Speak Up Saturday

[feurioo]

Welcome to the weekly roundup post! What are you watching this week? What are you excited about?

Comments

Regarding Xander

[shadowkat]

Oh, interesting! I hadn't looked at it that way yet. (And I'm not sure Joss Whedon was self-aware enough to consciously do this?) But the show does it really well indeed

I really didn't see it either until now? Mainly because back then much like everyone else, I'd normalized the behavior and thought little of it? Sad but true.

But, Whedon liked to examine abuses of power and was self-critical and self-deprecating in his writing and required the same from his writing team, often bullying them into it. He got a lot of criticism for not putting Xander and Buffy together, and having the male characters come across as toxic, but he was also intent on writing a subversion of the slasher/horror films/series and teen films that he grew up watching in the 70s, 80s and early 90s. Also, he had all the writers/himself included told to write about their worst day ever, their most embarrassing moment, or the thing they did in high school that they regretted the most. And I have a feeling he created the character of Xander as not a tribute to himself but a critique and he may well have been unconsciously per those guidelines punishing the toxic behavior of the incel instead of rewarding it? I never noticed it before now. I was somewhat surprised by it to be honest. I'm not entirely sure if he was aware of doing it, but I do know that when he turned Xander sadistic in The Pack, the first time they commented on the incel, and then again, with Xander in Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered - that yes, they were doing that.

Another bit to keep in mind? Whedon wasn't alone in the enterprise, he may have been the principal show-runner? But he had producing partners that had a say, along with a lot of other writers, etc. He didn't write, direct and produce every episode like Noah Hawley did with Fargo (for the most part).
He didn't direct or write over 90% of them. And the Xander episodes tended to be written by other people. Marti Noxon wrote Xander most of them in S2. I don't think Whedon wrote a lot of Xander's dialogue.

Re: Regarding Xander

[tinny]

Those are all good points! And the worst day thing is new to me!

He got a lot of criticism for not putting Xander and Buffy together

omg whyyy? Just because he was the only male in the group? Ugh.

And they did have the evil boys (omg they had a name but I forgot) as a Big Bad in the second-to-last season, didn't they? They had incel written all over them, too.

Re: Regarding Xander

[shadowkat]

There were a lot of annoying Bander or Xander/Buffy shippers in the Buffy fandom during the original airing 1996-2003. And in the 20th Century, that was the trope? Putting Buffy with Spike or even Angel went heavily against the trope established in the 20th Century. Buffy did a lot of things no one else did. Now, they do it all the time, but twenty-five to thirty years ago? They didn't.

Back in the 20th Century, they paired the heroine with the nice guy. The movie - Buffy the Vampire Slayer paired Buffy with the nice guy, who was not a vampire. The Xander character. It's one of the many reasons why it didn't work.

It wasn't Whedon who changed that up - by the way, that was David Greenwalt, who convinced Whedon to do in a different direction and make the vampires more complicated. It saved the series. Fans give Whedon far too much credit for that series, all you have to do is watch his other things - to realize it was the collaboration of all those writers and producers that made the series. I mean there's a reason the other ones didn't do quite as well.

Yeah, the Little Bad of S6 was the Troika (Warren, Andrew, and Jonathan - who were all basically versions of Xander's character or the writers at their worst), the Big Bad was actually Dark!Willow or how the Scoobie Gang was handling things.