brunette buffy summers

Thinking this morning about the cultural legacy of buffyspeak and the whedonism/whedonesque quips as they have come to be culturally dominant in big budget films like marvel (even before whedon himself was actually working on marvel) and I think part of the issue is that so many people (read: men) in Hollywood see the appeal of whedonesque dialogue as ‘smart guy fast quips’ while ignoring the actually interesting and subversive aspect of buffyspeak, which is that it was rooted in a maligned & devalued dialect & subculture associated with vapid and shallow teenage girls. Whedon is absolutely not the first guy to write fast-paced witty dialogue, but he IS revolutionary for merging fast-paced quips with y2k valley girl slang in a way that created such a lively and unique artistic idiolect that really feels like an organically-derived dialect that arises amongst a group of friends. It’s not the pace that made buffyspeak iconic, it’s the vernacular! + the way the vernacular interacted with the pace. So modern whedonesque dialogue falls SO flat and is so boring bc it all uses the same dialect and diction, rather than having a unique dynamic of tension by engaging with/creating its own idiolect. And that’s why it’s buffyspeak not whedonspeak. A single quip can be a whedonism, but just quips alone cannot create the realistic and engaging artistic idiolect of btvs