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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?
Re: BTW, he *does* know better--
Oh, wow, that exponentially ups the creepy factor
However, it also neatly dismantles the usual excuse that is made by
people who don't know Joss from a hole in the ground but feel free to describe his life circumstancesfan apologists who excuse him on the grounds that well, white guy, Hollywood, prolly doesn't *know* many non-white people, so of course he doesn't think to go outside his comfort zone - which mind you always rang a little hollow to me given that I am a raging recluse in lilywhite New Hampshire who nevertheless is currently on first-name and/or life/work-trivia-details-exchanging terms with over half-a-dozen people from other ethnic groups - but now is completely blown out of the figurative water.It's sort of telling that - in the entirely homemade, thus not subject to his dreaded Network Meddling, Dr. Horrible, he nevertheless went along with the H'wood stereotypes that Ms. Tancharoen flytes in her verse. (Plus others, of course, like The Fridge.) And though he allowed it - as a DVD extra - that comes across as particularly patronizing given that he *had* the opportunity to be a different example and chose not to do so. (Not to mention the fact that *his* big lament is the completely-unhistorical assertion that *his* work gets examined for deep meanings by critics - unlike Homer's. Lucian of Samosata laughs in the Islands of the Blessed...)