Horace Slughorn is enormously fat in the books (though not the movies), and while he’s not the greatest guy - he explained Horcruxes to a young Voldemort, and he’s very into status and cultivating high-profile students - he does play a large part in the defense of Hogwarts at the end of Deathly Hallows. He certainly redeems whatever earlier failings he had.
Hmm… reading up on Slughorn (I’d forgotten him), he’s motivated by “creature comforts”, he’s “self-indulgent, enjoying an excess of expensive liquor, good food and fine clothing.” He’s prone to favoritism; and he’s a Slytherin. I guess that’s better than being a Dursley, but it’s not amazing.
Take out the Slytherin, and you’ve described me…
Modnote: I’m going to assume this thread has run its course. So these sidetracks are fine at this point. Barring some new news on the original subject, I think that is a fair statement.
Thanks–I meant to say something similar, that I’d be happy to shut up if other folks wanted to focus on Whedon, but that the lack of news made me think shooting the shit about other problematic nerd-faves would be okay.
My personal opinion is that Whedon saw an opportunity and took it. He realized there was an untapped market for fictional works featuring a competent young female protagonist. So he targeted a work for that market. There’s nothing terribly wrong in this. Lots of great fiction is created with no deeper thought than the realization there’s an audience who will eagerly buy it.
The problem started when the praise being given to Whedon’s work began being heaped on Whedon himself. And he participated in this. He began marketing himself just as much as he was marketing his work.
That was what hurt Whedon in the end. Nobody likes a hypocrite. If Whedon had just stuck with the story that he was a typical Hollywood figure who happened to create works that appealed to a feminist audience, he’d be mostly okay right now. Most people can separate the work from the author. But Whedon built himself up as an icon and it’s now been revealed that he doesn’t live up the status he has claimed.
I don’t think that is fair to Whedon. Everything indicates the original Buffy (movie) script was something closer to the eventual show and studio interference dumbed it down. I think he likes strong female protagonists but that doesn’t stop him from being an asshole toward some of his actresses.
I’m just a casual Buffy fan, but it did change for American TV at least the way woman were portrayed. He accomplished something while being part of the problem behind the scenes.
I think it’s a bit more than that. As pointed out upthread [sorry to the poster who pointed it out, I think in a response to me, but I can’t find it at the moment to cite], Whedon was also portrayed in geek-centric media, and actively participated in shaping that portrayal, as geek-made-good who was having a ball playing with geek culture tropes and making entertainment for fellow geeks, before geek culture went mainstream. He was in a lot of ways similar to Kevin Smith. His image wasn’t as down-to-earth, he wasn’t really ever a fellow fanboy, but even as a Hollywood mover-and-shaker he still carried with him that aura of being a genuinely nice guy who had fun making fun projects. He also definitely projected an image of a guy who was fun to work with (see the discussion upthread of Much Ado About Nothing).
His hypocrisy, in short, was not only, or maybe even mainly, about being a “feminist” creator who wasn’t a feminist in his actual daily work and personal life. His hypocrisy was also, and maybe even more, in projecting an image of a fun guy making fun projects, where everyone involved was having fun, while it turns out (if the accusations are true) that he was actually a toxic, bullying boss, and his “fun” projects were actually a nightmare for many of the actors who worked on them.
I sort of feel we’re saying the same thing. I mentioned Whedon’s reputation as a feminist because that’s one of the first things that propelled him to icon status. The general issue is that Whedon was marketing himself as something he wasn’t.
But compare Joss Whedon to Roger Tapert. Tapert was also able to make a series in the nineties about a strong female protagonist and he followed this up with a lot of geek-friendly movies and tv series. But he did this without making himself part of the product he was selling.
In the video game industry, a problem with getting any sort of labor reform is that there’s a culture among employees that see things like putting up with excessive overtime as “badass.” Working two months of crunch at 80 hours a week makes you “hardcore” and not “exploited.” I suspect there’s a similar thing in Hollywood that lets bullies skate. Surviving making a picture with a tyrant of a director is a badge of honor, and its considered “worth it” because they’ve bought into the myth that abuse brings out better performances.
Yeah the righteous bullying and personal fable is off the charts in the off the charts books.
Wait, I had to look that name up. The guy behind Xena? Seriously? That show was low brow dreck and anti-feminist I thought? I’m really confused.
Maybe I missed something as I never watched much of it, but I thought that show was closer to I Dream of Jeannie on the strong woman protagonist scale, rather than Buffy.
There was definitely a lot of cheesecake and titillation, but Xena apparently really did become a feminist and more specifically a lesbian icon. She was definitely a strong female protagonist, even if she was doing her ass-kicking in a microskirt. Buffy didn’t display nearly as much skin, but Sarah Michelle Gellar wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn’t exactly shy away from taking advantage of that.
Yes, it didn’t a high brow concept like a high school girl fighting vampires.
Let’s face facts, any tv show and movie is going to have a large element of silliness in it if you stop and think about it too long. The questions is how well the work rises above its inherent silliness.
I have no dog in this fight. I have never watched an episode of Buffy or Xena.
OK, but you can see where it was easy to get the wrong impression about Xena I hope. Every publicity pic looks like something closer to Baywatch and the first season was closer to Baywatch.
I never really got into Xena, and only saw a handful of episodes. Still, I’m surprised you missed how big a deal Xena is in feminist and lesbian circles. Xena fandom is, I think, almost exclusively feminist, and very, very queer. The show’s generally lauded as a pioneer of queer representation in popular media. Although standards at the time meant they couldn’t make the relationship explicit* it was clearly intended to be a lesbian relationship, and not just something projected onto it by the fans. It also didn’t fuck it up by having one of them end up with a dude. It was low brow and low budget, but that was part of what made it a big deal: it was a popular, mainstream entertainment that was this close to being openly gay.
On the feminist side of the coin, she was a kick ass action star who was never cast as the damsel in distress, or needed a man to solve her problems, which was also pretty rare at the time.
Also, she was Greek, so she gets a pass on wearing a skirt into battle.
*Not that sort of explicit, you pervs.
Sorry, Herc & Xena were off my radar very quick. Neither show were of interest to me. I tried a few of each and found both wanting.
I mean, how can we know? It’s possible that:
(a) Whedon is an amoral cynic who realized “hey, there’s a big market for female action stars, and then I can pretend to be a feminist and grow rich”
or
(b) Whedon genuinely holds and values feminist ideals in his conscious mind, and genuinely felt that he was doing good by increasing the amount of strong female protagonists in pop culture… but also is an asshole control freak whose assholeishness, when directed towards women, takes on very clearly sexist forms.
(Or of course, a mix of the two).
But there’s no reason to think that people can’t sincerely and honestly espouse and support ideals that they themselves fall short of.
Absolutely, I agree. And Whedon very well might be “(b).” We can’t know. And the public conversation shouldn’t depend on knowing for sure which is which.
The ultimate focus should be on addressing toxic workplaces in show business (and other businesses).
There are posts in this thread to the effect that well that’s the way Hollywood is, or that’s the way creative geniuses are. I’m sorry but no. We don’t have to accept abusive employers in order to have good entertainment.
Really, Harvey Weinstein helped create some great movies. Are we going to say that we need to tolerate some rape because that’s what geniuses do? No. No. No. No.
We can’t say whether Whedon is a feminist or a sexist “in his heart” but we can and must address his behavior and its impact on the people who worked for him. (His infidelity to his wife is not my concern except to the extent that he abused his workplace authority while doing it.)