“What would be considered”. Sorry
I help out with the youth group at church and one of the students is in the 10th grade and he is pretty retro (loves movies and tv shows from the 80s and 90s). He used to be a big Star Wars fan and lost interest due to "disney making it a princess product" as he puts it. He was asking me the other day how did all this happen or when did it start, and I couldn't pinpoint an exact person who started this but had some ideas.
What did start it all? I know Ghostbusters 2016 seems to be the first movie to actively be made to piss off fans (when the original director was trying to do Ghostbusters 3 and they screwed him over). With Star Wars, if they wanted to appeal to actual women who were fans they could've used Jaina Solo or Mara Jade.
Was it in gaming? I remember when gaming magazines seemed to have constant articles about women in gaming or about the "abuse" they received online as if they have never heard the language you hear where guys get together and hang out.
Comic books? I mean they literally made comics of women sitting around the table discussing feelings and as Eric July said "modern comics are made for 14 year old girls on tumblr who don't read comics"
So honestly who is patient zero or who is to blame?
Indeed. The first season of Buffy is a bit rough in some respects, just because it was new and probably a bit under budget, but season 2 is where it picks up and finds its style.
And there's a fair bit of good stuff to draw from the overall series. Both fun and a little insightful as it relates to how people try to deal with a lot of things they go through in life.
The same is true of Angel, but while Buffy touches on general topics and some specific to women, Angel touches more on challenges men might face in life. Pre-Clownworld of course. I'd even say that it touched on racial issues in some honest and interesting ways without being heavy handed about it. It does have one season that is widely lauded as having some of the weirdest worst plot twists imaginable, but in hindsight I still find that season fairly watchable.
This is generally pretty true for a lot of shows. The first season or two is a lot rougher in hind sight because you don't have the character history yet, etc, and the writers need to really learn to nail it.
Much like TNG, the first 2 seasons were rough (and there were some mediocre episodes after), but generally the writing quality picked way up and so did the actors as they settled into their roles.
Yeah, it is pretty typical. I guess I usually say it specifically because of how different shows and their first seasons stand out in really different kinds of ways.
For some it's because they're weirdly retro, others it's because they're very grounded and haven't picked up a formulaic approach, and for some it's a situation where later plots diverge so drastically from early ones.
With Angel though, I generally didn't feel like its first season was all that rough. It was maybe a little more toned down or smaller in plot scale, but it generally didn't stand out like a sore thumb like most first seasons do. Likely because it was a spinoff, so there was at least some familiarity, flow, and funding already established.