Once again, the behavior of Joss Whedon is back in the spotlight… and there’s a lot to unpack. This week, an article from Giant Freakin Robot began to be shared across Twitter, titled “Joss Whedon’s Cancellation Still Makes No Sense, Unless It’s An Attack On You.”
In the piece, Joshua Tyler compares a literal bullet point list of Whedon’s misconduct allegations against the actions of “other Hollywood notables who aren’t cancelled and can do whatever they want,” like Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and Mel Gibson. (I know, I’ll touch on that in a minute.) The piece goes on to argue that Whedon’s cancellation is an example of pop culture’s enduring “anti-nerd bigotry”… as is the fallout surrounding both Pixar’s John Lasseter and Ain’t It Cool News founder Harry Knowles.
“I’m not arguing here that Joss Whedon should be un-cancelled; he seems like a hypocritical jerk,” Tyler argues. “Also, Harry Knowles always struck me as a sleaze; we’re probably better off without him. But if being unlikable is the baseline standard we’re setting for whether or not you’re allowed to work, then shouldn’t Woody Allen be locked up in a torture dungeon, instead of being celebrated as a genius? Make it make sense. Until you do, I’m going to assume you hate nerds and respond by hating you right back.”
There’s A Lot to Unpack Here…
It should be noted that Giant Freakin Robot has its fair share of flaws as an outlet. For years, they had been pretty prolific posters of superhero and genre “scoops” — about actors being eyed for roles, or projects being in development — regardless of whether or not any of them end up being true. Some, occasionally and eventually, did turn out to be true, in the sort of “a broken clock is right twice a day” way. But they still flooded the nerd landscape with inaccurate headlines and vague information, which have now (unfortunately) become commonplace in the age of anonymous Twitter accounts and Patreon paywalls.
While Tyler temporarily “shut down” the website in 2024, it has since returned with a mix of scoops and thinkpieces like this Whedon article… only to be criticized by certain fandoms, most recently Star Trek, for their inaccurate spins. This Whedon piece has gotten a similar amount of backlash, with replies on Twitter calling out blatant lies about Polanski, Allen, and the other controversial names cited in the article.
Not only do Tyler’s bullet points about the allegations downplay the severity of their behavior, but it’s fundamentally inaccurate to say that those men “aren’t cancelled and can do whatever they want.” Polanski, in particular, has literally been hiding out in Europe for decades to avoid the legal fallout of the sexual assault cases against him.
For that matter, Whedon (and Lasseter and Knowles) were not just shunned from the industry for being “unlikable” — there are clear allegations and patterns of problematic behavior against all of them. The argument that their cancellations are just an example of nerds being persecuted by the proverbial jocks of the world is already shoddy… but even more so when it intentionally glazes over the specifics of what happened.
People can still admire or have a fondness for the work that Whedon and other “cancelled” men did, while still recognizing the reality of the actions they took while making them. Plenty of Buffy and Firefly fans have been reckoning with exactly that in the years since Whedon’s controversy hit its peak. But he isn’t some tortured genius who made his art in a vacuum: every project he worked on had massive casts and crews, and we shouldn’t have to sacrifice their potential safety and well-being just so you can get another movie helmed by him. It’s not “anti-nerd bigotry”… it’s the consequences of actions.
(featured image: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic)
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