Clever girl!

glossylalia:

thusspakekate:

downlo:

Once again, Cracked surprises me by publishing a thoughtful cultural critique. I thought they were a humor site?

Michelle Rodriguez (pictured above in Girlfight) on being typecast as the strong chick who keeps getting killed:

“… people can call it typecast, but I pigeonholed myself … Saying no to the girlfriend, saying no to the girl that gets captured, no to this, no to that, and eventually I just got left with the strong chick who’s always being killed, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

You read that right: She’s limited her roles to interesting, strong characters. For a male actor, that means “action hero.” For a woman, it means she has to die — over and over and over again, each time making way for the petite model to take down the villain with her Waif-Fu instead. That’s the phrase TV Tropes coined to describe the martial art that allows a woman to thrash trained soldiers twice her size while having no musculature on her frame at all. It’s considered empowering when Joss Whedon includes ass-kicking females in everything he writes, but when he needs a badass kung fu killing machine, he casts the pretty, wispy Summer Glau.

The women who develop careers as action stars are not just pretty, but are pretty in the most feminine way possible: Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Uma Thurman, Milla Jovovich, Michelle Yeoh and Halle Berry.

[…]

Joss Whedon can pretend like the ass-kicking supermodels were created as a reaction to the helpless victims, but he’s just substituting one weird male fantasy with another. It’s as if there’s nothing in between “beautiful victimized woman crying while splattered in blood” and “beautiful invincible woman kicking people while wearing skintight fetish gear.”

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Now seriously—who looks like she’s more capable of kicking your ass? Michelle Rodriguez or any of the following women?

Hell, I think Michelle could kick ALL of their tiny asses in one go. Yet we’re supposed to believe that waifish women without visible muscles can credibly play invincible badasses?

I love Joss Whedon’s work, but the point the article makes is undeniable. He did challenge action/horror convention by creating female protagonists who don’t rely on male characters to save them. But he also cast conventionally beautiful, femme, delicate-looking women to play those butt-kicking, strong female characters. One step forward, two steps back.

I do believe Joss is sincere about his feminism, but sincerity only gets you so far. The situation reminds me of those ‘enlightened’ liberal guys who say they prefer pretty brunettes over pretty blondes.

I’d like to make a slight defense of Joss and say that, specifically with Buffy, the entire point was that it was an unassuming young woman. He’s said in interviews that the whole inspiration for Buffy came from an idea of a scene where you see a small young blonde woman—your stereotypical ~*victim*~—running through the woods. The audience sees this an assumes she is on the run from an attacker. But then, it is revealed that she is actually the hunter—not the hunted. The point was to turn audience expectations of the beautiful, feminine, delicate looking cliche on its head. Also, Buffy, like the other Slayers we see on the show, was imbibed with the spirit of a demon in order to have her powers. Her powers are supernatural, they don’t come from working out in the gym and taking a lot of kickboxing lessons. 

With River, Joss continues his fascination with institutionalization and governmental attempts to create super-warriors (which is a common trope in sci-fi!) that we see in Season 4 of Buffy with The Initiative and Adam. Again, I think the point with River was that we underestimate the potential strength and power of femininity. And like Buffy, this power that isn’t something that is naturally gained or purposefully sought after, its forced upon them by patriarchal institutions (the alliance and the watcher’s council respectively) and then used against said institutions to dismantle or at the very least discredit them. Yes, Summer Glau is waspish and willowy, but River Tam is a government experiment. 

I haven’t watched Dollhouse, so I will refrain from comment on that.

Can we hope for/demand a larger and more diverse look to the women of the whedonverse? Hell yes. And we should. We all know he’s crap at writing POC characters and the whedonverse is—generally speaking, a whiteopia. I’m certainly not trying to claim that he gets it 100% right and that I have no bones to pick with him regarding representation, but I think that when we’re talking about sci-fi/fantasy genres, we also have to look at the character’s origin story in addition to the actor who is cast in that role. 

Right but, I think the question may also be more of a systematic issue as to WHY female action/sci-fi protags are always coded in a manner to be casted in this way. Even with the primary example of Rodriguez given, her characters have also never been mainline protags, that in itself is a foundation to take issue with. 

homotronic:

velocicrafter:

darkwhitewolf:

samandrewthegeek:

velocicrafter:

So here’s a lovely woman of color making a guest appearance on Angel. Naturally, she ends up being the monster of the week. Way to promote equality, Joss.

Yeah, I mean none of his shows ever had powerful or multi-dimensional black people. Gunn, Book, Zoe and Boyd just stopped existing. I forgot. This is just searching for a problem when there just isn’t one. 

I’m also one hundred percent sure that there were never ever ever any white demons. No way were the only humans to kill other humans in the Buffyverse white. Nope. Uh-uh. Joss just hates all the equality: he also despises women, which is why he has so few strong female characters in any of his shows; he hates gays and lesbians, so obviously none of the main characters would even THINK of someone of the same gender, and he despises all the religions, so he would never make a character Christian, Jewish, whatever. Just imagine if he made, like, a lesbian jew, or a black christian. LOL THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN. (…Seriously?)

That’s a lovely straw man argument you’ve got there. :o)

I mean, most of the characters captainstrawman up there references were from the same show, and are vastly outweighed by the sheer volume of moster-of-the-week types played by POC, as well as the frequent POC’s-as-collateral-damage and so forth. 

It’s not that Joss Whedon isn’t good at what it doesn’t. Hell, it’s not that he doesn’t right good female characters (there are other issues here we’ll discuss another time), It’s that he’s almost COMPLETELY INCAPABLE of writing in quality POC characters. The First slayer was black, but also preverbal and dressed in “tribal wargear”, Kendra was black and she was a joke. Ashanti did a guest spot and ended up being a demon. I mean, seriously. 

Nobody’s saying he’s doing these things ON PURPOSE, but doing them on accident or without realizing is just as bad, because it shows that as a white man HE ISN’T THINKING ABOUT IT BECAUSE HE DOESN’T HAVE TO BECAUSE HE’S A WHITE MAN. Unexamined privilege is just as bad as willfull ignorance.

What Davitron said, because seriously, this is something that has been discussed Ad Nauseum amongst Joss Whedon fans who are POC. As far as I’m concerned, DarkWhiteWolf & SamAndrewTheGeek can choke on their ignorance/suck a fuck, because because a few TOKEN examples don’t “not a problem” make.

#ThisHasBeenAPost

….this “Angel + Cordelia” storyline kinda came outta nowhere, right?

Like, seasons & seasons (ok, like 2.5 seasons) of no sexual tension, to inklings of attraction, then suddenly Fred & Lorne are like “oh you two should totally get together! I know you like each-other!” and then… they’re crushing on each-other suddenly?

I mean, I hear that Cordy dies soon, so I bet it’s one of those sadistic things Joss likes to do where he kills off a well-liked character after things look like they’re going well & you’re really rooting for them (*cough* Angel *cough* Tara *cough* Wash *cough* Topher *cough* Joyce *cough* Buffy *cough*)

kendalawesome replied to your post: kendalawesome replied to your post: soylenth…

He’s also shitty at making strong female characters who aren’t physically small&dainty.

I was gonna reference ‘November’ in Dollhouse, but then she ended up being kind of a mess.

How do you feel about Inarra in Firefly/Serenity? Morena Baccarin was curvier when she played that role.

it’s available streaming on Netflix right now. The characters are really amazing. Ultimately, they’re stock characters (outlaw leader w/a sense of nobility, not-too-smart sidekick who can kick a lotta ass, hooker w/a <3 of gold, that kind of thing), but Joss Whedon’s storytelling brings a lot more depth to them than you’d see from any other producer/writer. You get a sense from the get-go that there’s a heck of a lot more going on than initially meets the eye, and you can really tell that there was much more story to tell before it got canceled.