That is Not How Fighting Works

...With a note about cultural setting.

Before I get to heaping contempt on the way thin-wristed little pusses like Joss Whedon portray combat, permit me to offer you a quote:

Wash: Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction.
Zoe: We live in a spaceship, dear.
Wash: So?

Now this is an example of why Whedon is the writing equivalent of phimosis, as in a schmuck who just won't leave. Assuming for the moment that the genre of science fiction still exists in the star-spanning 2500s—and hasn't just become a spacefaring culture's "traveler's tales"—spaceships would no more be a part of it than airplanes are a part of ours. Idiot.

Anyway. The way River fights—and it's not all Summer Glau's fault, she's much more believable in Sarah Connor—and the way Buffy fights...they hurt me, they wound me to a fundamental level. I realize Whedon spent most of his high school life in his locker, or fantasizing about Wonder Woman—or both at once—but maybe he should've asked someone who's been in a fight to choreograph his fights. Even a sparring match will do; hell, anything more combative than a slap-fight would be better.

I avoid Buffy if remotely possible, so my knowledge of the fighting in that comes only from brief scenes that I quickly averted my eyes from, ashamed to share a species with their choreographer. But I have seen Serenity several times, and permit me to say, "What the Hell, Michigan? Indeed, what the Putnam Township, Livingston County, Michigan, USA? What the entire universe allegedly run by consistent physical laws?!"

See, River's a teeny-tiny little girl. I get that Whedon, with his delusions of being a feminist, likes showing girls getting the upper hand of guys in a fight. Of course it suffers from the fatal flaw of most power fantasies: in real life, it doesn't happen. Not the way he depicts it, at least. He shows girls beating guys in fights with brute force. Sorry, that doesn't happen, especially not with a lady like Summer Glau, who's smaller than many eighth graders.

Fortunately, and actually quite intriguingly, technique is superior to brute force. A girl River's size could quite realistically hold her own, if she used jujutsu or aikijutsu. She could conceivably even pull it off if she used a hard style, if she hit the right spots. Gautama H. Buddha, Whedon, the girl's a ballerina: did it occur to you to get someone to teach her savate? It's a pressure-point-using martial art, that uses the feet! Nothing says "female empowerment" like using the pointe au foie on someone twice your size, girls—it's a fouetté to the ninth and tenth ribs. The force goes right into the liver. Let's not even discuss the reason fouetté à figure is illegal in sport savate (it involves the ending of Million Dollar Baby).

But no, rather than something that would actually look good—in martial arts, realer is better, always—Whedon's hack of a choreographer has her gently brushing people with her feet, while ridiculous meat-slapper sounds straight out of Cave Dwellers play. Really? And how come nobody told her to move her frigging feet faster? I get it, her conditioning lets her access the unused power in her muscles, like the woman who lifts the minivan (who, by the way, is sort of the "cow skeletonization time" of "adrenaline power-up"). Only guess what? She'd be moving different, wouldn't she? Also she'd hurt herself doing it much (Naruto knows that, Whedon, why don't you?).

But Whedon can't abide seeing women excel on men's terms—or rather, on the terms of the cold, hard world where physics is real, the world men have to cope with. He needs them to have superpowers, emphatically not because they enhance his story, but because he can't abide the fact that, in the real world, men are stronger than women. And that, in the real world, women make up the difference with guns. That's why his male characters are always far more offensively helpless even than girl characters who can be immobilized from the wrist. That's why guns are supposedly "never helpful", against creatures that die when you behead them (Whedon needs to meet a little thing called ".44 magnum hollow point"—I'm not picky about how vigorously he meets it, either). And that's why all his female characters have ridiculous superstrength, that's somehow greater than a man's would be with equivalent powers.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say Whedon was a troll-persona created by male chauvinists, to discredit male feminists. How the hell can you be a strawman of your own position?

Finally, why the hell do people fetishize Summer Glau's feet? She's a pretty woman generally (albeit in a very babyish, Kewpie-doll way that blows Whedon's feminist credentials to hell), but her feet are weird. They're sodding long; she's like a female Sideshow Bob.