If you’ve read any amount of Twilight, this is not a good example for “good writers”. Just on the mechanical level it’s just not good writing. Sometimes the words and language themselves are used in ways they just aren’t meant to work. And not in a clever way. Structure, plot and dialog wise it is just not well put together.
This is what the Oatmeal bit was likely pointing out. It’s a common tick of not very good writers to over emphasize objects, often inconsequential ones, at the expense of theme and character. In going to school for writing and film. You are specifically trained not to. And it’s not as if that emphasis on props in Twilight was well described or used language well.
Whedon on the other hand. A lot of the praise leveled on him as a writer is specifically on mechanical grounds. His snappy dialog. His “clever” use of tropes. His speed of characterization, vocabulary and so forth. How “quick” he is with language and a come back.
Twilight is a good comparison point in another direction though. That series was heavily criticized for depicting what is essentially an abusive relationship as a positive, as romantic. For engaging in tropes about “fixing” problematic men, and an almost predatory approach to romance as a genre.
Twilight is creepy.
Whedon has gotten some very similar criticism over the years. With his central female characters often cutting closer to male wish fulfillment. A very similar tendency to portray awful stalkery and abusive seeming relationships as desirable and romantic. That “fix him” thing running full through.
Good writing is not just writing that’s mechanically adept. Just compelling writing needn’t be for that matter, Twilight certainly connected with a lot of people despite being an absolute mess.
But good writing has something to say. It’s got themes with a point, complexity. If The Great Gatsby had used all it’s complexity to tell us that Fruity Pebbles is the best cereal. It wouldn’t be the great American novel.
What I think may be going on here is that Whedon. Like a lot of abusive people. Was pretty damn good at hiding his scumbag.
He new enough to present all his scumbag shit as the opposite. And because he was erudite, and good at the mechanical end of it. People believed it, and maybe read something into it that wasn’t there.
It does take a fair bit of empathy to believably write people unlike yourself, and situations you yourself have not experienced. And maybe can not experience.
And Whedon was specifically called out for being an empathetic writer.
But it looks an awful lot like it went the other way. That he covered his creepy shit by projecting it onto female characters, and tap dancing fast enough to sell it as empathy and a feminist’s take down of the very thing he was furiously masturbating to.
Some of the comments in the profile indicate he was well aware of this. And his deflections on the accusations of harassments follow a very similar pattern. All that quickness used to reframe the negatives as positives, or excusable foibles.
There are also a lot of anecdotes in there about him using that speed with language to tear others down.
