Whedonesque Fail

[thedivinegoat_archive]

Fail Fail Fail Fail Fail Fail

If you've got your feminist bingo card ready, read the Hathor Legacy thread. You could fill the card several times over.

(I posted the Hathor and Rebecca Allen links, but never went back to the thread as it made me too angry. See the link for Girl Wonder, have a look and then Simon's pulling the same shit all over again. I'm sure that by tomorrow morning you'll be able to fill your racism bingo card as well).

ETA I pulled those quotes because they are either mods, or in the case of bix! people with a huge amount of credibility and respect at Whedonesque.

ETA 2 "Was there a discussion that the Cosby-Show had to few white characters?
Did anyone mention that the Sopranos had too many italians??"

ETA 3This post is now unlocked.

Comments

[simonf.livejournal.com]

I do get why people have a problem with his record on killing off characters on Buffy. But I genuinely think he doesn't look at their sex or skin colour. He just kills people so it can add to the drama. I can understand why it looks bad when you look at the pattern but I don't think there's any wilful malice or ignorance behind it. Though I would be interested to see what the artist Georges Jeanty thought of it all. I would imagine his input matters as well.

And one minor problem I have with a lot of critiques of Joss' track record on killing people is that they tend to focus on Buffy and ignore what happened on Angel and Firefly where there were PoC in the core cast.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Actually, I am factoring in what happened on Angel. (See: Gunn, Gavin, etc.) Firefly is a different case, as it's a different universe; but there, yet again, the sole black male dies, and for all the Chinese spoken there was a decided lack of visible Chinese characters. The whole point is that things can reflect prejudice without the author being aware of either their prejudices or the way they're being expressed in the work.

Everyone has a set of assumptions they're working with that they're not necessarily aware of, and that's okay. It doesn't mean we think (or I do, at least) that Joss is a bad person. But it does mean I want him to learn, and grow, and do fewer problematic things in the future (I'm a bit heartened, in fact, but the slightly more diverse-looking cast of Dollhouse).

[simonf.livejournal.com]

The lack of Chinese people on Firefly was a bit of odd. But I gather Simon and River Tam were to be viewed as being from Chinese as well as Caucasian descent. And I think that the Chinese in the 'Verse did have their own planet, we just never got to see it. Did they become isolationist? We'll never know. The short run of Firefly did limit the back story so a lot of it is presumption and vague memories tweaked from writers' brains.

but there, yet again, the sole black male dies

And the sole married man dies as well. Joss will kill anyone to further the plot.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Because we all know there's a great lack of married male characters in current popular culture. Good lord.