In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Joss Whedon is the coolest.

Jill

Confession time: I hated Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV show, not the movie — the movie was rad). I know that this strips me of credibility in some internet feminist circles, but I’m sorry, I just couldn’t stand it — I dislike fantasy-type entertainment in general, plus Sarah Michelle Geller grates on my nerves. But, that said, I love Buffy creator Joss Whedon. And here’s one reason why (I think we may have posted this video before, but it deserves more play):

50 thoughts on Joss Whedon is the coolest.

  2. I dislike fantasy-type entertainment in general, plus Sarah Michelle Geller grates on my nerves.

    I feel the same exact way.

  3. I am just so excited and grateful, Jill, that you’ve given me this opportunity to rant in a supportive environment. This man has got to figure on the list of the top ten most wonderful men ever. Even without the endless wit, heart, imagination and collaborative approach to finding and using talent. Just from the point of view of my loathing for all the mediocre writing out there, and my love of well constructed prose: will you look at how superbly crafted that speech is?

  4. I feel the same exact way.

    *grin* I originally read your username as “SarahMG”, and thought to myself, “Naah, it can’t possibly be her.”

    —Myca

  6. HERESY!! BURN ‘ER!!

    i get what you mean about SMG, though.

    Yeah, me too. I’ve always preferred Willow and Faith to Buffy, hands-down. No offense to SMG, but something about her puts me off.

    I love, love, love Joss, however. I mean, the man made my favorite TV shows ever and introduced me to Veronica Mars, thus automatically becoming a hero in my life. I still can’t get over his response to the Captivity ad campaign; he articulated my feelings on the whole torture-porn/’misogyny for fun and profit’ thing so well.

  8. Aww, man, why you gotta hate on the Smidge?

    (Aside from that she apparently stopped eating around Season 4.)

  13. yay! i couldnt stand buffy either, tho i loved the movie. its cos smg made herself into this whiny beige nightmare. beige tan beige hair she was like a walking talking pair of khakis. i didnt like xena either. i dislike that in order to show these strong female characters it had to be campy (cos i dont care how many times people worship it buffy was just as campy as xena) cos otherwise if they took themselves seriously it would come off as offensive of something.

    but, im mad impressed by everything i hear out of joss whedon as a person as opposed to an artist.

  14. and i guess i should also mention i dont much dig on fantasy anyway, im a comic book geek, but only for those quirky indie comics about the way people interact with each other. jessica abel, terry moore, daniel clowes, that sorta thing.

  15. I hated Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV show

    Oh, I dunno. The latter half of the second season had a few good moments, and the 7th was (surprisingly) pretty fucken good while Marti Noxon was on maternity leave. Still, there was an awful lot of chunky suckage (but it did prove to be fertile ground for Usenet flamewars).

  17. I’m sorry Jill, but as a Whedon fangirl I have to say you’re just wrong … there’s actually a rare objective reality here and you don’t get to diss Buffy and be considered mentally together. I mean, you can hold that opinion, but you’re nuts.

    😉

    (I admit it, I love fantasy, gothic, scifi)

    That said, mind you, my love for Whedon’s writing aside, I would admire him regardless just for his wonderfully feminist statements. Wish we had more men like him.

  18. I love Buffy, but at the same time, does anyone notice the disturbing tendency of the strong female characters to go absolutely batshit in response to grief?

    Not meaning to turn this into a Buffy discussion thread. Really :). Love Joss’ statements but think it doesn’t transfer as well into his art.

    And liking Buffy the movie over Buffy the show?! Good grief. I may faint. 😛

  19. While we’re here: can someone please explain to me the concept of the Dead and Evil Lesbian Cliche? Every time Joss Whedon comes up on a feminist blog, someone pops in and says “how can you consider Joss Whedon a feminist when he so shamelessly used the Dead and Evil Lesbian Cliche???” and my question is… that’s a cliche? Really? I’ve literally never heard of it being used anywhere but Buffy, ever. So… am I nuts?

  20. Is anyone else weirded out that he refers to his mom as “sexy”? Other than that, thanks for posting this. I hadn’t seen it before and it’s cool to see Joss being his awesome self.

  21. Isabel,

    Am I being stupid? I don’t even get where there’s a “Dead and Evil Lesbian” cliche in Buffy. I mean, Tara dies, and Willow became temporarily evil, but neither was simultaneously dead and evil. (Unless you count the two-episode parallel universe bisexual vampire Willow in season 3.)

    Now that you mention it though, there is a cliche of lesbians whose extraordinary and dysfunctional passions make them do evil things (e.g. Heavenly Creatures). I see how Willow’s rampage at the end of season 6 fits into that cliche. While that rampage was about magic addiction, I’m not sure if it would have flowed as well if it had been triggered by the death of a male love interest (e.g. Oz). Season 6, though, was generally a gross departure from the show’s feminist moorings.

    Incidentally, I know lots of people (myself included) who absolutely love the T.V. show, and I don’t think any of us particuarly like Sarah Michelle Gellar.

  22. While we’re here: can someone please explain to me the concept of the Dead and Evil Lesbian Cliche?

    I think there’s a Dead Lesbian Cliche and an Evil Lesbian Cliche but they’re seperate. The dead thing is just that, for the longest time, any characters in a variety of medias who turned out to be gay/were in gay relationships were probably likely to end up dead, have their partner be dead, or have it otherwise end horribly. “The Children’s Hour”, etc. Although it wasn’t a cliche when that came out, of course. So yeah, Tara’s death might be considered an addition to that, and IMHO a cheap plot device that just made the sucky 6th season suckier.

    The evil thing is more of a salacious evil, preying on virtuous het women, etc. “Notes on a Scandal”, apparently abused this. But I haven’t seen it, so that may not be true. But I don’t see that in Evil Willow at all. Evil Willow was out of control of her rage and totally taken over by her addiction/rage. Which is what I’d like to see questioned in Buffy- not the fact that she’s gay and was at one point evil. I don’t think this plays into the evil lesbian cliche at all- Willow was a central character, her gayness was from the very beginning accepted by the others, and hers and Tara’s relationship wasn’t any different than the het relationships. And she wasn’t evil, full stop.

  23. The dead/evil lesbian cliche is that lesbian relationships always used to end in grief in movies, tv, etc. because of how people viewed lesbian and censorship laws wouldn’t allow positive portrayals of “amoral” behavior. A lot of the time the plot followed the pattern that one of the partners will die and the other responds by going evil, killing people or something similar.

    Oh, and I have no idea about Sarah Michelle Gellar as a person, but I really liked her portrayal of Buffy. I hated whoever did wardrobe. She is about 5’1″ in real life, and they would always have her wear heels on the show even when doing stunts. (I’m sure she actually switched to tennis shoes for some scenes, but they would edit it so that she was almost always wearing at least a two inch heel). Xander and Cordy also failed at looking like high schoolers. I like both actors in the roles, but they were never convincingly in high school.

    From a feminist standpoint, I have several problems with Whedon’s tv writing. I actually liked the evil Willow subplot, but I do not like his portrayals of relationships. And several aspects of Buffy and Angel and Firefly are problematic. Warring rant ahead, but I would really like to talk about this in a feminist context where people don’t just assume Whedon can do no wrong. I loved Buffy, hated Angel season five, but loved the rest of Angel which made season five such a shock. Firefly was ok, but I got tired of “Mal saves the day” every episode.

    My first problem with Joss Whedon’s tv shows is that he believes that unhappy relationships are the only or at least most interesting relationships (I read an interview where he outright said so) therefore every relationship on his shows ends in failure. I also never liked how he went about portraying the difference between vampires with and without souls.

    The contrast between Spike and Angel was really problematic. As Angelus, Angel is a sexual sadist, and a serial killer/rapist. As Angel, those tendencies presumably don’t exist. For Angel, not having a soul seemed to cause a complete change in being. But for Spike, not having a soul just destroyed his ability to understand morality. William, soulless-Spike, and Spike-with-a-soul all have the same basic wants and desires. Spike without a soul just has no sense of appropriate behavior or right or wrong and doesn’t empathize very well. He is a bad, bad, man, but nothing compared to Angelus. Where do Angelus’ compulsions come from? Are the inherent in Liam and Angel. I really hope not, but the way Boreanaz played Angel on the Angel show tended towards the scummy and morally ambivalent a lot of the time.

    Maybe the vampire issue is just poor world-building, but Angel the show had major problems about how it portrayed women in season five. That season had really poor writing and didn’t address any of the previous story arcs. It was disappointing to watch, but I really hated how the writers, presumably with Whedon’s approval or under his direction, killed all of the female characters and had Fred date Wesley who was sexually obsessed with her and pretended that they had a functional relationship. Wesley’s previous girlfriend Lilah, dressed up as Fred to see how he would react and he told her to “leave the glasses on.” There were also hints throughout the show that Wesley was controlling towards women. Fred is blind to the scary part of Wesley and decides to date him. Then she dies and her body becomes the vessel for an ancient entity. That same season Cordy dies without anyone trying seriously to help her. In the case of Cordelia, even if the actress wanted to leave, it could have been handled a lot better. Fred dating Wesley was a classic recipe for an abusive relationship, and, instead, the storyline is that Wesley just lost the love of his life but her body is still walking around and he has to cope.

    In terms of feminist credentials, I also didn’t like the way Firefly treated gender and prostitution. It would seem probable that a future society would have slightly different gender relations from contemporary society. Not to mention the way companions are trained from early girlhood, but the series implies that Inara had a choice in her occupation, or at least that being a companion is a skilled trade that women not little girls enter. Mal obviously doesn’t respect her trade, but the consensus seems to be that he’s just ignorant.

  24. Nah, you don’t lose cred for not liking the show. You lose cred for liking the movie. 🙂
    That said, I didn’t care for Buffy-the-character all that much either, but fortunately, there were enough others on the show for me to find someone to identify with.

    I was a bit surprised they honoured Firefly, though. That I didn’t care for the “horsies in space” angle is a personal preference, certainly, but the “hookers in space” angle didn’t exactly seem to scream “good char to identify with” at me. Maybe this all changed in the course of the show, but I don’t remember any strong/sexy women in the pilot episode that I’d have cared to identify with. Yes, no, maybe?

  25. Azundris, I agree with you somewhat about Firefly. I liked Kaylee. She was my favorite character, but she is sort of flakey, and her crush on Simon, while cute and in character, wasn’t role model material. I really wanted to like Zoe, but she just fell flat for me. River was interesting but not the type of female character to identify with. I liked Inara as a character, but have major problems about how Whedon set up companions.

  26. oh hell, season 5 was the only Angel season i really liked.

    i loved Firefly, but yeah, had some problems. Not least of which: it’s a universe where China and America were the predominant influences before branching out to other planets (interesting, totally plausible), but, there are -no people of apparent Asian extraction-.

    truthfully race is way more of a constant glaring issue in the Whedonverse, for me at least.

    per female characters in Firefly: yeah, i feel about Inara the way Melissa does about Zoe, or at least the actor: fell flat, somehow. no discernable sense of humor. I thought the “Companion” thing actually made some sense, was a bit annoyed though at Mal’s constant baiting.

    the episode featuring a (very Old West, there) brothel, that was good, i thought.

    as per identifying: eh, you’ve got the whole gamut, i don’t know why anyone has to identify with any one character exclusively.

    also kind of dug that the biggest macho asshole was named Jayne.

  27. oh, I think the whole deal with Cordelia was that she was already dead. “had gone on,” as it were. I had way way more problems with the whole Rosemary’s Baby schtick the previous season (not to mention the weird icky and grating Oedipal thing with the incredibly annoying Connor). and, eh, i dunno, i kind of dug Ilyria.

    “I wish to do more violence.” w00t.

  28. I think you’re all being boring and prudish. Willow and Tara’s relationship was the most beautiful, positive thing, that grew naturally and saw them both go through all sorts of changes, including learning to stop hiding and be themselves. Of course characters get blown apart by grief. Grief may be the biggest hand grenade any of us have to deal with in life, and it was great to see someone finally acknowledge that on a TV show. Wesley wasn’t just “sexually obsessed” with Fred, there was loads of material that indicated that he had a genuine love for her, in all her aspects, and I won’t have anyone spoil his death scene for me, it was heartbreaking (“Would you like me to lie to you now?”).

    And Firefly: we get a series with four gorgeous, individuated, funny, brilliant female characters and everyone is whining? I can’t believe there are complaints about the way prostitution is presented, when we are actually getting to see sex workers treated with respect. What do you want, more judgemental crap? The very first episode showed an image of a companion giving benediction to a minister. I say, yay for subversive role reversals. Sex is always portrayed positively in this series, except in the cases when men try to use it to exert power over women. Favourite scene, case in point: the flashback to when Kaylee joined the crew. Mal finds her in the engine room where she’s shagging his mechanic, who hasn’t been able to get the ship off the ground. She fixes the engine (“I saw what your problem was when I was down there on my back, before”), so he hires her instead. And Zoe’s delivery of dry comeback lines was incomperable.

  29. belledame –

    THANK YOU for bringing race up. It almost never does, especially in Buffy fan circles.

    I think Joss is mostly awesome. I love that speech. I loved Buffy (not SMG) for five seasons and for a few bright shining moments of season 6, and then I went into deep mourning during season 7 (HAtED! o_0). I frickin’ LOVED Firefly and never really watched Angel.

    But srsly, for all the talk and dissection that can be done about Whedon and Co.’s treatment of female characters and the lesbian couple (and I’ve done a lot), WTF is up with his treatment of race? It’s always bugged me. It’s like he can’t apply all his awesome feminist thought to see how white his casts are or how people of color get written and used (Zoe in Firefly being an exception, but even then, it’s not like it’s ever mentioned that she’s a different race than everyone else). ALL through Buffy, women of color were used to shore Buffy up as the shining blonde heroine before getting themselves killed off. And a sunny CA town with no Hispanics?

    And speaking of where are the Chinese people in Firefly (where ARE they?), what was up with all the haha-Giles-and-the-Chinese-potential-can’t-understand-each-other jokes in season 7? I have to say my instinct is that when it comes to race, Whedon just hasn’t thought about it much and doesn’t feel he needs to.

  30. Let me just clarify: I wish TV and the movies were FILLED with female characters like those on Whedon’s shows. I don’t always think he gets it right and I think all art should be open to critique, but strong, sexy, complicated, and kick-ass women are always on my to-watch list. So yeah, I’ll be watching his next project fer sure.

  31. The lack of actual Asian actors on Firefly and Hispanic people in general on Buffy bothered me too.

    The reason I’m bringing up the prostitution on Firefly is that even though Inara didn’t get disrespected for her work by anyone other than Mal, it seemed like she was supposed to be an empowered sex worker who made her choices herself. Instead, we get to see the little girls getting trained to be companions in at least the movie. My problem with sex work in Firefly has a good deal to do with the way Whendon borrowed themes from Anime and added the Chinese element to the show but didn’t follow through with Asian characters or accurate portrayals of Chinese or some other Asian culture. Companions seem to be modeled on geishas but the way they are portrayed leaves out a lot of elements of how real geishas lived. I’m most familiar with the period before WWII, but I think that Whedon was drawing on U.S. and European perceptions of geishas not on any actual Japanese history. He seems to be trying to craft a type of positive, skilled sex workers, but he leaves out the problems that sex workers, be they geishas courtesans or high priced call girls face. Inara doesn’t quite work as a character because she is sort of an idealized sex worker coming from an idealized branch of sex work.

    belledame, I won’t fault you for liking Angel season five. If you hadn’t been watching the other seasons carefully, you probably wouldn’t have noticed the dropped plot lines or been as infuriated by what happened to Fred. Wesley might actually have appeared somewhat likable. He was missing his memory and so seemed “like Wesley on happy drugs” according to a friend of mine.

    orlando, I have to disagree strongly with you about Wesley. I haven’t seen Angel in a long time so I won’t be able to make exact references, but there are hints throughout the series that Wesley has problems with women and his obsession with Fred is blatant and disturbing. Wesley was one of my favorite characters to watch. He is complicated and his character development was fascinating, but he comes across as controlling towards Fred and never really listens to her opinions. I really liked that season four revealed how capable Fred really was, when she was the only person left to stop Jasmine. Then they ruin it by making her date the man who is obsessed with her as his “perfect woman.” Its just creepy. But then so is the fact that Angel was willing to erase his friends’ memory of a year of their lives without their consent.

    As long as the whole Jasmine as the anti-Christ thing doesn’t bother you, and I know it bothered some people, season four worked in context. In the episode “Birthday” (season three or early season four–I haven’t seen the show in years), Cordy got thrown from her body by a vision. She found out from the demon who was actually Jasmine’s agent that unless something drastic happened she was going to remain in a coma until she had another vision and the back of her skull blew off. He basically tricks her into asking to be infused with demon essence. There are strong clues that that the essence in question is Jasmine. Cody starts glowing and her personality changes in ways that resemble Jasmine’s sort of odd over-nice behavior after the infusion. Then, after Jasmine is born the next season, she slips back into a coma. Presumably, she returned to the pre-Jasmine status quo.

    In any case, Angel acted like he was in love with her but then wrote her off once she slept with his son while possessed. That bothered me because the sex wasn’t consensual for her. Oh, and Cordy is supposed to be only a few years older than Connor. She’s in her early twenties in continuity, but because Charisma Carpenter was so considerably older than high school age when she was cast as a high schooler, Connor and Cordy seems really icky in terms of the age of the actors. The whole being in love with Angel and sleeping with his son should have been a clue that she was possessed, but apparently Angel thinks women do that. Maybe? That part always seemed problematic to me.

  32. Lizzie, watch Angel, series 2: “Are You or Have You Ever Been…?”.

    Also, Gunn in Angel is a fantastic, complex and, frankly, hot character, and race is a constant issue in that series (with demons being used to tease out some of the scenarios that clearly comment on prejudice). Not to mention that Shepherd Book in Firefly is also black (so Zoe isn’t different from “everyone else”), and that the actor playing Zoe was first seen in Angel.

    I suspect if a young, white guy is starting out with a show like Buffy he’s going to be overcautious with anything to do with race, because anything he does is going to be called wrong. All the same, Mr. Trick was pretty cool.

    And what on earth is problematic about the gags with Giles and the Chinese potential? She’s not being mocked, the butt of the joke is Giles, fount of wisdom, who knows hundreds of archaic languages, but who still flounders when he’s faced with someone operating outside his cultural experience.

  33. Quick Buffy comment before I head to work: Season 6 was, by far, the best season. People who remember it as “bad” haven’t re-watched it to see how well it hangs together. They not only did a musical episode with a catchy soundtrack, that episode actually moved the series and the characters forward and foreshadowed a lot of what happened the rest of the season.

    Oh, and Tara was supposed to come back for Season 7, but there was such a huge outcry about her getting killed in Season 6 that Amber Benson got weirded out and refused to return, which is why a lot of Season 7 is so awkwardly plotted. They had to write around the parts where Tara was supposed to return. So thanks a lot, idiots who fly off the handle.

    I agree that Whedon’s not good on race. “Firefly” was better than “Buffy” in that respect, but only with black characters. He’s got no idea what to do with Asians or Latinos. Though, given the appearance of Simon, River and Anara, I thought they were supposed to be mixed-race that’s so mixed you can’t quite tell what the components are.

  34. I thought Inara was a pretty flat character played by a pretty bad actress. But I actually thought that there were glimmers that there was going to be something interesting going on with prostitution in the Firefly universe, if the series had survived. I mean, for all of the talk about prostitution being high status and accepted and awesome, we see a lot of evidence that companions actually have a much more complicated social position. They are, in some sense, high status people, and Inara is in some ways an upper-class character. But she’s not the kind of upper-class character that Simon is (or was): she’s not entirely respectable, no matter what she and everyone else may claim. Mal’s issues with Inara’s profession are largely class-related, and there’s a degree of jealousy involved, given his infatuation with her. But Inara expects Book to disapprove of her, too, and Atherton Wing, who is one of her valued clients, treats her like shit and clearly doesn’t respect her or her profession. Isn’t she snubbed by ladies at the shindig? I think this is a case in which the society says one thing and really does another. Prostitution is supposed to be a respected, high-status position, but people aren’t actually as accepting an un-repressed as they claim to be.

    I don’t think that much of the Firefly universe was what it seemed in the episodes we’ve seen. I mean, Whedon has said that the Alliance isn’t all bad, and we think it is because we see it from Mal’s point of view. I really think that the status of prostitutes is much more fraught and complicated than it seems at first glance. And it’s possible that we would have learned more about how race functioned and that it wouldn’t have been straightforward, either. In the original shooting script for the pilot episode, Book considers booking passage on a different ship, and it’s indicated to him that the ship won’t carry Asians or Catholics. So it’s possible that the Firefly universe is segregated and that the initial absence of Asian characters was deliberate, rather than accidental. (On the other hand, I think I read somewhere that originally Kaylee was meant to be played by an Asian actress, which would mess with that theory.)

    I have some pretty serious political issues with Firefly, though. I can’t really deal with the way that it uses and revises the American Civil War, for one thing.

    [Have I mentioned that I’m vaguely obsessed with Firefly. I mean, I’m not really obsessed with Firefly, given how totally obsessed Firefly fans can be, but I think it was a really interesting, if definitely problematic show. And it makes me super sad that it’s not currently about to start its sixth season.]

  35. Here’s my take on the “strong women characters” in Firefly.

    The women are all very different in their strengths: Zoe is a soldier. Kaylee is physically easily intimidated but basically holds Serenity (the ship) together. Inara practices her profession in a ‘verse where patriarchy and misogyny still clearly exist, though unevenly (there’s the “Heart of Gold” episode, as someone said above, and then there’s Atherton’s treatment of Inara). There’s also the suggestion that Inara is dealing with some burden that has driven her away from the core worlds. River is…just River.

    As far as race is concerned (in Firefly and Serenity at least, not having watched Joss’ other stuff)… there’s how his treatment of race relates to our understanding of race today, and there’s how it relates to race in the social time and place he is portraying.

    It is true that only Zoe and Shepherd Book are nonwhite. Saying that their race being ignored is an issue is something I’m ambivalent about. On the one hand, I have no patience for people who say we could have a colorblind society today if we just ignore race. On the other hand, it is plausible to me that in the social setting of the show and movie, other schisms are more salient–Alliance vs. Independents, Core worlds vs. backwater planets, etc.

    I do think it is strange that there are no actors of East Asian descent among the crew or main characters. Still, though it perhaps smacks a bit of cultural appropriation, I do find it noteworthy that Mandarin is spoken (though how well it can be spoken atonally, I don’t know) even when there are no people present who are of Chinese descent. This is a bit like English/the US today. There are many places in the world where the influence of American culture have resulted in people in different parts of the world using some English words or phrases among themselves. This is giving us a feel for what that’s like.

    Also, think about a series onscreen in today’s climate where white people express themselves in a language other than English–and not in a European language, either. That shouldn’t be controversial, but damn if he isn’t making a political statement!

    One more thing and then I’ll shut up. The one aspect of race that I haven’t seen discussed yet here is the roles of Ernie and the Operative (SPOILER WARNING).

    Ernie and the Operative are the only two major characters outside of the crew who are black. I think it is interesting that the only two characters to get into hand-to-hand fighting (not shootouts, not bar brawls, not capture-and-torture) with the crew are black men. Especially thinking about which man it is that threatens a very physically weak female character with rape, you get an interesting insight into what Joss thinks of black men’s relationship to violence.

    …OK, posting. I won’t be surprised if there are tons of new comments above mine because of how long it took me to write this…

  36. Did people in general think that Angel was a feminist show? All the discussion is about troublesome things in seasons 4 and 5, but I never thought Angel was feminist. I was pretty surprised by the stark contrast with BtVS as soon as Angel started. The first two seasons are essentially about a male hero and his male sidekicks saving damsels in distress. Cordelia was a strong character, but essentially a strong supporting female character; she’s the strong and intelligent housewife who stays at home and supports the man in his quests. The later seasons differ in a lot of ways, but I’m not seeing anything particularly feminist in them either.

    Don’t get me wrong, I liked Angel, particularly in seasons 4 and 5. And in fact, the things that people are bringing up as problematic, I generally don’t have problems with. (I always saw Fred dating Wesley as a cheap trick to make her death more painful for Wesley, much like Willow’s reunion with Tara, rather than an integral part of Fred’s character development. And I think it’s reasonable that Angel would have been too upset to be able to rationally analyze why Cordelia might be sleeping with Connor.) I’m just not seeing anything interesting in the show from a feminist perspective.

  37. Woops, double-posted because of the comment not seeming to post. Jill, please delete if you don’t mind or don’t let one through moderation…

  38. For Angel, not having a soul seemed to cause a complete change in being. But for Spike, not having a soul just destroyed his ability to understand morality. William, soulless-Spike, and Spike-with-a-soul all have the same basic wants and desires. Spike without a soul just has no sense of appropriate behavior or right or wrong and doesn’t empathize very well. He is a bad, bad, man, but nothing compared to Angelus. Where do Angelus’ compulsions come from? Are the inherent in Liam and Angel. I really hope not, but the way Boreanaz played Angel on the Angel show tended towards the scummy and morally ambivalent a lot of the time.

    It comes from what both characters were like in life. Liam/Angel was a drunkard and a whoremonger constantly at the heels of his father’s disapproval. One of his first acts as a vampire was to kill his family in order to make his father suffer. Whereas William/Spike was a goody-two-shoes, momma’s boy poet wanna-be. His first act was to make his mommy a vampire so they could be together forever. (Seriously). He loved Drusilla and Buffy even when he didn’t have a soul.

    Basically, Spike was always the romantic and Angel was always the predator. It’s why Angel’s soul is such torment for him and not for Spike – Spike requested his soul out of love, Angel has always had it inflicted on him by outside forces.

    As much as I love Angel, his mental and emotional growth was severely stunted in both life and death and it showed in his white-knight sexist chivalry when it came to women, and his constant self-pitying brooding when it came to his curse. Angel was basically a teenager for 80% of his existence and it wasn’t until late in his own series that he matured beyond that.

    The entire fourth season of Angel was a disaster to me. Joss’s inability to feature healthy happy romance is the culprit, I think; Angel and company worked beautifully when they were family instead of all lusting after each other like lovesick teenagers. Cordelia and repeating guest stars like Buffy, Faith, and Darla were all strong and unique female characters with their own demons to face. Fred was wonderful, but the way her death was handled in Season 5 was terrible (with the exception of Illyria’s awesomeness).

    There’s also a recurring theme in the show I call the Phoenix Effect (also known as Women Do Bad Things With Power and Must Be Stopped). Cordelia becoming half demon and even a higher being was a sham that made her evil. Jasmine took away people’s free will (and ate them) and had to be depowered. Illyria was losing control of her vast powers, and also had to be depowered. Same thing happened in Buffy. Willow became addicted to magic and had to be, you guessed it, depowered. I mean, am I missing something here? Why does this keep happening?

  39. Melissa, you’re probably right about Wesley, in that I think they got very deeply into dark side/emotionally messed up W. in season 4, and then realised they had no exit strategy, hence “W. on happy pills”. Still, I wouldn’t give up the puppet episode for anything.

    Amy Acker should get a spin off series. They never really gave a satisfactory explanation for what happened to Fred’s soul when Illyria took over her body, and Fred had such a strong personality. Illyria was clearly beginning to manifest aspects of that personality, which was breaking through. Can you imagine a Fred/Illyria combo as a pivotal heroine? I have a suspicion that they did the switch in order to give Acker more of a chance to show off her (clearly remarkable) range.

    I’m going to stop talking now, because this is getting unhealthy. I normally only do this with Shakespeare.

  40. orlando, I agree that if they had developed what happened to Fred’s soul and allowed Fred/Illyria to work as a complex character, Fred’s death wouldn’t have bothered me as much. But I’m still not sure why Fred has become supernatural and get possessed by Illyria to change as a character and become a badass fighter. Wesley changed so much from Buffy through season four of Angel, but Fred doesn’t get to stay human and still go through profound changes. Considering her past, I think that there was definitely the potential for dramatic and interesting changes in Fred. Why can’t a human woman have a permanent pivotal role in Angel or Buffy without getting supernatural augmentations, when both Wesley and Gunn get to be human and some of the most effective team members?

    I really like Gunn, but it is a little weird that he considers himself the “muscle” of the group when he is smart and comes across as a superior leader to either Angel or Wesley and no one dissuades him of that belief. There are some definite race and class issues in how Gunn interacts with the other characters that I think they could have developed more strongly.

  41. The second waver in me is coming out when I say the women in Firefly and Buffy are wimpy or too girly. A sci-fi role model to me is Ripley in Aliens. IMO Rush Limbaugh has made younger women distrust feminism. Don’t hate me.

  42. River and Simon are supposed to be Chinese, right? Everyone speaks some dialect of Chinese but no one except extras look Chinese. Some of the characters look mixed.

  43. orlando: I knew I was forgetting a Firefly regular (sorry, Shepherd!). I agree with Indubitably that it’s not necessary in future/alternate worlds that race be dealt in ways similar to our own time and place, but I guess going from Joss’ track record of kinda ignoring it on Buffy, and the way Firefly folks were speaking Chinese and having Chinese last names but not actually seeing many, y’know, Asians, it just made me wonder if the ignoring of Zoe and Book’s race might have been less an artistic choice, and more a disinterest in examining how race plays out in the Whedonverse. Again, I think Indubitably makes an excellent point about Ernie and the Operative (and what about Book’s mysteriously-knowledgeable-about-all-things-violent past?). Even if it’s set in the future, people are watching it now (which isn’t to say seeing a vision of a colorblind future can’t be awesome, natch).

    Not having watched much Angel, I can’t really have an opinion on Gunn – I do remember wondering how Joss was going to deal with his character, tho’, when he appeared. (Wasn’t there some storyline about him being made magically lawyer-smart and then desperately making a deal with the bad guys so he wouldn’t go back to being “dumb” muscle?)

    Buffy had Principal Wood in Season 7, but I think the fact that he and Faith ended paired up has lots to do with race and class and Buffy’s shining white blondeness.

    Anyhoo, I’m not feeling so coherent – it’s been years since I’ve watched any eps so I’m not arguing for the capital-T truth of my thinkings. I just remember being kinda continually upset at how women of color were positioned in Buffy, especially in relation to Buffy herself. And the Chinese potential jokes did bug me. I can’t think of specific moments now, but I didn’t see it solely as a kind of harmless poke-fun-at-Giles running gag. To me, it was out of character for Giles to be so . . . dickish about someone not speaking English and so unwilling to admit that he doesn’t know something/so unwilling to learn something new (like some basic words in another language). But then, I think Season 7 just defenestrated everyone’s character consistency, so there’s my simmering rage about that still. 🙂

    And speaking of Season 7 and characters and all that – I can’t speak Truth on this subject either, Mnemosyne, but how I remember Amber Benson explaining her decision not to return (I’ll have to dig up the interview) wasn’t because she got “weirded out”, but because she felt a responsibility to the lesbian and gay fans of Tara’s storyline, and she didn’t want to further hurt them by appearing as the First Evil in Season 7 (it was originally supposed to be her and not Cassie who appears to Willow in the library and tries to convince her to kill herself). I mean, she mentioned getting fan mail from gay teens who stopped feeling suicidal because of the Willow/Tara relationship – and she didn’t want Tara to reappear as evil incarnate, manipulating Willow. I remember her sounding very protective of the character, the relationship, and the fans. I don’t think young fans who were emotionally involved on a personal level with the first long-term, openly-lesbian relationship on TV and who were genuinely distressed about Tara’s death deserve to be called “idiots who fly off the handle.” I admire Benson for not returning due to personal convictions about what the show owed its fans. I don’t think the hot mess that was Season 7 can be laid entirely at her feet.

    And now I’ve typed way to much and it’s past my bedtime. 🙂

  44. I think the temptation is always there to look at material selectively until it fits a theory. Willow got depowered in series 6? Well, she got pretty extraordinarily repowered in series 7! Jasmine was a villain, ergo, was defeated: or do we only let men be villains? The last thing Illyria did was kill FOUR of the evil circle, when everyone else only had to cope with one. River started disempowered and only ever got more and more powerful.

    Ditto with black men and violence. Distinguishing hand to hand fighting from all the other kinds of fighting looks very much like special pleading, and then going from Early to an “insight into what Joss thinks about black men’s relationship to violence” is one heck of a leap. Book is black. Every conceivable kind of violence is perpetrated by white men somewhere in the series, and the character by far the most sexually abusive of women is the man who attacks the brothel in “Heart of Gold”.
    I think it says more that the Operative was English: you just can’t make a Hollywood action movie unless you’ve got you a villain with a fancy schmancy English accent.

  45. I’m not sure that I buy the thing about black men and hand-to-hand combat, especially since it doesn’t really hold up within the crew. And I don’t think that the Operative and Early are really very similar characters, except that they’re both adversaries, they’re both trying to catch River, and they’re both black men. Early is crazy and the Operative is highly rational. Early is completely in it for himself, and the Operative is motivated by principle and devotion to the Alliance. Early is a foil for River, and the Operative is a foil for Mal. I think we’re supposed to see the Operative as a sort of sympathetic character: he’s the stand-in for the liberal imperialist impulse, and if he’s done horrible things, it’s out of the same motivations that people in the audience have done or sanctioned terrible things. I actually think that’s one of the huge ironies of Serenity. Pretty much by definition, a feminist is a person who thinks that it’s possible to make people better. The movie makes us identify with Mal, but I think the people making it and most of the people watching it are really more like the Operative. The movie, I think, is supposed to make us realize how our best impulses can make us monsters.

    Sorry. Rambling.

    I do, however, think that Joss was trucking in racist stereotypes when he had Early threaten to rape Kaylee. It fits with the story, and it’s very possible that he’d have had a white actor say the same thing. But it doesn’t matter: it pings a particular racist fear, and it uses that racist fear to make Early seem more scary and more menacing. And casting a black actor probably made that scene scarier to the audience and made Kaylee’s reaction more understandable. I think in that scene Joss was using the audience’s presumed racism to heighten the dramatic effect, and it makes me really uncomfortable.

    Also, what’s with naming a black character after a Confederate general? The best explanation I could come up with is that Jubal Early is just a really cool name.

  46. I agree that these questions of race are all very murky in Firefly. I am trying to neither apologize for Joss Whedon nor paint him as a racist–so there’s no “theory”, per se, that I’m trying to fit this into.

    That being said, I did have a reason for making the distinction I did of “hand-to-hand fighting.” Mostly, these acts/fights are not part of warfare–even though the Operative represents the Alliance, he doesn’t beat up Mal and Inara as part of a battle. These are also different from bar brawls in that those a) involve a lot of people and b) seem to be started as often by the crew as by an antagonist.

    What Early (not Ernie–sorry for my poor memory) and the Operative are doing is just plain old beating the crew up. Both of them are extremely intelligent and know exactly how to neutralize the crew. Still, they are really the individuals who pummel the crew with their fists–it is a very physical thing, very different from, for example, the hands of blue.

    I admit that this comparison is not watertight–it isn’t meant to be. It is just meant to be an interesting thing to think about in terms of the picture presented by the movie.

  47. It was expressly emphasised that Gunn wasn’t dumb: he just didn’t have any formal education. They juiced him up with lawyer training (and Gilbert & Sullivan), not brains, because he had the most untapped potential. One of the really charming things about Gunn was the way he responded and chanaged so eagerly whenever he got the chance to grab new opportunities or experiences. In a way, he was the most open character.

  48. Ok, I guess it takes defending Firefly to bring me out to post. Love the site, BTW, long-time lurker. And, in the end, are we all not just the biggest bunch of Whedon-geeks here?

    I have to take some umbrage on the idea of Joss pushing a “black beatdown” or anti-British meme. Safron did also try to/succeeded in beating on the crew in an attempt to send them to their death. Seeing as the Operative appeared to be the only Alliance member to have such an accent I don’t see Whedon having the same fixation as Lucas did on English-accented enemies. That and Ejiofor(yes, I did have to look up his name to spell it) is a good actor as evinced by this and Children of Men. His was a character rather than a caricature.

    As for Early, I’m a bit more conflicted. Yes, the threat to rape Kaylee was shocking, but to me more emotionally threatening wasn’t that it was coming from a black man, but it was just so, damn, cold. It was not about taking pleasure from her, it was purely about punishment and domination.

  49. OK Stepper (FL?), I know we’re the only ones left here, but I just can’t bear the thought of you thinking that I think Ejiofor (thanks for saving me looking it up) was cast for any other reason than that he’s a sensational actor. The English villain thing is just a funny quirk of American movies I couldn’t resist commenting on, but I adored the Operative. I actually fell for Ejiofor years ago, when he was in one of the BBC’s adaptations of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (the Knight’s Tale). If you ever get the chance to see it, grab it, it’s brilliant.

  50. Melissa M (post 24) pointed out something about the Vampire with a Soul thing I always wondered about. It was kind of odd and inconsistent that Angel’s personality was so completely different depending on whether his soul was present or absent, whereas Spike was a complex character with plenty of conflicting emotions even without a soul. I think the answer is that the demands of story dictated these things. Angel/Angelus needed to be a drastic contrast to make the Buffy/Angel love affair so devastating, and Spike had to be capable of emotional depth even as a soulless vamp so we’d all get excited about that love affair. Let’s face it, Joss is a storyteller, and providing good role models for women or being consistant with theme and values are always going to be second to telling a rattling good yarn.
    One other thing: I think people get confused between what a writer depicts in a story and what he or she approves of. For eg, the Fred/Wes thing. Intelligent women do actuallly get involved with men who don’t love them properly. Do we want stories to reflect reality, or just to give us models for how we’d like things to be?

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