Which was a TV show, where the head writer/showrunner/creator wields all (or at least most) of the power. Whedon’s failures with the Buffy movie and Alien 4 were movies, where the writer is seen as almost a nuisance by the director/producers, the people who wield all the power in film.
Can you give some examples from other shows? I can certainly see where you’re coming from in Dollhouse - although I very much disagree with your interpretation of Whedon’s intent, I can at least see the material you’re using to arrive at that conclusion. With his other shows, I can’t really think of any examples of that trope. The closest I can come up with is the episode of Buffy that introduced Warren as a geek who had built himself a sex-bot, then abandoned it when he met a real girl. I have trouble imagining how anyone could view that episode and come away with the idea that the point of it was to titillate, though. Really, it came across more as a polemic against a particular stereotype of male lust. I’m sure that, out of twelve seasons of two TV shows, I’m forgetting some other episodes that, with some amount of manhandling, could fit into your description, but it seems to be quite a stretch to say that it appears with “noticeable regularity.”
Hmm, I can kinda see it. Spike also had the Buffybot for a while, and then there were the Companions on Firefly - they weren’t stripped of free will and personality, but they were willing sex slaves. It came up in Angel briefly too, in the episode She, with those women from the alternate dimension who were literally turned into mindless sex slaves - though, TBF, we only saw them as fighters trying to escape that slavery, with no time spent on any mindless sex-slave titillation.
However, the women always break away, it’s never condoned and there genuinely are lots of very strong female characters in his stories (not always physically strong, either), so I can forgive that weirdness.
Whedon’s not perfect. He’s just much, much better than most and some episodes of his shows, especially episodes where he was the writer, pretty much are perfect.
Dollhouse is such a shame. Lots of people are going to miss the brilliance of season 2 because of the crap of season 1. I only slogged on with the first season because my GF wanted to watch it. But the second season, WOW. It’s of a completely different quality. I’d recommend that people watch season 2 first, or maybe start from Epitapth One (which blew my mind away, though that was partly in comparison to season 1).
Say what? Companions were never slaves of any sort. They were very high status folk following a highly trained and admired profession. Mal wanted Inara aboard Serenity for just that reason. She would allow them access to areas and places and contacts they otherwise could never hope of reaching.
Sounds like someone is bringing their own baggage to their analysis.
It might be a case of confusing inclusion with advocacy. One of Whedon’s defining attributes is that he puts lots of things he completely disagrees with into his shows, as a means for examining the implications of those things. For example, Mal is politically libertarian, whereas Whedon himself is a big-D Democrat along the lines of Sorkin. Similarly, the fact that Whedon includes space geishas in his scifi universe doesn’t imply some inner desire for real geishas, any more than the inclusion of sexy androids in “Battlestar Galactica” implies some secret desire by Ron Moore for RealDolls.
Seconded. I’m fairly sure Joss wouldn’t have killed off Newt, for instance (I kinda see Winona Ryder’s Call as a grown-up artificial Newt substitute)
De Gustibus. I was hooked from the beginning.
Yeah - and even when he is ripped for his writing work, they always forget to credit him for his successes, like Toy Story or (the way underrated, imo) Titan A.E.
I’ve rarely been so tempted to quote a long passage and just write “This”. Your thoughts on Whedon and his fans are pretty much the same as my own. The only part of the above that doesn’t apply to me is “I’ve sampled all the flavors of his writing and will continue to do so”. I’ve been exposed to some of the flavors of his writing and have zero interest in trying more.
In fairness to Whedon, I merely dislike the man and his work. What I hate is the Whedon cult. It sure doesn’t help that 1) there’s a supporting character on Buffy who shares my real name, so of course Buffy fans immediately think I want to talk about the show! :rolleyes: and 2) I hang out on here, where any thread on a topic with even the most tangential connection to Joss Whedon or his work will wind up degenerating into a lengthy hijack on the subject.
I am sure there are plenty of people who simply enjoy watching Buffy, etc., and aren’t at all pushy or obnoxious about it, but they’re unfortunately overshadowed by those who are. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the Whedon cult say that anyone who doesn’t like Buffy needs to watch every episode in order from the beginning. No, no we don’t. I already know more about Whedon’s work than I ever cared to, and prolonged exposure to more sounds about as fun as Chinese water torture. And frankly, even if watching every episode of Buffy in order were guaranteed to make me love the show then I still wouldn’t do it. If I became a Whedon fan I’d be forced to deal with the irritating cult subset even more often, and the prospect of becoming a cultist myself is too terrible to contemplate. I’d rather skip straight to the Flavor-Aid.
That’s because the conversation usually starts like this: “I’ve seen three random episodes from Buffy. In one she was in high school, in one she was in college and in another I think she was a robot or something. Why don’t I think this is the best show ever yet?”
Taking tiny pieces of the whole (even watching episodes in order from the same season, not just from the beginning, would help) will leave you completely lost as to how much Buffy is. So when someone is clearly confused, but wants to watch the show, the fans fill in why they’re lost. Come to think of it, this applies to people who get confused by Lost too.
The only real answer to this question is to get ahold of some of Whedon’s work and watch it. If you like it, you won’t have to ask the rest of us why, and even if you decide it’s not your thing, you’ll probably at least see some of the good features of it that the rest of us appreciate.
A few months back one blogger launched her theory about Joss Whedon’s sexual hangups. Her opinion, OK. But she’s now got acolytes who can’t be bothered to watch his shows & draw their own conclusions but want to sound intelligent. So they see a thread for Whedon fans & chime in to deposit their oh-so-intellectual opinions. Can’t call it threadshitting because the stuff’s so predigested–sort of like those neat little pellets that rabbits leave behind.
I like Joss Whedon because his works amuse me. They bear up to repeated watching & show surprising depth. If somebody doesn’t like his stuff or just thinks they might not like his stuff because there are too many girls & women involved, that is absolutely their right. Let them find something they enjoy & start threads to express their enthusiasm; I won’t try to convert them.
Last night’s final episode of Dollhouse was excellent but heartbreaking; so many stories deserved fuller development. But I’m not feeling very patient right now.
I’ve never quite understood the slavering over his stuff, myself. My husband goes through spells of downloading his old stuff and I’ve seen most of Firefly, Serenity, about half a season of Buffy, and all of Dollhouse. Dollhouse was pretty good when they weren’t dealing with Echo, Buffy was pretty meh, and Firefly was just plain stupid. I suppose I could go through and watch more of the old stuff, but why on earth would I want to do that? I don’t need or want to go through extra effort to find stuff that bores the tits off me when I could just turn on my tv and find plenty that would fit that bill.
I think a lot of my indifference is that I like self-referential humor, I like it in very small, tightly controlled doses whereas Whedon seems to slather it on with a trowel. It comes across to me as forced and almost clownish and right off-putting.
Most of my friends are huge fans of Whedon. I didn’t watch Firefly until shortly before Serenity came out which meant that I was the odd man out at many social gatherings. Almost invariably there would be 20-30 minutes of conversation revolving around the series and all I could do is sit there and shrug my shoulders. Even after I saw the series, which I enjoyed quite a bit, I just didn’t want to talk about it all the time. It was just weird to me how much devotion they had to a series that didn’t even last a whole season. Strangely enough there isn’t a whole lot of the same type of conversation surrounding Dollhouse.
Odesio
I’m sure the conversation seems that way to people who can’t grasp that anyone could possibly both dislike Buffy and be uninterested in changing. But I have been on the receiving end of “Well, you just need to watch EVERY EPISODE, IN ORDER!” and I’ve never said anything like that.
In my experience, the conversation opens with some reference to Buffy by the other person, with the clear expectation that I will then reveal myself as a Buffy fan and we’ll spend the next few hours talking about Buffy. When I say I don’t care for the show I’m asked how many episode I’ve seen. When I say I don’t know the exact number but I’ve seen a few and I didn’t like them, I’m told that I have to watch every single episode in order and then I’ll surely love it. Because I clearly have nothing better to do with my time or money than obtain every episode of a 7 season TV series and watch them all in order. :rolleyes: I wouldn’t do that with a show I liked, so I’d have to be some kind of masochist to do so with a show I dislike.
Yes, the show said that their profession was highly admired. But their profession was selling themselves for sex. They were willing sex slaves. By definition. I’m not sure how you can deny that.
I think you might want to throw your juvenile ‘baggage’ accusations at someone else.
@Tanbarkie: Miller asked where there were other examples of ‘willing sex slaves’ in Whedon’s work. So I gave some examples. I have spent bloody ages defending Buffy against the kind of idiots that claim it’s misogynist and homophobic on the basis of one event in one episode - my God there are lots of those idiots out there - but this ‘sexbot obsession’ allegation does have at least some basis in reality.
I never said he advocated it. In fact, I pointed out that the subjugation of those women is never condoned. It is, perhaps, simply inclusion, but it is a lot of inclusion. It just doesn’t bother me, for the reasons I gave before.
What’s odd, though, is that some people - not you personally - will go on and on and on about how terrible Buffy, Firefly and Dollhouse are, with loads of twisted theories about the series, and lots of very strong opinions, and all without watching more than an episode or two.
If I’ve only seen an episode or two of something then I’ll say what I thought about those episodes, but no more. If someone tells me that the show improves tons after whatever episode, and I haven’t seen after that episode, then I’ve got no grounds to agree or disagree with them - but that doesn’t stop some people.
The same can be said for just about any work of art that people like. Personally, if Arrested Development and the works of Tolkein vanished tomorrow, I wouldn’t bat an eye. Ditto a ton of other works. So what? People get enthused about what they like, and they like talking to others about it. You aren’t ever going to be able to change that, so getting your panties in a bunch over it is counter-productive and leads to undue stress. Which leads to premature hair loss, anal leakage and chronic halitosis. 
scifisam - I suggest you look up the word “slave” in a dictionary.
He’s very polarizing. As annoying, exasperating, and rabid as Whedonites* (especially Browncoats**) can be, his detractors often show the same traits. This subset of his critics are just as insistent on showing how much they hate his shows as his fans are at showing how he’s the greatest writer since Shakespeare. It seems to get very personal, and reminds me a lot of the Star Wars vs. Star Trek rivalry, except that that makes more sense to me, since it’s two sci-fi franchises, and we geeks do love our “Who would win in a fight?” hypotheticals.
- For those that missed my initial post in this thread, I’m one of his fans
** …and *Firefly *is his magnum opus. Still, Browncoats are fucking annoying.
I suggest you read more than one word in a post. ‘Willing sex slaves’ was the phrase I used to describe the companions. Now, the word ‘willing’ seems to go against ‘slave’ too, but it doesn’t because ‘sex slave’ itself is in currency as a phrase that doesn’t depend on the ‘permanent ownership’ aspect of the word ‘slave.’ They were women who sold their bodies and their skills to other people who wanted the primarily for sex. That’s not exactly the same as the actual sexbots that appeared in Buffy or the mindwiped women (and at least one man, that we know of) in Dollhouse, but it’s in the same general area.
There are a lot of sexbots of various kinds in Whedon’s work, more than you’d expect, and denying that is like denying that there are a lot of vampires in Buffy.
However, acknowledging their existence doesn’t mean you have to, as some people do, leap to the conclusion that Joss Whedon has a fetish for sexbots or that he hates women or that he likes being in control or all the things various people say. He could even be including them so much because he thinks it’s a really good trope to fight against. Who knows?
People say that ‘Whedonites’ will defend his shows against any accusation and get personal about it. That’s what you’re doing. It makes the rest of us look bad. 
Oh, come now. As I recall, only two vampires actually got into Buffy.
(Unless you count the Master and Dracula, both of whom got their teeth – and only their teeth – into Buffy.)
No, that would be a whore. The clear difference between a whore and a Companion was elaborated on more than once in the show, but best in Heart of Gold.