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Creator / Joss Whedon

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The metaphorical cradle of This Very Wiki in the flesh.

"This is my entire career in one scene: Look, she’s helpless! No, she’s kicking their asses!"

Joseph Hill "Joss" Whedon (born June 23, 1964) is a scriptwriter, script doctor, director, cameo actor, television producer through his famed Mutant Enemy production company, comic book author, and—as of his appearance on This American Life—a singer.

Whedon is best known for his work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dollhouse, the famously cancelled cult hit Firefly, its motion picture Serenity, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and the first two Avengers movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Coming from a family of talented writers, he is also notable for often being called one of the first third-generation television writers.

Most of his works include badass female characters, as well as numerous characters with dry, caustic wit. And angst. Lots and lots of angst. Even in the middle of comic storylines or situations.

In fact, Whedon delights in defying audience expectations, to the point that "Jossed" became synonymous with fan theories being disproven. For instance, rather than killing a major character, he'll kill off a minor but much more endearing character. Whedon explained in the DVD commentary for Serenity that he likes doing such things because people expect the hero to die or be horribly injured at some point — but they don't expect the minor characters to die, so the impact is much greater! Unfortunately, he's done this so often that nobody familiar with Whedon expects characters they like to live anymore.

He was also the first writer/director to have had a hand in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, DC Extended Universe and X-Men Film Series, if only by reshaping Justice League (2017) with reshoots, new scenes and repurposing of Zack Snyder's scenes for the DCEU, and script doctoring for Fox's X-Men.

In 2020, Whedon was accused of abusive behavior on the set of Justice League by actor Ray Fisher. He has since been accused of the same by a number of other collaborators including Charisma Carpenter, Michelle Trachtenberg, Amber Benson, Jason Momoa, and Jose Molina, in addition to 2017 accusations of infidelity by his ex-wife Kai Cole. These accusations came not long after he was accused of sexually pressuring several younger women who worked on his shows into affairs with him. Whedon has steadfastly denied all claims of impropriety while admitting that he can be "confrontational".

    List of Works 

Television Work:

Films written:

Films directed:

Films Produced:

Comics written:

Web Original projects:

Trope Namer for:

This creator and his works contain examples of:

  • Abusive Parents: A staple of the Jossverse, sometimes lampooned. Amusingly, by Season 3 of Angel, this reached the point where the fact that Fred's parents were perfectly nice people came off as a shocking twist.
  • Action Girl: Though Whedon himself doesn't think this should even be a trope. He once recounted how interviewers always ask why he writes so many strong, competent female characters, saying he always wants to yell at them about why they aren't asking every other writer why they don't write these kinds of characters. Instead of viewing a character as a woman who does "action-y" things, view it as a character who does "action-y" things who happens to be a woman.
  • Anyone Can Die: Villains, heroes, children, the main character, anyone can die in a Joss Whedon production.
    • Buffy / Angel: Jesse, Jenny Calendar, Doyle, Tara, Anya, Joyce, Lilah (sorta), Jonathan, Cordelia, Fred, Wesley, Lindsey, Spike, Angel, and Buffy herself, twice. Giles as well as of the Season 8 comics. Giles was resurrected at the end of Season 9 however, and Fred in Season 10
    • Dollhouse: Topher Brink, Boyd Langton, Paul Ballard, Mellie!November, Bennett Halverson, and possibly the majority of the cast considering the Distant Finales, particularly Mr. Dominic and Ivy.
    • Titan A.E.: Korso, Preed, and Cale's father.
    • When AoS star Brett Dalton was asked to meet with the writers regarding Ward's Face–Heel Turn, he thought they were going to tell him his character was about to die. This is a bit Hilarious in Hindsight as when the show did kill Ward off a couple years later, it was done in a way that allowed Dalton to stay on the show with the Inhuman Hive possessing his body.
    • The Cabin in the Woods: Every last member of the cast and then the entire planet.
  • Author Appeal:
    • Likes characters with English accents, as he attended school in Britain (The Watchers, Spike, Adelle, Badger, Simmons).
    • People with mental illness show up in a lot of his shows.
    • Women walking around barefoot.
    • Elvis Costello references.
    • Tends to turn his female characters into lesbians, if they weren't already.
    • Likes to name his characters after objects (Willow, River, Spike, Faith, Book, Skye).
    • Mysterious organizations who recruit people with special talent (The Watchers Council, Blue Suns, The Academy, Wolfram & Hart, SHIELD and SWORD, The Evil League of Evil).
    • Snarkiness.
    • Petite women.
  • Bad Boss: Can be quite cruel to his staff, especially his writers. According to Jose Molina, he thinks it's funny.
  • Bad News in a Good Way: He enjoys excitedly announcing to his actors that he's killed them.
  • Bathos: He often follows up a tragic or serious scene with a joke for comic effect. He even provides the page quote!
  • Better than a Bare Bulb: The source of much Whedon comedy.
  • Brainwashed and Crazy: River, Drusilla, Alpha, Hawkeye.
  • Buffy Speak: While he didn't invent it, Joss and his shows had a big hand in changing the way TV and movie characters talk, especially white teenagers. This isn't because he likes it so much as it's how he speaks.
  • Bury Your Gays: Joss actually likes having same-sex couples who are in happy, stable relationships. But since he also thinks True Love Is Boring, this eventually leads to him killing one or both members of the couple for the sake of drama. Note that he does this to heterosexual couples too.
  • The Cameo:
    • Guest starred as a sports agent in Jane Espenson's web series Husbands.
    • Appeared in an episode of Geek & Sundry's Written By A Kid.
    • Douglas the car rental office boss in the Veronica Mars episode "Rat Saw God".
  • Creator Cameo: He has self-inserted himself into a number of his own works, including:
  • Cast the Expert: The casting of ballet dancer Summer Glau in an episode of Angel and hiring Tony Award-winning Hinton Battle as a choreographer and as the dancing demon Sweet in Buffy's "Once More With Feeling."
  • Casual Danger Dialogue: One of the most represented types of dry wit in his projects. For good or bad, after The Avengers and everybody copying it, he is considered one of the great harbingers of this type of character interaction in fiction from The New '10s and onward.
  • Chiaroscuro: The man adores negative space.
  • Cute Bruiser: A number of his Action Girls also have Super-Strength, including Buffy, Cordelia and Fred.
  • Deadpan Snarker: In his own words, The Avengers has so much dry wit that it looks like a desert.
  • Dropped a Bridge on Him: Though he's always had a reputation for using Anyone Can Die, he's been accused of relying on it a bit too much, killing characters off just for cheap shock value long after we've learned to suspect it's coming. He always wanted to do this (for example, the character of Jesse in the first episode of Buffy), but sometimes it was pushed on him by circumstance (Doyle was written off of Angel because of actor Glenn Quinn's drug abuse).
  • Dystopia Justifies the Means: Once jokingly asked Americans to vote for Mitt Romney in order to bring about an awesome Zombie Apocalypse.
  • Foreign Cuss Word: A staple of his productions. Examples include Spike dropping British cuss words on Buffy, the Serenity crew swearing in Mandarin, and Loki calling Black Widow a "mewling quim" in The Avengers.
  • Genre Blending: His shows do mix various genres together.
  • Girl on Girl Is Hot: If Buffy and Firefly are anything to go by.
    • Considered making Xander gay, but Xander was his self-insert, so instead he made Willow gay and made her far more sexual.
    • Inara picked up a female client. Everyone commented on it. "I'll be in my bunk."
  • Hollywood Atheist: Malcolm Reynolds is deeply bitter against God/Christianity after losing a war. Nathan Fillion himself stated that Mal is actually a Naytheist who's pissed off after the Serenity Valley.
  • I Call It "Vera": Wrote the script for the Trope Namer. Also had a typewriter in school named "Mutant Enemy".
  • Kill the Cutie: Many from his works:
    • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Examples include Jenny Calendar, Tara, Amanda, and Jonathan.
    • Cordelia Chase and Winifred Burkle in Angel
    • If there's one blessing in the short lifespan of Firefly, it's that Whedon didn't get a chance to do this to us. Though he made up for it by killing Book and Wash in The Movie.
    • He also poked fun at his penchant for this in the pilot of Firefly, with Kaylee's "death" (it all turns out to be a psychotic joke by Mal). The only reason that the joke was as effective as it was is because of Joss's track record.
    • Dollhouse:
      • Bennett Halverson in "Getting Closer" (2x11).
      • In "The Hollow Men" (2x12) Mellie kills herself to protect Ballard.
      • In 2x13, Topher performs a heroic sacrifice and gets blown up.
  • Mood Whiplash: Many heartwarming scenes and jokes in Whedon works are followed by a character being unexpectedly and often brutally murdered seconds late and many a very dramatic scene will be punctuated with a joke.
  • Person as Verb: As the trope namer for Jossed.
  • Prefers Going Barefoot: While not as egregious as Quentin Tarantino in that regard, Whedon often shows female protagonists who go barefoot by choice (usually as a manifestation of eccentricity or free-spiritedness), from River to Pepper. Also occasionally justified by having said characters using martial arts or other acrobatic maneuvers. He's even stated that River's feet are the eleventh character of the show (the ship Serenity being the tenth).
    • Having Pepper barefoot in The Avengers (2012) serves a practical purpose: Gwyneth Paltrow is a little taller than Robert Downey Jr.. If she's not wearing shoes and he is, the difference is less obvious.
  • Put on a Bus: Numerous characters, but most notably Kitty Pryde during his run on Astonishing X-Men. Particularly shocking, considering how much he loved the character (she's often cited as an inspiration for Buffy). Obviously, another writer undid it. But still...
  • Shiny New Australia: Aside from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog being the Trope Namer, in the documentary Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope, he comments:
    Whedon: When people say the geeks have inherited the Earth, I say (...) "How much of the Earth do I get? Can I have Australia?"
  • Star-Crossed Lovers: If a relationship in one of Whedon's shows isn't unrequited or otherwise troubled, chances are it's doomed to end badly. Joss Whedon hates happy relationships.
  • Straw Misogynist: Includes at least one in each of his television shows. They all suffer violent deaths at the hands of women.
  • Stuffed in the Fridge: Any time he kills a character, their loved one will inevitably walk in on the corpse soon after to amp up the angst.
  • Too Happy to Live: Whedon regularly kills happy characters, or destroys their lives, or ruins their relationships. Or all three.
  • True Art Is Angsty: People who love and loathe his work can both agree that Joss has a peculiar love for this, almost to the point of overkill. Which is probably why the funny moments are much more powerful.
    Whedon: "Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke."
  • True Love Is Boring: Every time Joss writes a happy, stable couple, he proceeds to kill one or both of them to make things more interesting.
  • Waif-Fu: He's very fond of tiny Action Girls kicking the asses of big, burly men, as seen with Buffy, River and to a lesser extent Black Widow.
    Buffy: I'm tired of super strong little women who aren't me.
  • World of Snark: Due to all his characters being exceptionally Genre Savvy, they tend to all be Deadpan Snarkers too.
    Joss Whedon: Everyone has such a dry wit in this movie. It's like a desert of wit.
Grr. Argh.

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