Whedonesque

» see whedonesque.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

A site named after a living person carries a risk that person never signed up for and never has to manage. Whedonesque ran for fifteen years on the premise that Joss Whedon's work was worth a daily link post from strangers, and it stopped the day after that premise turned into something its own readers did not want to hold.

Buffy and Angel were not my television. In the years Whedonesque was getting started i was in Turkish internet cafes playing Counter-Strike and paying by the hour, and the American showrunner fansite was a format i knew existed rather than one i visited. This is a grave reconstructed from the record and not from memory.

It began in mid-2002, built by Caroline van Oosten de Boer and Milo Vermeulen, two people in the Netherlands running a site about American television. The rules were set at the start and most of them were about restraint: link outward instead of pasting, and keep the permanently unwinnable arguments off the front page. USA Today gave it one sentence a month after launch. By 2003 it was being named as one of the two Buffy sites that mattered.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

Whedon admitted to reading it in late 2004. An account called joss had been created for him on 15 August that year, and his first post went up on 27 April 2005 to announce preview screenings of Serenity. From there it became the closest thing he had to an official channel without ever being one. He announced the end of his involvement with the Wonder Woman film there in early 2007, and Reuters and the Los Angeles Times sourced the story from a fan blog. During the writers' strike of 2007 and 2008 he posted his politics there and readers organized Fans4Writers off the back of it.

The load followed the attention. When Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog came out in 2008 the traffic took the site down for a day and forced a move off Pair to Media Temple. Entertainment Weekly named it one of the 100 Greatest Websites in December 2007 and put it eighth on a list of essential fansites the following May. Dark Horse released images of a Buffy tarot deck through it. Comic editors read the threads to judge how a storyline had gone over, and academics cited individual posts, permalinks and all, in the Buffy studies journal Slayage.

~ the actual end ~

On 20 August 2017 Kai Cole, Whedon's ex-wife, published an essay in TheWrap describing their marriage and accusing him of hypocrisy about the feminism his name had come to stand for. The next day the moderators posted that Whedonesque would take no more submissions. The closing note asked anyone who wanted to mark the occasion to donate to organizations treating complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which is what Cole had written about being treated for.

Van Oosten de Boer said afterward that she had been thinking about closing for about five years, and that is almost certainly true of anyone who has run a site for fifteen. It is also not the reason the date is 21 August. The site went read-only and sat there as an archive for three and a half more years.

On 11 February 2021 Charisma Carpenter described how she had been treated on the Buffy and Angel sets, and other cast members said publicly that they recognized it. Whedonesque came down entirely that day. A fansite has exactly one asset and it is the name at the top of the page, which means the whole thing is held by somebody who does not know it exists.

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