I just don't get all the judgmental grievance about Buffy and Willow slut-shaming Cordelia (by calling her a skanky ho).

I don't endorse slut-shaming, but let the characters be imperfect. They've got many reasons to be angry and resentful towards Cordy. They were trying to say something hurtful.

And Xander keeps getting dragged over the coals for being a teenage horndog. The show does not endorse his pathetic attempts to exert control over who Buffy is seeing or when. Nor Willow. He's a complex character with a mix of strengths and weaknesses and that's what makes the story go round.

re: Mark Watches--does it make me a bad human being to get tired of people being horrified and heartbroken that the show doesn't address all the social ills they personally abhor and it's just the most awful thing ever?

If so, we are both bad humans. I was just conversing with a buddy about how annoyed we are by people who seem to be constantly looking for things to be outraged about.

I agree, Tep, although I thought that storyline, being the millionth iteration of Ross/Rachel, kinda sucked too.(on rewatch, I've kinda stopped 'shipping them...what happened to Emily seems kind of awful, now that I'm this age.) But I wouldn't have mentioned it to my pastor, if I had one. And, oh, shit, wait till poor Mark gets to the Key and Tara's brain...and they use the c-word quite a lot. Well, *Mark's* c-word. Not the Anglo-Saxon one.

There are times where the -isms are wedged deep in the text. I don't like it if the *work* is offensive, but not every show/book has to march in every Pride parade. It'd be great if it could change the world, but you can't ask everything of everything and actually get a lot of quality as a result.

It'd be great if it could change the world, but you can't ask everything of everything and actually get a lot of quality as a result.

That's one of my criticisms of the Hunger Games trilogy (most specifically Mockingjay). I felt like the War IS BAD message was hammered way too hard. We get it.

I don't think she wrote the trilogy -- or specifically Mockingjay -- in service to that message, but it was still hammered way too hard for my taste. It felt like she was trying way too hard to tell the readers that War IS BAD. Which we kinda already knew.

(I know, wrong thread, but related topic.)

re: Mark Watches--does it make me a bad human being to get tired of people being horrified and heartbroken that the show doesn't address all the social ills they personally abhor and it's just the most awful thing ever?

No.

Which is basically how I feel about BTVS not being a pro-Romani bandwagon. Don't give a crap. It's fiction. Shoehorning in A Message makes for really, really crappy fiction.

And I don't think the Romani come off particularly bad in the Buffyverse. At least no worse or better than anyone else.

At least no worse or better than anyone else.

It's all "You mentioned the Romani! You must now make an explicit effort to undo generations of bigotry or you're part of the problem!"

Is it just because they're young? I feel very old and cynical when I read the comments.

Eh, having people devote their lives to a vendetta based on someone who was killed before they were born doesn't strike me as the most positive of depictions. But then Jenny Calendar called out how insane the lengths they were going to actually were, so there was an onscreen counterpoint.

Definitely better than Native Americans!

Definitely better than Native Americans!

I wonder how they'll react when Xander's penis gets diseases from a Chumash tribe.