iamanartichoke
mentioned you on a post “I’ve been thinking about this line a lot. And I’m not sure it’s given…”

@philosopherking1887 re: your tags, what’s the deal with tumblr and joss whedon? I keep getting snippets here and there but I’m not sure what the story is haha

@iamanartichoke I’m honestly not sure. There seems to be a pattern on Tumblr of idolizing a celebrity to a ridiculous degree and then collectively turning viciously on that person when they turn out not to be as impossibly perfect as the fans made them out to be; I’ve seen people predicting that Tumblr will shortly turn against John Mulaney en masse because the level of adoration is becoming unsustainable.

I have been told that a similar thing happened with Joss Whedon, but I never saw the worship phase. I joined Tumblr in late 2015, and being an ordinary geek, I liked his work a lot (and still do). I had watched Avengers: Age of Ultron and I really liked that, too (and still do!), probably because I wasn’t steeped in The Tumblr Consensus that it is Sexist and Terrible. There are stories about Whedon treating actresses badly, and after his wife divorced him, she published an essay saying that he’s not really a great feminist and he would complain to her about all the beautiful young women throwing themselves at him and not being allowed to touch them. He also does sometimes fall into sexist tropes with storytelling, characterization, and visual depiction of women, and arguably he does this with Black Widow in both Avengers movies. (I don’t think she was saying in Age of Ultron that she’s a monster because she can’t have children, though it is easy to hear it that way, and he should have been more careful about the potential for misunderstanding.) I have not read his draft script for a Wonder Woman movie that’s floating around online, but I’m told (by people I generally trust, but who are susceptible to being swayed by The Tumblr Consensus) that it is full of sexist crap.

Tumblr being what it is, the fact that Whedon is morally imperfect, and that he is an imperfect feminist (if not the completely fake one that Tumblr has decided he is), has led everyone to conclude that he must be a terrible writer in every way. People will make offhand comments about how the scripts of the Avengers movies were “terrible”; they claim that he doesn’t understand any of the characters and exaggerate the extent to which his dialogue is made up of jokes and pop culture references. One of the most absurd, infuriating examples of this that KEEPS GOING AROUND is a pair of gifs of Steve/Cap, in one saying “Son of a gun” and in the other “Son of a bitch.” The original caption is “character development”… but then someone reblogged with someone else’s tags saying that it was actually the difference between Joss Whedon’s gee-whiz boy scout version of Cap and Steve Rogers the scrappy Brooklyn kid and WWII Army vet, and a bunch of people piled on with the insistence that Whedon got Steve All Wrong. Now, I think most of this stems from a shallow understanding of what was going on with Steve in the first Avengers – and in fact, I think the criticisms of Age of Ultron also stem from shallow understanding (which is rampant not just on Tumblr). But the most glaring irony is that the second gif of Steve saying “Son of a bitch” (which is supposed to be the accurate, appropriately vulgar characterization) is from Age of Ultron… which was also written by Joss Whedon. Say what you want about the recurring “Language!” joke in AOU (I have a theory, but I don’t want to go into it here); you can’t say that the gif on the right is an improvement from Joss Whedon’s terrible characterization if it is also by Joss Whedon. I think people must assume that it’s from Winter Soldier because they don’t remember that the ironic punchline to the “language” joke is that Steve swears, too.

So yeah. That’s the story.