Why I love Joss Whedon

I'm pretty slow about my EW reading as I am just about everything else, but when I got the issue with the Joss Whedon, I tore through it, or tried to. And because it won't leave me alone, I'm rereading it again mostly because I've been trying to articulate why I'm Joss Whedon's bitch and why I'd follow him to the ends of the earth, so I thought, but reposting some of his words, I'd better understand that, and myself.

"But there's a lot of inarticulate emotion that I articulate pretty well when I'm under the guise of a teenage girl."

Was it just me, or did everybody's brains explode with that statement? There's something so perfect about this sentiment. I've reached a better understanding of myself by just writing through some of my characters in much the same way. I'm so appreciative of this idea and how it was expressed.

The one thing a creator can bring to the table when everybody else has all the money and power is a centeredness and the ability to walk away. Never sit at a table you can't walk away from.

God, that takes some balls.

And when he's asked to give a response for how he feels about Twilight and other shows like it, he gives the most brilliant answer:

And that's incredibly frustrating to because a lot of what's taken on the oeuvre of Bully is actually a reaction against it. Everything is there except for the Buffy. A lot of things aimed at the younger kids is just Choosing Boyfriends: The Movie.

Listen, I liked the Twilight series, both the books and the movie, but it did feel pandering in a lot of ways. What do teenage girls want? Love triangles in which they are the center. And sure Buffy and most shows Joss has done had their share of triangles and messy love situations, but they mostly felt grounded and not navel gazing at all. It all felt earned, where a lot of the stuff that's out there now, trying to replace it, does not.

And then:

I was a different version of them. we're almost like a support group.

This is in regards to the fan response to his work and how they've said he's helped them through a dark time and how he's realized, that through his own writing, he's actually helped himself out of a dark time. Again, I think this comes out of the same place as the teenage girl statement, that any good writer worth his grain in salt is using his characters not only to get somewhere in a story, but to get somewhere emotionally themselves. I have a book written that I felt I had to write just be somewhere with what I was dealing with emotionally. Writing that book, putting all those emotions somewhere, probably saved my life. I hope one day I'm able to publish it and all those emotions help someone else. I'm so glad Joss can see that in himself, that he understands it on that level and that he realizes the power of his own writing in his own life.

We use stories to connect, to care about people, to care about a situation. To turn the mundane heroic, to make people really think about who they are. They're useful. And they're useful to me because if I wrote what I really think, I'd be sad all the time. 

Can somebody arrange it so that I can hug Joss Whedon. Because I think we both need a hug after that. It's so easy to be bleak, to think in bleak terms about society, the environment, all of it. The harder thing is to think optimistically, to write optimistically and to provide a source of optimism even if we don't feel it ourselves. This was brilliant interview about a  brilliant man and I love the heck out of the both of them.