Other people were more eloquent, but I want to chip in anyway. (This is why I didn't last long as a lurker.)

Willow's not an addictive personality. She's all about the the control. That's her weakness, she wants to control everything, cause she's been hurt and so have her friends and she wants it not to happen again, and she thinks she can make that happen.

Her potential to evil is that she can regard her fight with Tara as a problem to be fixed in Tara. She debugged her girlfriend like she would a computer and seemed not notice the mmagnitude of what she was taking away from Tara. She thinks she's right, when she's got this massive dangerous blind spot, she won't listen to anyone about it, and she's got massive amounts of power.

None of which has anything to do with addiction. And by spatchcocking that plotline in there, they removed the chance for us to see her actual descent and it's real consequences, and thereby, destroyed any interest I had in Willow as a character, permanently. And that's why I hate magic!crack. It violating five and half years of continuity is peanuts in comparision.

Okay, having reread your post -t, I must add, I don't know that much about addiction. I'm basing a lot of this off my being a control freak, and knowing how far addiction is from my personality.

But then there was Rak. At Rak's place, Willow didn't DO magic. She had magic DONE to her.

Yes this! Thank you Nova for articulating what made this ring untrue for me.

Many people who feel obligated to be in control all the time have some type of escape where they are out of control. It could be drugs or alcohol; it could be submissive sex; it could be extreme sports. But it's something DIFFERENT from what they do in day-to-day life. With Willow, they took the one domain where she was most in control & made it into a mechanism for her to cede control. Made no sense at all! And it was a totally unnecessary move, plot-wise, because at the finale, Willow was back to controlling magic again.

I think this may be why B/S worked for me. I saw it as Buffy finding one area in her life where somebody else was driving. It may have been horrible & abusive, but at least it wasn't her trying to save the world . . . again.

Just adding that I agree: B/S totally works. I don't love it, I find it somewhat painful pretty much all the way through, but it rings true to me.

Whereas the magic!crack does not.

Maybe my first foray into fic will be a rewrite of Smashed, Wrecked, etc, where some sort of error she makes DOING magic causes her to give it up. Then we can find Alyson Hannigan, and make her film it.

I honestly think that, with that story not so bad, season 6 would have been one of my favorite couple of seasons. Many things about it were just so wonderful.

Okay, I can see the objection to Willow going from doing magic to having it done to her. But it did make sense to me - she was burning herself out, and Rak was "recharging" her. Similar to the weekend chipper who finds that sniffing heroin doesn't quite make him as able to handle the suckitude of his life any more and gets a friend to shoot him up. Just to get through the work day.

The motivation for her to go to Rak wasn't to float on the ceiling or whatever, but to be able to do as much magic as she wanted the rest of the time.

I really don't think addicts see themselves as giving up control when they do whatever their addiction is. That's the time when, in their minds, they are most in control. When the universe is exactly as it should be and conforming to their wishes, in fact. And isn't that what Willow was doing with magic all along? Bending the universe to her will? Making everything okay?

When Willow zapped Tara's memory, that was an inappropriate use of magic, a short term fix that bit her on the ass when Tara found out abot it. And she tried it again, but bigger, in Tabula Rasa, even though she knew it didn't fix anything the first time and in fact made things worse. That's pretty darn close to a definitition of addiction.

imo, control issues and addictions are two different things, and not mutually exclusive. There are (most likely) different root causes of addictions in different people. Some people do seem to have addictive personalities. Some substances are just horrifically addictive. Some people seem (although scientific support for this waxes and wanes, depending on whom and what you're reading) to have a genetic predisposition for addiction, which can be separate from the addictive personality thing.

I didn't like Wrecked for many reasons. But mostly what I didn't like is what it didn't have. One of the great things about BtVS was that it told me about real life using fairy tale. Through Tabula Rasa, Willow's power issues and magicks use were still in the land of fairy tale, such that you could liken it to an addiction. Wrecked made it into an actual addiction.

It's a lonely corner, my liking Wrecked corner. Not much decor, either. Maybe I should get myself some inspirational posters or something.

The emotional reality of that episode hit me hard. Close to the punch The Body packed. And it's well-nigh thought to be deeply flawed to the point of being complete garbage by people who aren't me.

Well, I have successfully proven that y'all aren't just aspects of myself that appear as words on my computer screen :-)

Just wanted to throw in a "hell yeah" for the people who specified that their problems with the magic crack arc was that it turned into something Willow had done to her instead of something she was doing. -t, I think your interpretation - that she was being recharged by Rak - was the intended interpretation; unfortunately, I don't think that came through for a lot of people (myself definitely included). At the time, I was pretty lost by the ceiling-floating scenes. :(

(Then again, I have that problem with Season 6 - I don't think the storyline they were trying to tell came through clearly enough in several places for a lot of people. (Not all people) This is also my issue with Spike in Season 6, but hoo boy, I don't think I want to open up that can of worms (i.e. discussing Spike's characterization) :) )

Another weird issue I had with Wrecked - which, -t, I didn't hate, it just felt (as Cindy said) like it went from fairy tale to real in an awkward way - was the timeline. Now, I haven't seen this in a long time, but I vividly rmember being confused as to how much time had passed during Willow's 'sodes and how much time seemed to have passed for other people. It was a weird thing, that I don't remember anyone else ever noting online, but I remember discussing amongst friends the possibility that there were some weird time-manipulation things going on. (Which there weren't, apparently.) Anyone else recall this?

Another weird issue I had with Wrecked - which, -t, I didn't hate, it just felt (as Cindy said) like it went from fairy tale to real in an awkward way - was the timeline.

I was in complete denial about Wrecked, and that they were telling me an actual!addiction storyline, for a while. Then Steve DeKnight posted at the Bronze Beta. I asked him if he knew why they (I think Marti wrote "Wrecked" but I only had access to Steve) took such a heavy hand with the metaphor, and his response was basically something like, I don't know what to tell you, except that it wasn't metaphor. It is an addiction.

I hadn't even let myself see what they were doing.

This may sound strange, but if Wrecked had been a standalone, and had aired in a season that wasn't largely about Willow's slide to the dark side, I think I would have liked it as a standalone. I didn't like that there was an actual car crash, but I could have let that slide. I think Alyson did some damned fine work. She broke my heart, when Willow was crying in the shower, and was cuddling up to Tara's empty clothes. But Willow had such a great foundation for going dark, that I just resented the hell out of how Wrecked misused that history--I want to say "dishonored" but that's just too melodramatic, even for me.

edited to actually answer the question...

...and so no, I don't remember the timeline wonkiness. I don't doubt it was there, though. She was flying or whatnot, and things were generally wonky in the episode.

This is also my issue with Spike in Season 6, but hoo boy, I don't think I want to open up that can of worms

You're actually pretty safe here.

I suspect our ability to actually, y'know, discuss the issues we had with the character, etc., may be part of why we appear to have a rep as Spike haters. (Collectively. We've been accused of it.)

Jilli and I have discussed this at great length, offline. We both "got" the story they appear to have been attempting to tell with Spike, and spend a fair amount of idle chatter time (our drive home, in other words) trying to pin down the various reasons why other people not only didn't see the same story we did, but saw a *completely* different story about a grand romance that by rights should have lead to hearts and flowers, or a tale of redemptive love, or a vampire in an abusive relationship with a bitch what used him, or whatever.

We've decided that S6 is where the show suffered a serious break in universality of the storylines, in addition to the other issues. Unlike the other issues, there's not a good way to address this particular problem. My solution of "have the whole audience spun into an alternate reality where they've dated my ex-honeys" doesn't appear to be practical, you see.

My solution of "have the whole audience spun into an alternate reality where they've dated my ex-honeys" doesn't appear to be practical, you see.

I'd like to be exempt, because I had my own soul-sucking demon. But as to the viability of your idea, you never know until you've tried.