What We Do
For a couple of days now I’ve been trying to figure out why I’ve taken the reveal about Joss Whedon’s professional and personal conduct so hard. I don’t know him. I don’t know anyone who knows him personally. I was never privy to the rumors surrounding his behavior for apparently his entire career.
I came to Buffy and Angel later, after both had been well off the air. When they were on I wasn’t interested in them, being something of a snob when it came to TV. My love for long form narratives was reserved for comics and books for the most part.
And then enough people recommended it to me that I gave it a shot. I started with Buffy and, to my surprise, found that what I had assumed was a silly, superficial, supernatural, teen soap with a goofy name…was more than that. I mean, it was also a silly teen soap with a goofy name, but it wasn’t superficial. It was subverting tropes and exploring character in ways that I didn’t often see. It took risks and dealt with issues more mainstream and “serious” material didn’t even touch. And it had a main female character who was flawed, self-centered, girly, and complicated…and still a hero. Sure she could kick ass and stake multiple vampires and do all the stuff we mere mortals can’t. But she also struggled with identify and, when she didn’t have those abilities or was confronted by demons both literal and metaphoric that were stronger than she was…she didn’t give up. She was strong because at core she was a hero, regardless of how hard she could punch.
After that I watched Angel, which was a darker show right from the start. And it’s first season dealt with the idea that, the “good fight” is never over. You can’t just win against evil, the fight is never done. “If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.” It was an unusual take for something set in a supernatural world where most of the time the good guys win against an enemy of some sort. They save the world, sometimes multiple times. To start off your world with the concept that the good guys are never going to really win, they are always going to have to fight, and keep fighting, because the world is the way it is…was something different and unexpected for me.
The somewhat existential idea that it’s not the winning that’s important was significant. Both in the show and applied to real life, it was a fairly simple articulation of what I think a lot of us feel. And a reminder that the fight for what is right has meaning whether you “win” or not, and whether or not that “win” is forever. Which it probably isn’t.
I could tell you about the different episodes of Buffy and Angel that have personal meaning to me. The Body. A Hole in the World. Conversations With Dead People. Once More With Feeling. The way the show dealt with grief and the complexities of being human, was something I kept going back to, re-watching more than nearly any other media besides some beloved movies and Farscape. The storytelling and narrative decisions were interesting even when I disagreed with them, and I enjoyed critiquing episodes that fell flat or were just plain bad. And I also found the critiques of the more serious issues, like the whiteness of Sunnydfale and how characters of color were treated, to be important to acknowledge and keep in mind. And, for all that I do still believe the show was more feminist that not, there are episodes and character choices that failed that as well.
And then I became the editor of the Angel comics for IDW and, eventually, took over as a co-writer. For over a year of my life I was creatively dedicated to that world. I had to put aside my personal feelings about it and make sure we were telling stories that “felt” like the show as much as I could. I had to spend a lot of time examining and interpreting what I thought the stories and characters were doing and what the intentions of the show had been. I wrote up a massive story bible with character arcs per season, timelines so we would know where Angel and others were from basically the time of his siring to the present. I made detailed rundowns of the episodes and what they had accomplished or established. And I spent a lot of time trying to make whatever we did “feel” as much as like what Whedon had done and would do, as possible.
I also engaged with fans in a way I hadn’t on previous projects because I knew how much the stories mattered to them and, at the time, a lot were feeling pretty frustrated with the comics both by IDW and by Dark Horse. I got emails begging me to resurrect characters because of how strongly the loss had impacted someone. I weathered criticism about how those working on the books weren’t “real” fans or didn’t care what they thought. I spent a lot of time building up trust again, where I could. Because I knew it mattered.
When the license went back to Dark Horse I wasn’t surprised, given the actual relationship with Whedon they had. The Angel books I worked on existed (and exist) in a kind of “gray canon” area for me. We did our best to match up what we could, to stay true to what was established, and make changes that makes sense from that and not arbitrarily. We made sure the timeline matched up to the Dark Horse Buffy comics as much as possible so fans could have some kind of transition, while still giving the ones reading our take closure.
I honestly haven’t followed any of the comics since I stopped working on them. For me, that had been such an intense time, that I needed a break. It was a few years before I could watch Buffy or Angel again with any kind of distance and enjoy them just as stories again.
I learned a lot from working on the series, about fan engagement, about storytelling, about the responsibilities of a creator who makes something that matters to others. We all want our work to connect, I think, and there’s no denying that these works do that with the people who love them. Stories matter.
That a person’s work is flawed, that a creator is flawed, is not new or even the issue here. I don’t think anyone who has watched any of his shows could argue the work doesn’t have problems. Some of them were obviously dated opinions or privilege based. But they didn’t seem to be coming from a lack of trying or a lack of caring. They didn’t seem to be malicious and might be something any of us could mess up. They seemed to be coming from someone who was, like everyone, struggling to figure out what it means to be human and tell entertaining stories along with the deeper ones. Sometimes with vampires. Sometimes in space.
But there were cracks. It’s one thing for a show in the 90’s with rigid casting requirements to be as white and conventional looking as Buffy. It’s another thing for a show set in space and using Chinese slang and culture with no Asians anywhere, to never explain that choice. It’s one thing for a show about teenagers and vampires to mess up relationships, another thing entirely for a show like Dollhouse to do…pretty much everything it did.
If what was revealed about Whedon hadn’t come with the fact that he’s presented himself a very particular way for years, as someone who cares about and advocates for women in media and elsewhere…if he hadn’t been abusing his position to gain the most gross kind of access to young women…if he hadn’t prevented his partner from having agency over her own life for 15 years…this wouldn’t sting so much. If this was just a flaw, like a one time mistake or a problematic opinion or statement, it wouldn’t feel so much like it was wrong to ever find meaning in the work. To have spent actual years of my life immersed in it, caring about it, and trying to connect with others via it, because it was my job and something I took seriously.
I don’t think you can treat your partner in life with so much disrespect, for 15 years, and still say you’re an advocate for women. I don’t think you can be someone who is as powerful as he is, use that to have affairs you know you are hiding from your partner and which he had to have known had inherent power balance issues, and call yourself a feminist or even a feminist ally. That is a fundamental disconnect and disrespect for another person’s agency. He clearly only considered their life together as HIS life, to do with as he chose, without extending that same basic right to her. That is grotesque. And suggests that, regardless of what he says, he did not view her as a full person.
People want everyone to be neutral about this and give him the benefit of the doubt. But I’ve seen this exact scenario play out with people I actually know and it’s too likely for me to do that. And there are his own words quoted that are more damning than anything she said. And I think that she had every right to talk about her own experiences and pain. That narrative doesn’t belong to him.
I hope that at some point I can come back to the stories and not have them tainted completely by this. I’m not that great at separating art from artist sometimes. I can’t watch Woody Allen or Roman Polanski films. Writers like Lovecraft have their issues all over their works. I know that, as someone who also makes things, that they reflect some of who I am. That’s inevitable.
What I keep coming back to is that stories matter. They matter to you whether the people who make them are good or bad, and these stories weren’t made by one person. And they don’t just belong to them, either. Once a story is out in the world, it becomes more than that. It becomes something to you, the person who loves it. And something else to someone else who loves it. It’s different for each person who loves it and for whom it means something.
In the end, that’s what matters. Because all that matters is what we do.
