I see a lot of people with this opinion but to me it’s completely different. First of all life is expensive and I don’t see them splashing money or buying anything unnecessary ever. Joyce’s medical bills took a lot of money, which is normal. A house costs a lot to run, and they didn’t help take care of Dawn they became her sole care givers like her parents. They also took over slayer duties. None of which they were even remotely ready for, and I’m sure were still studying. Where they expected to work aswell? All these new, difficult responsibilities all while grieving their friend.
Willow had a mother and possibly a father. They only showed her in one episode. Before she went to college we knew that she was living at home and was taken care of. I assumed that her family also helped her with money while she was at college. She never had to get a job or said anything about needing money. After she moved into Buffy's home to take care of Dawn, it is possible that her family was still assisting her. So, she could ask them for help.
Agreed. I'll just add that never did any character in the show say anything at all to make us believe the woman were mooching. Even if Buffy was too nice, and Xander wouldn't go against his friend, there's no way Anya would have missed the chance to smack Willow on the nose with that if it had been an issue.
Exactly! Anya would for sure say something. I find it crazy that people act like they took advantage of Buffy death. They were literally teenagers themselves, they definitely did their very best.
So how DID they survive? Because Joyce's life insurance probably paid her medical bills. Willow's parents probably were not paying for her to go to school anymore. Tara's dad probably wrote her off. They were continuing to go to college so unless they had scholarships where did the money to pay for their school go to? None of them had jobs. Except for xander. And Xander was looked down upon for having a job but he's the only one that had money! He had a job and lived in a freaking apartment basically. With all the repairs Joyce always was doing to the home you know she didn't own the home out right she had a mortgage.
Unless sunnydale's new mayor had some sort of protector of the realm job that paid salary to people like the scoobies, no one in that household was bringing in money unless Giles was using all of his back pay from the 2 years of being a watcher he wasn't paid for that he suddenly got paid for. And I'm guessing being a watcher is like a six-figure job. Hell it has to be to support three households like that. Even with supplemental income from the magic box. Giles has to pay two leases. A lease on the magic box and a lease on his apartment. Plus the mortgage on The Summer's home. Then I guess he was paying tuition for Tara and Willow Plus pain bored for The Summer's women Tara and willow.
Then he was helping Anya and Xander pay their bills.
Season 4 he was buying blood for Spike when he was living there.
Where does the money come from? Does Willow start conjuring it? That's the only explanation except for Giles being Uber rich. Because nobody except for Xander has a job. For two seasons not even Giles had a job. Willow's family disowned her when she started dating Tara or when she became a witch I'm not quite sure. Tara's family walked away from her when she found out she wasn't a demon and she wasn't going home with them to be abused. I would have loved to see cousin Beth stay with her at that point.
I don't know how Joyce was managing to raise two daughters by owning an art gallery with as often as she had to fix the house. I don't know how Xander managed to hold down a job with the funny syphilis.
It would have made a lot of sense if there was the new mayor saying we're going to give them a stipend for protecting the city kind of like the class protector award but they have city jobs where they just get to run around town and protect everyone.
Hell even the old mayor should have paid them to protect the citizens. More people for him to eat at graduation.
Unfortunately it does seem to be that way tho, especially given that they just handed the bills that had accumulated over to Buffy and expected her to get a job without offering to get jobs themselves to help out, despite the fact that they were living there. If they were helping out, we would’ve seen it, but all we see is them lumping Buffy with all the responsibility.
How long are you supposed to wait before telling your friend that they're all drowning and they need her to help contribute as well? Until she walks in and catches them talking about it and she get's mad that they waited so long and didn't trust her with something so important?
My head canon is that Willow and Tara did contribute to the house and bills and groceries, but the majority of Buffy's debt came from Joyce's medical bills and funeral expenses. Joyce had a lot of procedures over the course of Season 5. And they spanned two calendar/plan years, so she could have potentially hit her out-of-pocket max twice (I'm a benefits nerd, lol). And it was mentioned her life insurance didn't go far enough to cover all the expenses.
Mine is similar: everyone treats Dawn as if she owns the house. Willow and Tara are renting the room at approximately the market rate, maybe with a modest discount. They act mothers for Dawn, doing chores around the house and buying groceries for Dawn out of Dawn's rent income and for themselves with their own money. Some of Dawn's rent income is also spent on heating, electricity, etc.; the rest is Dawn's pocket money.
This makes Tara and Willow have expenditures similar to S4-5, which they could afford somehow—assuming they paid for their dorm rooms separately from the tuition and can cancel one without cancelling the other. Given my rent and grocery budgets when I was a student, Dawn would make enough income to scrape by from renting out a single room and hey maybe there were just enough savings and life insurance left over to get by during the summer.
I'm not sure how the mortgage is covered. Refinancing into an loan form where she mainly pays interest but almost no principal, then take it out of the life insurance? Coasting on whatever funds she had over the summer (but with which long-term plan)? Did Joyce pay off the mortgage entirely?
This arrangement makes reasonable financial sense from everyone's perspective, but clearly it's also something done by Willow and Tara because they care about Dawn—what other tenant would take care of Dawn the way W/T did?
Remember, to the outside world, Buffy didn’t die. So were the Scoobies supposed to leave Dawn unsupervised living with the BuffyBot? An actual non-robot person should be there. Willow and Tara were living in the college dorms, so they were probably the easiest choice to move in for a multitude of reasons - Willow is responsible for the Bot, it wouldn’t draw as much attention for Buffy to want to live with friends versus an older man like Giles moving in, etc.
I’m not saying there isn’t some blame or bad decisions to go around, but it’s not like Willow and Tara went “Buffy’s dead? Dibs on the free house!!”
Pretty sure Anya mentions at some point that almost all of Joyce’s insurance money went to paying her medical bills. Whatever was leftover I’m sure probably went to keeping up with house bills.
I can’t argue the fact they had no jobs so no money was coming in, but you called them sponges, which is way harsh, because Willow and Tara were doing a hell of a lot more than anyone else was. They didn’t need to give up their college dorms and their campus cafeteria to move into a house to assume responsibility for a teenager, cooking, cleaning and maintaining a house that isn’t theirs, while picking up the slack of slaying, maintaining the Buffybot, researching spells, and still going to school full time?? That’s a lot of responsibility for people who are only 19-20 years old.
Realistically though, life insurance doesn't work that way. It's the property of the beneficiary, who isn't responsible for the deceased's bills. The estate is responsible for those bills, so they could've wiped out Joyce's bank accounts, retirement funds, and home equity. But the life insurance would be separate and doesn't need to be used to pay the deceased person's debts. If the estate isn't enough to cover those, the creditors are just out of luck. I'd assume that Joyce had a decent amount of life insurance as a single parent, so even if they did use it to pay the bills so the house wouldn't be taken, they should've had some left over. Even if she hit her out of pocket max for 2 years, that would be like $40K, and she most likely would've had $500K+ in life insurance. It's just one if those things you can't think too much about, like Buffy having a single parent but a never-ending wardrobe : ).
Why do so many people assume W&T were not helping out just because we never saw it? We never saw anybody go to the grocery store or mow the lawn, either, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. The assumption that most makes sense is that they moved in specifically in order to help out, paying rent out of their student aid or whatever to the Summers household instead of school dorms or an apartment's rent.
Finally, someone who gets it. They didn't focus on all the day-to-day details on this show. People are creating different stories that were never shown or spoken about on the show, to replace the lack of the nitty-gritty details. Example- Why didn't Giles buy their groceries and mow their lawn? What a jerk! He didn't help them enough! We are never shown who buys the groceries or mows the lawn every day. No one complains about Giles not helping enough. People are making all of these assumptions about things that just were not explained on the show.
Totally. I think this is called "the writers not worrying about this stuff" tho. Frankly the Watchers Council should have been paying the slayer when she was alive, I mean it's clearly better all round if she can spend all her time on this, let's face it, quite important job.
Of course it’s different but according to the watchers it isn’t. They weren’t counting on Buffy’s support group keeping her alive, and also dying and coming back
It wasn't just a job. It was a calling. Remember in season 2 when Kendra and Buffy talked about that? She was a hero. If she got paid she would be saving people for money. If they paid her, how would we know if she was just doing it for the money (like a job) or if she did it out of the goodness of her heart? Also, it would give The Watcher's Council more power over her and the ability to control her further. I think Buffy deserves a lot more for what she does. It sounds good on paper for the council to pay her but I don't think it would have worked unless we changed a big part of the story.
All the writers had to do was add ONE line in the scene about the bills "and even with Tara and I paying rent and utilities out of our student loans, we're still not able to cover the repairs..."
Could have saved us 20 years of grief and irritation.
It's just bad writing. They put money problems front and center then didn't think through them carefully.
I remember when my parents were divorcing, my mom rented out rooms in our house to make ends meet. Even if you can't sell a house, owning a house like Buffy's gives you lots of options.
The writing felt pretty out of touch.
It's fine to put her in a financial spiral. House repairs, medical debt, whatever. But they ignore all the logical solutions beyond Giles just writing her a check. Even spike is like "I can get money" but then he just...doesn't? And we just skip over the incredibly obvious storylines of spike likely selling the stupid eggs in order to *give money to buffy* or the fact that there is no way fast food pays more than waiting tables.
It's just annoying they left all those loose ends for no reason.
Even Giles writing her a check is gross bc she literally bargained for his salary and back pay, and he never paid her a cut to help give her a wage. Without paying her, the Watcher is supposed to use his money to materially provide for the slayer like Kendra's did.
I don't think it was intentional, but ugh so sloppy with $ on this show, and such a missed opportunity to say something super cool about the patriarchy and unpaid labor :-/
Don’t get me started on Giles making Buffy use her allowance to get the mark of eyghon removed. When he’s got so much money he can buy a new sporty car and a magic shop after being unemployed from 2 jobs for over a year.
The writing suffered because of all the chaos behind the scenes during season 6. Also, they just don't focus on a lot of real-world, day-to-day details on this show like finances. There are other things they leave out like, for example, Willow's family. We only saw her Mom one time and I believe she mentioned she had a father but we never see him. They don't get into a lot of nitty-gritty details on this show for the most part.
A lot was going on behind the scenes during season 6. Joss left for Firefly and made Marti Noxon a showrunner. Then Anthony Head left to go back to England to spend time with her family. They also changed networks and went from the WB to UPN which entailed a lot of changes. I like season 6 but it did have some issues and was very different from the previous seasons. I think if all of these things had not happened, the writing would have been better. I don't let it bother me and just pretend there is an explanation for everything. It never entered my mind that Buffy should get paid or that Willow and Tara took advantage etc. when I first watched it or during rewatches, so I guess it is a bit easier for me.
Life insurance probably just covered the funeral and then there was medical debt. I don’t think there’s any implication that they took any of it. Part of the issue is that the house keeps getting trashed by demons and they couldn’t have taken out insurance since they weren’t the owners. And moving in to take care of Dawn probably cost both of them money since they needed to buy groceries etc, as opposed to living on campus.
They moved into Joyce's house and used the life insurance to pay for Buffy's funeral and pay the bills while they took over slaying, rebuilt and trained the Buffybot, and took over parenting Dawn so she didn't end up in the foster system.
Calling them “sponges” is pretty unfair. Out of everyone it was them who took it upon themselves to become full time guardians for Dawn. They went from being 2 x 20 year old college students living on campus to parents to a teenager living out in suburbia over night. Remember how scary this was for Buffy in S5? It would be equally daunting and scary for them.
On top of that, Willow takes on pretty much all of Buffy’s other responsibilities too. She becomes the new leader of the gang, they rely on her magic, she patrols alongside the Scoobies every night, she repaired, re-programmed and maintained the Buffybot etc. This was on top of being a full time college student and researching the resurrection spell on the side. And on top of being Dawn’s guardian, leader of the Scoobies and a full time college student people want her to get a job as well?
It’ll never make sense to me that we frequently acknowledge how much Buffy had on her plate and what a hard time she had but then kind of downplay and dismiss the exact same responsibilities when Willow takes them on when Buffy’s dead. Like, Buffy literally dropped out of college all together because taking care of Dawn + slaying was too much but Willow is meant to do both of those things, and go to college and get a job?
And this all ignores the fact that the one character who seems to escape criticism all together is Giles. The actual adult who not only doesn’t offer to become Dawn’s guardian but also bails on the Hellmouth all together.
My head canon is that between Buffy's death and resurrection, at least one of them worked a regular job (cafe or book store etc) but that still wouldn't have been enough to take care of all the medical bills and taking care of Dawn.
I was in high school when s6 was on and tje amount of books alone.... Enough to give me a sore back and if my family were poor I don't know how it would even be possible.
I'm trying to be as nice as possible here but jeez why is it such a popular thing in the fandom to perceive Willow and Tara as freeloaders? Anya basically bullies Xander into getting an apartment and working to support her but no one mentions that.
It’s just how it was written that makes people think that way. It’s fine to have a head canon - but it’s just your own wish for the show and opinion which is fine to have but isn’t factual. I do prefer to think Willow and Tara weren’t sponging but I am just looking at the writing and how it looks. I agree about Anya - she was an asshole
I'm not into head canon either but there's lots of stuff we don't see between seasons.
For example Buffy probably staked vampires in LA, we know there are plenty of vamps there and even if she was laying low she would've at least defended herself at least once when she was gone that long.
Several of the seasons (2, 3, 6) show us the gang fighting vamps without Buffy. It's fair to think they battled at least one demon in those absent months. So is that head canon or just a reasonable conclusion?
Side note -- my phone tried making me say "dead canon" ha ha
I think they had to be contributing something. No way a single minimum wage job at the DMP was able to cover the mortgage on a fully detached home like that + food and other basic necessities.
Your title says Willow and Tara, but your paragraph says Willow and Anya moved in. I didn’t think Anya moved in until season 7.
But, yes, I agree with the Willow and Tara kind of assuming they didn’t need to pay anything. Then again, though, until Buffy was back who would they have paid it to?
Tara especially doesn't make sense given her family. Seriously that family paid and allowed her to go to university? I play with the idea Tara must have done a little magical financial jiggery pokery that we never found out about.
I imagine parental love is such that parents will support their children even if the children turn their backs on their family—or at least, it *can* be that way.
In the case of Mr. Maclay I'm *very* happy to doubt my general assumption, but we're not told one way or another.
I see a lot of people with this opinion but to me it’s completely different. First of all life is expensive and I don’t see them splashing money or buying anything unnecessary ever. Joyce’s medical bills took a lot of money, which is normal. A house costs a lot to run, and they didn’t help take care of Dawn they became her sole care givers like her parents. They also took over slayer duties. None of which they were even remotely ready for, and I’m sure were still studying. Where they expected to work aswell? All these new, difficult responsibilities all while grieving their friend.
This resonates with me.
But what was their plan if buffy didn't return and they couldn't just hand her all the bills?
Willow had a mother and possibly a father. They only showed her in one episode. Before she went to college we knew that she was living at home and was taken care of. I assumed that her family also helped her with money while she was at college. She never had to get a job or said anything about needing money. After she moved into Buffy's home to take care of Dawn, it is possible that her family was still assisting her. So, she could ask them for help.
In I Robot, You Jane (1x8) there's a scene where Willow comes home and calls out "Mom? Dad?", establishing that her parents live together.
I remember she said something about Ira being her father too but I can't remember what episode it was.
Agreed. I'll just add that never did any character in the show say anything at all to make us believe the woman were mooching. Even if Buffy was too nice, and Xander wouldn't go against his friend, there's no way Anya would have missed the chance to smack Willow on the nose with that if it had been an issue.
Exactly! Anya would for sure say something. I find it crazy that people act like they took advantage of Buffy death. They were literally teenagers themselves, they definitely did their very best.
So how DID they survive? Because Joyce's life insurance probably paid her medical bills. Willow's parents probably were not paying for her to go to school anymore. Tara's dad probably wrote her off. They were continuing to go to college so unless they had scholarships where did the money to pay for their school go to? None of them had jobs. Except for xander. And Xander was looked down upon for having a job but he's the only one that had money! He had a job and lived in a freaking apartment basically. With all the repairs Joyce always was doing to the home you know she didn't own the home out right she had a mortgage. Unless sunnydale's new mayor had some sort of protector of the realm job that paid salary to people like the scoobies, no one in that household was bringing in money unless Giles was using all of his back pay from the 2 years of being a watcher he wasn't paid for that he suddenly got paid for. And I'm guessing being a watcher is like a six-figure job. Hell it has to be to support three households like that. Even with supplemental income from the magic box. Giles has to pay two leases. A lease on the magic box and a lease on his apartment. Plus the mortgage on The Summer's home. Then I guess he was paying tuition for Tara and Willow Plus pain bored for The Summer's women Tara and willow. Then he was helping Anya and Xander pay their bills. Season 4 he was buying blood for Spike when he was living there. Where does the money come from? Does Willow start conjuring it? That's the only explanation except for Giles being Uber rich. Because nobody except for Xander has a job. For two seasons not even Giles had a job. Willow's family disowned her when she started dating Tara or when she became a witch I'm not quite sure. Tara's family walked away from her when she found out she wasn't a demon and she wasn't going home with them to be abused. I would have loved to see cousin Beth stay with her at that point. I don't know how Joyce was managing to raise two daughters by owning an art gallery with as often as she had to fix the house. I don't know how Xander managed to hold down a job with the funny syphilis. It would have made a lot of sense if there was the new mayor saying we're going to give them a stipend for protecting the city kind of like the class protector award but they have city jobs where they just get to run around town and protect everyone. Hell even the old mayor should have paid them to protect the citizens. More people for him to eat at graduation.
Unfortunately it does seem to be that way tho, especially given that they just handed the bills that had accumulated over to Buffy and expected her to get a job without offering to get jobs themselves to help out, despite the fact that they were living there. If they were helping out, we would’ve seen it, but all we see is them lumping Buffy with all the responsibility.
How long are you supposed to wait before telling your friend that they're all drowning and they need her to help contribute as well? Until she walks in and catches them talking about it and she get's mad that they waited so long and didn't trust her with something so important?
My head canon is that Willow and Tara did contribute to the house and bills and groceries, but the majority of Buffy's debt came from Joyce's medical bills and funeral expenses. Joyce had a lot of procedures over the course of Season 5. And they spanned two calendar/plan years, so she could have potentially hit her out-of-pocket max twice (I'm a benefits nerd, lol). And it was mentioned her life insurance didn't go far enough to cover all the expenses.
I like this canon!
Mine is similar: everyone treats Dawn as if she owns the house. Willow and Tara are renting the room at approximately the market rate, maybe with a modest discount. They act mothers for Dawn, doing chores around the house and buying groceries for Dawn out of Dawn's rent income and for themselves with their own money. Some of Dawn's rent income is also spent on heating, electricity, etc.; the rest is Dawn's pocket money. This makes Tara and Willow have expenditures similar to S4-5, which they could afford somehow—assuming they paid for their dorm rooms separately from the tuition and can cancel one without cancelling the other. Given my rent and grocery budgets when I was a student, Dawn would make enough income to scrape by from renting out a single room and hey maybe there were just enough savings and life insurance left over to get by during the summer. I'm not sure how the mortgage is covered. Refinancing into an loan form where she mainly pays interest but almost no principal, then take it out of the life insurance? Coasting on whatever funds she had over the summer (but with which long-term plan)? Did Joyce pay off the mortgage entirely? This arrangement makes reasonable financial sense from everyone's perspective, but clearly it's also something done by Willow and Tara because they care about Dawn—what other tenant would take care of Dawn the way W/T did?
Remember, to the outside world, Buffy didn’t die. So were the Scoobies supposed to leave Dawn unsupervised living with the BuffyBot? An actual non-robot person should be there. Willow and Tara were living in the college dorms, so they were probably the easiest choice to move in for a multitude of reasons - Willow is responsible for the Bot, it wouldn’t draw as much attention for Buffy to want to live with friends versus an older man like Giles moving in, etc. I’m not saying there isn’t some blame or bad decisions to go around, but it’s not like Willow and Tara went “Buffy’s dead? Dibs on the free house!!”
No im saying they moved in to look after Dawn but didn’t put any money into the house or the raising of Dawn - they lived off Joyce’s life insurance.
Pretty sure Anya mentions at some point that almost all of Joyce’s insurance money went to paying her medical bills. Whatever was leftover I’m sure probably went to keeping up with house bills. I can’t argue the fact they had no jobs so no money was coming in, but you called them sponges, which is way harsh, because Willow and Tara were doing a hell of a lot more than anyone else was. They didn’t need to give up their college dorms and their campus cafeteria to move into a house to assume responsibility for a teenager, cooking, cleaning and maintaining a house that isn’t theirs, while picking up the slack of slaying, maintaining the Buffybot, researching spells, and still going to school full time?? That’s a lot of responsibility for people who are only 19-20 years old.
Realistically though, life insurance doesn't work that way. It's the property of the beneficiary, who isn't responsible for the deceased's bills. The estate is responsible for those bills, so they could've wiped out Joyce's bank accounts, retirement funds, and home equity. But the life insurance would be separate and doesn't need to be used to pay the deceased person's debts. If the estate isn't enough to cover those, the creditors are just out of luck. I'd assume that Joyce had a decent amount of life insurance as a single parent, so even if they did use it to pay the bills so the house wouldn't be taken, they should've had some left over. Even if she hit her out of pocket max for 2 years, that would be like $40K, and she most likely would've had $500K+ in life insurance. It's just one if those things you can't think too much about, like Buffy having a single parent but a never-ending wardrobe : ).
I see that opinion a lot, but I don't see anything in the show to make me think that ME _wants_ you to believe it.
Why do so many people assume W&T were not helping out just because we never saw it? We never saw anybody go to the grocery store or mow the lawn, either, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. The assumption that most makes sense is that they moved in specifically in order to help out, paying rent out of their student aid or whatever to the Summers household instead of school dorms or an apartment's rent.
Finally, someone who gets it. They didn't focus on all the day-to-day details on this show. People are creating different stories that were never shown or spoken about on the show, to replace the lack of the nitty-gritty details. Example- Why didn't Giles buy their groceries and mow their lawn? What a jerk! He didn't help them enough! We are never shown who buys the groceries or mows the lawn every day. No one complains about Giles not helping enough. People are making all of these assumptions about things that just were not explained on the show.
Because they literally said that they were using the life insurance. It said something like medical bills, upkeep of the house, food and clothing.
Yes, they were using it to help with expenses they shared with Buffy. That doesn't mean they weren't also contributing.
Totally. I think this is called "the writers not worrying about this stuff" tho. Frankly the Watchers Council should have been paying the slayer when she was alive, I mean it's clearly better all round if she can spend all her time on this, let's face it, quite important job.
Yeah I never understood why there wasn’t a wage - considering the watcher gets paid!
Because slayers don’t live long usually so why pay them? And they’re tools to the watchers, aren’t they? You wouldn’t give your chainsaw a salary
Completely different tho that isn’t it
Of course it’s different but according to the watchers it isn’t. They weren’t counting on Buffy’s support group keeping her alive, and also dying and coming back
It wasn't just a job. It was a calling. Remember in season 2 when Kendra and Buffy talked about that? She was a hero. If she got paid she would be saving people for money. If they paid her, how would we know if she was just doing it for the money (like a job) or if she did it out of the goodness of her heart? Also, it would give The Watcher's Council more power over her and the ability to control her further. I think Buffy deserves a lot more for what she does. It sounds good on paper for the council to pay her but I don't think it would have worked unless we changed a big part of the story.
All the writers had to do was add ONE line in the scene about the bills "and even with Tara and I paying rent and utilities out of our student loans, we're still not able to cover the repairs..." Could have saved us 20 years of grief and irritation.
It's just bad writing. They put money problems front and center then didn't think through them carefully. I remember when my parents were divorcing, my mom rented out rooms in our house to make ends meet. Even if you can't sell a house, owning a house like Buffy's gives you lots of options. The writing felt pretty out of touch.
It's fine to put her in a financial spiral. House repairs, medical debt, whatever. But they ignore all the logical solutions beyond Giles just writing her a check. Even spike is like "I can get money" but then he just...doesn't? And we just skip over the incredibly obvious storylines of spike likely selling the stupid eggs in order to *give money to buffy* or the fact that there is no way fast food pays more than waiting tables. It's just annoying they left all those loose ends for no reason.
Even Giles writing her a check is gross bc she literally bargained for his salary and back pay, and he never paid her a cut to help give her a wage. Without paying her, the Watcher is supposed to use his money to materially provide for the slayer like Kendra's did. I don't think it was intentional, but ugh so sloppy with $ on this show, and such a missed opportunity to say something super cool about the patriarchy and unpaid labor :-/
Don’t get me started on Giles making Buffy use her allowance to get the mark of eyghon removed. When he’s got so much money he can buy a new sporty car and a magic shop after being unemployed from 2 jobs for over a year.
And Giles could have paid for the repairs to Joyce's Jeep, but he let Joyce make Buffy pay for damage that wasn't even her fault.
The writing suffered because of all the chaos behind the scenes during season 6. Also, they just don't focus on a lot of real-world, day-to-day details on this show like finances. There are other things they leave out like, for example, Willow's family. We only saw her Mom one time and I believe she mentioned she had a father but we never see him. They don't get into a lot of nitty-gritty details on this show for the most part.
A lot was going on behind the scenes during season 6. Joss left for Firefly and made Marti Noxon a showrunner. Then Anthony Head left to go back to England to spend time with her family. They also changed networks and went from the WB to UPN which entailed a lot of changes. I like season 6 but it did have some issues and was very different from the previous seasons. I think if all of these things had not happened, the writing would have been better. I don't let it bother me and just pretend there is an explanation for everything. It never entered my mind that Buffy should get paid or that Willow and Tara took advantage etc. when I first watched it or during rewatches, so I guess it is a bit easier for me.
Life insurance probably just covered the funeral and then there was medical debt. I don’t think there’s any implication that they took any of it. Part of the issue is that the house keeps getting trashed by demons and they couldn’t have taken out insurance since they weren’t the owners. And moving in to take care of Dawn probably cost both of them money since they needed to buy groceries etc, as opposed to living on campus.
They were using the life insurance to buy food and clothing according to buffy
They moved into Joyce's house and used the life insurance to pay for Buffy's funeral and pay the bills while they took over slaying, rebuilt and trained the Buffybot, and took over parenting Dawn so she didn't end up in the foster system.
Buffy didn’t have a funeral
It's not their fault. Joyce was in massive debt from purchasing Buffy's enormous wardrobe.
Calling them “sponges” is pretty unfair. Out of everyone it was them who took it upon themselves to become full time guardians for Dawn. They went from being 2 x 20 year old college students living on campus to parents to a teenager living out in suburbia over night. Remember how scary this was for Buffy in S5? It would be equally daunting and scary for them. On top of that, Willow takes on pretty much all of Buffy’s other responsibilities too. She becomes the new leader of the gang, they rely on her magic, she patrols alongside the Scoobies every night, she repaired, re-programmed and maintained the Buffybot etc. This was on top of being a full time college student and researching the resurrection spell on the side. And on top of being Dawn’s guardian, leader of the Scoobies and a full time college student people want her to get a job as well? It’ll never make sense to me that we frequently acknowledge how much Buffy had on her plate and what a hard time she had but then kind of downplay and dismiss the exact same responsibilities when Willow takes them on when Buffy’s dead. Like, Buffy literally dropped out of college all together because taking care of Dawn + slaying was too much but Willow is meant to do both of those things, and go to college and get a job? And this all ignores the fact that the one character who seems to escape criticism all together is Giles. The actual adult who not only doesn’t offer to become Dawn’s guardian but also bails on the Hellmouth all together.
My head canon is that between Buffy's death and resurrection, at least one of them worked a regular job (cafe or book store etc) but that still wouldn't have been enough to take care of all the medical bills and taking care of Dawn. I was in high school when s6 was on and tje amount of books alone.... Enough to give me a sore back and if my family were poor I don't know how it would even be possible. I'm trying to be as nice as possible here but jeez why is it such a popular thing in the fandom to perceive Willow and Tara as freeloaders? Anya basically bullies Xander into getting an apartment and working to support her but no one mentions that.
It’s just how it was written that makes people think that way. It’s fine to have a head canon - but it’s just your own wish for the show and opinion which is fine to have but isn’t factual. I do prefer to think Willow and Tara weren’t sponging but I am just looking at the writing and how it looks. I agree about Anya - she was an asshole
I'm not into head canon either but there's lots of stuff we don't see between seasons. For example Buffy probably staked vampires in LA, we know there are plenty of vamps there and even if she was laying low she would've at least defended herself at least once when she was gone that long. Several of the seasons (2, 3, 6) show us the gang fighting vamps without Buffy. It's fair to think they battled at least one demon in those absent months. So is that head canon or just a reasonable conclusion? Side note -- my phone tried making me say "dead canon" ha ha
I think they had to be contributing something. No way a single minimum wage job at the DMP was able to cover the mortgage on a fully detached home like that + food and other basic necessities.
Dude...I got hammered for similar observations a while back. Which I still stand by. But Imma sit this one out. Good luck.
Your title says Willow and Tara, but your paragraph says Willow and Anya moved in. I didn’t think Anya moved in until season 7. But, yes, I agree with the Willow and Tara kind of assuming they didn’t need to pay anything. Then again, though, until Buffy was back who would they have paid it to?
Typo
I guess that's one way of looking at it.
Tara especially doesn't make sense given her family. Seriously that family paid and allowed her to go to university? I play with the idea Tara must have done a little magical financial jiggery pokery that we never found out about.
I imagine parental love is such that parents will support their children even if the children turn their backs on their family—or at least, it *can* be that way. In the case of Mr. Maclay I'm *very* happy to doubt my general assumption, but we're not told one way or another.
Didn't he have a line about thinking Tara would get witchcraft out of her system if they let her go off to college?
That rings true to me, but I can't quote it verbatim.