I die because I choose to
on December 8, 2021 at 1:01 amChapter: Same Planet, Different Dementia
Location: Shortpacked!
Actually, love has value!
It’s not always about power.
I take extreme satisfaction in probably the greatest Fuck Yeah speech given in Shortpacked! being delivered by a Leslie, who was originally supposed to be a one-off joke name character of extremely limited narrative consequence. BUT SHE KEPT STICKING AROUND because, really, Leslie is awesome. Head Aliens just need to get with the program.
Head Alien II namedrops Joss Whedon ‘cuz he was known for offing loveable side-characters. Agent Coulson was freshly dead at this point in time! These days he’s also known for, uh, other things.
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If HA2 is a sorta time traveller then he probably knows about Joss Whedon post-Avengers
I’m not sure how much he time travels when he hops dimensions. He seems to stick within a certain range of years that doesn’t reach past publication time– Like, I don’t think he menaces anybody’s future kids.
Except the ones that come to him, of course.
Well, maybe there’s an alternate timeline where Whedon’s abuse record became public much earlier, so HA2 knows about it?
Leslie is clearly wearing steel-toed boots suitable for working in the storeroom. The OSHA rep would be proud if Galasso hadn’t chased him off with the hounds years ago.
I assumed at the time the Joss Whedon joke was a shot at him having offed Tara on Buffy, specifically.
Y’know, the other character who started as a satellite love interest to a freshly-out queer lady and became a fan favorite.
I am not familiar enough with Joss Whedon shows to make that level of reference! I think Maggie had me watch Firefly when we started dating and also I’ve seen the two Avengers films.
It’s an astounding coincidence, in which case.
Either that or Joss Whedon just likes killing off characters, no matter how much it hurts his fans…
…*sniff*…I’m a leaf on the wind… :'(
(Glances at Dina)
Killing off characters, and hurting the fans in the process, does not imply the author liked doing it– nor does it mean the author disregards the pain it causes. Pathos!
I can’t speak for Whedon’s specific case, though, because I don’t watch enough TV/movies, let alone ones he worked on. Maybe he really is sadistic like that (whether to characters or to fans or to both), but if it consistently hurt the fans to begin with, the dead character was written well-enough to get the fans to care in the first place, which… means something, though for this context I’m not sure what.
I’m also probably out of the loop on what “other things” he’s known for now, and I’m kind of afraid to find out.
In TV series characters usually are killed (and sometimes resuscitated) because of contractual reasons.
I will never be over Tara’s death, I think. She deserved at least for her death to be deliberate.
See also “Angel” (multiple instances, but specifically Fred) and “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.” That’s just off the top of my head.
“These days he’s also known for, uh, other things.”
Celebrity-based humor runs the risk of aging really, really poorly. Cheezus, if I had a nickel for every Shortpacked! strip about Kevin Spacey being awesome… though given my age it’s probably the one about John Lasseter that hurts the most. Dude was, like, my childhood hero.
Not specifically a Shortpacked! example, but I think the one that cut the deepest was Cosby. In hindsight it should have been obvious because he was a little TOO clean…
Conversely, the UK subconsiously decided that nobody as obviously creepy as Jimmy Saville could actually be hiding anything.
(Well, that and the decades of murmurs that got stomped down by everyone who still wanted to believe the act…)
By coincidence, this reference actually aged very well. The fact that he’s menacing a woman makes it feel like it could be a reference to later revelations.
And here we are.
This is not the single greatest Shortpacked strip. Hell, I’m not even sure it’s the single greatest Leslie moment, because she got some damn good ones towards the end. But since ‘Like hell it is’ doesn’t exactly qualify as a speech, I can definitely agree with it as very possibly the greatest Fuck You speech in Shortpacked, and I think its strongest competition was Amber, to a corpse. But DoA Amber’s had a chance to match that Fuck You now, and possibly even surpass it, with the ‘I made me’ strip.
Leslie’s a teacher in DoA. She might still be a character, even a major character thanks to her semi-parental role to Becky, but I’m not sure she’ll ever get to headline a story like this in quite the same way again. As a result, she and Robin are two of the few characters for whom my ‘real’ versions are still their Walkyverse ones. Which, you know, makes me a bit sad. Leslie was probably ultimately my favorite character in Shortpacked, and this storyline’s a huge reason why. It’s not quite over yet, but I was glad for a chance to revisit this arc and see this strip, with her beaten and bloody and still defiant as all hell and kicking ass against an immortal reality warper, again.
There’s still only one Leslie Bean. And even if she doesn’t stand a chance against an all-powerful Head Alien at the peak of his powers, she’s still way more fucking awesome than he’ll ever be. If he weren’t a godlike being, I’m pretty sure he would have legitimately gotten his ass kicked in. Not bad for an intended one-off character.
I think the Holy Trinity of Shortpacked! Fuck You speeches are Leslie to Head Alien II, Amber to Blaine’s Corpse, and Leslie to Mom Bean.
I forgot that one! Yeah, that is also a pretty much perfect Leslie strip. And since it’s also Leslie, yeah, there is only one Greatesr Shortpacked Fuck You Speech contender that wasn’t her and it’s Amber’s last respects.
Head Alien says that because he’s about to go barefoot.
You know, I’m really, really glad Leslie grew past her humble origins. She really blossomed, both here and in DoA, even if her taste in romantic partners is a bit dubious in both worlds for different reasons.
You know, as a long time Joss Whedon fan, we (those who followed the behind-the-scenes stuff) always knew he was an abusive asshole. I remember during Angels’ run how cruel he was to Charisma Carpenter when she didn’t get pregnant on his schedule (also his presumption that he should have any say about her body, but that’s a whole other topic).
However, years and years of TV had convinced everyone that good directors were abusive assholes – the Prima Dona Director trope over on TV tropes covers it pretty well. So a lot of us were like ‘welp, that sucks, but I guess that’s just how TV Directors are.’
It is only in the past decade or two that the idea that you shouldn’t be abused by your employer really sank in. It seems obvious in retrospect, but again, TV told us all that our bosses would be cruel and abusive, and that we should just roll with it.
I just remember when all that stuff came out about Whedon a few years back, and I was like “yeah? He was always like that.” Cause, yeah, it really wasn’t a secret or anything.
I feel like what happened with Charisma Carpenter on Angel was either an open secret but never directly confirmed by a first party… and/or possibly HE admitted it but in a way that probably made him sound like less of an asshole, I don’t remember the specifics but I do remember hearing the story before Charisma brought it up herself last year. I think it was really the ‘he cheated on his wife’ part in 2017ish that was new, and really started solidifying him from ‘his work hasn’t aged well and we’re paying more attention to the issues that always existed’ to Grade A Asshole. And then Ray Fisher spoke up, not exclusively about Whedon but significantly, and Carpenter backed him up and added ‘yeah he’s always been like this,’ and then almost every major Buffy/Angel actress backed her up and several had their own stories which were also new info. (Or at least I don’t remember hearing about the ‘Whedon wasn’t allowed to be alone with Michelle Trachtenberg’ set rule until that point.)
I mean, part of it with Charisma was how obvious it was on the show itself. Charisma did a thing he didn’t like, so he destroyed her character by making her the villain for a season and then fridging her, put her in obviously uncomfortable wardrobe, and then worked her long hours. She looks absolutely miserable in the show – like, she’s trying her best, but she’s visibly exhausted and uncomfortable. And the rest of the cast is clearly unhappy and uncomfortable about it too. It’s one of the reasons that Season 4 of Angel sucks so hard.
I feel like some of the stuff with Geller and Marsters was at least a bit known too.
And see, the “cheated on his wife” stuff never bothered me. Relationships are complex, and shit happens. It isn’t a nice thing to do, but I didn’t feel it had anything to do with the other stuff.
As to his stuff not holding up – I’m not sure I agree. There are problematic elements, particularly in Buffy, but his big three (Buffy, Angel, and Firefly) are still very watchable. I just rewatched Firefly recently, and it made me remember why I was a fan of his work in the first place – it is exquisitely well written.
If nothing else, Whedon is an incredible writer – he’s just also an abusive asshole. And while I don’t particularly want to support him any longer, to write off his work entirely is to write off the work of all the actors (and others) who suffered under him.
More the ‘cheating on his wife and telling her he couldn’t POSSIBLY be doing that, he’s a FEMINIST’ aspect that was troubling. Like, not just that he cheated, not just that he lied, but used his reputation as The Hollywood Feminist specifically for the lie (and also was apparently sleeping with at least one person who worked on the shows and therefore HOLY power dynamics, Batman!)
Probably bad phrasing. I agree they’re still watchable series, but obviously in recent years the ‘hey these shows are VERY white for their settings’/the distinct lack of Chinese major characters in Firefly has finally gained some traction, and I seem to recall Age of Ultron’s Black Widow plotline prompted some looking back at the classic shows and going ‘yeah, there’s a lot of traumatized women and a lot of female characters being kickass in very specific ways going on here, huh.’ Not ‘it’s bad’, but ‘yeah there’s some baggage that’s more noticeable looking at his work as a whole against a more varied landscape in these genres of TV.’ That, and it gradually becoming clear that his understanding of feminism and portrayal of female characters hadn’t really been growing and changing as the field was 100% doing so. Taken with the ‘used the I’m A Feminist thing as a deflection from justified concerns he was cheating,’ it started reading more as ‘his feminism was always pretty superficial so no wonder.’
OH. Okay, huh. I hadn’t heard that quote from him. I just heard a bunch of people say that cheating = not feminist, which seemed odd. So HE was the one who claimed that. Huh. Yeah, that’s pretty assholeish. Also stupid. Cheating and feminism have nothing to do with one another – after all, women can cheat.
I don’t really keep up with what’s going on with actors and directors and most other celebrities, so I didn’t hear about Whedon being an abusive jerk towards people who worked on his movies and TV shows until today. I’m assuming HA II’s reference to him back when this strip was made was about him killing off characters well-liked by the fans of his shows.
I never understand why more people don’t focus on cracking HA’s helmet open when they’re trying to kill them. It was established that those aliens don’t breathe our atmosphere, wasn’t it?
Cracking open Head Alien II’s helmet doesn’t help much when he’s a literally-unkillable godlike being.
(As today’s strip aptly demonstrates.)