“We just wanted to show two disabled women onscreen and present it as the norm, with no fanfare. We’re also kind of big jerks in the series, which is unusual! We thought it’d be fun to play characters that aren’t necessarily likable or easily digestible, which is very different from most portrayals of disability that you see. Disabled people are supposed to be sweet, plucky, and nonthreatening, and we’re none of those things.”
***
Oh my God, it makes me IRRATIONALLY HAPPY that the defense decided their best strategy was for Robin Thicke to just go with “I hardly even wrote the song! I’ve never seen T.I. a day in my life! How did this keyboard get in my hands?”
*puts on a false mustache* “I just-a work here, molto bene. My name? Not Robin Thicke. No sir, call me…Zamboni…Godfather.”
IDK, if the mental image of Robin Thicke very poorly disguising himself as an Italian-American night watchman in order to escape embarrassment doesn’t please you in the very center of your immortal soul, I’ve got nothing else for you.
***
HI DEAR PRUDENCE ANSWERED A LETTER FROM A GRANDPARENT WHO WANTS TO SECRETLY VACCINATE THEIR GRANDSON AGAINST HIS PARENTS’ WISHES SO IF YOU ARE ANYTHING LIKE ME YOU WILL WANT TO GO READ EVERY SINGLE COMMENT BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY OPINIONS
***
Probably none of you care to read about the eighteenth anniversary of the premiere of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Would you? No, it’s been such a long time. Surely we’re all tired of talking about it by no–OKAY HERE YOU GO I WAS JUST TEASING
***
that is SO MUCH MONEY to spend on putatively haunted dolls????
***
roommate just asked if kabbalah was canon
— noah kulwin (@nkulw) March 11, 2015
***
Some day it will happen to us!
***
I don’t think there’s any other news I care to talk about today. I am SEVERAL BRIEF DAYS AWAY from closing on a house, and there is so much to do! PLEASE JUST PUT ME IN MY HOUSE NOW.
Tags: i picked grimace because robin thicke reminds me of grimace for reasons i can’t explain, link roundup, news
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Congratulations, mallory! Houses are so exciting and so awful at the same time (just ask me about the five days we spent with frozen pipes and no running water last month) but the ability to do whatever I want whenever I want is THE ABSOLUTE BEST.
And dear God how is it only Wednesday??? I am so wiped out and have zero motivation to do any work and I am in desperate need of some time off and/or a nap. Or both.
Also I can’t even stand to read comments on vaccination articles any more because the number of idiots makes my blood pressure spike and I froth at the mouth while screaming “DO YOU KNOW WHAT WHOOPING COUGH DOES TO INFANTS? IT BREAK LITTLE TINY BABY RIBS UNTIL THEY COUGH BLOOD.” This is why I’m not popular at parties, I imagine.
I took off on Monday and Tuesday for a mini-break with Spouse, and I’ve been at work for all of an hour and I’m so done.
In related news, after discussing things with Spouse and several good friends at length, I think I will be giving notice this Friday. Which is a whole other ball of wax to fret about.
Good luck with whatever comes next!
Houses ARE exciting and awful. We just spent serious buckaroos for a plumber to come unclog the wastewater pipe to the septic tank – you know, so dirty water wouldn’t keep flooding our basement. Sigh.
I’ve been fighting a nasty flu-like illness since Sunday night, and there’s nothing to do but gargle salt water, take Advil and drink fluids, and I still feel like garbage and have to deal with work nonsense, and WHY ISN’T THIS WEEK OVER YET.
Yep. Just dropped mad cash to replace the leaking water heater. And as soon as the snow melts off I don’t even want to think about how much money is going to replace gutters, fix some dry rot, deal with our ancient radiators. The yard is huge, though! That’s the whole point, right? Sigh.
I am SO SORRY about the horrible water in your basement. So very sorry.
Mallory! If it isn’t too late, consider buying a home warranty! We bought a foreclosure last year and that thing has saved our butts (also wallets) on a few occasions. We’re definitely re-upping when it expires.
Mr. Rose and I bought a then-2-year-old house that came with a warranty on the appliances. We ended up going 9 months without a microwave while the insurer dicked around. I am not the patient one in the marriage, and begged Mr. Rose to just fucking buy a new microwave and tell the insurer they can go fuck themselves. But it’s his kitchen (I do no food prep, ever), so his decision. He was able to wait. Not without significant cursing.
We laughed directly into the phone when the insurer asked us to re-up 45 days later.
Not all warranties are created equal, is what I’m saying. Insure the truly expensive stuff. Keep a savings account for the small stuff.
I love Buffy but I hate discussions about how Joss Whedon’s work is so ~*~empowering~*~ to women. What do?
I think a big problem with Whedon is that BtVS was super progressive for the mid-90s, but both Whedon and his acolytes seems pretty interested in pretending that his thinking on feminism at that time was as far as progress needs to come.
Also, I have a deep and abiding antipathy for anyone who calls him “Joss”, but doesn’t know him personally. This extends to any fan that refers to an author or a producer or whatever by their first name. Don’t know what it is exactly, but it drives me nuts.
I actually dumped Angel early on (I caught up way later, after it finished, when I was unemployed) because we went from feminist enough Buffy to Angel Saves The Women Who Need His Help, featuring A Bunch Of Dudes and Sometimes Cordie. (This was before Fred.)
I never got that far. I was a huge Buffy evangalist in High School (Buffy and I are exactly the same age, so I graduated at the end of Season 3), but by the time I got to college all the nerds had replaced “enthusiasm for something that looked like feminist progress” with “manic interest in triviallities”, and it caused me to despise both them and everything they liked.
I am…kind of not a very good person, I can admit that.
Sit with me and be friends.
Yes, please, me, too.
Hating things jerks like is typically a good choice, and tbh other than a few episodes here and there Buffy was totally downhill after S3 so you win.
I like to just go on about how much I hate Xander.
(I mean, I think at the time Buffy was pretty good for how network tv portrayed women. It’s like Joss Whedon then thought “achievement unlocked: feminist!” and never had to move past late 90s level.)
Am glad we agree on this subject.
It’s because we are so very right-thinking and correct.
We are the rightest.
So, jennytrout.com, who also does the most hilarious Fifty Shades of Grey recaps on the internet, is also rewatching and blogging Buffy in order, and one of her many, many numbered themes is Xander as Creepy Nice Guy. You would probably love these, because Xander is the worst.
I did love them! There also used to be a great LJ post but it went private.
There is a vocal minority of people on the internet who hate Xander. The thing is, they could have fixed him, but they never bothered to — everything he did was consequence-free. Unlike the female characters, he never has to deal with fallout from the crappy things he does.
It’s actually interesting to compare his trying to assault Buffy as a hyena (which I don’t really think was his fault, though pretending he forgot everything was not on) to carefully keeping him away from everyone else while killing the principal, because apparently murder-as-hyena is unforgiveable but attempted rape isn’t.
ANYWAYS I have opinions.
I once watched that episode with a brand-new not-by-choice housemate of mine, and her reaction to that scene was, “man, Xander should have gone for it, he’s such a pussy.”
I was uncomfortable around her for the next two months until I finally left.
Man, and isn’t that right, too? Xander IS a Creepy Nice Guy, but back in the mid-90s “Creepy Nice Guy” was a trope that hadn’t really been discovered yet; we hadn’t successfully identified it and codified it into something that was easy to have an opinion on, so back then he seemed a lot more sympathetic.
(Well, he seemed more sympathetic to me, before the metanoia changed my thinking on how gross and creepy Nice Guys are.)
I’ve been listening to the Dusted podcast on recommendation from someone on here, and it’s been really interesting as one of the presenters (who was very pro-Xander) is rewatching it all more critically and finding him awful in retrospect.
I believe it was noted philosopher Muhammad Ali who said “The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”
I think it’s a really good sign when we look back at things that seemed really great and progressive to us (almost) 20 years ago and they don’t hold up anymore because it means, in a certain sense, that they did their job.
“We hadn’t successfully identified it and codified it” makes it sound like “Creepy Nice Guy” is actually some kind of disease, perhaps involving a fungus that likes to attack one’s butt region.
I approve.
This is not accidental.
Okay, but has someone written the think piece comparing Xander as “Creepy Nice Guy” to the Trio from season 6?
In as much as Buffy was ahead of its time in gender politics, I think the best example is that the Trio managed to portray the narrow line between “awkward nerd boys fear/don’t understand women” and “actually murderously violent misogyny”. Which, in these years with Isla Vista and Gamergate and also the internet as a whole, feels like the most prescient thing that show ever did.
So it feels extra-strange that the show would never punish Xander for his sins while literally making villains of and then killing the Trio.
I just rewatched Season 6, and Warren’s misogyny really jumped out at me – I had known it was there, I just hadn’t realised quite how prominent it was. As you say, the show did a really good job of that.
Oh dang, how was I getting through life without knowing the word “metanoia”? Thanks!
hahah when I first learned that word it was a revelation. “Oh wait, you mean that feeling has a NAME? !!!!!”
Oh god, Xander. He never ever deserved Anya, even a little bit.
Anya: “You don’t care about what I think, you don’t ask about my day.”
Xander: “You really did turn into a real girl, didn’t you?”
Motherfucker, I will fight you! (“You” being Xander in this instance, obviously.)
And how did that seem to him to be a reasonable thing to say to somebody whose actual job, her reason for being, for centuries, was to ruin the lives of men who mistreated their women?
…shit, this was a way for Whedon to make a point about misandry, wasn’t it?
Xander/Anya remains the most mystifying/infuriating relationship of all Buffy. Ugh Anya you are too good in every way for that creep.
But she’s only ever seen horrible relationships and terrible men, so she thinks this is just what being a human woman means. If it gets bad enough, you murder him or invoke a vengeance demon, but small indignities are what make up being a human woman in a human relationship.
XANDER. ugh.
My boyfriend and I are rewatching the show because I was pretty young when it came out so don’t remember much (we’re near the end of season 3 at the moment), and Xander is just the worst! At first I thought he was meant to be a completely unsympathetic character, and then he’d get better and finally be vaguely likeable and it would all be through the wonderful help of friendship or something, but he’s it’s season 3 and he’s still an entitled self-obsessed douche and I don’t think he’s going to improve.
And also he’s Whedon’s creator insert, so I think that says a lot. -_-
YES. An actual hobby of mine is rewatching Buffy episodes with the specific purpose of hating on Xander (and being disappointed when he isn’t killed by praying mantis teacher demons/steroid reptile monsters/Ashanti). He is THE WORST.
It sometimes feels like I’m the only person who likes Buffy but gives Whedon a serious side-eye when it comes to feminism, so I’m very grateful for this thread.
I will love all things Buffy, Forever and Ever Amen, but I missed Twin Peaks the first time around and am just now watching it. Are there any Twin Peaks fans out there? I have been pleasantly surprised by Lucy, the receptionist at the Sheriff’s department. She’s pregnant, and there are two possible fathers, and everybody’s just totally matter-of-fact about it. She’s very upfront with both suitors, no longer dating either (I’m halfway through season 2), and nobody tries to slut-shame her or anything. She’s pretty awesome. (All the sex the high school girl characters are having with much-older men is a whole other story, though.)
I am superexcited for the new series next year. It’s one of the box sets I have on almost constant rotation.
I just started that show a few weeks ago, too. Totally enthralled by the first season and a half or so, but by the time the killer was revealed, I started losing interest. You’re totally right about Lucy’s story, though. I love her. And Nadine!
This show is BONKERS. I can’t wait to see where they’re going to go with the Nadine storyline, now that she thinks she’s 16. And has super-strength. BONKERS. I can’t believe it ran on regular ol’ TV.
Lucy is THE BEST! I remember being pretty pleased at that storyline, too. And Agent Cooper is just such a freaking joy to watch (he’s like the original Chris Traeger!). I love how Twin Peaks vacillates between dark, gritty murder show and zany, small-town silly show. What even is it?!
A rewatch is in order sometime before the new season comes out next year, but this will require that I have some pie at the ready.
I was just thinking about this show last night! I was obsessed with it for a time last year, but stopped right around the uncomfortable yellow face. I think I just need to push through because I loved season one and I want to catch up before season 3. And I love Lucy–she’s such a fun character and I love her voice. She’s not sure what she wants, but she’s not going to hurry up and find out for the sake of silly old men.
Also: The sweaters. So many glorious sweaters.
I have a Tumblr tag: my hate-on for joss whedon never diminishes, so yeah. I hear ya, bb.
I’M TOTALLY HERE FOR HAUNTED DOLLS okay maybe not “sexually sadistic dolls”
okay just what
I lied what the hell is going on in this article
“The Common Sense Guide to Buying and Selling Haunted Items” THIS IS A THING THAT EXISTS
JUST IN TIME.
No seriously, I think I own a haunted doll, but I’m afraid if I sell him he’ll get mad at me and do that horror movie thing where he’s just back in my house one day when I come home, aaaaah!!
Man, if it was REALLY common sense, why would you even need a guide?
Common sense ain’t exactly common.
auuugggh i am constantly frustrated by common conventions in nomenclature
Like… like binomial nomenclature? Say it’s binomial nomenclature and we can go off and form our own subthread about our problems.
This is beautiful thank you you have made my day.
I kind of want to use that title and/or the actual Common Sense Guide as the springboard to write a horror story. Only probably not a horror story about haunted items; that would be too obvious.
It is absolutely bananas. What on earth???
“It is absolutely bananas.” Perfectly put!
(I don’t know though, that last group photo showcasing the dolls? Check out the one in the far right corner …she was giving off some serious “I’m cooooming to git yoooooou” vibes.)
How did you close so quickly?? Took months once we found a house…
t can go quick. We put in a offer on a Saturday, it was accepted on Sunday, and we closed the following week after the home inspection. Very fast and easy, but we had a motivated seller.
Yeah we found a place and closed in a week or less pretty much.
HAVEN’T CLOSED YET
The house is full of ghosts.
your picture of Grimace reminded me that there is a player on a local sports team nicknamed The Hamburglar, and this weekend I tried to explain the story to a friend who doesn’t follow sports because I figured she’d get a kick out of athletes nicknamed after cartoons and it turned out she had NEVER HEARD OF Hamburglar, Grimace, Mayor McCheese, or ANY of the McD’s characters other than Ronald.
Inspired by this, I ended up on the McDonaldland wikipedia page, and I’m low-key horrified by the descriptions. They’re very surreal and disturbing out of context. I don’t remember being frightened as a kid, but I sure as hell am now.
Also: my boyfriend is wrong, the Grimace is not supposed to be a chicken mcnugget. I knew it. Why would you make a chicken mcnugget purple?
YUP. Also I never knew what Grimace was supposed to be… does the name “grimace” refer to the face you make when you get brainfreeze then?
Andrew Hammond! I am so delighted with his success, mostly because he went to my University and is by all indications a really super dude, but also because what a great nickname!
YES also he seems super humble and down to earth in all his interviews even when everyone was freaking out and McDonald’s was giving out free hamburgers in his name and the other players were tweeting the cheeseburger emoji after every game and all the hockey media was like “WHO IS THIS GUY HE IS A LEGEND”
It has been really exciting to see everyone talking about him. As quite a few of the stories have been quick to point out, he was a good goalie on some fairly bad teams, but he came to my university (Bowling Green) at a time when the hockey program was in serious jeopardy, and provided some much-needed stability and excitement. And he was definitely always very down-to-earth and humble. Pretty much the entirety of my Facebook and Twitter feeds for the past few weeks have been fellow alumni just thrilled about his success sharing every article and mention of him. And hamburger jokes. Lots of those, too.
I am an Old, and can remember with clarity the commercials starring Grimace, the Hamburgler, Mayor McCheese (and that one lame attempt of introducing a female character who was some kind of bird with navigation issues. Even as a kid, I was cynically aware that OF COURSE the “girl one” was ditzy/dumb).
I am morbidly curious about the response to the pro-vax grandparent, but I don’t think I can deal with… people being wrong about important things this morning. So I will wait for highlights to be posted and summarily dealt with here in the Toast comments.
Also, never watched Buffy but my roommates are re-watching the whole series. They’re on Season 4 now, and just getting the audio has been a very interesting experience for me.
Most of the comments I read were pretty much along the lines of, “Yes, kids should be vaccinated but it is illegal for you to take your grandkid without permission, doctor probably wouldn’t even give vaccines without permission, he wouldn’t get boosters, etc. And basically the lady would be risking her relationship with her kid and grandson for essentially nothing.” Which I feel is a pretty rational take on the specifics of that situation.
Yeah, the advice was decent, but it definitely feels like one of those questions that really needs a doctor, lawyer or social worker to answer it, not just some folks with opinions. Still, what a lousy position to be in (and, ugh, once the grandparents get a bit older they’ll probably be vulnerable to diseases the grandkid might pick up, and uuuugh what then?).
I too have watched So Much Buffy via roommate proxy.
So I had a costume party with a “Dress like characters from your childhood cartoons” theme, and the gentleman I was seeing at the time came dressed like Grimace, although the costume’s infrastructure did not withstand the party, and the whole mess of tubes and purple fabric remained crumpled in his backseat for months afterward.
So now I have this vision of that gentleman, Robin Thicke, and makeshift Grimace all superimposed like a holographic trading card, and it is not pleasant, thanks a lot.
I am seeing it more like an Animorphs book cover, where Grimace morphs into Robin Thicke, and that is exponentially better.
I want to read Mallory’s buying a house in the Bay Area story almost as much as I want to read Nicole’s birth story. Because honestly it seems like it would be just as painful and harrowing (no disrespect, moms).
It’s been mostly pretty good! The last few days of the process have involved some tricky legwork, but that didn’t have so much to do with buying a house as it did general DEALING WITH BANKS-ness. But I can write about it at some point, probably!
That’s good! I just feel like I have so many friends whose stories were “we offered $150,000 above the asking price, in cash, in the worst neighborhood in Oakland, for a house that actually has no insides, with our left kidneys included in the deal, and we were still outbid.” Glad that wasn’t your experience since no one deserves that.
We bought a little over a year ago and that part surprised me too. Just the sheer amount of print – scan – email – confirm -update – print – scan – email… ad nauseam. They never show that on House Hunters!
Oh man that secret vaccinating grandparent reminds me of how my Catholic grandparents had me secretly baptized while babysitting me. (It’s apparently the only time they ever volunteered to babysit.)
My Catholic aunt tried to secretly baptize me while babysitting!
Man, what is up with Catholics and secret baptisms?
My friend’s mom tried to do a secret Catholic baptism on her child! Is that an accepted thing in Catholicism?
I don’t know whether secret (or, more precisely, non-clerical) baptism is particularly common now, but it used to be accepted under church law. If you need a ragefix, the story of Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish child who it was claimed had been secretly baptized by a family servant and who was subsequently removed from his home by Papal authorities, will do the trick.
I was just thinking I needed a ragefix, many thanks!
At first I read that as PayPal, and was very confused.
Technically yes! Any Catholic can perform a baptism that qualifies as a “get out of hell free” card, provided that they invoke the Trinity when they do it. It’s mostly intended to be used if the subject is actively dying, but who’s to say that someone WOULDN’T be actively dying if – right after the baptism – they tripped into oncoming traffic or something.
Yeah, Emergency Non-Clerical Baptism is how the Catholics eventually got my when I was in college. I wrote a letter to the Pope to see if he’d excommunicate me, but I never heard back.
My grandma MAY have done secret Catholic baptisms for me and my brother. It’s uncertain as my grandmother was a very reserved Polish lady who knew how to keep a secret and she’s been dead for quite a while. The family scuttlebutt is that it happened. My stepmother has suggested that it happened for realsies in a church.
I was so mad when I found out though. SO MAD. I definitely contemplated taking a trip to Vatican City and doing something that would get me excommunicated right quick.
Apparently it’s fairly difficult to actually get excommunicated: http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/features/2013/07/…
Plus, Cool Pope is you know, cool, so he’d probably just take your bad behavior as a sign of unhappiness and invite you out for some gelato so you two could talk.
I’d be up for gelato with my pal Il Papa.
Yep, that’s what they did with me. Apparently my Protestant baptism wasn’t going to be enough to keep me out of hell.
I just re-read Gothic Novel Motifs Index to my dad, so I’m all about the secret Catholic baptisms atm.
My grandmother secretly baptized ONE of my two cousins in the bath tub when she was babysitting them. Hilarious. The heathen-cousin isn’t sure if she should be relieved or offended that she was left out.
Is that technically kidnapping? Did you know what was going on, or were you too tiny?
I was a baby!
I totally thought of secret baptisms too! And I suspect there are fewer doctors who would vaccinate without parental permission than clergy who would baptize without parental permission.
NOT YOUR JURISDICTION, GRANDPARENTS.
I don’t even think there were clergy involved; I’m pretty sure they just took some holy water and baptized me in their sink.
Wait, one can obtain holy water to take away for personal use? Iiiinterestingggg…
You can totally buy Holy Water. From the Holy Land, even. It’s a profitable business.
My fiance has a thermos he rolled around on the Stone of Anointing in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which he claims makes the thermos a third relic, and any liquid he puts in it therefore becomes holy. We’re both Jewish, so I have no idea if that’s true, but we both find the idea terribly amusing.
One can, in fact, take water directly to a priest and have it blessed! Voila, holy water. (I actually just learned this on Sunday)
The Common Sense Guide to Buying Haunted Items has some sources for you, in case the purchase of haunted items goes wrong. (Link about 50 comments back)
Holy cow, I thought this was a peculiar tick of my Catholic grandma. She took me out to have me baptized when she was babysitting me (apparently intent on getting her licks in because she was convinced my Jewish grandparents had done “something Jewish” to me); my parents were so pissed off they made sure she couldn’t sneak my younger brother out, so she did the home-baptism with him. Now I wonder who was egging her on, since I guess this was not her own idea after all.
The things you learn reading the comments on the Toast.
Deep breaths before your closing! You can do it! Good thoughts!
I can’t believe Buffy is 18. Might be about time for a binge-rewatch.
Gah, why do I have so many things to say about Joss Whedon, King of Feminism, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Have I always had these feelings, and just been bottling them up? Who am I? How did I get here?
Shhh, it’s okay, you’re on the Toast, surrounded by people who also have issues with pseudo-feminist Mr. Whedon and his weirdness. No need to bottle up/repress things here! Fire away.
AND YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE, I’m sorry that Joss Whedon hated the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, but I saw that movie and it was great. Screw that guy, man. I’m burning it all down, we’re done, it’s over.
The movie Buffy has always been my favorite Buffy! Multiple people chew scenery and it’s goofy as hell and so much fun. I also like that Buffy gets to be the Slayer in her own way (such as lighting Rutger Hauer’s face on fire with hairspray after distracting him with a crucifix).
Plus it makes hardcore Whedon fans really mad when you tell them you like it.
I do not know what people’s problem with that movie is. Is it Paul Reubens’ five-minute death sequence? Is it Kristy Swanson shooting a fly out of the air with a thumbtack, or judo flipping a guy that grabs her ass? Is it Luke Perry who won’t let his vampire friend in the window because he’s weirded out that he’s flying?
People are dumb, that movie is awesome.
(“Mleh mleh mleh, Donald Sutherland kept changing my precious words and now it doesn’t make any sense mleh mleh mleh” — Joss Whedon)
I just don’t understand how anyone could be mad at Donald Sutherland. If you have a horror movie or a horror-adjacent movie and you can’t get Boris Karloff or Vincent Price because: dead, then Sutherland is your guy and just let him do his thing he has way more experience than you do.
I like Paul Reubens’ barely-concealed impatience with Rutger Hauer at times. Horrible bosses, amirite.
On a serious note, the fact that Kristy Swanson is less waifish than SMG helps me suspend my “tiny lady kicks ass in spite of laws of physics” disbelief much more effectively.
And even if you don’t like Donald Sutherland, like don’t around talking shit on him in interviews like you’re a punk. Ugh, come on.
Also, it’s kind of funny how the movie has Kristy Swanson sort of integrating her slaying with her feminine interests, and then the TV show rejected that so that Buffy could gradually give up all of the frivolous girl-stuff that was holding her back, only for culture to come back around and recognize the earlier form as actually maybe being more progressive after all.
I hate Joss Whedon. He angers me more than any overtly racist or sexist douchebag because he loves to bask in his fake egalitarianism and refuses to listen to legitimate critiques. Even if he wasn’t such a hypocrite, I would despise him for relying on overt emotional manipulation instead of legitimate character development to engage the audience and then blame the audience for their grief because “real life is like that.” Yeah, well, real life is why I like fantastical fiction, ass-wipe. So fuck you right in your pasty-ass face, Joss Whedon.
I have a lot of feelings about this.
Speaking as someone who is a fan of his work, you are pretty much spot-on with your critique of it.
Buffy may have been hugely important to me, but that doesn’t mean I support all of his storytelling choices.
And I very much enjoyed the Avengers movie (with only two moments of FUCKING RAGE, which is pretty much on par with other things I watch and enjoy). But the man needs to be taken down a peg or nineteen. Don’t even get me started on the mess I’m sure he’s gonna make of the MCU and its ridiculous choice to go with the Civil War storyline. I’ve emotionally divorced myself from all of it post-CATW.
I remember watching his Much Ado About Nothing with some friends who are fans of his, and kept thinking “How is it possible that this is both more white and sexist (and also ageist when it came to casting women) than the Branagh version from 1993?”
As much as that is my fave Shakespeare comedy, I just can’t bring myself to watch it.
I appreciate the work he brought to the Toy Story script, and I’m grateful for Zoe/Wash, but I just can’t work up enough enthusiasm to watch any of his other shows.
There were two good things about his Much Ado: the casting of Sean Maher as John the Bastard (he’s still a dick for no reason, but there’s actual acting involved!) and the casting of Nathan Fillion as Dogberry (hearing him say “thou naughty varlet” is amazing).
Oh god I wanted to throw his version of Much Ado across the room. Alas, it was digital. The only good part was watching Clark Gregg get more and more hammered throughout the filming.
The Hero’s virginity subplot in Much Ado About Nothing makes me really uncomfortable with any adaptation that sets it in modern times.
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
OMG yes. So much yes.
But it’s okay, because he included one background shot of a black woman looking offended at a racist line! ~Subversion~
NGL, all this Whedon hate is giving me life today.
I was saying something about that shot, and how awful it was; when a Whedon apologist informed me that no, that actor wasn’t the only POC in the film, there was another extra in one of the crowd scenes. So it was totally okay.
So often in Joss Whedon conversations, I find myself struck with the urge to bellow “OH GOOOOOOOOOOOOOD FOR YOU” in my best Christian Bale voice, This is one of those times.
Late to this party, enjoying myself immensely anyway, here is something you might enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8oIDvCl6lA
Well, Emma Thompson was also involved in that one, and she clothes herself in agency like a mantle, so that probably helped.
FLAWLESS.
I was introduced to his stuff via Serenity (I watched the movie before the TV show), so I didn’t really understand the critiques of his work. BUT THEN, the more I watched of his stuff, the brighter the lightbulb grew, until I realized it was all the same story. All of it. I still like individual things he’s done, but the repetitive, INTENTIONALLY overwrought, emotional rollercoaster, pseudo egalitarian, pseudo EVERYTHING just grates on my nerves like nobody’s business. Bah humbug. BAH HUMBUG I SAY.
This whole thread is filling me with such joy I don’t even know where to respond. I like bits of Joss Whedon’s work (Nathan Fillion, Zoe) but am not fond of the man himself, or at least what he says in interviews. I confess that I DO like talking shit about him to his fans to see what I can stir up. It’s endlessly entertaining.
Also, women get beat up a lot. Like, just so much.
YES! And then he tries to pass himself off as someone who likes depicting “strong women,” but all of his strong women have to be traumatized first. Like he only values them if they’re “broken” somehow. UGH THERE’S ALL THAT RAGE. FOUND IT.
It’s like a Lifetime movie, in that the female character has to be frightened and traumatized and hurt before she can discover her agency in the third act and hit her stalker in the face with a frying pan. Yes, it’s great that she finally did that, but couldn’t we have a narrative where a woman doesn’t have to be fridged as part of her own personal growth? Or where hitting her stalker with a frying pan/going to the police/setting up a network of valued friends and confidantes who will look out for her is step one rather than step 10?
And they can only be strong if they’re conventionally beautiful tiny waifs. Because – subversion warning – the blonde cheerleader is actually the dangerous one! MIND BLOWN.
…in 1997. It’s been 18 years. You may want to show a different variety of Kick-ass! Empowered! Sexy! Vulnerable! woman now. We know you can write them if necessary (Zoe) so your obsession with the tiny ones is clearly a concious choice to fetishise.
(There is a scene in one of my favourite episodes of Leverage where a rival hitter shows up. And she is HOT but curvy and burly and her arms aren’t the size of a normal human’s wrists and I will forever love them for casting her.
Also reading the description of Kameron Hurley’s women in the Gods War and Mirror Empire books was like when you only realise how loud the airconditioning was after someone turned it off. Suddenly I was reading descriptions of heavily muscled, short, broad female warriors, that were still sexual, and all this ‘and here comes the so sexy! so dangerous! so overblown description of boobs!’ anticipatory tension I didn’t even know I was carrying just bled away.)
“King of Feminism” is making me so cross.
He would probably accept the title of Honorary Black Person, that is, if he knew any black people. Ugh. UGH. God, he is just so fucking smarmy.
Can we digress here to talk about how horrible the “Gunn sells out by becoming a smart and powerful lawyer and wearing suits” storyline was?
Because he got law school PUMPED DIRECTLY INTO HIS BRAIN. By DEMONS.
Right, which led to him losing his “urban” roots, learning to talk all fancy, and dressing like The Powers That Be would want him to. He got education and upward social mobility by selling his “authentic”, folksy self to the establishment.
(by which we mean White People)
Honestly, I love Buffy and Firefly and will watch and re-watch forever, but I think the critical part of my brain got turned off to Joss Whedon’s stuff a while ago – thank you Toasties for turning it back on. Yes, Xander really IS the worst and JW has some major issues. I think I’m gonna enjoy this show a lot more now while I binge re-watch knowing that I can yell at Xander and wish a rain of fire herpes upon him without wondering why I feel that way.
Exactly.
The swift karmic justice visited upon Robin Thicke in the last year brings so much joy to my heart.
RT? He had everything / he had NOTHING. Also drunk + on vicodin @ work… maaaaan just confirm every stereotype about the kind of person you are
“It’s not my fault I made terrible choices! I’d already deliberately taken judgment-impairing substances before supervising other people in a professional setting; there’s no possible way I could have avoided this.”
Also, does anyone want to read a story about a badass mid-twentieth-century Lady Scientist? A story that doesn’t trigger ALL THE RAGE? A Very Naughty Little Girl: The Extraordinary Life of Janet Vaughan
(Note: There’s a bit citing a 1920’s patient that comes off as rather Oppresssion Olympics-y, or perhaps inadvertently racist.)
“The decision, which hinged on the fact that Gaye’s family owned only elements of the sheet music to “Got to Give It Up,” came from eight jurors who listened to testimony from musicologists…”
You have no idea how much the idea that someone listened to musicologists thrills me.
I know, right? How often does that happen? (Though really it’s the theorists we should be ignoring.)
(Hi, fellow double-reeder!)
From Dear Prudence:
“Who should pay for a graduation dinner? I’m graduating from school in Cambridge 😉 ”
😐 <knife emoji> <monster emoji> <smiling pile of poop emoji>
This is how I felt too. Ugh. (1) Don’t be inside-jokey with the advice columnist, that’s sort of weird, (2) generally UGH.
In fairness, the “went to college in Cambridge” thing is a long-standing Prudie joke.
The LW was alluding to a previous letter a few months ago, about how/ whether someone should mention that they went to Harvard. That person came in for a great deal of ribbing from Prudie (and the comment section), hence the winky face. I’m guessing they might be a regular commenter.
Dear :-),
You should graduate just like me. Spend 5 hours sitting in the early summer humidity, then with go to the tourist area of town with your parents. Have father insist on mini-chain brewpub, because beer. Have mid range pasta while your parents argue about the very patio you are sitting on. Get a massive headache, go home,cry.
Sincerely,
Went to a state school. *middle finger emoiji*
Obviously this person graduated from Cambridge College.
Or else this person is going to be bragging about having gone to “school in Cambridge” many, many years after graduation while everyone else secretly pities them for having peaked at age 18.
I’m Went-To-College-In-Cambridge Rob Lowe and I have cable.
This would be the first Rob Lowe digital commercial to actually make me laugh out loud. Film it!
What a question, too. “I wanted to pay for dinner to demonstrate that I am an adult”. Possibly stop being coyly smug about where you went to school to demonstrate that you are an adult?
Definitely don’t demonstrate your adultivity by having a reasonable conversation with Dad about who’s coming and what’s on the agenda. (okay okay I know stuff like relative-wrangling and deciding who pays are especially not intuitive when you’re 22 but I WANNA SNARK)
Mostly I’m just perplexed at “10 to 20” people flying and booking hotels for a relative’s graduation. I didn’t even go to my own grad school ceremony because graduations are soooo booooring. Maybe that place in Cambridge is rustling up an all-star speaker.
Oh, snark away. I am generally annoyed by anything implying that being an adult= having money. I personally demonstrate my adultivity by appreciating the hell out of it when my parents buy me a meal. Are kids whose family can’t afford a graduation dinner at all not adults?
And yeah, the number of people is bizarre. I think I had four tickets to my graduation, and I only went to the larger school ceremony and not my college’s, because hearing 3000 kids names read out was not my idea of fun.
I refuse to believe that even Cambridgetown State University can hold a graduation worth going to if you’re not the graduating student or the proud parent.
I refuse to believe it even then. My folks pretty much dragged me by the hair–and guilt re: grandparents–to my ceremony, and then our car got stolen. KARMA.
Graduation ceremonies: nobody cares, everyone wants to go get lunch elsewhere, and they’re all about a year long.
Though I did make five bucks off the speech betting pool: cleaned up on both the Someone Mentions 9/11 and Someone Thanks Jesus Christ categories.
things I have learned from my graduations:
high school: High school will impose arbitrary restrictive rules on you even when you are done with it
college: hey wait you’re allowed to just not pay for the cap & gown and walk wearing whatever? I should have known!
grad school: Going to the botanical garden and lunch with Mom & Pop was a good decision.
My favorite graduation ceremony was done in an hour AND they gave me food and alcohol afterwards. That one was for my MA at a university that has smaller ceremonies over the course of four days or so. I also got to sit with my classmates and gossip the entire time, which made it even better.
My mother still brings that one up as her ideal graduation… mainly because of the food. The interminable ones with no food are just too much to sit through any more.
I have these on my living room wall, I like to think of them as having freed themselves from Joss Whedon’s Fauxgressive Palace so that we can all live in a Fully Realized Lady Commune together with my dog (also a lady).
Those are INCREDIBLE.
That artist, Megan Lara, is great. She is a huge nerd (I mean that in the best way) and she has a ton of delightful nerdy gorgeous art. http://meganlara.tumblr.com/shop
How have I lived so long never hearing the term “fauxgressive?” Thank you. THANK YOU.
I feel very strongly that those women deserved a better creator.
I feel that way about so, so many female characters.
That poster of Zoe is awesome.
My ladyboner for Zoe remains undiminished.
I am so frequently here for both Dear Prudence and scornful abuse of anti-science anti-vaxxers. Yesssssssss. Let me bask in my hatefire.
DO IT GRAMPS! They might never find out but even if they do, FUCK THEIR CRUNCHY WRATH! I’m imagining you like a snowy-haired Christian Slater in True Romance yelling I JUST DID YOU THE BIGGEST FUCKING FAVOUR OF YOUR LIFE. You have a moral authority, a moral obligation to that child that supersedes that of his mother, on account of his mother’s a fucking dunce.
Also lol “well educated”. No duh. If it was anyone other than white middle-class hippies pulling this shit those kids’d be in care like boom.
(not gonna read the comments because I’m a delicate flower)
I mean I would be surprised if anyone involved in the creation of “Blurred Lines” was not drunk and high on vicodin the entire time, but I don’t see why that matters.
Right? I mean, even if it WERE a valid excuse, eventually Thicke would’ve sobered up and realized what a terrible, horrible, no-good, rotten song it was and tossed it down the shitter.
I remember that episode of Star Trek. The song was actually written by Robin Thicke’s evil doppelganger from the Antimatter Universe, while our own Robin Thicke was high on Romulan mind crystals. The two then had to fight a ritual death duel using giant metal Q-Tips. Grimace was the omnipotent alien forcing them to fight, the better to understand these concepts you humans call “good” and “evil.”
Fun Fact: Antimatter Mallory Ortberg can explain exactly why Antimatter Robin Thicke reminds her of the Antimatter Sir Shake-A-Lot, and frequently does so.
This made my day. <3
True story: I left my high school very abruptly during my last semester. I had been skipping a lot of class, hanging out late at night in with the “wrong crowd”, etc. Then one day I just wasn’t there, and hadn’t told anyone where I was going. The high school rumor mill churned. And my friend, god bless her to this day, began implying to everyone that I had been called as the Slayer.
When I go home to visit my family, I still to this day get people double-taking at me and coming over to ask, jokingly but just nervously enough to suggest that their teenage selves might have bought it, if it was true.
OK ok but what if one of those real sex dolls can be haunted? If that could be a thing, I am DEFINITELY forgoing my previous plan of haunting my old college house in favor of being a ghost in a life-size doll who can position herself just *around*, knock some paint down, and who has a misandrist vendetta. I would spirit away some underwear though, because really.
Robin Thicke has read a book?
BtVS has been my favourite TV programme for sixteen years. (I started watching it in its second week on UK television, and am still annoyed I didn’t watch it right from the start.) I have been making my boyfriend watch the entire series (we’re up to Season 7, after being bogged down in Season 6 for years!). I know it has its flaws, as does Joss Whedon, but I do not care; the rational part of my brain is too overwhelmed by the obsessive fan part which causes me to do things like memorise the order of all 144 episodes.
I'm Went-To-College-In-Cambridge Rob Lowe and I have cable.
I want to be believe there will be a sequel to Galaxy Quest where the aliens have finally seen BtVS and think IT'S real, and they have a vampire problem, and they come to Earth and kidnap Sarah Michelle Gellers and the rest to help them fight the vampires.
If you can, find a movie called "Scarecrow Slayer." Tony Todd is in it, and it is the WORST,most INCOMPETENT movie I have ever seen. I think it might have been made by middle-schoolers.