Watcher Junior

SLAYAGE Special Issue CFP

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen Romanelli) — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:59:00 +0000

CALL FOR PAPERS

SLAYAGE Special Issue: Critical Reflections on THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012)

Edited by Kristopher Woofter and Jasie Stokes

Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s recent horror film, THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012, produced 2010), was released to general critical praise, but left many fans and scholar-fans divided regarding the film’s love-hate relationship with the genre, its framing of the horror audience as both savvy and deluded, and its simultaneous celebration and ridicule of horror conventions.

Trading on character types of the 1980s Slasher film, but decidedly not a Slasher film in any other way, CABIN left many viewers wondering how to place the film: Is it a deconstruction of a horror genre in a state of crisis? A fraught film, caught between the sensibilities of a “visionary” Whedon and the horror fanboy approach of Goddard? Is it a satire? A comedy? Or is it, as Whedon has intimated in several interviews, an ethical interrogation of horror’s ostensible turn to “torture porn,” a contested term in scholarship identifying a trend of spectacle horror in films as diverse as Mel Gibson’s splatter-prone THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004), Eli Roth’s interesting hybrid, HOSTEL (2005), and recent French philosophical horror film, MARTYRS (2008)?

Regardless of how successful one gauges THE CABIN IN THE WOODS as critique, Whedon and Goddard have created their film as a commentary on the state of the horror genre specifically, and horror artistry, reception, and viewership more generally. If the film is an act of horror criticism, then it is largely in line with the most popular critical concepts applied to horror since the 1970s—that of Carol Clover’s trend-setting (and over-applied) work on the “final girl,” and of feminist criticism of the male “gaze” initiated by Laura Mulvey and then debated in the work of Linda Williams, Carol Clover, Cynthia Freeland, and others.

This special issue of Slayage hopes to generate discussion around THE CABIN IN THE WOODS within a number of contexts: historical, cultural, commercial, artistic, generic, thematic, theoretical. We especially encourage essays that take on THE CABIN IN THE WOODS’s own theoretical pretensions—around the cinematic gaze, media saturation, surveillance, horror fandom, horror genre conventions, other genre conventions, horror viewership, monsters and monstrosity, corporatized media, the Hollywood “dream machine,” and so on. Illuminating comparisons to recent trends in horror in cinema and on television (not necessarily related to Whedon’s or Goddard’s other work), as well as to specific films from any era of horror, are most welcome.

Please send a proposal of not more than 250 words to Jasie Stokes (jasiestokes@gmail.com) and Kristopher Woofter (hauntologist@gmail.com) by Friday, 7 June, 2013. Begin your email subject line with the following “tag”: [Cabin].
You will be notified within a week after the deadline if your proposal is accepted. Please note that if your proposal is accepted, a first draft of your essay will be expected by no later than Friday, 30 August, 2013.

(via Kristopher Woofter/WSA on Facebook)

New Firefly book!

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 22:56:00 +0000

Call for Papers: Joss Whedon’s Firefly

Michael Goodrum (Essex) and Philip Smith (Loughborough), Editors

It has been ten years since Joss Whedon’s Firefly (2002-3) was first screened. Although the narrative covered only one season and a film, the series has enjoyed a long afterlife through comic books, a roleplaying game, and the fan community. Despite the continued interest in, and development of, the series, Firefly remains relatively unexplored in academic literature, particularly when compared to the critical attention directed toward Whedon’s earlier series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003).

This volume, comprised of 12 essays, to be published by Scarecrow Press, seeks to address this imbalance. We are looking for 5,000-7,000-word contributions which fall into one of the following broad areas:

Politics
Race
Class
Agency

Preference will be given to proposals which satisfy one or more of the following criteria:

Contributions which are prepared to challenge, as well as celebrate, Firefly. Consider Firefly in light of the controversy over the casting of Avatar: The Last Airbender (2010), for example. How should we read a series with an abundance of Chinoiserie and very few (if any) Asian actors? How does the uncomplicated, humorous and stylized violence of Firefly and Serenity relate to the high instance of gun violence in the US and the very real violence of American military action overseas?
Contributions which examine Firefly alongside other texts. How does Firefly's Western/Sci-Fi multicultural landscape compare to the Noir/Sci-Fi multicultural city shown in Blade Runner (1982)? How does the portrayal of Asian cultures compare to that shown in Avatar: The Last Airbender? How does the relationship between the Browncoats and the Alliance compare to the Empire and the Rebels in Star Wars?
Contributions which include a consideration of Firefly and Serenity's afterlife. How have the comics, roleplaying game and fan-made expansions of the universe changed the series? How have the creators used their respective mediums?
Contributions which show an awareness of existing Firefly scholarship. How does your work relate to the papers in Investigating Firefly and Serenity (2008) and to Christina Rowley's work on gender in Firefly? What are the limits of the existing scholarship?
Willingness to apply theoretical concepts. Contributions should be prepared to mobilise theory in their approaches to Firefly, particularly if dealing with agency.
Willingness to situate Firefly in a broader historical context. How does Firefly engage with prevalent themes in both US history and the history of international relations?

Proposals of 300-500 words should be sent to mgoodr@essex.ac.uk by May 1, 2013. Proposals should include the author’s email address and affiliation. Full papers will be expected by September 1, 2013.

Time to Nominate for the Mr. Pointys of 2012!

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 23:37:00 +0000

Nominations of excellent scholarship in Whedon Studies for work copyrighted in 2012 to be recognized by the Whedon Studies Association’s Mr. Pointy Awards can be submitted to the jury for:

best article (including scholarly chapters in books, scholarly articles, scholarly essays online)
best book (monograph or collection)

These articles and books should be on any aspect of the various Whedonverses, their audiences, or the work of Joss Whedon or that of his associates (e.g. other writers on a Whedon series, the music director of a Whedon series, an actor in a Whedon series, an editor of a Whedon film, etc.).

Nominations should be sent by WSA members by March 31 to Tamy Burnett, chair of the Awards Committee, at tamy.burnett@gmail.com. Please note that WSA members may not nominate articles or books they wrote/co-wrote and/or edited, although they may nominate articles from the book they edited if the articles were not written by them. WSA members may nominate book volumes to which they contributed an essay but did not perform larger editing duties. Only associates of the WSA may nominate. If you would like to join the WSA, please contact WSA Secretary Kristopher Woofter at wsamembers@gmail.com.

What follows is a non-exhaustive list of articles. Please post in the comments if I've forgotten someone and I will post them post-haste.

Long Mr. Pointy (for books):

Frankel, Valerie Estelle. Buffy and the Heroine's Journey: Vampire Slayer as Feminine Chosen One. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012.

Mary Alice Money with PopMatters.com, eds. Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion: the TV Series, the Movies, the Comic Books and More. London: Titan Books, 2012.

Short Mr. Pointy (for articles and chapters):

Boreliz, Caitlin. "Kaylee Frye: Slaying the Angel in the House." Watcher Junior: The Undergraduate Journal of Whedon Studies 6.1 [7], July 2012. Also presented at the 33rd Annual Southwest/Texas PCA/ACA Conference, Albuquerque, NM, 8-11 February 2012. http://www.watcherjunior.tv/07/boreliz.php

Cochran, Tanya R. "'Past the brink of tacit support': Fan activism and the Whedonverses." Transformative Works and Cultures 10 (2012).

http://journal.transformativeworks.com/index.php/twc/article/view/331

Doran, Selina. "The 'Faith Goes Dark' Storyline and Viewers: Interpretations of Gendered Roles." Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association 9.2 [34], Fall 2012. http://slayageonline.com/Numbers/slayage34.htm

Ellcassor, Elizabeth. "Tweeting @feliciaday: Online Social Media, Convergence, and Subcultural Stardom." Cinema Journal Volume 51, Number 2, Winter 2012, 46-66. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cj/summary/v051/51.2.ellcessor.html

Joseph, Ben. "A Look Back At Joss Whedon's Roseanne Episodes." Splitsider.com website. 29 May 2012.

http://splitsider.com/2012/05/a-look-back-at-joss-whedons-roseanne-episodes/

Hindle, Michael. "'Jimmy Olsen jokes are pretty much gonna be lost on you': The Importance of Xander in Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Watcher Junior: The Undergraduate Journal of Whedon Studies 6.2 [8], September 2012. http://www.watcherjunior.tv/08/hindle.php

Lavoie, Erin. "Sex, Love and Sadomasochism: Buffy/Spike as a Queer Relationship." Watcher Junior: The Undergraduate Journal of Whedon Studies 6.2 [8], September 2012. http://www.watcherjunior.tv/08/lavoie.php

Lecoq, Frédérique. "Play, Identity, and Aesthetics in 'Restless'." Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association 9.2 [34], Fall 2012. http://slayageonline.com/Numbers/slayage34.htm

Longbons, Jarrod. "Vampires Are People, Too: Personalism in the Buffyverse." The Undead and Theology (ed. Kim Paffenroth and John W. Morehead.) Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers (2012): 34-53.

Magnusson, Gert. "Are Vampires Evil?: Categorizations of Vampires, and Angelus and Spike as the Immoral and Amoral." Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association 9.2 [34], Fall 2012. http://slayageonline.com/Numbers/slayage34.htm

Magnusson, Gert. "Harmony: The Lonely Life of a Modern Woman." Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association 9.2 [34], Fall 2012. http://slayageonline.com/Numbers/slayage34.htm

Mahoney, Melissa. "A Slayer's Death denial: The Struggle for Authenticity in 'Graduation Day: Part One and Two." Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association 9.2 [34], Fall 2012. http://slayageonline.com/Numbers/slayage34.htm

Makishima, Keiko. "'You're not the source of me': Adoptive Identity and Child-Heroes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Watcher Junior: The Undergraduate Journal of Whedon Studies 6.1 (7), July 2012. http://www.watcherjunior.tv/07/makishima.php

Messina, Justin. "The Legacy of the Slayer: How Buffy Lives on in Chaos Bleeds." Watcher Junior: The Undergraduate Journal of Whedon Studies 6.2 [8], September 2012. http://www.watcherjunior.tv/08/messina.php

Moylan, Katie. "'Nothing is what it appears to be': Event fidelity and Critique in Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse." Science Fiction Film & Television 5.1 (2012): 67-84

Nile, Melissa. "'We Aim To Misbehave' : How The Browncoats Changed the Face of Community as We Know It." Paper presented at 3rd Annual CommUnity: Online Conference on Networks & Communities, Department of Internet Studies, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, 23 April - 13 May 2012.

http://networkconference.netstudies.org/2012/we-aim-to-misbehave-how-the-browncoats-changed-the-face-of-community-as-we-know-it/

Parnell, Will. "Reconstruction: Meltdown in the Midst of Beauty." Early Childhood Education and Phenomenology. Ed. Will Parnell. Special issue of The Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 12 (May 2012).

http://www.ipjp.org/index.php/component/jdownloads/viewdownload/4-early-childhood-education-and-phenomenology-may-2012/195-reconstruction-meltdown-in-the-midst-of-beauty-by-will-parnell?Itemid=318

Raya Bravo, Irene. "El genre mixing en la ficción televisiva norteamericana: El caso de Joss Whedon." Comunicación: revista Internacional de Comunicación Audiovisual, Publicidad y Estudios Culturales 10 (2012): 396-411. In Spanish.

http://www.revistacomunicacion.org/pdf/n10/mesa2/032.El_genre_mixing_en_la_ficcion_televisiva_norteamericana.El_caso_de_Joss_Whedon.pdf

Rowley, Christina and Jutta Weldes. "The Evolution of International Security Studies and the Everyday: Suggestions from the Buffyverse." School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol, Working Paper No. 11-12, 2012.

http://www.bris.ac.uk/spais/research/workingpapers/wpspaisfiles/rowley-weldes-11-12.pdf

Sparrow, Kevin. "A Queer Primer to Joss Whedon." In Our Words: Salon for Queers & Co. website. 25 May 2012.

http://inourwordsblog.com/2012/05/25/a-queer-primer-to-joss-whedon/

Stephenson, Sophie. "The Fans Who Never Lost Faith: Slaying 1970s Subculture Theory." Watcher Junior: The Undergraduate Journal of Whedon Studies 6.1 (7), July 2012. http://www.watcherjunior.tv/07/stephenson.php

TV Fangdom CFP

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:18:00 +0000

TV Fangdom:

A Conference on Television Vampires

7-8 June 2013

The University of Northampton

Vampires have always made charismatic characters and with the rise of the VILF and the fangbanger they are more popular than ever. This conference aims to explore the vampire particularly in relation to its presence on television. From Barnabas Collins to the Count von Count, from Mona the Vampire to True Blood’s Pam, vampires appear everywhere on television schedules and in television history, whether in serials, made-for-TV movies, adaptations of gothic novels, adverts or children’s TV. How has the vampire mythos been tailored for TV? Does the vampire’s appearance on a domestic medium like television blunt its fangs and tame its hypersexuality? What kind of audience have TV vampires attracted and how has their popularity been exploited? In what ways has the vampire been remade for different eras of television, different TV genres, or different national contexts?

Keynote and featured speakers:

· Brigid Cherry, editor of True Blood: Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic and author of Horror (Routledge Film Guidebook)

· Marcus Recht, author of Der Sympatische Vampir

· Catherine Spooner, author of Contemporary Gothic

Proposals are invited on (but not limited to) the following topics:

TV’s development and appropriation of the reluctant vampire
Vampire hunters on TV
The vampire as allegory
Issues of gender and sexuality
Narrative and structure
Different formats (miniseries, animation, made-for-TV movie)
Adaptation
Visual style
Sound and music
Special effects
Scheduling
Marketing and advertising
New media, ancillary materials and extended narratives
Intersection with other media (novels, films, comics, video games, music)
Audience and consumption (including fandom)
Genre hybridity
The vampire and children’s television
Inter/national variants
Translation and dubbing

We will be particularly interested in proposals on older TV shows, on those that have rarely been considered as vampire fictions, and on analysis of international vampire TV. The conference organisers welcome contributions from scholars within and outside universities, including research students, and perspectives are invited from different disciplines.

Please send proposals (250 words) for 20 minute papers plus a brief biography (100 words) to all three organisers by 16^th December 2012.

s.abbott@roehampton.ac.uk

lorna.jowett@northampton.ac.uk

mike.starr@northampton.ac.uk

Conference Website: http://tvfangdom.wordpress.com/

This conference is run in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Narrative and Cultural Theory at the University of Northampton and the Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures at the University of Roehampton.

The Sacrificial Virgin in the Whedonverses: It's RAW!

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 19:03:00 +0000

Two of the few panels that Kristen and I attended together at Slayage 5 were the Saturday panels, which she covered last week. Since she has a great recap, I won't repeat her, but I do want to make a few observations.

First, Kristen does watch Everybody Loves Raymond many nights, even though she hates it, as its syndicated reruns are on the CW at 11:30 pm between Friends and 30 Rock, both of which she loves. I never thought that TV flow in scheduling matters, with the advent of the remote control and video on demand like Hulu and Netflix, but we are living proof that flow still matters. Of course, she's the quintessential distracted viewer during that time block (because she dislikes the show) and I bet her twitter logs would prove that!

Second, I too adored the Christine Jarvis presentation, "The Reappearance of the Disappearing Heroine: Considering Buffy and Bella." She ends her discussion of runaway heroines by asking why audiences embrace a "psychology that's likely to end in disappointment," noting that running away serves as a passive aggressive tactic by the voiceless to force loved ones to declare their emotions, punish disappointing lovers, and get missing validation. This childish "they'll miss me when I'm gone" trope was on the wane in romance literature. Buffy's running away is not endorsed by the text the way that Bella's is, esp. in "Dead Man's Party" and in the fact that her missing lover is not available to be entangled by this kind of emotional blackmail, as she sent him to Hell. Of course, one could look at Buffy as directing her covert anger towards her parental figures (Joyce and Giles) and Bella's being the classic romantic entanglement.

Jarvis, in the Q&A, noted that some readers might embrace Bella's choice because, like the romance readers studied by Janice Radway, they are themselves running away through the act of losing themselves in a book, playing hooky from being other-directed care-givers as they indulge in me-time. Of course, viewers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer do the same thing. The question then becomes whether the audience is finding themselves in a story or losing themselves in a romance and hoping to be found by a significant other who goes looking for them (and finds them curled up on the couch). Since one of the dominant audiences of the Twilight series were mothers who endorsed its premise of "True Love Waits", I really want to know whether they endorsed Edward and Bella's running away or shook their heads from a place of wisdom. The few readers of Twilight at Emerson College have been quite critical readers of the series, so I have my hopes.

Third, I found Laurel Bowman and Lauren Mayes' presentation, "Death and the Maiden: Tragic Virgins in the Whedonverses" to be very intellectually stimulating. They note that sacrificial virgins litter Whedon's work: Buffy (Prophecy Girl), Kendra (Innocence), Dawn (The Gift), the entire Slayer institution, Fred (by her mentor and in Pylea), River (essentially a Cassandra whose task is to get people to listen to her message, eventually revealed in Serenity), and Connor sacrifices a girl for Jasmine. These sacrifices must be of marriageable age but unattached; be sacrificed by a male who they trust and feel affection for, usually a father; and must be to benefit a male community and/or birth family, not for their own self-interest. And there's usually an outfit involved, and some bondage if you're a bad sacrifice and stick up for yourself.

So, isn't Angel an inversion of the sacrificial virgin in season two? He's certainly virginal as Angel (not Angelus!); at the very least his amnesia renders him innocent. He's sacrificed for the good of the community by a trusted figure he feels more than affection for. He's in a special black outfit which is an inversion of Buffy's white formal gown from the first season finale.

Lastly, Kristopher Woofter, a WJ board member, presented a memorable paper starting the academic study of The Cabin in the Woods. He's arguing that while Whedon and Goddard may want us to read the film as "a hate letter" to torture porn, it may be more accurate to read it as a critique of reality television, with the scientists hosting a reality show for the entertainment of the Elder Gods, who, like us, demand ever-more baroque sadism of the contestants. (I can just see Cthulhu shouting, "It's raw!") Or is the audience more like the scientists, betting on the outcome of the reality contest? And he sided with me on my debate with Kristen over whether the film should have shown what happened to the bird as they entered the secluded terrible place of the mountain cabin. Anyway, I really want to see this published in time for a Whedon class that I'd like to run next fall at Emerson College.

Next time: Wow, there's a lot of dismemberment in the Whedonverses!

Slayage 5 Recaplet: Day 2 (KR)

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen Romanelli) — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 20:29:00 +0000

Welcome back! Watcher Junior has decided to take a page out of NBC's playbook and present our Slayage coverage on time delay, so this post isn't late at all.

Since David has already written a fantastic post covering the Day 2 keynote by Jonathan Gray, Joss Whedon as Undead Author, I'll spare you my three pages worth of notes and leave you with this thought: What are we doing with Whedon? Why do we so often invoke him while also claiming the death of the author?

Okay, now... page cut!

The first panel I attended on Saturday was The Intertextual Whedonverses (II). Gert Magnusson was up first with Humour and Jokes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Magnusson compared the frequency and context of jokes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which is best known as a cult-TV supernatural melodrama) with those in Everybody Loves Raymond (a highly rated U.S. sitcom that ran for nine seasons and won 13 Emmy awards¹... and I, personally, cannot stand).

Humor in a program primarily tells us about two things: The characters' relations to each other, and the audience's relation to the show. Magnusson observed that the sitcom humor of Raymond works off of making the audience feel superior to the subjects of the program. The characters aren't trying to be funny to each other — in fact, they're quite mean and often rely on gender role stereotypes. In contrast, Buffy frequently uses affiliative humor. The Scoobies use humor to put each other, and the audience, at ease. It unites them. "They're not telling jokes; they're joking."

Christine Jarvis presented The Reappearance of the Disappearing Heroine. Considering Buffy and Bella. Now, "Bella" is a loaded name at a conference where Buffy is queen, but please don't leave! Jarvis explored an old romance genre trope she calls the "disappearing heroine." This is when the heroine runs away, often into a perilous situation, to make the hero realize how precious she is. It's a childish reaction, and perhaps an urge one may remember briefly feeling at the age of 14. The disappearing heroine had nearly vanished from teen romance until Bella Swan took up the mantle. This trope did show up in Buffy in the Season 3 premiere, Anne. But the show did that thing it does and turned the disappearing heroine around on herself. At the end of the episode, Buffy reclaims her identity. "I'm Buffy. The Vampire Slayer. And you are...?" She's her own hero and isn't solely defined by her relationship. When Buffy returns to Sunnydale, her petulant behavior isn't rewarded. In fact, her best friend, Willow, calls her out on it when Buffy tries to run away again in Dead Man's Party.

Bella Swan doesn't have a network of people to keep her in check. Rather, she's constantly the center of love and concern, but without a base of reality that keeps her grounded. Her self-destructive behavior is rewarded rather than chastised, even when that behavior threatens the safety of everyone she loves. Jarvis asks why an audience is so openly embracing this "psychology that's likely to lead to disappointment."

The next presentation was co-presented by Laurel Bowman and Lauren Mayes: Death and the Maiden: Tragic Virgins in the Whedonverse. This was all about imagery of the sacrificial virgin in the Whedonverse. "Everyone loves to see a pretty girl get murdered on stage." Bowman and Mayes talked about the mythological Iphigenia, who was sacrificed to appease an offended Artemis. Her sacrifice was played out on stage in Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis. This brought up the imagery of sacrificial virgins in the Whedonverse, most specifically Fred Burkle. I'm going to just go cry now.

After lunch, I went to the Dr. Horrible and Cabin in the Woods panel. I had been looking forward to this because I was impressed with how quickly Kristopher Karl Woofter pulled together his presentation Watchers in the Woods: Ludic Reflexivity as Horror Criticism in Cabin in the Woods. He had warned me beforehand that it wasn't overly positive and asked that I please don't throw anything at him. Although I didn't entirely agree with his arguments, it was a very good presentation and I did agree with a good portion of it. Woofter began his presentation by saying that Cabin is the "most deeply cynical work from Whedon and Goddard" and that it upholds a frustrating tradition of genre snobbery. But what he saw as a hate letter to the genre, I saw as a critique of its path with scattered love letters to its history. But I digress. His viewpoint is very much valid and I would love to read this as an article.

Where I agreed with Woofter was his comparison of Hadley and Sitterson to reality show runners. He also drew on the parallels of Cabin and Dollhouse, saying that they both critique the exploitation of technology and surveillance. Cabin, however, "doesn't know how to frame it's viewership."

I didn't even see how much I'd love the next presentation coming. Leigh A. Clemons gave us "Everything I Ever Wanted?": The Faustian Bargain in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I mean, I should have seen it coming. I love Dr. Horrible. I love Faust. No-brainer, right? So, Clemons went beyond noting that Dr. Horrible's deal with the devil was selling his soul for power and then facing the consequences for stepping outside his limitations. What actually happens is a choice between Faustian bargains: Does he choose Christopher Marlowe's deal for knowledge and power, or does he choose Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's temptation for happiness? He can't have both, and there's no escaping the consequences of a Faustian Bargain. As we know, he went for power. "Dr. Horrible completes his decent into Hell by joining the Evil League of Evil."

At the end of her presentation, Clemons brought my pet allegory into the mix when she alluded to the "Faustian bargain" that faced the WGA when they went on strike in 2007. This dilemma was part of the inspiration behind Dr. Horrible and what made the web series so compelling to me in the first place.

Unfortunately, I missed a good part of Jim Wilson's presentation, "A Heinous Crime, a Show of Force": Billy Buddy, Bad Horse, and the Nature of Evil because I made a Faustian bargain with my lunch.² However, the part I was around for drew comparisons between Herman Melville's Billy Budd and "Billy Buddy." I would love to read what I missed!

This recaplet is significantly shorter than my first one, but I'm sure David has a lot to add. I'll also let him recap the Featured Speakers session (as I was pretty ill and missed most of this as well — boo!).

¹Outstanding Comedy Series (2003, 2005), Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series (2002), Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series (2000, 2001), Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series (2002, 2003, 2005), Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series (2001, 2002, 2003, 2005), Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series (2003).

²Sorry for that, but it's true.

Slayage 5: Whedon as Undead Author

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 19:52:00 +0000

Jonathan Gray, a personal favorite of mine for his writing on LOST and on anti-fandom, gave the keynote speech to open up Saturday's session. He provided a classic description of why textual studies killed the author and why the WSA was right to dig him up when it came to Joss Whedon, Undead Author. It turns out that Gray has some interesting things to say about why Joss Whedon matters.

Roland Barthes, famously, killed the author so that the reader could be liberated to better understand the text. He wasn't alone, of course. There's the criticism of the intentional fallacy, in which readers make the mistake that the intention of the creator is the only correct interpretation of the work. (There's many examples of how this isn't true. Alfred Hitchcock frequently lied about his own work. Stephen King was so deep in his substance dependency at the time of Cujo that he has no memory of writing it. DW Griffith famously toured with Birth of a Nation declaring that it was an anti-war film, not a racist epic; he was wrong, lying, or too much a part of a certain kind of Southern gentility to see it. Novelists regularly change their minds about the meaning of their work over the years.) The tyranny of the author makes reading an exercise in psychology and literary biography, at best, or a slave to the author's interpretation at worst.

People like Adorno and Horkheimer have argued that the author should be killed because all too often auteurism is window dressing for industrialized crap. The idea that the unconscious of the author is irrelevant to the making of meaning only serves to amuse psychoanalytic critics.

My approach is strongly influenced by Umberto Eco and Stuart Hall. Eco, in writing about the rights of texts and interpreters of texts, provided an apt summary of the feedback loop that overly focusing on the author's intent obscures:

“Since the intention of the text is basically to produce a model reader able to make conjectures about it, the initiative of the model reader consists in figuring out a model author that is not the empirical one and that, in the end, coincides with the intention of the text. Thus, more than a parameter to use in order to validate the interpretation, the text is an object that the interpretation builds up in the course of the circular effort of validating itself on the basis of what it makes up as its result.” (Collini, 64)

Actual authors write a text for an ideal reader, using the text to move actual readers closer to that ideal through craft and pleasure. They can never write for each individual reader, however, because they can never meet that many or hold that many people in mind. Even when authors meet fans at conventions, via fanmail, lurking online, they can never write for the entirety of their audience, which is international and millions-large. So the reader to an author is always imagined.

Actual readers use the text to construct an idea of the author, as Whedonesque, Hitchcockian, etc. Few people meet authors, and, when they do, they discover that authors are less than their work, if it's any good. To fans, there is no Joss Whedon; there is only their Joss Whedon.

Now, to understand how authors craft the message, let's use LOST, where the issue of authorial intent is pretty famously important. There, the author draws on the cultural bank of culture (Sawyer is all that is man, no, Sayid is all that is man), industrial norms (of Hollywood, of publishing, of TV land, etc.), the medium (TV images play on a different screen, where the colors, fidelity, and lighting work differently), art history (LOST draws on The Prisoner, The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Survivor; the pilot does things that only blockbuster films did), genre (the Robinsonade, sci-fi, etc.), the author (JJ Abrams' Felicity and Alias both had time travel plot lines, so it that work is relevant here. Try it with Star Trek?).

The audience interprets the author's message through the filters provided by those same factors we called the bank: culture, industrial norms, the medium's traits, art history's inspiration, genre's influence, and the creator's track record as a predictor of future messages.

Let's complicate that by introducing the notion of the serial. In serial narratives, actual authors (the person or persons creating the text to be shared) create additional texts informed by their imagined model of the audience. Actual audiences (the persons with whom the empirical authors’ work is shared) then change their imagined model of the author in light of the new evidence provided by the evolving serial text.

The result, for Eco, is not a direct communication between actual authors and actual viewers. It is an indirect dialogue between actual authors and their imagined models of their text’s interpreters on the one hand and between actual audiences and their imagined models of the authors implied by the text on the other.

This conversation can be repetitive, requiring little alteration in either’s model of the other. Aaron Spelling’s Charmed serves as a useful example of the repetitive author-text-audience paradigm, in which dozens of episodes seem to have been inspired by the costume changes that they would require.

Or, an actual author may create an innovative serial work that challenges actual critical readers of it to live up to the actual author’s especially demanding model of their audience. Those actual critical readers, potentially, could then challenge that actual author to live up to their model of an especially innovative author. That's especially true as audiences connect and collectively become much smarter through their access to each other's expertise, research, and insights through fan boards and wikis. The standards of what intelligent television have gone way up since the 1960s, because "none of us is as smart as all of us," as the saying goes.

Serial narratives that are consistently innovative are created out of an indirect dialogue between authors and audiences in which each encourages the other to strive to embody an ever-shifting ideal.

Got it?

Now let's make this more complex and more real still... The problem is that there multiple authors with different understandings of what the dominant, hegemonic meaning of the text is. Let's use LOST again. David Fury thought the "real meaning" of LOST was in the world-building, the numbers and the long-term arc plan. He left the series in a huff after season 1, having written two classic episodes of the series, for 24. The network suits believe that every fantastic event has to have a scientific explanation, even though Abrams believed that the odd was what would make this Robinsade last. Lindelof and Cuse think it's in the character drama, if we can even believe them. Power determines what the dominant meaning of the text is intended to be.

Stuart Hall observes that audiences are authors too. Their interpretation shades the meaning of the program for themselves (dominant, negotiated, subversive codes) and for others when they discuss it or make new messages out of it in pamphlets, fanfic, filk and fanvids. Other examples would be how racial minorities become accustomed to cross-racial identification in mainstream works, while women often find the scream queen and the sex object unsatisfying for their own narrative needs and look elsewhere too. We read against the grain of the text because we read it from our own particular subject position, emotional state, narrative desires, etc.

The audience is a source of the material that the authors draw on to make stories in the first place (we call it culture). Life provides the cultural bank that authors make withdrawals from in their role originating, retransmitting, and evolving the message.

Moreover, authors are audiences too. As narratives get longer and more complex, authors need to reread past seasons, through the filter of audience feedback, to write future seasons. Joss Whedon had to ask Jane Espenson whether they intended to have Willow become a lesbian back with "Doppelgangland". He forgot that he killed Warren in season six when he helmed the Season Eight comics. They also need to employ continuity experts to keep a "book" of the prior narrative decisions. Indeed, this continuity expert is almost never smarter than the internet, as any perusal of Memory Alpha's critique of the forehead ridges moving around willy-nilly on Klingons or Lostpedia's lists of the prop department errors when it comes to time travel continuity and publication dates for the books on shelves.

Even better, texts are authors too. Casablanca is one of many films where the text was written day by day during the shoot, responding to what worked. Abrams likened the process of creating television to driving in the fog: you know where you're going, you can kinda see where you are, but connecting the two points is where the artistry and improvisation comes in. (This is where Michael Emerson's move from mere Other to mastermind comes in. Or you can note that James Marsters acted his way out of an early death for Spike.) The goal of many writers is to create characters with the complexity necessary for them to start speaking to you. Internal coherence often leads stories to unexpected places too. We call these various ways that the text writes itself "the Muse." And we fail to follow it at our own peril.

Even paratexts influence how we interpret the text and thus generate meaning. Spoiler-phobia indicates their power. But it's also in advertising too: the ad campaign for Prometheus is vastly better than the film itself. Of course, I can't know that for sure, because I approached Prometheus expected it to be as uncanny, action-filled, and terrifying as its ads and was bitterly disappointed to find that it was different from it.

Finally, of course, the text sets the limits of valid interpretation of it by its own authors and its audiences. Buffy is about is about many things, but the redemptive power of peanut butter is not one of them. (LOST, on the other hand...) So when Lindelof and Cuse claim that the characters don't care about the numbers, any fair reading of the text would conclude that Hurley cares quite a bit about them. They were wrong in their interpretation of the text, reading it the way they wanted it to be, not the way it was.

So:

Authors create texts but are also audiences reading that serial text and responding to the interpretations authored by the audience

Audiences read texts, but are also authors of interpretations and reinterpretations of the text. They build the "author" out of their experience of the text, authoring him or her.

Texts are authors too.

So why have we dug up Joss Whedon and made him an Undead Author?

Well, he's one of the good ones, according to Gray. One reason we killed the author is that he was greedy for credit and tyrannical in his rule over the text. But Joss Whedon gives a lot of credit to the staff of Mutant Enemy and gives them opportunities to produce and direct (Jane Espenson is a classic example of this, as is Drew Goddard). Gray notes that Whedon listened to audiences, using the writing of Oz in season two as one example; I would cite his use of fan fiction forms like Doppelgangland, Superstar, and shout-outs to the online fandom with Andrew. Do we want to kill good authors who listen, he asks? Why should feminist authors make Barthes murderous?

And, of course, just because the author's intent has been abused in the past is no reason not to use it wisely now. While we can never entirely trust the author's intent, they are valuable and knowledgeable interpreters of their own work. Surely it's informative that one possible way of reading Cabin in the Woods is as a "hate letter" to torture porn, in Whedon and Goddard's words?

The author is one way of dealing with the Horkheimer and Adorno culture industries critique: there has to be an option other than crap and stuff you mistakenly think isn't crap. And speaking of the cultural industries, one can hardly approach Joss Whedon's work understanding him as the sole important creator of meaning, as the Powers That Be at Fox radically influenced both Firefly and Dollhouse. Barthes doesn't seem to acknowledge how frequently the author is a victim in his quest to show us how frequently he victimizes us.

And, of course, the author serves an important role, as Nick Fury, subtly pushing the actors to become authors in their own right. They run interference with the industry (mysterious shadowy forces that they are). Auteurs in industrialized media production have to be catalysts as much as individual creators.

Any study of Joss Whedon through the prism of auteur theory has to ask: maybe there aren't enough authors in our analysis. Look at how different Season 8 was without the actors, composers, cinematographers, etc. Maybe killing the author should be replaced by elevating other workers to auteur status.

So, Gray ended his lecture as I'll end this too-long blog post: With a series of questions to ponder.

Why now?
How does the text of these series and films change with Joss added to it?
What do the stakeholders want with him? The press? The fans? The audience? The critics?
What are the fights about Joss about and who profits from them?

Next time, we'll get to Bella and Buffy, I promise...

Slayage 5 Recaplet: Day 1 (KR)

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen Romanelli) — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 06:53:00 +0000

I suppose it's time to start consolidating the pages and pages of notes (and recordings — for personal reference only) I took over the three day conference period that is Slayage and mold them into some sort of recappy format. David's already begun his summaries and it's making me look bad.

First I want to give you an idea of the scope of this conference. There are three full conference days, running from 9am until well past 7pm. It is a dense conference and the amount of information we receive comes at such a rapid pace that it's easy to get overwhelmed. By the last day, I honestly couldn't make it through the end of the final panel. One needs a truly sturdy constitution to make it through without wavering. It would take Rupert Giles himself.

But this is a digression! Follow me behind the cut to continue our adventure:
Ta-da!

We skipped the actual beginning of the conference because we were asleep by 8:30pm. You see, we're Bostonians and the three-hour time difference in Vancouver, plus the 10-hours of travel, made us a little wonky. So, no banquet nor "The School of Whedon" (links to .pptx file) interactive presentation for us. However, David Lavery has graciously made his presentation available on Slayage's website for all to experience. Please do check it out!

The next morning, we were treated to Cynthea Masson's keynote: “Break Out the Champagne, Pinocchio”: Angel and the Puppet Paradox. ...I have puppet issues.¹ I'm not even kidding. Cynthea encouraged the audience to bring puppets with them to the conference and I may have had a little moment when they all came out. Puppet Issues aside, the keynote was superb. David already did quite a good job of covering this in his post, but I'll say that I loved how Masson talked about puppets as ensouled objects and how Spike often alluded to Pinocchio in his dialogue.²

The first panel I attended was Law and Language panel, which was appropriate as the conference was held at UBC's law school. Also, law and language are two of my favorite things. In college, I began as a history major who had been a mock trial team member ("Outstanding Witness" award winner — haha!) and ended up as an English/Creative Writing major with a massive media obsession. This panel was the conflation of these two interests.

Erma Petrova presented first on the "state of exception" with "I’m Declaring an Emergency”: Leadership and the State of Exception in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Petrova referred to the Slayer as operating "outside the law" and that Buffy had the power to declare emergencies, therefore circumventing the law, as is done with executive branches of government. Although modern states of exception tend towards becoming totalitarian regimes, Petrova noted that Buffy refused to use the Potentials as "expendable pawns" and that she truly did act for the greater good.

Next, Sharon Sutherland and Sarah Swan on Vampires, Reavers, and Lawyers: Joss Whedon’s Lens on Law. I'm going to say this upfront: If Sutherland and Swan write a book on Law in the Whedonverse, I'm going to buy that thing right up. They had an enormous amount of material, and I would love to see it collected. The Whedonverse is enormous and the topic is so dense. Like a delicious, whedony law-cake. We have Buffy who declares, "Human rules don't apply. It's only me. I am the law." (Selfless, B7005) And on Angel, we have Wolfram & Hart, the Big Bad law firm and its merry band of lawyers. Amongst those lawyers is Gavin Park, the solicitor who tried to throw building code violations at the Fang Gang and then declared that Angel doesn't exist:

"The guy has no social security number, no taxpayer ID, no last name as far as I know. How can he go down to the building department, or anywhere else in officialdom for that matter? He's the rat and we're the maze. Don't you wanna see what he'll do next?" (Carpe Noctem, A3004)

Delightful.

There wasn't a lot of time to go into Firefly or Dollhouse, but they discussed with the audience the multitude of law topics that can be found in each program: trade, trafficking, borders, transactions, contracts... The list is enormous. And this is, again, exactly why I want to see it in a book. I will love it forever.

Finally, Rhonda V. Wilcox presented A Soliloquy by Any Other Name: Speech-Making in the Whedonverses. Wilcox is an amazing presenter. If you ever have the chance to see her at a conference, do it. She noted that while monologues are rare outside the Whedonverses in modern television, they are not rare within the Whedonverses. These soliloquies and monologues require the audience to pause and think about the speech, the characters, and their context. The only other show that I can think of off the top of my head that has memorable dialogue that can be considered soliloquy or monologue is Mad Men.³ Oh! And South Park.

Wow, this is going to be long, isn't it?

The next panel was a true highlight for me as it's sort of in one of my areas interest⁴: Music in the Whedonverses. Neil Lerner presented first with Spike’s Musical Motif in Season Seven: Notes of Melancholy and Mourning. Lerner's presentation was extremely well put together; I was impressed with it! As you know, Robert Duncan wrote nearly all of the music for Buffy Season 7. Lerner looked at a motif that began its development in Beneath You (B7002) after Spike says, "Hold the torch, would you?" and Buffy flashes back to that scene in Seeing Red (B6019). At first, it's only two notes; it's something that begins small and slow. This motif is sprinkled into the seventh season and culminates, in a new key, in the moment when Spike is consumed by fire in the end. Lerner posits that this is possibly the only love theme (and he does believe it's a love theme) in the Buffyverse that shows us the point of view of the lover and not Buffy. It's the love theme of someone whose love isn't returned. "The torch he bears is scorching him."

Steve Halfyard, whose Slayage 4 keynote I'll never forget, presented next on Music in (and out) of the Dollhouse. Specifically, she explored the opening title song and the significance of stripping out the lyrics of its original form (the lyrics, not the video). If you listen, you can hear significant plot points given away. That wouldn't do for an opening theme for a program that relies on intrigue. So, Halfyard says, the theme was "stripped down" in a way that that recalls the "glossing" Cynthea Masson talked about in her lecture at Slayage 4, Who Painted the Lion?: A Gloss on Dollhouse's 'Belle Chose.' On an somewhat unrelated note, there was a lot of talk about the glockenspiel notes at the end on the song. ...I played the glockenspiel in high school marching band.

In the next session, David and I met up again and we were treated to Beyond the Textual Text: Format, Authorship, and Meaning in the Whedonverse. Casey McCormick was up first with Paratexts Across the Whedonverse and the Disbursal of Narrative Signification. First, I must note that the podium was decorated with a collection of paratexts — DVDs, comic books, action figures, video games... These are all part of the Whedonverse and should all, according to McCormick's presentation, be considered when we study the Whedonverse. She goes further by saying that fan-created media — tweets, fanfic, fanvids, reviews, blogs — are all paratexts to this universe. "It's one big, happy Whedonverse!" David did balk at the idea of having so much more to take into consideration for scholarship, but I think he just doesn't want to write that paper on my Sims family based on Buffy characters. Seriously, though, I hope this presentation will be made available. It was very informative and fun!

Julie Hawk presented next on 'Watch how I soar': Finding Serenity in the Death of the Author and the Death of the Book. Hawk talked to us about finding the voice of the author within Whedon's work, specifically pointing out that Wash "carries the voice of Whedon." And we all know what happens there.⁵

I'm sorry, but I feel like I need to rush to get through this. The post is enormous!

Marc McKee's presentation Topher Brink and Joss Whedon: The Death of the Author as the Gift of Narrative Agency tied in very nicely with Hawk's presentation. McKee presented Topher Brink as the author surrogate of Dollhouse. The theme of "the death of the author" was present throughout the conference this year and something that McKee said really stuck with me here. He said, "The birth of the reader comes at the cost of the death of the author."

The final panel of the day for me was Firefly and Serenity (I). I'm really glad I came to this panel! The first speaker was Matthew Pateman, who had switched into this panel due to travel arrangements. He presented Whedon Studies: The Director's Cut. Why don't television directors get any love? We write about actors, writers, "to a lesser extent, composers," but there is very little scholarship on the inner-core of Whedonverse directors outside of Mr. Whedon himself. Pateman says that, in television, "directors are not considered central to the creation" of the program. The creator is the auteur. He gave a call to scholars to study the work of Whedon regulars such as David Solomon, Marita Grabiak, Michael Grossman, James A. Conter, and others. I must also note that, as someone who edited for about six years, I love that Pateman gave a shout-out to the contributions of Lisa Lassek — Whedon's go-to editor for several project — for helping create a cohesive vision of the Whedonverse. Editors rarely get love, too.

Next, K. Dale Koontz talked about the parallels of Firefly and Cowboy Bebop in her presentation: Some Call Me the Space Cowboy: Anime, Outlaws, and All That Jazz. This had two great things going for it: 1) Koontz is an incredibly engaging speaker; and 2) I love Cowboy Bebop. Koontz reminded us that Gene Roddenberry initially pitched Star Trek as a "wagon train to the stars." Romantic, no? This combination of Science-Fiction and Western was the forbidden fruit of the speculative fiction world for years, though, thanks to an "ad" on the back cover of Galaxy magazine slamming the genre. "You'll never see it in Galaxy."

Too bad. Here come Cowboy Bebop and Firefly, getting all mixy with your genres!

Koontz drew parallels between opening credits sequences (in that they both set the tone for the series, despite the fact that the music is very different), the characters, and the fact that they are misfits in a world where Earth no longer exists. Honestly, it made me want to break out some Bebop and pretend I was in college again.

There it is! The first day in one incredibly long recaptlet. The banquet and sing-along followed, but you don't need to hear me chat about David's tone-deafness.⁶

¹I'm fine with finger puppets and sock puppets. It's marionettes and ventriloquist dummies I can't handle. Or mascots that look like people. Those count.

²"Strong. Someday he'll be a real boy." (Once More With Feeling, B6007)
"To making me a real boy again?" (Hell Bound, A5004)
"Deserves to become a real boy." (Soul Purpose, A5010 — Fred referring to Spike in that whole Blue Fairy fantasy)
"What do you think all this means for that Shanshu boogaboo? If we make it through this, does one of us get to be a real boy?" (Not Fade Away, A5022)

³Please note that I haven't yet caught up on a whole mess of new programs, like Game of Thrones.

⁴I write for Film Score Monthly Online.

⁵*SOB!*

⁶It's endearing. Mostly.

The Very First Scholarly Article on Joss Whedon has been found

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 17:55:00 +0000

It had been thought to be lost, but WJ board member and super-librarian Alysa Hornick has found it:

Betancourt, Michael. "Educating Buffy: The Role of Education in Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Transylvanian Journal: Dracula and Vampire Studies 3.2 (1998): 1-12. Print.

Fittingly, it focuses on the pilot episodes.

Seriously, this is an invaluable find for Whedon Studies. Take a look through and see if his analysis holds up for the series episodes aired after 1998! (Seriously: there's some fun assertions here, especially in the conclusion.)

Slayage 5: The First Day (DK)

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Keynotes are lengthy presentations, over an hour, plus there's a Q&A session afterwards. While there's some more keynotes we'll take a look at on the WJ, there's also some really good 20 minute papers that I'd like to highlight. Of course, you won't be hearing about all of the good ones. There were 3-4 panels going on simultaneously, so I can only tell you about a few. Kristen will be able to tell you about a few more, plus there's the conference report that will be posted on our big sister publication, Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association. Plus, jet lag's a killer: there were a few papers that I liked that I just lacked the energy to take notes on.

Also? My first task as the editor here is to scout out new talent. So, I attended the first Angel panel and lucked into a fascinating investigation of the unaired Angel episode, "Corrupt". Now, we're all used to unaired episodes now with Dollhouse and Firefly making it the hip thing, but Corrupt was on the scene first. You've probably never heard of it. (Okay, I'm done channeling that particular hipster meme...) But, really, I hadn't heard of it before! Evidently, it caused a reboot of the series, featured a demonic crack whorehouse, and maybe was the beginning of the deterioration of the relationship between Whedon and the WB, despite all the public quotes to the contrary.

Anyway, Matthew Hurd's paper on it, "Nine Hundred and Ninety-Nine to Go": An Analysis of the Unproduced Angel Episode, "Corrupt", will hopefully be coming soon to our publication. So, I'll leave it at that teaser and move on. I also heard good things about Ryan Jawetz' presentation on identity and moral agency in Dollhouse, Rachel Mellen's discussion of the grotesque in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Jared McCoy's presentation on the carnival mask of Captain Reynolds. It's always exciting to see undergraduate presenters at Slayage, which is a tradition.

Moving on from the undergraduate panels, there was a fascinating survey of the importance of paratexts in studying modern media by Casey McCormick, "Paratexts Across the Whedonverse and the Disbursal of Narrative Signification". Paratexts are near and dear to my heart, as I've published on one example of them, the opening title sequences of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Paratexts also include things like interviews, DVD commentaries, tweets (so important to Felicia Day's cult celebrity and to Castle's narrative, as the series had Castle tweeting his solving a mystery in between seasons one and two), and basically anything that you might regard as a spoiler or that could influence how you approach the text. I played the lazy old fart in the audience for Casey during the Q&A, asking the traditional question of whether all that material is really worth the effort, given the over 13,000 minutes of media that Whedon's been an important author of. She had a good response on the value of a porous border to texts when it comes to fan studies. There was also a lovely presentation on Serenity and authorship by Julie Hawk, who has a very good article on Dollhouse and is an excellent bus companion. Both anticipated territory covered by Textual Studies notable Jonathan Gray, whose keynote I'll cover in depth in a later post.

Lastly, I attended a panel with an excellent presentation by a TV producer and independent scholar, Heather Porter, exposing the Parent's Television Council for, shall we say, being misleading in its reasons for listing Buffy the Vampire Slayer's seasons 4, 5, and 6 as being in the ten worst programs for children due to its violence. She used their own methodology to show that those seasons were not particularly more violent than the first three seasons, which weren't listed, and that the seventh season, which also wasn't listed, was the most violent of all under their methodology. I won't share the data here, as it will be published in a book soon, but Heather completely convinced me that the real reason seasons four through six were listed by the conservative media watchdog was that season four was the first season with lesbian sexuality and unpunished heterosexual sex outside of marriage. As soon as Tara's dead and Buffy stops having kinky sex, they stopped listing it. Keep an eye out for her future work, especially the documentary that she's working on with new WSA president, Tanya Cochran.

I'll end with the conference papers that, due to conflicts or brain cramps, I failed to see, but desperately wish I had:

Neal Lerner, "Spike's Musical Motif in Season Seven: Notes of Melancholy and Mourning"
Janet K. Halfyard, "Music in (and out of) the Dollhouse"
Samira Nadkarni, "'Memory in itself guarantees nothing': Witnessing and 'the jews' in Joss Whedon's Dollhouse"
Camille Lefevre, "Dancing Intertextuality: Summer Glau's Performative Presence in the Whedonverse"
K. Dale Koontz, "Some Call Me the Space Cowboy: Anime, Outlaws, and All that Jazz" (Think: Firefly and Cowboy Bebop)
Elizabeth Rambo, "Battles, Banter, Betrayal, and 'Kissy th' face!': Sugarshock!'s Quintessential Whedonverse" (Missing this one was heart-breaking, as I hope to run a Whedon class next year at Emerson College and this is literally the only article on this property. Please, someone publish this soon!)

If any of these authors are reading this, I'd love a copy of your conference presentation. I promise to tell everyone how brilliant it was!

Mr Pointy Award Winners!

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 13:00:00 +0000

The WSA announced the winners at the Slayage 5 conference for the Whedon Studies Association’s annual award for the best work in the field is a juried award.

The winner for the Short Mr. Pointy for the best article or chapter or online short scholarly work published in 2011 is:

Bennett, Eve. "Deconstructing the Dream Factory: Personal Fantasy and Corporate Manipulation in Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse." Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association 9.1 (2011): n. pag. Web. 1 June 2012.

I will say that I was impressed with not only the scholarship in this analysis of the series, but also how accessible it is to a general audience. Eve has managed a great marriage of style and insight.

The winner for the Long Mr. Pointy for the best scholarly book published in 2011 is:

Macnaughtan, Don, ed. The Buffyverse Catalog: A Complete Guide to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel in Print, Film, Television, Comics, Games and Other Media, 1992–2010. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2011. Print.

I'll post about his presentation with our own Alysa Hornick on cataloging the Whedonverses later this week, but I can say that his book not only has citations, but descriptions of the work catalogued, which ranges from Season 8 to scholarly books to fanvid sites. Invaluable. Write your library today to have them buy it.

Additionally, all conferees at the Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses in Vancouver had the opportunity to vote for the best conference presentation. The winner of the Paper Mr. Pointy is...

Iatropoulos, Mary Ellen. "Defining Joss Whedon's Disability Narrative Ethic: The Impairment Arcs of Lindsey McDonald, Bennett Halverson, and Xander Harris." The 5th Biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. 13 July 2012. Presentation.

File this one under "Wish I had attended that panel." Of course it's my own fault: I should have gone as a teacher of disability studies and someone who's written about Xander. Curse you, conference luck fairies! Grr! Argh!

At least that one's going to be in the forthcoming disability studies book on Joss Whedon, so I'll have another shot at it.

Edit from KR: We were remiss to leave out the two special Mr. Pointy award winners. The above winners were announced in the official email from the WSA, but we were planning on covering the special award winners in our recaps.

At the Slayage banquet, Matthew Pateman presented our friend Nikki Stafford with the first special Mr. Pointy Award for her Great Buffy Rewatch project (in which both David and I participated).

On the final day of the conference, Alysa Hornick, who is a member of the Watcher Junior editorial board, received the second special Mr. Pointy award for Whedonology: An Academic Whedonstudies Bibliography and her ongoing contributions to scholarship on the Whedonverses.

Slayage 5 recap: Smile Time (DK)

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 20:11:00 +0000

Slayage 5 is always a whirlwind: catching up with people, meeting new people, listening to presentations, recruiting writers for future WJ issues, singing... So, while Kristen was one of several attendees tweeting, neither of us have gotten around to providing you with info on the conference in paragraph form. I'd like to start rectifying that by giving you my impressions on a few of the papers I saw presented.

Let's start with the wonderful Cynthea Masson, whose Keynote continued her tradition of being a difficult act to follow. Her stylish presentation, "'Break out the Champagne, Pinocchio': Angel and the Puppet Paradox. That's right, Slayage 5 started with an in-depth analysis of the best standalone episode in Angel—Smile Time.

I hope Cynthea will forgive me if my description doesn't do justice to her presentation. Kristen and I got in a few minutes late, as we struggled with the Vancouver public transit. (You buy tickets, but they don't hold their value past 90 minutes from purchase. The buses require exact change, which the bus driver will not make. And the entire system is on the honor code, but if you're nabbed in one of the spot checks by the police without a validated ticket, it's a 172 buck fine. Clean buses and transit, though.)

Cynthea began by noting that Smile Time isn't really a standalone episode at all. It's more like the culminating exploration of the theme of being controlled by outside forces from across several seasons of Angel. Puppets have their first appearance in BtVS, with Puppet Show in season one, and Whistler's monologue in Becoming, Part One, "So what are we, helpless? Puppets? No. The big moments are gonna come. You can't help that. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are." Early on, Angel dances to the tune of the Powers that Be through the visions of Doyle and Cordy, while in season five, it's the senior partners of Wolfram & Hart. The zombie cops in The Thin Dead Line have someone pulling their strings. Jasmine's charm turns LA's populace into meat puppets. And, of course, there's all of Spike's references to who's going to become "a real boy" as a result of the Shanshu prophecy. (Cynthea did a brief diversion to a comic book series called "Pinocchio the Vampire Slayer" at this point, noting its similarities to Angel, especially when he briefly becomes human.)

What's interesting is that puppet theorists (you read that correctly) have described the puppet-puppetmaster relationship in very relevant ways to Angel. The question of whether the puppeteer creates a productive or destructive unity with his puppet is central to puppet theory. One theorist described it as a kind of necromancy, bringing the dead object to life. Another puppeteer in Being Elmo noted that when the puppet is true, good, and meaningful, it's the soul of the puppeteer you're seeing; the puppet as an ensouled object. Puppets embody the mind-body disunity and unity through their merger with the puppeteer. So, when Angel becomes a Vampire Puppet Hero, the series makes him embody the metaphor of Angel as a puppet calling the most abusive puppet masters to account and foreshadows his actions in the finale. As Joss Whedon said of this episode, "If we're going to be silly, let's be serious about it." And that's so true.

Letters from the front lines of Slayage 5 (DK)

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 14:03:00 +0000

If you follow us here at Watcher Junior, you're likely also aware of @watcherjunior. Kristen's been tweeting about #Slayage5 with a bunch of others here. (So you would already know that Jane Espenson gave us an incredibly sweet video message thanking us for talking about the messages they knew were in the work and those that they didn't know were there! She rocks.) It's a very different experience for me, as it's been the first time I've been at a conference where I've been aware of such a commentariat... It's an awful and empowering and scary thing to think about, given how fragile most of us presenters feel our work is at the time of presentation. These conferences are about nurturing ideas into fully formed critiques. I imagine it's how TV creators must feel about reviews of their pilot episodes, or maybe just Variety commenting on how things are going on set.

So, I'll be contributing to the beady glare of the internet on this blog, which is close enough to print and speech for me to feel a comfortable with it. As I catch a breath, I'll post snippets of presentations I liked and was not too exhausted to take notes on. (To give you some sense of how engrossing an academic conference can be, I don't think that Kristen's knitted a stitch this weekend!)

I won't be posting a recording of my singing at the Sing-along, as it is painful to hear. A lovely experience that I look forward to each year, especially when we get to sing "Mandy," which we didn't get to do this time.

Let's start with the presentation on this project based on our work together, "'Bring Your Own Subtext': Surveying Online Fans about the Values Expressed by Joss Whedon's Work." I've posted the Powerpoint, handout and the speech outline on Google Docs for you to keep. A note: you should go back and forth between the two documents, as I deliberately put quotes and stats in the ppt that I was going to talk about but not read to the audience. And I outsourced my critical frame to the handout!

I gave it in a rush, and still was a very naughty academic by running long. Still, people seemed to be very interested and those who weren't actually provided very useful feedback. One comment from the latter group was "What do we do with all of this?" I really appreciated the question. And you know, the impact is something that I haven't figured out yet. I think it's important for scholars to learn whether fans see what critics see, just like grading papers is the real reality check of the semester for teachers, not the course evals. If the students hate you, but they've done great work that shows improvement over the midterms... well, I'd take that... if I had a stiff shot too. For all that the scholarship is about equality, critical thinking, and aesthetic appreciation in the works of JW, these were not dominant values for the sample, especially the latter. Neither side is "wrong," and perhaps it just means that fans and critics still have something to talk about together. It's not an echo chamber.

Another conference attendee, who I think did find the presentation interesting, asked whether other series share the profile of Firefly and Buffy surveys, in which you said that there was NO value that was never or almost never in play. And my answer was: I don't know. I didn't even think to look that up... but I should have. I, like Dawn, will soon be off to the library.

There was also some very helpful support and advice given. Cynthea Masson was very kind to say that she liked my presentation, which is very flattering because she is the most stylish presenter that I've ever seen, including TED presentations. I'll be talking about her opening presentation on puppets and Wee Little Angel in the next blog post. Fascinating stuff that also drew great guffaws. How rare is that?

I am not a social scientist. Christine Jarvis and Viv Burr are, however, and gave me great advice in a sit-down after lunch yesterday. Evidently, there's a lot of publishable material here, which is great news, not for my career (I'm an adjunct, so publish or perish doesn't apply to me; it's more like teach or starve), but for us, as it means that there's a chance that the views of the Whedonverses fan will get the attention of a new circle of teachers and ultimately a new circle of students. Breaking it down by survey, by value, by type of response... there's a lot of ways to make this process interesting to this new audience.

In addition, they said that I should continue to share the raw data with you, that it wouldn't endanger the project's ability to reach new academic audiences. And that's great, because I find it fascinating to post and I can't imagine that you would take a 44 question survey with oddball questions about cleanliness without getting the payoff of seeing the results yourselves.

Well, I've got to go: time to recruit the next slate of Watcher Junior authors! Next time, you'll find my take on presentations that deal with the importance of puppets, why we know the Parent's Television Council was lying about its reasons for listing Buffy as a terrible influence on children, understanding "Anne" and "Breaking Dawn", thinking about Cabin in the Woods, and more...

Firefly Survey Results 2

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 16:30:00 +0000

Hey, all, just a final bit of house keeping from the Firefly survey's results. Those results are after the page break.

We've examined the values nearly always shown (capable, courageous, imaginative, independent, family security, freedom, self-respect, true friendship), nearly never shown by the series (no value rated near a 1 as almost never being shown), and those values on which there was no consensus on its representation (world at peace, mature love).

Tomorrow night at the latest, we'll have a new issue of Watcher Junior to talk about. And, on Thursday, we'll be off to Slayage 5, where we'll be reporting on the conference. Soon afterwards, we'll publish a version of my presentation AND we'll have another issue of Watcher Junior for you!

And the values are...

Frequently (4ish): ambitious, open-minded, helpful, intellectual, responsible, exciting life, sense of accomplishment, equality, wisdom, emotional support, emotional challenge support, task appreciation support, and personal assistance support.

Sometimes (3ish): cheerful, forgiving, honest, logical, loving, self-controlled, happiness, inner harmony, pleasure, listening support, task challenge support, and reality confirmation support.

Rarely (2ish): clean, obedient, polite, comfortable life, world of beauty, national security, salvation, social recognition, and tangible assistance support.

And that's it, the last of the lists.

Cabin in the Woods results 3

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 16:30:00 +0000

Hey, all, just a final bit of house keeping from The Cabin in the Woods survey's results. We've examined the values nearly always shown (courage, independence, intelligence, freedom, and true friendship) and nearly never shown by the series (cleanliness, obedience, manners, aesthetic appreciation, salvation, and tangible assistance support), along with a post detailing a number of values on which there was no consensus on its representation (forgiving, helpful, honest, exciting life, sense of accomplishment, world at peace, equality, family security, inner harmony, and national security). We'll take a look at the values represented frequently, sometimes, and rarely by the film after the page break.

A reminder: The summary post of the other values for Firefly will be posted on Tuesday. By Wednesday night at the latest, we'll have a new issue of Watcher Junior to talk about. And, on Thursday, we'll be off to Slayage 5, where we'll be reporting on the conference. Soon afterwards, we'll publish a version of my presentation AND we'll have another issue of Watcher Junior for you!

What follows are the values represented frequently, sometimes, and rarely by the The Cabin in the Woods:

Frequently represented (4ish): broadminded, capable, competent, imaginative, logical, pleasure, self-respect, wisdom, listening support, emotional support, emotional challenge support, task appreciation support, and personal assistance support.

Sometimes (3ish): cheerful, ambitious, loving, responsible, happiness, task challenge support, and reality confirmation support.

Rarely (2ish): self-controlled, comfortable life, mature love, and social recognition.

And there you go.

Avengers Survey Results 2

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 23:37:00 +0000

Hey, all, just a final bit of house keeping from The Avengers survey's results. Those results are after the page break.

The summary post of the other values for Firefly and The Cabin in the Woods will be posted on Monday and Tuesday. By Wednesday night at the latest, we'll have a new issue of Watcher Junior to talk about. And, on Thursday, we'll be off to Slayage 5, where we'll be reporting on the conference. Soon afterwards, we'll publish a version of my presentation AND we'll have another issue of Watcher Junior for you!

We've examined the values nearly always shown (capable, courage, helpful, freedom, national security) and nearly never shown by the series (clean, mature love, salvation, tangible assistance support), with those values on which there was no consensus on its representation (inner harmony, personal assistance support).

What follows are the values represented frequently, sometimes, and rarely by the series:

Frequently represented (4ish): Ambitious, broadminded, forgiving, imaginative, intellectual, responsible, self-controlled, sense of accomplishment, world at peace, equality, family security, true friendship, wisdom, emotional challenge support, task appreciation support, and task challenge support.

Sometimes (3ish): Cheerful, honest, independent, logical, loving, exciting life, happiness, pleasure, social recognition, listening support, emotional support, and reality confirmation support.

Rarely (2ish): obedient, polite, and a comfortable life.

And there you go.

Countdown to Slayage 5: One Week!

noreply@blogger.com (Kristen Romanelli) — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 19:47:00 +0000

It's one week until Slayage 5 and I'm already yearning for Vancouver's sunny, cool high-60s forecasted by Weather.com rather than the gross, muggy high-80s we're currently sludging through in Boston. That's right. Sludging. Also, Slayage Online posted the final program on their site, making me (if it's possible) even more excited for the conference. O frabjous day!

When the preliminary program was posted, I was overwhelmed by the wealth of possibilities (in the best way possible), but I think I've now found some focus. Follow me behind the cut to find out where I'll be at Slayage 5!

Thursday, 7/12: The reception! It's the only place to be. This is, of course, given that we're not completely wiped from traveling from Boston. But that's what coffee's for, right?

Friday, 7/13: I feel like not scheduling the Cabin in the Woods panel for Friday, the 13th is a missed opportunity. But I digress...

9am: Cynthea Masson's keynote, "'Break Out the Champagne, Pinocchio': Angel and the Puppet Paradox" sounds great! Also great: Vancouver's 9am being Boston's noon.
10:45am: Law and Language. I thoroughly enjoyed Sutherland and Swan's presentation at Slayage 4 on the Watcher's Council as lawgivers, so I'm looking forward to seeing them talk about "Joss Whedon's Lens on Law." Rhonda V. Wilcox will also be a part of this panel with "A Soliloquy by Any Other Name: Speech-Making in the Whedonverses." It's always a pleasure to listen to her speak. Shiny!
1:45pm: ...the first conflict. David swears that it's okay if I skip his panel (Fandom (I) — which will be a knockout). But it's only because it's running against Music in the Whedonverses. Janet K. Halfyard, who is brilliant, will be presenting "Music in (and out) of the Dollhouse." Neil Lerner will be presenting on Spike's musical motif in Season 7.
3:30pm: This is another tough spot, but I think I'm leaning towards Beyond the Televisual Text: Format, Authorship, and Meaning in the Whedonverse.
5:15pm: I feel like I'm leaning towards the Firefly and Serenity (I) panel, with K. Dale Koontz and Jes Battis, although I'm really glad that there's a comics panel with a presentation on Whedon's Astonishing X-Men.
... ... ... ...Sing-a-long!

Saturday, 7/14: Allons enfants de la Patrieeeeeeeeeeee... Perhaps not.

9am: Jonathan Gray's keynote "Joss Whedon as Undead Author" sounds promising!
10:45am: BtVS (II). Colonial discourse, cultural stereotypes, and metaphorical others. It may sound heavy, but I think it'll be fascinating.
1:45pm: Once again, they have made this timeslot difficult by pitting really great panels against each other. However, I'm definitely going to the Dr. Horrible and Cabin in the Woods panel. Kristopher Woofter will be presenting "Watchers in the Woods: Ludic Reflexivity as Horror Criticism in Cabin in the Woods," and I can-not wait.
3:30pm: Featured speakers time! Three speakers, one forum — good times to be had by all! And just look at the program. Seriously. It really is going to be a good time.
7pm: Screening of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and Commentary! The Musical. Although, I may want to skip out on Commentary to have fancy-dinner-time in Vancouver.

Sunday, 7/15: Not really a day of rest. Also, fun fact: Ani DiFranco is performing at the Vancouver Folk Festival this night.

9am: Tamy Burnett is today's keynote, and how can you not get excited when you see the title "'I’ve Got These Evil Hand Issues': Amputation, Identity, and Agency in Angel"?
10:45am: I think I'll be in Race and Gender in the Whedonverses during this time slot. I'm especially interested in "Women and the (Space) Frontier: Firefly’s Ladies," presented by Gianna Martella.
1:30pm: WSA meeting.
2:30pm: I'm 87% sure that I'll be in Firefly and Serenity (II). Natalie Stevens' "Protest, Freedom, and Transformation in Space: Firefly as Road Narrative" sounds great!
4:15pm: Whedon Bookers! This is kind of a roundtable forum with published Whedon academics. Hooray!

And there it is! Fellow Slayage 5 attendees: What are you looking forward to?

See you there!

"Cry Baby, cry. Make your mother sigh."

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 19:43:00 +0000

Just a quick update. Kwiksurveys is attempting to resolve a tech issue with the surveys, so we're waiting to hear back from them. We'll continue the surveys as soon as we reolve it.

You Can't Take the Sky from Me: Firefly's Values

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 02:01:00 +0000

This survey's results are going to be unusual. It's the first survey in which no online source dominates. It's the first survey in which the respondents believe that one of Whedon's works doesn't flat out reject any value. And, once again, the survey-takers had a lot to say.

For those of you interested in the results of prior surveys, there's the 2010 survey on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (complete with summary of a demographic survey of that fandom by Claudia Rebaza) and this summer's surveys on The Avengers, The Cabin in the Woods ("Let the debate begin" and "You think you know the story"), and Angel ("What values aren't shown in Angel?" and "The Core Values of Angel").

Let's take a look at the results in a bit more detail. But before we do, one question: have you taken the surveys on Serenity or Dollhouse? You have one week left on the Serenity survey, Browncoats and Whedonites!

Let's begin with who you are. For the first time, this survey doesn't mostly measure the opinions of those who come to the survey from Whedonesque. Instead, survey-takers came from a number of other sites where we posted links, in descending order of prominence: our Twitter account, paizo.com (a tabletop fantasy rpg board I belong to), our followers on Google Reader, buffyforums.net, Whedonesque, fireflyfans.net, Can't Stop the Serenity, and the Canadian Browncoats, Seattle Browncoats, and SoCal Browncoats communities on Yahoo Groups and Facebook. I want to thank all of the moderators and community members for their kindness in letting us spread the word about this project. While we have fewer surveys than usual, we have drawn from a larger number of Whedon fan communities.

Did drawing from a variety of online sources change any basic survey-taking behaviors? Not really:

About 21% of Firefly page views resulted in a survey being taken, which is a rate statistically equivalent to the finish rates for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (20%), Angel (20%), The Avengers (16%), and The Cabin in the Woods (17%).
About 80% of Firefly surveys were completed, which is a rate statistically equivalent to the finish rates for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (76%), Angel (73%), The Avengers (71%), and The Cabin in the Woods (66%).
About 74% of the respondents come from the US, with China, Canada, the UK, and France making up the next 16%. (Germany's traffic fell to 10th in the Firefly weeks. I wonder what that means? Did Firefly not get distributed there?)

I'll be curious to see if the finish rates and survey taking rates for Serenity, Dollhouse, and Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog follow suit.

There's also a few biases to be aware of in the results, although every statistical profile is going to be incomplete, a partial description of the fandom. Studies of fans often capture social fans and omit the lurkers of the mass audience. Online surveys are still affected by economic and educational biases based on leisure time and computer access. And while I'm very pleased to have 80 people (of 383 page views) take the time to do a 44 question survey, it's a small enough sample to mean that we should seriously examine only the very clearest results. These surveys are a data point in how some people right now understand these works.

What are the values of Firefly?

The primary values shown on this series for you were being capable, courageous, imaginative, independent, and having family security, freedom, and self-respect. These strike me as the virtues of a frontier setting.

"We've done the impossible and that makes us mighty."

Respondents have consistently marked competence as a value sometimes or often displayed in these works. 72% of Buffy survey-takers rated it a 4 or a 5, while 2/3 of The Cabin in the Woods surveys gave the same ratings. A majority of those who took The Avengers survey rated effectiveness as being almost always represented. With Angel, however, the ratings were evenly split between sometimes, often, and almost always.

Firefly thus far most heavily values being capable in its representation of the characters and their world. That's not surprising given how frequently the series uses the heist genre, which values expertise very highly.

Your comments:

Everyone must have a purpose to be considered part of the crew.
The characters are all frequently shown as excelling in their respective skills.
Competence and loyalty was the main theme of this show.
Everyone is part of the "family," but they originally gained value due to specific skills or talents that they had.

"Big damn heroes, sir."
"Ain't we just?"

All five surveys had a majority rate courage and conviction as a top value in Whedon's works: Cabin 58%, Avengers 78%, Angel 88%, and Buffy 89%. That can't be a surprise for works authored by an atheist feminist who got his start as a television series creator working for Fox. And before that, I imagine that standing up for your beliefs was a fact of life for him working as a script doctor and a staff writer for Roseanne, whose creator you may recall stood up for herself rather frequently.

Your comments:

Browncoats!
The characters in Firefly consistently stand up for what they believe in.
Absolutely! I think the crew (Browncoats) were a bunch of idealists to the end. And their enthusiasm to their ideals was infectious.
Consistently emphasized by two or more key sub plots or main characters in almost all episodes
Such a big theme. But also about how hard it is.
Mal fervently stands up for his beliefs in the face of the Alliance and these beliefs form the basis of the show's concept because Mal bought the ship and brought the crew together to be away from the Alliance.
One of the biggest values represented--standing up for what you believe in and WHO you believe in.

"Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"

Imagination, daring, and creativity have proven to be important values across all the surveys: Angel 70% split evenly between ratings 3 and 4, Avengers 79% at 4/5, 83% of Cabin ratings split between 4/5, and 79% of Buffy ratings split between the top two marks. Ensley Guffy's written about the importance of Buffy's creativity as a military leader, Mal and Angel both pull of pretty exciting ambushes, and Matty has what can only be called a "James Bond Bong." And Wash has a delightful little play with his dinosaur dolls. So fortune favors the daring, although we'll see if that holds true with Dollhouse and Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog.

Your comments:

They were a group that "thought outside of the box".
The plans the crew comes up with are usually daring and they tend to pay off well (after going wrong).
Definitely. Creativity and craftiness in obtaining jobs and carrying them out was highly valued ( and the various skills of each person who allowed these jobs to come together in an inventive way.)

"We meddle... We're in their homes and in their heads and we haven't the right."

I hope you'll pardon me borrowing a quote from the Big Damn Movie for this value. The Avengers and Angel surveys rated this value as a moderate one, with respondents commenting that both were about the importance of teamwork. Cabin surveys thought this value often appeared in the film, with 44% rating it a 5. Buffy surveys were pretty evenly split between 3, 4, and 5 ratings.

The balance between individualism and interdependence, between self-reliance and teamwork, seems to be a prominent theme across these works and perhaps suggests that audiences see Whedon trying to resolve the contradictions between these binary values.

Your comments:

This is perhaps the strongest value that comes across. The whole series has an underlying theme of self-determination.
A major theme of the show!!!
That idea is practically the catalyst for the series of events that set up the entire show.
Mal puts a lot of stock in not having to pander to the Alliance and being able to provide for his crew.
Absolutely! One of the strongest values expressed...but in a way that allows for protection of those in a chosen family.

"You're on my crew. Why are we still talking about this?"

A majority of respondents found family security to be always represented in Angel, while 71% gave family security a 5 rating in Buffy. With The Avengers, this value was a solid 4 rating, while there was no consensus on this value when it came to The Cabin in the Woods (after all, there aren't any family members shown in the film).

Your comments:

Assuming that we're talking about "found family," here.
Family may not be blood related. The crew on the Serenity are not related (with the exception of Simon and River). Even Zoe and Wash became husband and wife AFTER being coworkers.
The crew was the family and everything would be sacrificed for even one member of the crew.

"Funny, sir, how you always seem to find yourself

in an Alliance-friendly bar come U-day, looking for a 'quiet drink'."

Percentage of survey-takers who rated this value at 5: Buffy 56%, Angel 53%, Avengers 65%, Cabin 76%. Perhaps Joss' horrific experience with Fox amped up the prominence of this value in his works? Maybe he got crankier as he aged?

More seriously, Firefly seems to anticipate territory explored in Dollhouse: the difference between "freedom from" and "freedom to." Consider "Train Job," where Mal replies that he didn't have a choice but to return the stolen medicine; he's free from Alliance and police control, but his nature means that he's not free to do anything he wants. Consider the rules of decorum and fashion that Kaylee flouts in "Shindig," only to find that she can be free to embrace her status as wallflower and still be the belle of the ball. Anarchism is not freedom from responsibility in Firefly.

Your comments:

Main theme of the series.

"Would you like to lecture me on the wickedness of my ways?"

This value's hovered around a 4 or a 5 rating in prominence in each work's surveys. Buffy's surveys were the only one to have a majority rate it as almost always present, while Avengers surveys rated this least prominently, at a solid 4. Cabin surveys had 63% of respondents split between rating this value a 4 or a 5, with 78% of Angel surveys doing the same.

To me, Simon and Inara, the two characters most strongly associated with civilization, had the most self-respect; that's interesting because the Western archetypes of the Easterner and the Whore are often opposed.

Your comments:

Always! You were all you would ever have.

"I love my captain..."

Friendship declines in importance as Whedon goes on, thus far, with 93% of Buffy surveys giving 5 ratings for true friendship, Angel 80%, Cabin 50%, and Avengers 38%. That may say something more about how dark his work got until The Avengers. Because, as an auteur, Whedon's known for his ability to collaborate with writers (Marti Noxon, Jane Espenson, David Fury, Drew Goddard, David Greenwalt, Jed Whedon, Tim Minear, Maurissa Tancharoen, Steven S. DeKnight, and others) and actors (see the cast list of Much Ado about Nothing.)

Your comments:

Loyalty, yes. Friendship, I don't know. This was a highly military type relationship.

Does Firefly Showcase the value of a World at Peace and Mature Love?

Firefly seems to be of a piece with the grittier fare of Angel or The Cabin in the Woods, as surveys showed no consensus on whether a world at peace was a value. All three tied the pursuit of peace with antagonists at times: an Alliance focused on pacification, a god who squelched free will in the interests of peace, and peace with the Elder Gods comes with a horrifying, torturous ritual and the degradation of humanity's watchmen.

But overall, there's been no consensus on this value across five major works. In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer survey, 31% rated a world at peace as never/almost never being represented, with another 44% rating it at 2. The Avengers, on the other hand, nearly 27% rated this almost always being represented as a value, with another 40% rating this value a 4 in frequency.

Your comments:

This is really unspoken, but the backdrop of the war and the subsequent devastation is always there.

Although the Alliance portrays peace as their goal - the reality is that it is oppression that they are portraying.

Negotiation was always at the end of a gun. Peace was always for someone else.

Again, strived for, but the reality is that war and strife keeps them in business (as well as on the run--it is a double edged sword.)

Your comments:

Emotionally, this was Junior High School.

Myself, I feel that the Zoe-Wash marriage, with its erotic love, teasing, storytelling, and its unresolved arguments (on having a child, on Zoe's emotional bond with Mal) make for one of the most mature representations of love in Whedon's work. I love the fact that Whedon ignored the false industry wisdom that the chase is all that matters when it comes to relationships.

Dollhouse: It's Fun to Survey!

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 16:30:00 +0000

This week's survey will have you examine the values expressed by Dollhouse, the 2009 television series created by Joss Whedon. It will be interesting to see whether there are commonalities in the values expressed here with other projects. You'll be able to find out how it turned out July 3.

Take the Survey!

Reminder about the Serenity survey: The survey is still open! It'll remain open for one more week, then we'll provide preliminary results next week. We've gotten about 20 responses, so I'm thinking that people regard the film to be more of an extension of Firefly than perhaps they do with the comics for Buffy and Angel. Still, we hope to get enough surveys to share get some insights into Serenity.

More on the survey itself after the break...

What do I need to know about these surveys?
This survey is one way of quantifying your perceptions of the meanings of Dollhouse. If you would like to learn more about this type of survey, it's called a Rokeach Value Survey. This survey's validity has been extensively tested over several decades, so the questions have been shown to avoid bias and allow us to compare responses about a range of works.

The survey will ask you to indicate the extent to which you see each value to be important in Dollhouse. For each question, rank the value's importance from 1 to 5 as represented by the film. There are no right or wrong answers. Fill out the survey to the best of your ability as an indication of what your perception of the film is. There are 44 multiple choice questions.

Each of those questions has a comments box. Comments providing your thoughts on the issues raised by the questions or why you made your decisions are welcomed and are an important part of the study.

Reminder about the schedule:
Firefly: survey results tomorrow, June 20
Serenity: Take the survey June 12 through June 26
Dollhouse: Take the survey June 19 through July 3
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: Take the survey June 26 through July 10
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8: Take the survey July 3 through July 17

TBA: Angel (the comics), Buffy: Season 9, Much Ado About Nothing, Dr. Horrible 2.

As we did with the surveys on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel (results reports 1 and 2), The Cabin in the Woods (results reports 1 and 2) and The Avengers, we'll post an overview of the results in two weeks, with more detailed information on responses to each question later. I plan on reporting the results to the Whedon Studies Association's bi-annual conference in July. We'll let you know what the scholars and fans at the conference think too!

A final reminder on privacy: KwikSurveys doesn't use or sell to a 3rd party any data collected. And since the survey asks no identifying questions about your demographics, I have no idea who you are or what your contact information is, so fear not. I'm more interested in the Bring Your Own Subtext principle than demographics research.

This survey is too pretty to die!

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 10:53:00 +0000

Last day to take the Firefly values survey!

Angel results 3

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Hey, all, just a final bit of house keeping from the Angel survey's results. Over the past two days we've examined the values nearly always shown and nearly never shown by the series, with one value in which there was no consensus on its representation. What follows are the values represented frequently, sometimes, and rarely by the series:

Frequently (peaks at 4ish)
ambitious, capable, honest, imaginative, intellectual, loving, responsible, self-controlled, equality, salvation, self-respect, sense of accomplishment, wisdom, listening support, emotional support, emotional challenge support, task appreciation support, task challenge support, reality confirmation support, personal assistance support.

Sometimes (3ish)
independent, logical, obedient, exciting life, world of beauty, happiness, inner harmony, mature love.

Rarely (2ish)
cheerful, clean, polite, pleasure, social recognition, tangible assistance support.

We'll be doing summary posts for The Avengers and The Cabin in the Woods over the weekend. After the Slayage 5 conference presentation, I'll post periodically to get all the written comments on each question for each survey out there.

The Core Values of Angel

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 16:30:00 +0000

As we noted yesterday, survey takers felt there was great clarity in the values of Angel. Indeed, one commenter was offended at how easy they found the survey! 27 values peaked at a 4 or 5 on the scale, with many of the 5s showing no doubt; just seven values were marked as being rarely or almost never being depicted. This clarity on certain values was a hallmark of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer survey results too; with 11 values being ranked 3s or lower. For The Avengers survey results, there was an even split between frequently represented values and those infrequently represented. The Cabin in the Woods survey's results showed little unanimity, with just freedom and friendship being rated a 5 by at least 50% of voters.

Let's take a look at the results in a bit more detail. But before we do, one question: have you taken the surveys on Firefly or Serenity? You have one week left on the Firefly survey, Browncoats and Whedonites! We have about 70 surveys on Firefly, versus more than 200 for Angel and The Avengers.

I'm not sure what to make of the results yet. This clarity on Angel's values could indicate something about the medium shift between television and film. I would have thought that, with less narrative to work with in film, there would be more clarity in values. Perhaps the longer narratives and larger casts of Buffy and Angel allow for more emphasis. Perhaps the fact that the two films aren't out on DVD yet has led to fans being less sure of their answers due to repeated viewings. Perhaps they're still deciding with this year's films Cabin and Avengers, while they've had more time to debate the two series since 1997 and 1999.

Perhaps this effect has something to do with the process of collaboration, with Goddard as co-writer and director of Cabin and Whedon notably consulting with prior directors in the Avengers prequels. But then, Angel is co-created by David Greenwalt, who wrote 11 episodes and directed 6 until he left after the third season. Sometimes dialogue leads to consensus, although every television series is the result of both the catalyst of its show-runner and the dozens of highly trained creative people's decisions in the production company.

What's even stranger? As a noir series, Angel is best known for its shades of gray morality as a deviation from the more black and white (ish) morality of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Moral clarity is NOT what I would have expected from these results.

It's not easy, being green:

58% of Buffy survey-takers rated this value at 5, while 27% did for The Avengers and 30% did for The Cabin in the Woods. So, all four works have had being broad-minded as an important value. This series, of course, stars four demons: Angel, Lorne (bless his heart), Cordelia (who becomes half-demon to deal with the visions), and Doyle. Others noted that being open-minded applied beyond their race or species to antagonists like Lilah (a personal fave) and Lindsay (decidedly not).

Your comments:

Even a "demon" could be one of your closest friends and confidants. And, people can change.
Demons's representations on Angel are more complex than just "white" and "black". And Lorne is the answer!
That is definitely in there with people coming to terms with there being good demons and also dealing with the various shades of grey that they must deal with.
Characters are always sure that way they are doing is right; when they are wrong, it is not because they were not broadminded, it is because someone else just happened to have the right viewpoint.
things are never black and white
Good v. bad demons presents a conflict frequently for Cordelia and to a lesser extent Wesley.
Angel himself!
It's shown from time to time. Angel sometimes gets lectures for being a bigot, discriminating demons. We're also shown that there is no black or white, no entirely good or bad. As Wesley once expressed it, they often have to work with gray areas in season 5.
A lot of comments about being a demon doesn't make you evil. The whole story line in "Hero"
them more so than buffy said not all demons were bad. they had a lot more shades of grey
While it's parent show took the 'Demons are evil and we must destroy them' approach more often than not, Angel took great strides toward accepting Demons as useful fighters on the side of good, like Lorne and Doyle. The show even humanized it's main antagonist, Wolfram and Hart, by providing sympathetic character development to Lilah and especially Lindsey.
Sometimes expressed sincerely, sometimes mocked. Sometimes first impressions are correct with deadly consequences to those who are too open-minded.
Green karakote loving demon, need I say more?
But... see a few more spangel please! The producers (not Angel) is not openmind really ;)
Never on the side of evil unless it profits them to be so. But the Angel crew and demons who aren't evil need open-mindedness to survive.

"Well, personally, I kinda want to slay the dragon":

Not surprisingly, Whedon's works have all communicated the value of courage, with 78% of The Avengers surveys, 53% of Cabin surveys, and 89% of Buffy surveys rating this value at a 5. These surveys seem to support intellectual, moral, and physical courage as a hallmark of Whedon's works, although I'm curious to see how that's going to play in Dr. Horrible and Much Ado About Nothing.

Your comments:

At the end of the day, our beliefs are all we have
"Let's go to work!"
This survey is starting to be so simplistic that it's offensive.
"If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do..." "We live as if the world were as it should be so that we can show it what it can be."
This is valued by almost all characters, but some characters are punished for doing so.
Almost every episode is about how you have to stand up against evil in the world, so yes. Season 5 was especially focused on Angel's struggles withy going against his belief for a bigger belief; he used means he disliked to get to and end.
You have Doyle sacrificing himself. Angel willing to undergo the trials to save Darla and giving up his happiness to turn back time when he became human. Faith risking dying to save Angel
you game
depends if you're evil
This is one of the hallmarks of the series. If you ever just try to settle for the way the world is and how large a presence evil has in it, than you've lost sight of the mission. As Lindsey pointed out in season 5, heroes fight even if it's a losing struggle.
"I'm Angel. I beat the bad guys."

Connor!

Well, let's see... This series has Angel nearly lose his soul in the process of fathering a boy, has the vampire mother commit a heroic sacrifice to save that baby, has a nemesis steal the baby through a dimensional rift and raise him to hate Angel, have all kinds of dramas occur before the adult son sires Angel's granddaughter with Angel's love interest, then has the son try to commit suicide by bomb vest, get his memory wiped, and go off to be a jerk on Mad Men. Family security does seem to be an issue in the plot of the series!

With The Avengers, this value was a solid 4 rating, while there was no consensus on this value when it came to The Cabin in the Woods (after all, there aren't any family members shown in the film).

Your comments:

I am slowly realising, as I take this survey, that all things portrayed as important by the show are inevitably impossible for our main characters to actually achieve. What a happy show it is.
That's one of the core of this show, besides Angel's redemption. It's always about family. Blood or not.
I would pick ten if I could
"Family" of course including demons, vampires, ghosts and others.
Angel made the whole world forget about Connor and gave him up so he could live a normal life
You don't have to be related by blood to be family
The core cast are family
we're all family
Angel would do anything to keep the family he has made for himself safe.
important until you spy on you son and discover him sleeping with your love interest, who used to change his diapers

Wesley: "I had my throat cut and all my friends abandoned me."

As you can see by the quote I chose to lead this section, we can learn as much about a value's importance from negative role models as positive ones. The comments on this question show that the survey takers understand that what's depicted is not the same as its effect on viewers.

84% of Buffy survey-takers rated this value as being frequently represented (a 4 or a 5), although people often comment on how forgiveness is not always consistently applied. 69% did the same for The Avengers, while there was little consensus on forgiveness in the apocalyptic Cabin.

Your comments:

Important doesn't mean it always has to happen, right?
Angel the series is entirely about forgiveness. Not only forgiveness for Angel, but for every character's transgressions over the course of the series. The only people who don't receive forgiveness are those who don't ask for it.
Angel came around on the Wesley front because he figured out his friend was willing to make the hard choices, even if it would hurt others or himself.
There would be no series without forgiveness.
This is shown most strongly through the characters of Faith and Wesley and their respective relationships with Angel. While everyone else is out to stop Faith, Angel tries his best to save and redeem her. Later on in the series, after Wesley has kidnapped his son, inadvertently setting up events that would trap the child in a hell dimension, Angel's reluctance to forgive Wesley causes both of them much pain, and they are not really whole again until Angel has forgiven Wesley of those things and Wesley has forgiven Angel for the way Angel treated him afterward. Granted not all of this is verbalized in the show, but I feel it is implied that Wesley forgives Angel for his negative reaction once he realizes in season 5 what he had done in previous seasons.
Thinking mostly of Wesley kidnapping Conor... the series really shows how difficult it is to forgive.
Pretty much the point of Angel's redemption arc.
the only time Angel really wasnt forgiving was an extreme case when Westley kidnapped his son and gave him to a deamon.
Although many characters desire forgiveness, very few seem to be willing to forgive others, or to see doing so as a moral imperative
Maybe more to be able to forgive yourself of what you've done, but it's there.
While the series focuses on the significance of forgiveness, it repeatedly demonstrates that forgiveness is difficult to grant and to earn. Indeed, forgivenss functions more as an ongoing process rather than a simply done deal.
While it's important to forgive, we can see on the show that it takes a bit of time. Angel with Wesley. Wesley with Fred and Gunn. Wesley with Faith.
angel and connor never forgive wesley
Unless it's Spike.
Only to thers. Characters on Angel have a hard time forgiving themselves
If this show has one thing to say, it's that people deserve forgiveness. When Faith was rehabilitated by Angel in "Sanctuary", it was because he knew she could do good and needed help. The same goes for countless others.
This series is full of people who don't deserve second chances by normal rules. And they make the best of their sins and mistakes, to be better people and to help carry the burdens of others.
Always important unless it's your best friend and he's kidnaped your son.
One word: Faith
For the most part, a resounding yes. But I don't think Angel ever truly forgave Wesley for what happened with Connor, which is sad.
Hard to answer. Everyone on the show had their boundries. No one was entirely forgiving and no one was completely unforgiving that I recall.

Season 4: Mindless Happiness vs. Free Willed Struggle

Whedon's existentialism may be showing with this question. The most naked statement of existentialism in the series comes in this exchange, in "Epiphany":

Angel: If there's no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters... , then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do. Now. Today. I fought for so long, for redemption, for a reward, and finally just to beat the other guy, but I never got it.
Kate Lockley: And now you do?
Angel: Not all of it. All I wanna do is help. I wanna help because, I don't think people should suffer as they do. Because, if there's no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.

Of course, that episode was written by Tim Minear. And he wrote a killer end to that scene, as Lockley remarks on her faith in a higher power guiding the two of them: "Because I never invited you in." God, I love that scene.

Anyway, fully 3/4 of the Cabin respondents made had the importance of free will, whatever the cost, as being a core value of the film, which fits the film's ending, to be sure. 64% rated free will a 5 in The Avengers. 87% had this as a 4 or a 5 for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So, I'd say that while free will is a core value in Whedon's works thus far, Angel seems to rate it lower the others, perhaps due to all those pesky prophecies.

Your comments:

Especially during the Season 4 finale.
Most strongly shown when Darla doesn't have the choice about becoming a vampire again.
Its more about doing the right thing no matter how much it inconveniences you
very irish-american
This is especially relevant toward the end of the show. We all have free will and the ability to make our own choices, no matter what anyone else would have us believe.

Oh, Cordy...

There's a certain experimental comedy to the comments for this one.

Your comments:

We hope you're helpless.
"We help the helpless." Plus, their rats are cheap.
They help the helpless.
We have now crossed the line into definitely offended.
that was kind of Angel's whole purpose.
We help the helpless...nuff said
we help the helpless :)
"we help the hopeless"
We help the helpless
The motto of Angel Investigations is 'We Help The Helpless'.
Of course evil works for personal gain.

A long time ago, we used to be friends...

The invention of the work family is possibly the most influential narrative structure of modern media programs, with examples from radio serials like the Jack Benny Show to TV sitcoms like The Dick Van Dyke Show to virtually every genre of series today. I guess if you count war as a workplace, you get work families in heroic epics and Shakespeare, but it doesn't feel the same.

Anyway, nothing--not baby stealing, lying, corporate corruption, or letting lawyers die--keeps these people apart permanently. 93% of Buffy survey-takers rated true friendship a 5, with 78% rated it a 4 or 5 for Avengers and 78% rated it similarly highly for Cabin in the Woods. Thus far, true friendship seems to be a core value across all works.

Your comments:

Most important things on Angel.
Not Fade Away
see family
Friends and loved ones are more important than anything to these characters.

Tomorrow, we'll post a short list of the values that skewed to the 4 (frequently), 3 (sometimes), and 2 (rarely) ranks.

What values aren't shown in Angel?

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 16:30:00 +0000

One the more striking things to note about the results of this survey is that you felt that Angel showcased more values than the other works to date. Just eight values were consistently rated 2 or below, while 27 peaked at a 4 or 5. You were also a very chatty bunch, with many questions resulting in a dozen or more comments from survey-takers explaining their thinking. That's going to mean that we're focusing on three values that aren't shown as values today, while we'll return tomorrow with a mega-post on the core values of Angel.

For those of you interested in the results of prior surveys, there's the 2010 survey on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (complete with summary of a demographic survey of that fandom by Claudia Rebaza) and this summer's surveys on The Avengers, and The Cabin in the Woods.

Let's take a look at the results in a bit more detail. But before we do, one question: have you taken the surveys on Firefly or Serenity? You have one week left on the Firefly survey, Browncoats and Whedonites!

Let's begin with who you are.
As with prior surveys, most of the survey takers are from whedonesque, with other notable sites including Google, Twitter, and Facebook. About 71% of the respondents come from the US, with the UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany making up the next 25%. (China slipped from 4th to 6th for this survey.) There's also a few biases to be aware of in the results, although every statistical profile is going to be incomplete, a partial description of the fandom. Studies of fans often capture social fans and omit the lurkers of the mass audience. Online surveys are still affected by economic and educational biases based on leisure time and computer access. And while I'm very pleased to have 216 people (of 983 page views) take the time to do a 44 question survey, it's a small enough sample to mean that we should seriously examine only the very clearest results. These surveys are a data point in how some people right now understand these works.

Does Angel Represent a World at Peace Frequently as a Value?
There was no agreement on this question. Many comments noted that Jasmine's utopia (maintained by a disturbing tithe in lives and freedom) deconstructs the value of true peace. (This storyline's a classic in critical utopian literature, with a notable example being Ursula K. LeGuin's "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas". For more on this trope, see Powered by a Forsaken Child and Utopia Justifies the Means.) Some commenters seemed to be grappling with how to rate what they felt was represented as an unreachable but desirable goal.

In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer survey, 31% rated this value as never/almost never, with another 44% rating it at 2. With The Avengers, on the other hand, nearly 27% rated this almost always being represented as a value, with another 40% rating this value a 4 in frequency. And in The Cabin in the Woods survey, there was no agreement on this value, with no number garnering more than 26% of the vote.

Here's your thoughts on the matter:

...important but impossible. (And definitely not if Jasmine's involved.)
The series states that such a goal is unachievable. Every time they stop one threat, another one pops up. On the one occasion they achieve peace, it's at the expense of independent thinking. So long as humans think for themselves, they will disagree, and there won't be peace. To achieve peace at the expense of thinking is too high a price.
It's important to WANT a world at pease for sure
I would say that Angel argues that it is impossible to have a world at peace, because humans cause conflict. What is important is to keep fighting. I suppose it is to seek a world of peace, but realizing that this is impossible.
It is but the fight never ends. That is the ultimate ideal that Angel's group strives for, so long as that peace does not come at too high a cost (such as everyone's free will).
Jasmine shows specifically why this actually CAN'T happen....
Jasmine. So, no.
Angel tells us that it is impossible to achieve, but that working towards that goal is all that really matters. Peace is a silly and unrealistic dream in his eyes, but fighting for it is the most important thing that he can do.
There will always be a struggle. The only thing that matters is which side you're on
Remember Jasmine? Free will is more important than world peace
uh -- back to the "are you evil" thing
Like I said, one of the main points of the series is that evil is never totally vanquished. Neither is good though, which presents an almost optimistic message.
This was deconstructed with Jasmine.
It was represented as in it was a theme for a while, but it was rejected as being important. The conclusion was the opposite was important as out of conflict arises choice. (free will)

Is National Security one of Angel's Values?

Mostly no. The numbers skew negative like they did with the survey on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but more so as Buffy's numbers peaked at 2 and 29% rated it a 4 or a 5. The Avengers had national security as a primary value, while The Cabin in the Woods numbers ranging between 15-29% for each data point, with no real agreement pattern. While Angel might show the importance of safety, how that safety is achieved matters a great deal.

Your comments:

If anything, this show supports the idea that national or public security measures are ill-equipped to handle the most dangerous threats.
Protection is valued, but never on a national scale.
Its about the good fight, which tends to go beyond national security. Although Angel did work for the government in WWII
Attack from what?
not that type of show, really
Angel always tries to protect his friends and others as best he can.

Angel's Team of Plucky Squatters
As much as advertisers might have liked for the show's entrepreneurs to enjoy achieving worldly success in season five, you observed that this was emphatically not the case for Angel Investigations, which lives hand-to-mouth, finds money in the basement, and then finds a new hell in a corporate high-rise. (Of course, this series devotes an entire episode to finding a dream apartment for Cordy, just like BtVS did for Anya/Xander.)

With the Buffy survey, you noted how the series assumed a middle class lifestyle through Joyce's efforts, but that Anya and Doublemeat Palace showed, in their own ways, that this wasn't a primary value. But just 6% voted it a 4 or a 5. Similarly, just 5% of you said that The Avengers frequently showed prosperity as a goal, while The Cabin in the Woods also had just 6% vote it a 4 or a 5. Thus far, Angel seems to make the clearest statement against comfort and prosperity as a value.

Your comments:

Important in season 1, particularly for Cordelia, but less important as the show goes on.
They're least happy when they're rich.
Money matters but it had never been the problem.
Helping others is viewed as being more important to the heroes of this show than being comfortable is.
The sell-out to Wolfram and Hart that allows this is portrayed as exactly that, a sell-out.
Cordelia, from wanting to be rich and famous, to ending up as an ultimate selfless "light". Gunn, from eventually coming back from the dark side with wolfram and hart. Traditional "sucess" is Not important.
Doing the right thing usually leads to pain
You have to pay the bills. and buy clothes.
It's important to have friends and family who love you, but wealth is never shown as being an important part of a comfortable life.
"We take what we can, and try to make the best of it."
If you have a snazzy apartment it'll get blown up anyway.
Represented by the bad guys a lot, but not by Angel and crew.

Tune in to Watcher Junior on Thursday for the core values of Angel!

Can't Stop the Signal: The Values of Serenity

noreply@blogger.com (David Kociemba) — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 19:35:00 +0000

This week's survey will have you examine the values expressed by Serenity, the film created by Joss Whedon. (Firefly's survey is ongoing, so keep your answers separate!) It will be interesting to see whether there are commonalities in the values expressed here with other projects. You'll be able to find out how it turned out the week of June 26.

Take the Survey!

Reminder about the Firefly survey: The survey is still open! It'll remain open for one more week, then we'll provide preliminary results next week. We've gotten about 65 responses, so we thank all of your for your efforts! There are still incomplete surveys, so don't forget to finish by next Tuesday!