punch_kicker15

Oz's cheating on Willow with Veruca - a parallel to Joss' cheating on his wife. It's making me wonder if threads like that in the show, also Buffy and Parker, didn't reflect what was going on with him.

Absolutely! I was working on this chapter for a while and was writing the dialogue about Oz's cheating right before Kai's story broke, and it was really, really weird having real-life stuff parallel the fanfic I was writing.

There were a couple of other things that bring up Joss parallels in my mind:

The whole Willow/Tara memory spell arc in Season 6. Memory spells are like a supernatural form of gaslighting. And the show never really went in depth about long-term effects of the memory spell (like would it make Tara question her grip on reality, which is something Kai said about the gaslighting). The show also never addressed the sex Willow and Tara had in OMWF as non-consensual. I sort of chalked it up to "The show has some blind spots when it comes to consent issues" and now I wonder if Joss was the one with the biggest blind spot of all.

And then there's Riley in Into the Woods:

BUFFY: Fine. Fine! Tell me about your whores! Tell me what on earth they were giving you that I can't.
RILEY: They needed me.

Joss in his apology to Kai: "When I was running ‘Buffy,’ I was surrounded by beautiful, needy, aggressive young women"

And then Riley blames the whole thing on Buffy's lack of need for him, and demands some change from her with his stupid ultimatum, and never once offers to do any work on himself to improve the relationship. It's even more gross in retrospect.