Dollhouse 1x01

[oyceter]

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?

Comments

[oyceter]

like, it turns Joss on to see hot chicks fighting with big guns, and while I'm always fine with seeing hot chicks with big guns, it'd be nice if it also didn't feel like someone else's stroke material, to be crude about it.

YES THIS!

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

Actually serrana pretty much crystallized that for me -- VERY roughly paraphrasing what she said, it's this kind of geek fetish for stories about women who could beat the crap out of him (also the lesbians-are-hawt factor). Teeny blonde women or damaged childlike brunette women kicking ass. Which is _represented_ as feminism, was her point, because, hey! hot chicks with guns. (I must admit I love hot chicks with guns, myself -- and so do many of my friends.) You can draw good things from what he's doing, and his intentions are probably really good (aren't everyone's? Who sits up in bed and thinks, "I'm going to help strengthen the patriarchal status quo today!"), but....I'm just personally getting more and more disenchanted with him being a Big Feminist in Hollywood, referring to himself as feminist, and so on, when his response to the (awful) 'Captivity' billboards on whedonesque was, Men oppress women because they are jealous of the ABILITY TO CREATE LIFE. I loved Buffy, but Buffy fell right into the stereotype of strong-women-who-cannot-handle-emotions-and-whose-love-life-sucks, and that hurt to see.

(Pay no mind to me! I am bitter!)

[oyceter]

No no! I read that post too and was like...mmm. I have problems with this. Especially with how a lot of the reception to it was "Joss is great!" and how it felt like giving male feminists a cookie for not being sexist assholes.