[ SECRET POST #5784 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5784 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 48 secrets from Secret Submission Post #828.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

08. https://i.imgur.com/QCxHaVS.jpg

[sabotabby]

I remember someone saying "Penny was a toy that two boys fought over until it broke" and that's when I realized.

[(Anonymous)]

That's a good point. And it's interesting, because at the time, it was considered insightful in that Joss seemed to understand that neither of those two boys really understood Penny.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah Penny got the freaking raw end of the deal. I was so charmed by the original approach of the show at the beginning and then I just hated it instantly.

[(Anonymous)]

You can make a feminist reading from that. I didn't look that deeply either way, but you absolutely can look at it more than one way.

[(Anonymous)]

I always saw DHSAB as a very feminist story, because I assumed that was exactly the point. It was a commentary on men's (often fragile and oversized) egos, the way men look to women to fulfill their egos, the way that harms women, and the way men end up harming themselves through their inability to genuinely self-actualize because they mistake dominance and possession as primary means of self-actualization when they aren't. And so they just become increasingly entrenched in their toxic beliefs about themselves and the world, while citing all the injustices and ills the world has dealt them as though that justifies their toxicity.

And to be honest, I still think that was the point. I think Doctor Evil was a very astute commentary on toxic masculinity and how it often functions, and I think that absolutely was Joss's intent. That doesn't mean he isn't/wasn't also an embodiment of a lot of the toxic shit he was commenting on. Frankly it kind of seems like Joss used his work as a confessional for his "sins" (i.e. the worst parts of himself) on the regular.

[(Anonymous)]

Seems a bit harsh to judge people on what their attitude towards a piece of media was 14 years ago - that's a lot of time for someone to change their way of thinking.

[flibbertygigget]

lmao I was like 10 when this came out and haven't seen it since, I think I'll cut myself some slack.

(honestly, most of the people who were into it at the time, at least that i saw, were teenagers. don't expect teenagers to have an incredibly deep understanding of literally anything.)

[(Anonymous)]

I've never seen this because I didn't like Joss Whedon's work at the time AND I don't like media where people break into song. What about it was a giveaway about Whedon's faux feminism?

[(Anonymous)]

I watched it (at some point) and I'm not sure what the OP is referring to in their secret, either. I'm vaguely remembering a Mad Scientist villain type who's the main protagonist, and the drama involves his developing a crush on a girl who seems like she probably wouldn't like him if she actually knew him, and then getting into a fight with a generic hero type and accidentally killing her.

The bit of it that stuck with me is that he idolizes a criminal who's a much bigger deal than him, but can't give this girl an honest answer about who he looks up to: the confused dismay on her face when he tries is enough to make him backpedal and change his answer to "I mean Gandhi!"

And I was like, what a pity.

[(Anonymous)]

I've never seen it.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I was like 15. This is a silly secret.

[(Anonymous)]

Well I was 14 when this came out, had pretty much no exposure to feminism as a concept irl and had extremely limited internet time. All of these things have since changed and so have my opinions on Whedon (and many other content creators).

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I criticised the Penny plotline on my LJ and got flamed for it, including by a couple of people actually on my flist, who then unfriended me. One wrote me a whole essay about how her role was "the catalyst" complete with a whole list of references to musical theatre and told me I was obviously unfamiliar with the work of Sondheim!

So yeah, it was shit, but the actual thing that made me wary of Whedon was his treatment of Charisma Carpenter.

[(Anonymous)]

I did. I swear to God I did back when this first came out.

No one listened to me.

[greghousesgf]

some friends of mine pretty much made me sit through this several years ago (and none of us was teenagers at the time FWIW) and I was so not impressed with anything about it other than Nathan Fillion, who I thought was a riot in it

[(Anonymous)]

He could have gone on his entire career with his flawed feminism and I would have been fine with it. In real life, I know a lot of smart, respectable people with flawed beliefs. *I* have flawed beliefs. It's that he was proven to be an abusive creep that made it impossible to continue supporting his work. So I think it's performative to be all, "You should have seen the hidden signs!" instead of judging people for their actions.

[(Anonymous)]

Basically, this. Fandom was a much nicer place before it became fashionable to waste a lot of time scrutinizing each other and canon for sinful thoughts.

[(Anonymous)]

I also want to apply this to everyone suddenly noticing all the problematic things in Harry Potter (mainly antisemitism, classism, things that are technically about cis women but could be seen as transphobic if you know what to look for) and talking about them like we always knew they were blatant and unforgivable, when literally nobody noticed them before JK went full TERF.

[(Anonymous)]

Yea, I agree. I feel like a lot of people - although the sample size is 'my and my friends in the early 2000s' found Joss' 'feminism' lacking - we had running jokes about his hangups with sex workers, and men saving women from themselves, and I can't even remember the rest. Maybe (probably) we're not as switched on as OP but none of us thought 'oh he's also definitely predatory', we just stopped thinking about him when the shows we watched ended. And then, as we got more information, we changed our opinions.

[(Anonymous)]

I just liked the songs

[meadowphoenix]

I don't think this is a fair understanding of the conversation at the time, which is mostly a conflict/discussion over whether he meant the reading any person picked or not. in fact, I would say this was mostly the conversation about Whedon, even starting with Buffy. do eye find it sketch when feminist men always talk about sexism through the lens of how much mean hurt women? yes. but that's because I am perpetually skeptical about feminist men. other people who thought he was thoughtful about it likely found this short a confirmation of what they believed, that he understand how much men, good and bad, project on women at the expense of their personhood/life.

full disclosure: i still don't think the natasha/red room is shitty. of course natasha thinks she was a monster for not being able to bear children...she was brainwashed and sterilized in order to think that exact thing so she'd be a more compliant and loyal assassin. i think it's reasonable to be weirded out that the narrative never seems to comment on this, and it's fair to be weirded out that whedon keeps doing this to his female characters, but it's actually a nice character beat in universe imo.

[(Anonymous)]

it's fair to be weirded out that whedon keeps doing this to his female characters

GOD does he ever keep doing this to his female characters, though!

I agree that it makes sense in the context of the movie separate from the creator - if you take the movie in isolation, it's not a bad character beat. But at this point, I'm pretty much unwilling to accept any variation on this from Joss, regardless of what he does to try to justify it in-universe. The consistency of the pattern is just too much.

[(Anonymous)]

the thing about the natasha/red room thing is that that's not even something that whedon made up. richard k morgan came up with that a decade before age of ultron was released and it's a consistent themes in stories where natasha is the focus (most notably marjorie liu's the name of the rose). and yeah, she does have complicated feelings about it. was that handled super gracefully in the movie? no, but the fandom's reaction to her opening up to bruce/showing interest in him was way grosser to me than the actual scene.

[luxshine]

I dunno. I think Dollhouse (Aka. Rape the series) was a bigger red flag.