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Dollhouse 1x01
Dear Joss,
While it's nice that you have an Actual Asian Person (TM) in your cast, it would be even better if you would stop using things like Asian teapots, hotels, clothes, and geisha (who seem to, like all the others, act as scenery in your world) while populating the surroundings with all white people.
No love,
Another Actual Asian Person (TM)
Spoilers
I will probably keep watching for now, because despite the extremely sketchy premise, the amnesia and the doll bits are right up my manga kink alley.
On the other hand, WOW sketchy racial politics! We have Latino victim/businessmen, threatened by a Latino gang, disembodied Asian artifacts set in a world of white people, and even more white people with all the power and control! And another white person investigating. (see ETA)
And a single black man, who though I like so far as a character, have almost zero faith in his development.
I know I read as very cynical and angry. I love Buffy, but I feel that with each continuing product, Joss gets more and more problematic, like he spent all his feminist cred on Buffy (hello, Angel) and then basically just stopped thinking about anything past what floats his own boat, id-wise. It's lucky for us that some of it involves women with guns, but at this point, I'd like a little less crazy brunette and a little more of something else.
Also, the writing in Dollhouse wasn't so great—clunky As-You-Know-Bob's, not much humor or wit, and characters who I feel I've seen in many other Joss shows before (hello Warren! hello damaged brunette out to get her abuser! hello Lilah! hello Wolfram & Hart! hello police guy who vaguely looks like Nathan Fillion!).
ETA: Wait, FBI guy is Helo? Wow, I am out of it fannishly. OK, another plus for a POC actor, and I am crossing my fingers that they are not doing the "multiracial person coded as white" and actually write the agent as POC.
ETA2: And apparently the Spanish is not so much with the grammatical! Why am I not surprised?
While it's nice that you have an Actual Asian Person (TM) in your cast, it would be even better if you would stop using things like Asian teapots, hotels, clothes, and geisha (who seem to, like all the others, act as scenery in your world) while populating the surroundings with all white people.
No love,
Another Actual Asian Person (TM)
Spoilers
I will probably keep watching for now, because despite the extremely sketchy premise, the amnesia and the doll bits are right up my manga kink alley.
On the other hand, WOW sketchy racial politics! We have Latino victim/businessmen, threatened by a Latino gang, disembodied Asian artifacts set in a world of white people, and even more white people with all the power and control! And another white person investigating. (see ETA)
And a single black man, who though I like so far as a character, have almost zero faith in his development.
I know I read as very cynical and angry. I love Buffy, but I feel that with each continuing product, Joss gets more and more problematic, like he spent all his feminist cred on Buffy (hello, Angel) and then basically just stopped thinking about anything past what floats his own boat, id-wise. It's lucky for us that some of it involves women with guns, but at this point, I'd like a little less crazy brunette and a little more of something else.
Also, the writing in Dollhouse wasn't so great—clunky As-You-Know-Bob's, not much humor or wit, and characters who I feel I've seen in many other Joss shows before (hello Warren! hello damaged brunette out to get her abuser! hello Lilah! hello Wolfram & Hart! hello police guy who vaguely looks like Nathan Fillion!).
ETA: Wait, FBI guy is Helo? Wow, I am out of it fannishly. OK, another plus for a POC actor, and I am crossing my fingers that they are not doing the "multiracial person coded as white" and actually write the agent as POC.
ETA2: And apparently the Spanish is not so much with the grammatical! Why am I not surprised?
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I'd probably feel less like cringing at everything he's done post-Buffy if he hadn't somehow, by quasi-empowering the tiny blonde, gained some kind of rep for HAVING cred that people take on faith (and argue loudly), even when his works are seriously problematic.
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It was a bit... um. I really wanted to stop the interview and find out exactly what he did and didn't mean, and if he really believed that people on the privileged end of a dynamic automatically "get" it more easily/accurately/whatever than those on the unprivileged end, or if he was intending to talk about some very narrow situation and realized that outside of that narrow context it usually works the opposite of what he had just suggested. But, yanno, taped interview conducted by someone else. :-/
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Interviews are weird, and sometimes Terry Gross doesn't follow up on things the way I wish she would.
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If he did, he wouldnt be the first one...
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I wonder if part of the Joss backlash is that there's better stuff out there than there was-- BSG, and Sarah Connor, and...eh, I dunno. What do you think?
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I feel like the same goes for his dialogue at this point, actually. A lot of Firefly, in particular, was wince-inducing clunky. It got them the joke, but still.
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I know a lot of people are drawing connections between Topher and Warren, but (and I wasn't around when Warren was being discussed - I never watched Buffy consistently when it was first on, and certainly wasn't part of the fandom) it seems more Topher's supposed to represent the stereotypical fanboy who thinks being a conventionally-attractive woman is so awesome because of all the power she gets over men and thinks the whole thing is a game and that feminists are just awful whiners who don't realise the truth.
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Hey, I don't pretend. I did not fall off the Whedon bandwagon out of some sense of moral superiority. I initially disliked Firefly because it was BAD.
Then I had lessons in Racial Awareness 101, and realized it was REALLY BAD.
I... don't know about Topher, sorry. ;)
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And they noticed:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.tv.firefly/msg/0d4963babfd37455
people were defriending me?
Someone basically said I was off my meds for not liking something or other by Whedon that the Whedonites were squeeing over. Maybe the musical Buffy episode, which mainly served to demonstrate that most of the cast wasn't cast on their ability to sing or dance. Whedonites get cranky when people don't adore their idol.
1: http://www.trektoday.com/news/201201_04.shtml
"The concept was inspired by the aftermath of the American Civil
War. 'I wanted to make something that's about a guy who fought for the
South, lost and doesn't like anybody anymore,' Whedon said. 'This show
isn't about the people who made history; it's about the people history
stepped on. [...]'"
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[...]
'This show isn't about the people who made history; it's about the people history stepped on. [...]'"
Oh the bitter, bitter laughter. Yes, let us make a show about the people history stepped on—the Confederate Army! But while we do so, let us ignore that nasty thing about slavery, the genocide of Native Americans that goes hand-in-hand with the Western expansion narration, and the Chinese labor that helped build those trains you see see running across the desert that are so fun to rob! That's a great idea!
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ME TOO. Even in Buffy there were oh, so very many problems, and he's just gotten worse as times goes on, I think.
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You know that icon lots of people have, with the whole bragging Joss quote about "how come you have all these strong female characters?" I really want to do a modified version of that asking, "So how come you have all these strong female characters, but oh, by the way, they all just happen to be crazy skinny instead of being big and/or muscular, and then the plot just happens to require that they all shower together?"
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