I’m rewatching inuyasha and have no one to talk to about the fact that Kagura should have lived and by doing so the entire Sessh/Rin weirdness could have been completely avoided. Like I have trouble picturing Kagura pregnant but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen and half the time in fairy tales of all locales the kids pop out of the dad’s migraine or some shit and honestly they’d also make amazing godparents (or whatever the equivalent is) to a half dozen adopted mortals and their bloodlines. I’m mad about it and commenting on ao3 fics for this fandom is like screaming into the void.
As much as I enjoyed Firefly, the universe created was going to get very complicated and bad if it had been let to develop for the next few years.
They are going to have to explain a lot to justify that Confederate veterans deserved to be the heroes and I don’t think that Joss Whedon was up to that task.
The brown
shirtscoats?? I think the point was they weren’t actually the good guys. The show kinda hits you over the head with that. Mal (which literally means bad) is the main character who goes out of his way to associate with other bad people, and do bad things. The show paints the Alliance as evil but if anything they’re just authoritarian and they’re up to some shady shit but 90% of the interactions with the alliance, Mal is actively breaking the law and has a reason to be afraid of them other than the alliance being evil.The Alliance is a simple allegory for the US. The brown coats an obvious allegory for the Confederacy which happened to spawn a bunch of old West outlaws that we turned in to folk heroes. The entire James Younger gang were confederate soldiers or their siblings.
The show also hits viewers over the head that there are morals that the crew won’t cross, like stealing medicine from that town. It is also in the opening song that, because of the war and his service, Mal can’t exactly settle down and be a good law abiding citizen, so he takes jobs of dubious legality since they pay better.
Mal is the same kind of bad that Han Solo was painted as in Star Wars. He’s not a nice guy, but more neutral than evil and will perform good acts at times.
The show also played up the Alliance as being more absolutely evil because it had to in order to justify Mal.
There is an unreliable narrator happening here. The source of most of the information about the Alliance is from the crew. Notably, Shepard and Inara do not share those views. Zoe and Mal have very strong opinions about the alliance and the Doctor and River help feed that narrative. But the things they don’t say out loud paint a very different picture. I think had the show gone on, the brown coats would gradually have become another villain and Mal would have had to contend with the reality of who he was fighting for.
especially when it was giving southern us more than other types of wars for independence
There’s no indication that slavery was a factor, only political self-determination
…that phrasing is not helpful to this argument…
We’re not told much about the Independant Planets, certainly nothing suggests that they themselves did anything wrong (other than secede). You seem to have a problem with their superficial resemblence of the confederacy.
Mal and his crew are thieves and smugglers, not pirates or murderers. The ‘Mal is latin for bad’ line another commenter mentioned was a red herring in an episode. They aren’t evil people intent on subjugation.
Firefly’s lost-cause origins are like A New Hope’s allegory for Vietnam, in that the author might’ve intended it, but it is nnnot in the text. Honestly neither is the trans angle on The Matrix. Lana and whatsherface can say it’s about gender, but unless you are explicitly told that (and also previously educated on the subject) there is the barest shadow of that inspiration.
Universally identifiable villainy is difficult to square with specific struggles. The Last Jedi is an anarchist critique of Star Wars and even general leftists Do Not Get It.
Firefly’s lost-cause origins are absolutely baked into text from the opening scene in how the main characters interact with others. The main difference between the lost cause in Firefly and the lost cause in real life is that we don’t really get to see what the lost cause in Firefly looks like. There is the common “Union bad” trope, but we don’t exactly see what cause Mal was fighting for.
I’m not even going to address the other stuff since I’m just discussing Firefly and how other media use their themes has no bearing on how Firefly uses its themes.
We know the Alliance are patronizing colonial aggressors - and the Civil War is about the only context where that cannot be the US government.
Listen. In the words of Gary Brannan, I am thick as mince. When someone pointed out years later that Arrested Development was about the Bush dynasty, I spent several straight minutes going ‘oh my god, and the thing with-- oh my god.’ But even contemporaneously, people said Firefly was about the Confederacy, and all I could think was, no it isn’t.
Firefly’s backstory is that the Alliance looked at every inhabited planet and went “Mine.” There’s a lot of people who could portray the US that way. The South is not eligible. The Confederacy seceded from an established union over their own intolerable bigotry, after decades of violently asserting that bigotry within other states. Lincoln, a compromise progressive whose policy on slavery was just that new states couldn’t do it, insisted the reason doesn’t even matter; you can’t just leave. They flipped their shit before he was even in office and were firing on the US army within three months.
When fiction makes those assholes the protagonists by changing all of the details, it is no longer about that war.
Unless you subscribe to the death of the author. Joss Whedon said he was inspired to write Firefly based on post Civil War stories in context of confederate soldiers moving out west.
There was a unified colonization of that solar system by several Earth nations including the United States and China. That unified group settled the various habitable worlds in system. Because of that initial unifying colonization group, it is unclear if the Alliance has claim from the initial colonization efforts for the entire system or not. However, given that the war started after negotiations between the two parties, it is possible that that it was assumed that the Alliance has justified claims to all planets and that is why the other planets had to declare independence. After all, why declare independence from a country you’re already independent from?
Inspiration doesn’t mean it’s in the text. 50 Shades Of Gray started as Twilight fanfic, but does not contain vampires. I assume.
If we’re going from word choice, why is the end of the war called Unification Day, and not Reunification Day?
Even in your reading, the Union did not have a claim to Confederate states; those states had long since joined the Union. Territories fighting to maintain independence is the story of that Union versus England, not the story of the South versus the North.
So now you’re going to misrepresent the American War of Independence?
British colonies were at least as separate from Britain itself as you’re saying these planets were. No one would say the United Kingdom included Scotland, Wales, and Massachusetts. The British army was seen as an occupying force by the colonists.
By contrast the United States is a federation of co-equal governments which joined voluntarily. Even if there’s some intense footnotes on the word “voluntarily.”
The vibe in Firefly is that most backwater planets were politely disinterested in deepening their relation with the more-industrial core worlds, and then things escalated. Saying the Alliance was more of an absentee landlord than a foreign conqueror doesn’t change how both differ dramatically from half of a country trying to set up its own federal government with blackjack and hookers. And slaves.
What was the French and Indian War about?