Joss Whedon - Television Tropes & Idioms

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Some people have a gift of reaching right into your soul

And finding the hole

And making it bigger.

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"For those of you looking for the 'Joss Whedon is a better writer than you' panel, you're in the wrong room. That's going on in every other room at this convention."

Marv Wolfman, at a Comic-con panel

"It was then that I realised that Joss Whedon is craaaaazy."

David Greenwalt, Consulting Producer of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Scriptwriter, director, cameo actor (Quentin Tarantino style), television producer (through his famed Mutant Enemy production company), and Comic Books author. (And as of the live movie-theater broadcast of This American Life on April 23, 2009, singer.) Joss (short for "Joseph"; rhymes with "floss") is from a family of talented writers, and is one of the first third-generation television writers.

Best-known for Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, the famously-cancelled cult hit Firefly (and its motion-picture version, Serenity), Whedon's characters and scripts are famous among his fans for containing a dry, caustic wit; Whedon's humor is a trademark of his work, and he can be counted on to do something completely unexpected in every new series (in Buffy, he listed a regular guest-star in the opening credits for the first time — only to kill her off in that very episode.) He also gets a lot of praise from feminists for his strong female characters (look at the article on The Bechdel Test and see if you don't notice a pattern among the first few entries in the "TV" section).

Whedon delights in defying the audience's expectations — rather than killing a major character, he'll kill off a lesser-known but much more endearing (and often fan-favorite) character.

In the DVD commentary for Serenity, Whedon explains that he likes doing such things because people expect the hero to die or be horribly injured at some point during the production — but they don't expect the minor characters to die, so the impact is much greater.

Unfortunately, at this point he's done this so often that nobody expects the characters they like to live, rather dulling the impact.

He's also perfectly aware of how some people think of him; [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLyuTU26sDk