Godwinning all over the Firefly reboot

[sabotabby]

I feel guilty every time I post about something shallow and trivial. However, I enjoy shitposting and we could all use the distraction. The way I distract myself is being spicy in fannish communities.

If you have emotional attachments to a certain cancelled sci-fi show and its creator, skip this post.

Still with me? Okay.

So I want to propose a new TV show for you. It's set IN SPACE in the far-flung future, think gritty space dystopia, think found family, think QUIPS and BANTER and BIG DAMN HEROES. 

Our heroes are the crew of a spaceship. They dress in snappy black and silver uniforms. They're all played by white guys and women, most with blond hair, all of them extremely fit and attractive. They have a cool logo that looks great on merch. Their ships are very cool looking and the best in the galaxy. They stand up for the common man. 

They are fighting a snivelly and sinister enemy, a vast galactic conspiracy that is secretly pulling the strings behind every bad guy of the week. Maybe they turn out to be, IDK, some kind of lizard alien or something.

By the way in case you're getting ideas about historical analogies here, I should make it clear that the first officer on the heroes' ship is a Jewish woman and the heroes don't commit any genocides on screen. In fact, one of them has a speech about how violence is bad in the first episode! They are shown to be very against war crimes in fact, it's the antagonists who are doing all the war crimes.

Now, a poll:

Poll #34385 Which would be less bad?

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 18

View Respondents

Which would be better, if this show concept HAD to exist?

View Answers

Depicting the protagonists doing war crimes
10 (55.6%)

Not depicting the protagonists doing war crimes
8 (44.4%)

Comments

[sovay]

Sorry, got distracted by the mention of war crimes.

(I am not sure I know enough about Firefly to engage in appropriately spicy discourse beyond the premise being very Lost Cause in Space.)

[sabotabby]

To be clear, I have no problem with depicting fictional war criminals doing war crimes! I loved Babylon 5.

The premise is exactly Lost Cause In Space, except of course it's the kind of Lost Cause mythology that suggests that the Confederates were good and not racist at all. Which I think is worse, personally, than portraying Confederates being racist.

[gingicat]

That is almost exactly what Minoanmiss said about it.

In better creative hands it could have been more like the French Resistance. It was certainly very Wild West.

[sovay]

To be clear, I have no problem with depicting fictional war criminals doing war crimes! I loved Babylon 5.

Hence thinking of you for that post!

The premise is exactly Lost Cause In Space, except of course it's the kind of Lost Cause mythology that suggests that the Confederates were good and not racist at all.

I thought the Confederacy doing no wrong was part and parcel of the mythos, but if Firefly leans especially hard into it, whoopee. By which I mean bleh.

[kore]

The hero stands in front of the ship and intones "We will rise again" iirc. Ughghgh.

[brittdreams]

Another B5 fan in my life? How did I not know this about you??

[kore]

I was thinking of B5 in this context and it's interesting that of the four mains who do commit war crimes, the most repentant are the most Other-looking -- G'Kar and Londo -- while Delenn I think never fully reveals what she did (could be wrong) and Sheridan seems the least repentant. (Then again I liked Sheridan the least of the core four, lol.)

[yarrowkat]

Firefly is so deeply and totally a Space Western that i couldn't take any of it seriously. i was too busy critiquing the low-budget settings, some of which i even recognized as places on earth i have been to. (not just on earth! in california and southern Arizona! which is... not much of an alien world, really. even when you add houseplants to it. or a lot of bamboo. i get SO TIRED of people looking at the desert and going "this is an alien world because i personally have never seen it!")

anyway, this was upsetting to people in my general vicinity who want me to feel the same way they feel about television and are thus doomed to eternal disappointment.

i understand the reboot is going to be animated? is that a correct understanding? i imagine we'll eventually watch it out of morbid curiousity if nothing else.

[dewline]

There's lots of world-building gaps to fill, to be sure. One way and another. The critics - inside and outside the fandom - have compiled lists. Sabs isn't wrong to look at the contradiction at the heart.

[sabotabby]

It's going to be animated, which means I won't even pirate it, and I pirated the Melania movie.

[sovay]

i get SO TIRED of people looking at the desert and going "this is an alien world because i personally have never seen it!"

BUT CACTUS.

(On my mind recently because because my mother who grew up primarily in the American South- and Midwest and has never eaten a dragonfruit in her life correctly identified it as a cactus fruit from appearance alone, its Asian labels in the supermarket notwithstanding. She is climatically designed for desert and has lived for almost the last fifty years in New England. She's still wearing so many layers right now.)

[kore]

As someone who grew up in California, OG Trek is hilarious in that respect too. My dad used to point out when Vasquez Rocks was onscreen.

[conuly]

I haven't actually read The Iron Dream, and don't intend to, but I have read about how willfully obtuse people can be when they don't want to get the point.

So on the whole, I don't think it matters if they do war crimes or not. Actually, television is full of war crimes - don't think I've forgotten how eager post 9/11 TV was to tell us all how effective torture is if you really have to do it - so the existence of those war crimes wouldn't even be noted as war crimes unless they were really egregious, I bet.

(I was going to link to the Ursula Le Guin review at archive.org as well, but archive.org is down so welp.)

[sabotabby]

Ugh, yeah, good point. If the logo was cool enough and the lead charming enough, it'd have its apologists.

[greylock]

How have I never seen that over? It's wild.
(It also looks exactly like the cover dress from the Star Trek novels of the day).

I'd almost be tempted to buy it, but all the Spinrad books I've read have been dull. Even Bug Jack Barron. I can't remember anything "shocking" (or any explicit sex), but in the Thatcher years they did get vexed a lot.

[greylock]

Not being American (or American adjacent), I've never quite bought into the''Lost Cause in Spaaace' narrative as much as some, can't deny it's at least there, but I am one of the few people who was interested in the planned Confderancy alt history TV show..... so what do i know?


[Also, it's not a reboot? IIRC, it's a mid-quel between the show and movie.]

And as we know, prosecuting for war crimes is woke! Lethal lethality not bent-wristing gaylaity... or whatever Alpha Man said.

[sabotabby]

I'm not American either, but it's very explicit, and Whedon said that his inspiration was a book about the American Civil War. (The book sounds...fine? It's one of those "humanizing soldiers on both sides" but seems to be generally pro-Union.) Since there's really no way to imagine it as Alliance=Confederacy and Browncoats=Union, and he also talked about writing it from the point of view of the losing side, you have to conclude that the Browncoats are the Confederacy. I think you also have to view the Reavers as Indigenous peoples, but people get even more angry when I say that.

[dissectionist]

I don’t know anything about Firefly but it seems to me like if you’re trying to suggest your protagonists (Jewish or otherwise) are good people, then yeah, don’t have them be doing war crimes. Shouldn’t war crimes be an automatic disqualification for being seen as good?

[sabotabby]

Well, here's the thing about Firefly. The good guys (Browncoats) are modelled after the Confederates fairly explicitly, while the bad guys (Alliance) are modelled after the Union. But this is a fictional show where the Confederate analogues never did anything wrong and the war was fought over states planetary rights rather than slavery. To prove how not-racist they are, the second in command is a Black woman.

Only, I think it is vastly worse to have a show where the Confederates are shown as good guys who don't believe in slavery than one where the Confederates are shown to believe in slavery, because there is a real-life belief among most Americans that slavery wasn't a big factor in the Civil War and that both sides had very fine people on it.

That's why I bring up the Nazi analogy. If you have characters who look like Nazis, sound like Nazis, and spout off the kinds of things that Nazis say when asked to defend their ideology, you should probably portray them doing the things that the historical Nazis actually did, rather than pretend that the Holocaust never happened and stick in a Jewish character just to show how not-antisemitic they are.

Or you could, idk, not base fictional characters on Confederates and Nazis, that was also always an option.

[ethelmay]

I am reminded of the Nazi-planet episode on Star Trek, where an apparently well-meaning guy (the script, I think, wants us to take him at face value, but I find that impossible) thought he could do Good Parts Version Nazis and it didn't work.

[sabotabby]

Hah it's been so long since I've seen that. TOS really raided all the other shows' costume departments and built their plots around it, didn't they?

[lynnenne]

Isn’t Gina Torres non-white? My understanding is that she’s African-Cuban, but I could be wrong.

I never got the rabid fandom around Firefly. The stories never interested me and Nathan Fillion drives me up the wall. I don’t remember any specific war crimes but I watched it so long ago that I don’t remember a damn thing. It sounds about right for Whedon’s general levels of hypocrisy.

[sabotabby]

So my objection is that they don't do war crimes on the show, and if they are Confederates, they should. The ones doing the war crimes are based off the Union. (Which, to be fair, also did war crimes! And also was racist! But they were the less bad side because they were fighting to abolish slavery.) It's a bad thing that the show made the Confederates the good guys and tried to whitewash this by casting Gina Torres.

[springheel_jack]

There are Actual Lost Causes, though. Just not that one.

I'm a little unclear on the premise of the thought experiment. Are these people on the space ship the government? Is this like Star Trek, like in those episodes where the butt bugs try to take over Starfleet? Do they actually do war crimes, and we just don't see it?

[sabotabby]

So, in Firefly, our heroes don't do anything wrong, despite being based on the Confederacy. The thought experiment is basically: What if instead of basing our heroes on the Confederacy, we based them very obviously on Nazis, only in our fictional universe, Nazis didn't do any war crimes, weren't racists, and were big damn heroes? I feel like most people would recognize this as bad, so I don't know why Firefly keeps getting a pass.