Confederate HBOs new show

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-confederate-tweets-during-game-of-thrones-20170731-story.html

Whhooo boy... I don't know how long this thread will last given the... controversy surrounding the show so let's try to keep things civilized

I'm personally just going to wait and see how the show handles its subject matter before passing judgement.

I disagree with the wait and see approach, and here's why: https://black-to-the-bones.tumblr.com/post/163632346009/this-is-what-you-a-white-person-can-do-to

Ignoring all the controversy for a moment, at least this show appears to be better about the alternate history. I can't remember how many stories I've read where the Confederates conquered the Union and turned the whole continent into a slave nation. The Confederacy was on a defensive footing for the entire war and only did as well as they did because they had the home field advantage; they never had any desire to conquer the North, and they definitely didn't have the ability to actually do it.

I'm not going to watch this show, but I just wanted to mention that.

@wisewillow

It would be slightly better if this was an adaption of "Bring On The Jubilee" and just replace the German Union with a super powerful British Empire.

Or have it be 10-20 years after the South wins the war and have the South try to reintroduce slavery into Haiti and have it focused on the Haitians fighting off the Confederate invaders including them getting international support from other nations. However that's just my two cents.

edited 31st Jul '17 1:39:37 PM by warrior93

I mean the show might be well made and well written but there will always be a level of uncomfortableness while watching it... you ever have one of those shows that you admit is well made but makes you feel uncomfortable.

I wonder how much of this show's viewership is going to be from the alt-right with a ton of chucklefucks on backwater message boards going "This is what America should really be like!"

I'm just wondering if it's going to last one episode or three

The scary thing is we will never know which are just being trolls and which are serious.

My idea for this show would for the first half of the season show the galmorous side and have the second half deconstruct the "confederacy was right" mindset and point out why it is wrong.

Or we could do a Kindred miniseries instead. *shrug*

Funny how this kind of thing is airport fiction when it's in novel form and nobody cares, but if it's made for TV, it's serious business.

This isn't a good idea.

At least Man in the High Castle works off of an already obliterated foe.

The Confederacy was never truly defeated. Half of America wants the Confederacy back or at least wants to turn America into the Confederacy.

People wanting it back, what extreme minority of them there are who do, who definitely don't remotely add up to half the country, does not mean it was never defeated.

Reconstruction failed. Badly. The north gave up. Jim Crow, mass incarceration.

Take a look at Louisiana's prisons. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thefader.com/2017/05/20/activist-samuel-sinyangwe-louisiana-mass-incarceration/amp

[reads article] For crying out loud... you think it's just one or two tiny towns out in the middle of nowhere, and then it turns out that most of a mid-sized state is fucking still pre-Civil War.

Wasn't Louisiana's voting recently ruled unconstitutional due to being blatantly racist or something? Or maybe it was Virginia. I remember there was a state where the courts said "Yeah, this technically isn't even a democracy any more, this has to be fixed."

I think you're thinking of North Carolina.

Probably. I'm terrible at geography. Yay for American stereotypes.

Well, I don't know, everyone in The Man in the High Castle wasn't a mustache twirling bastard. I'd have to see a little more, probably an episode or two. I doubt I'll be traumatized. And I'll doubt it'll show the Confederacy in a unanimously positive or glamorous light.

I think it's an interesting Values Dissonance case. I'm (non-white) guy form Europe, so for me all that American Civil War thing feels very distant - with all respect for American history and social impact of ths event on the American nation, of course. So, I'm naturally more likely to give a credit to this idea.

In the other hand here, on the Old Continent, Nazizm and Holocaust are still fresh in social memory, so show like, say, The Man in the High Castle it's more disturbing and fells dangerously close to home. Specially with growing problem of that ugly Neo-Nazizm here.

edited 1st Aug '17 6:51:53 AM by Misiael

Ironically, with Man they seem to have achieved the opposite effect. In the trailer for the show in youtube, there were a lot of comments about how this series is "Jewish propaganda demonizing the Nazis" and how inaccurate it is to Hitler's beautiful dream. So it seems like neo-nazis mostly rejected the show.

I'm not sure why everyone is calling the show racist even though it hasn't aired yet and the synopsis has explained that there will be multiple points of views from both the pro and anti slavery characters so there's a chance it might deconstruct one person's view who thinks highly of slavery only for another person's view to show it isn't.

I find it ironic that critics have a problem of "two white guys" writing an alt history fiction show about slavery despite the fact there are four writers doing the show, two of them being a black couple, Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman, and the other two writers, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, are Jewish.

Did you look at the link I posted earlier? If not, you really should.

B&B also have a serious issue with Rape as Drama if Game of thrones is any indication. And their approach to slavery in that show has.... not exactly been not without issue either *cough*Dany the great white saviour*cough*

And then being Jewish has exactly...what to do with the fact that the premise is racist?

Yeah. Again, the concept is basically: hey, remember how your ancestors were brutally enslaved, and the scars from that trauma have never really been dealt with by American society, and repercussions can still horrifically affect you and your family today? Well, what if you were still enslaved? Let's imagine that!

Oh, and the show runners are a couple of white guys, who have historically not dealt well with writing people of color, or in framing sensitive political issues, or in dealing with sexual assault. But it's OK, we got a couple of black writers to sign off on all this, so it's cool, right?

edited 1st Aug '17 4:44:57 AM by wisewillow

This show is a terrible idea, and only two white edgelord dolts would think that the premise that the Confederacy was an evil government whose legacy pollutes our discourse to this very day needs a show where they were victorious and set the dominant political and cultural narrative in America. It won't be deep, it will be offensive, and it'll gain — if it hasn't already — the mother of Misaimed Fandoms.

edited 1st Aug '17 4:49:03 AM by CrimsonZephyr

There's also the fact that The Man in the High Castle makes it abundantly clear that this is a dystopian hellhole being run by two of the worst authoritarian regimes in the long and storied history of mankind, and even the collaborators fall into a camp of being either desperate or, themselves, kind of evil.

I do not trust HBO to do something similar with the Confederacy. There's going to be some mealy-mouthed Lost Cause drivel buried in this thing, I can almost guarantee you as much.