#Joss Whedon mentions

[gloriousburden]

Hey, you don't have to apologize at all! <3 We all have our lives. Also, it is up to you to decide when you wish to answer or if you wish to answer some asks at all! This is supposed to be your space, so def take all the time you need!

I'm happy that I helped you put some thoughts into words, too! And like always, I agree w all you say!! Also, for the Sylvie shapeshifting part — there's a post on it (if I find it I'll send it to you), and sadly, it is true. I didn't connect the dots before, but now it makes further sense with how they use her character, too. It is stated multiple times in the series by Mobius, and in general they kept highlighting the fact that she's a female counterpart. I shouldn't be surprised, but I always am in the end 😔

And another point you made — for Ragnarok, I saw your rb and. Man. When I tell you my jaw DROPPED at that scene — like ... It's awful. I hope that we won't have that one day, even if that feels far away. None of you deserve this. Putting such lines is very harmful, because (other than the fact that it's just straight up disrespectful, racist and ignorant) while the film itself is fictional, it still has influence in real life and people could take that and think it would be fine, to belittle and mock others. I've learned about your culture and am still learning, and with everything that has transpired, things like this make everything worse. It's so widespread, too, the misinformation. Of course, the best weapon to this is to be respectful, open, informed, and curious about everything, but still, such lines should not be accepted at all. You have already stated it very well. Thank you for that.

Sorry you had to see that, Thor would never. Bruce either, that cannot be Bruce, I revoke him ... Oh, and I'm definitely up for listening to your points on this. I'm very curious about it. I'd also love to learn more about your culture!

(Including your other ask here as well)

Hey! I checked out a few of her posts about it. Is this it? [Link]

In all honesty, I’m not too sure about the shape-shifting thing. But… I assume her being able to shape-shift as well as the enchanting stuff would’ve made her too “OP” (not that they really care about that) and not “distinctive” enough from Loki lol. As for her being strictly female and not fluid… man, I don’t know. I guess they wanted to focus on female rep (which they’re not really good at either) instead. They already see Loki as male, so they treated both of them as only being female/male with the ‘Sex:Fluid’ thing being an afterthought to “please” fans. Basically:

‘OKAY SHUT UP YOU’VE GOT IT! WE THREW IN A FILE SAYING HIS SEX IS FLUID DURING THE CREDITS, BUT HE IS SHOCKED WHEN A FEMALE VARIATION OF HIM SHOWS UP! Uh… it totally wasn’t an afterthought or anything, haha…”

🤦🏻‍♀️ so stupid.

Female counterpart… the writing and handling of Sylvie being female felt misogynistic to me. Okay so Loki cannot call her out on her own flaws (because how dare a female character have flaws), but also she’s automatically stronger and is so “badass”, but also she has no depth and there was little thought put into her backstory. I can straight up say that as a female that I do not want to see robotic female characters with absolutely no depth, and no flaws! Instead of them correcting the misogynistic mistakes they’ve made in the past with making a strong female character, they make her robot like because I guess that’s easier than giving a female character depth.

I feel like a good example of a well written female character is Mikasa from Attack on Titan. She is strong, but also has depth. She loves Eren, but has a personality and motives outside of that. She has weaknesses, and is not immune to struggling. She’s one of my favorite female characters, and I think more should be written like her. Anime/Manga are notoriously BAD at handling female characters, but in Attack on Titan (though there are still flaws of course), they feel real. They aren’t just there for fan service, or just to shut up female audiences with no actual care put into any part of it.

Lol sorry I deleted the RB Because I felt no one saw it, but thank you so much for reading it!

[Link] for context.

I really do appreciate you taking the time to learn about my people, and our culture. Thank you for seeing us for who we are, outside of all the hatred. It truly does mean a lot, as I’ve been discriminated against throughout my life.

I also want to point out that the joke isn’t JUST beyond disrespectful to my OWN culture, but it is disrespectful to any other culture that’s cultural clothing includes headscarves. So many people who proudly wear their headscarves (and any other cultural clothing for that matter) are targeted in hate crimes and It’s just really gross to me that they chose to mock them. It fuels hatred and ignorance. It alienates people.

A lot of people when talking about anti Roma racism mainly talk about the G word (Gypsy), but there are more important things to me than that. Like the fact that Roma children are ethnically targeted in hate crimes by non Roma ADULTS and AUTHORITY FIGURES throughout Europe, but primarily in the Balkans where a lot of us reside/have ties to.

Politicians openly spew hatred against us, with little to no repercussions. They want my people to assimilate, but when they attempt to, they are mocked and just overall treated like garbage. There’s no winning. They want them to strip themselves of our culture. Of our traditions.

I will not get into it on here a whole lot as it is absolutely vile, but my people were targeted during the Holocaust and experimented on in horrific ways. How were they targeted? Nazi scientists studied our features, and how we dressed.

That’s why jokes about how we look or how we present ourselves really are not funny. It reflects real life.

I believe I said this in so many words on the OG post, but the weirdest part to me of all of it is how little sense it makes for Bruce to make that joke to Thor. Like it was just Mark Ruffalo going out of his way to be hateful towards us once again. Thor doesn’t pay much mind to the joke if you watch the scene.

It’s funny because Thor (after his banishment), has almost always been respectful towards other groups of people from what I can remember at the top of my head.

He was respectful towards humans when he was casted out to Midgard, and he CLEARLY tolerates them to a certain extent if he’s willingly in a relationship with one, as well as willingly associate with them (The Avengers.)

‘You can’t kill an entire race..’

‘You think yourself above them?’

Thor is supposed to be open minded for an Asgardian, so.. this really was just Mark Ruffalo and his racism again. And I know he portrays himself as being aware of and deeply caring about social issues, but I guess that awareness and care excludes Roma. That’s what makes it worse. What also makes it worse is the MCU’s history of racism against us. A lot of people have talked about this on here, but the white washing of MCU Wanda/Pietro. As well as Joss Whedon’s racism towards us.

Thank you for the ask! Once again, feel more than welcome to send another any time 😁

[greensaplinggrace]

can this fandom stop acting biased as hell. almost every single one of your faves in the buffyverse has raped or attempted to rape another character on that show. the only two people exempt from this happening on screen are anya - who's an eleven thousand year old vengeance demon well versed in the art of exquisite torture - and giles (who has a fraught history of black magic and dancing on the wild side). buffy's pretty much the only person actually free of the blame here, probably because she was the victim in over half the scenarios.

[lokiinmediasideblog]

Came across a bad take from super-hero-confessions defending Thanos and claiming Loki is "literally Hitler" on the loki tag and now I am slightly pissed off...

Loki-haters, stop calling a queer comic book character a Nazi. It's disrespectful and reductive to compare a comic book villain's half-assed alien invasion to a real life genocidal dictator's methodical torture and murder of Jews, Romani, disabled, and queer people. You're all fucking annoying and you are all acting like your families died in the Chitauri attack in NYC (That Thanos wanted Loki to do, and is implied to at the very least coerced him) or Jotunheim.

Thanos kidnapped and tortured children. Stop acting like he's noble and had no choice.

[harocat]

Like Utena/Anthy in both movie and tv form predate the Tara/Willow storyline.

The show came out in 1997, and the Utena movie, the one where they make out naked for like five minutes straight? Came out in 1999.

Lest you think Utena was some kind of niche, late night anime, it wasn’t. It was a major project that aired in early evening on a flagship network television channel. The show was aimed at the same audiences that watched Sailor Moon, so wasn’t even a purely ‘adult’ show. Yet it was still explicitly sapphic.

Not to mention the deuteragonist was a brown skinned Indian woman, which is something that elicited racist feedback from viewers.

Tara and Willow became a thing in 2001, on the WB. Also Joss Whedon was there.

Know your history, respect your elders? Indeed. Believe it or not, East Asian media counts.

[coraniaid]

trick or treat!

This is a Kendra headcanon that I like a lot but that I'm not sure will ever make it into anything I'm writing.

So: Kendra occupies a pretty strange place in the wider setting of Buffy. She's the first Slayer other than Buffy we meet, but the show itself is pretty aggressively uninterested in her. After the two parter she's introduced in, she's not mentioned again until Becoming, when she comes back to be killed off. She'll only be mentioned a couple of times after her death. Years and years after the show ended, Joss Whedon retroactively gave her full name as "Kendra Young", even though Kendra herself tells Giles that "[she] has no last name".

And the little scraps of backstory we do get about Kendra don't really feel consistent with anything we learn about how Slayers and Potentials operate, either. Kendra was identified as a potential Slayer when she was very small, and her parents (apparently willingly) gave her up to be raised by her Watcher, a Mr Sam Zabuto. She's very, very rules-focused, and familiar not just with the Slayer handbook but with more general details of the supernatural (for example: she's read about Angel before, which Giles himself hadn't, and she can cite sources about the Order of Taraka that Giles seems not to have read).

Meanwhile, the Council didn't know anything about Buffy or Faith until they were both Called, as far as we can tell, and even Potentials like Season 7's Kennedy who were identified at a young age don't seem to have been treated much like Kendra. Kennedy was trained to use weapons, but she doesn't seem to have separated from her parents (at least not based on how she talks about her childhood to Willow) or expected to memorize the contents of multi-volume arcane texts that even a Watcher like Giles describes as being "a bit stodgy" (in fact she tells Willow that magic "seems like fairy tale crap", so her theoretical knowledge must be pretty limited). Something is strange about Kendra. She's not like the other Slayers.

Kendra herself tells Buffy that "[her] people" take Slaying very seriously and that she sent to live with her Watcher at such a young age that she "doesn't really remember" her parents. And ... okay, well, let's be honest: this is mostly just bad writing. It can be explained by a combination of the show trying to position Kendra as, at all levels, an opposite to Buffy [Buffy lives with her mom so Kendra doesn't; Buffy's parents don't know she's a Slayer so Kendra's do; Buffy dislikes studying so Kendra must excel at it; Buffy has friends and dates so Kendra can't, etc.] and not caring particularly if the results add up to anything consistent. And it can, more damningly, be explained by the Buffy writers' regular automatic assumption that non-white people living outside the USA are necessarily more "primitive" and more in touch with old, pre-modern traditions, that they are less interested in the happiness of the individual and more respectful of authority and in doing what is best for the collective. That Kendra's people are like the Incans who sacrified the girl who we only know as "Ampata" (not her real name, of course), or the Shadow Men who activated the First Slayer, or Jenny Calendar's Uncle Enyos (who explicitly contrasts the beliefs of his "tribe" to those of "the modern man").

But what if things were different? What if this wasn't just another example of the show's constant background racism?

As it happens, as early as Season 1 we were already introduced to a group of people who take Slaying very seriously and who pass knowledge of the supernatural and the occult down to their children. People who think of themselves as having "destinies" and who make "tiresome speeches about responsibility and sacrifice". What if this group is, unbeknowst to her, the people Kendra is refering to when she tells Buffy about "[her] people"? What if Kendra's parents were Watchers?

We know that the Council don't always identify Potential Slayers at a young age, but they did manage to identify Kendra, at a young enough age that being a Potential is practically all the life she knows. What could explain that better than if Kendra herself grew up surrounded by Watchers? As soon as they decided to start looking for nearby Potentials, they'd have found one practically under their feet.

What if Kendra's parents had been expecting to train her as a Watcher, but now found themselves having to face the fact she might be Called as a Slayer? What if that's why her training focused so much on reading books and studying theory; why it made her into somebody Buffy describes as a "she-Giles"? What if her parents were hoping that she would grow up never being Called, until she was old enough that she never would, and she could become the Watcher they were always hoping she would be?

Well, we might ask: why then does Kendra claim not to remember her parents? And why does she tell Giles she doesn't have a last name?

This is, in fact, something of a mystery in any case: if Kendra's parents knew she was a Potential and were happy for her to be raised by Watchers -- even if they weren't Watchers themselves -- why was it necessary for them to cut off all ties with her? Why did she have to be raised in isolation? It can't have been for secrecy, because these people would have known that Kendra was a Potential Slayer. Again, this isn't something we see the Council insist on for any other Potential Slayer. Was there some ulterior reason that Kendra couldn't be allowed to know who her parents were, or to talk to people who might have known them?

Well, remember what Quentin Travers accuses Giles of having in Helpless: "a father's love for the child ... and that is useless to the cause". How might somebody like Travers reacted to finding out that a Watcher had potentially given birth to a Slayer? Would he trust them to raise her? Would he allow it?

What if, instead of cheerfully giving her up, Kendra's Watcher parents -- or perhaps parent, singular -- had to agree to raise her as if she wasn't theirs, just to prevent the Council from swooping in and taking her away? What if the reason Kendra thinks she hasn't got a last name is that, if she'd remembered what it was, she'd have noticed it was the same as somebody else she knew? What if, while Buffy had a Watcher she often thought of as a father even though they weren't biologically related, and who was punished for being too much of a father figure, Kendra had a Watcher who was related to her, but who was under Council orders not to tell her that he was?

What if "Kendra Young" was born "Kendra Zabuto"?

[lizardsfromspace]

I went to this URL and it just won't load and I've never been happier to not see a "buy this URL!" screen bc there's a very strong chance I would. Not as an ironic redirect, I would make this my personal homepage. It would never once mention Joss Whedon or anyone associated with him. I would make business cards just to hand them out and say "you can learn more about me at Restore Joss Whedon and His Smoking Hot Ass Kicking Chicks dot org". I want to put it on a resume but then no one would hire me again and I wouldn't have enough money to keep owning the website. Am I not a strong enough female character to deserve this

[jerryterry]

There was one inevitable downside (/upside for Tumblr Drama fans?) to all of these poll tournaments coming to Tumblr, and that's "fandom polls being run by people with a massive bias/opinion that they can't help from plastering all over the posts". Like, there's this one New Vegas poll currently running where the OP has a seething hatred for Cass, among others - badmouthing characters in their poll posts, getting into ranting arguments about it. It's inconsequential and funny, and situations like this are a dime a dozen on this site, but seeing this made me want to take a look at this one a lil closer. Because it brushes into something small I've always found interesting about New Vegas: the rumor of homosexuality in the Legion, as well as a wider factor about the writing of companions in general (Under a read-more for length).

OP literally says "If you tell her you're a gay man, she calls you a nazi", so lets take a look at the line they cite for this:

There's multiple points where characters joke about the Legion having similar prominent homosexuality to the actual Romans (which was notable enough that there's straight-up a "Homosexuality in ancient Rome" Wikipedia page). For example:

- Veronica

- Major Knight

What's interesting is that the one character who talks about his direct experience with this subject, Jimmy (a former Legion slave), actually says something that contradicts that last quote:

This opens up the likely possibility that it's NCR propaganda - a homophobic lie to emasculate the enemy. Even if maybe it IS something common in the Legion, it's something frowned upon and is at best a rampant open secret. Either case makes Major Knight's quote provably false.

Regardless, it's a wide non-Legion belief that homosexuality is common and accepted in the Legion. If the source of that rumor IS cooked-up homophobic propaganda, it's interesting that it hasn't worked on the only characters who talk about it. All three of those quotes not only have no ill will toward the idea (Cass immediately states it's not an issue AND notes how common it is behind closed doors), but two of them are mentioned in a context of longing: Veronica's quote is immediately followed by her being angry that only men are allowed to be gay, wishing the same for lesbians. Major Knight's quote is in the context of him having to hide his homosexuality at work -- which sadly makes it clear that the propaganda was likely more effective in general than on the one straight character who mentions it.

I'd say it's funny that OP has a hatred of Cass for being homophobic despite being one of the few characters in-game who makes an explicit statement of not having a problem with homosexuality (I for one would've loved to see Boone - the biggest NCR bootlicker around - make his stance clear on the matter). But admittedly it IS tactless and clumsy to make a backhanded comparison of gayness to the Legion (that statement's obvious expository purpose aside). They also read "there's a lot more of that in the Mojave" to mean "ew, it's not this bad where I come from!", but Major Knight makes it clear that where she comes from is actually MORE supportive. As well as another comment she makes about having slept with women while drunk, which OP construes as likening homosexuality to a drunken mistake.

Like, relax. Yes, "I have no problem with it" isn't the most heartfelt statement of support. But the most Cass' words betray about her is ignorance. I think it's clear she's well-meaning but ignorant, and for the most part intentionally written that way. Most of the companions have intentional personality flaws - Cass is crass, tactless, and stubborn. Arcade is an idealist to a fault (in the game's opinion). Boone is blinded by loyalty to a flawed system despite enacting the worst parts of it. Veronica talks like every line was written by Joss Whedon. The others' flaws are a little more external, but ALL of the companions are intended to be flawed and have pros and cons (while not entirely equal), and all are still intended to be well-meaning people despite this.

It reflects a realism in the nuance of human beings. In general, the writing often tends to rely on this "no black or white, ALWAYS nuance" approach to an almost frustrating degree - like I WISH you could get a better ending for the Followers in a "did everything right" Yes Man ending, even though I know the phrase "did everything right" itself goes against the core philosophy of NV. The poll thing was intended as more of a jumping-off point to talk about some stuff in New Vegas I find interesting rather than a response to that post, but honestly - I know Tumblr has a bit of a problem with seeing nuance, but have a little faith in the writers, will you?

Oh. They... think the game itself pushes the idea that "all fascists are gay"??? How can you be a fan of this game yet have such a low opinion of its writing? Such a lack of critical understanding? This person says "According to my academically trained eye..." and then goes on a series of reaches that critically misunderstand the text in a really unfavorable way, just because they were (understandably) offended by a clumsy offhand statement a character makes and immediately clarifies. And they chose to run a poll despite their open hatred for some of the characters involved (they also seem to hate Boone, for obviously more understandable reasons). Interesting choice.

What's funnier is that OP's open disdain for this character makes it more likely for Cass to win the poll on account of spite votes. Cass would've absolutely been buried by Arcade and Veronica in any other scenario.

Anyway, here's a YouTube comment I found while grabbing these quotes that I found funny:

[Transcripts of screenshotted quotes are available in the alt text]

[hainethehero]

A JOSS WHEDON HATER FOREVER- a think piece on how Avengers 1 set up Steve Rogers to be the MCU's punching bag for the rest of the franchise

(We all know Joss Whedon is an absolute garbage person. He's done many horrible things including being a racist, sexist moron who should be behind literal bars.) This is a commentary on his absolute shit writing for Avengers 1.

This one particular scene and the one following it is purely poor writing & direction for the character of Steve Rogers.👇

After Coulson dies, Fury addresses Steve and Tony and tosses Coulson's bloodied Captain America cards at Steve. He says something like "guess you never found the time to sign them" which is just horribly cruel and though not OOC for Fury, is not something he'd say lightly. We later realize here👇

...that he's secretly trying to put together the team. This is where he makes his big "there was an idea" speech and mentions that "Stark knows this." Because yeah, Tony was made aware of this in Iron Man 1 when Coulson visited and told Pepper. In contrast, Steve had no idea about the Avengers Initiative.

In fact, the dude was just pulled from the Valkyrie in the ice!! In the beginning scene of Avengers 1, we see him at the gym with the punching bag having LITERAL WAR FLASHBACKS about Bucky and Peggy and the Howlies! He's not stable and yet Fury confronts him and ropes him into the mission to get the Tesseract. Steve says, "you should've left it where you found it." And I can't help but think that maybe Steve means himself as well because dude just lost EVERYONE & EVERYTHING he literally knew and cared about.

Anyway, back to the point, Steve knows nothing about the Initiative but is suddenly made to feel guilty about Coulson's death in some kind of roundabout way of "convincing him to join the team" in honor of Coulson.

And then, to make matters WORSE, in the next scene they make HIM comfort Tony 👇

They make him say, "im sorry" (like it was his fault???!) and "he was just doing his job" and "is this the first time you've lost a soldier?" LIKE WTAF???

*INSERTS JACOB ELORDI MEME FROM EUPHORIA SAYING WHAT THE FUCKKKKK?!*

First of all, Steve barely knows these people! Second, he was fond of Coulson and I'm sure they would've been close friends. But did they have to GUILT-TRIP Steve into joining the team? Like, that's just dumb and proves that they don't actually give a fuck about his character!

AND TALK ABOUT MEAN! Fury at least knew about Steve losing Bucky on that train. He KNOWS Steve's first words when he woke up from sleep was "I had a date" reflecting the tragedy of the man out of time. To just rip him out of sleep and thrust him into a mission and later making him feel guilty about Coulson was just pure cruelty, making SHIELD no better than HYDRA. They all saw Steve as a pawn, another mindless soldier to carry out their missions and I hate JW for that.

Steve's character was not accurately portrayed nor was his trauma properly dealt with and so this is why today, we see alot of MCU "fans" calling Steve the worst avenger, lame, boring and basically a crutch to Tony's genius. (I'm a huge Tony Stark fan, don't @ me). It just felt that the mcu wanted to make Tony the ultimate hero- which is fine, Nothing's wrong with that- but they did it at the expense of Steve's character and trauma.

Sadly, this narrative continues all the way down to Endgame and for that I will always hate JW & the mcu's portrayal of Steve Rogers.

[tainbocuailnge]

i think ive mentioned this before but something that I keep running into with replaying the game in german is that i was often remembering the english version as like, more thematically coherent than it was. so people will remember drk as being very good because they're like remembering the shadow on the wall of a single person getting angry on your behalf and of running yourself so ragged that your own self preservation instinct has to step in and remind you saving everyone includes yourself, and then you actually read it again and it's like damn do you really have to talk like that? but it's not just with drk even though that's got some of the biggest differences i keep running into scenes all over the game where it feels like the english translators weren't aware that something was a theme so they end up de-emphasising various elements that were supporting that theme. and it's very often that this de-emphasis comes paired with presenting wol as uniquely tortured and special, as opposed to ultimately just one of many people trying to do the right thing, which is part of a larger pattern of being scared to let characters be motivated by genuine complex emotion instead of being gruff and cool. and that's setting aside how much they hate women. calling (the english version of) dark knight very american in ideology is almost too on the nose but it really is a very succinct way to put it. and again having seen john crow speak on panels and knowing he did the english translation for drk it's really not surprising that the guy who talks like a joss whedon character would be overemphasising how cool and edgy and tortured dark knights are at the cost of most of the emotional sincerity.

[canonmisogynyvictimstournament]

PRELIMINARY ROUND - BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER/ANGEL THE SERIES

PROPAGANDA

Fred Burkle

1.) She is chronically a damsel in distress in the canon even though she has demonstrated her intelligence and ability to use weapons. The canon consistently takes away her agency over her body and ability to make decisions just to further plot. Why does she die because she gets possessed by a god for no reason </3

2.) ok I promise I'll be more normal about the other ats female characters than about cordy. fred was introduced as a genius physicist who had spent five years stuck in a demon dimension where humans were persecuted, surviving on her own and trying to somehow find a way back home. after being rescued from the demon dimension by the show's main characters, she joins the main cast and starts trying to readjust to the normal world. the setup for her character is really interesting, with her having a lot of trauma from her time in the demon dimension, feeling helpless, and struggling to become comfortable living in the human world again. but I guess because she's a Woman the show instead reduces her to just being at the centre of a love triangle with two of the other main characters, which she has almost no agnecy in and gets stretched out over like two seasons. and then after she breaks up for good with one of the guys and it looks like MAYBE she'll at least be freed from love triangle hell, the show introduces a NEW love interest for her just to keep the love triangle drama going. she basically never gets any focus or to be an active player in the show's plot aside from in a couple of episodes, pretty much being reduced to just a damsel in distress. and as if all that wasn't bad enough, fred's story ends with her being killed by a demon that takes over her body and destroys her from the inside out in a way that isn't Technically a mystical pregnancy but is like. close enough to one and presented close enough to one for it to count. (if you read the cordelia submission and are perhaps thinking to yourself jesus christ did they actually fridge both their main female characters in exactly the same way? Yes. Yes they did.) the demon in fred's body then allegedly becomes a new member of the main cast but the show does pretty much nothing with this character and she doesn't play any important role so it really does just feel like fred died for no reason other than to make her boyfriend sad. This is because fred died for no reason other than to make her boyfriend sad. It fucking sucks but I guess it's not like she got any agency or development when she was alive either

3.) Poor Fred. Amy Acker is a fantastic actress and Fred had the potential to become a truly wonderful character - a brilliant scientist who goes through intense trauma and finds her purpose in helping other people. I have a lot of love for her. Unfortunately she was the victim of a lot of really misogynistic writing. For starters, a lot of her characterisation falls into the ‘quirky weird girl who’s hot but doesn’t realise’ camp which Joss Whedon is fond of. Like other examples of this, her trauma is turned into something quirky which fades away once they get bored of it. Also, she becomes completely sidelined and silenced in a love triangle where the feelings of the man pining over her are given all air time, and her own opinion is never mentioned. Additionally, she’s constantly sidelined in the final season after being made the token girl, and is finally killed off unceremoniously to generate drama and pain for the aforementioned man who was pining over her. And you know what the worst part is? She still gets off more lightly than Cordelia.

Cordelia Chase (CW: Pregnancy)

1.) (downs an entire bottle of vodka and slams it back on the table) SO. CORDY. Cordy started off as a supporting character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At the start she was your typical high school mean girl character, but as the show went on we got to see more depth to her character: her insecurities, her courage, her capacity for incredible acts of kindness. Then after the third season she moved into the show's spin off, Angel, where from the beginning she was basically the show's secondary protagonist. Her and Angel were the two mainstays of the show's main cast, she gets the most episodes centered on her out of all the characters aside from Angel (and yes, I've checked), and we really got to see her grow from a very shallow and self-centered and kind of mean person to a true hero who was prepared to give up any chance at a normal life to fight the good fight while still never losing the basic core of her character. There were some… questionable moments like the episode where she gets mystically pregnant with demon babies and things got a bit iffy like halfway through season 3 where the writers seemed to run out of ideas for what to do with her outside of sticking her in this romance drama/love triangle situation with the main character but overall, pretty good stuff right? THEN SEASON 4 HAPPENED. In season 4 she gets stripped of literally all agency and spends pretty much the entire season possessed by an evil higher power, and while possessed she sleeps with Angel's teenage son (who BY THE WAY she had helped raise as a baby before he got speed-grown-up into a teenager it was a whole thing don't worry about it) and gets pregnant with like. the physical manifestation of the higher power that's possessing her. it's about as bad and stupid as it sounds and also is like the third time cordy's got mystically pregnant in this show and like the fourth mystical pregnancy storyline overall (you will be hearing more on that note in other submissions I'm so sorry). after giving birth she goes into a coma, in which she remains for the rest of season 4 and the first half of season 5. SPEAKING OF WHICH DON'T THINK SEASON 5 IS GETTING OFF SCOT FREE HERE. yeah so in season 5 the show just FULLY starts trying to erase cordy's existence. she gets mentioned ONCE in the first episode and then never again until halfway through the season where she wakes up, helps out Angel for a bit and encourages him in his fight against evil, and then goes quietly into that good night and dies so it can be all sad and tragic. I'd call it the worst fridging of all time but even THAT feels generous because the whole point of fridging is killing off a female character so a man can be sad, and after Cordy dies basically no one's even sad about it because the show immediately goes back to pretending she never existed. she is not mentioned ONCE in the two episodes after she dies. in the whole stretch of time between her death and the end of the season she gets mentioned exactly four times. again, I counted. anyway the fun twist to all of this is that all of this happened because the actress who played cordy got pregnant before season 4 and joss whedon was so pissed off about this affecting his plans for the show that he decided to completely fuck over her character and then fire her and write her out of the show. so cordy's a victim of both writing AND real life misogyny!! good times!!

2.) OH SO MANY THINGS they menaced by giving her terrible hair cuts, making her seem like she'd get together with the guy she loves (and who loves her back) but instead she was killed and when she was brought back, she got possessed by an evil entity who used her body to give birth to itself. afterwards she was in a long coma and died. her character was so throughoutly assassinated

3.) She got demonically pregnant TWICE - there was this real sense of a womb/ability to get pregnant as like, a place for evil to get in. She got positioned as femme fatale and evil mother. The actress basically got fired for being pregnant, and when she agreed to come back for a single final episode she specifically said they could do anything but kill off the character. Guess what happened

[raisedbythetv89]

*tw* mentions of sa throughout the btvs series:

Expanding on the thoughts in this post about fandom culture and etiquette for how to make this a safer and more enjoyable space for everyone no matter who you ship

If you are a fan of btvs or ats no matter who your favorite characters are or who you ship - you have suffered at the hands of joss whedon's narcissistic personality and the subsequent emotional abuse he not only put the actors and his characters through but the audience as well

He gave us characters and relationships we fell in love with and then always, without fail, something horrible happens to one of them or they do something horrific and we're forced to cope with the emotional whiplash that happens every time he does it and decide if we love the character or relationship enough to cope with what joss did to them or if that's it for us enjoying that character or relationship

Like Bangel? Surprise! He's gonna lose his soul and completely psychologically destroy Buffy! AND THEN he's gonna come back and turns out he's been lying to this whole time to Buffy and he actually loved Darla so much he tried to be evil even with the soul first and actually stalked Buffy for a year before he introduced himself and fell in love with the sight of her crying at 15 and we made her look SUPER childlike and innocent to really up the ick factor!

Like Spuffy? Here take the most traumatic depiction of attempted sexual assault we've ever seen in the series that comes out of absolutely nowhere and is specifically designed to punish women after Spike was the only person who could be there for Buffy besides Tara as she battles her severe depression!

Like Tillow? Well Willow goes from empowering Tara and standing up for her to yelling at her to shut the hell up and then magically drugging and sexually assaulting her! and then when Tara calls her out on in she uses the "I didn't mean to" line and then is gonna use magic on her in the exact same way! and then we're gonna rush tara forgiving her just to kill her off!

Like Fuffy? Well Faith is gonna steal Buffy's body and then sexually assault both buffy and riley simultaneously while trying to goad riley into violating buffy's body as much as possible!

The list is truly ENDLESS you either survive on btvs long enough to do something horrific or you're killed off in a brutal, shocking and senseless way (I'm not going to list every single relationship and horrific event as it seems unnecessary and I know I can expand on the above example even further but again it feels unnecessary so please don't freak out if you feel I missed something this is by no means an exhaustive list)

Joss hates people, he hates women, he hates people of color, he hates his audience. Doing horrible things to people you claim to love is incredibly normal for him and any abusive narcissist because they don't love people or even see them as fellow humans - they're just things they play with for entertainment or to make them feel good about themselves which is why this is so prevalent in the buffyverse in the first place

Liking a ship where something horrible happens, you're not condoning it - it happened TO YOU. You were going along loving a character or relationship and then the creator got bored or angry and decides to throw a narrative punch just because he can and he likes the control it gives him to make a bunch of people react in certain ways emotionally and he loves to ruin things people love that's a huge thing for narcissists - if they see someone else feeling good about themselves or experience joy they want it destroyed

We have all suffered at the hands of this man, everyone has their favorite characters for very specific and deeply personal reasons. Just because you can't move past or accept certain behaviors from a character doesn't mean you get to dictate that for everyone else. Truly loving or connecting to a character means you have more capacity for forgiveness than someone who just liked them - and loving a character also usually comes with a deeper understanding of that character in the first place that can give you perspective and understanding that helps you contextualize the bad things.

Loving even the worst fictional characters literally harms no one, but attacking, shaming, judging, feeling superior to real people for their fictional tastes does so don't come on here and "well actually" me with "well MY fav didn't do [x]" or "MY fav never did anything.." because that's not the point. The whole point of this post is other btvs or ats fans who like different characters or ship difference ships are not you enemy - JOSS WHEDON is the only enemy here - be mad at him and only him, hate on other characters all you want but being cruel to other fans who don't agree with you is exactly what joss wants and we all hate that fucker so stop playing his game and don't be a dick.

[ordinaryschmuck]

While you mentioned not liking the amount of swearing in Hazbin, I do kind of like that CHARLIE is still willing to swear. Because, with the type of character she is, you'd think she'd be less willing to, but no. Heck, her dad actually swears less than her. And that makes sense. She grew up in an environment where the people around her probably swore all the time and didn't care. It's kind of why I think she's less innocent than she'd seem regarding sex stuff. Like, she saw two people having sex and didn't seem put off, she knows what the term bukkake means, even when she went to Valentino's studio, before the stuff with Angel Dust, her reaction was less "scandalized" and more "Oh wow, this is all hot." Like, she's kind and sweeter than most people around her, but not the innocent Disney Princess she gives the vibe of.

I get what you're saying...but I don't know. I feel like if EVERY character swears, from the angels to the demons, it not only takes the PUNCH of the curse, it gives the sense that there's not everyone is so unique. Like, the dialogue and the energy each voice actor puts into the performance at least helps differentiate everyone, but to me, it feels like VivziePop makes her characters swear like Joss Whedon makes superheroes quip. It ignores the fact that dialogue is dependent on who's saying what, because if everyone talks the same then nobody's all that different. You could give the line to anybody and the effect would still the same.

Now, that's not to say I'm opposed to Charlie swearing at all. It's the same reason why I'm not against Batman making a quip in the original Justice League. When asked what his powers are and his response to go "I'm rich" is perfect. It's quick, it's dry, it's Batman. But him saying, "Yup, something is definitely bleeding" after Superman throws is awkward and could have, again, been said by anybody if they were thrown like a ragdoll by Supes. If you gotta make him quick, make him do it in a way that suits HIM.

Same goes for Charlie. If she's gotta swear, swear in a way that suits the optimistic princess...who happens to be the Princess of HELL. Have her say regular stuff like "hell" or even "shit" on the regular, but save the bigger stuff under her breath or when pushed to the brink. For example, there's this now dead show from the late and great Rooster Teeth called Camp Camp, which has a similar problem. Everybody's cursing left and right, with "Fuck" being the most popular word--I mean, it's a Rooster Teeth production. What are you going to do? The only characters who don't swear as often are Nicki, Space Kid, and, of course, David. So when THEY swear, it's either to give that extra PUNCH for the joke or for the dramatics, with David's first AND ONLY f-bomb in the series resonating with me all these years later since I first watched the show. It works because of the character who said it, not what was actually said. Because in a show where "Fuck" is said by almost everyone, HIM saying it hits the hardest because you would never expect it. And that's Hazbin's whole problem with almost every character cursing, especially Charlie.

You can have them swear as much as you want, but if everyone talks the same, are they really all that different?

[greensaplinggrace]

Who else besides Spike has committed SA on Buffy? youre grasping at straws to excuse your pathetic white boy again..

literally the entire main cast except buffy. and technically giles. although i count him amongst those who have engaged in grievous nonconsent, considering what he did during the tento di cruciamentum.

angel against buffy: statutory rape and grooming. plus stalking. not to mention the line he toes by having her memory erased.

angel against drusilla: everything he did to her. enough said.

xander against buffy: attempted rape while possessed by the hyena spirit, which i will count for a number of reasons - key of which is that if i wasn't counting xander i would have to discount spike. and i very much do count spike.

xander against the women of sunndyale: do you remember that love spell he did that erased their consent and forced them to fall madly in love with him and almost caused more than one murder? because i do! that's sexual assault!

willow against tara: mind-rape as well as rape, because when you erase someone's memory of a fight so they can continue sleeping with you when they would otherwise say no, that's rape.

willow against buffy and spike: not as serious, but if spike and buffy had slept together during thy-will-be-done spell, she would have been in some serious trouble. as is, her spell erased their consent and forced them into romantic and borderline sexual situations together anyway. so that's sexual assault right there.

willow against everyone in the bronze: forcing people to strip dance against their consent is sexual assault. and also a basic violation of bodily autonomy.

willow against the scoobies: not technically sa, but she still violated bodily autonomy and consent through her tabula rasa spell, which was an attempt to mind-rape buffy.

faith against xander: they initiated sex and then he revoked consent. she kept going. that's rape.

faith against buffy and riley: she had sex with riley while in buffy's body, against both of their consent, which is rape. also stealing buffy's body is just straight up hinky to begin with.

anya against xander: technically this is toeing the line of grooming/predatory behavior, but the way she pursues him at first isn't exactly above board.

anya against countless others: almost everything she did as a vengeance demon was sexual assault.

so you know what i'm beginning to think this is your typical 90s tv show where cases of sa and rape are handled with very little care, and to make matters worse it's written by joss whedon. so honestly, i condemn spike just as i condemn every other character, but i'm not going to hate him for something that i consider the very peak of bad writing when i dont hate them for it either. and i don't even consider it bad because it happened, but because it was handled so fucking poorly and cheaply in the narrative. just like every other instance of sa and rape in the show. sorry, but i have more awareness of writer bias than that.

and if you really want to delve into it, i think it's fascinating how spike's attempt in seeing red is atypical of your usual sexual assault. i think the fact that he stops and is actively horrified is interesting, considering that most attempts in real life and in the show are defined by a certain mindset that drives the assaulter to keep going. it's not an excuse, by the way, it's an analysis. put side by side with even other characters in the show and their own similar crimes, it's downright indicative of quite a lot of things.

[czolgosz]

Halfrek: "Do I have to mention Mrs. Czolgosz?" This could be a reference to Leon Czolgosz (pronounced Choal-gosh), the anarchist who assasinated President William McKinley at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition in September 1901. In 1900, Czolgosz, then 23, married Emma Wisemki, a 17-year-old German immigrant whom he had apparently gotten pregnant. She had gone to Charleston, West Virginia looking for the father of her unborn child (who was using the alias Fred Nieman); he reportedly readily agreed to the marriage after police located him. Stephen Sondheim, of whom Joss Whedon is a big fan, wrote about this event in "The Ballad of Czolgosz" in his musical Assassins.

??????????????????????????? <-my issue is less the false biographical information and more the last sentence because ok maybe you're not being at all rigorous with your sources sure whatever but you can clearly observe that "the ballad of czolgosz" is NOT about that

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Is It Really That Bad?

I don’t think I’ve ever felt like the universe actively conspired against something until I witnessed the production of The Flash.

Since 1991 there have been quite a few proposals for Flash movies, but they never really got off the ground for whatever reason. Following Barry’s debut in Justice League, a movie finally was announced before multiple delays due to rewrites, in particular to cut Ray Fisher’s Cyborg from the story after he went public about the awful shit he had to deal with under Joss Whedon. Things seemed hopeless until It director Andy Muschietti came onboard, at which point production on the film finally started to go smoothly. Sure, there were rumblings about Ezra Miller having episodes on set, but that’s just typical actor nonsense, right? Surely it couldn’t get any worse!

Look, I’m here to review a movie so I’ll keep this brief: Miller committed crimes. Lots of crimes. So many, in fact, you’d think they were method acting for the role of Reverse-Flash. The thing is, despite all of this, Miller was basically given a slap on the wrist by the studio, being forbidden from doing promos and press tours (oh no! The horror!). And as if the situation wasn’t already a fucking mess, while Miller’s crime spree was ongoing WB canned the nearly-complete Batgirl movie that featured Michael Keaton and Academy Award-winning actor Brendan Fraser while simultaneously inflating The Flash’s budget to nearly $300 million with reshoots. It seems baffling to cancel a movie that was nearly done and that people were marginally interested in for the sake of a movie that people were losing interest in quickly due to its star’s erratic behavior, but remember: Leslie Grace isn’t white, while Ezra Miller is. WB is never beating those racism allegations at this rate.

With a normal movie, this is where the nonsense ends. BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

This film was meant to smooth out the clusterfuck continuity of the “Snyderverse” with a soft reboot, with Henry Cavill filming a end-of-movie cameo alongside Miller, Gal Gadot, Keaton, and Supergirl’s actress Sasha Calle to establish the new direction of DC going forward. Unfortunately, the hierarchy of power at DC changed, and Gunn shot that down. While this meant the ending would probably not get people confused with regards to upcoming projects, it also meant the movie wasn’t going to really have any closure for the old universe. Affleck, Cavill, and who knows who else are just gone, and the future is just a big old question mark. At least Aquaman is safe, maybe?

Literally none of this news was very reassuring to fans. Nothing above is any good for a film’s perception to audiences under normal circumstances, but here we have all this news coming to a fanbase that genuinely did not want this fucking movie. The DCEU was already divisive when the film was announced, and Miller’s portrayal of Barry doubly so; the fact it was adapting Flashpoint was seen as lazy and uninspired, not to mention its not really a story that lets Flash stand on his own merits, making it seem more like this movie was just an excuse to reboot; it was a multiverse story in a day and age with an abundance of such stories, and it was releasing around the same time as Across the Spider-Verse to boot; and Gunn’s reboot plans meant this story was likely a narrative dead end. This movie had an uphill battle the likes of which haven’t been seen since Sisyphus.

But much like that mythological figure, the boulder came crashing right back down when the numbers came in. The movie would likely need to gross $500 million at minimum to break even after factoring in the reshoots and advertising, and it only managed half of that with a pitiful opening weekend followed by a massive 73% drop. It now sits alongside films like The Lone Ranger and Mortal Engines as one of the most expensive bombs in history, to the point where WB would have saved more money by cancelling it like they did with Batgirl. And despite glowing praise from the likes of Tom Cruise and Stephen King, it received middling reviews from mainstream critics.

Audiences haven’t been any less mixed, but considering most people weren’t particularly excited or invested in this film’s existence this is basically a miracle. Sure, there’s plenty of people out there saying this is the “worst comic book movie ever” like they do every time a new superhero movie drops, but even more people are saying they enjoyed the film… although even they tend to have some severe criticisms.

Even though I knew most of what was going to happen in the movie going in, I wasn’t really sure what to expect given everything surrounding the movie. But you know me, I’m willing to give almost any movie a chance, and bombs this big don’t happen every day, so even before it was voted on I was trying to make time to check it out. So sit down, microwave yourself a snack—

—and watch as I try and determine if The Flash is really that bad.

THE GOOD

The biggest shock of this film is that Ezra Miller is actually really good here.

Their Barry is still a bit of a goofball, but he’s clearly matured as a character since his precious appearances. They managed to make him much more charming and likable than he ever was, and this gets compounded when he interacts with the younger Barry and gets confronted with how annoying he was before. I think young Barry could have come off as really insufferable, but the fact he annoys everyone around him and also ends up maturing makes him a lot more endearing.

Miller really kills it with the emotional moments, particularly the ending encounter with Barry’s mom and the scene where old Barry snaps at young Barry. The film is really carried by the dramatic, emotional moments far more than any of the superheroics, and Miller manages to sell a lot of it very well. It was to the point where I started thinking, “I really wouldn’t mind if they stick around.” Then a scene where Barry says the Justice League has no real psychiatric help or where his younger self ends up repeatedly exposing himself in public by accident happens, and then I remembered, “Oh yeah, aren’t they a mentally unwell criminal?”

Unsurprisingly, Michael Keaton absolutely kills it in his role as Batman, but much more shockingly is that Ben Affleck's brief return as Bruce is pretty great as well. I always thought Affleck, much like Henry Cavill, was desperately trying to give a great performance while weighed down by bad writing; here, he gets an actual poignant scene where he talks to Barry about how dwelling on tragedies isn't the way to do things, and you should try and move forward instead. It shows he really could have been great if given better material to work with.

Okay, enough being nice to Affleck, I wanna talk about Keaton again. As much as the marketing hyped him up and as much as he is obviously the most blatant fanservice possible, it's still so cool to see him in the suit again. I am not immune to nostalgia pandering, and as corny as it could have been from anyone else, the zoom into his face when he says The Line really is a highlight of the movie. Keaton has a great deal of charisma, and while there are issues with Batman they aren't his fault at all. Most impressively, he doesn't steal the show away from Miller like I thought he would; he enhances the scenes he's in without stealing the spotlight completely from their performance. I feel like this is a problem in a lot of movies like this, where the lead gets overshadowed by a hyped up character, but somehow The Flash of all things managed to avoid this.

And as bad as the cameos could get, this movie gave two of the greatest cameos ever put to film with the return of the GOAT George Clooney Batman and, best of all, Nicolas Cage Superman from the unmade Superman Lives, fighting a giant spider to the death just as God intended. I am not immune to the charms of Nicolas Cage.

Overall, this movie presents us with a solid story, plenty of fun moments, great character dynamics, and more... for the first two acts, anyway.

THE BAD

Once this movie hits the third act, it basically just loses any and all focus and becomes a big dumb video game-esque battle against Zod and his forces in a bland desert landscape. While both Barrys admittedly get some pretty cool moments sprinkled in and Keaton’s Batman’s second death is actually a well done emotional moment, Supergirl ends up being completely wasted, with her sole role being to angrily scream and then die repeatedly.

This actually highlights the problem with Kara in this movie: She’s basically nothing but a plot device and has zero personality, and a good 80% of her dialogue is just angry screaming. As hot as Sasha Calle is and how much she obviously wants to make Kara compelling, she is given so little to work with that her efforts end up being fruitless. She does nothing of consequence after helping Barry get his powers back, and could be replaced or written out of the story and it would still make perfect sense.

Zod’s inclusion is pretty baffling as well, especially since they chose to water down one of the only good things from Man of Steel into a boring, generic doomsday villain. You can really feel that poor Michael Shannon would rather be doing anything else, and his bored performance just highlights how poorly implemented Zod is in the plot. Like, the Fladh has some of the best and most colorful DC villains in his rogues gallery, one’s that are often overlooked because Batman’s villains sell more toys. Why not highlight some of them instead of taking a Superman villain and stripping him of all personality to the point the actor clearly has no passion for the role? Cutting Zod would make cutting Supergirl even easier, and then two of the biggest problems with the movie are gone!

The third act does manage to mostly rerail itself once it goes back to Barry trying to unfuck the timeline, with only a disgustingly egregious bit of fanservice that I’ll discuss in the next section hampering it. But at the end, despite the incredibly based George Clooney cameo, there’s just so many unresolved and unanswered questions, with the biggest one being who killed Barry’s mom? Considering her death is what kickstarted the whole plot, you’d think this might come up, but it never does. A lot of other things come up and get dropped too, like whatever was going on with Batman in the opening, but maybe I’m just crazy for wanting elements introduced in a plot to have significance beyond just being there to be cool.

Even beyond that, there’s the fact that Supergirl and Keaton!Batman’s final fates are never really resolved, something that apparently wasn’t a problem in early versions of the film since they showed up alive in the final scene. As much as I loved seeing Clooney, I think trading him for getting some closure for Keaton and Calle would have been more satisfying.

Everyone harps on how bad the CGI is—and it absolutely is, don’t get me wrong—but for the most part I found it endearingly bad. Like the opening with the CGI babies? That’s too goofy for me to hate. But once the movie revolves into bland grey and black CGI bad guys and creepy deepfake celebrity cameos, I stop being quite so forgiving.

Oh, and on the subject of cameos, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one as pointless and unfunny as Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman showing up out of nowhere (complete with theme music) to make Bruce and Barry look like dumb assholes. Imagine thinking this was a good idea.

THE UGLY

The biggest point of contention surrounding this movie is the CGI necromancy used in the aforementioned cameo clusterfuck from the climax, which gives us George Reeve, Christopher Reeves, and Adam West posthumously reprising their DC roles in non-speaking appearances (there’s archived audio from West, but his cameo isn't really focused on to the point you can barely tell it's him) where they just stand there before the camera swoops around like in that Saul Goodman gif.

I think this is one of the very few times where I actually think the outrage is mostly justified. To be clear, I’m not getting mad on behalf of dead celebrities I never knew, and as long as the filmmakers went through the proper channels and the estates of these stars were properly compensated, I don’t have any legal objections. All of my distaste is coming from a subjective, moral standpoint.

I have never liked this CGI necromancy ever since Rogue One popularized it. I find it really gross and distasteful, and in most cases I think finding a lookalike actor would be preferable than playing Weekend at Bernie’s with a computer generated facsimile of a dead person. In The Flash, I understand having lookalikes would diminish the wow factor of the crossover, but there was an extremely easy workaround to this: Have cameos from all the living DC stars.

Was Brandon Routh not available to put on the Superman tights? Would it have been so bad to let Grant Gustin pop in for a cameo? They acknowledge Helen Slater, so why not Melissa Benoist? Hell, if you want to reference bad, campy movies, have Shaq show up as Steel or Josh Brolin pop in as Jonah Hex! Or even Ryan Reynolds, I’d bet he’d be down to return if you gave him a real suit this time!

Like there’s just no excuse for ghoulishly parading around dead guys when there’s so many alive guys you could use instead. People can complain all they want about the fanservice and cameos in the past few Spider-Man films, but at least they only had returning characters played by living actors. And when this movie already has the niche, out-there Nic Cage Superman cameo, proving they were down to do things as out there and inoffensively creative as reference unmade movies, it’s really just inexcusable. It doesn’t ruin the movie for me, but it makes me lose a bit of respect for the people who okayed this over less offensive cameo ideas.

IS IT REALLY THAT BAD?

To my surprise, this film actually turned out to be pretty good. Not “great,” not “the best superhero movie ever,” but genuinely mostly good and enjoyable.

My opinion is that the movie is good in spite of itself. The third act is truly a hot mess, the stupid desert battle against Zod is awful and boring, Supergirl is depressingly pointless, so many plot points are just dropped or otherwise forgotten, and the CGI necromancy is nothing short of ghoulish. But the rest of the movie is truly a lot of fun. Barry and his younger self have a fun dynamic, Keaton really manages to take what little he’s given and show that he’s still got it as Batman, the Clooney and Cage cameos were delightful, and most importantly the emotional moments are actually effective.

I think with a bit more polish this film could have actually lived up to the hype around it. There is a great movie in here being suffocated by fanservice and CGI but still managing to get a few gasps of air regardless. I think if they’d kept the conflict more grounded or made Reverse-Flash the primary antagonist, things might have turned out better.

I think its score is pretty fair. My friend @huyh172 described this as “the worst good DC movie,” and it’s an assessment I fully agree with. It’s not as good as Aquaman, Wonder Woman, The Suicide Squad, the Snyder Cut, or Shazam!, and it’s definitely not as bad as stuff like Wonder Woman 1984 or Josstice League. It’s also a bit too enjoyable to be mid. It’s just a really solid movie held back from true greatness by some damning flaws… and really, that makes it the perfect capstone to the "Snyderverse," a cinematic universe that had some solid movies but was held back from greatness by incredibly bad ones.

[coraniaid]

In 2001 Buffy writer Drew Z. Greenberg wrote a scene in which (canonically lesbian character) Willow uses a magic spell to make two random men hassling her at a bar (neither of whom we have ever seen before and both of whose sexuality is unknown) start kissing each other. However, Buffy showrunner Joss Whedon vetoed this scene, which was then cut from the episode before filming, because he didn't want to suggest magic could change people's sexual orientation or that same sex attraction was some sort of punchline. Definitely not for any other reason, of course.

In 2002 Buffy writer Drew Z. Greenberg wrote an episode in which (canonically lesbian character) Willow is affected by a magic spell that made her -- and every other surviving woman on the show -- suddenly attracted to a random teenage boy. Of course, since Joss Whedon's decision to cut the previous scene I mentioned was motivated by principle and not just a blanket refusal to ever openly depict romantic or sexual attraction between men on screen, this episode was also heavily rewritten to make it clear that magic cannot change people's sexual orientation, and ...

... oh, what's that? It wasn't rewritten? At all? The fact that Willow is a lesbian is brought up as a punchline? Oh, okay.

Well, that probably doesn't mean anything.