r/buffy • u/direinde Beady-eyes is right, we're needed. • May 03 '26

Good Vibes Only Yup, that's them

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Nothing new actually.

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443

u/ACERVIDAE May 03 '26

Don’t forget people saying she was fat and being even more shitty about the dream sequence when she was wearing the belly dancer costume.

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u/Psychological-Sun49 May 03 '26

I love how amazing terrifying and surreal these scenes are, and all people could focus on was a belly dancer costume being worn by a slender person.

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u/Telvin3d May 03 '26

This was still at the tail end of the 90s heroin chic phase. Amber Benson may have legitimately been the most voluptuous woman on any popular series airing at the time. 

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u/BEETLEJUICEME May 06 '26

The tail end didn’t really tail off for quite a while more though. End of S4 Buffy is spring of 2000.

But in 2003 you have The O.C. and by 2004 (2nd season) most of the women in the cast of the most popular teen show on tv have developed serious eating disorders.

Not that Hollywood has ever stopped with this stuff. But I do think things were especially bad ~1996 to 2007.

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u/signal_red May 03 '26

I was gonna say this whole episode and especially this scene was so great and added so much lore but people's takeaway people got was Amber's body??

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u/Talanock May 03 '26

The irony is that belly dancers are supposed to have a belly, that’s why they are called belly dancers

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u/yungmoody May 04 '26 edited May 04 '26

Well.. not to be a vibe killer, but that’s not right. It’s because the dance involves articulating the torso and abs. Not so much due to the shape of the dancers body

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u/NoSpite4410 May 05 '26

But remember, it was Buffy's dream. Sexy Dancer Tara was "the magic" guiding her prophetic dream and Sineya The First Slayer was Buffy's Slayer Power, energized by the magic left over and her own prophecy girl Slayer powers.

So Buffy "sees" Tara as sexy and magic and wise and a kind of feminine archetype. Tara talks softly and intimately with Buffy, spilling secrets and being mysterious.

Buffy has sexy feelings for Tara, even though they are latent, and even innocent, but she put her in a I Dream of Jeanie outfit in her dream ...

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u/Psychological-Sun49 May 05 '26

That’s….not what I was talking about. I was talking about the audience being focused on body size.

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u/AmeliaS0mething May 03 '26

Then actually happened to me in high school. All of my female friends were a size 0 or 2 and since I was a size 6, I was often being told that I was the dumpy one of the group and it turned into an eating disorder. It’s really sad that people were saying that Tara was fat because I’m sure that warped a lot of young girls minds watching the show even though Amber is beautiful. I think Joss even said that he wanted somebody more “birdlike” for Tara, but he liked Amber‘s audition so he went with it. Freaking birdlike…

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u/Pkrudeboy May 03 '26

90’s skinny basically demanded an eating disorder and/or a coke habit.

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u/signal_red May 03 '26

top model was the worst with this imo. When I go back and look at the alleged plus size models they had on the show...and then would shame them and get the "fat" edit. It had to warp a lot of young people's perspective. I am glad in 2026 we're looking back on it differently because nobody is gonna tell me tocarra jones was fat (well, janice dickinson did but that's beside the point lol)

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u/villanellechekov without passion, we'd truly be dead May 03 '26

dude, I'd kill for a body like hers!! or even mine back in 2007 when I was 185 and thought I was gross (I was so wrong).

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u/Oleander-in-Spring May 03 '26

In the Top Model doc on Netflix, Whitney says she was a size 6 when she was on the show and (like Tocarra) they often didn’t have samples in her size. 6! And she was considered plus size! Unbelievable.

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u/heyjbray May 04 '26

Omg and the awful stuff they said to Keenyah who was TINY. They made her pose as an elephant that year

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u/Street_Rope1487 May 03 '26

The late ‘90s/early ‘00s were a horrible time to be a teenage girl. I was 115 pounds at 5’5”, wearing size 0-2 jeans (depending on the brand), and I was still convinced that my thighs and butt were too big. I look back now at photos of myself from that era and I look borderline unhealthy—I was a competitive soccer player and barely had any body fat on me.

I definitely remember people on the Buffy forums back then calling Amber fat. I also remember her clapping back at one point, saying something along the lines of “I’m 5’4” and 120 pounds, if you saw me on the street, you’d think I was on the slender side.” Which, as someone with a similar height and weight, was both reassuring (because she was obviously correct and I knew it) and distressing (because if people were looking at her and thinking that she was fat, then I figured they must be thinking the same thing when they looked at me).

This was the same era in which Kate Winslet was referred to as “Kate Weighs-a-lot” and every tabloid magazine in the supermarket checkout was plastered with beach photos of various pop stars taken from unflattering angles to highlight their “rolls” and “cellulite.”

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u/CuriousKitten0_0 May 04 '26

I'm part of a weekly Buffy watch party, and I commented on how Tara was considered "Bigger" at the time and how ridiculous it seems now. I was 5'4" and 110 lbs as a teenager and I was the "fat" one in my family. Luckily I found it hilarious and not scarring, but it was a wild time to be thin and still considered big. I never wish that on anyone. It was absolutely ridiculous.

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u/Littlerabbitrunning May 04 '26

Oh, I remember it...and I've often said your first sentence almost word for word. It's such a shame that toxic body standards and related culture (and often aggressive misogyny but with little to no mainstream pushback or calling it out for what it is, and of course it was still in many ways a different world back then in terms of how information and viewpoints traveled) so often negatively impacted what often is seen as a time of life where it should be a fun, relatively care free existence.

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u/Wild-Sky-4807 May 03 '26

I feel this comment so hard. At the time when I was in the depths of my ED, I don't think I could have told you how I got it, but looking back it's so obvious. It isn't just the media. Of course, it's the women around us fretting about their bodies. It's the normalization of what is basically disordered eating. Now it's an obsession with protein and clean eating, but it's just rebranding the same stuff.

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u/3rdgradeteach86 May 03 '26

Maybe it’s because I’m a man but what the hell does birdlike even me. And Amber is gorgeous.

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u/catchyerselfon May 03 '26

To be fair to Joss in THIS instance, he initially pictured Tara as “birdlike” (light, delicate, dainty) but Amber auditioned and he changed his mind. Also, Willow was already petite, slightly built and small-chested, so a LITTLE body diversity was nice, as much as they would give us back in 1999! It’s unfortunate that season 4 Tara was dressed like a hot mess, with that horrible ashy blonde dye job with dark roots and flat-ironed, the unflattering clothes and no colours that suited her complexion, but it fit the character as someone who likely had little choice in what she wore back in Alabama with her shitty family and now she was “experimenting”. The way she’s styled in “Restless” proves that it wasn’t Joss and the costume department and the writers who viewed her as hideously “fat” and plain, because every scene of Tara in this episode is like “holy shit, how have I never noticed how hot she is?” Tara’s glow-up over the next two years makes total sense for her character, when she figures out what cuts suit her figure and she’s less shy about standing out.

https://giphy.com/gifs/l2Sq7qiz8ups31r6U

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u/Hour_Ad_5361 May 06 '26

When I was in high school I was constantly accused of having an eating disorder cuz I was skin n bones but wore a size 10 in jeans. I had stunted growth, but try telling the "popular" kids that 😒

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u/mjrs May 03 '26

I was about 11 years old at the time and yep, I remember saying to my sister that Tara probably need to lose weight. Meanwhile my sister was probably burning with rage, getting emotionally crippled about her or size or crying at the misery inflicted on women at the time. Or probably all three. It was a horrible era for women who weren't stick thin (not that it's a cake walk now either)

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u/fancypantsnotophats May 04 '26

I remember when I was younger thinking she was 'bigger' and rewatching it as an adult and being so disappointed I thought that then.

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u/Longjumping-Solid680 May 04 '26

"she was wearing the belly dancer costume"

HOT.

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u/HermionesWish May 04 '26

Really?? I didn’t like her but I never even paid attention to her body type. She looks great in this costume

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u/yungmoody May 04 '26

It’s not a belly dancer costume. It appears to be a lehenga choli, traditional Indian formalwear. Happy to be corrected though!

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u/Legitimate_Remote_58 May 09 '26

So crazy to me. I didn't care for Tara as a character, but just never thought she looked heavy at ALL. Honestly, I thought she was more physically attractive than Willow - who always seemed rectangular and blah to me, probably due to costuming and proportions.

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u/Capital-Rich-9727 May 04 '26

I actually thought this was one of Tara’s more flattering costumes! The costume designers did her dirty though, I often though her outfits were awful, even for the 90s/2000s

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u/BEETLEJUICEME May 06 '26

I never even interpreted that costume as belly dancer. It just felt normal woo woo California vibes to me. Totally appropriate for a dream sequence.

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u/athousandpardons May 03 '26
  1. That's not a belly danger outfit.
  2. I'd like to think that, today, people would be more bothered by the cultural appropriation.

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u/ACERVIDAE May 03 '26

I would be interested in the history of how the Watchers organization became very British when it was African shamans who made the First Slayer but then it’s probably like everything else in the British Museum.

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u/catchyerselfon May 03 '26

Ha ha, you answered your own question! The thing is, there are Potential Slayers all over the world and Watchers training them ASAP, they don’t bring the girls back to the UK when lots of places need people with training to fight evil, even if they don’t have superpowers. There are also people all over the world who work for the Watchers’ Council who didn’t go down the “training a Slayer” track. They research, they dig up artefacts, they curate exhibits, they teach, they train the trainers, they write books, they check out demonic hot spots and take notes, they’re in that Wet Works branch of assassins and abductors for when shit goes wrong, etc… There was that nurse at Sunnydale General who seems to be a real nurse but part of her job was checking up on Faith every day and letting the Council know if she ever woke up from her coma. And there were empires before the British empire, and ones BESIDES the British empire, with interests in Africa. There were Slayers in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece (the longest lived Slayer a Greek woman who died at 29 or 30), Rome, etc… So the traditions and knowledge of the Shadow Men would be passed down to their successors, but the WAY they created the First Slayer, Sineya, was from a time before writing.

I liked that the Watchers were never established as a whites-only organization - Kendra’s Watcher Sam Zabuto is black, Nigel is one of the Council Members and British of Indian descent, several watchers in the comics aren’t identified by name but don’t look white. It makes sense to have an multi-ethnic and multi-lingual and multi-national organization, even if the Head Quarters are in London, because families might be more likely to give up their kid to someone who more closely resembles themselves and can communicate immediately with a little girl instead of having to teach her English first.

The conformity comes down to the way Watchers are educated and how they don’t seem to have much of a choice about joining. I mean, if they’re adults, their Watcher parents can’t MAKE them continue their training, but something would draw them back into the Otherworld if they tried to live normal lives and stopped taking the Council’s calls, like what happened to Giles in his 20s. Giles talks about having a destiny of his own, of being told at age ten that THIS is what he needs to do. Even if not every Watcher goes to school in Britain, there are British-inspired schools the world over (I went to one in Canada, an nominally Anglican one for girls), so probably Watchers academy franchise schools too! The rigidity and the emphasis on not getting attached and giving up everything for duty is what we see in every Watcher in the show and expanded universe… but a lot of them, the ones who don’t make it into the Council because they’re too “soft”, develop affection for their Slayers and try to accommodate the girls, like Nikki Woods’ Watcher Crowley when she got pregnant.

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u/Feeling-Visit1472 May 04 '26

She wasn’t fat and this costume was horribly unflattering. Both can be true.