Tag: joss whedon

philosopherking1887:

Why are there all these Thorki shippers who apparently don’t like Loki, and just think he’s a no-good lying self-deceiving butthurt pissbaby drama queen who has no legitimate grievances against anyone and just likes killing people for no reason? Look, I’m not one of the Loki apologists who claim that he’s never done anything wrong or screams “abuse!” every time Thor so much as lifts a finger toward him. Anyone who reads my blog (or my fic!) knows that. But I also think Loki has some genuine reasons for complaint about his treatment in Asgard, and it does an injustice to the interest and complexity of his character to ignore them.

Nuance, people. It’s possible to rebut the apologists without careening to the opposite pole and completely tarring Loki’s character. Anyway, if Thor is such a flawless angel (as such people tend to claim, once more eliding nuance in their rush to take the polar opposite position from their adversaries), why would you ship him with Loki if he’s as much of a piece of shit as you make out?

@foundlingmother, you’ll understand what I’m vagueblogging (vaguebitching) about.

*storms back into the the room* You know, I think these godawful readings of the movies that make Loki into a completely worthless piece of garbage character with absolutely no good reasons for doing anything he does, which people pull out of their asses just in order to distinguish themselves as much as possible from the woobifiers of “Loki’s Resistance,” serve much the same function as the utterly tone-deaf, inconsistent readings of Joss Whedon’s work that aim to show that he’s a completely shit writer of plot, dialogue, and characterization as well as a bad feminist (again, not gonna contest the latter, but contesting the hell out of the former). People will convince themselves that all kinds of obviously false things are true in order to prove their membership in the virtuous puritanical elect that can recognize no value in anything or anyone that is morally imperfect.

Why do I even waste my time on this fucking website…?

touchtheowl:

prokopetz:

If we’re going to update the pantheon of regrettable artists, can we add “white male writer who was legitimately progressive twenty years ago, but hasn’t learned or grown as an artist in any way whatsoever since then, and now exists in a state of grumpy bewilderment at the fact that he’s being critcised for doing exactly the same stuff that used to win him praise”?

That’s a long winded way of saying Joss Whedon

When we say “regrettable artist,” do we mean that his entire existence is regrettable? That we’re not allowed to still like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, or The Cabin in the Woods? Should we wish those things had never existed? Must we now condemn everything he writes as worthless in order to prove our social justice bona fides? I’m strongly suspecting the answer is “yes,” since I see a lot of very flimsy criticism of his characterization in recent films: because his feminism is imperfect, his writing must also be terrible in every way. No one who has any moral failings can have any virtues, even non-moral ones. The most ironic example of this I’ve seen lately is a juxtaposition of a gif from The Avengers of Captain America saying “Son of a gun” – claimed to be an example of Whedon’s inept characterization of Brooklyn-born army vet Steve Rogers as a euphemism-using prude – with a gif of Cap saying “Son of a bitch,” which is said to be more authentic. The irony, of course, is that the second gif is from Avengers: Age of Ultron, also written by Joss Whedon. In their haste to condemn every aspect of his writing, Tumblrites happily misattribute quotes.

I’m willing to concede that Whedon has not followed the zeitgeist on representation of women in action films. His approach is still to show the way women are sexualized, victimized, and underestimated on account of their gender (which, I can attest, is still accurate to the experience of women in male-dominated fields), while the favored strategy in progressive circles is now to depict a situation in which women are accepted and respected without question and gender is a non-issue. (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. does pretty well on that, as well as on racial diversity among women as well as men, but Joss Whedon’s involvement may be minimal at this point.)

But I still think that Whedon is a better writer of dialogue and, yes, character than most of the other staff hacks writing in the MCU. People also have a tendency to reduce his style to pop culture jokes, and yes, there are a lot of those. But there’s also “I remember a shadow”; “It’s a terrible privilege”; “Big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, what are you?” / “Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist” / [Natasha shrugs]; “I’ve got red in my ledger, I’d like to wipe it out”; “Loki, he’s a full-tilt diva”; “Seeing as it’s a stupid-ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it”; “Satisfaction’s not in my nature” / “Surrender’s not in mine” (yes, he wrote the Dark World bro-boat scene); “Actually, he’s the boss, I just pay for everything”; “That up there, that’s the endgame”; “If you step out that door, you’re an Avenger.” Those aren’t just punchy quotable quotes; they’re moments that tell you a lot about a character. Our conceptions of characters in the MCU are profoundly shaped by some of those moments, and people are happy to gif them and quote them in tribute to the characters, giving no credit to the person who wrote them, then turn around and unconditionally demonize the writer. And I’m really tired of it.

I wasn’t in Tumblr fandom in the mythical days I hear of when criticizing Joss Whedon was an unpardonable sin; all I’ve seen is the excessive backlash. I ask for nuance; I ask for credit where it’s due. And I’d really like people to stop implying that I’m a bad feminist (which, to the rigorist Tumblr Left, makes me an irredeemably wicked contributor to Oppression) for continuing to like Joss Whedon’s writing (or George R. R. Martin’s, for that matter). As a historian of philosophy, I’m used to dealing with people like Kant and Nietzsche whose attitudes were often Problematic, sometimes even regressive relative to their day. I’ve also learned how not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

tuvok77 mentioned you in a post

@philosopherking1887 Considering he’s a fake feminist who gave us the Flash/ Wonderwoman boo joke in JL cheated on his wife and gave us the most sexist and mignoginistic Wonder Woman scripts ever. What’s not to hate.

@tuvok77, clearly you did not read the tags on my post, which said “Joss Whedon is not a bad writer, whatever you want to say about his feminism.” The point being: what on earth does any of that have to do with his characterization of Loki in The Avengers? I am not interested in defending the quality of Joss Whedon’s feminism (though if you wanted to take a consequentialist tack, you could say that Buffy actually did a lot of good for the feminist cause, regardless of the impurity of his outlook or motives in creating it). I want to make the point that people with imperfect social justice credentials can still make good art in other respects. What I object to is not criticisms of his depiction of female characters, if the criticisms are well-defended, but “arguments” that his writing is bad in respects unrelated to his depiction of women. These arguments tend to be poorly defended – which is unsurprising, considering that they are motivated entirely by a moral objection to his “fake feminism,” and not by considerations that actually bear on the interpretive issue at hand (in this case, the characterization of Loki; I have seen similarly flimsy arguments regarding his characterizations of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers).

The assumption here seems to be that if someone has imperfect social justice credentials – if someone is morally flawed – nothing they do can have any merit, including aesthetic merit. They must be a bad artist because they are a bad person. This strikes me as appallingly bad reasoning. I came to like Joss Whedon’s work, including Firefly, Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, The Cabin in the Woods, and the two Avengers movies as well as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not in the first instance because I thought they were works of revolutionary feminist propaganda but because I found the stories and characters compelling, the dialogue clever and well-paced, the premises innovative and philosophically interesting. None of that is obviated by the fact that Whedon cheated on his wife, or by anything in the Justice League movie or his unproduced Wonder Woman script (neither of which I have seen).

If the only reason you like works of art is because they take a moral stance of which you approve, or (even worse) because you approve of the moral character of the artist, I think you’re making incredibly impoverished aesthetic judgments that have only a marginal claim to be aesthetic judgments, i.e., judgments of taste, at all; they are actually moral judgments that happen to be directed at works of art. It seems like a lot of people on Tumblr are like some weird kind of moral hipsters who, when an artist they liked “sells out” (which is to say, proves to be morally flawed, by their lights), claim that nothing they made was ever good in the first place – even the things that they used to like (such as Buffy). The hipsters’ judgments are not aesthetic judgments, either – at least not about the music; they are judgments about the social cachet to be gained from liking something obscure. If you’re content to base your judgments about works of art on their obscurity, their moral qualities, or the moral qualities of their creators, fine, knock yourself out; but don’t go around pretending to be making a good-faith effort to interpret their content or evaluate their aesthetic quality. Just be up front about it; go ahead and say, “Joss Whedon is a bad feminist/person, therefore none of his work has any artistic merit.” Don’t make bullshit claims about unrelated points of dialogue, plotting, or characterization so you can feel morally superior, hipster-style, about how you always knew his work was crap.

spikedbat:

joss whedon: loki tortures and murders people for fun, and, despite being the god of CHAOS, is a fascist who says things like “it’s the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation” 

taika waititi: loki is an annoying little shit who day-drinks, puts on theater about himself, and fucks his way to the top

Oh my fucking God, did y’all even watch The Avengers? Or are you so determined to hate Joss Whedon for every reason you can scrape up that you’ll accept the most shallow, clumsy reading of the movie purely out of spite?

To those who are paying attention, the Loki of The Avengers has pretty clearly been messed up by whatever happened with Thanos. Also, notice what he’s looking at when he smiles about taking the dude’s eye out: not the guy writhing on the bench, but the confused, horrified people screaming and running away from him. Chaos. Notice what he does when he gets himself captured by the Avengers: feed them carefully chosen truths about themselves, expose their hypocrisy, as mythical Loki does in the Lokasenna (thanks for this observation, @seidrade); sow dissension and, yes, chaos among them.

Not that I really expect anyone who’s determined to hate Joss Whedon and everything he does to read something that fits The Avengers neatly into the rest of Loki’s characterization, but I have made a fanfictional effort to do just that which all of its readers have reported is successful.