In 2017, his ex-wife, Kai Cole, published a sensational open letter about him on the movie blog The Wrap. But in recent years, the good-guy image has been tarnished by a series of accusations, each more damaging than the last. His fans thought of him as a feminist ally, an impression bolstered by his fund-raising efforts for progressive causes. Marvel later put him in charge of its biggest franchise, hiring him to write and direct 2012’s The Avengers and its sequel Age of Ultron, two of the highest-grossing films of all time. Kurtz designed a T-shirt that gestured at Whedon’s stature in popular culture at the time: JOSS WHEDON IS MY MASTER NOW. He was a celebrity showrunner before anyone cared who ran shows. It wasn’t just scholars who worshipped him in those days. As Lavery would write in the introduction to a book he co-authored on the series, Whedon had not simply composed a narrative about a struggle against the “forces of darkness - vampires, demons, monsters of all varieties” he had taken a stand against a panoply of oppressive “social forces,” most obviously the “forces of gender stereotyping.” According to the prevailing rules of Hollywood horror at the time, Whedon’s protagonist, a hot blonde with a dumb name, should have died within the opening scenes, but Whedon had flipped the genre on its head, endowing her with superhuman powers and a hero’s journey. On the first morning of the conference, David Lavery, a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, stood at the podium and declared the show’s creator, Joss Whedon, the “avatar” of a new religion, the “founder of a new faith.” Lavery and two other professors would go on to establish the Whedon Studies Association, an organization devoted to expanding the field of Buffy scholarship. If the line between scholarship and fandom was vanishingly thin, so was the line between fandom and worship. ![]() ![]() Professors stalked around in long black leather coats like the vampire Spike, Buffy’s enemy and, later, her lover. There were life-size cutouts of the eponymous heroine as well as Buffy-themed chocolates, action figures, and, in the welcome bags, exfoliating moisturizers (“Buffy the Backside Slayer”). They were an eclectic group - theologians, philosophers, linguists, film professors - and they had descended on the medieval city for a conference dedicated to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a cult television show about a teenage girl who fights monsters while attending high school in Southern California. ![]() In the fall of 2002, 160 scholars convened at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.
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