Lot of Barbie discoursers using Ken to work out the issues with masculinity in post-feminist crisis that Joss Whedon gave them Xander for a quarter-century ago.
Kinda want to do something where I use “allegate” as a verb (in place of “allege”), and yes that is Joss Whedon dialogue, but it’s the good, TV Whedon dialogue that’s actually largely Jane Espenson dialogue
TVTropes is such a weird website because the language (and I guess the ‘culture’) of the site was codified in an extremely specific era of internet use (mid to late aughties), and by members of an extremely specific and insular subgroup (nerds) that it codified all the tropes in what is effectively a dead language. No one talks like that anymore and yet because there’s no renaming or updating, and in the 2000s we thought the future was forever babyyyy etc, it all continues to chug along as part of a world where self-respecting adults use words like “woobie”. It’s remarkable to me because its not a relic or preserved in amber (an online Pompeii like an abandoned geocities page), people are actively using it! Like finding an island where everyone speaks English in the style of Chaucer. I would be just as surprised if a man on the street greeted me “Hail and well met” as if someone in casual conversation deployed the phrase “crowning moment of awesome”.
its just so weird how this post diagnoses the problem without mentioning the actual cause: it wasn’t just nerds it was specifically joss whedon fan nerds particularly centered around Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
the tvtropes people talked/wrote weird compared to general internet users, or even fandom types specifically in 2005 as it started, let alone as it continued to accrete users. expansion brought in wider use of general internet/fandom writing but the core of people really really into buffy in particular and joss whedon in general kept it somewhat discordant against popular usage.
oh man! that explains so much! it sorta follows his lead in many ways; the ideal TVT writer is a fan of the tropes despite believing (sometimes correctly, sometimes Very Not) that they see through them and can identify all the strings being pulled; chauvinistic about Nerd Dialect that was off-putting in its vintage year and anachronistic now; bought-in on the whole “nerd culture” phenom lock stock and barrel, with all the weird reading and writing priorities that come with that; and way, way less progressive than they seem to believe they are. in other words: Joss Whedon.
TVTropes is a monumental temple built to a god that failed, which is beautiful in the abstract and repugnant in the particular. I think that’s where I’ve landed
::Recalls that a significant part of my internet coming-of-age was Alyson Hannigan fandom::
Actually now that I think of it out of the whole main cast (as in not David Boreanaz) she was the only one that really turned BtVS into something
The Boreanaz/Fillion “be a complicated Joss Whedon man then get cast in mom fantasies” career arc is definitely a Thing, tho
This is a little uncharitable, but depends on where you set the bar. No one else (other than those 2 and Gellar, who admittedly under performed after, or if you count animation or producer roles) had a headlining role in a successful TV series (defined as an unfraught renewal for a second season minimum, but at least 3 seasons to be safe) and/or starring roles in successful a-list (non-kids) movies, but every one of them kept legitimately working consistently (even Brendon - the only work gap in any people cited in the opening credits is Dushku who hasn’t been seen since 2017 or 2018 if you count producing Mapplethorpe) which is not typical of a TV show like this, and I’m counting everyone who was ever in that opening.
Of the core cast (is that anyone who was in at least as many eps as Charisma Carpenter? Not sure where this line goes) everyone has had at least a major recurring role in successful TV with many have non-blockbuster successful starring roles. A minor hobby of mine is following the threads of actors’ careers and most of the people at this level fizzle quickly, and this consistent level of work is unusual. This also doesn’t account for a fair number of the major recurring cast now being successful producer/writer/directors. Also note, this doesn’t apply to the other Whedon shows, where there are many more that meet the initial bar I laid out (forget Firefly where the success rate is absurd, Angel’s Amy Acker, Julie Benz [in an originally recurring role in Buffy], and Vincent Kartheiser [who joined Firefly’s recurring Christina Hendricks on Mad Men] have done pretty great).
It is kind of funny that one of his biggest Hollywood legacies was casting the actress with big tits as an evil whore.
On “pff, what did Joss Whedon ever give us anyway”, he gave us a questioning girl hooking up with guys and then deciding she was meant for girls, he did give us that
In the grimdark ‘90s Harley Quinn was developed as an exploration of the internal life of a woman in an abusive relationship
And in the “female representation” 2010s she’s been reimagined as a DD/lg roleplayer or a nonmonogamous bisexual pinup fantasy.
I think about that sometimes.
Oh, @kontextmaschine, do you… do you think that Bruce Timm wasn’t super into sexy nonmonogamous bisexual pin-up girl fantasies?
Oh you sweet summer child.
Timm was like “crazy girls are hot because their eccentricities give you opportunities to connect with their vulnerable core”
The new stuff’s just “crazy girls are hot cause they put out for attention”
Which was the tired back when Timm was wired, really
Hey did we ever get followup on which coworkers Joss Whedon cheated on his wife with?
Like, Alyson Hannigan, Jane Espenson, Eliza Dushku, Christina Hendricks, y/n?
a movie like my fair lady but where a frat boy is turned into a feminist
omg
SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY
Starring Channing Tatum. It’s still a musical and he dances.
Viola Davis as Henrietta Higgins
My Fair Lady is a musical about a phonetics professor who makes a bet with another linguist that he can take a Cockney street vendor and pass her off as literal nobility by teaching her an upper-class accent.
The analogy still works for me, I’d pay to see a movie where a women’s studies professor teaches a frat boy to rant about privilege and rape culture in order to pass a Woke Turing Test
Must include a “move your blooming ass” type slip that causes an actual feminist to fall for him.
Also the professor being portrayed as at least somewhat abusive.
And of course, Why Can’t a Man be More like a Woman?
this was a season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and everyone hated it
Riffing off that Sady post from a while ago, yeah, you really get an appreciation of fiction when you try to write it. When I was in LA I was trying to be a TV screenwriter. Wrote some amazing stuff, but didn’t work because I don’t have connections to get anyone to read my stuff and had too much contempt for the people I’d have to schmooze to make them.
Anyway writing spec scripts really gets you a feel for the medium in general, and your selected show in particular. I ended up doing a Veronica Mars (amazing, available on request), and a pilot (ditto) but before that I started a Firefly. I abandoned it halfway through because it was really too out of date, but one of the things I realized that’s a real problem with the show is that given that so many episodes are about the gang getting together for some heist, it’s damn-near impossible to work up an explanation for why and how Inara would join in.
You realize the actual staff - which is to say, people on the Minear, Espenson, Whedon level - couldn’t really figure this out either. In Jaynestown she kind of got a side mission that looped in at the end, but most of the episodes she’s kind of given an excuse to stay away. The only episodes where Inara had an organic part of the mechanical plot were the Saffron episodes, because Saffron was goatee-universe Inara, but there’s limits to that. (Remember how Vampire Willow episodes of Buffy were amazing, but the actual Willow Goes Evil plotline of the pentultimate season was such a mess?)
That’s a shame because for how hard she is for the mechanical plot, she’s got great potential for push/pull dynamics with each character to power the equally important emotional arc:
Mal (basic love/hate)
Simon (shared appreciation/longing for the finer things in life in the harsh emptiness of frontier space, bonding over their identity as professionals, resentment that he takes his professional status from the settled straight world as equivalent to her status from the demimonde they now inhabit)
Kaylee (shared appreciation of an unapologetic girlishness that can cut both lacy and innocent or leathery and promiscuous, conflict over the fact that their skill sets are so far apart that if they’re ever under pressure together one’s always acting the ignorant amateur to the other’s polished master)
River (motherliness towards someone who’s earned her respect but still exhibits vulnerable neediness, especially on the grounds of a ‘still waters run deep’ weaponized femininity; wary that she can’t even conceive River’s interiority well enough to manipulate her at all)
Jayne (the same direct brutishness/elegant intrigue contrast that makes for great personality conflict also makes them a pretty balanced team in pursuit of a goal, plus the Whedonian play against TV convention with the complete impossibility of romantic subtext given that Inara would never and Jayne doesn’t do subtext)
Shepherd (the shared experience of secret-keeping vs. the fact that Shepherd intentionally presents to avoid his mystique while Inara presents to enhance hers)
Zoe (envious of her easy and uncomplicated relationship with Mal/cautious that it relies on the exact kind of unquestioning deference she avoids; cautious about her role as the crew’s female icon of settled monogamy/envious that it’s the exact model of egalitarian relationship she wants.)
Wash (Actually, I don’t know how you’d write an Inara/Wash plot. Wait no, I got it. She’d depend on him for something and he’d fuck it up in a dumb way and try to joke her temper down and she’d call him on his bullshit then be catty about him to the rest of the crew. Then he’d pull a totally amazing save and she’d look like the jerk. She’d do fish-out-of-water dealing with being the least liked person around, and appreciate the way that he’s really the one holding the crew in balance, performing the same kind of emotional labor she does.)
Saw The Cabin In The Woods today. All the reviews I read were all “I can’t think of anything at all to say about this plot without running afoul of my weird and pathetic 2000s spoilerphobia.”
Which is odd - to the extent it’s different from any other horror film, the novelty is deliberately put in front of your eyes from the very first scene.
But if they were going to be like that anyway, here’s what they should have said - you know how all horror movies are all basically the same story, only with different, colorful antagonists? Cabin is a horror movie where the antagonist is “horror movies”.
I dunno, Joss’ writing has always been aware, but between this and Dollhouse, he’s lately been hella meta. (Scream was aware horror.)
More meta, in fact, than anything I can recall since Sandman, where storyteller Neil Gaiman used the story of Storytelling incarnate as a frame story for stories about storytellers from famous stories. They should have a meta-off.
Actually, people’ve been trying to put a Sandman movie together since forever, I wouldn’t be surprised if Joss ends up doing it. Maybe that would be the meta-off.
With a script co-written by Charlie Kaufman.
Bam.
(And then the making of the film would be included as an episode in both of two parallel series from Alan Moore and Grant Morrison about the British Invasion authors, which would eventually conclude with each telling the story of the other telling the story of itself.)
BAM.