It shouldn’t have taken a white person backing up his statements for film twitter to pay attention and listen to Ray Fisher, but I am so proud of Charisma Carpenter for speaking up about her experiences, and I hope both of them (and any other actor who’s suffered at that man’s hand, but maybe doesn’t have the resources or voice to publicly speak on it) continued healing, love, and support.

Charisma Carpenter and Amber Benson finally speak out against Joss Whedon and his behavior during Buffy and Angel

holy shit what an upgrade

Someone tell me, who is this woman?

roxane gay wrote world of wakanda one of the greatest modern comic books (shes a writer outside that, of course, but thats what i know her for)

Because I know this will be a thing...

Don’t deny yourself “Buffy,” “Firefly,” “Dollhouse”, or “Serenity” because of the recent revelations that Whedon was a sub-optimal husband and feminist. Remember that many, many other writers, producers, and actors made those shows – not to mention editors, who are often every bit as key!

Sadly, many, many writers are capable of clearly and empathetically diagnosing in their writing the problems which they themselves have. Sadly, setting up a writer/actor/or singer as a hero based on their work is deeply dangerous – artists can be MUCH more aware and decent in their work than in their real life.

It’s especially painful to learn all this because of the stance Joss took both within and outside of his work on feminism and women’s empowerment. But remember that once a book/show/character is brought to page/stage/or screen – it belongs to us. It belongs to the fans, as no work of art gains real life unless that magic, alchemical reaction between the art and the audience happens.

Certainly, Joss’ Lovable Geek Feminist Hero pedestal is knocked down. But Buffy and Dollhouse and Firefly are, like all works of art, something greater than the sum of their creator. They belong as much to everyone else who made them happen: they belong as much to us.

Don’t let anyone, even their creator, take that away.

Whedonesque, the most prominent Joss Whedon fan site, is shutting down after 15 years online.

This news came within hours of a shocking article by Whedon’s ex-wife Kai Cole, who accused him of multiple affairs with fans, coworkers, and actors on the set of Buffy and other projects.

something amazing happened today.

I’m looking at screenshots of this horde of furious girls and women destroying Joss Whedon on twitter and it’s so great

Motherfucker you knew you were a misogynist and a fraud in 2002 when you wrote the autobiographical Buffy episode about Andrew the filmmaker fetishizing the pain and hero stories of the house full of women who despise him, and now it’s finally coming crashing down on you and happening in real life.

I sincerely hope some of those girls calling him a piece of shit and a trash can and demanding, “fight me” shook him; this has been his deepest fear about his behavior towards women for over a decade now, but he hasn’t made a change, and he’s always known on some level that he deserves to be hated for it.

BUFFY: Are you still filming me? Stop. ANDREW: But it’s a valuable record. A-an important document for the ages. ‘A Slayer in Action.’ BUFFY: ‘A Nerd in Pain.’ Would they like that? Cause we could do that.

BUFFY: When your blood pours out it might save the world. What do you think about that? Does it buy it all back? Are you redeemed? ANDREW: No.

Ugh ok ok I actually have a ridiculous amount of words about this (hi ocelot, can I post those emails from 2012??)  But I wanted to say that this… idk.  This has been a long time coming for Joss and it’s absolutely a bed he made for himself, and it makes me gratified on a brutal visceral level to see it coming back to bite him, but a lot of that anger is watching an artist I loved curdle into his own self-hate and turn into the kind of awful man he used to write about.  Joss…Joss has had a recurrent fantasy of self-loathing and shame about his treatment of female characters and actresses that started, afaik, in season 6 of Buffy, with the introduction of the three nerd villains Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew.

The initial patriarchal villains of the Buffyverse were men who abused women using either brute strength or political power: Angelus, the Watchers, the Mayor. The three nerds introduced another kind of misogynistic male antagonist that grew to dominate and completely consume Joss’s work in the 00s: the nerdy, story-obsessed guy who used his intelligence and mastery of technology to abuse and control strong, heroic women.  Nerdy men who, like Joss, either created or tampered with the women they wanted total control over, either by building androids or altering existing women, usually via invasive medical torture.  Joss the writer invents the character of Buffy while having workplace clashes with her actress Sarah Michelle Gellar;  Andrew, Warren, and Jonathan drug their girlfriends into compliance and create the BuffyBot to obey their will.  This villain character would show up again and again in Joss’ later works: the scientist who had, thanks to his technical and storytelling skills, been given custody by higher powers over women who would normally be far out of their range of influence. And, uncomfortably, all of the actors cast for these roles bore a striking physical resemblance to Joss.

When Joss aired “Storyteller”, I was surprised and impressed.  It was penned by Jane Espenson, Buffy’s strongest staff writer, and was a story about Andrew the Joss doppelganger filming the house of potential Slayers for a series he called “Buffy, Slayer of the Vampyres.”  A major theme of “Storyteller” was Andrew’s intrusive use of the Buffy cast’s personal lives and pain to make a good story, his refusal to acknowledge their privacy, and possibly, as Anya kept insisting, to use his videos as masturbation material.  It seemed like a huge moment of self- awareness and self-reflection about the relationship Joss had to the real and fictional women who worked for him, especially given the conflicts he had at the time with actresses like Charisma Carpenter over her character Cordelia and personal bodily autonomy (pregnancy).   It was self-critical and raw and I was incredibly proud of Joss for being willing to go there in such a public way.

Buffy ended, and Andrew redeemed himself, but the misogynist-nerd-self-loathing metastory intensified. One of the aspects of the Three Nerds villain arc that had always made me profoundly uncomfortable was the way Joss positioned the boys’ nerdy pursuits and lack of traditional masculinity– not just their treatment of women– as something inherently repulsive.  Viewers were supposed to be disgusted by the sight of three dorky boys nerding out over Star Wars figurines.  Buffy and the house full of potential slayers call Andrew vile names for being a nerd, not in response to his behavior; by the end of his run, I felt the urge to protect Andrew, not from the girls, but from Joss, who was clearly using him as a punching bag onto which he was projecting his own self-loathing.  (Eventually Joss was quoted saying that Andrew was, as had been hinted, gay, but would remain in the closet indefinitely “because it’s funny,” something that horrified and enraged fans, but which Joss seemed to view, appallingly, as as an ultimate emasculation.)   

The next major Joss project was Dollhouse, with evil scientist and Joss lookalike Topher Brink programming, manipulating, and violating various women into playacting roles he’d scripted for them.  It was such a blatant story about Joss and his actresses it was difficult to watch.  Like, My Feminism Is Just An Excuse To Exploit Hot Actresses, I Am Such A Disgusting Creature!!!  Coming soon to the CW!   His next project, the webseries I Am So Horrible And My Feminism Is A Sham, featuring NPH as the Joss stand-in, was similarly cringeworthy. 

A big outlier here is Wash, from Firefly and Serenity, who almost fit the pattern, but not quite, and that “not quite” was enough of a problem that, like the similar character Oz, he had to be written out of the story.  Alan Tudyk had the same general physical resemblance to Joss and the same dress sense as Andrew, Topher, and Billy Horrible.  His dinosaur theater sessions looked and sounded like the action figure games the Trio played, and the blurb for Joss’s media company, Mutant Enemy.   But unlike all the other nerdy blond men of the Whedonverse, Wash was in a equal and loving relationship with the strong soldier woman he adored.  Other characters in the series were preoccupied with the traditional gender role imbalance in Wash and Zoe’s marriage and questioned whether Wash felt emasculated by his wife being stronger than he was, but both Wash and Zoe were completely above and untouched by it.  She was a warrior woman and she was married to a dorky guy who told stories and who wasn’t the most physically powerful man on her crew.  She could have broken him in half with her pinky and they loved and respected each other and had a happy, healthy marriage. This was, somehow, too much for Joss to handle, and so Wash had to die. 

When venting about Joss I want to say that the problem isn’t that Joss was always terrible, or that all of his work was tainted or had a poisonous message from the beginning.  It wasn’t; Buffy was and still is incredibly important; it had the kind of powerful emotional intelligence that burrows into your heart and stays there and I think it still stands by itself, years later.  Buffy still stands.  Charles Gunn still stands.  Anya still stands.  When my mother passed away last year, I watched “The Body” like a ritual, and I know I’m not the only person to have done something similar.  That canon isn’t going anywhere.

The problem is that at some point in his career, Joss became so intent on the masochistic fantasy of being hated by strong women for being a nerd that he spent a decade writing stories about violating those women to ensure they would hate him.   I wish Joss had ended that obsession with “Storyteller.”  I wish he had talked about the feelings that made him want to make “Dollhouse” with his therapist and tried to make things right with Charisma Carpenter instead of turning those particular personal demons into a bad TV show.  I wish the ideas of intimacy and equality weren’t so threatening to him that he had to write men like Oz and Wash out of existence instead of trying to evolve into them.  I wish he hadn’t let himself fall into that pit of destructive self-loathing back in 2002, and I wish he hadn’t stayed there so long that he started to turn that hate outward onto the women he perceived as loathing and rejecting him.  I wish he hadn’t turned, in twenty years, from the man who wanted to see the blonde girl in the horror movie survive and thrive into the rich bastard who thought it was funny to call Natasha Romanoff a cunt on IMAX and who called her a monster for being the victim of medical abuse.   I’m still laughing angrily at Joss being driven off twitter by a mob of angry, betrayed female fans, because wow does he ever deserve it, but man, Joss.  It didn’t have to be that way.

I think this is the best summation of the Joss Whedon issue that I’ve seen thus far.

This is so good.

Spoiler-free AoU review and thoughts on the Twitter fiasco

AoU wasn’t the best movie I’d ever seen, but I was so jaded by the time I went to see it from spoilers and general anger of people around me that I could hardly enjoy it at all, which was a shame. I really legitimately enjoyed parts, and I’m excited to see what the Russos will do with the series. I need to rewatch the film as something “inspired” by the comics but nothing like the comics at all, so I can try to enjoy it more. I do have a problem that the dialogue often feels like there was just a really really long monologue for one character, but everyone shared lines from it (the characters personalities kind of blended into each other’s and turned into quip after quip). It didn’t really feel like any of the characters were the same people from the other movies, sadly–I kind of got the impression that Joss may have written it before Winter Soldier came out–as a lot of characters reverted to how they were without any of the development they gained in that film. I think the super extended cut of this film will be much more enjoyable, perhaps making it seem less like a bunch of video game cut scenes back to back, and allowing it to flow better and be more coherent. Of course, I’m salty about some significant changes to many of my favorite characters, and especially the inherent racism in the change of the twin’s heritage (as well as the super tasteless rape joke that Tony made), but it’s a different universe, and I always have my comics where a lot of the real versions of my fave’s live. As a stand alone universe, the MCU is beginning to get more fleshed out, especially with the perfection that was Daredevil (and hopefully the rest of the street-level hero shows). Heck, I even really enjoy Agents of Shield, and am loving the Inhumans stuff. I like a lot of Joss’s older shows, and where a lot of them suffer from similar problems, I still find them a refreshing breath of air compared to a lot of other “attractive white dude with baggage” Gary-stu type shows we get. I’m not a huge fan of how Joss handles the Avengers, and I’m glad it’s being handed off to another writer, but I still look forward to seeing if he’ll make anything else with his own characters (where he does a much better job). I think it was super immature of him to block people for minor criticisms, but I understand and respect him deleting his Twitter due to death threats (which are never cool no matter how shitty or not someone is). I’m still thinking about how I feel on this whole matter, and everyone I know is really divided on this. I guess this is just my two-cents in the void, without addressing any of the super divisive and emotion-fueled parts of it. Thanks for listening.

(Side note: The only personal gripe I have is that now it’s going to be all that much harder to have Kate Bishop show up though, and for that I’m bummed.)

Joss Whedon confirms he is leaving Marvel Studios

The Age of Ultron press tour is over.

Captain America is here. See Marvel’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron” in theaters May 1!

"Get ready for Chris Evans’ jaw. Greatest jaw in the film. Get ready! Here it comes… Oh yeah. Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s a hero." - Joss Whedon in the Avengers commentary