fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2715 ]

[ SECRET POST #2715 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2715 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

__________________________________________________

02.

[Tales of Innocence]

__________________________________________________

03.

[Transamerica]

__________________________________________________

04.

[Final Fantasy VIII]

__________________________________________________

05.

[Interview with the Vampire]

__________________________________________________

06.

[Andrew Lloyd Webber]

__________________________________________________

07.

[Critical Miss]

__________________________________________________

08.

[Great British Menu/Emily Watkins]

__________________________________________________

09.

[Mike Malinin, Goo Goo Dolls]

__________________________________________________

10.

[Pacific Rim]

__________________________________________________

11.

[Star Trek TNG]

__________________________________________________

12.

[Homestuck]

__________________________________________________

13.

[The Man From Nowhere]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 058 secrets from Secret Submission Post #388.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I get annoyed with absurd, far-out accusations of popular series.

Like the Firefly hate, claims that Zoe was Captain Mal's black slave in this pro-Confederacy story and Joss Whedon has a dangerous sexual fetish for women with no shoes or stuff like that.

It's like, hate things as you will, but why do you have to justify your hate with crazy claims?

ugh I know we just did this argument like a week ago, so I won't get into it too much.

But the claim that Zoe was Captain Mal's black slave, and the claim that the Independents as presented in the show are a fairly direct stand-in for the Confederacy, are very different claims in terms of how ridiculous they are. As in, the first one is pretty ridiculous (although I can see where people are coming from), and the second one is not ridiculous at all even if you don't agree with it.

Not to start a fight or anything. It's cool, do what you want to do, I'm glad that you enjoy Firefly, you don't have to agree with me or anything, feel free to think I am wrong/crazy. I just don't think it's a ridiculous claim.

I think the Browncoats/Confederacy thing relies a fair bit on an excessively romantic view of what the Confederacy was all about. Which doesn't mean the metaphor isn't there, just that it's one that's half-assed and ignorant of what went down at the Nashville Convention.

An excessively romantic view of what the Confederacy was all about is exactly what Confederate apologism was full of, though, especially the kind that ended up in a bunch of Westerns. It's a totally inaccurate view, yes, but that is how the Confederacy was represented in a lot of places after the war for a long, long time (and still to this day, some places).

the Independents are not the Confederacy. Literally not, taking place in the future and all. Yes, the show was going for Western atmosphere, particularly romanticized Wild West elements, and you might be able to make some very, very generalized parallels between the Independents and the Confederacy in a strictly political sense. In that they were, you know, trying to break away and failed. It might be somewhat less crazy to make that parallel, especially in regards to the Wild West genre, but it is crazy to call the show pro-Confederacy and say the Independents represent any of the horrible things that the Confederacy did. The show is blatantly anti-slavery, for example.

The way that Mal and other former Browncoats talk about the Independents is pretty much the way that ex-Confederates in Westerns talk about the Confederacy in Westerns. The similarity is not just because they both tried to break away. I mean, the idea that the Confederacy was about trying to preserve a way of life or preserve the right to live how one wanted without interference isn't exactly unheard of (even though it is massively historically wrong).

I don't think the Independents represent any of the horrible things the Confederacy did. The worst I would say is that in the episodes we actually saw Whedon uncritically replicated a lot of features of the Western, and that included recapitulating some apologist arguments about the Confederacy in another form. And fwiw I strongly suspect he would have complicated things more if the show had gone on. But, I mean, the parallels are there. It's not ridiculous to say that they're there, whether or not you think that's a fatal flaw for the show.

There's this weird revisionist history in American politics that the Confederacy wasn't about slavery, it was about states' rights. But that's revisionist hogwash because the Fire Eaters walked out of the Democratic caucus in April 1960 in protest of popular sovereignty in Kansas.

I am not endorsing that version history. It is massively wrong and the result of a pretty concerted political attempt to whitewash the Confederacy.

I am saying that the source material for Firefly - the genre of the Western - was part of that revisionist history. It was one of the sources used to promulgate it. And Whedon has, in adopting the tropes and settings of the genre, adopted a lot of things that look a whole lot like a lot of those revisionist arguments. It's the wrong way to understand the Confederacy, but it is the way that an ex-Confederate soldier might have tried to justify the Confederacy, or that someone writing a story about an ex-Confederate soldier might have done so.

I was explaining revisionism to the anon I responded to, not disagreeing with you.

Ah sorry. Mea culpa.

The reason I don't like the whole Independents = Confederacy thing is because it basically comes down to this: there's a Wild West motif and the Independents were trying to break away, therefore it's gotta be about the old South.

And that is ridiculous and incredibly weak, particularly considering that the West =/= the South.

The west =/= the south, no. But the archetypal Western is set in the period pretty much immediately after the Civil War and a lot of Western characters - usually heroes - are ex-Confederate soldiers. It's not just a Wild West motif, it's in the genre of Western. And that's a genre that has had a lot to do with the Civil War, historically, and the plots and characters of the Western tend to be associated with the Confederacy in pretty much the same way that the plots and characters of Firefly are associated with the Independents.

I'm not saying that the Independents are exactly Confederacy, or that Whedon is actually a Confederate apologist. But I think the parallels are there. I don't think it's ridiculous to say that.

The thing is, it seems intuitively obvious to me that Whedon wanted to have some fun with Western tropes, but he also wanted to take out the more fucked-up elements of them. Because it's fun to have terrifying sneak-attack cannibal savages who come out of nowhere, but it's fucked-up to pretend, as old Westerns did, that Native Americans fit that description. It's fun to have a bunch of crazy outlaws who were on the losing side of a war for independence, but it's really fucked-up when the noble lost cause they were fighting for is slavery, like it was in all those old Westerns.

So you do new versions of those narrative structures that divorce them from their awful associations, and everyone can just relax and have a good time with them, without hurting anyone.

Except, apparently, not.

honestly I'm pretty OK with that. I'm mostly just saying that the parallels exist, and it's not fundamentally ridiculous to point them out.

I think it would have been cool if he had done more to distance the two things, like he did with the Reavers, instead of having the arguments be so closely the same, and I suspect he might have done if the show had gone on. It's mostly just something that niggles at me, rather than something that prevents me from watching it. But it is there.

Zoe was Captain Mal's black slave

what

don't get me wrong; I can complain about Firefly all day (I love it, but it's far from perfect), but

what

that claim was made here not that long ago

I fully support everyone's right not to like Firefly. but the series has some of the craziest antifans ever.

I would like to see the original version of that claim, if you have a link handy.

mostly everyone I know who is into talking about Firefly is a "fan with complaints" rather than an anti-fan, so I'm not familiar with what true anti-fans have to say.

da, but google allecto- her Firefly rants are, well, she says that she's never seen a good relationship between a black woman and a white man, therefore Wash is abusing Zoe. I am not making this up.

It doesn't get better.

Is she the one that said that all sex between a man and a woman is automatically rape? :\

anon who asked in the first place

I haven't read all the way through the comments, but the reasoning usually goes like this:

-sex without clear consent is rape
-power imbalances fuck up consent in various ways
-intense and pervasive power imbalances between men and women are baked right into our society as it currently operates
-sex between men and women comes with an automatic dubcon warning until the power imbalances are fixed.

Yeah so basically the same reasons sex with children can never be consensual. So basically women are like children. Cool. Very feminist conclusion there.

Re: What fandom things are you tired of hearing people rant about?

(Anonymous) - 2014-06-10 05:11 (UTC) - Expand

apparently this writer is also a TERF, or was in 2012 when they stopped updating their website

D:

oh no!!!! but. . . but. . .wash/zoe is the best relationship of all time! D:

well I will put some bubble wrap around my poor heart and go check it out later this evening. thanks, anon!

Ok, wow. Set aside my Wash/Zoe stanning for a sec and went and looked at allecto's post, and wow. Wow! I haven't taken a trip down Anti-Pornography Lane in a long-ass time.

The thing about unhealthy interracial couples looks like it's a universalization of her own experience and family. which doesn't excuse it but -- if she'd said "I don't like Wash/Zoe because my grandfather treated my grandmother like shit and it makes it hard for me to enjoy fictional interracial relationships where the guy is a white dude," that would have been totally understandable! No one has to think Wash and Zoe are the best. But instead, it has to be Wash couldn't possibly really love Zoe because all white dudes are inherently the worst across space and time, which. . . I don't know. She reads his attraction to Zoe as being obviously dehumanizing objectification and so on.

I'm not going to ramble too much here (too late!) but that was really interesting. Toward the end allecto speculates about Joss Whedon's wife and how he treats her, based on Inara's role as a peacemaker on the ship. Then in the comments she asserts that she is sure Whedon rapes his wife on the regular, and she can tell because. . . (???????????)

Ok, I'm going to stop reporting on the thing you linked me to, but. This has been a fascinating hour, thank you!

.....

......

.........

... Even if you're a Whedon hater, that last paragraph - like - WHAT THEH HELL?!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only