I was waiting for the backflips people would do for this fucker.

Yep, he clearly had a type he kept casting over and over in his shows - it’s the number one reason why I’ve always felt uncomfortable about people praising him as a feminist icon. Almost all of his female characters are super skinny, petite, supermodel types with severe mental issues often exploited by men (hello…

This comment section proves an emphatic yes to willful blindness. Jesus, the mental backflips of some people...

There’s a good summary of it (including some of her speaking — very carefully, given how powerful a figure he is in Hollywood/nerd culture these days — publicly at a panel about it) here!

No, I think she is saying she has PTSD because she spent 20 years with a guy who turned out to have lied to her so often, and so successfully, that she has to question if they ever had an authentic moment. Every time she remembers him having to work late, while she believed him completely at the time, she has to ask…

Oh yes! I always wondered how Buffy could be seen as a feminist show: Sure, the girl can hit hard, but she’s an emotional doormat all over the series.

I could live with being a feminist and an asshole. Hell, I’m an asshole far more often than I wish I was. I do not countenance, however, someone claiming to be a feminist when they are a gaslighting, manipulative sleazebag who abuses their authority and uses their spouse as a shield to lower the defenses of vulnerable…

Didn’t the illusion of wokeness go up in smoke the moment the Wonder Woman script draft got leaked, or is everyone just willfully blind?

I always thought there was something off about Whedon.

Why don’t you believe her? Do you think her story is implausible?

Not exactly news. I was never a Buffy fan (nor much a fan of Whedon in general at all, tbh), but even I know all you have to do is ask Charisma Carpenter if you want to know what a shit-heel Joss has often been to women, despite all his big talk.

And his writing of women in recent years hasn’t been all that, either. I’ve got real issues with the way he’s written Black Widow (Whedon did Avengers and Age of Ultron). Whedon’s Widow is consistently more emotionally fragile than the character appears in pretty much every other movie in the MCU. In the others she is…

Yes, seriously. He’s pretty obviously not a prince among men. I can enjoy his work and still not think he’s a demigod, or even a great guy. He’s not Roman Polanski, from what I’ve heard, but he’s also pretty clearly said some questionable things over the years, and I’m hardly surprised by this, either.

“Beautiful, needy, aggressive young women”. So his favourite kind then. And dude, you wrote the show and decided what kind of people would be in it, you’re the one who surrounded yourself with the beautiful, needy, aggressive young women. They didn’t just, like, turn up.

there’s a reason it was canceled

I’m kind of surprised that other people are surprised.

Not if you’re having repeated affairs with women you’re in a position of power over and using your wife as a shield against anyone looking too deeply into your fucked up behavior.

Yeah, but on the spectrum of shit, “sleeping naked with your underage nieces” is pretty far out there.

Not surprised by his infidelity despite calling himself a feminist.

thank christ we can all stop talking about firefly now