I just discovered this podcast and I’m binge listening my way through the episodes, and AAAAHHHH a podcast about femslash is just everything I want and need on my very long commute.
I’m commenting here because I’m a Fandom Old – like, Buffy started the year that I graduated from college – and I wanted to add some context to Tara’s death.
It definitely had an impact on the Bury Your Gays trope that followed it. As you noted, Lexa’s death felt very familiar to Buffy viewers for a reason. However, Tara was not the early days of this trope.
The Dead Lesbian Syndrome trope (which kind of more accurately describes what we usually are experiencing in what we now call BYG) goes all the way back to lesbian pulp novels of the 50’s. Lesbian romances at the time always ended in death, as a matter of censorship, because no character was permitted to be homosexual and happy at the end of a novel or else it was seen as gay propaganda. Lesbian films that came later continued this trope – if a lesbian had sex, she would die, as punishment for her “sin”.
At the time that Tara’s death occurred, Joss Whedon did get major push back from fans who linked it (rightly) to the trope, and wanted to have a conversation about how harmful it was and how it so directly linked to the trope considering she died immediately after sex.
So yeah. It was an extremely controversial episode, even upon originally airing.