entirely ruined her disposition with books

From here:

Scott Allie will be co-writing the Buffy Season 8 finale

WHAT.

Oh, Joss. Why do you do this to me? It's like you want me to hate you.

A comment over on the website-which-shall-not-be-named got me thinking.

Here it is:

It is horrid but their sex brought on the end of the world so it was never meant to be a positive development. It’s already happened to her once before in Where the Wild Things Are when something urged Buffy and Riley on and they were turned into mindless sex zombies who had "no control over themselves." This time it's only has larger and more disastrous consequences.

It may be squicky but I’d still prefer that story to a story where Buffy knowingly jumped the bones of Twangel and didn’t care that the world started crumbling down around her.

There are about seventy places I could go with this (like, how very, very much I hate WtWTA), but what I really want to get to is this:

Why does questionable sex have to be at the heart of this at all? I hated WtWTA; I hate this. I'm so incredibly over Joss's whole SEX LEADS TO BADNESS thing. And reducing the entire plot of the season to Who Buffy Boinks...seriously?

So let’s talk about consent and sexual punishment in the Buffyverse. I don’t have any deep insights into it; I haven’t really done enough thinking about it for that. But I would like to start up some conversations about it.

And it’s all gonna be behind a cut for the sake of mollivanders, as not to spoil her, and for the sake of the portion of my flist that could care less about my natterings about BtVS


( Cut for Rambling )

Dear Joss Whedon, Scott Allie, et. al.,

If you break Emmie's heart, I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever forgive you. Not in a million years. :P

No love,

Me

P.S. Jane? Please come back! We need you! If anyone can open these guys' eyes to their own privilege, it's you! These guys need a HBIC, and I nominate you.

Oh, Joss. I do not understand your infatuation with Eliza Dushku. She's very excellent at playing a specific kind of character (badass, uninhibited: Faith, pretty much), but she has a very limited range, and I would rather Joss do a project with literally any other Dollhouse cast member than him try to do something with her again. With the amount of incredible people in that cast--Enver and Olivia Williams and Reed Diamond and Dichen Lachman and pretty much everyone else--I can't imagine why he'd rather work with Eliza. *sigh* But clearly, everyone at whedonesque disagrees with me.

Also! Just in case someone missed it, this thread (and yes, you have to read all the comments, since that's where the fun is) might be the greatest thread in the history of lj. Just sayin'.

Thank y'all so much for going with the Three Sentence Fic-a-Thon. It's making me really, really happy, and there's some great, great, great fic being written. Keep it up!

1. I'm having a very interesting discussion here regarding Angel and his morality. And I think I'm ticking someone off. I'd love y'all's thought on whether or not I'm being insensitive and/or wanky--it's so hard to gauge tone on the internets! I'm Lirazel, obvs. Scroll down a bit until people start talking about whether Angel is redeemable. Also: spoilers for Twilightgate!

2. redsilverchains and I have been having a blast making up fake plotlines for the hypothetical 7 seasons of Firefly right here. I feel like I want to turn this into a meme somehow and get a bunch of people in on it, but I'm not sure how to organize it. Thoughts?

Via a recent link on whedonesque, I stumbled across a series at meloukhia.net about feminism and Joss Whedon's shows. The one linked to on whedonesque is on Dollhouse, and is a bit disappointing--it opens arguments without really exploring them, to be honest. But some of the older articles are worth checking out.

Like this one on sex and punishment on Joss's shows--not anything that hasn't been said before, but still, nice to see someone examining it again.

But I really, really like this two part exploration of how Angel is really pretty antifeminist. It especially delves into Cordelia's character and hints at how it was destroyed (I still want to yell "WTF, JOSS?" about that one), and it had one especially insightful quote I wanted to share.

We see a recurring theme with Cordelia: she is not allowed control of her body, because her body “needs” to be used by others. Yes. I had never, ever noticed this before (probably mostly because I got into Angel before I really learned how to read texts from a feminist perspective), but it is so, so true. From demon pregnancies to visions forced on her against her will to having her body stolen from her to be the vessel of Jasmine, poor Cordy is never allowed to be Cordy for very long before her body is stolen from her again. Since she's far and away my favorite character on that show (with Gunn in a close second), and since I love her so hardcore on Buffy, where she's always HBIC, this still makes me bitter.

And then Fred goes through the same thing! It's troubling, and not something I'd thought about on a conscious level, even if I would have told you that Angel isn't exactly a feminist show.

On the other hand, the second part includes some truly great moments for women on Angel and also has some love for Lilah, who I think is just an incredibly fabulous character in every way.

I don't agree with all her points in all the articles (obviously), but still, there's some interesting stuff going on all of them. I really appreciate that she's examining all this from the point of view of a fan who still sees problematic aspects of shows she loves (just like me!).

ALSO: Go vote for Buffy here! Because River is beating her, and we can't have that! As much as I love River, Buffy is my hero.

[ETA] While we're on the topic of Joss-criticism, I thought I'd throw out this link, too, since it's someone who is far more knowledgeable than I am calling him out about something else that's really bothered me about his shows.