Joss Whedon and feminism

Let's keep talking about Joss Whedon today, I have mixed feelings about his work. Buffy and Angel are... not for me I think, I missed the boat on getting into those shows when they were new, and when I attempted rewatching them a couple years ago I was unimpressed to say the least and did not make more than halfway through a season before giving up.
There are those who would say I didn't give it enough time, and that season 2,3,4 5 or whatever is when it really gets good, to those I say phoey! I feel like a TV series is a large investment of time, and if it can't be interesting in the first few episodes, I have no obligation to keep trying until the creators get it right.
But I do leave room for personal taste on those ones.

My feelings are much less mixed on his more recent work, basically from Firefly to today, they are all pretty uniformly excellent, with the exception of Dollhouse, which pretty much creeped me out more than anything. Joss Whedon has elevated himself to a pretty unique level in the nerd community, making fun, witty shows with interesting characters and a reasonable level of depth, with the exception of the Avengers films, which are pure popcorn flicks and don't aspire to be anything more.

He gets a lot of props for writing strong female characters, and here is where he fails as a writer and where I must disagree with a lot of his fans, I think he's actually pretty bad at writing women, but not for the obvious reasons. They have the appearance of being strong and independent, but that is an illusion, he doesn't seem to be able to give his female characters any agency of their own, they never drive the plots.

Let's look at the crew of Serenity, Zoe, the second in command, is a good example, she is a tough as nails no nonsense character who can kick a lot of ass it's true, but ask yourself, exactly what does she do to drive the plot? What personal goals does she have? What episodes would be different if she was not there and her character replaced with "random dude with a gun"? Her main noteworthy traits are being married to the pilot, and obeying the captain. This doesn't make her a bad character, just not a particularly well rounded one, and this pattern repeats itself with the whole crew, Kaylee the engineer is basically there, the two situations where she drove a plot were trying to get Simon to date her, and getting mad at the captain when he scoffed at the idea of her in a dress.
Then there's River, the psychic kung-fu girl and creepy nerd fantasy, she is pursued by an oppressive government and is protected by her sometimes overbearing brother as well as the rest of the crew, she harbors powers that are not fully understood, but her contributions are limited to freaking out, and pulling psychic ninja powers out of her hat when the plot demands it. She never has agency of her own, only reacting to those pursuing or protecting her.

This pattern repeats itself in pretty much all of Whedon's work, hell, Black Widow in the Avengers follows it to perfection, strong, snarky, completely at the mercy of the actual drivers of the plot: Nick Fury in the first film, and Bruce Banner in the second.

They aren't bad characters exactly, you could say the same things about many of the male characters in his films, but virtually everybody with agency who sets goals and pushes the plot forward are males, while virtually every female character is reduced to this role which is essentially supporting, it isn't denigrating exactly, but the illusion of equality is just that.

I think Joss Whedon is someone who is still developing his relationship with feminism and the ideas it represents, by all I can find he thinks of himself as an ally but he hasn't quite gotten there as a writer of female characters

This is just a guys thoughts on the topic so make of it what you will, I certainly am not going to judge anybody for taking inspiration from these characters that I didn't see, and at least he seems to be trying, but I feel like he isn't quite there yet and the praise is not really deserved, at least on this issue.