Sunday, December 11, 2011

Joss Whedon is Diablo Cody

After googling their names I found out I’m not the only person in the world to draw this conclusion, which makes me feel better about the world.

Okay seriously. I was trying to explain to Clayton why even though BtVS is really special to me, I don’t really consider myself a Joss Whedon fan. About the time I stopped was when he wrote some issues of Runaways and portrayed Chase as a big superhero fan. This sounds dumb, but like…that would be Victor. It became really obvious to me while reading that arc that Joss Whedon could only write, or was only willing to write, Joss Whedon Characters with Joss Whedon Dialogue.

That felt self-centered to me—well, maybe I’m putting moral judgments on the lack of certain abilities, but even if that’s true, I don’t think Whedon should be considered such a huge genius if he can’t write characters who think and talk outside of a very narrow style.

While I was saying this to Clayton, it occurred to me that Diablo Cody is super maligned for: a. writing characters who belong to a certain “type” b. writing characters who all talk in a certain quirky way.

What the fuck, guys!

I would argue that in Juno, despite the homeskilletness or whatever people are offended by, Cody comes out on the side of saying that someone uncool and unquirky like Jennifer Garner’s character is a better person than her husband who seems to think he’s better than her because he’s so ~indie. Which in my opinion is much more open-minded than Joss Whedon.

Yet Joss Whedon’s name is basically a synonym for AWESOME, while Cody is criticized and made fun of for having quirky dialogue and characters?

3 comments:

  1. Love this blog. But out of curiosity, what else has Diablo Cody written? Joss Whedon created Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, and Dr. Horrible, as well as runs on the aforementioned Runaways and Astonishing X-Men. I suspect that's why he gets a lot of leeway with his writing limitations, because his properties have such devout fandoms.

    Even though Buffy was a franchise he ran into the ground, and the Season 8 comics did lewd things to the corpse. I'd be curious what other things you don't like about Whedon...

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  2. It's basically a)running everything into the ground, b)the across-the-board quirk. Also the thing with Runaways bothered me not just because of the quirk, but because Chase is my favorite ever and I felt like Whedon wrote him in a way that was insulting to his character because he didn't want to get in the head of a character who's not a geek. I find that a shitty thing in genre.

    Anyway Diablo Cody has written Juno, Jennifer's Body which I've heard is really bad, and Young Adult which I haven't seen. She also created United States of Tara, which I enjoyed, but I don't know how much she wrote it after S1. I'm not an expert on all her stuff, but I loved Juno when it came out. I think I saw it in theaters six times. And whenever people criticize it I feel like they've only seen the first ten minutes of the movie.

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  3. I do consider myself a Whedon fan, but your observation rings pretty true to me.

    (I also adored Juno, and am definitely interested in whatever else Diablo Cody does. I like the quirky dialogue in both writers' works, actually.)

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