Reporter: So, why do you write these strong female characters?
Joss Whedon: Because you’re still asking me that question.The question should be “Why do you write seemingly strong women and then punish them for that strength?” I see a lot of characters in this set who got shit on by Joss not to mention at least one actress he fired for the crime of getting pregnant.
A friend of mine likes to challenge “Joss Whedon, Feminist” acolytes to name a female character on Buffy who doesn’t die or go crazy.
I feel like this game could be expanded to find lead female characters who don’t die, go crazy, or lose a loved one in a gruesome way as part of their suffering. Bonus points if they get to the end without anyone threatening to rape them or trying to rape them. There has to be at least one right?
If we include those, we may as well be playing bingo. Joss Whedon’s female characters’ punishments: collect them all!
Who gets mind wiped? Who gets beaten? Who watches everything she ever loved burn? It’s a game for all ages! Bonus points for the ones who die without ever having gotten to live!
I might have feelings about Kendra. A lot of them.
Goddamit, and now I feel compelled to do an actual tally of his original female characters, albeit offhand and from memory. So:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Buffy - two deaths, one rape threat, one attempted rape, two sexual assaults, one dead parent.
Willow - one rape threat, two breaks with sanity, one dead girlfriend.
Cordelia - damselled about a billion times, one attempted forced marriage.
Anya - one rape threat, dead.
Tara - dead.
Kendra - dead.
Faith - multiple breaks with sanity.
Ms Calender - dead.
Joyce - dead.
Dawn - one attempted forced marriage, one dead parent.
Darla - dead.
Drusilla - multiple breaks with sanity.
Angel
Cordelia - two forced impregnations, at least one sexual assault, at least one attempted rape, dead.
Fred - one attempted rape, multiple breaks with sanity, dead.
Lilah - one rape threat, dead.
Darla - multiple breaks with sanity, dead.
Drusilla - multiple breaks with sanity.
Illyria - multiple breaks with sanity.
Faith - multiple breaks with sanity.
Firefly
Kaylee - one rape threat.
River - multiple breaks with sanity.
Zoe - one dead husband.
Inara - one threat of sexual assault.
Dollhouse
As none of the Actives are capable of informed consent, pretty much every sexual interaction they have while on assignment constitutes rape or assault, even though the narrative only flags Sierra’s experiences as such. So, yeah. Also, I never saw S2, so can’t speak to what happened at that point.
Welp!
Oh, and the one female character in Dr Horrible ends up dead, too. So there’s that.
Ugh. This thread drives me crazy. If you want female heroes, those females are going to meet with violence and personal tragedy. THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS TO HEROES. How many times have Batman and Superman died? How many loved ones has Spider-Man lost? I don’t defend every choice Whedon makes — I hated the attempted rape of Buffy by Spike — but what exactly do you people expect of drama? You cheapen feminist critique when you subject everything written by men to a can’t win / Catch-22 standard. There aren’t enough depictions of women, the cruelty of men isn’t accurately portrayed… Oh, but also don’t let anything bad happen to the characters I like. I’d be interested to see what a show you wrote would look like.
The assertion isn’t that female characters shouldn’t meet with personal tragedy and violence; it’s that they shouldn’t do so vastly more often than men, and that repeatedly threatening female characters with sexual violence is extremely not cool. Over the course of Buffy and Angel, Whedon kills four male characters permanently - Doyle, Warren, Jonathon and Lindsay - while killing and resurrecting Spike once. By contrast, he kills *seven* female characters permanently while killing and resurrecting Buffy twice. To my recollection, all the women in Dollhouse are either assaulted or threatened with assault, while only one man is, and I can’t think of a single male character in any other show who faces or is threatened with sexual violence, whereas pretty much *every single female character* does or is. In Firefly, we have two male characters who die against no female deaths, which is slightly more equitable than usual, but even though both Spike and Angel go mad for a while, there are still far more female characters who break with sanity. So, yeah: it’s kind of an issue when female characters are repeatedly and disproportionally the subject of specific forms of violence and disempowerment that men either don’t experience at all, or experience far less frequently.
(via jeffscherer)
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4wheelsandaroof said: Never realized how much better off female genre characters would be without Joss. Imagine what a difference if we’d never had to deal with him.
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