Joss's Fascination with Crazy Female Characters
POSTED BY: kukoo
UPDATED: Sunday, August 2, 2026 15:59
VIEWED: 6072
PAGE 2 of 3
I've been thinking about this, and even though it's difficult to diagnose the mental state of a fictional character, I'm beginning to think that there are just a lot of people throughout the Jossverse who are at least a mite whimsical in the brainpan.
I'm sure Zoe wasn't serious when she called Mal "psychotic" in "Serenity," but a number of commenters *have* referred to his instability.
If you ask me, both Jayne and Warren (BtVS) are sociopaths, there's definitely *something* seriously wrong with Jonathan and Andrew, Wesley is exactly the sort of person who keeps psychoanalysts in BMWs, Giles had a nervous breakdown after graduation, and I don't think you'd put Ethan on the cover of Sanity Fair either.
And then there was the coach who wanted to turn his swimmers into fish, the kid with the Jekyll-and-Hyde potion, the one who wanted to build his dead brother a girlfriend, the coach who put a kid into a coma for dropping a baseball....
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Sanity is a big issue in almost every form of fantastic literature, and for very good reason.
See, reality is formed by concensus. How do we know vampires don't exist? Because out of millions of people in our society (and completely ignoring other societies, because they can be culturally dismissed as "wrong"), only a handful actually believe that vampires could exist.
What we call "sanity" or reality is just what most people believe. People who're "insane" are just tapped into something else. In other cultures, they'd be shamans, witches, sorcerers, dream-walkers, whatever. But our culture doesn't allow for anyone to disagree with the Concensus.
So people who see things in a different way must be marginalized. They're just crazy --their view of the world is Wrong (which presupposes that the Concensus view of the world is Right).
Joss' fantasy stories happen in a world that is intended to be as real (i.e., as similar to the audience's own shared world) as possible. It's not "long ago, in a far-away land," it's in Sunnydale, or L.A. People drive cars, have jobs, watch TV, read comics, buy groceries, go to vacation in England, and worry about flunking social studies.
Look at it this way: Buffy is sane, right? But she's a teenaged girl who runs around at night with weapons believing that she's killing undead monsters. We see from her perspective that she's right. Vampires exist and are real, and outsiders (like Xander, Willow, Oz, etc) can be brought into her world and made to see these things --but normal people don't, normal people are still going about their lives, staying inside at night because that's what normal people do, and not noticing the other things because their Concensus tells them that only crazy people notice those things.
Dru, Fred, CrazySpike, and River aren't insane. They're just perceiving and experiencing reality in a way that most others aren't. They just look crazy 'cause we (and the other characters) are on the outside looking in.
Who knows, maybe Blue Sun didn't make River crazy (stripping her amygdala would've made her sensitive, but not outright insane). Maybe River made herself that way to escape from them. And maybe she can teach others to do the same thing.
Maybe River wasn't at the Academy to learn, but to teach. Remember what she said:
Quote:
"Am I dreaming?"
"We all are."
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We applied the cortical electrodes but were unable to get a neural reaction from either patient.
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The Cope Is Real: Election Denier Stacey Abrams Refuses to Admit Trump Win Was a 'Seismic Shift'
https://www.westernjournal.com/cope-real-election-denier-stacey-abrams
-refuses-admit-trump-win-seismic-shift/
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Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
The Cope Is Real: Election Denier Stacey Abrams Refuses to Admit Trump Win Was a 'Seismic Shift'
https://www.westernjournal.com/cope-real-election-denier-stacey-abrams
-refuses-admit-trump-win-seismic-shift/
That mid-level two digit IQ still thinks she's the President of the Federation even though she can't win a real election to save her life.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Stacey Abrams Somehow Concludes That JD Vance Is ‘DEI Graduate’ During Meandering Rant
https://ijr.com/stacey-abrams-somehow-concludes-that-jd-vance-is-dei-g
raduate-during-meandering-rant/
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A nonprofit called "Power Forward Communities," barely a few months old and scraping by with just $100 in its account, was tied closely to Democrat Stacey Abrams when DOGE revealed it had been handed $2 billion in taxpayer money in 2024.
Stacey Abrams founded two other nonprofits listed as partners on the Power Forward Communities website. She also works as senior counsel for Rewiring America, which spearheads a coalition that counts Power Forward Communities among its members.
Free Beacon reports: “Power Forward Communities' grant was one of just eight Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants that the EPA doled out in April 2024 and that, altogether, totaled $20 billion. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced on Feb. 13 that his staff and Department of Government Efficiency officials discovered that the Biden administration parked that same $20 billion at an outside financial institution before leaving office, limiting the federal government's oversight of the program.”
https://x.com/stillgray/status/1892386546910638503
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Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
She also works as senior counsel for Rewiring America, which spearheads a coalition that counts Power Forward Communities among its members.
All Democrats managed to do was rewire their party and drop the sparky end in a bathtub.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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From Advocacy to Accountability: Lessons from the Downfall of Male Feminists
https://therowanwoodchronicles.blog/2025/01/16/from-advocacy-to-accoun
tability-lessons-from-the-downfall-of-male-feminists/
“Joss is (no longer?) Boss”: three layers of cancelling in the joss whedon fan community
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2024.2381244
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and so the 2 party system continues
Abrams: Trump a ‘Petty Tyrant Who Is Surrounded by Complicit Flunkies’
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2025/03/05/abrams-trump-a-petty-tyrant
-who-is-surrounded-by-complicit-flunkies/
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Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
and so the 2 party system continues
Abrams: Trump a ‘Petty Tyrant Who Is Surrounded by Complicit Flunkies’
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2025/03/05/abrams-trump-a-petty-tyrant
-who-is-surrounded-by-complicit-flunkies/]
I enjoyed your link to fandom and the reasons expressed there for canceling Joss, or not. It helped to understand why some, no matter what Trump does, cannot cancel him out. Apparently, the good things they thought about themselves; like believing in equal rights for women or such, weren't true. It wasn't who they really were.
While others, who actually believe in an issue, like equal rights for women or such, can cancel Joss if Joss turned out to be false. They would cancel Joss because it is who they really are, and backing that up by dumping Joss would be a must.
T
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