[ SECRET POST #3580 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3580 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 55 secrets from Secret Submission Post #512.
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.

Comments

John Carter of Mars

[thelesbianfuturist]

Anyone familiar with this series? Anyone else having a hard time reconciling the fact that he's the HERO with the fact that he was a soldier of the FUCKING south in the american civil war.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[philstar22]

Yes. I read the first couple of books right before the movie came out. I have to say that while I liked the movie, I wasn't a big fan of the books. I chalk him being a Confederate Soldier up a bit to the time it was written, but still yes it is hard to reconcile that with him being a hero. And honestly the books came across as way more racist than the movie. It seems they edited that stuff out for the adaption.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[thelesbianfuturist]

Yeah, the movie came across pretty racist too. The whole apache business at the start, the "Red men" thing. The white saviour thing. I want to like it but...

Re: John Carter of Mars

[philstar22]

I liked it in spite of those bits. The beginning did make me cringe, but once he got to Mars I mostly enjoyed it.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[(Anonymous)]

Just pretend he is played by Nathan Fillion, that seems to be enough to get most people to overlook that sort of unfortunate implications.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[philstar22]

Not every government vs. rebels fictional war represents the US Civil War. Considering who the Alience were and who the Browncoats were, I think that's a pretty faulty comparison for Firefly.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[thelesbianfuturist]

I think they're talking about how Mr Fillion boasted and laughed about having a famous slaver as an ancestor.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[philstar22]

Oh, I had not heard about that. Assumed they were talking about Firefly. That's really gross. Why would you be proud of that?

Re: John Carter of Mars

[(Anonymous)]

The thing with Firefly isn't that every government vs rebels fictional war represents the Civil War, it's that Firefly is a space Western and the Western genre is very explicitly a post-Civil War genre. If Firefly didn't go out of its way to invoke the Western genre, it would be a lot easier to say it's a faulty comparison. But when you're going out of your way to set up a Western thing, I think there's a lot less plausible deniability.

The other thing is that it's complicated to talk about "faulty comparisons" here. Is it a faulty comparison compared to the actual historical reality of the Confederacy and the USA? Absolutely. But it's a lot closer to the way that post-Civil War apologists for the Confederacy understood it, which is the worldview that shaped the Western as a genre. So again, I think it's more complicated than that.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[thelesbianfuturist]

This is sadly true.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[(Anonymous)]

It has been over for a hundred years, you're allowed to call it period character quirk at this point.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[thelesbianfuturist]

The book came out more than 50 years after the american civil war ended, tho. Even then, people knew that the south was just plain evil.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[(Anonymous)]

"knew that the south was just plain evil."

What?

Re: John Carter of Mars

[thelesbianfuturist]

Even as little as 50 years after the south was crushed, it was publically acknowledged that slavery and everything the south stood for was abhorrent.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[(Anonymous)]

I read all of them when I was a kid and no, it doesn't bother me. It's not like all southeners were bad guys, just regular soldiers, and considering how old those books are, I'm not holding them up to the modern standards.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[thelesbianfuturist]

Not all southerners were bad, no, but all southern soldiers were. They were literally fighting for the right to enslave PoC's.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[(Anonymous)]

Are you an idiot? That isn't how ANY war works. Even fucking Nazis were not all bad. Many were young teens conscripted or pressured into fighting.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[thelesbianfuturist]

"Even fucking Nazis were not all bad"

That's a thing you just typed.

Look at your life.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[(Anonymous)]

The fact that the political ends they were fighting for were unequivocally wrong does not mean that they were all bad people. I am as anti-Confederacy as anyone you're going to find, but that's just a ridiculous conclusion. People end up in armies for all kinds of reasons besides political conviction.

nayrt

[(Anonymous)]

Most southerners didn't even own slaves. Most Confederate soldiers were dirt poor themselves.

HELLO. I AM AN ACTUAL HISTORIAN.

[chardmonster]

YOU ARE KIND OF FULL OF SHIT.

I mean I know what you're doing, but feels ain't history. History is fucked up. The people of the past are not like us.

First, there was a draft in the South. On top of that was a lot of social pressure. You can't really get away with not joining up. I mean unless you want total social isolation and possibly getting beaten up. Most human beings aren't that strong.

Second, there's the fact that the North was literally invading the South. For some soldiers it was more about regional loyalty than loyalty to slavery as an ideal.

Third: I hate to say it but most of the North wasn't much better. Abolition only becomes really mainstream in the 1850s. A lot of people didn't think this was really a thing--and abolitionists crazy--until they read Uncle Tom's Cabin and got sad. And believing slavery was wrong did not mean they weren't horrible racists. Hell, there were Northern political movements specifically against ending slavery because freed slaves would take jobs.

If you want to hate someone, hate Confederate leadership causing all this fucked up death. But it makes no sense to hate Random 20 Year Old Who Died 150 Years Ago. Hate someone alive right now.

Re: HELLO. I AM AN ACTUAL HISTORIAN.

[(Anonymous)]

this. it's really easy for people today to say that they would have stuck by their principals and refused to participate in war while under duress, but the fact is that most people probably would have done it because there would have been severe consequences not just to them, but often to their families as well

Re: John Carter of Mars

[(Anonymous)]

Oh boy.

It's probably a mistake to understand John Carter of Mars as an isolated thing here, because it's really not an isolated thing. It was quite common to have heroic characters be former Confederate soldiers - to the point where having that as a background is more or less the norm in many period Westerns - but more than that, it fits into the much broader pattern of historical understanding and misunderstanding of the Civil War, and how the United States dealt with the aftermath of the Civil War. I don't think you can understand why it was so common to have ex-Confederate heroes without understanding it as part of, you know, the failure of Reconstruction and the invention of the Lost Cause mythology.

Is that a justification? No, of course not. The Lost Cause myth was historically wrong - just a bald-faced lie - and it was used to justify awful political ideologies and out-and-out racism. At the same time, I think if you're going to try to read historical fiction, you're inevitably going to come across terrible ideas and implications that are a reflection of their time in much the same way that the revisionist history of the Confederacy was part of the period when John Carter was written. And you have to decide how much of that shit you're willing to put up with, and it's a personal choice. But I would say that treating it as an isolated incident of wrongness is probably not productive, you know?

Anyway. Yeah, the US is really not very good at dealing with this shit.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[(Anonymous)]

I really liked your comment as a whole, but particularly this: "I don't think you can understand why it was so common to have ex-Confederate heroes without understanding it as part of, you know, the failure of Reconstruction and the invention of the Lost Cause mythology."

And YES to the fact that when reading older fiction, you definitely have to take into account the prevailing attitudes and opinions of the time. If you can't get past those parts of the story, then it's probably best to stick to contemporary fiction.

Re: John Carter of Mars

[(Anonymous)]

never read it but it sounds like you really don't like it so I would suggest you not reading it either