What's wrong with Whedon's philosophy? Why exactly would I want to feel sad or angry when I could be laughing instead?
What's wrong with Whedon's philosophy?
What's wrong with Whedon's philosophy? Why exactly would I want to feel sad or angry when I could be laughing instead?
I mean I agree, but don't tell a joke every 5 seconds
And don't make every character a sassypants
Well, that happened
Probably one of the most overrated writers ever.
idk about overrated but definitely underhated
this guy is literally the Prometheus of all soibeards and troons and their cringe baby culture of products
This. He basically created these older millennial cat ladies and sois collecting gay shit like figurines and funky pops.
I watched Firefly for the first time just before Christmas. His style is so odd, like everything he writes is just an amateur writer's first ideas all tossed on screen and mashed together. It's just a ton of cliches and tropes and subversions, clearly written to make the audience feel clever for noticing. It feels very derivative, but it's not actually derivative of anything so it ends up being this really neat mix of fresh and comfy. I can understand Firefly getting only one season, and I can understand it having a rabid fanbase.
Just an odd writer. He really spoke to a very small section of people.
>What's wrong with Whedon's philosophy? What are we philosophers now? Really? We're doing this huh? OK you go first or I go first?
Levity is, by definition, insincere and in a medium like film, sincerity is all you got. It's the writing equivalent of the Wilhelm scream, where the constant quips remind you this is just a film and there's no real stakes.
>Levity is, by definition, insincere
stairs muffin
there's nothing inherently wrong with it as a stylistic choice, but it would be wrong to raise it to the level of a fundamental axiom
>Why exactly would I want to feel sad or angry when I could be laughing instead?
because sometimes it's a good, formative, and even pleasurable thing to be provoked, or challenged, or made to feel sympathy or grief
now you can stop posting this over and over
And this philosophy, along with there being way too many writers trying to leave their mark, is why everything is so tonally inconsistent this past decade.
While whedon isn't a good writer, there are even worse writers that have taken this philosophy and fricked it up
Buffy is great. This is a hill I will die on.
Okay, die quickly.
Remember when buffy got double teamed by selections of the Houston Rockets?
Most of it aged shockingly well for what it is.
Yeah it was shit then and it's shit now
>le contrarian that hates everything
Wow, such a dying breed for this site...
it works for Whedon, most of his stuff has been alright, the problem is all the people who try to copy his style and absolutely suck at it
It's like people trying to rip off Quintin Tarantino and his dialogue and writing style. There were so many films that tried to emulate his style of writing and failed so utterly and miserably.
The key to writing is to steal but steal so well no one notices. The people who stole from Tarantino and Whedon are terrible thrives.
It's never going to be a good comedy because it's already too dark, and by adding jokes you've prevented it from being a good drama/thriller or whatever, you've sucked out all the darkness that you built. It now succeeds at nothing.
Should have been a clown
Because it removes any semblance of stakes and tension. Just take it to the ad absurdum degreee and you'll see what I mean.
Imagine any high-point of a movie that's the least bit somber, dark or tension-building and make sure at the highest point of tension you follow it by adding a fart sound.
That's essentially Joss Whedon's, and all his followers, philosophy.
It's a lower artform than youtube poops.
Whedon style writing isn't fricking funny. Shane Black does the whole "quippy" thing a lot better.
Whedon's style before Marvel wasn't even quips. He looked at usual writing standards and used that as the setup, and then the 'subversion' was the punchline. The problem is that audiences became familiar with that and suits required him to become stupider to broaden the appeal, so it got reduced to quips.
This style works great for more lighthearted episodic TV. It does not work well for serious movies. It works pretty okay for movies being treated as episodes. Has he ever done one of those """bingeworthy""" shows that are effectively episodes being treated as movies?
That didn't seem to apply when Buffy's mum died.
yeah. what a hack
Imagine you are confronting a serial killer who you've been hunting down for miles and miles after they had murdered your mother, your father and your sister.
Imagine him standing infront of you with a butchers knife, covered in the blood of your family. You standing before this murderer who could take the lives of innocent people so easily and remorselessly. Imagine that pain, that anger, that fear just coarsing through your body as you stand before him.
Then you say 'where'd you get that jerk shirt? At the jerk store?'
Because it creates tonal whiplash. If a scene is meant to be serious, a corny one-liner totally diminishes the drama.
This type of thing worked for Buffy, because Buffy was a teenager girl from the Valley, and this was during the 2000s, where being ironic and snarky used to be a thing among teenagers.
Grown ups behaving this way in every moment just doesn't work.
At its a core, he's correct in that you can't truly empathize with your characters without some levity to show their humanity. I have trouble thinking of a truly perfect movie that doesn't have at least one thing you could call a joke.
But subtlety is dead, so everything is Marvel writing where all serious moments need to be undercut by a quip.
He ruined a generation of Hollywood writers with this statement.
The Coen brothers know how to do this, Whedon doesnt
Moments of levity can heighten the emotion of a tragedy, and comedy is often improved by including a tragic element, but when you start writing like late-stage Whedon where every moment of emotional significance is undercut by some snarky one-liner or dated reference, it renders things emotionally-hollow.