Day: September 6, 2008

First Cracked listed Firefly‘s River Tam in its rundown of the “Randall Munroe — which I thought was sort of ridiculous, partly because I don’t agree with it, and partly because I don’t think River was an attempt at feminism. I’m not convinced that every female character has to be.

And then they linked to that LJ post as some kind of proof or approbation of their theory…

When I read that “beyond a shadow of a doubt” Joss Whedon obviously abuses his own wife, the essay went from being just an extremely flawed reading of Firefly to being downright insulting. I waded through just enough of her current blog to see that she considers Whedon “a profound misogynist,” and men in general to be, at best,”superfluous creatures.” (At worst, we’re violent misogynist bastards not to be trusted around anyone else.)

That’s when I realized that we had, in fact, seen two very different shows, and we were never going to agree on something like this.

A couple of weeks ago, Mary Ann took some of the Firefly (and Torchwood) characters to task for being racial stereotypes. And while I didn’t really agree with her on that, I could definitely see her point. As a middle-class American white guy, I’ll admit my persepctive may be different, and I may not be as sensitive to these things as I could be.

I don’t think Joss Whedon, Russell T. Davies, or anyone else should get a free pass. When they do wrong — or could do better — they should be called on it. But, at the same time, I don’t think every time a person of color displays a character flaw that that’s racism, or that every time a female character shows some sign of weakness it’s because the writer is a profound misogynist. Sometimes it’s actually just good writing. People are often flawed; people are sometimes weak. If all we have are predictably flawed and weak characters, then we have a problem. And if all of those characters are women and/or non-white, then the root of that problem could very well be racism and/or misogyny, and that needs to be fixed.