it, as is true of Gabrielle's work.
As I've noted elsewhere on my journal and hereabouts in fandom, Tara's store of courage, strength and even self-confidence is overlooked and underplayed not just in fandom but on the series itself. She pursued Willow in Hush, not the other way around, after all. I don't need the metaphor of monsters and Little Bads to recognize the courage that takes, and that it took for a young lesbian in the 1990's. (I know from experience.) Of course, Buffy would recognize and respect that in Tara. And of course she would want the best for her beloved best friend Willow. Gabrielle NAILS all that right here in a very short scene. (And the last line, as you'd expect, is ACES.)
It also hints at something else as well: the stereotype cherished by some straight women and lesbians, that a lesbian relationship is inherently nicer than a hetereosexual one; that women together are kinder, sweeter, more understanding, etc. It's a pretty fantasy, and terribly untrue. But completely understandable that Buffy would view W/T through that lens. And Gabrielle doesn't make a deal of it, in fact you mightn't notice, but it's there, lying beneath the humor and that's the important thing.
THANK YOU so much Gabrielle, I'm truly honored! (If I'd known the gift of a banner would lead to the gift of a fic I would have worked harder to learn how to make banners sooner!)