Y2/D307...MLK Holiday, Whedon, etc...

Done nothing to celebrate it. It's been a drab, gloomy day, and all attempts to do laundry were thwarted. (Ah, what I wouldn't give some days for my own washer/dryer. When and if I retire - I'm retiring to a place where I have them or at the very least a reliable service.)

Slept poorly, and I've been fending off the January uglies - which seem to be a combination of depression/anxiety or general malaise. Not helped by hot flashes.

Anyhow, bought/ordered KN95 masks for mother. About 50 of them, for about $83 via Amazon. Two boxes worth. I swear - I think I've spent close to $500 on masks in the last two years if not more. I also have lots of the cheap and free useless ones in my desk at work and at home.

Mercury is in retrograde, or so I'm told, so it may be best to take a social media hiatus. (Of course I'm ignoring that advice.) Instead I wandered about in Twitter, and found this...interesting, if mildly disturbing and slightly unsettling one about Joss Whedon, whereupon he responds to the allegations against him by playing the victim. For once, it would be nice for someone to take accountability for it.

Joss Whedon Breaks his Silence on the Allegations Against Him

It's worth reading if you are interested in the history of the Buffy fandom, Whedon's perspective on it, and interacted with it online. Since it delves into that history - and that surprised me. Starts out talking about the Whedon Studies Association - almost as if the writer is making fandom somewhat complicit in Whedon's rise and downfall, and perhaps fandom is? I don't know any longer.

( Excerpt 1 - about the scholarly fans and Whedon.. )

There's a bit of a disconnect in these stories...because what you have is a very wealthy, privileged family, who has never had to worry about money. Who lives in splendor. And got work easily. And you have a show that many identified with - but their perception of it wasn't what was inside the creator's head completely. Also there's a kind of disconnect between how fans viewed the cast and crew and creator's relationships on and off screen, and what it actually was.

( excerpt 2 - early days of internet fan culture )

I've become increasingly aware of this disconnect between what we want to be real and what actually is. Reality is far more complicated than what most perceive, and yet also far simpler. I think having a father who seems to be slipping in and out of various realities inside his head has made me more aware of this - of how reality in of itself can be little more than a construct of our own minds and perceptions of things.

There's new a game out entitled Wordl. Perhaps you've heard of it? It's all over social media. I tried it. I suck at it. I suck at word games, my father does too - even though we are both wordsmiths. But that's not a requirement of this sort of game. It's a spacial counting game with letter and word configurations. Plays havoc on anyone with dyslexia or spatial issues. I kept getting the number of letters I needed in each word wrong, and the squares confused me, as did the letter set up. Also I kept flipping everything around.

But the internet assumes anyone can do it, and everyone loves it, and it is the game we "all" need right now - emphasis on all. Why do we do this? Assume that what works for a few people or even several hundred, works for everyone? What's up with that?

I think sometimes this is the flaw in all of it. This assumption that we live in a one-size fits all world, and I've become increasingly aware that we don't. We can't be completely communal, no matter how much we may want to be, we are unique organisms, with unique gifts, perceptions, and ways of thinking - we cannot be treated the same.

**

I'm tired. And in a kind of malaise. Mercury is in retrograde or so they say. It's Martin Luther King Day - and depending on your perspective, we've either come a long way towards the kind of world King envisioned or hardly moved at all. Hard to know how King himself would view it. When he died, the world appeared to be in chaos, and yet it is also in chaos now. Is it better or worse than it was in 1968? I honestly do not know. I was one years old and have no memory of it.

I know in some ways we've advanced further than I thought possible, but others, we still seem to be hopelessly stalled. There are too many bigoted fools in the world and I dearly wish there were less - either culled from the population by a virus and natural means, or having changed their minds.
But alas, neither seems to be happening - and that frustrates me. But I'm also not surrounded by them - or near them or really know many, so maybe, I'm wrong about that.

Unlike Whedon, in the excerpts above, the sun is very much my friend. And I wish I could be sitting in his sun drenched house, just a few blocks from the beach. Without him or his artist girlfriend. Just trade abodes for a few minutes. Or hours. Or days. Or weeks. Or months. Where he can work looking out on a gray, drab, colorless world or a cubicle wall in a office with no windows...going to and from work in the dark, with the days slowly getting longer, but no where fast enough, and the sun seems at times to have taken an interminable holiday. And I can work in sun-drenched splendor, in an airy home.

I don't want anything else from his life though, just the home so briefly described in the article. I want the sun. I want to bath in it daily as I did in Hilton Head, for the sun is the enemy of the virus and all that comes with it. But then, I am not a vampire.

Random Photo of the Night...

Meta on Culpability or Accountability

I've read through the NY Magazine aka Vulture Whedon article now, and ..I find I don't come to the same conclusions as the author does.

( conclusion of the article )

Perhaps because I've met people like Whedon in my life time, too many to count, across industries. Narcissists are very charming, and more than one thing. But I don't see Whedon as a victim here - but as someone who is well-off and invested in playing the victim.

He reminds me a great deal of Steve Carroll's character in The Morning Show. Is he mentally ill? Yes, most likely. And as Claudia Black previously stated - I do hope he gets help for it. But the mental illness doesn't excuse his behavior, it doesn't remove culpability or accountability.

Also, I watched Snyder and Whedon's Justice League's back to back, and well, you know there's a problem when the least offensive version and most entertaining was Snyder's. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of Snyder (actually I'm rather ambivalent and I don't tend to seek out his work for the most part, it's very stylistic, with not much emphasis on script, he has a painting background and is into video games), but Snyder's Justice League was not only the better film it was the least offensive.

There's changes Whedon made that underscore an offensive frat boy sexist humor, that I kind of handwaved in the Buffy and Angel series, but was blatantly obvious here.

I also read the Wonder Woman script, and the original Buffy script. So...there you go.

The writer of the article spends more time critiquing Whedon's fandom or the fans of his work - as if they are somehow complicit in his downfall or worse in enabling his actions. I don't agree with that assessment. They were and are fans of the art, they don't know him. They fell in love with their perceptions of his work and the performance he provided. My friend embers_log certainly did not endorse any of these actions, she didn't know about them. She loved the performance or what she perceived.
**

Why does this intrigue me, right now?

I'm discussing this because it fits with a theme of works that I gravitated to this weekend for reasons I'm not quite certain I understand. Except that I've always been fascinated by why we do what we do, the dark underbelly of humanity or those dark impulses.

From Frankenstein to Dexter. In each, the individuals involved are putting on delicate performances. They are brilliant men, some may say genius. And yet, they are also incredibly good liars. I told a friend once, that humans are good liars, particularly at lying to ourselves.
( meta narrative on Dexter, Frankenstein, Whedon, Buffy, and Yellowjackets - with major spoilers for Frankenstein and Dexter, vaguer ones for Buffy and Yellowjackets )

**

On Twitter, Michael E Knight's comment at fan event was posted, and I thought it telling in a way...

Last night on the JPS/MEK zoom, MEK said about these times we’re in:

“I don’t know anyone who’s thriving right now. In 10 yrs, we’re gonna look back at now & be like ‘that was really some shit’. You don’t know you’re living through something biblical until it’s over.”

I think this is true. Trauma can take many forms. And affects people differently. But, there's a caveat here, it does not excuse or justify hurting others to benefit one's self. The actor who I quoted, to my knowledge, has always been kind and never hurt a soul.