Patriotic people don’t know the patriotic song.

A few times there it sounded like she was trying to slip it into a minor key, which fits:

Given the setting, I’m guessing it’s a no-talent blonde.

LoL yes good point. That’s the transaction. “Allow me to loot anything that isn’t nailed down and I will own the libs for you.” 

It’s just not the same without basketball players struggling not to crack up.

Every celebrity entourage should have at least one person who hates you paid out of a trust you don’t control.

There was a long discussion about the impact of Confederate mythology on Firefly’s ethos in another forum, and it was an interesting analysis of what aspects of the ‘War of Northern Aggression’ narrative the show adopted and what it didn’t. There was the also the sense of the Death of the Wild West narrative, what…

That was what I got from that scene too - that she was bemoaning the fact that her body had been surgically mutilated specifically to make her a more efficient killer. She was trying to connect with Banner by pointing out that she, too, had been changed by her experiences into something monstrous, something that…

I felt the same way, but on top of that the key context to me is the fact that the movie is not making the statement that Black Widow is a monster, but rather that she feels that way, the fact that she’s been carrying around that guilt the whole time. Of course, she absolutely should not feel that she’s a monster…

I’ve always taken that scene as Widow saying “I sacrificed my ability to have kids just so it would never be a hindrance to my job and that makes me a monster”, with the monster part focused on the fact that she puts killing people as a priority.

I’ve never liked that reading of the scene either. I always took it that Black Widow thought that her agreeing to be sterilized, in order to become an assassin, is what made her a monster. She traded life for death.

I don’t know of any actual interactions female cast or crew had with Sorkin that would be considered harassment.

I really love Firefly but agree with you, the flaws with it are carried over from the Western genre that influences it so much. So many great Westerns in film and television feature protagonists and sympathetic characters who fought for secession during the Civil War. Their personal history of being soldiers on the…

I mean you described Firefly to a T. The whole story is about people on the losing side of a civil war that have to work as mercenaries. In my opinion Firefly is a much better example of strong female characters than Buffy. You have the strong warrior, the super intelligent mechanic, and the troubled killing machine,…

Hitler was the no-talent assclown who became famous and started invading countries!

I imagine we’ll get a bunch of supposedly high minded First Amendment freedom of association lyrics set to a jaunty dog whistle.

My grandfather had a “toothbrush” mustache. He grew it some time in the 1920s and then Hitler became a thing. My grandfather’s stance was that “it was his first”, he refused to change it, and had that thing until the day he died in 1995.

Yep, this. In fact, I’ve always argued that Joss’s work got markedly worse, both in its craftsmanship and its representation of women, when people stopped treating him as a skilled artisan who wrote well-constructed stories about the sort of women who interested him and started lauding him as this Genius Artiste…

Within the rubric you propose (which I agree with), I think “feminism” serves the purpose of an underdog narrative. It’s not that Whedon was a particularly strong feminist in his personal life or beliefs - certainly not in his professional behavior. But rather his approach to his craft demanded an underdog element and…

For many, he was an example of what more equitable storytelling might look like, a model for how to create compelling women protagonists who were also very, very fun to watch.