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?