Firefly

I couldn't find the thread in the search engine so I must start a new one. Is there any way this show's legacy will survive its creator's current downfall? Should it? I ask because it was a major influence on me but now is hard to deal with.

I'd say no, and also no. There were always elements that were a bit troubling but could possibly be ascribed to ignorance instead of malice, though recent news may change the lens on that.

Either way, if it ever was going to come back it certainly isn't now, so it should be left to die forgotten honestly.

There still can be "Space Westerns" (The Mandalorian and Book of Boba Fett both seem to have that aesthetic) but the Confederacy imagery etc needs to be kept in the past.

Edited by jakobitis on Jan 19th 2022 at 8:20:56 AM

Honestly, I grew up in the Lost Cause area of the South and was fully drenched in apologia and I kind of wonder (ignoring Joss Whedon in all of this) how much people ignore how much pushback the Firefly show gave to it all. I think that people ignore this because they don't understand just how subversive the show was and how what an utter FU to all of it was.

One of the things that has been a problem of the Western is the fact that it has done a massive amount of whitewashing of the past to remove all references to brown, black, and Asian people from the popular mythology despite the Wild West historically being built by them. The Western became incredibly white and "Ex-Confederates" made a huge part of it without acknowledgement of ex-slaves, Union soldiers, Chinese immigrants, and Latin Americans.

Firefly really did one incredible thing and that was utterly shred the Neo-Confederate approproation of the Western mythology by spitting on those values. Despite the fact the fact Mal is the "loser" of the war, it prominently features an interracial marriage front and center between a black woman and white man while also making anti-slavery a major theme of multiple episodes. "Jaynestown", the opening of "Train Job", and more. It also thoroughly demonizes the plantation class with the Magistrate and Atherton.

So, while Firefly has the losers of the War be the protagonists, it also shows its utter disgust and contempt for everything the Confederacy actually stood for. Which is something I don't think gets nearly enough credit since all the Wild West imagery is made around progressive anti-racist imagery.

Speaking as a Western film scholar (okay, I took a few classes), I'm actually more annoyed by the lack of Asian representation not as a annoyance of the sci-fi angle but the fact it's not there for continuing to reclaim the Western for historical accuracy and the minorities that built it in RL.

The Confederacy was an oppressive classicist white supremacist state and Firefly sings its long of diversity and disgust at class as well as authoritarianism.

Basically, Firefly wanted to use the character archetype of the ex-Confederate soldier going West after the war, but without the political baggage that carries.

Same way they used Reavers to fill The Savage Indian role: they play the same part in the story that Native Americans did in old Westerns, but have no relation to Real Life Native Americans.

Edited by RavenWilder on Jan 19th 2022 at 8:58:27 AM

I will say that while the Asian thing gets more prominence, that bothers me to no end because it effectively erases any Natives existing in the setting. You can't do any Native American stories in the Firefly setting because there's no Natives.

I mean, you could definitely have descendants of Native Americans in Firefly, it's just that they'd no longer be an indigenous group.

This is true.

It's interesting how they would have handled the various tropes had things gone on. Apparently, they did have plans to explore the Grey-and-Gray Morality of the setting with the Alliance not being nearly as bad as Mal thought while the Browncoats were not as good as Mal believed.

The traditional way to do "Native Americans in space" is with native aliens. Which, even if done well, still has its own problems because you're making up a new oppressed people rather than finding a way to speak for the actual real oppressed people.

You could also do a thing where the Native Americans were the first wave of colonization, terraforming everything for who would come after as part of a deal with the governments... and then when everyone else arrived they promptly screwed them over, just repeating the exact same thing that happened in real life.

That approach is also very, very likely to go hard into unfortunate implications. Part of what happened with the Native Americans/First Nations was that they'd figured out how to live more or less in harmony with the land, only using as much as they needed to (more or less, depending on which group you're talking about) and then the Europeans showed up to ruthlessly exploit everything and everyone in the Americas.

Having Native Americans be the ones doing the terraforming is really awkward and uncomfortable because it feels like the reverse of what they would normally be doing. Terraforming is, after all, just the logical extreme extension of what the Europeans did to the Americas. It has, for real, been centuries worth of low level terraforming.

I think a better approach would be to have some distinct Native American cultural groups around, but they're having an internal cultural crisis because of the switch in home systems jumbled up their culture and because the Alliance just bluntly refuses to give them any help or support in protecting themselves or preserving their culture. Maybe throw in something about a bunch of different cultures all got stuffed on one colony ship and the people running it didn't bother trying to keep them differentiated, so their data was all mixed together too, and they don't have enough access to the computers it's stored on to separate it out.

Bluntly, terraforming is just the high end of ranching and farming so this Unfortunate Implications in its own right. It also plays into some negative stereotypes that Native Americans didn't adopt and tame regions of food or domestic animals. Which they absolutely did.

As someone who didn't watch the show when it originally aired, put up with it's fan obnoxiously singing it's praises nonstop for two fucking decades, then finally watched it a few years ago and liked it, I think it will survive. A lot of good works survive their creators flaws as long as the works don't have a heavy undercurrent of them.

They did...but saying "oh yeah, these planets were terraformed by the Native Americans from whatever their natural state was" is really difficult to work with.

Ultimately, there's only really one solution to this. Get actual Native American writers on board and find out what they think would make sense and what would work.

The "Better Days" comic-book miniseries flat-out says that many Browncoats resorted to terrorism as it became clear that they weren't going to win, if I recall correctly.

Except there are a lot of Native American tribes and cultures, and they are not a monolithic entity. You can’t grab a handful of writers and expect them to boil down everything in a neat package.

I know. I'm not saying to lump them together, I'm saying to get the specific writers of the specific cultures hired to put their heads together and come up with something. Like, an Inuit writer, a Maya writer and a Navajo writer working together would likely come up with something significantly better than anything I could do, with the idea being that the Alliance couldn't be bothered to differentiate between them during the evacuation and also didn't bother to look in a granular enough manner to actually save people from all of them.

A story about a forced cultural blending due to an unthinking and uncaring authority and the cultures later trying to untangle themselves and pick out which thing was part of which culture would, I think, be an interesting way to tackle how the European colonizers deliberately tried to flatten out and simplify (and later destroy) Native culture as much as possible in order to pretend that they're a single homogenous mass. Especially if the attitude by the Alliance in the present day of the setting is "we saved you, stop whining, at least we didn't leave you to die." It's also not a problem that can be white saviour'd or easily fixed.

Edited by Zendervai on Jan 20th 2022 at 3:57:48 PM

So your idea is for a bunch of white people to get minority writers to write about how fictional white people bastardised their culture?

Like, I know how you have good intentions but this is still full of unfortunate implications.

I might try to argue it as getting a diverse group of Native American writers to express their cultural experiences and stories through the frame work of Firefly's world.

Or, alternatively, get a diverse group of Native American writers to carve out their own place of power within this sci-fi narrative that is void of being *about* colonization and it's horrors. There are people who want representation that isn't rooted in their relationship to their own minority-ness.

There are different approaches to representation here.

I'd definitely steer away from the "oh the alliance didn't care about Native Americans so the only Native Americans in our show are this weird mashup of three out of 574 tribes" angle. Honestly I'd just have it so individual tribes or several tribes that have strong ties with each other formed their own colonies, and have writers from said tribes handle those episodes and world building. Because like you said, it's important to have representation that isn't based on how Europe has oppressed and fucked them over.

One thing that I liked that was barely touched upon was the fact that Atherton and the other "plantation" nobles weren't Alliance supporters but actually Browncoat leaders who weathered the war then returned to their positions afterward. There's a definite difference between the Alliance General that they steal the lassister from and the rich ones on the Rim.

It kind of makes it so that Mal is missing that "his" side isn't what he thinks it is.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 20th 2022 at 9:58:21 AM

Yeah, it probably would have come up more if we'd had more but Mal was generally shown as someone who really truly believed in The Cause (rightly or wrongly) whereas the really powerful movers and shakers didn't really buy into the rhetoric.

It also has elements of the post-Civil War South, where most of the former slave owners just continued on their way with minor adjustments. Note that slavery is common in the Rim, and Mal never explicitly says anything against it (though he implies distaste a few times).

Mal is all about "going your own way." He might free slaves or stop slavers, but there's nothing much he as an individual could do to end the practice. Ending the practice would take a central, organized government of some kind, and that's not something he cares for.

I always felt it was interesting in that at no point does Firefly insist that Mal's perspective on the Unification War is correct. His is just the perspective to which we're most often exposed. His crew (aside from Zoe) is mostly made up of people who didn't care about either side of the war. We see the advantages and disadvantages of being controlled by The Alliance, and the advantages and (mostly) disadvantages of living under their radar, out on the Rim. While the show doesn't go in depth about about it, it actually frequently illustrates a great truth about human society, that in the absence of a centralized authority, smaller authorities will start to arise. Planets or communities that don't have centralized governments have strongmen, or gang bosses, or warlords. It's mostly about which devil you're most comfortable with. Anarchists would only ever get their way for a very brief time before people started creating systems of order again.

Understand that, in the American Civil War, there were those who fought for the South based on the idea that they didn't like a central government telling them what they could or couldn't do. Whether or not they could keep slaves was the biggest thing they were in danger of being told they couldn't do, and that became the rallying cry for them. Others fought specifically over slavery. Others fought for their side because they happened to live on that side of the Mason-Dixon line. Some fought because they were drafted. As with any war, it wasn't cut-and-dried.

I always thought it was odd that there were no Chinese/Asians in the central cast, what with all the Chinese cultural bits. I think the only Asians you even see over the (admittedly abbreviated) course of the series is a brief shot of a gang at the spaceport in the pilot and one of Nandi's prostitutes from "Heart of Gold." Kaylee was apparently originally written to be Asian, but they liked Jewel Staite's performance so much that they changed it. Simon an River Tam were supposed to be of mixed Chinese/American descent, but both actors were entirely Caucasian, so I don't think that counts.

Edited by Robbery on Jan 23rd 2022 at 9:45:30 AM

A massive amount of issues re: the Chinese matter disappear if you read the Story Bible and find out the Tams are supposed to be a pair of Asian actors who come from the wealth Core Worlds.

They just changed it because they loved Summer Glau so much.

Edit:

Jinx!

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 23rd 2022 at 10:37:26 AM

I don't know if that fact makes the Chinese matter disappear completely. It is still a setting where China and Chinese culture is mixed in to the characters' everyday lives, but somehow no actual Chinese characters have any importance.

Yeah, the "these two characters are totally supposed to have Asian ancestry!" thing doesn't really make it better.

I think one thing that was a weakness of the show (as we got it) is that we got next to nothing about the Alliance itself. Was the Miranda project an official formal thing? Or was it a pet project of whoever was in charge of Miranda? How much does the Alliance government actually know about what Blue Sun was up to? How much of their behaviour is a demand to control everyone, and how much of it is "holy shit, why the hell is there suddenly widespread slavery on those planets out there?" The main information we got is that they wanted to establish control and the Browncoats refused, leading to a failed rebellion and the Alliance...patrolling the space and doing very little about the actual planets and moons. And, uh, the one bit that didn't age super great is that the Browncoats have a pretty heavy American South vibe to them and most of the big conflicts that heavily involved the American South were for...less than good reasons, I'll say, and the South pretty much weren't on the morally upright side each time.

It raises a lot of questions about what exactly a lot of the leaders of the Browncoats were intending and why exactly they were fighting against the Alliance. I'm just chalking it up to the show getting cancelled really early, in terms of why a lot of it is so ambiguous.

Edited by Zendervai on Jan 23rd 2022 at 2:00:08 PM