It seems surprisingly easy to hurt the feelings of many White Men in America; just mention CRT or Institutional Racism, and listen to them squeal. 
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Ive always maintained a line between a creator and their work. People are complicated, and terrible people can make beautiful things. That doesn’t excuse them. And it doesn’t damn you for liking something they have created.
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Whedon was hardly the only writer on staff.
And I don’t think was even the showrunner for the entire series.
If you need to “credit where credits due” maybe look to all those people who were significantly responsible for those good bits.
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Which is perfectly acceptable, from a standpoint of fairness. Organizations like the MPAA decry how it takes food out of the mouths of film workers, but that is misdirection. When a film hits the theater, or a show is broadcast, those folks have already been paid.
If anything, doing this “hurts” the distributors – who are responsible for things like $10 buckets of popcorn at the movie theater. Turnabout is fair play, I say.
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If there’s one thing we’ve learned- it’s that real, believable supervillains don’t see themselves as villains.
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Same, Never got into any of his stuff and I really couldn’t sit though Firefly. I like his MCU films but probably most of that was already mapped out by more people than just him.
To be fair, the DCEU was a dumpster fire before he was given the film to finish and he just made it a different kind of dumpster fire. He just helped add fuel to was has become a very toxic fanbase.
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Having watched it relatively recently with my then 11yr old daughter I have to say I was relieved when I saw Jane Espenson as the writer as I wouldn’t have to apologetically explain or say “yes that is creepy” at certain scenes,
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see: picasso
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If anyone is thinking of clicking on the youtube link for this thread (“Chapter 1: Joss Whedon’s Shadow”), do not bother. It is a waste of time. I don’t know what her (or JW’s) full story is, but she takes a full 60 minutes to NOT tell her full story. Chapter 1 consists of: "I worked for JW. I dated JW. After a while, I no longer worked for JW, and I no longer dated JW." That’s it. Thats the entire TL;DR. Let my sixty 180 minutes be your five seconds.
[EDIT: out of what must be masochism, I’ve listened to 3 hours of her (while doing other things): she is completely nuts, credulously invests in every New Age “spirituality” jaunt you can think of, all while never mentioning Whedon.]
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Yeah there’s also that element of “important step at the time” to this. A lot of Whedons stuff was already reading pretty creepy well before he imploded. Part of why Buffy hit the way it did is there really wasn’t a lot of other options on this front in terms of 90s TV.
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To me any conflict of enjoying Firefly is washed away by one name: Tim Minear. Coexec on the show. His not working on the Serenity movie (which I hated) showed me that what I loved and cared for in Firefly was way more Tim and the other writers than anything Joss ever did.
I have always felt something was odd about Joss. It was good to read this piece to see my assumptions about him were pretty spot on.
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I worked on the industry. Ticket price was pretty much 50% to the movie company, the 50% from exhibition included all the costs of taxes, paying employees, cleaning, rent etc and you were forbidden offering discounts on prices that touched the 50% you had to pay for the movie. Bomboniere (popcorn, soft drinks etc) was by far what kept movie theaters in business.
Of course I have zero love for Cinemark and other mega chains. Pirate away.
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There are many people who make beautiful things; the fact that some are labeled as geniuses, and others are not may have a great deal to do with marketing.
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Yes, I used to be a ticket-taker and popcorn maker, all at minimum wage. One of the things that used to infuriate me was how the manager would retain money meant for bonuses for himself.
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Once I learned Whedon wasn’t allowed to be alone with Michelle Trachtenburg on the Buffy set, that was it for me.
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Exactly. He was a garbage ass human being. I can recognize his significant contributions to the art world and still acknowledge that fact.
There is that question:
The White men who get put up on pedestals - how much of that deification is due to actual talent and how much is due to a powerful cult of personality?
Agreed.
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I did watch them first time round, and I still don’t feel conflicted about it.
Firstly, because of this:
And secondly, because it was very much not all about him. It was also about equally talented writers and producers like Jane Espenson, Marti Noxon, David Fury, etc.: and fantastic actors like Sarah Gellar, Tony Head, Alyson Hannigan, James Marsters, and so on and so on and so on, who brought the characters to life.
Regretting enjoying Buffy because of one guy would be pandering to that guy’s ego.
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That’s a great take on it.
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For most forms of art at least, the main question for me is whether they’re likely to use their proceeds to support an odious agenda. (Like J. K. Rowling.)
If so, then, hey, yar-har-fiddle-dee-dee and enjoy yourself.
One can make a case that movies and cinema are different because they are large, capital-intensive enterprises with lots of people in a strong hierarchy. So a jerk at the top is a harm done to everyone under them.
(Even then, Yar-hard-fiddle-dee-dee seems an option.)
I think people underestimate the effect that “Can we enjoy art by bad people?” has on making people realize that someone’s deeds are, in fact, atrocious. Since if something was significant to them, it involves what might feel like ripping a tiny piece of ones emotions up to reject it.
Even then it’s basically who wins the anti-lottery and comes up in the news cycle, so focusing on ‘bad creators’ seems a distraction from the question of how you could make cinema and television less hierarchical and just not have someone in the kind of position where they can coerce and abuse people.
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Batman vs God
Morals off, prep time.
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