Favorite Whedon TV Show Meme

[shadowkat]

I can't remember what Whedon tv shows my readership favors. So perhaps you can help? My current guess is that you rank them as follows:

1. Buffy
2. Angel (with about 25-45% preferring Angel to Buffy for various reasons)
3. Firefly
4. Dollhouse (with 65% squicked by the series and finding it unwatchable)


Only 5% read the comics and liked them. Everyone liked Dr. Horrible. Few read the X-men comics by Whedon or stuck with them. So comics Whedon - not a fav. Also few appear interested in the current films, Much Ado, Cabin in the Woods, or Avengers. Am I right?
Here's a poll to find out, assuming people participate. As all mathematicians and staticians know...polls are repsentative of the sampling. If only 20 people take the poll?
You guess based on those 20. So...I have approximately 150 who have friended me, of the 150, about 50 probably read on a daily basis, of the 50, 30% are into polls. So..I have no way of knowing, do I? The only way I can know is if everyone who reads my journal and likes or ever liked Whedon shows takes the poll. And that's well impossible. So this is ...far from an exact exercise. (A lesson to the people out there who do a lot of surveys for sociology, psychology and marketing classes - people? They aren't that reliable. You know that right? IF not, just read the internet - it will prove it to you. There's a reason that sociology, psychology and marketing are considering inexact sciences or soft. They rely on inexact data that can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Lawyers love to poke holes in statistical data.)

That said, for a bit of fun, take the poll and see if you can prove me wrong? Feel free to link, since a lot of readers seem to be through links at times.

[Poll #1831422]

[Note: Won't be able to respond until late on Thursday or Friday, since I can no longer access personal blogs via my workplace. So can only access at home. PS: I reposted this poll fifteen minutes after first posting, because I screwed up on the last question and had to fix it. Now it should be fine. If you responded to the deleted post, please respond again. Thanks.]

[ETA: Read the comments. Fascinating.]

Comments

[infinitewhale.livejournal.com]

I don't want to spoil you or anyone reading, but you've got it pretty much nailed. It's not really a scary movie, but it is a horror movie in the sense horrible things happen. It really is a send-up of the Torture Porn genre, but it sends it up by...being torture porn.

Personally, I don't think it's a coincidence it was written around the time Joss started getting bored with S8 because the story is thematically the same, more or less.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

It really is a send-up of the Torture Porn genre, but it sends it up by...being torture porn.

I think Whedon's problem is that he's trying to critique the "torture porn" horror genre in the same way he critiqued the "slasher" genre or more accurately Kevin Williamson critiqued the "slasher" genre with the Scream flicks.

But it's very hard to critique that genre...without it becoming torture porn.
Others have tried. In which they make the audience feel complicit in what is happening on screen. (ie. You the audience are getting off on watching people being tortured in a horror movie. Which unfortunately is true. A lot of people are - that's half of the appeal. Which is why the genre is so incredibly squicky and from my perspective, impossible to watch. I can handle violence but not torture.)

The closest I've seen anyone come to critiquing the torture porn/reality show genre is Suzanne Collins with The Hunger Games triology - she's more subtle about it.

Whedon despises the torture porn genre or perhaps a better way of putting it? Despises the fact that he privately enjoys it (although I have no way of knowing that for certain.) And is attempting to critique it in his stories but...it's not working.

Personally, I don't think it's a coincidence it was written around the time Joss started getting bored with S8 because the story is thematically the same, more or less.

Hmmm...I may have to skip it. I really didn't like the themes of S8 at all.
Actually this is my problem with Whedon in a nutshell. When he sticks to emotional character arcs and explorations of character and quippy dialogue like he did with Buffy, Angel, and to the most part Astonishing X-Men, he's actually really good - when he starts trying to do broader themes...I begin to wonder about his world-view and begin to realize that while we agree on a few things, others.... not so much and I'd really rather not go there.

[infinitewhale.livejournal.com]

I think the problem inherent with CitW, unless there was a major rewrite somewhere after, is that it is pretty harsh on the audience. It's a send-up of the whole fanbase and the writers behind it. The BtS Scientists are stand-ins for the writers (this is made obvious) trying to appease the misogynist nature of the world.

Torture the girl to save the world is the theme...same as season 8. Both are done for the male gaze. It's hinted at in S8 with the way it was done but made obvious in CitW in a scene I won't spoil, but is pretty gruesome.

It's an attempt to fool the audience into realizing what they're watching is destructive and hateful. What Joss doesn't seem to get is that is the point of it. For all his talk about feminism and whatnot, he doesn't seem to actually understand the basis of misogyny at all. Being demeaning and dehumanizing is largely the point of it, so doing it as soem kind of critique is actually taking the fantasy to another level.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Thank you. I think I may have to skip CitW after-all. Because...

Torture the girl to save the world is the theme...same as season 8. Both are done for the male gaze. It's hinted at in S8 with the way it was done but made obvious in CitW in a scene I won't spoil, but is pretty gruesome.

I can't watch that. I just can't. Life is far too short and there's enough misery and horror without adding to it. Reading it in the S8 comics was enough to turn me off of Whedon almost permanently. No, not sure I can see that at all.


I think the problem inherent with CitW, unless there was a major rewrite somewhere after, is that it is pretty harsh on the audience. It's a send-up of the whole fanbase and the writers behind it.

No, from what I've read of the reviews and saw of the trailer that appears to be the gist. One reviewer stated it was brilliant because it was a send-up of why we like horror. Or the sadistic appeal of horror.

For all his talk about feminism and whatnot, he doesn't seem to actually understand the basis of misogyny at all. Being demeaning and dehumanizing is largely the point of it, so doing it as soem kind of critique is actually taking the fantasy to another level.

You'd think he'd get it - having created Warren Miers, Andrew and Jonathan.
The sadism in the human animal. My friend CW and I chatted about this a while back, we both decided we could not watch torture porn horror genre, because of the fact that the audience isn't scared, it's getting off on the torture...there's a part of us (call it the lizard's brain) that gets off on it. We both could write it. We don't want to go there, we choose not to explore that part of ourselves. Social Psychologists have done studies on the sadistic tendencies of humans - what we are willing to do to each other when placed in certain scenarios - the Zimbardo Prison Study and the infamous one about shocking people who get an answer wrong. The people in the studies...were horrified by their actions. Because most of us, Whedon included, doesn't like to think of themselves as...sadistic or that we all have a nasty side. I think you are correct Whedon is attempting to critique that tendency, particularly in regards to misogyny. But the problem with "Whedon" doing it is that he is a white, privileged guy who LOVES slasher movie films and has never really struggled for anything. So, he doesn't get it. He doesn't understand.

As one poster stated in regards to Dollhouse, perhaps it would have been better if Eliza Dusku had been allowed to tell the story not Whedon. Whedon telling the tale is a bit like the Marquis de Sade telling us Justine's point of view. Whedon tortured his actors like most tv writers often do for his art. He reminds me a lot of two of the characters he wrote - Topher Grace and Jonathan - great intentions, but he just doesn't seem to get it.
To be fair, he's not alone in that. There's a lot of male writers making the same mistakes.

[infinitewhale.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what to make of him, really. It's like his recent work is the opposite of the things he says. He'll say in an interview that misogyny is not natural and is sucking the soul out of the world, yet in these two stories, he literally makes the world/nature innately misogynist. The comics directly play on most of the things Buffy was about circumventing or subverting. There was almost a checklist of things mocked on the show that we were supposed to take seriously.

I had thought for a time that the comics were actually a big-time dressdown of comics and the people at Dark Horse, but nope. Doesn't seem to be the case.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure either. Whedon's recent works are...so poorly structured and put together that it's hard to tell what his intent was.

I don't want believe he's being as disingenuous as it appears. And I know enough about the industry he's working within, to realize that its a hard one to create honestly in. Too many barriers, many of them commercial ones. We do, like it or not, live in a sexist, racist, misogynistic society ruled by spoiled angry white men and no where is that more evident than comic books, genre television, and commercial films. All you have to do is look at the reactions to the Hunger Games.
Or our political discourse.

Also, if you read some of the comments further down? Not everyone read the Buffy comics or Firefly or Dollhouse the same way. Some people saw things that I didn't in them. And did not see the things that I did.
So whose to say, which view is the correct one or if there is one?
It's so subjective. People look at it from so many different angles.

But what everyone does appear to agree on is that Firefly didn't have enough time to fully develop itself, and Dollhouse was an uneven mess structurally speaking.