As I’ve probably mentioned on this blog, I’ve written my fair share of fanfiction over the years and read infinitely more. So much that, after a certain point, that when you go through the title page with the disclaimer and introduction my eyes just don’t process it any more. But sometimes, there are obvious exceptions.
Several years ago – I don’t remember how long – I was engaging in one of my favorite fandoms, Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The name and author are long lost to my memory. What is not is one of the key lines I saw as to why the writer wrote the piece. It was four short words: “Joss is a dick.”
Now there are two things you need to know. The first is, when this fanfic was written, the rumor mill about just how toxic a personality Joss Whedon was had not even begun to hum, much less the evidence supporting that this statement was true. No one knew the kind of man Whedon was behind the scenes, the toxic work environment on the set, the fact that he was sleeping with many of his underage co-stars, the fact that he had created virtually an entire storyline on the fourth season of Angel to punish Charisma Carpenter for getting pregnant.
The second is one of the main reasons many people – I include myself – write fanfic in the first place. It is because even though we love a series and find it a work of art, there are flaws in the characters and plots that even the most devoted fans can not ignore. That is why many people wrote so much fanfic excoriating J.K. Rowling well before her views on LGBTQ became very public knowledge, why so many wrote alternate Star Wars stories well before anyone claimed the final three Episodes ‘ruined’ the franchise, why I have been writing alternate Lost fanfic well after I learned what the ’flash-sideways’ were.
Now the last year, Buffy has begun to air reruns in syndication. I’ve rewatched quite a few of the episodes in the last several months, and despite what I know about Joss Whedon and everything he did behind the scenes, the fact remains it’s still a damn good show. A lot of this is because of the quality of the acting, from the incredible work of Sarah Michelle Gellar on down. But I have to say is because of the writing. No matter how much you may hate Whedon now (and I’m going to give you more reasons in this article, believe me) the show was, for much of its run, a masterpiece. James Marsters work as Spike is still dazzling, episodes like Pangs and Band Candy are still hysterical, episodes like Hush and The Body are still triumphs of the medium, and the overall arc of so many of the characters – Faith in particular, despite the controversy about her – is still impressive. Some will say it was the product of its time. I say it still holds up.
But. What becomes incredibly clear the more you watch Buffy – and to a far greater extent, Angel – is that Whedon had a very dark and cynical view of every aspect of humanity. In many of his interviews, particularly in the lead up to The Avengers, Whedon made multiple statements that he felt very clearly “someday the world’s going to be destroyed and it will be our fault.” It’s understandable for any person to think this way. But what becomes clear the longer his body of work began to unfold is that not only did Whedon think it inevitable, but he actually may also have thought it wasn’t entirely a bad thing if the world did end. (The characters in Cabin in the Woods actually state that directly.) And the more you look into so many of the situations and characters of the Buffy verse, you get the feeling that Whedon holds many of the characters he’s created either in contempt or acting out of futility.
This is not an unusual attitude to be found in Peak TV; not long after Buffy debuted HBO essentially changed TV as we know it by creating a number of series that argued the best days of America are behind it and that the institutions we believe in are fundamentally broken beyond repair. But it’s one thing for a series like The Sopranos arguing that people will always act in their short-term interest rather than any good or The Wire arguing that the drug war, politics, or education are utterly broken. It’s another for a fantasy series set in a high-school where teenagers are trying to save the world on a weekly basis.
This is bad but that’s not the reason for that slur on Joss or why so many fanfic authors thought the same. How do I put this best? In the classic ‘Surprise’, the curse on Angel is put this way: “One true moment of happiness…of contentment will bring about darkness.” And that’s what happens that night when Buffy and Angel make love for the first time. This was one of the great moments in TV history – but we didn’t know that this curse was essentially Joss’ mission statement for basically every character in the world of Buffy and Angel.
None of them would have a happy relationship or a lasting one. Furthermore, most of their relationships ended so badly than when Riley flew off to join the Army, leaving Buffy behind screaming his name frantically, it would count as one of the ‘easier’ breakups in the show’s history.
I often thought that the way Shonda Rhimes would destroy couples by killing off one or both members was the most cynical statement a showrunner could make about love. Turns out, Whedon did her one better. He argued that killing off someone you love didn’t even begin to the end the emotional carnage it could do to a person. There are so many example of this in the Whedon-verse that it’s kind of appalling, but I think by far the one that sums it up the best is the relationship between Wesley Wyndham-Pryce (Alexis Denisof) and Fred Burkle (Amy Acker) on Angel.
Note: Because the world of Whedon was so dense and all-encompassing that (to use a phrase one of his characters might well use) the Cliff Notes version would need Cliff Notes, in order to explain much of the reasoning behind this I have to summarize a lot of the story behind both characters and shows to explain the nature of this sin. I ask you to be patient.
When Wesley was introduced in the third season of Buffy, he was a replacement watcher who basically seemed to be an example of everything wrong with the Watcher’s Council. When he wasn’t incompetent, he seemed to be comic relief. Either by chance or by design (we may never know for sure) Wesley ended up on Angel halfway through the first season. As was the standard for most of the characters in the Buffy-verse, he underwent a great deal of personal growth as the series progressed, taking over leadership of Angel Investigations halfway through Season 2 when Angel left and holding it well after he returned.
Near the end of the season, the story engaged a four-episode arc that involved the characters traveling to an alternate dimension, in part to rescue a girl named Winnifred Burkle, a physics students who had accidentally ended up there five years ago and had been stranded in isolation ever since. Fred returned with the team at the end of the season (Acker was made a series regular in Season 3) and spent the first part of the season learning to come out of her shell and gradually rejoin civilization. There was clearly an attraction between Fred and Wes, but it was complicated by a similar spark between her and Gunn (J. August Richards). Halfway through the season, Fred and Gunn became a couple. In hindsight, this action was the first step towards the destruction of Wes as a character.
Immediately following this, Wes interpreted a prophecy that led him to believe Angel would kill his infant son. In one of the most wrong-headed moves ever done by any character in television history, rather than tell any of his friends what he had learned – and he was given multiple opportunities in the next two episodes – he chose to side with Angel’s worst foe, Holtz. He betrayed Angel and ran off with the child, only to have his throat slit by Justine, Holtz’s most loyal follower. When Angel’s son was lost to an alternate dimension, Angel’s eventual reaction was to try to smother Wes in his hospital bed. Wes never truly recovered from that betrayal, even after he rejoined the team.
During the remainder of Season 3 and the early part of Season 4, Wes continued to drift unable to decide where he was. He spent many episodes literally sleeping with the enemy, Lilah , the chief representative of Wolfram and Hart, the show’s ‘big bad.’ He refused to either join evil or truly commit to good. Even when he officially rejoined the team at the end of Season 4 (I’ll get to how that relates in the next part of the article) there was no real sign of reconnection with the forces of good. He was more violent and impulsive than he had been before. At one point when a man claiming to be his father appeared and threatened Fred, he shot him five times before the threat could be finished. The fact that his father was in fact an animatronic recreation did not diminish his hatred.
Meanwhile by this point in this series Fred and Gunn’s relationship had imploded, mainly because he had murdered the man who had made sure she was sent to Pylea so she wouldn’t. The two were distant for the rest of the season. Wesley was still attracted to Fred (they even kissed at one point during a time of desperation) but neither seemed willing to commit. Then halfway through Season 5, the two finally seemed to have worked past all their baggage and got together. So naturally, that’s when Joss did the worst thing possible.
The very next episode, Fred inhaled some toxic dust that turned out to be the spirit of an ancient demon known as Illyria. The entire team focused all their energy on saving her, only to learn there was nothing that could be done. Fred was going to suffer a face worse than death – and on this show that said a lot. Her body would still be there, but her personality and soul would completely eradicated. Not just from Earth, but from existence. Wesley could only watch as the woman he loved worsened, coughed, and then changed into a different being.
Then it got worse. The being still had the appearance and memories of Fred but she didn’t have a single human emotion or impulse in her. Worse because her civilization and relics had died years before, there was no place for her power. Illyria had been brought back to existence for what amounted to nothing.
I should mention a few episodes earlier, Angel had unexpectedly been cancelled by the WB. At the time, I was enraged at the death of a series whose ratings had finally been going in the right direction. By the time this episode aired, the only reason I was still watching the show was because the endgame was now in sight. Had the series still been promised another season or beyond, I would have stopped watching right then. The official ‘death’ of Cordelia a few episodes earlier had been bad enough (and how Charisma Carpenter was persuaded to come back for a final appearance after everything that we now know Whedon did to her in Season 4 is incomprehensible to me) but essentially killing off Fred just four episodes later was a bridge too far. And it wasn’t just that Whedon had killed off Fred; for all intents and purposes Whedon had killed off Wesley with that action. From that moment on, he essentially had nothing left to live for.
Which brings me to the series finale. In the final minutes of the episode Wesley is fighting a powerful wizard (I’ll get to the how and why in the next part) and ends up mortally wounded. Illyria finds him and tells him: “Do you want me to lie to you now?” Wesley nods. She takes the form of Fred (something she has the ability to do) and says goodbye to him with compassion, making sure the last words he hears are: “Now we can me together.”
So it turns out there is a writer with a more cynical view to love than Shonda Rhimes. At least she believes that two characters can be together in the afterlife. Whedon lets his characters be miserable for eternity.
Even before I knew of the toxic work environment that existed on Whedon’s sets, I was astonished that after Angel both Denisof and Acker worked together with him on multiple projects. It’s not like either was lacking for opportunity; Acker landed a job on Alias the year after Angel ended. Was the writing so good that both of them were more than willing to return to the fun and games that pervaded his shows? Were they somehow completely oblivious to what was going on with their co-star the previous season? It boggles the mind.
But why should we be surprised that Whedon was determined to make the characters on his shows completely miserable. That’s actually on brand for how he seems to view not only his characters, but the human race as a whole. I’ll go into that in great detail in the next article in this series.
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