‘Girls Who Like Girls’

BY PHOENIX, 17

Read the full work here.

She went home that night and asked her mother why girls who kissed girls were bad. Her mother gave a laundry list: no one likes them, they get abused, et cetera. Willow thought that over. She liked herself just fine, so it couldn’t be true that no one liked her. And Buffy liked her, if not in a kissing way, and Xander liked her, with the same footnote. Giles liked her, and Miss Calendar liked her. Lots of people liked her. And abuse wasn’t the fault of the abusee. So the girls who liked girls weren’t bad themselves; other people were bad. Therefore, there was nothing wrong with liking girls. Just something wrong with being a bad person.

When did you start watching “Buffy”? I started watching “Buffy” last May, which sounds ridiculous, since I’ve become such a big fan since.

Why did you start writing fan fiction? My first ever was for “Harry Potter”; it was sort of a Voldemort back story. Since I was 13, it was utterly terrible. Now I write fan fiction both out of a desire to expand on fictional worlds and out of a desire to correct fictional worlds, in a sense. For example, I didn’t like some parts of Seasons 6 and 7 of “Buffy,” so I wrote a few pieces where Seasons 6 and 7 went the way I wanted.

What prompted you to write this piece? In Season 4 of “Buffy,” Willow, a character who has previously only demonstrated interest in boys, falls in love with a girl. I love that arc, but I wanted to explore whether Willow had been attracted to girls before then. In my mind, the way that this would be demonstrated would be through a high school crush on Buffy. I wanted to write about a young Willow discovering who she was. One of the best things about fan fiction is that, since a lot of writers are LGBT+, it can have really good representation of what it is to be LGBT+ that is hard to find in other places. This is part of my contribution to that.