Went to my uncles cabin in the woods for a few days to relax, he’s got the box set of the show and decided to give it a rewatch, was a pretty big fan in college. Got through like 3 episodes and shut it off.
Yes, Whedon is a creepy and maybe knowing that affecting my judgment, but honestly does feel like I’m noticing things my younger brain didn’t. A lot of the dialog seems overwritten, some of the “quirky” shit the characters do comes off more obnoxious than endearing, also the story is giving me weird AnCap vibes. I mean yeah the Alliance clearly is pretty evil but we never get much explanation as to what the Brown Coats political program is, why did they want to succeed? Them being confederate coded sure as shit doesn’t help.
Also, it almost leans TOO much into the whole western asethic sometimes, to the point I find it unbelievable. Okay, sure, humanity hastily colonized some planets and now some have regressed into SciFi Deadwood, I can dig that. But like, people on horses with cowboy hats seems a bit too comic for me.
Idk, just some random observations.
Edit: oh yeah and the intro song fucking sucks. That was something I thought even back when I liked the show.
my favorite part is how everyone speaks chinese patois/pidgin and chinese writing is everywhere but i can’t think of a single asian character
For some reason I thought Summer Glau was part Asian but I just looked it up and no she’s white. Weird cuz her character and her brother have an East Asian sounding last name so I assumed their character were supposed to be of mixed Asian heritage.
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WEIRD completely white wtf
According to Wikipedia
Now that I think about it, Simon is a book smart nerd who’s socially awkward and physically weak. River is a naive little girl who turns out to be a ninja Kung Fu master.
Both characters are written like lazy stereotypes of Asian people.
Speaks Chinese is a strong term for the pronunciation going on there. Couldn’t even get a language coach.
I know there are other good reasons to have non-horseshit cultural representation in shows, but if I’m enjoying something and they do this, all’s they gotta do is tell me it’s in the distant future and I can completely ignore how bad it is because of how much languages and especially lingos change over time
That would be fine if they didn’t also have extras yelling out in perfect cantonese.
I assume it’s because the Space KKKrakers genocided the Chinese but kept parts of the language, like how the US still has Native American place names.
Either that or the Chinese part of the system is the nice part and Chinese people wouldn’t be caught dead visiting the shitty American part the show takes place in.
The Chinese developed hyperspace travel and made the morally correct decision to leave the
s behind.Almost what the fascist clans did in the Battletech universe. Just said fuck to the space libs and peaced out into deep space.
Uh… that’s not how it went down in the battletech universe.
I can explain more when I get home, as the clans themselves are a hot mess when talking about the writing.
Apparently they were originally planning to cast an Asian actress as Kaylee but they changed their mind lmao
Cowboy bebop is a much better space western.
Cowboy bebop is a much better space western.
You’re right.
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spoiler
not sure if it matters but the movie explains that the reavers are Alliance colonists that got experimented on by the Alliance
I had never thought about Reavers in the context of the western allegory and now it makes complete sense to me why they probably felt the need to address it in the movie
I never got the impression the Reavers were meant as Native Americans. Tbf they barely show up in the original show.
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To be fair, if done well, the plot from the film used as material for more seasons of show could have drawn on the falsehood of the narratives as a major plot arc, rather than just tying up loose ends.
Joss Whedon, creator of the Firefly series and director of Serenity, has said of Reavers, “Every story needs a monster. In the stories of the old west it was the Apaches”.
Fucking Christ Joss.
Also why is your name Joss and not Josh? Wtf do you think you’re special?
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right, but that’s the myth pushed by the central planets of the alliance, not the true history of the reavers.
hegemonic discourses do be like that.
I may reluctantly agree with you there except I can’t help wonder if it was a much-later-than-the-show retcon tacked on by the movie.
Besides, would discourse about “savages” on the western frontier be more acceptable if someone wrote that smallpox-infected blankets made them evil that way?
oh come on. literally the movie was made to close a bunch of threads that were opened in the only season, which was cut off.
if you’re going to assume bad faith, go bigger.
just say that Captain Malcolm Reynolds was literally a double secret slaveowner and that the finale of the series after 12 seasons was originally going to be him assaulting his human property on his own private planet for 45 minutes to the tune of Dixie on a loop while shouting “Serenity Now!”
because who can say that isn’t what they had in mind all along??
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No need to blow up at me. I don’t know that much about the show and only speculated and was open to being wrong there.
I’m less interested in exploring it further after your post.
I’m less interested in exploring it further after your post
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen people pull this sanctimonious affect on you multiple times. He who fights monsters, etc.
Maybe.
I’m not sure how else to phrase what you call a “sanctimonious affect” when I really don’t want to further discuss it with someone that blew up on me before trying to continue the discussion in the same post.
I haven’t watched Firefly in quite a while, but I generally agree with your criticism. I think the western-ness could have been really interesting if the show had more to say about colonialism, but it doesn’t. The show makes fairly milquetoast observations about the west and does very little with them. They’re just a cool backdrop to Wheadon. Sci-fi as a genre is one of the few genres I do not think normal libs are capable of writing well. Sci-fi is based in rejecting the status quo, dreaming of a new, better future. Post-modernist irony has essentially ruined lib’s abilities to do this. They recognize the American war machine as awful, they recognize a million different issues in the world. But we’re widely met by snarky apathy on these subjects, where what’s wrong in the world is an unchangeable constant that we shouldn’t exert energy fighting against. Plus, being within the imperial core takes away from their ability to even percieve persecution. They can imagine vaguely dystopian future, but can’t imagine good enough backing to make the world anything more than a YA book like Divergent. All they make is a hellish world with very little resolve, with no real solutions. The lack of resolve can work, but libs generally don’t like it in their stories. I could get into signifiers at this point, but I don’t want to.
George Lucas is actually a good example of this. While I don’t think he’s a socialist, the rebellion fighters of the Star Wars universe were apparently modeled after the Vietnamese fighting American invasion. For all of the questionable implications made throughout the movies, one thing is clear. The imperialists are the bad guys, people fighting for self determination are the good guys. Even though the empire is almost an unstoppable force the rebels will pretty much never take down, Star Wars argues that fighting that hell is the resolve and it is worth it. True freedom in the Star Wars universe isn’t making peace with the unstoppable force, or just arbitrarily overthrowing it with good guys. It’s about fighting for your stake in the world around you. There is still a resolve here. There is still understanding of who would be on the bottom or top in the sci-fi realm
Let’s compare this to what I’d call bad lib sci-fi. Divergent is fucking ASS. People are arbitrarily split into 5 groups based on a single personality trait from birth, but there are some people who have all 5 personality traits and they’re DANGEROUS!!! It’s arbitrary sci-fi, there’s no world where this makes sense. Classes are completely arbitrary, almost ignored. Race is also ignored. In divergent, scifi becomes an aesthetic, a signifier of what it really is. It fundamentally misunderstands what sci-fi is at its heart and leans into what people think sci-fi is. I think this is why Wheadon moved onto Marvel
People are arbitrarily split into 5 groups
The Hunger Games and its consequences. That series is pretty good for YA and gets dangerously based at times, but it kickstarted a trend of fiction featuring arbitrarily segregated societies but not doing anything with them
I actually quite like Hunger Games as well. But God were the copies so bad. Divergent will always be one of the shittiest things I ever got tricked into reading.
It’s like the YA novel equivalent of what Final Fantasy VII did for JRPGs for a generation or two, everyone kept trying to copy it often without understanding what made it good
Or like the whole genre of YA “romance with a hot supernatural creature” novel (plus film adaptations!) that sprung up trying to recreate the success of Twilight
the sequels to the hunger games got worse though
It was a bit of a trope structure for just-add-water dystopias. the Uglies series was incredibly popular and, I’d argue, really popularized that idea in YA.
gets dangerously based at times,
Unfortunately, if I remember right, it tries to pull the “violent rebellion is as bad if not worse than fascism” card, and so naturally the protagonist turns against the rebellion at the very last second.
Assuming you’re referring to the ending,
spoiler
The revolution itself isn’t really portrayed as bad, just elements within it like Coin. Everything about her characterization screams deep state neolib ghoul, and I see Katniss’s assassination of her as recognition that prim and proper “rules based order” liberals are just as dangerous as more obviously evil fascists, and can’t be trusted
Someone here must be able to point me to a sci-fi where Earth’s socialist and capitalist nations expand out to the stars and then solidify as 2 or 3 competing intergalactic societies, written by a marxist, from the point of view of a citizen of the socialist sphere
anyone?
There is a comic book based on an unused spec script from aliens 3 that has this premise.
You should write it.
Idk if this is sarcastic or not but I’d be down to read a book like this.
Look up the table top RPG “Lancer”
Lancer’s pretty lib tbqh, even though it thinks it isn’t.
I don’t know enough about the lore to really say
Edit: actually I probably know more about the lore than most people but I’m curious your take on why it’s Lib
I’d have to read up on it a bit but I think some recent expansions to the lore address some of these points.
Not written by a marxist, but the TTRPG setting Transhuman Space, has essentially this within the Solar System. By 2100, advanced biotech and AI allow space colonization, with China dominating Mars and Weird Space AnCaps infesting the asteroid belt to do biological crimes. It manages to be fairly neutrally presented.
An example from the setting encyclopedia:
Nanosocialism
This was a political philosophy developed (under then name “information socialism”) by the Australian academic Kyle Porters in 2034. Originally from the left-anarchist tradition, Porters felt that the vision of a pure anarchosocialist society was unrealistic. Nevertheless, he observed that although modern civilization was utterly dependent on information technologies, the central notion of “intellectual property” often gave rise to significant injustice. He believed that only the state could properly reward innovation, while still distributing the benefits of such innovation fairly to all.
Infosocialism thus began with the premise that “information needs to be free,” but redefined freedom as the nationalization of intellectual property and its free distribution by the state. Thus, the government does not award patents, but subsidizes research and creative endeavor. This is less absurd when one imagines a “university” rather than “corporate” model of research and development.
Infosocialist doctrine failed to take hold in the hyperdeveloped nations and instead took root in less-developed nations, many of whom felt that they were being exploited by wealthier corporations’ locks on major genetic patents, nanotechnology designs, and software systems. Infosocialism – later known as nanosocialism – gained power in Peru, Indonesia, and Thailand.
One of the policies of nanosocialism was an end to the enforcement of international copyright agreements and trademarks. The sanctions that resulted provoked a backlash, and helped weld the nanosocialist countries into a tighter (and increasingly paranoid) bloc. This culminated in the Pacific War and the overthrow of nanosocialist governments in Vietnam and Thailand.
Despite that reverse, nanosocialism remains an important factor in world politics. There are infosocialist or nanosocialist parties and sympathizers in most nations. Although Thailand was forcibly separated in the aftermath of the Pacific War, nanosocialist strength is growing in South America and in India. At present, the situation is one of “cold war.” The issues that led to the Pacific War have not yet been resolved. Meanwhile, the world has seen its first outbreak of total war since 1945 – and most nations have become uncomfortably aware of how vulnerable they are to the destructive potential of the Fifth Wave.
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I don’t know about Firefly I never watched it but I’ll say my view of Trek also changed over the years, as I moved further left the glaring limitations and the world view portrayed by some of the writers(through some very questionable episodes) made me move from thinking TNG was FALGSC to understanding it is merely some good optimistic future based entirely on western liberal values.
The “dog whistles” people point out e.g Picard saying there is no money are just that, dog whistles at best, a full understanding of what communism actualy means would also lead to some very undesirable changes e.g
-The Earth government is just the UN and it is very much hand waved away, same with the “economy”. This wasn’t an issue until the whole shit with Picard series and the vineyard.
-The “military” is actualy in charge and people think its fine.
-The way the entire premise is human focused, obviously with rooted in the cold war mentality but it leads to some very silly stereotypes only DS9 realy managed to even begin to tackle properly(ferengi as more than capitalist troupe, Klingons are more than just “barbarians”).
There is more but yeah what you went through isn’t uncommon, for my take I still love Trek but I am very much aware of what went on behind the scenes and to be quite honest, the franchise is quite top heavy i.e a small percentage of extremely excellent episodes and a huge percentage of average to mediocre TV.
The Picard series was so bad it made me question if star Trek was ever good to begin with.
trek was very good in the 1990s except for a couple of the movies and some stinker episodes. grading on a curve it was incredibly good in the 1960s although some things are usually lost on modern audiences like the short skirts being a symbol of womens’ liberation at the time or how amazingly progressive the diversity of the cast was. Dr. King famously, among trekkies, convinced Nichelle Nichols not to quit the show.
enterprise was trash, ruined by production burnout and 9/11. nemesis is worse than the star wars holiday special. the abrams/kurtzman movies are awful and everything that those pieces of shit and their friends touch is awful which is why discovery and picard are like that.
Watching TOS for the first time just now and (as you say, grading on a curve) I’m greatly enjoying it.
Even though I frequently disagree completely with the cast, the way that they’re able to discuss alternate philosophies, change their minds through experience, and admit to being unhappy when their solution is imperfect - it shouldn’t come across as refreshing as it does.
And it’s just fun whenever Spock goes smash and starts crumpling props.
Oh yeah definitely. I hate Abrams and kurtzman so much I can not properly express my hatred for them in this brief moment. I had mentioned in this thread that strange new worlds reminded me of what I loved about the earlier series and pulled me out of my trek slump, even though it is very far away from being the best star trek. I’m probably just going to watch the old ones and pretend that the new stuff doesn’t exist from now on.
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It’s like people who told me mandalorian season 2 was good because Luke shows up at the end. I don’t fucking care about your CGI nostalgia bullshit, that makes it even worse not any better!
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I pulled myself out of the Star Trek slump after Strange new worlds. SNW isn’t great but it is good enough to convince me that there is something good in there and there are still some people out there who can see it too (sometimes).
-The “military” is actualy in charge and people think its fine.
it’s literally not the military. the federation president was some alien guy. you’re stuck in a 20th century mindset.
Starfleet is among several other things a sort of paramilitary reserves. the primary function of it is not military but when a hostile external force tries to start shit they already have the organizing and logistics to engage on that level. They are not professional warfighters nor do they seek to be.
There’s not much real world equivalent to this but we could imagine the primary missions of the US military being NOAA, NASA, search and rescue, and the corps of engineers i.e. doing science and maybe building things rather than killing brown children and serving capital. It starts to not look like “the military” pretty quick the same way post-abolition “prisons” would still exist because you’ve got to protect society from serial killers, but that “prison” would be so different from what we have now that calling it with the same term is misleading as fuck.
I’m well aware of the in-universe justifications of Starfleet’s function, that is part of the problem but not the main issue though there were very notable exceptions to this, DS9 Homefront is an attempted coup by the
militaryscience and peace loving civilian organization.Imagine working for NASA and you’re court martialed because you looked at the director funny and didn’t follow your “orders”.
NASA did not call the Space shuttle craft “USS Columbia”. Small things like that requires suspension of disbelief and they all add up. In the real world we know why, its all because of early TOS lore wasn’t as developed and it actualy was very much based on “USA in Space” theme of the cold war and 50s sci-fi, almost everything we think of the Federation today was established later specially on TNG.
I love that, just like I love competence porn. But it is sure damn convenient everything is in English and every ship is USS something isn’t it? Again it is peak liberalism to think everyone is just going to forget the actual meaning of “USS Enterprise” when you see it, specially the Vietnamese/Chinese/Koreans lol.
Again in-universe, I’d love it, just press a magic button and everything is perfect, we have space communism*(terms and conditions apply). Trek is comfort food and its ok. But I know exactly what they did and why and it is hard to completely ignore.
What do you mean by very undesirable changes?
The romantization of the military is an easy one. If you remove the entire naval background and influence it loses a lot/most of its character. Trek is defined by the bridge crew, the military hierarchy etc.
In more realistic sci-fi space missions and space craft would not necessarily follow those traditions.
The River character and all of that creepy command-language stuff about her aged like milk, especially now that I’m aware of what a sex pest creep Whedon is.
No but bro what if the dubiously aged socially vulnerable girl character was like, also a sexy blank assassin agent 47 manchurian killbot, but in a way that removes even the flimsiest pretext of her skills granting her agency?
River seemed outright plucked from Joss Whedon’s personal masturbatory fantasies, which made her “born yesterday” style emotional and developmental issues real fucking sus.
There was apparently also supposed to be something really bad planned for Inara
CW: SA
she was to have a scene where the Reavers would gang rape her, but they’d die because she’d injected herself with an anti-rape serum or something
:cringe: It really is better that there was never a second season.
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what the hell lmao, i guess sometimes typecast assholes are just not acting
The show really jumped the shark and screwed the pooch not having Mal fling him into space.
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Yeah, I knew that from the beginning but kinda wrote it off as part of the whole western thing, since having a Southern Vet of the civil war who’s all bitter about losing is a bit of a trope in that genre. Probably would have worked better if the lore of the show did a better job of explaining what their whole deal was rather ran just being generic “underdogs”, so the Confederate coding just comes off as problematic.
I prefer the similar plot of Farscape, but instead of space confederates being the protagonists, it’s a bunch of minority alien convicts fighting a colonial empire and instigating revolution. Which is really just the plot of basically every space thing since Star Wars.
That’s my problem with how little is shown of the Alliance, making a faction all grey all day is not a substitute for showing me why it’s bad
I mean, they were trying to genetically engineer psycho super soldiers using kidnapped girls, and had creepy CIA looking dudes with radiations death sticks. So they’re probably pretty evil, but the only reason the Browncoats give for trying to succeed from them is “muh big guberment trying to get in our business”. Get in your business for what? Cuz the guys who inspired you didn’t like the guberment getting in their business about owning slaves. Didn’t even mention the death stick secret police.
Yeah, the Alliance is basically supposed to be cyberpunk white dude China and built from a bunch of classic “the US literally did/tried to do this and the Soviets verifiably did not, but we’re gonna write it as the Soviets doing it” tropes, while the secessionists were just like “yeah I can’t handle all their rules you know *licks lips inappropriately* had to come out here for some real freedom you know *lips licks some more, for longer* heh heh heh you know what I’m talking about,” Heinleinian (how the fuck is “Heinleinian” an actual word that spellcheck accepts) frontiersmen.
“a civil war” is not the same as “the civil war”
Yeah this is like saying paradise lost is confederate apoligia
It was an extremely “normie” friendly SciFi show that got a cult following because it ended too soon. It was in the vein of Lexx and Farscape but not a horny isekai.
Oooh, gotta rewatch Lexx, I def missed some episodes
I enjoyed it a lot in a recent rewatch, but it’s definitely a “brain switched off” sort of show for me. Had fun while watching, but didn’t find much of substance to sit and think about afterward. The “world building” was really just a backdrop for the characters. But I think that’s OK sometimes. The lack of Asian characters was IMO the show’s biggest flaw.
It will always mess with my brain that the DVD subtitles always just said “speaks galactic language” when people speak Mandarin.
We call that “foreshadowing”
Last time I watched it i found it underwhelming.
it’s good that it got cancelled, really
this is the first time i have ever seen this opinion expressed online. huge turning point for the culture.
Couldn’t really get into it the first time around tbh, and I’ve enjoyed a lot of different space-themed stuff
Same. I’ve always felt it was overrated. I don’t have any particular issue I could point to. I just thought it wasn’t that good. I didn’t watch it when it aired though, I saw it a few years later with a roommate so maybe that’s part of it
Yeah I just couldn’t see what the fuss was all about. I’d rather rewatch Nickelodeon’s Space Cases lol, they at least did some relevant social critique on what it’s like to be part of a formerly enslaved population.
I think the weirdest thing about Firefly was that the characters are slinging around Chinese phrases, but there’s not one Asian character in sight. Also thought it was weird that the people in the outer territories are apparently all voracious cannibals, seemed kind of problematic in a racializing kind of way.
Eventually I put two and two together and realized that’s where they are, Whedon decided that’s where all the Chinese people went, they’re the barbarians in his universe lol
You’re the first person I’ve seen mention Space Cases. That was a cool but really freaky show when I was a small child and hardly anyone else I talk to ever watched it.
Sup fellow space case. I think people don’t remember it because it never occupied a prime slot with Secrets of the Hidden Temple and it probably came off as Fardscape for kids. I enjoyed it when it came on though! It was unique and the characters were played in earnest, i enjoyed it while I was in middle school / early high school, wonder what it would be like watching it today.
Its really old at this point, I thought it was sooooo cool when I was a teen? Im 31 now. I dont want to sound like an old person but there just wasnt as many entertaining shows back then, maybe the standards were a lot lower. Plus its cancellation really boosted it in the lore, so to speak.
Great world building (aside from the garbage Confederate cosplay), but the show didn’t know what to do with the setting and as a result meandered for most episodes
It would probably get canceled today for being “pro-Chinese”
I watch it like 5 years ago and really liked. No idea if it “holds up” but but I remember it being fun.
The problem with firefly is that even if it is lame now it never had a chance to be enduring because it chose a mishmash of western tropes rather than picking one western type and sticking to it.
The intro slaps. And it’s a space western, so I don’t see how it could lean too much into it.
Some of it just came off bit goofy to me. I get it’s the space west but you got people dressed up like they’re going to one of those western theme parks.
I think that’s the budget they had showing through. Like TOS going to WW2 or gangster planet a couple times because they had those props to work with.
Yeah, the alliance armor is reused from Starship Troopers. It’s not like they had the budget to create hundreds of custom outfits, and there aren’t a whole lot of good looking sci-fi costumes sitting around that would have worked for the show.
Spacesuits they had were pretty good
