Fuck Joss Whedon

I've already mentioned that "literary" writing is dead in America, but what about popular writing? Much worse, though not a zombie because that would imply it was ever human. And you wretched swine are into that. However, after careful study, I've found much of this awful emanates from one malignant tumor in the body of contemporary entertainment...

Obey the neckbeard!

Joss Whedon. The mingy manchild who gave the world Buffy the Vampire Slayer and some other shows loved by people who think of Buffy as the best show ever. They'll tell you all that stuff is clever, original, feminist, or whatever adjective gives them a warm fuzzy feeling. These people are idiots because, by any objective criteria, Whedon's work fails on all those points.

Clever? If you think stunted mumbling constitutes wit. I understand some poor souls have never seen a Coen brothers movie so that's not too much of a stretch. What cleverness does occasionally show up feels forced and awkward, or pops up in the middle of a serious moment, ruining the drama. Because Whedon has no sense for revision, "killing the baby" as it's often called. It sounds funny so leave it in, context be damned!

Original? Compared to what? I'll admit the "cheerleader kills the monster" was different but not seven seasons different. And having seen enough Angel and Firefly to be unimpressed, I can say he just recycles the same plots and archetypes with only cosmetic changes to the setting or accents. The one thing that ever stood out to me in Angel was when the title character got turned into a puppet - but that was still overshadowed by some turgid romantic subplot. After watching Burn Notice, I see that Whedon can't even write romantic tension for adults, just awkward teenagers and those with all the emotional maturity of awkward teenagers. Which explains his popularity in certain circles but I'm getting ahead of myself...

As for the whole feminism thing, lots of others have called bullshit on that. I'll only add that for supposedly empowered female characters, they sure do love the cock. And not in a healthy way but in the way fantasized about by impotent male nerds.

Which brings me to those miserable bastards known as Whedonites. To be fair, Whedon himself isn't always terrible. At best he's mediocre, couching the same cheeseball one-liners from Arnold's day in contemporary geek in-jokes. This would make him just another Hollywood hack, except his mouth-breathing fans hype him to the stratosphere. Go to Amazon right now and check out the reviews of The Avengers. A handful of the 160-ish reviews are negative, and they have on average 500 down votes. Compare that to any other product on the site... and it doesn't compare. Five times as many down votes as reviews! It's a cult of personality masquerading as a fandom!

Should the object of worship be held accountable for such behavior? Hell yes, he enables it by presenting the same escapist fantasy to these losers over and over. A common criticism of the internet - "bad information can circulate forever in a bubble where everybody agrees with it" - springs immediately to  mind, only in this case it's bad storytelling. Left to survive on their merit, Whedon's tales would be confined to the B-movie bargain bin. Thanks to an energetic minority - with nothing else going on in their lives - he's been propelled to summer blockbuster status.

And, in the instances where these trolls don't shout down all legitimate criticism, Whedon denies all responsibility for the subsequent bomb! He famously said of his work on Alien: Resurrection, "They cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do,"  when the simple fact is not even Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Ron Perlman could salvage the steaming pile of a script Whedon delivered. Try this - watch that mess again and see how often you cringe. I'll bet good money it'll be at all those "clever" lines of dialogue.

So fuck Joss Whedon and fuck you double if you like him. You're what's wrong with America.