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Rick Gore's avatar

Really liked this. In addition- isn’t a lot of this just performative “allyship”? If you think misogyny is bad (I certainly do) one thing you could do is, I don’t know, volunteer at a domestic violence center. Or donate to a domestic violence charity. Or something else that actually might make a meaningful change for the cause you claim to care about. Or you could just loudly talk about how you won’t watch anything Joss Whedon made to show your bona fides - and then amp it up by talking about how much you loved his work and what a huge sacrifice it now is to avoid it.... Now you get the social media credit, and it didn’t cost you anything. And I bet in many cases- you’ll still “slip” and watch Firefly on the sly....

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Quiara Vasquez's avatar

This is a great piece. A couple things.

ONE: A thing I really appreciate about your writing is that it got me to get over my stupid and largely ignorant animus towards "Girls," which was based almost entirely on my dislike of Lena Dunham as a person and a subconscious belief that a show for and about white millennial women couldn't not be mostly vapid. This is where I return the favor: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is really, really, REALLY good. When "The Sopranos" turns 25 in a couple months you're going to read a lot of fawning pieces about how it's the greatest television show ever made. It may very well be in terms of quality. But pretty much every "innovation" credited to the "Sopranos" is something "Buffy" did backwards in high heels, so to speak. This is hard to explain concisely, particularly if you mostly (and imo wrongly) think of Joss Whedon as "The Marvel Quip Guy," but basically, "Buffy" invented a kinda-episodic-kinda-serialized structure for TV drama that basically every single "prestige drama" of the '00s and '10s followed. Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Good Wife, Justified, The Americans - all shows in that vein.

I will grant you that when the show is bad it's really, really bad, but the best episodes of "Buffy" are up there with any of the all-time greats' (which is insane for a network series with 22-episode seasons and a budget of, like, five dollars). And also David Simon is on record as saying it's the best show ever, yes, even better than "The Wire," which has to count for something!!

TWO: I think the unspoken reason Buffy and Harry Potter fans are so desperate to claw back their beloved fandoms from their creators is that these fandoms are overwhelmingly female, and in general us ladies are waaay less comfortable with "problematic auteurs" than the fellas are. Have any men ever tried to "take back" their fandoms from "problematic" creators in this fashion? Hell, do guys even use the word "problematic" unless they're macking?

It's interesting to compare that Vox piece you quoted about Harry Potter with this one about Rick and Morty:

https://www.vox.com/culture/23589595/rick-morty-justin-roiland-dan-harmon-save

Weirdly Zen tenor here, for a show whose creators are both serial sexual harassers (and one of whom was ousted for almost certainly beating up his girlfriend)!! I'm being a little reductionist, I know, but it definitely seems like gender is a relevant factor here.

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