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Nathan Fillion Wrote the Foreword to a Whedon Biography, and It's a Beautiful Fanboy Tribute

By Vivian Kane | Celebrity | August 4, 2014 |

By Vivian Kane | Celebrity | August 4, 2014 |



Are you aware that an official biography of Joss Whedon is currently available, just sitting on a shelf in a bookstore or a lonely Amazon warehouse, waiting for you to read it? Well, it is. Joss Whedon: The Biography, written by a journalist and fan named Amy Pascale, went on sale August 1st. Reviews have been mixed, but the foreword, written by Nathan Fillion, is a beautiful tribute to a man who can tell the sh*t out of a story.

Foreword
By Nathan Fillion

My generation, we were kind of raised on the super-cool, “I can handle anything” with a gun in his hand hero. Any situation you throw at him, he can handle it — with catchphrases. It was very cool.

But Joss Whedon’s version of a hero doesn’t always win. He loses more than he wins, and when he wins, the victories are tiny, but he takes ‘em. “That’s a victory! I call that a victory!” It’s a tiny victory — he takes it, and that’s what he walks away with. And that’s something I can actually relate to.

A friend of mine once told me that what he finds so satisfying about Joss Whedon is his way of telling stories. As a society, we are incredibly story literate: We know story.

He said, “Joss Whedon will give you a story twist. But instead of twisting it to the story tradition that we know, he twists it and says, ‘That’s what happens in stories. This is what happens in real life. This is how real life went.’”

I described Joss to a friend as we were on our way over to his house for a party. And she’s heard me tell stories over the years about this fellow. We went to his house, we had a great time, and on the way home, she said, “You know, I got to say, from your description of the kind of guy this guy is, and from all the stories you’ve told me — I expected him to be six two, chiseled jaw, long, wavy golden hair and bright blue eyes and gleaming teeth, and just chesty and …” The guy, she said, “when you describe him, he’s so heroic.”

And yeah, he is. He’s heroic like that.

The full foreword is available at USA Today, and the book is available through Chicago Review Press.