What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

snorlockholmes:

fozmeadows:

karnythia:

nickminichino:

karnythia:

nickminichino:

karnythia:

hxcfairyhasmoved:

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. 

Can we see a comparison with male characters in terms of torture/death/insanity? Maybe not rape because male rape is still super rare in media unless it’s a “don’t drop the soap” thing, but I mean this idea of characters being punished in general. 

Isn’t it possible that Joss is just an asshole to all his characters because he likes to write about pain and death and shit? Like, how is “dead husband” not an argument for the tough times his male characters have too?

Of this list, I’ve only really watched Buffy, but I know Angel and Spike both go insane in it, at least for a while. And Spike gets that chip in his brain that tortures him any time he tries to hurt someone. Arguably a good thing overall, but it’s still a huge punishment. Oz gets turned into a werewolf, which I’m pretty sure counts as both torture and multiple breaks in sanity.

And apart from Xander and Giles I can barely even remember any other male characters. How many male characters even are there in Buffy that don’t die or get horribly tortured in some way, or lose a loved one?

If someone goes out and shoots two women and two men, they’re not a “sexist woman murderer”, they’re just a murderer, right?

I mean if I’m wrong, feel free to point out how much happier, chilled, and long the lives of all his male characters are by comparison, but until then you’re literally only looking at one side of the argument.

Whedon’s male characters do tend to get tortured a lot, but that just seems to complete the other side of the problematic binary in play here - which is to say, specific types of bad things happen disproportionately to women, while other specific types of bad things happen disproportionately to men, which is still revealing of the implicit double standards applied to male and female characters. The fact that, as you say, male rape is still “super rare” in media, is a case in point: yes, it happens less often to the general male population (1 in 33) than to women, but that’s still high enough to merit exploration, and as has been recently pointed out, under certain conditions, male rape is just as likely as female rape

So: including the Potentials, I can think offhand of ten female characters in the Buffyverse who end up permanently dead, compared with just four men - Buffy also dies and is resurrected twice, with Spike dead and resurrected once. It’s also disproportionate on the insanity front: Angel and Spike both have protracted sanity breaks, and I’ll include Oz in the count because of his werewolf status, but the women still number higher.

As for losing loved ones, it’s important to bear in mind the Women in Refrigerators trope, which here expresses itself in the fact that both male AND female characters are more likely to lose a female friend, lover or family member than the men, and that associated male deaths tend not to happen purely or primarily to further a male character’s developmental arc. Thus: Giles loses Jenny, Willow loses Tara, Dawn and Buffy lose Joyce, and Xander loses Anya, but with the possible exception of Andrew losing Jonathan - whom he also kills, which is arguably a mitigating factor - there’s no habit of women losing men. (I’m discounting Buffy’s respective loss of Angel and Spike for the simple reason that both are ultimately resurrected.)

Point being: yes, all Whedon’s characters suffer, but the *type* of suffering experienced differs significantly according to gender.

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  21. 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.
  22. hxcfairyhasmoved posted this