Or more succinctly…
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Did JMS do anything specifically shitty like Whedon here, or is he just generally kind of a smug asshat?
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As far as I can recall, he wasn’t specifically shitty. He can be a smug asshat, but he also has gone through some traumatic shit so I see him as a Mensch.
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I too never got into Buffy. I have seen a few episodes, but it was on when I didn’t watch a lot of TV.
Still love Firefly.
Too bad Whedon is a raging asshole 
Get some therapy and apologize to the people you hurt.
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Having dated a guy who was incredible at feminist leftist rhetoric but treated me like a discount fleshlight, I don’t doubt that Whedon got his clout by being really good at writing fun things that make money. The ability of some very smart, talented men to invalidate their espoused politics in the bedroom is pretty stunning.
That said, it doesn’t take much to see his fun house mirror take on female liberation when you take a hard look at Dollhouse or Age of Ultron.
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Sounds like Disney is making a new series (without him). One of the rare cases where the corporation taking the IP and making more of it without the creator is a good thing…
I’m not sure I’m willing to go that far yet. If it was going to be made, better that it be made without him than with, but that doesn’t mean that making it will be better than not making it.
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Besides generally being a total shit to women, the interview rather hints at deep voids in his ability to empathize and self-reflect, which seems like it would be pretty limiting as a writer… which makes me think some key parts of “his” creative output wouldn’t be there without other people doing the work.
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must be why to stuck to low brow comics and science fantasy
* ducks *
i do like the first avengers movie, buffy, firefly, oh and the very last episode of dollhouse - but what he seemed to do well is not generally deep or emotionally self aware. his big emotional play is killing of beloved characters. mostly i think because it made him seem edgy
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It’s probably worth noting how often he seems to have played out his own foul behaviors as plot points. Whether played for drama among the protagonists or ascribed to the bad guys.
A lot in that article sounds startlingly familiar.
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I think your statement, combined with what @Shuck wrote, hints that good writers sometimes are not empathetic, because if they cared too much about their characters then they wouldn’t have the ability to have them go through the wringer the author puts them through.
There was an Oatmeal comic a long time ago disparaging the Twilight novels (well, maybe not disparaging but poking fun at them) because the work put into them isn’t in fleshing out the protagonist, but in fleshing out the objects of interest. Scott McCloud made a similar point in Understanding Comics, about how details are interpreted: less details, the better we are able to identify with something, but more details separate it, make it apart from us.
This is just a musing on why it seems that the overlap in the Venn diagram of creepy assholes and creative types is what it is, not excusing the creepy assholes, mind.
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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.
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Thank you for clarifying. If anything, it explains why people forgive it, because it leaves things vague in just enough places to cover up the shoddy workmanship. Which is why my go-to-reference is more Scott McCloud because he so eloquently drew/wrote what aids in storytelling and visualising the story.
For the record, my favourite authors are all dead*: Kurt Vonnegut, Terry Pratchett, Iain Banks, the list goes on. Some were known to be caring individuals, others like Harlan Ellison made being a shitty person a part of their persona. And yet others like Isaac Asimov are complex, once lauded as forward thinking, but now considered creepy for the careless misogyny.
*not all, as John Scalzi, Charlie Stross and Andy Weier are still around, now that I think of it.
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I think few people forgive it. I think they just like it anyway. It’s also a young adult book that was rigidly (and heavily) marketed at a narrow age band of teen and tween girls. It’s crossover was more than half ironic in my experience.
There was certainly an amount of projection involved in the core fan base. Seeing themselves in and as the main character, that caused people to over look a lot of it’s foibles.
Similar to what I’m saying about Whedon. People wanted it to be the thing he purported it to be. And wanted to see themselves in the work. Ported that expectation over to him.
He also worked mostly in Television until around when he jumped Marvel. Where a lot of other people were involved and had a voice and contributions.
So I wonder how much of it was Whedon being adept enough to crib their genuine empathy to help gloss his creep.
Well, what I meant was there is an emotional depth in “his” work that he himself doesn’t seem capable of (which I attribute to others he worked with).
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Yeah, I never got into those, and actively bounced off Firefly back in the day, despite the hard-core evangelism for it.
I did recently watch through Firefly based on my partner’s advocacy and…if you haven’t seen it, you’re not missing much. Standard c-grade space opera stuff with really annoying dialogue written by a guy who clearly likes putting his ‘clever’ words in people’s mouths, and doesn’t know or care how people actually communicate (not surprising, in retrospect).
I remember hearing so much back in the day championing Whedon’s dialogue writing, but after watching Firefly I was struck by how grating it all was.
Though he could be the greatest writer in the world and it wouldn’t excuse him being a predatory choad who we probably shouldn’t be materially or culturally enriching by continuing to patronize his shit. There’s plenty of great art out there not made by predators out there.
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I did like Firefly quite a lot, despite it’s short comings. But never quite got the fervor for it as the greatest whatever the fuck in the history of spacey things. Part and parcel of what works there is that the dialog is often pretty stylized, and far less “quippy” than a lot of Whedon’s other stuff.
His whole thing has always been very stagey, and he loves an info dump.
But the way opinions on his Avengers movies have shifted in the last few years, Especially Age of Ultron, is pretty telling. People commonly comment that it seems dated because of his dialog. That it’s too quippy, too “Whedon”, it doesn’t fit with where the MCU has gone since in terms of tone, humor and characterization.
I think there’s a lot more of that “at the time” running around in this. You didn’t used to see a lot of word play, or incidental/observational dialog in network TV. Genre shows didn’t used to get the big Aaron Sorkin style monologue. And when shows did do that it didn’t get undercut by a joke.
It just doesn’t stand out in the context of that whole “Golden Age of TV” thing that followed on it’s heels.
It’s interesting. Something like Buffy, a lot of what that’s credited with. A show like Xena was doing a lot of the same. Straight down to like musical episodes, and deliberately goofing on the format. At exactly the same time.
But where the reputation of Whedon’s work seems to be tapering off. There’s a whole “Wait Xena was awesome” reappraisal going on right now. Seems significantly better regarded now than it was back in the day.
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Gate-keeping snobbery is also something to be avoided, as it can and often does lead to ‘being a dick.’
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I like that. Promptly stealing it!
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There’s probably A LOT of really talented people that aren’t assholes or abusers that could see, do and produce things in a similar manner, the problem is that they don’t get the same chance the white son of people that already worked in Hollywood on the same industry gets. Most positions of power in the Entertainment industry select for assholes putting other assholes in power. I’m looking at you, comics industry! Also you, game industry!
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The best thing about Dollhouse was that it introduced me to Enver Gjokaj, who is phenomenal in it. The only actor in the show that really pulled off the whole “completely different personality in the same body” premise of the show
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