#tw rape mention
he’s like this because nothing happened to him.
nothing kicked his ass into keeping with the times. he’s been allowed to coast along on milquetoast 90s feminism for two decades now, and yes he wasprogressiveback then. but you could see him getting behind the times as soon as the firefly era. or rather, the times getting ahead of him.
it’s not just that he’s been so busy patting himself on the back on the platform that the train left him behind, there’s not even a station where he’s standing anymore. yet he’s still jerking himself off with how much of a progressive feminist he is.
he was always like this, it’s just when he started, “this” was considered progressive, and now it’s ass-backwards.
joss whedon was never progressive. he’s always been a misogynist confusing his fetish for waifish white women beating things up with feminism, and everyone let him get away with it because he was a white man who claimed the term feminism. white feminists ate his shit up, just like they do with every other mediocre white man who claims feminism and blows smoke up their ass.
he has always been sexist, racist, intensely biphobic, lesbophobic (I assume none of you are old enough to remember the shitshow that happened when he killed off tara and this allegedly hip and smart writer feigned ignorance about the killing off lesbians trope). poc have been onto his shit ever since he killed kendra and damn near every other token woc that ever turned up on buffy.
So I don’t appreciate this revisionist history about Joss. Many people even then were there, in fandom, calling out his shit myself included. And we were being reviled and run off message boards and fora and email lists for daring to question Saint Joss, Champion of Feminism. I know because I was there in Buffy fandom. I hung out on TWoP’s Buffy and Angel boards among other places. People wrote meta then on it. It’s not like the 90s and early aughts were the damn dark ages. *Fandom* wasn’t nearly as receptive to criticism of faves though. Even less of white man faves than now.
I wonder if the people complaining about his Wonder Woman script also know about his plans for Firefly’s second season that never was (which involved Inara being brutally assaulted by Reavers and making it all about Mal’s manpain). This is not anything unusual for him it’s literally par for the course
Like the only thing that changed here is that y'all finally figured out how shitty he is. many of us have known this for damn near 20 years and have been yelling about it the whole time. nobody wanted to listen because most of us were qwoc lmao
the emperor never had any clothes folks. the only thing that stagnated in him was his latent bigotry. white feminism as usual is a day late and a dollar short.
I remember (oh Gog I am old, but whatever) I remember going off about his racism & misogyny on Livejournal so you know…at least 10 or 12 years ago. Maybe longer. And getting so much blowback from white feminists about not recognizing his value. And then again in 2009 bringing it up on a panel at WisCon & someone stopping me in a hallway to lecture me about how much worse things used to be, as though the fact that he kills off or dehumanizes Black characters (especially Black women) in new settings is an improvement. And yes Whedon is better than the absolute worst possible people in Hollywood, but that doesn’t make him good, doesn’t make his work less creepy. Marti Noxon’s work is why so many people liked Buffy, but I guess we’re supposed to ignore her too in favor of pretending Whedon wasn’t always a problem.
god , i remember when he killed off kendra, and how awful i felt, how none of the scooby gang (or ANY gang outside of like…freakyleaks) was a person of color. this was the part of the 90′s where all the things i loved from sci fi to feminism began to make me feel alienated.
i was so glad that Buffy got a “black friend” who also kicked ass and had amazing fashion sense. then she died the dumbest death on the series. and i was hurt,and i didnt know why. i didnt want to continue watching, but i couldnt explain why.
i was ten.
I was a teenager then, actually I was the ages of the characters on the show which is why I related to it so much. and felt extra hurt by the things that happened, on the show and in the fandom
cuz you know all the awful shit every black female character on mostly white shows gets aimed at her by white fandom? “boring” “bitchy” etc. ignored and never shipped w anybody?
Kendra got that too. I had to read so many vile posts on how she was “ghetto” (????), annoying, a fake Slayer, etc. then she got killed by Dru’s fingernails and ppl rejoiced
I think that was my first real experience w misogynoir in fandom as a black fangirl and I didn’t have the vocabulary or understanding then to know why specifically it made me feel so bad. but it fucked me up
Lemme slide in this Whedon drag real quick. Season 2 of Buffy is unarguably my favorite and least favorite season of Buffy. Favorite because it brought in some of my favorite characters, least because the entire plotline was “Let’s torture as many women and girls on the show as possible”.
Drusilla: psychologically and possibly sexually tortured.
Willow: stalked and harassed, is taunted with her dead pet.
Jenny: Is brutally murdered and left for Gilles to find to advance his man pain.
Kendra: Is murdered for no reason other than to add to Buffy’s suffering.
Buffy: Is sexually harassed, stalked, and tormented by the man she lost her virginity to, kicked out of her own home and threatened with murder charges for Kendra’s death and is forced to kill Angel because of Xander’s lie (that he’s never called out for)
I was 7 when this shit aired and even then I knew what I was watching was bullshit. And I’m annoyed it took 17 years between Buffy season 2 and the fiasco that was Age of Ultron for his stans to take their heads out of Joss’ ass crack long enough to actually listen when people tell the truth about him putting out misogynist torture porn for decades under the guise of being an ~ally~.
I’m looking at screenshots of this horde of furious girls and women destroying Joss Whedon on twitter and it’s so great
Motherfucker you knew you were a misogynist and a fraud in 2002 when you wrote the autobiographical Buffy episode about Andrew the filmmaker fetishizing the pain and hero stories of the house full of women who despise him, and now it’s finally coming crashing down on you and happening in real life.
I sincerely hope some of those girls calling him a piece of shit and a trash can and demanding, “fight me” shook him; this has been his deepest fear about his behavior towards women for over a decade now, but he hasn’t made a change, and he’s always known on some level that he deserves to be hated for it.BUFFY: Are you still filming me? Stop.
ANDREW: But it’s a valuable record. A-an important document for the ages. ‘A Slayer in Action.’
BUFFY: ‘A Nerd in Pain.’ Would they like that? Cause we could do that.BUFFY: When your blood pours out it might save the world. What do you think about that? Does it buy it all back? Are you redeemed?
ANDREW: No.Ugh ok ok I actually have a ridiculous amount of words about this (hi ocelot, can I post those emails from 2012??) But I wanted to say that this… idk. This has been a long time coming for Joss and it’s absolutely a bed he made for himself, and it makes me gratified on a brutal visceral level to see it coming back to bite him, but a lot of that anger is watching an artist I loved curdle into his own self-hate and turn into the kind of awful man he used to write about. Joss…Joss has had a recurrent fantasy of self-loathing and shame about his treatment of female characters and actresses that started, afaik, in season 6 of Buffy, with the introduction of the three nerd villains Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew.
The initial patriarchal villains of the Buffyverse were men who abused women using either brute strength or political power: Angelus, the Watchers, the Mayor. The three nerds introduced another kind of misogynistic male antagonist that grew to dominate and completely consume Joss’s work in the 00s: the nerdy, story-obsessed guy who used his intelligence and mastery of technology to abuse and control strong, heroic women. Nerdy men who, like Joss, either created or tampered with the women they wanted total control over, either by building androids or altering existing women, usually via invasive medical torture. Joss the writer invents the character of Buffy while having workplace clashes with her actress Sarah Michelle Gellar; Andrew, Warren, and Jonathan drug their girlfriends into compliance and create the BuffyBot to obey their will. This villain character would show up again and again in Joss’ later works: the scientist who had, thanks to his technical and storytelling skills, been given custody by higher powers over women who would normally be far out of their range of influence. And, uncomfortably, all of the actors cast for these roles bore a striking physical resemblance to Joss.
When Joss aired “Storyteller”, I was surprised and impressed. It was penned by Jane Espenson, Buffy’s strongest staff writer, and was a story about Andrew the Joss doppelganger filming the house of potential Slayers for a series he called “Buffy, Slayer of the Vampyres.” A major theme of “Storyteller” was Andrew’s intrusive use of the Buffy cast’s personal lives and pain to make a good story, his refusal to acknowledge their privacy, and possibly, as Anya kept insisting, to use his videos as masturbation material. It seemed like a huge moment of self- awareness and self-reflection about the relationship Joss had to the real and fictional women who worked for him, especially given the conflicts he had at the time with actresses like Charisma Carpenter over her character Cordelia and personal bodily autonomy (pregnancy). It was self-critical and raw and I was incredibly proud of Joss for being willing to go there in such a public way.
Buffy ended, and Andrew redeemed himself, but the misogynist-nerd-self-loathing metastory intensified. One of the aspects of the Three Nerds villain arc that had always made me profoundly uncomfortable was the way Joss positioned the boys’ nerdy pursuits and lack of traditional masculinity– not just their treatment of women– as something inherently repulsive.
Viewers were supposed to be disgusted by the sight of three dorky boys nerding out over Star Wars figurines. Buffy and the house full of potential slayers call Andrew vile names for being a nerd, not in response to his behavior; by the end of his run, I felt the urge to protect Andrew, not from the girls, but from Joss, who was clearly using him as a punching bag onto which he was projecting his own self-loathing. (Eventually Joss was quoted saying that Andrew was, as had been hinted, gay, but would remain in the closet indefinitely “because it’s funny,” something that horrified and enraged fans, but which Joss seemed to view, appallingly, as as an ultimate emasculation.)The next major Joss project was Dollhouse, with evil scientist and Joss lookalike Topher Brink programming, manipulating, and violating various women into playacting roles he’d scripted for them. It was such a blatant story about Joss and his actresses it was difficult to watch. Like, My Feminism Is Just An Excuse To Exploit Hot Actresses, I Am Such A Disgusting Creature!!! Coming soon to the CW! His next project, the webseries I Am So Horrible And My Feminism Is A Sham, featuring NPH as the Joss stand-in, was similarly cringeworthy.
A big outlier here is Wash, from Firefly and Serenity, who almost fit the pattern, but not quite, and that “not quite” was enough of a problem that, like the similar character Oz, he had to be written out of the story. Alan Tudyk had the same general physical resemblance to Joss and the same dress sense as Andrew, Topher, and Billy Horrible. His dinosaur theater sessions looked and sounded like the action figure games the Trio played, and the blurb for Joss’s media company, Mutant Enemy. But unlike all the other nerdy blond men of the Whedonverse, Wash was in a equal and loving relationship with the strong soldier woman he adored. Other characters in the series were preoccupied with the traditional gender role imbalance in Wash and Zoe’s marriage and questioned whether Wash felt emasculated by his wife being stronger than he was, but both Wash and Zoe were completely above and untouched by it. She was a warrior woman and she was married to a dorky guy who told stories and who wasn’t the most physically powerful man on her crew. She could have broken him in half with her pinky and they loved and respected each other and had a happy, healthy marriage. This was, somehow, too much for Joss to handle, and so Wash had to die.
When venting about Joss I want to say that the problem isn’t that Joss was always terrible, or that all of his work was tainted or had a poisonous message from the beginning. It wasn’t; Buffy was and still is incredibly important; it had the kind of powerful emotional intelligence that burrows into your heart and stays there and I think it still stands by itself, years later. Buffy still stands. Charles Gunn still stands. Anya still stands. When my mother passed away last year, I watched “The Body” like a ritual, and I know I’m not the only person to have done something similar. That canon isn’t going anywhere.
The problem is that at some point in his career, Joss became so intent on the masochistic fantasy of being hated by strong women for being a nerd that he spent a decade writing stories about violating those women to ensure they would hate him. I wish Joss had ended that obsession with “Storyteller.” I wish he had talked about the feelings that made him want to make “Dollhouse” with his therapist and tried to make things right with Charisma Carpenter instead of turning those particular personal demons into a bad TV show. I wish the ideas of intimacy and equality weren’t so threatening to him that he had to write men like Oz and Wash out of existence instead of trying to evolve into them. I wish he hadn’t let himself fall into that pit of destructive self-loathing back in 2002, and I wish he hadn’t stayed there so long that he started to turn that hate outward onto the women he perceived as loathing and rejecting him. I wish he hadn’t turned, in twenty years, from the man who wanted to see the blonde girl in the horror movie survive and thrive into the rich bastard who thought it was funny to call Natasha Romanoff a cunt on IMAX and who called her a monster for being the victim of medical abuse. I’m still laughing angrily at Joss being driven off twitter by a mob of angry, betrayed female fans, because wow does he ever deserve it, but man, Joss. It didn’t have to be that way.
I think this is the best summation of the Joss Whedon issue that I’ve seen thus far.
