ppl asking “what the fuck happened to joss whedon, why is he like this” are missing the fuckin’ point, my friend

karnythia:

elfyourmother:

doolallymagpie:

he’s like this because nothing happened to him.

nothing kicked his ass into keeping with the times. he’s been allowed to coast along on milquetoast 90s feminism for two decades now, and yes he was progressive back then. but you could see him getting behind the times as soon as the firefly era. or rather, the times getting ahead of him.

it’s not just that he’s been so busy patting himself on the back on the platform that the train left him behind, there’s not even a station where he’s standing anymore. yet he’s still jerking himself off with how much of a progressive feminist he is.

he was always like this, it’s just when he started, “this” was considered progressive, and now it’s ass-backwards.

joss whedon was never progressive. he’s always been a misogynist confusing his fetish for waifish white women beating things up with feminism, and everyone let him get away with it because he was a white man who claimed the term feminism. white feminists ate his shit up, just like they do with every other mediocre white man who claims feminism and blows smoke up their ass.

he has always been sexist, racist, intensely biphobic, lesbophobic (I assume none of you are old enough to remember the shitshow that happened when he killed off tara and this allegedly hip and smart writer feigned ignorance about the killing off lesbians trope). poc have been onto his shit ever since he killed kendra and damn near every other token woc that ever turned up on buffy.

So I don’t appreciate this revisionist history about Joss. Many people even then were there, in fandom, calling out his shit myself included. And we were being reviled and run off message boards and fora and email lists for daring to question Saint Joss, Champion of Feminism. I know because I was there in Buffy fandom. I hung out on TWoP’s Buffy and Angel boards among other places. People wrote meta then on it. It’s not like the 90s and early aughts were the damn dark ages. *Fandom* wasn’t nearly as receptive to criticism of faves though. Even less of white man faves than now.

I wonder if the people complaining about his Wonder Woman script also know about his plans for Firefly’s second season that never was (which involved Inara being brutally assaulted by Reavers and making it all about Mal’s manpain). This is not anything unusual for him it’s literally par for the course

Like the only thing that changed here is that y’all finally figured out how shitty he is. many of us have known this for damn near 20 years and have been yelling about it the whole time. nobody wanted to listen because most of us were qwoc lmao

the emperor never had any clothes folks. the only thing that stagnated in him was his latent bigotry. white feminism as usual is a day late and a dollar short.

I remember (oh Gog I am old, but whatever) I remember going off about his racism & misogyny on Livejournal so you know…at least 10 or 12 years ago. Maybe longer. And getting so much blowback from white feminists about not recognizing his value. And then again in 2009 bringing it up on a panel at WisCon & someone stopping me in a hallway to lecture me about how much worse things used to be, as though the fact that he kills off or dehumanizes Black characters (especially Black women) in new settings is an improvement.  And yes Whedon is better than the absolute worst possible people in Hollywood, but that doesn’t make him good, doesn’t make his work less creepy. Marti Noxon’s work is why so many people liked Buffy, but I guess we’re supposed to ignore her too in favor of pretending Whedon wasn’t always a problem.