Maybe he's worried his "petite woman in the corner is actually the strongest person in the room" troupe might not mesh with Babs's vibe.
Agreed, though Cass would have been perfect for his...uh..."preferences" in that department. Though I guess having the petite little girl who can kick everyone's butt NOT having a patriarchal figure to look up to, but instead a highly intelligent, capable, wheelchair bound woman as her mentor figure was the deal breaker. Bonus points for her actual father being physically and mentally abusive and her quasi-adopted father figure being demanding and emotionally distant. I tell you what, the whole "pro-feminist" narrative of his works take on a whole new light once you realise that Giles, Wesley, and Mal are the self-insert characters.
I love you man. That said, I've been through the stress of divorce and the stress of COVID. I don't use those as excuses, it's just a swamp I have to swim through. Joss is in a far better position to swim through all this sh*t than any of us. I don't cut him, or anyone else slack for divorce or COVID.
Yeah, not buying it. He surely had plenty of ideas; they just weren't getting approved, and, in the wake of JL's under-performance, along with general uncertainty as to how to handle Batman on the big screen, and the Joker spinoff project likely in the works around the same time, his ideas/scripts drew the short straw.
You have no right to say what amounts of stress can make or break a person's mental health. We all know people who have fallen harder from even less, and if you personally don't, then lucky you.
Gape and spew at someone else, thank you. They didn't even come up with the joke, old joke or not, until months after production had ended. Chris Evans had his hand over his face because he had his beard he grew for his next project. They decided to use the joke because Joss and the producers liked Downey's delivery of the suggestion. He didn't have it on top of a stack of jokes he wanted to use in the film. Just because you want something to be one way doesn't mean it's that way. And telling me I posted, therefore I'm wrong doesn't make it so, either. Talk about pedanism.
Interestingly, of those three I think Wesley is probably the one with whom he identifies most (Just by the subtext and various things he's said over the years.), and he's the one who's a total creep.
Giles is literally the subject of the "mentor figure who betrays you whom you have to let go of" trope in Buffy season seven. I think Xander was much more the self-insert in Buffy.
There was Buffy after Season 5? I know they brought everybody back for a musical but I thought that was just a one-off.
Xander was more the result of the writers running out of ideas for a character after Season 3 but the actor not wanting to leave...so he spends more then half the show meandering around due to being beyond the expiry date.
Xander actually had a decent character arc. He went from your typical teenage boy to someone without any direction after high school to maturing as he found a purpose that lines up more with his skills of not really being a great student but still a hard worker and making it in Construction and then his fears of being like his parents that end up dooming his love for Anya which was real unlike the kind of teenage crush he had on Buffy when in high school and sort of with Cordy. Granted that was when they sort of ran out of story for him but at this point it was season 6 with only one more season to go so they did alright I feel with the character. Granted they did alright with all the characters IMO. I mean it's a great show so of course most of the stuff they did with them worked out well. Only real dropped ball was Willow's girlfriend in the final season. Never really liked the character and couldn't hold a candle to OZ, Tara and even Xander when dealing with him as a crush. I guess Dawn sort of ran out of story as well once her being The Key was no longer important. Maybe they should have made her a vampire or something. Jason
I'll spare everyone my hot take on Whedon but it is probably not the best time for a man to be creating projects with female characters, especially one with some perceived baggage. Most of the new projects we're seeing with women characters are being matched up with like writers and directors and so on.
That too! Umm. Well. I mean... * * * Re: Firefly. I would consider Wash to be much more of the self-insert character than Mal. If Mal is the self-insert, it's unintentional -- Mal is depicted as being quite often a verbally abusive asshole, and, well, apparently Whedon is too.
Which honestly is another example of "Woke Culture" getting too big for its britches. I'm all for women creators writing and/or directing projects about women, POC making POC projects, LGBT making LGBT projects, etc., but in each example, there exists the danger of each group expounding itself out of existence. I've had this argument here before, most recently in the Batwoman thread. On the one hand, it's great to cast a lesbian to play Batwoman, as the character is lesbian and representation is long overdue. But it's too easy to make "only gay can play gay" into "gay can only play gay" and force the LGBT actors back into the closet just so they can find work. After all, if there's no need to specify a character's sexual orientation/identity, say in a feel-good family film, why do so? And since there are no such characters, why hire out actors to play them? And then there is this. The autism spectrum community has just come down on Sia like a ton of bricks for casting Maddie Ziegler to play a non-verbal autistic character instead of an actual non-verbal autistic. Sia has stated that she attempted to work with such an actor, but the stress of the production turned out to be too much for her. The reality of the situation is that if the able actor can play the character respectfully, while the role is too much for the actor who corresponds to the character's reality, should the project be dropped, and the character's story be ignored? Or is it possible that having the able actor play the role gets the character and their reality the attention they deserve, so that in the future new ways of making such a project can make allowances for the (autistic, say) actor to represent themself with the same level of respect?
Side-note: I've been thinking about how, for whatever reason, the quality of Whedon's work seems to have gone down since The Avengers. Much Ado was lovely, but, well, he wasn't really the writer for that one for obvious reasons. He wrote and direct the pilot for Agents of SHIELD, and that was fine but not amazing. Avengers: Age of Ultron was good, but didn't really reach the heights of entertainment he reached in The Avengers or of genuine artistry he reached circa 2000-2005. Justice League was a bit of a mess; I could attribute it to being a Frankensteinian attempt to sew together two entirely different, conflicting artistic visions, but even the bits that are clearly Whedon's work are a bit of a let-down frankly -- especially because he's weirdly objectifying Wonder Woman, even to the point of having a "guy falls into a woman's boobs when they both fall down" gag, which is the sort of thing Whedon himself used to object to. Whedon famously spent a year trying to failing to come up with a good story for Batgirl -- this from the guy who for six years came up with 12-22 young woman superhero stories a season on a much tighter budget? And now leaving The Nevers due to "exhaustion?" Even Dollhouse, circa 2009, was a bit of a let-down. The only post-Avengers thing he's done I can think of that I really enjoyed was The Cabin in the Woods, but that was co-written and directed by Drew Goddard. Even Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog was co-written by his brother and sister-in-law. And then a friend pointed out to me that essentially the works of his I've been disappointed in were all things he seems to have been doing after his marriage fell apart circa 2011 -- and that it's possible that his wife Kai Cole was a significant creative influence for him, possibly as an unofficial early-stage editor, or possibly even an uncredited co-writer. That does fit the available evidence -- we know that Cole sang the female parts in the Buffy musical demos for him, we know she co-produced Much Ado and In Your Eyes with him, we know she and he were co-hosts of their famous weekend Shakespeare get-togethers. It fits the available evidence in another way: In Your Eyes was written in the early 1990s, before Whedon and Cole got together, and, well, the script for that one is mediocre, too. So I really do find myself wondering if Cole's influence may have been that extra ingredient that pushed Whedon into greatness in the late 90s and early-to-mid 00s. Because the stuff he's turned out since Avengers? It's just not in the same league.
Xander's jealousy over Buffy never went away and he was constantly making poor decisions because of it. He was constantly dismissive of Cordy and patronizing to Anya. And always took Willow for granted. He used his charm and humor to pacify them and than made grandiose gestures to excuse his behavior. It's toxic (potentially abusive) relationship 101.
Stepping back from casting to writing, I was just listening to linguist John McWhorter's Lexicon Valley podcast's episode titled "White Author, Black English. Problem?" discussing the danger of editors telling non-white writers not to try to write "black" and the possible unintended consequence that some writers might simply cut back on including black characters for fear of being taken to task. (McWhorter is black, btw.). That would be an unfortunate turn. The perilous part of writing something that isn’t your experience—especially in something as fraught as race—is that all you can do is write your version of what you think the experience is. It may line up with the truth but it will necessarily only coincidentally line up with that truth. Even if the writer does the research and immerses themselves in the culture and the subject there is a danger that confirmation bias will take over and they will discard those facts which don’t align with their perceived version of whatever it is they think happened and thus will cherry pick and pay attention to those facts which match that fictionalized viewpoint and end up with a 21st century Grace Hassell Soul Sister. As ever, the pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.
I have often wondered if that might be part of why Buffy and Angel were so incredibly white in spite of being set in southern California.
One thing I do find kind of interesting in relation to this conversation about Xander, is that the reboot comics have actually turned him into Spoiler: spoiler their big bad. I've only read the first trade, so I haven't reached that point yet, but given the negative light the character is being looked at with now, it does seem like an interesting choice. And I was looking through the solicitation descriptions for next few issues, and issue 20 talks about a big confrontation between him, Buffy, and Willow, and somebody will die. The descriptions for 21 and 22 mention Buffy and Willow, so it looks like they might actually be killing him off. I have to confess, when I was watching the show regularly, he was actually one of my favorite characters. I never really noticed the bad behavior you guys are talking about.