Lauren Cates Hates Joss Whedon
October 3, 2013 12:40 pm | Leave your thoughts
So I was going to write a reaction, much less a review, of Agents of SHIELD, but it kept rambling on and on and on during the first fifteen minutes that I just couldn’t. Could. Not.
Look, I’m going to level with all of you. I hate Joss Whedon. Not in that dumb ironic I-hate-you-for-making-me-love-you way.
I hate that he’s a writer that covers his lack of detail with cries of “but it’s META” and a snarky line from every character like nobody’s ever in a more serious situation than a cocktail party.
I don’t mind that other people like his work, but I find him to be extremely problematic in terms of tone and style, and frankly detail, to the point where if I’m watching anything that he’s written, I’m likely to begin shouting, anywhere between five seconds to two minutes in, “THAT’S NOT HOW SHIT WORKS”.
About me: I have a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering. Okay, so I should be in the target audience, but my problem is I also had it up to my eyeballs in people with clever shit to say all the time when I left college.
Why?
Because those people have been, without fail, people with so astonishingly little to say that they use jokes or other flashy distractions to cover it up.
Every time I watch something with the name Joss Whedon on it (I have friends who love his work), I have to brace myself for the onslaught of dumb shit that makes no sense in his work but people give him a pass on because…I’m not sure why.
In Buffy, the graduating class of Sunnydale praised her for being the class protector, but really if everyone knew that there were vampires in town, don’t you think Sunnydale would have become a ghetto because most people would have left?
In Firefly, the gimmick of all planets developing the same way, when we can’t even get small countries to be uniform on one planet is, frankly, small-minded and uncreative. And no, the stories or characterizations did not overcome that. They were just as cutesy as your five year old sticking a GI Joe head on a Barbie doll and calling it “progressive”.
In Dollhouse, well…there were so many issues I had with both the concept of the technology, the way it was implemented, and the fact that we were supposed to think that human traffickers could also be decent and generous individuals that cared about humanity that I lost my shit halfway into the first episode.
In The Avengers, I can’t seem to get past the idea that the only way anything in the movie made sense at all is that SHIELD knew exactly what Loki was doing and let him do it anyway (between the first pissing contest where Loki just sat there waiting for them to finish and a system of captivity whereby if he misbehaved, they would just let him go, you’d think they were actually trying to incite The Battle of New York themselves).
So, when I watched Agents of Shield, I could not get 15 minutes into it. Between all the quipping and cutesy behavior (A poop with knives sticking out of it? And these people are looking out for the welfare of the world? Just. Fucking. REALLY?), more shit that doesn’t make sense (you will never convince me that a woman was in the room when the person who wrote this episode wrote a line about a woman who invites a guy back to her van, because, while it was played for laughs, that shit would otherwise be considered creepy) and even more of that well-we-don’t-really-have-a-team-just-a-bunch-of-rejects-that-will-work-together-eventually thing that we apparently didn’t get enough of in the movie.
Ugh. Kill me now, else I may actually blow up in front of my friends when they all try to tell me how great this shit is.
If you liked Buffy and that shit, taste it. But if you’re like me and ain’t buying what Whedon’s selling, toss it and then nuke it from orbit.
Tags: buffy, dollhouse, firefly, Joss Whedon, the avengers
Categorised in: Headlines
This post was written by David Griffin
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