Whedonesque Characters

People don’t use the word ‘Whedonesque’ much anymore, which is understandable even outside of his reputation imploding because of him being an abusive asshole. As I understand it, the word was mostly used to describe imitations of his dialogue; quippy, self-aware, and often deliberately awkward in its construction – TV Tropes still has the term ‘Buffy-Speak’ for when characters try to convey complex ideas or thoughts by deliberately mashing simpler language together. This kind of humor and mentality is so well-absorbed into the American genre landscape that it’s taken for granted now, much the same way that ‘GTA-clone’ gave way to ‘open world’ in video games.

After diving into Whedon’s most famous TV works, I’ve found ‘Whedonesque’ more useful to apply to his characterization. There’s a quality to his characters that I’ve found almost nowhere else; a specific magic to them that comes from a few simple principles. I would say there are two related but distinct possible meanings to the term ‘Whedonesque character’: characters who chase their motivations even when that would be wildly inconvenient, and less importantly but still interestingly, characters who achieve their goals through seemingly counterproductive actions.

The former tends to lead to the latter. Whedon industrialized the concept of character development in his stories; his characters each have very clear motivations, and they tend to chase them even when it’s either not necessary for the plot, or even seemingly counterproductive. The most useful moment I can think of to articulate it is the Mayor sincerely giving Buffy and Angel advice on their relationship near the end of season three; it’s funny, of course, to have the main villain give relationship advice (in fact, it’s fallen into cliche), but it’s also a sincere reflection of his motivation. His goal isn’t ‘kill and terrorize Buffy’, it’s ‘make the world a better place suiting his aw-shucks 50s morality’, and he’s perfectly happy to share some fatherly advice with a young girl.

There are a lot of other moments like this all through Whedon’s work; Angel refusing to forgive Wesley and smothering him with a pillow is a plot-shifting one that’s always stuck with me, as is Simon choosing to forgive Jayne on Firefly. On a philosophical level, I appreciate the reminder that people are what they are, regardless of what you or I or even they think of them. On an entertainment level, I enjoy that a story can begin with something surprising yet inevitable. What’s interesting is how this ends up going somewhere even weirder and cooler.

Whedon’s characters are strict in their motivations and malleable in both their emotions and, more importantly, their expression of those motivations. Whedon characters as a rule learn from what happens to them and change their behaviors in the face of failure; the most spectacular of these is Wesley, who never changes his core motivation – be an effective occult detective – from the moment he appears onscreen in season three of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but radically changes how he expresses that motivation; initially, he tries not only going by the book, but lecturing The Book at people and acting as if his words are to be believed by virtue of him saying them. By the end of Angel, he’s a brutally efficient puzzle-solving ass-kicking machine who only speaks when he has to. Failure defines his story as much as success; his failures with Faith in Buffy lead to him joining Angel Investigations as the only outlet for his desire to be great in his field, and getting his throat cut and abandoned by all his friends causes him to completely throw out all unnecessary parts of his identity.

Again, this is only an extreme example of things all over Whedon’s oeuvre; I particularly think of Jayne, the one to evolve the fastest and the most extreme out of all the Firefly characters, and not only his increasing humility but his growing friendship with Shepard Book. Xander relaxed over time as he found his identity as a working man; Willow shifted from nerd to hypercompetent witch. Whedon is a natural writer of melodrama, and one interesting thing about this is that the extreme emotions characters feel is, all at once, sincere, a building block of a larger story, and a specific tool characters use to measure their own development.

To a Whedon character, our current emotion and how it compares to the past is a measure of growth. The fact that you are less happy now than you were in some other situation might, depending on your point of view, come down to you having been more naïve and childish, and your unhappiness now is a result of hard-earned wisdom (I certainly think that would be Wesley’s argument for his grimness in season four of Angel). 

One interesting thing about the extreme emotions Whedon characters feel is that they’re the sole people really responsible for them; it’s not the world’s fault they’ve got feelings, and it’s certainly not the world’s fault for how they choose to act on those feelings. I find that very resonant with my own views; I don’t consider myself responsible for my immediate feelings, but I do consider myself responsible for which ones I’m going to make everyone else’s problem. 

And what’s really interesting about this process is how characters end up articulating their motivations in precise ways that would seem counterintuitive, especially to their younger selves. One could see Whedon characters as constantly experimenting, and the funny thing about life is how often you end up becoming what you previously detested; there’s that old saw about people being liberal when they’re young and conservative when they’re old, which is frequently incorrect but does capture the way people can seem to become what they hated.

Those liberals-turned-conservatives, of course, simply wanted to feel powerful, and when you’re young the best way to achieve that is a self-righteous rant whilst old people can collect enough capital over their lives to amass actual power. Whedon’s process can reveal similar ‘hypocrisy’, as the character acts in what they initially think is an effective way to get what they want and then find an actual way to get it. It’s my understanding that the most effective way to look smart is to ask a lot of questions (sincerely, obviously!), when our first impulse is generally to give a lot of commands and explanation; there are a lot of things in life where things that make us feel effective are exactly the opposite of what make us effective. This is what Whedon captures, and at the end of their development, a lot of Whedonesque characters look really weird.

That said, some of these post-Whedon-development characters do exist outside his universe. I realized one of the things I like about Alan Shore of Boston Legal is that he’s a Whedonesque character dropped into a normal procedural, and indeed elevating it through sheer force of will. His cheerful and knowing hypocrisy imply a Whedonesque character development, in which he found the most effective way to enact his liberal ideals on an individual level was to gleefully embrace the system that causes the issues in the first place. 

I’ll finish with a drop in on the most Whedonesque character in Whedon’s works: Spike. Ironically – in another Whedonesque moment – Spike shows the power of the Eternal Motivation because his motivation is constantly changing. But he owns those motivations even as he discards them; one of the most powerful moments in the Buffyverse is when he flatly refuses to feel an iota of guilt for killing Principal Wood’s mother. As far as he was concerned, he was a vampire and she was a Slayer, and she entered into fights with him knowing what they both were, and he would no sooner apologize for killing her than he would for breathing no matter how concerned he is with doing good right now.

Spike’s main motivation is, above all, to feel good as often as possible, and he’ll do that by murdering innocents or by teaming up with Buffy to murder Angelus or by laying low for a while or by regaining his soul or by, god help us all, helping the helpless. What I love is that he wants this so much, he’ll even resist the narrative’s attempts to force him to change – Spike will only change when he bloody well wants to, thank you very much. This is the best expression of Whedon’s belief that the individual is simply too powerful to be restrained for long.