Let's Eviscerate Joss Whedon!

Joss Whedon is one of those popular writers we sometimes talk about.

He’s a television writer, mainly, famous for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Dollhouse. He’s an object of veneration for much of geekdom due to his Tarantinoesque knowledge of things like comics, television history (he’s a third-generation television person), and fantasy, his tendency to get screwed over by the Fox network on an alarmingly regular basis, and his general affability and accessibility as compared to a lot of other writers of cult television (I’m looking at you, Russell T. Davies).

And all of these things, especially the last, are admirable. He seems like a great guy. That being said, however, he is one of those writers who I am tired of people expecting me to like just because I like Doctor Who and anime and fantasy and superheroes, because I just don’t think a lot of his work is actually very good. For this reason, he is a rare slice of prime fodder for the first instalment in what will be my ongoing series, Let’s Eviscerate Overrated Writers.

The first problem with Mr Whedon is his trigger-happiness. I don’t mean that he’s a gun nut like Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs, two far superior writers. I mean that he uses indiscriminate slaughter of fan-favourite characters as a cheap way to get sympathy. This isn’t to say that this is never the right way to do things—killing some sympathetic character at some point is actually necessary in many or even most types of stories. I cried over Chloe in Noir, Katarina in Doctor Who, or Mr Tully in Sapphire and Steel just as much as anybody. But the way Mr Whedon goes about this is all wrong. In the Firefly movie, Serenity (there had to be a Firefly movie because it was one of the shows that Fox cheated out of a proper finale), two characters die. One dies for a reason; another doesn’t. The character whose death does nothing to advance the plot and isn’t even used for as much interpersonal drama between the survivors as one would expect was also the single sweetest and most likable character on the show, although this isn’t difficult since the show was essentially the Lost Cause of the Confederacy IN SPACE.

This brings me nicely to my second point. Mr Whedon is often held up as a paragon of social conscience and progressive values in television writing, mainly because so much of his work features Summer Glau beating the shit out of much larger men. Really? Is Whedon’s writing really so conscious and forward-thinking compared to that of people like P.J. Hammond of pro-conservation nightmare fuel fame or Mashimo Kouichi of anti-US-involvement-in-Latin-America dramedy fame? When Tara died in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, her widow, her lesbian partner Willow, turned evil and became the main antagonist for that season. ‘One lesbian partner dies, the other lesbian partner turns evil’ is one of those tropes that exists at a really toxic intersection of homophobia and misogyny along with ‘lesbians are all victims of child abuse’ and ‘bisexual women are all whores’. When it happens in a show like Grey’s Anatomy or Battlestar Galactica it’s a problem, and when it happened here it was a problem. If this was the only example of Mr Whedon’s writing undermining his feminist/anti-racist/LGBT-ally/what-have-you credentials it would be unfortunate but an instance of ‘everybody fails sometimes’. But this is a show that takes place in a Southern California with no Hispanics, by a writer who in another show tried to milk human trafficker characters for sympathy and respect and portrayed them as morally superior to grey-market gun sellers somehow, in another show brought the romanticisation of the antebellum South and the Confederate cause proudly into the twenty-first century, and has his own admitted and strong prejudices, most notably against religious people. (He uses the ‘sky bully’ description for the monotheistic concept of God, which is pretty much a sure sign that the person saying it knows nothing about how religion or religious people actually operate and doesn’t care to learn because he’s content in his smug superiority.)

Add to that the facts that the genre-blending and world-building are shoddy, it’s practically impossible to tell characters’ voices apart because they all talk like either hipster white teenagers (or rather hipster white teenagers imitate the way Joss Whedon characters talk), the few exceptions tend towards various ethnic or historical stereotypes (see the fusty Brit Giles in Buffy, the aforementioned magical negro Book, the aw-shucks Tom Sawyer good-ol’-boy Mal Reynolds, and the over-the-top posh English human trafficker Adelle DeWitt), nothing is as original as Whedon’s fans make it out to be (I liked Firefly better when it was called Cowboy Bebop and Blake’s 7, Dollhouse better when it was called Kara no Kyoukai and DIDN’T EXPECT US TO SYMPATHISE WITH HUMAN TRAFFICKERS FOR GOD’S SAKE, and Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog better when it was called Soon I Will Be Invincible), and Mr Whedon is, I should hope, well and truly eviscerated.

It’s not that he’s a bad writer exactly, though I myself don’t care for him. It’s that he’s an entirely run-of-the-mill genre writer who happened to catch a late-nineties zeitgeist with Buffy and has been using it for ironclad editorial protection for over a decade. Nothing bad that happens in or to any Whedon show is ever his fault. Firefly was screwed over by Fox, yes, but is that such a loss considering that when Mr Whedon said ‘space Western’ he meant literal six-guns and cattle drives on partially-terraformed asteroids some-fucking-how? Dollhouse was given every possible indulgence, including axing the far-superior Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles to make way for it, and people STILL blamed Fox when it floundered and failed. The racefail and genderfail? The historyfail in Firefly? Non-existent or at the very least not ‘dear Joss’s’ fault! No sirree! This was the guy partially responsible for Alien: Resurrection and Waterworld. He was the script EDITOR for Waterworld so it wasn’t like somebody meddled with this output! But no, that wasn’t his fault EITHER!

It makes me long for the days of Rudyard Kipling, who was a cultural supremacist but actually liked people, including a lot of the people he was culturally supremacist against. Mr Whedon explicitly says that he greatly dislikes the human race as a whole, and he lets it show in his work to stratospheric, trans-Joseph Conrad levels, especially in seasons six and seven of Buffy, the end of Angel, and pretty much everything about Dollhouse. My favourite Whedon work is Toy Story, and he had several cowriters on that. That’s really all that needs to be said about my opinion of his work.

But he seems like a perfectly nice man, and I hope that more cult writers follow his lead in having the productive and respectful type of interaction that he seems to have with his fans. For a man who I genuinely dislike, tune in next time for Let’s Eviscerate Ernest Hemingway instead!