"She's not just a woman, she's a hero"
This article.
So I was fine with the whole Buffy thing. I mean I never got into Buffy (it always seemed weirdly forced to me *shrug*), but I know lots of people did and I appreciate the complexity the show brought to genre shows and its work on gender. I totally understand fans feeling enraged with Whedon not being involved in the project. It does sound like sacrilege.
But when the writer jumps to arguing about the lack of heroes doing the right thing and saving people, eh I dunno. Especially because the writer cites Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and The Sorcerer's Apprentice ("to name two random movies")...what? I mean, if you're going to cite those two I'll cite the new Resident Evil at you or even Megamind as movies that follow the whole "hero" schtick (Megamind being more inventive). Sure I see the whole reluctance to be a hero thing (and to the writers credit ze addresses it later on as our "cynicism"), but I find it hard to miss the days where warm and fuzzy heroes were the key. Don't get me wrong, the reluctant hero thing is a cliche at this point and I have not so much love for it myself, but I'm not sure what the writer means by "we also haven't had a hero who sacrifices, and does the right thing in spite of the cost, and saves people." I'm guessing ze's emphasis is on sacrifice. (the person is corrected by mentions of SPN and Harry Potter). But wait, no, ze mentions that the problem is too little focus on "how great it is to do the right thing." What is this -- an after school special?
But what irritates me (apart from differing in opinion that I don't really need all that sacrifice & triumphalism, I'm more than happy with my cynicism), is all this organized under:
"We're not just lacking strong female heroes, we're lacking heroes"
Um no? You are not just sweeping gender into a universalized narrative...Idgf about the generic hero, which most of the time means some dude in a costume anyway. I know ze means well, but the logic is seriously flawed, bearing the implication that Buffy is distinctive because of some overarching depiction of heroism that transcends gender.
NO.
You do not transcend gender. You do not transcend any of the social categories around which identity is organized. They are there as part and parcel of whatever is being represented either acknowledged, ignored, subverted, reworked or otherwise engaged with (or all of the above), but never transcended or overcome and somehow left behind in some implicitly progressive movement. The suggestion that these are subsidiary category is something that irks me. Check out the rhetoric:
"...not just to tell better stories about heroic women, but to tell better stories about heroism, period."
Just? Like heroism itself exists in a vacuum? So I take it that it doesn't matter when Sarah Connor picks up a gun to protect her kid -- that gender baggage is secondary to her averting the apocalypse. I clarify that I don't mean that Sarah Connor (to take an example) is primarily a woman and then a hero, it's that, as I see it, those categories are intertwined, her heroism doesn't make sense unless you view it as intimately tied to issues of gender. And the same is true for male heroes, who as the norm are presented supposedly unmarked (to compare, how often does the fridging of a love interest happen to female heroes -- gender matters here too whether we like it or not). It's never just a hero.
I mean I get it -- all of this is to commend Buffy. I just think it's a huge disservice to praise it by claiming that issues of gender are somehow secondary when just the quickest glance at Slayage shows how central it is and how closely tied it is to her "heroism."
/rant