Joss Whedon

You know, it occurred to me today that Star Trek was actually quite ahead of its time. This is a program made during the Cold War, when fear of Communism and enmity with Russia was at its very highest - and yet they had a crew member from Russia!

yah that's what's most remarkable, not the black woman shown serving as a crewmember at a time when black Americans were still fighting for their civil rights

First interracial kiss on TV!

Srsly though, that was the point. The diversity on the bridge was supposed to make the series feel more like it was set in the future.

And the BBC banned the episode because of said interracial kiss.

Just remember that when people go on about how the BBC is more progressive than American media. :p

Cyberwulf wrote:

And the BBC banned the episode because of said interracial kiss.

The episode, Plato's Stepchildren, was officially not shown at the time (but was broadcast in the 90's) because:

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After very careful consideration a top level decision was made not to screen the episodes entitled "Empath", "Whom Gods Destroy", "Plato's Stepchildren" and "Miri", because they all dealt most unpleasantly with the already unpleasant subjects of madness, torture, sadism and disease.

The BBC considered Star Trek a children's show, and treated it as such.

Sauce, 'nother sauce

For what its worth, though, British Telly had the official first interracial kiss on TV a good four years before Star Trek did. (Granted, not from the BBC though)

Emergency Ward 10

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Avengers: Black Widow is taunted by Loki with a slow rape by Hawkeye and then calls her a "mewling quim". So she gets called a cunt. Awesome.

And wrong, as was made clear.

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Loki: I won't touch Barton. Not until I make him kill you! Slowly, intimately, in every way he knows you fear! And then he'll wake just long enough to see his good work, and when he screams, I'll split his skull! This is my bargain, you mewling quim!
Natasha Romanoff: [fearfully] You're a monster!

When Barton returns he asks Natasha if she knows what it feel like to be un-made. She says he knows she does. From that, and her introduction in Avengers, it seems that the Black Widow was trained to be an assassin from a very young age, (she says so to Banner). Apart from her 'specific skill set' she seems to find it efficient to put herself to men as vulnerable, get them to underestimate her and tell her his plan, then to turn the tables.

For all you want to twist it your way, I say Loki could have known from Barton that Natasha fears most losing her limbs, or looks, or senses. That could fit at well, if not better, as a way that he knows to 'intimately' kill her. Wouldn't need a special friend to guess she wouldn't like being raped, would it?

Loki's mewling quim was the worst thing he could throw at her for being sentimental. Loki is sentimental, but hates that part of himself. He stabbed Thor for the same reason. He actually spits the word 'Sentiment' after.

You might as well say Fury sending Natasha to get Banner was also 'rape'. After all, when the two of them fall down in the helicarrier, he turns into a monster and attacks her, right? So Whedon wrote Banner/Hulk as a rapist too?

Read it as rape if you want, but I'm not seeing Loki that way at all. Hiddleston once said of the remark that he didn't think Loki had a very high opionion of women, but Asgard only has Sif as a warrior, all other women, (bar Frigga, who was flattened after about two seconds in Thor), seem decorative. Loki doesn't think much of humans, he's above them, a god. If you think it was a rape scenario, then you'd have to believe that he'd be just as likely to offer rape to a human male.

As for Whedon:

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JW: There are very few perfect movies. "The Court Jester", "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", "Godfather" I & II... The list does not go on and on. "The Avengers" is notably IMperfect, which makes its success mean so much more to me -- because it's striking a chord that matters MORE than its obvious flaws. Like the team, it appears to be more than the sun of its parts. Boo-yah!

RDA: What do you feel is the greatest achievement of "the Avoiders"?

JW: Getting "mewling quim" out there to the masses. Also, Hulk.

I think he just wanted to get the word past the censors.

His serious answer:

Whedon's equality speech

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So... why do you write these strong women characters?

Because equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women. And the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who is confronted with it.

He may fall and fail at times, but he's trying and for the most part winning, in very mysogynistic corporate media. Give me Loki's 'mewling quim' over the sappy, useless female 'characters' in Avatar, for example.

Sorry, I'm not following your line of reasoning about Fury sending Natasha after Hulk being a rape metaphor at all. Showing Natasha's skills in agility and guile are great. The scene being discussed is Loki stooping to name-calling and specifically the line you are quoting *can* be interpreted as "Your best friend will slowly rape and dismember you, you crying cunt."

I don't see an eye-roll here. The point I'm trying to make, and I'll state yet again, is Joss falls back on "let's put women in peril by threatening them with rape!" and it's such lazy writing. What you write about Loki is more complex- put that complexity into his speech towards Natasha and don't reduce him into just a stupid name calling child. He was awesome in Thor.

I'm giving an echo to Cyberwulf saying he doesn't deserve all these cookies from people for being "OUR FEMINIST SAVIOR!" Fuck him for joking that he wanted to get the line out about "getting mewling quim out there to the masses." This is the man who also wrote the worst line ever in X-Men. "You know what happens to a toad when it's hit by lightening? The same thing that happens to everything else." OMG, HE'S SUCH A GREAT WRITER!

I hate Avatar too, and its really uncomfortable "let's plug in our phallic things into unwilling subjects, because they'll like it eventually!" stuff. But I'm not seeing any issues with the female characters? It's a stupid movie though. I liked it better when it was Ferngully.

LeeLee wrote:

Fuck him for joking that he wanted to get the line out about "getting mewling quim out there to the masses."

OH GOD THIS.

fucking hell

Summercorn wrote:

he's trying

Well he's not trying hard enough. He's making exactly the same effort as all the other Liberal Dude Writers out there. He's been riding on Buffy since 1996, ignoring the fact that he either wrote or allowed others to write her almost being raped, forgiving her rapist, and cosying up to him ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE RAPE ATTEMPT.

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Give me Loki's 'mewling quim' over the sappy, useless female 'characters' in Avatar, for example.

No, fuck that. I'm sick and tired of having to settle every time. I'm fed up of having to take what good I can from fictional works and brush off the crumbs of sexism and misogyny. As long as Joss Whedon is the bar for feminism, nobody mainstream is going to bother aiming any higher.

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RDA: What do you feel is the greatest achievement of "the Avoiders"?

JW: Getting "mewling quim" out there to the masses.

Oh, JW, you edgy man, you. Sooooo courageous to make a meme about a low opinion of women popular. Why, I fear you're so edgy, just reading these words may cut my computer screen!

Retch!

Cyberwulf wrote:

I'm sick and tired of having to settle every time. I'm fed up of having to take what good I can from fictional works and brush off the crumbs of sexism and misogyny. As long as Joss Whedon is the bar for feminism, nobody mainstream is going to bother aiming any higher.

+1

Cyberwulf wrote:

No, fuck that. I'm sick and tired of having to settle every time. I'm fed up of having to take what good I can from fictional works and brush off the crumbs of sexism and misogyny. As long as Joss Whedon is the bar for feminism, nobody mainstream is going to bother aiming any higher.

Have you tried watching The Good Wife? I think you'd enjoy it.

I have never heard any direct quotes from Joss Whedon until this thread, but he sounds like an arrogant douchecanoe that has bought into his own hype.

Mr.Doobie wrote:

I have never heard any direct quotes from Joss Whedon until this thread, but he sounds like an arrogant douchecanoe that has bought into his own hype.

It shouldn't really be surprising. This isn't a defense of Whedon, but Hollywood is all about inflated egos.

Penguin wrote:

Mr.Doobie wrote:

I have never heard any direct quotes from Joss Whedon until this thread, but he sounds like an arrogant douchecanoe that has bought into his own hype.

It shouldn't really be surprising. This isn't a defense of Whedon, but Hollywood is all about inflated egos.

Indeed, and I think it must be hard not to get caught up in it when people are constantly blowing sunshine up your arse and telling you how great you are. Think about it: you create something - a story, a TV show, a song, whatever - you're going to think quite highly of it, and feel a little pride when somebody else tells you that they think highly of it too. When lots of people are saying this, would that not make you feel good? Popular media persons tend to get elevated to godlike levels by ridiculous numbers of fans glorifying them continuously. Look at J K Rowling - an average writer who, if the public are to be believed, is the next Wordsworth. Even musicians get it - Nightwish's first singer, Tarja Turunen, ended up being dropped from the band because she listened to public acclaim so much that she became convinced that she was more important than she actually was, and ended up putting her own desires ahead of her commitment to the band. Apparently the Nine Inch Nails frontman used to say the same thing - he'd get bombarded with praise, and would have to try very hard to filter it out and keep his own ego from becoming overinflated. Then there's almost every football star on the planet; almost each one convinced that he's God's gift to the world, simply because he's quite good at playing a sport.

I think you'd have to be very careful about listening to public praise in order to not turn into an arrogant shit, and it happens to more than a few people in the entertainment industry - tv, film, music, writing, everything like that, people are at risk of becoming arrogant divas if they're not careful enough to take all praise with a pinch of salt. It's just a weakness of the human ego, and it's more likely to happen in the entertainment world, where your work is exposed to hundreds of thousands of adoring fans.

Joss Whedon is to television what Stieg Larson was to books. I don't watch anything with his name on it.

Okay, I don't hate Joss Whedon in fact he does seem to understand Popular Culture and good dialogue, hell I even loved The Avengers, not because it was perfect but because it was his biggest project and was in my opinion freaking awesome.

Hollywood does inflate egos, it happens to everyone who started out filming low-grade entertainment, like for instance I have never seen Evil Dead, but every raves on Sam Raimi older stuff, but his new stuff is sub-par. I think this is largely phenomena of people hating success, cult movies are better since not everyone loves them and in that sense they feel like they are special or smarter for liking this.

Psychological jargon aside, Joss Whedon is probably not the most innovative defining director in all of existence, but I think he can play both sides, he just was always better at TV since it allows more build up and I think his best example of this was not Buffy, but Angel, that went places and in my opinion reached perfection Buffy could never do, since Sarah Michelle Gellar is such a prima-donna -- proven from media I read on this subject in the past.

Does he deserve all the hate, not at all there is far worse monsters in Hollywood making movies some cheap shots, others far more damaging to scope of movies.

Rulke55 wrote:

Angel [...] went places and in my opinion reached perfection Buffy could never do, since Sarah Michelle Gellar is such a prima-donna

YEAAAAAAAHHH, it was all Gellar's fault the quality of the writing and plotlines dropped off a fucking cliff after season five.

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-- proven from media I read on this subject in the past.

Surely such media was completely objective and certainly not written by anyone with preconceived notions, prone to lazily repeating gossip, or with an axe to grind.

I never that SMG was the reason the show went down hill, it did not help she was a Prima-Donna, also the media I read never said she was a bad actress, a Prima-Donna:

pri·ma don·na
/ˌprimə ˈdänə/
Noun
The chief female singer in an opera or opera company.
A very temperamental person with an inflated view of their own talent or importance.
Synonyms
diva

No where does it say in the definition they are bad actresses or actors. What made Buffy so good was not one character, it was the vast variety of people who did it, and we grew to love. Now as for my comment on Angel I preferred it because despite the fact it had drama on sidelines, not one being one of the actors dying who was meant to return, I still think in sum of it's parts it was a great show.

This is what happens when you select one quote from someone out of context, you lose the meaning of their whole point. Seems like you honed in on SMG point which suggests a major bias here, but that could be me not understanding your point and that is neither here nor there.

I stand by my final point Joss Whedon is not the great destroyer and most lethal (hyperbole, sue me) entity in Hollywood. Which makes this rage even more misplaced. I love movies, hell can discuss movies until Cows come home, so I tend to get angry about certain films, one being Resident Evil the games weren't high-brow entertainment, but their difference from making similar story to game and what that jackass done to the story.

But even that is not the main issue with Hollywood, there bigger fish to fry.

My point sorry I deviate is that I like Joss Whedon because of three things, Avengers, Cabin in the Woods (I am a horror junkie) and Angel. As for Firefly it could have been good it could have gotten stupid, we shall never know.

Cyberwulf wrote:

Rulke55 wrote:

Angel [...] went places and in my opinion reached perfection Buffy could never do, since Sarah Michelle Gellar is such a prima-donna

YEAAAAAAAHHH, it was all Gellar's fault the quality of the writing and plotlines dropped off a fucking cliff after season five.

Yeah, I have to agree with Cy here. I really got the feeling that Joss continued Buffy on UPN after they threw tremendous amounts of money at him. (Although, season 6 is still a lot better than people give it credit for, it still wasn't... awesome.) To load that much on just one actress, an actress who is not bad, saying she is the cause it went downhill is just a simplistic and bullshit excuse. There was a whole crew to choose from, not to mention Joss himself and the other writers/producers who thought seasons 6 & 7 were good, if not great, ideas. As much as I love Buffy, the show went downhill because it didn't know when to call it quits.