fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2715 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2715 ⌋

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

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02.

[Tales of Innocence]

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03.

[Transamerica]

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04.

[Final Fantasy VIII]

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05.

[Interview with the Vampire]

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06.

[Andrew Lloyd Webber]

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07.

[Critical Miss]

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08.

[Great British Menu/Emily Watkins]

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09.

[Mike Malinin, Goo Goo Dolls]

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10.

[Pacific Rim]

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11.

[Star Trek TNG]

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12.

[Homestuck]

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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

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.

[ SECRET POST #2715 ]

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