TMC
05-13-2015, 02:08 PM
http://411mania.com/movies/the-8-ball-top-8-joss-whedon-heroines/
#1: Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
No question here. Buffy Summers is an absolute icon among heroines in pop culture and fiction. Whedon’s original badass was conceived as the girl who, when looking like the stereotypical horror victim, would then turn around and kick the monster’s ass. And while the film was twisted into something that he didn’t want it to be, when he took it to television he finally had the opportunity to do it right.
Part of getting it right is, obviously, the casting. Sarah Michelle Gellar has undergone a bit of backlash from Whedonites after she made comments expressing something other than enthusiasm for the show’s move from WB to UPN, as well as not coming back to reprise the role on Angel after Buffy ended. That backlash is seriously overblown but even if it wasn’t it shouldn’t take anything away from her work as the titular Slayer. And she had great material to work with thanks to Whedon and his writers’ character work. She was tough and she could fight anything from your garden variety vampire to a Hell-god, and even the latter didn’t keep her dead for long. Buffy Summers didn’t just go through supernatural travails; she had to deal with real-life issues and some of them of the very serious kind, such as the death of her mother in one of the single-best episodes of broadcast network television ever. Buffy Summers is the most iconic and influential characters in Whedon’s varied work as a writer of strong female characters, and that alone is enough to put her at #1 even if she wasn’t awesome in other ways (which she is).
#1: Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
No question here. Buffy Summers is an absolute icon among heroines in pop culture and fiction. Whedon’s original badass was conceived as the girl who, when looking like the stereotypical horror victim, would then turn around and kick the monster’s ass. And while the film was twisted into something that he didn’t want it to be, when he took it to television he finally had the opportunity to do it right.
Part of getting it right is, obviously, the casting. Sarah Michelle Gellar has undergone a bit of backlash from Whedonites after she made comments expressing something other than enthusiasm for the show’s move from WB to UPN, as well as not coming back to reprise the role on Angel after Buffy ended. That backlash is seriously overblown but even if it wasn’t it shouldn’t take anything away from her work as the titular Slayer. And she had great material to work with thanks to Whedon and his writers’ character work. She was tough and she could fight anything from your garden variety vampire to a Hell-god, and even the latter didn’t keep her dead for long. Buffy Summers didn’t just go through supernatural travails; she had to deal with real-life issues and some of them of the very serious kind, such as the death of her mother in one of the single-best episodes of broadcast network television ever. Buffy Summers is the most iconic and influential characters in Whedon’s varied work as a writer of strong female characters, and that alone is enough to put her at #1 even if she wasn’t awesome in other ways (which she is).