#Joss Whedon mentions

[seriousbrat]

sometimes i think some of the bad takes i see around here abt hp as a whole comes from ppl not understanding genre conventions and the target audience of the series (which, at least for the first few books, were kids and pre-teens). ppl be analysing "plot holes" and "flaws" without taking this into consideration, when that would answer 95% of their concerns

I agree with this! It sometimes feels like people expect some kind of deeply elaborate political treatise with Tolkien-level worldbuilding out of HP and it's like.... it was never going to be that, it wasn't supposed to be that, and it shouldn't be that. It's a kids book about a magic school and it's supposed to be whimsical and nonsensical at times. I don't see people going around being like "the worldbuilding in Alice in Wonderland makes no sense!!! Why did the author not consider the sociopolitical ramifications of the walrus and the carpenter gaslighting the oysters??" I mean I'm def exaggerating with that example lmao, but still.

Sure, there are some issues with the writing, but they're generally minor and imo a lot of what people consider to be flaws are either fully explained or really just.... purposefully silly. For instance iirc JKR has said she purposefully designed Quidditch to make no sense. It's not a world that is supposed to make complete sense. Like where is ur sense of whimsy guys.

And it's not that we shouldn't discuss Harry Potter in a more analytical sense or that there's nothing to talk about. That we're all here talking about it proves that there's plenty to talk about-- and I think it can be fun, interesting, and worthwhile to discuss. But it's unreasonable imo to expect some sort of brutally accurate depiction of fascism, for instance, in a kid's book about magic. If you want that there's plenty of historical fiction for adults that explicitly analyses the realities of fascism. There's even historical fiction for kids/YA that deals with the topic, but you'll notice they probably won't delve into the precise political mechanisms of fascism either lmao, but rather focus on portraying a lived experience. Because relating to an experience is a mechanism that a younger audience can use to understand complex topics.

Another is metaphor. Literature for kids and teens, particularly fantasy, deals heavily in metaphor and allusion to get a point across, but it has to be in a way that is understandable and relatable for a younger audience. Like Voldemort is a bald snake man with no nose, he's already a bit silly and unrealistic so why is the rest of it expected to be a super serious gritty analysis of fascism. How would that be something approachable for kids. Personally I think the metaphor is VERY obvious in Harry Potter lol but anyway

Kids aren't stupid, I'm not saying they should be condescended to either. But you wouldn't expect an 11 year old to read For Whom the Bell Tolls or something. And in general I don't think Harry Potter does treat kids as stupid-- especially given the fact that apparently fully grown adults cannot grasp basic concepts presented in those books lol. Such as an extremely obvious metaphor.

[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"?

[herinsectreflection]

Bored Now (Doppelgangland)

Doppelgangland is a very good episode.

There’s a version of this essay that is nothing but that sentence over and over again, phrased in different ways. It’s a nearly self-evident truth – this episode is uncontroversially and near-universally beloved. IMDB’s ranking has it as the best episode of Season Three, and 8th overall. It’s regularly mentioned as a season highlight by dedicated and casual fans alike. Vampire Willow is one of the show’s most memorable villains, and she only gets this episode to shine at all, after being criminally underused in The Wish. Even Joss Whedon ranks it among his own top 10. Fan ratings aren’t everything – the fact that Restless comes in at #33 is a clear indicator of the voters’ collective lack of taste – but when a fandom so clearly agrees on something, I think it’s worth asking why.

In one way, that question has a very easy answer: this episode is very fun to watch. Alyson Hannigan dazzles as the quietly charismatic Vampire Willow, dominating the screen with a very specific almost-awkward swagger. She then channels her inner Tatiana Maslany and delivers sparkling turns, first as Willow-playing-Vampire-Willow and then as Vampire-Willow-playing-Willow. She gets such joy from playing up the differences and similarities between both characters – perhaps my favourite bit coming in her demonstration of how terrible both Willows are at improvisation acting. Hannigan has been quietly improving as an actor since Welcome to the Hellmouth, and now shows herself to sit comfortably beside Gellar and Head as one of the strongest members of the cast.

And it’s more than just Vampire Willow – the whole show is singing. The humour is bright and zippy. Every character, now settled in the roles they’ll fill for the rest of the season, gets moments to shine. Anya is starting to emerge as a character who is recognisably Anya. The climactic fight in the Bronze is probably the best group action scene so far, and might have a shout to be the show’s best ever. Even the tertiary characters are in form: Devon’s insistence that only “fruity jazz bands” know more than three chords is quietly one of the funniest moments of the episode. This is an episode that starts being fun early on, and never stops.

Read More

[crazyaboutto]

What a shit show on Twitter and Reddit

This account is MCU!Natasha hate-free

I can’t believe people in 2025 are still pitting actresses against each other. Scarlett is talented. So is Florence. Yelena got her chance to shine and get character development well without being sexualised to hell and back

Meanwhile, Natasha was sexualised since IM2 to Endgame by all those male writers, directors and ofc Joss whedon. Whedon who basically cut her off in most scenes and made Nat Bruce’s nanny/mother/lover. Then in CACW, it was just about Tony and Steve. She got sidelined. She barely had screen time in AIW and ofc got killed off without much scenes in EG. Not to mention her leadership for 5 years between AIW and EG got taken from her the moment men (Steve and Tony) who weren’t even in the team anymore got back to Avengers HQ.

Ffs her suits throughout years until aiw were sexualised too. And all those posters showing arse or boob or thinning Scarlett’s waist. Or giving her heeled boots for no reason other than “women should look hot”

As much as I love Black Widow movie, Yelena got more spotlight than Natasha. And also by adding countless widow, they also basically made Black Widow title worthless

Scarlett Johansson walked so rest of female superheroes can run. From being the only female superhero in the team, we now have multiple female superheroes in teams. She didn’t have her scene in “A-Force” Easter egg despite she starting female superhero in MCU in 2010. She didn’t even fight in EG ffs. My EG hatred is coming back

Florence Pugh basically says this too, e.g. how much Scarlett helped her. She would say “what a fucking idiot” to those commenters since she knows her character would get the same treatment if not for Scarlett pushing for better after getting more power in the industry. She also knows if it was 00s and 10s, her character would be sexualised af like Natasha

And all those people are complaining about Scarlett and Nay while none are saying anything about Joss Whedon, Jon Favreau, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely and Russo Brothers!!

Men get away with anything they screw up whilst women get criticised for the things that aren’t in their hands

We deserve more Widow sisters scenes. We deserve better writing for Natasha. We deserve sexualisation free Widows

I still wish they kept comics origins and certain character relationships such as Alexei being Nat’s ex and BuckyNat (I’m also Romanogers shipper) instead of free styling

Oh gosh Bucky was pretty much side character as well but they developed him well over the years along with all male heroes. Clint too was sidelined and he was just there and he got time and opportunity to shine but they didn’t have time for female lead of Avengers movies and freaking leader of Avengers

[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

[weaselandfriends]

Chainsaw Man (Anime)

When I posted about my Neon Genesis Evangelion reviews earlier, I mentioned my goal to think more deeply about the things I watch. Evangelion invites viewers to think about it. Its plot is tangled and complex; it draws on religious iconography that gestures toward deeper symbolism; and its tone is weighty, self-serious, and ponderous. None of this is to say that Evangelion actually has deeper meaning (it becomes increasingly clear, for instance, how much of its kabbalah references are purely aesthetic table dressing), but it certainly wants you to ask yourself what it means.

Chainsaw Man, by contrast, is aggressively irreverent. Its main character Denji is a superhuman doofus; he and arch-doofette Power bingus brother about in a Beavis & Butthead routine that undercuts any pretensions toward seriousness the supporting cast might scrounge. Rather than oblique references to Judaic mysticism, Chainsaw Man draws its iconography from popular films; the OP directly remakes shots from such classics as Big Lebowski, Pulp Fiction, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and The Grudge vs. The Ring. Even the title "Chainsaw Man" is bluntly brainless, and the anime ends with a climactic battle between Chainsaw Man and Katana Man, except Katana Man's katanas look more like machetes, fulfilling the Sadako vs. Kayako horror crossover promise of the OP via Leatherface vs. Jason Voorhees.

It's a show that is very easy to watch, go "Yeah that was fun," and have nothing more substantial to say. In many ways, the show invites that reading.

It does have a few things going on under the hood, though. The first is how despite its irreverent tone it often cleaves tightly to plot beats I've seen in other shounen shows. Kobeni is a useless crybaby, but in a fight turns into an unstoppable badass; I saw this in Demon Slayer. A bunch of fodder characters are introduced, developed, and then summarily executed to give the impression "anyone can die" (the core cast has all survived); I saw this in Attack on Titan. The main character is too weak, so he gets trained by an eccentric mentor who kicks his ass until he gets stronger; I saw this too many times to list. Denji's Beavisness is itself only an intensification of the Monkey D. Luffy template for shounen protagonist, a well-meaning dipshit who takes ridiculous joy in simple creature comforts like stuffing his face with food. In a way, by overtly asking the viewer not to think about things too deeply, Chainsaw Man is defending itself from the realization that little of what it is doing is particularly unique. That it is, at its core, a series of recreated shots stitched together from pop cultural sources.

It works, though. I thoroughly enjoyed all of those regurgitated elements I mentioned before, even the fake-anyone-can-die shtick that annoyed me to no end when Attack on Titan did it. The brain-off style encourages the viewer to engage with the story at the level of an earnest and excitable child, the kind of person who would think someone called "Chainsaw Man" is super cool and not lame at all. It's fascinating, because there's an element to the story's willingness to undercut itself that is reminiscent of the Joss Whedon-style snarkery that has rendered the MCU unwatchable. Someone giving their serious backstory only for Denji to go "HNNNGGH? That's dumb!" is pretty similar to Loki's big villain monologue being interrupted by the Hulk. How much of Chainsaw Man's effectiveness is simply because it's hitting the exact right note at this moment in time, the way Avengers did in 2012 (when I finish my rewatch of Sword Art Online I'll have a lot to say about the year 2012), attuned to the exact right frequency of irony, before years go by and that frequency becomes passe, out-of-tune? It feels inexplicable now, but people really thought "Puny god" was an amazing joke back in the day. Now it's hollow and lifeless. Is Chainsaw Man doomed to the same fate, after a decade of imitators bite it to pieces? (And there are imitators; I'm currently watching last season's big anime, Dandadan, which takes a lot of tonal cues from CSM.)

I can't see the future, but Chainsaw Man has a bit of narrative bite of its own to sustain itself. There's a thematic throughline about the sacrifices people make to attain their goals. Denji is introduced as literally selling off parts of his body for money in pursuit of pathetically unambitious goals like "eating bread with jam"; later, most members of Public Safety are shown to have made contracts with devils in which they also literally give up body parts in exchange for the goal-fulfilling power. Like Denji from that first episode, though, the members of Public Safety are in a form of slavery they have no hope of escaping. Their sacrifices are noble gestures, but ultimately useless. In one scene, Aki uses a cursed sword that steals his lifespan to kill Katana Man, only for Katana Man, being functionally immortal, to stand up seconds later. Likewise, Himeno gives the Ghost Devil all of her body to save Aki, killing herself; the Ghost Devil is immediately devoured by the Snake Devil moments later, failing to do what Himeno wanted. (It's then revealed that all Himeno had to do to save Aki was pull the string on Denji's body.)

It is that sense of futile nobility that Chainsaw Man skewers most stringently, both in its text and its tone. Aki and even the devils taunt Denji for his lack of ambition, framing themselves as superior because they pursue something loftier than him. Yet Denji, of course, always prevails; even against Aki, he responds to the taunt by kicking him in the balls. Aki claims that only people with strong ambitions can survive in Public Safety, but the story proves him wrong at every turn. It's Denji and Power, in their brainless contentedness with basic pleasures in life, who survive battle after battle unscathed. They are both immortal (or "near immortal," as Power is described), as though they are simply too stupid to die. Even among the human characters, the only one who crawls out of the show unscathed is Kobeni, who seems to have no ambitions of her own beyond survival; she was forced into Public Safety by her family to pay her brother's college tuition.

At first glance, this makes the message of Chainsaw Man seem clear: "Ask for too much, and you'll simply be destroyed." This message perfectly matches the story's irreverence. If you wanted a deep and thoughtful story, too bad, you're getting a guy with a chainsaw for a head cutting up zombies. It's bread with jam, and the story wants to make sure you enjoy it.

But there's more at play here. Denji is unstoppable, sure. He lives while his colleagues die or get maimed. At the same time, he's trapped in the same web as the rest of them, Makima's web, and his simple ambitions only make him trivial for her to manipulate. At the end of the day, Makima is the only one who is getting what she wants, who controls everything. I once had a dream about Makima that accurately spoiled her role in the story, so even though I've only seen the anime I have an inkling of what's to come. I only wonder, narratively, how it'll play into the ideas about ambition introduced in this opening arc.

Then, there's the scene where Kishibe first starts training Denji and Power. In an endless graveyard of all the Public Safety employees who have died, he asks them what their ambitions are, why they fight. They give characteristically low-minded answers, and Kishibe chokes with emotion. "You're perfect," he says. "I love you." He hugs them, then snaps their necks as the first part of his training regimen.

Weeks later, speaking to Makima, Kishibe explains. He thought he could look at Denji and Power as toys. Meaningless, silly, able to be sacrificed. Not like the hundreds, thousands of dead Public Safety employees he's buried, who had real dreams with emotional weight. Only, after weeks of training, he's finding that even they can't truly be seen as toys, that something about them is growing on him.

I read this scene as a metaphor for Chainsaw Man's irreverence as a whole, for the purpose of ironic detachment in art. In the MCU, characters give undermining quips to avoid emotionally interfacing with the art. It's the ethos of "comic relief" in general. Relief; as though seriousness is too much to handle without some silly joke to take the weight off. Denji and Power are toys (there's something toyetic in the idea of Chainsaw Man himself), comic relief, an excuse to not become emotionally invested, Beavis & Butthead who go "HNNNGGH? That's dumb!" whenever things get serious.

But, in Chainsaw Man at least, the seriousness is still there, under the surface. There is a field of graves, there are people sacrificing themselves for no reason, there is a whole ecosystem of serious men and women in salaryman suits and ties being thrown into the meat grinder. (It's interesting that the characters who survive unharmed -- Denji, Power, even Kobeni when she goes badass mode -- forgo the black blazer of the Public Safety uniform and wear only the white shirt that gives them a younger, more student-like look, as though it is a metaphorical childhood that protects them, whereas the more formal black-suited members are consigned to an adult oblivion. I wonder if Makima's dogshit fit means anything in this dichotomy.) The irreverence is not a full reprieve. It doesn't make the emotional elements go away, and as the show goes on, more and more time is spent in the perspectives of characters like Aki, until Denji starts to feel like an alien element in his own story, the piece that doesn't fit correctly into the established emotional framework.

Additionally, Denji starts to notice sociopathic traits in himself, like when he ponders Himeno's death and finds it made no impact on him at all. This element only appeared near the very end of the show, so I don't know how it develops across the rest of the story, but on its own it suggests the downside of ironic detachment, an inability to feel emotion even when emotion is warranted. That was David Foster Wallace's bugbear with postmodernism; that it was too insincere, too distant, capable only of metatextual flippancy, and that there was a need for a "New Sincerity," a post-irony, a post-postmodernism. Chainsaw Man is, like so many works that are popular today, post-postmodern. What fascinates me about it is how it manages that not by abandoning irony and irreverence, but by embracing it even more totally. Or is that a necessary component of post-postmodernism, distinguishing it from simple pre-modernism? You can't simply forget the genre savviness that makes you see a story as a series of tropes rather than an emotional whole. The challenge in the post-postmodern landscape thus becomes to make a story work emotionally in spite of, or perhaps because of, that detachment.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't at least mention the animation. The show looks amazing. Anime has finally gotten adept at using 3D by blending it with 2D, the way the best live action films blend practical effects with CGI. Even beyond that, there's an excessiveness and indulgence to the show; every single episode has a fully unique ED, some of which are among the best EDs I've ever seen. What studio did this?

...Oh. I guess it was natural to make a show about adults sacrificing their bodies in pursuit of impossible goals when 300+ animators made that exact same sacrifice for the benefit of MAPPAkima.

[spiderjellys]

i love you wendy the werewolf stalker

awesome guide, etc, etc

yj98 #33 & #34 / wtws textual & visual refs

what is it? :°

wendy the werewolf stalker is a dc comics tv show parody of buffy the vampire slayer, appearing mainly in young justice (1998). the tv show centers around a girl named wendy who hunts werewolves and assumedly follows the same basic concept as btvs, where she is the one girl chosen with powers to fight werewolves and assorted monsters. the first mention of it is in yj98 #8, when kon complains about potentially missing the new episode (which would've likely been doppelgangland equivalent based on the date). best issues to read are yj98 #33 & #34, which is where it appears as an actual tv show. it's referenced frequently in dialogue and visual appearances.

characters

wendy the werewolf stalker - played by: terri jewel jackson (t.j.). the wtws equivalent to buffy summers. she is an experienced hunter and fighter, who stalks and kills werewolves. she fights with a crossbow (loaded with red-fletched arrows, which i assume is for her visibility as well as wolves not seeing red) and a silver stake as well as hand-to-hand. shown to be physically strong enough to grapple with a werewolf. likely has preternatural powers giving her enhanced strength, speed, and reflexes.

paulo - played by: javier sanchez. the wtws equivalent to xander harris. a close friend of wendy. shown to help wendy seemingly unarmed, is physically strong enough to partially restrain a werewolf.

unknown name - played by: melody [last name unknown] (mel). the wtws equivalent to willow rosenberg. a close friend of wendy. there's like no character information at all, but she might be a witch like willow? shown hanging onto luella after a fight and has a "romantic fixation" on luella.

cherub - played by: unknown. the wtws equivalent to angel. star of his new spinoff, cherub. one of the love interests for wendy. the character is described by t.j. as a "brooding hunk". (since he's based off angel what would his ""evil name"" like angelus be. cherubic?? cherubim?? lmfao).

luella - played by: cissie king-jones. the wtws equivalent (very very vaguely) to tara maclay based on her romance with melody's character and the shift from guest star to recurring character. shown to be proficient with a bow (looks like a recurve bow?), seems to have some experience with the supernatural based on her easy acceptance of wendy being the werewolf stalker. melody's character has a "romantic fixation" on her, which is likely requited.

lupus - played by: rover [full name unknown]. a recurring (i'm guessing that the wolf shown in filming is the same one every time based on his design) werewolf antagonist who fights with wendy several times, once seemingly after escaping captivity based on his broken chain.

unknown - (will be) played by: jake ketchum. the wtws equivalent of spike (i think. it makes sense with the whole werewolf love interest thing and spike. broods? sometimes? i guess. but i like spike so i miiiight be biased! he also seems like riley finn with the "hiding a big secret about who they are" plot and the season 4 equivalency). a non-antagonistic werewolf who is one of wendy's love interests, who she discovers is secretly a werewolf. the character is described as a "serious, brooding hunk".

the creator of wtws appears as (a vampire) joe/josh westin, the equivalent to joss whedon (barf)

btvs equivalency sort of i guess

even though season 5 of btvs had fully aired by the time of yj98 #33 & #34 it seems like the season taking place that cissie guest stars in is btvs season 4. the cherub spinoff places it after btvs season 3, while luella's introduction aligns with tara's introduction in season 4. joe westin also makes a reference to the ratings being down, and season 4 was pretty badly received comparatively.

[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.

[coraniaid]

I've recently been seeing people sum up the ending of Season 2 as "Buffy gets kicked out of her house", which feels to me like a pretty serious misreading of both the final episode and the wider season. And frankly, for that matter, a misunderstanding of the whole character of Buffy Summers. In all honesty I'm really not sure how anyone can arrive at this reading in good faith if they're even slightly paying attention to the show.

There are definitely valid complaints to be made about Season 2, but "an excess of subtlety" isn't one of them. This season -- and the two-part finale in particular -- is very, very anxious to make sure you understand what it's about. That's why we get the never before mentioned (and never after mentioned) character of Whistler to give his voice over in Part 1 of Becoming. And what does he tell us, that the writers are so keen to stress?

"Bottom line is: even if you see them coming, you're not ready for the big moments. No one asks for their life to change, not really. But it does. So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are."

Or, for more on the same theme, we can look to Lie To Me earlier this season. Buffy herself sums things up to her old friend Ford after she realizes why he's so desperate to attempt to become a vampire when she tells him that "You have a choice. You don't have a good choice, but you have a choice."

It's kind of fashionable at the moment for people to insist that because Joss Whedon is a terrible person [which, to be clear, he is] and because he treated many women in both his personal and professional life dreadfully [which, again, he certainly did] that surely the only reason bad things keep happening to Buffy Summers is because of Whedon's unchecked misogyny. But I don't think that conclusion follows at all.

Bad things happen to Buffy because she is the protagonist and needs challenges to overcome, and because the whole point of the show is that life is often terrible but what matters is how you respond to that. You often don't have any good choices, but you have a choice. (Or, to borrow from a later season, the hardest thing in the world is to live in it but you have to be brave and make the decision to live regardless.)

And I think it's entirely at odds with the existentialist themes of the show -- or Buffy's status as the central protagonist -- to treat the end of Season 2 (or the end of any season of the show) simply as something awful that happens to her. As something she is merely the passive victim of. Like Whistler tells us, it's what you do that counts. Buffy doesn't have a good choice, but she has a choice.

In Season 1, Buffy chooses to accept her destiny and face the Master and die, because she sees what will happen to her friends if she doesn't. In Season 3, Buffy chooses to try to kill her shadow self and fellow Slayer Faith in order to save the life of her (now ex-)boyfriend Angel. In Season 4 (foreshadowing the end of Season 7) Buffy chooses to trust her friends and share her power to defeat Adam. In Season 5 Buffy chooses to sacrifice herself rather than let her sister die, while in Season 6 she chooses to stay alive, not to merely protect her sister from the world but to show her how beautiful life can be despite the horrors and absurdities. These aren't fair choices, or easy choices, or choices that Buffy should have to make. But the necessity of making hard choices, day after day, is the whole point of the show.

To quote Buffy herself again, this time from Season 3's Amends, being a person in the world means being prepared to fight. "It's hard, and it's painful, and it's every day. It's what we have to do."

And Buffy makes a choice at the end of Season 2 as well. She chooses to leave town, to give up being the Slayer and to retreat from the world. Perhaps that's not the most heroic choice -- it's certainly not a choice we're meant to root for, even if we can and do sympathise with it -- and it's certainly not a choice she makes in the best of circumstances, but it's still a choice. The thing about having to make hard choices every day is that sometimes you make choices you regret or you wish you'd done differently. As the show will directly have somebody tell Buffy early in that season (admittedly, not in the show's best episode and certainly not through the ideal character to deliver this particular message), if you do make bad choices "you might just have to live with the consequences".

And, honestly, even if you completely ignore or reject the thematic reading, I still don't think it's at all accurate to say that Buffy leaves town "because she was kicked out". I don't think that's the reading the writers want us to come to, and -- more importantly -- I don't think it's a reading you can come to if you take what happens on screen even remotely seriously.

It is true, yes, that halfway through the final episode Buffy's mother presents her with an ultimatum: stay at home (and try to explain in detail after two years of secrecy what being a vampire slayer means and why exactly it's so important that she alone does it and what's at stake if she doesn't) or leave the house without any explanation (beyond "I'm a vampire slayer, accept it") and "not even think about coming back". It's true that -- for reasons Joyce can't possibly know, precisely because Buffy's Watcher has been so adamant she not explain her calling to her mother before tonight -- this isn't much of a choice for Buffy: the world really will end if she doesn't go and face Angelus right now. But the framing of the scene makes it pretty clear that Joyce does not have any power here: she wants Buffy to stay ("I am not letting you out of this house"), but as Buffy says in response she can't make her. She tries to grab hold of her and physically stop her from leaving, and Buffy effortlessly shoves her back. It's only then, in one last attempt to get her daughter to stay, that Joyce threatens that she won't be welcome back if she leaves.

It's also true, and frankly shouldn't really need spelling out, that this is a pretty shitty thing for Buffy's mom to say, whatever the wider context. It's understandable that she doesn't want her daughter rushing off into the night: even ignoring that Joyce now knows there are vampires out there, Buffy is still wanted by the cops for murder, after all. It's understandable that Joyce is frustrated at finding out that her worse fears were true: Buffy really did have a big secret she was keeping from her all this time, and she still doesn't want to talk about it. But Joyce had a choice too, and she made a bad one. I think that's pretty indisputable.

I don't believe we're meant to dismiss Joyce's words as inconsequential or harmless; and I don't think we should -- it's a real shame that, just like Xander's impulsive decision not to pass on Willow's message about trying to curse Angel again, or Kendra's death and the fallout of that, the show never follows up on it in any serious or thoughtful way -- but we're not meant to view it as the most significant moment of the episode either. It is one of many awful things that happen to Buffy this episode, and frankly not one of the worse ones. I think that is very, very clear from the pacing and structure of the episode.

And, despite the fact people on Tumblr try to pretend otherwise, we know for a fact that Buffy herself does not take Joyce's threat literally. She doesn't consider herself exiled from her home in Sunnydale forever. For one thing we know that because, a few minutes after sending Angel to hell, we see her walk back to her house. We know that she climbed into her bedroom and, while packing, took the time to write her mother a note.

This sequence does not make sense if we assume Buffy thought she literally couldn't go home again. She does, literally, go home! Almost immediately! We see it happen! If she thought Joyce meant her threat seriously -- if she thought that by leaving when she did she'd already made it clear she wouldn't be coming back -- why would she do this? Why would she take the time to leave a note unless at least a part of her assumed her mother would be expecting and hoping for her to come home? (As, indeed, we see from Joyce's reaction after Buffy leaves, she was.)

And I do think that, when Buffy walked out of the house, she was -- as much as she was thinking that far ahead -- assuming that she'd be back, despite what her mom said to her. It's not as if this is the first time that Buffy and Joyce have argued, and -- once Angelus was taken care of - Buffy would at least now be able to tell her mother the truth (something that we know she's wanted to do for a while: she argued for it back in Passion for example).

I don't think that when Buffy left to fight Angelus she'd already decided that she'd never come back. And I don't think we're meant to think this. A lot of awful things have happened to Buffy in the finale by this point -- failing to distract Angel while her friends restored his soul; finding her friend Kendra dead in the library, and blaming herself both for that death and for the injuries her other friends suffer; being falsely accused by the "deeply stupid" Sunnydale police of her friend's murder; being expelled from school by a vindictive principal whose had it in for her since day one; being unwilling outed as a Slayer in front of her mother at the worst possible time for either of them; being forced to agree to let Kendra's murderer leave town safely in exchange for the life of her Watcher -- but, the way the show clearly frames it, the very worst thing is yet to come. ("I've got nothing left to lose," she tells Whistler sadly, only for him to correct her when she leaves to face Angelus: "You've got one more thing.")

Buffy defeats Angelus, and is ready to stop his plan to awaken the demon Acathla and send the world to hell ... but not before WIllow's second attempt at restoring his soul succeeds. Buffy is forced to either send Angel -- now innocent and ignorant of everything he did over the last few months -- to suffer forever in hell, or to spare him and doom the world. That is the tipping point. That is the big awful impossible choice she can't bear. That is why, after doing the heroic thing that's expected of her one last time and sending the vampire she loves to hell, she gives up on being the Slayer and Buffy Summers and leaves town, seemingly forever.

I mean, I realize that -- for mostly very boring shipping reasons -- a lot of people want to dismiss or understate Buffy's relationship with Angel as much as possible. And for the record I am not a Bangel shipper myself. I agree David Boreanaz is a mostly terrible actor, especially in these first two seasons of the show. I agree that his relationship with Buffy is deeply unhealthy and much less romantic than the show often attempts to portray it as (though, honestly, there are times the show knowingly leans into how creepy it is in ways people also don't tend to acknowledge).

But despite all that, Buffy's love for Angel is a huge part of her character! It profoundly influences every one of her future romantic and sexual relationships, canonical or not, be that with Scott Hope or Faith or Parker or Riley or Spike or anyone else. Pretending that it isn't a big deal at all -- that Buffy doesn't leaves town because she's heartbroken over what she's done to Angel -- makes it impossible to understand the character of Buffy Anne Summers as she actually is depicted on screen.

Sending Angel to hell is the worst choice Buffy has been forced to make at this point in her life, maybe the hardest thing she ever does. And that's why she leaves town at the end of the episode. It's not necessarily the only reason, but it's the biggest one. We know that, because -- in the first two episodes of Season 3 -- Buffy is still having recurring nightmares about Angel's death and projecting her guilt about sending him to hell onto other people. By contrast she only brings up Joyce's threat once, in an argument with her mother, in one of the season's worst episodes, and the writing of that episode clearly doesn't expect us to think this is important. (The writing of that episode also sucks, sure. No argument there.)

Equally, I also know -- for reasons I frankly find even less intellectually respectable than shipping nonsense -- that a lot of people want to view Joyce Summers in as bad a light as possible at all times. That they are convinced that -- just like Buffy doesn't "really" love Angel -- she doesn't "really" love her mother in the way the show repeatedly tells us and shows us that she does. That that nice Mr Giles is (somehow) a much better, much less flawed parental figure than Joyce and that Buffy herself believes this.

But this isn't true either! It's a reading that doesn't make any sense in light of this episode or the ones that follow it. Buffy leaves her mother a note before leaving town. She doesn't do that for Giles (or for any of her other friends). She doesn't let him know where she is, or try to contact him all summer. She could go to a payphone and give him a call at any point but -- to tie things back to that whole choice theme -- she consciously chooses not to! The first person she seeks out when she goes back to Sunnydale is her mother. Because Buffy loves her mother, and always has done. And because she knows that her mother loves her and she believes, correctly, that she will welcome her back.

If it was true that Buffy left town primarily because her mother "kicked her out", the end of Becoming itself and the beginning of Season 3 would play out very differently. The show would want us to spend more time thinking about Joyce's threat, and would show us that Buffy herself is thinking about it. We wouldn't have had a shot of Buffy walking back to her house and going inside before she leaves town. She wouldn't need to tell her mother she was leaving. She'd speak to her friends or her Watcher and tell them what had happened rather than immediately getting on a bus. (If Giles were half the parental figure some of you think he is, he'd offer her a place to stay.) She'd spend more (or, well, any) time thinking about her fight with her mother while she was being "Anne" in LA. When she's finally ready to be "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" again she'd come back and speak to Giles or Willow or Xander first before being prepared to face her mom.

And I mean ... surely we can admit this is very obvious? Surely I didn't need to spend so many words spelling all this out? Surely we can stop pretending that the show isn't very very clear about how we're meant to read these scenes and understand Buffy's motivation?

(For that matter, surely we can stop acting bemused about the idea Joyce is upset a strange adult man fostered a secret relationship with her teenage daughter for months which led to her struggling in school and getting in trouble with the police and regularly risking her life?)

Surely we can actually listen to what the character of Buffy Summers tells us about herself, even if it means believing she likes and cares about characters who aren't our personal favorites?

[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?

[baltears]

more severance thoughts

- idk what this theory is about miss huang being related to gemma or ms casey because she seems like way more of an obvious foil/parallel to harmony. most likely she's a kid who is being raised by lumon and if we can judge by the rest of management she is not severed so maybe she's another product of a lumon orphanage. suuuper interested to see where they go with harmonys character this season as she starts to seriously question her faith in kier/lumon and i think miss huang will play a role in that or parallel that bc we are watching that dogmatism and combination of intense reverence to authority & equally intense force of personality be established in her. theres a sense of suppressed fear & resentment toward milchick that reminds me of harmonys relationship with the board/natalie in s1

- milchick remains king of the smize. NEED to know more abt him. also desperately want him and harmony to interact again

- the fact that lumon actually cares about the work caught me off guard bc i had been ignoring it due to the innies not knowing what it is and having basically no way of finding out. but like somebody mentioned that mark could be reformatting caseys chip and yeah that would make sense.... esp as the reason why they would need mark specifically to finish the project and can't just replace him. curious too about the other, 'spare' mdr workers and why the turnover happened as they apparently weren't working for lumon at the time they received their pineapple bribes. if mark is indeed reformatting her chip i just really wonder what everyone else is doing like do they all have a corresponding person like gemma? the worker besides mark we know the most about is petey but his loved ones all appear to have survived him. likewise were there additional circumstances around helena joining the severed workforce which apparently no eagan has ever done despite the obviously good optics of that? she could have just stayed unsevered and been ceo. can anyone be severed and if so why can at least some not be easily replaced? who is crucial and why, is it just mark because the situation with ms casey is some kind of high stakes leap-forward experiment?

- speaking of petey i do think it's possible we could see him again in some way, it does appear that the chip could contain extensive information about the brain, meaning he or part of him could potentially have been preserved in that form.

- also speaking of petey i anticipate the return of june and potentially her getting involved in serious anti lumon efforts which could add some complications for mark. but like sooner or later she's going to try to figure out what actually happened to her dad similarly to mark trying to investigate what actually happened to gemma

- is mark the only 'man on the inside' contacted by reghabi whose outie knows about reintegration and who is working against lumon? i kind of suspect burt could also be reintegrated or moving in that direction but like at least 1 other person must be or must have been. i also hope we get more info on why and how petey contacted her or if vice versa why she felt it was safe to reach out to him

- this show is a lot like dollhouse and as flawed as dollhouse is that does make me happy bc i do think it deserves a critical reexamination thats not about just pointing out every time joss whedon wrote something weird or revealing about himself. like yeah he did that. there's other stuff going on here though. i kind of think the chilly reception & cancelation of dollhouse might have contributed to his seemingly totally giving up on his artistic integrity around 2012 and personally i think as much as he sucks he had a point that the show deserved a different kind of attention than it was getting and really got shafted because it was genuinely ahead of its time in some ways

[tristantzara]

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