First forming in the Season One episode " The Harvest " to prevent The Master from opening a portal to hell, the line-up of the group varied from year to year, but the core that remained intact throughout the series ' run was Buffy herself and her best friends, Xander Harris and Willow Rosenberg, as well as her Watcher, Rupert Giles.

* Willow Rosenberg

* Willow Rosenberg

* Willow Rosenberg

* Willow Rosenberg

* Willow Rosenberg

* Willow Rosenberg, until the episode " Seeing Red "

* Willow Rosenberg, rejoins the group in " Help "

* Willow Rosenberg, rejoins the group in " The Long Way Home, Part 2 "

* Willow Rosenberg

# REDIRECT Willow Rosenberg

Willow Danielle Rosenberg is a fictional character created for the fantasy television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer ( 1997 – 2003 ).

Whedon created a group of friends for the main character, including Willow Rosenberg and Xander Harris.

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She becomes best friends with Xander Harris ( Nicholas Brendon ) and Willow Rosenberg ( Alyson Hannigan ), and meets her new Watcher, Rupert Giles ( Anthony Stewart Head ).

She is known for her roles as Willow Rosenberg in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lily Aldrin on the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, and Michelle Flaherty in the four main original American Pie film series.

Willow plays an integral role within the inner circle of friends — called the Scooby Gang — who support Buffy Summers, a teenager gifted with superhuman powers to defeat vampires, demons, and other evil in the fictional town of Sunnydale.

Willow appears in every Buffy episode ( making her the only character besides Buffy herself to do so ), is featured in three episodes of the spinoff Angel, an animated series and video game — both of which use Hannigan's voice, and the comic Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight ( 2007 – 2011 ), which uses Hannigan's likeness and continues Willow's storyline following the television series.

In the beginning of the series, Hannigan used her own experiences in high school — which she called " overwhelmingly depressing "— to guide her portrayal of Willow.

Throughout the series, magic is employed to represent different ideas — relationships, sexuality, ostracism, power, and particularly for Willow, addiction — that change between episodes and seasons.

After Tara leaves Willow, Willow divulges to Buffy that she does not know who she is and doubts her worth and appeal — specifically to Tara — without magic.

Sandy has eighteen elementary schools ( Alta View, Altara, Bell View, Brookwood, Crescent, East Sandy, Edgemont, Granite, Lone Peak, Oakdale, Park Lane, Peruvian Park, Quail Hollow, Sandy, Silver Mesa, Sprucewood, Sunrise, Willow Canyon ), six middle schools ( Albion, Crescent View, Eastmont, Indian Hills, Mount Jordan, Union ), four high schools ( Jordan, Hillcrest, Brighton, and Alta ), one technical school ( Canyons Technical Education Center — CTEC ), and one alternative high school ( Southpointe ).

In the first season, the female adolescents — Buffy, Willow, and Cordelia ( Charisma Carpenter )— establish their identities in contrast to older women, usually parents or teachers.

Riley also appears in the first issue of the follow-up series Season Nine ; the structure of " Freefall, Part I " suggests that Riley — like Spike, Xander, Willow and others — could have been Buffy's possible one-night-stand after the party she hosts at her apartment in San Francisco.

: Willow — stem cuttings

In " Doppelgangland ", when Anya, a vengeance demon who previously granted the wish, attempts a spell to regain her powers, it pulls the alternate universe's Willow ( Alyson Hannigan )— an evil vampire — into the current world and inevitably face-to-face with her human counterpart.

Whedon finds ways to get around that, with several cast members — particularly Anthony Head as the scholarly Giles and Alyson Hannigan as nervous witch Willow — proving to be wonderfully expressive silent comedians.

Oz and Tara — Willow's ex-boyfriend and current girlfriend — flirt with each other while watching Willow do her book report.

Both Buffy and Willow — whose skills in witchcraft are growing — are seized by M. O. O., who attempt to burn them at the stake.

Ann Rosenblatt, known as Ann Ronell ( December 28, 1906 or 1908 — December 25, 1993 ) was an American composer and lyricist best known for the jazz standard " Willow Weep for Me " ( 1932 ).

Physical growth also continued and the Willow Street Pump Station was renovated while a new, bricked-face Commerce Street Building opened at the corner of Commerce Street and Main Street — providing a new home for the College of Public Service.

Tara is killed when Warren Mears accidentally shoots her, launching Willow's spiral into Dark Willow.

Willow was noted to be the spirit of the Scooby Gang, and Hannigan attributed Willow's popularity with viewers ( she had by May 1998 seven websites devoted to her ) to being an underdog who develops confidence and is accepted by Buffy, a strong, popular person in school.

In " Gingerbread ", her home life is made clearer: Sunnydale falls under the spell of a demon who throws the town's adults into a moral panic, and Willow's mother is portrayed as a career-obsessed academic who is unable to communicate with her daughter, eventually trying to burn Willow at the stake for being involved in witchcraft ; her father is never featured.

Through the gamut of changes Willow endures in the series, Buffy studies scholar Ian Shuttleworth states that Alyson Hannigan's performances are the reason for Willow's popularity: " Hannigan can play on audience heartstrings like a concert harpist ... As an actress she is a perfect interpreter in particular of the bare emotional directness which is the specialty of writer Marti Noxon on form.

A one-shot comic dedicated to Willow's story was released in 2009 titled Willow: Goddesses and Monsters.

Contradicting the characterization of Willow's issues with magic as addiction, Buffy essayist Jacqueline Lichtenberg writes " Willow is not addicted to magic.

The transition from Willow into Dark Willow, precipitated by Tara's immediate death when she is shot through the heart, was ambiguously received by audiences, many of whom never foresaw Willow's psychic break.

" Several writers state that Willow's transition into Dark Willow is inevitable, grounded in Willow's self-hatred that had been festering from the first season.

Both Dark Willow and even Willow herself state that Willow's sacrifices for her friends and lack of assertiveness are her undoing.

People picked on Willow ... and now Willow's a junkie.

Some critics regard this as a failure on Willow's part to be strong ; Em McAvan interprets this to mean that Willow may be bisexual.

Scholar Farah Mendlesohn asserts that Willow's realization that she is in love with Tara allows viewers to re-interpret Willow's relationship with Buffy ; in the first three seasons, Willow is often disappointed that she is not a higher priority to Buffy, and even after Willow enters a relationship with Tara, still desires to feel integral to Buffy's cause and the Scooby Gang.

Tara, however, eclipses Willow's role as the moral center of the Scoobies, and as Willow becomes more powerful and less ethical, Tara becomes a maternal figure for the group.

When they first kiss in the episode " The Killer in Me ", Willow's realization that she let Tara go reacts with a curse put upon her by another witch named Amy Madison ( Elizabeth Anne Allen ), turning Willow into Warren, Tara's murderer.

In Season Eight, Kennedy and Willow are still romantically involved, but separated during Willow's self-exploration.

As the season draws to a close, Buffy is forced to battle her best friend when Willow becomes psychotic with dark magics after the human, Warren ( Adam Busch ) shoots and kills Willow's girlfriend Tara ( Amber Benson ) and wounds Buffy in the process.

* David J. Steinberg as Meegosh: Willow's closest friend who accompanies Willow partway on his journey.