Alyson Hannigan Solved Buffy's Spike And Angel Debate: She Should Have Dated Willow
Long before Team Bill and Team Eric on "True Blood" or Team Jacob and Team Edward in "Twilight," TV fans could really get impassioned over their choice of Team Angel (David Boreanaz) or Team Spike (James Marsters) on "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer." Everybody just wanted the best romance for Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who had to juggle all of the challenges of adolescence and young adulthood with being the chosen one to save Sunnydale from the Hellmouth. Fans can still get heated these days while defending their favorite love interest, which is how politician and romance author Stacey Abrams ended up discussing her Buffy beau picks on Twitter in 2020, and got quite a few people talking about their personal faves. The chatter included series showrunner Joss Whedon and actor Alyson Hannigan, and the latter offered up her own option: her character Willow should have dated Buffy!
While 1990s TV executives were fine with Willow being a queer character, it's not likely that they would have been okay with their lead hero being queer, so Hannigan's suggestion is great, but would have been super unlikely back when the series aired. It's a shame that one of TV's greatest love triangles didn't get to be a love quadrilateral, but I'm sure it's happened in fanfiction somewhere.
Some sapphic sweetness in Sunnyvale
While Abrams and Whedon both believed that Angel and Spike were good for Buffy at different times in her development as the Slayer, Hannigan simplified things by quote-tweeting Whedon with "Actually Buffy should have dated Willow." Willow was one of Buffy's closest friends and became extremely powerful in her own right as a witch, so the two would have been one intensely kick-ass power couple. That would have removed a whole lot of great TV drama though, unfortunately, because it's hard to imagine Buffy and Willow having the kinds of problems Buffy did with the vampire boys. There's also the fact that TV executives at the time probably wouldn't have let it happen, because Whedon went on the record in 2020 saying that he wanted to make Willow bisexual originally, but he wasn't allowed. If Willow couldn't be bisexual when the series aired, then Buffy definitely couldn't!
Willow did at least serve as some pretty positive queer representation, and she got a girlfriend named Tara (Amber Benson) in season 4. There weren't very many lesbian romances on TV when "Buffy" aired, let alone ones that weren't on cable. Willow helped a lot of young women see themselves represented, and it would have been incredible to have that representation extend to the show's main protagonist. A bisexual Buffy slaying vampires and our hearts, regardless of gender, sounds like horror hero heaven.