y yo a ti, brute

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

Dr. Ryland Grace is a coward, we all know that, we’ve all talked about that a lot. But I think that it’s really interesting, and I haven’t seen it talked about as much, is the way that we, the reader, find out that Grace is a coward, and the way Grace find out he’s a coward. Because we only find out at the end. For most of the story, we think that Grace chose to crew the Hail Mary. It actually makes a big deal out of the fact that he’s on a suicide mission, we are reminded constantly that they were not meant to make it home. We spend most of the book believing that Grace is a hero, and so does he. And, then, at the end, just as Grace is about to complete his mission, about to be the hero, the savior of Earth and Erid, he remembers. We find out. He’s no hero, just a coward who wasn’t able to run. And then, of course, it’s immediately after this that he sacrifices his life for Rocky. It’s immediately after he finds out he’s a coward that he finally does something brave.

i can understand changing elements of a story for an adaption (and im a big advocate for this! no adaptation can or should ever strive to be completely faithful to its source material) however. cutting the nobody part from the odyssey is a huge indicator that you have fundamentally misunderstood odysseus as a character i fear

i love that we see this in her goodbye speech too! she's always idolised her father and emulated him by expecting perfection, conforming to regulation, equating emotion with weakness etc. she's never told her nurses how she feels about them because that's something her father would never do, but as soon as she lets go that need for approval she realises that her father's way isn't necessarily the right way and she can tell her nurses how proud she is of them.

Everyone's so focused on Grace's primary hypothesis (life doesn't need water) remaining unsupported that you're ignoring his secondary hypothesis (the Goldilocks zone is for idiots) being proven correct