I know, or at least hope, the series is probably going to be largely critical of the Confederate world it presents, and I'm sure the intent is to give show the world a funhouse mirror that attempts to echo back issues of today, but yes, I also have concerns. The Misaimed Fandom aspect, of course; whether it'll actually offer any insights or simply be exploitative; whether in any of its worldbuilding it ends up creating any history with any ill-thought unfortunate implications. (It's hard to see a world where the Confederacy not only maintains its position during the American Civil War, but somehow also survives to the modern day largely in its original form, as anything but a constructed world.)
It's also got that question of, okay, well, you don't really want all the slave-owners to be one-dimensional evil shits, but you also don't want to go "Hey, slavery, it ain't great; but you know, there are two sides to every issue so who can say?"
For what it's worth, just to keep the thread from only looking at people's criticisms of it, the writers have given some defenses. This
is an interview with Vulture, and for those who don't want to read through the whole thing here's probably the most relevant part:
edited 1st Aug '17 9:23:58 AM by Lavaeolus
Would that it were so simple.
The Man in the High Castle would have been equally terrible as this idea if Germany had never been de-Nazified. Every schoolchild in America and much of the West is explicitly taught that the Third Reich was wrong, unlike Americans with the Confederacy.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
She/her
Malcolm Spellman has clearly not seen 13th. Or if he has, he didn't learn anything. But they didn't propose a prestige drama examining the current state of racism in America. Any depiction in Confederate is going to basically reinforce the notion that the current state of affairs in America could be way worse, and will thus inherently diminish our existing substantial and horrific race issues.
edited 1st Aug '17 5:22:00 AM by wisewillow
Guys, I'm afarid I really fail to see differece between Wolfenstein-esque Nazi Dystopia and premise of that show. Maybe it's something incomprehensible for non-American guy, but basically nothing what you said isn't valid argument (for me, anyway).
edited 1st Aug '17 7:09:40 AM by Misiael
She/her
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
please see the link I posted on the first page about Louisiana. It adds necessary context.
To be honest with you, I am non-American myself (from dear old Blighty), and while I can't speak about Man in the High Castle, games like Wolfenstein have always given me a vague unease. You know, I remember playing The Saboteur — set in occupied Paris — when I first met our Nazis, and the Nazi happened to be a fairly scantily-clad by military standards woman with pronounced breasts
◊. I had to stop a while there.
Of course, with Wolfenstein, it really does embrace a fantastical edge and your essential motivation is to simply slaughter every Nazi you see. Whether that genuinely makes things better, I don't know.
edited 1st Aug '17 7:49:24 AM by Lavaeolus
i think because it mixes in camp with the serious stuff. Superbunnyhop does a better job talking about this in his review of new order.
She/her
Mis, could you please explain why you did not find any of my comments persuasive? Even as a non-American, they should make sense to you.
I saw that link and I get that racism is huge systemic problem in USA, But why is that argument *against* Confederate?
From what I heard this series is supposed to be kind of satire on systemic racism in Uncle's Sam Land (I seriously doubt that it could be anything else). And satire is just that - you take one social problem and increase it Up To Eleven to proof your point. Just like in, for example, Black Mirror or Cleverman or whatnot.
We really don't know how creator will handle with that subject. I strongly believe that there isn't inherently right or wrong subjects of art - just some people can handle them in great, respectable fashion and some can't.
edited 1st Aug '17 8:39:41 AM by Misiael
Would that it were so simple.
It's problematic because neo-Confederate ideology doesn't get you thrown in fucking jail in America , to this country's detriment — it's a legitimized part of our national discourse that we have to shame into the closet every time it appears through protest and boycott. There's a genuinely large subsection of our society that would look at a neo-Confederate dystopia and view it as a positive society.
This isn't a premise that needs "deconstruction," but outright repudiation.
Also, "satire" as a useful tool of sociopolitical discourse is mostly dead. How can anything be satirical anymore when the American President was installed by Moscow and cribs Mussolini for his ideology? We're living in a satire, and it's because we live in a fucking comic strip mentality that our society has gone to shit. This won't satirize anything. It'll just exploit Confederate historiography for cheap shock value and give Lost Cause mouthbreathers an image of their ideal society. To these people, bad is good, and good is bad.
edited 1st Aug '17 8:48:23 AM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
Misiael, I'm an American and I have no idea why Americans are so much more tolerant of Nazis, or why a genre that has existed for more than half a century in literature suddenly became an affront to black Americans when HBO announced they would do a TV show in the same genre, but that appears to be the common reaction.
Nobody alive today endured American slavery, there is no one alive to be traumatized by memories of something that happened. By contrast, I have personally met Holocaust survivors, who definitely did remember what happened.
wisewillow, I read your links and nowhere did I find anything that explains why blacks should be more worked up by this than Jews should be by WWII alternate histories (probably the most popular alt history of all time is "the Nazis won" so if any ethnic group has cause for complaint...). Fascist and Euro-white supremacists are FAR from dead, they are MUCH more alive today than any actual American Confederate movement - unsurprising, since the US Civil War is three times more distant in history. It also didn't result in most of an entire race being exterminated like pests:
Pessimism!
I would guess because to many Americans, WW 2 was a European problem and the popular idea is that Americans came along and helped to clean it up. While slavery and the Confederacy is an American issue seeing as the Civil Rights era was not even a century ago.
edited 1st Aug '17 9:07:44 AM by AngryRabbit
She/her
Well, for one thing, look at how Germany educates their children about the Holocaust, versus how American schools gloss over slavery. For another thing, if you look at statistics for poverty and crime for Jewish people in Germany, I suspect there's not the same stark disparities as there are for black Americans in United States today.
Did you look at the link about Louisiana's prisons? That alone should shock you.
And, I repeat: this is a proposed show where all black Americans would be enslaved. Anyone not enslaved would be outliers. That is a creepy, creepy, creepy fantasy world to decide to depict.
Finally: the lack of empathy here is frankly pissing me off. If thousands of people yell out "hey, this hurts us, don't do this," maybe you should listen instead of assuming they are all whining babies? The No Confederate hashtag trended number 1 in the United States and number 2 worldwide during Game of Thrones, both the EST and PST airings.
edited 1st Aug '17 9:16:38 AM by wisewillow
Would that it were so simple.
The American Civil War might be 150 years finished, but we still have places that fly Confederate flags, commemorate Confederate victories, honor Confederate leaders, and social policies to the present day that are steeped in white supremacy. There is no history of repudiation where there should be.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
She/her
Yeah. Black children all around the south go to schools named after Confederate generals, for god's sake. It's abhorrent.
edited 1st Aug '17 9:24:53 AM by wisewillow
Yeah, except I do not really believe in that. And I'm from counrty, where democracy basically falls apart right now, so I guess I can say I know what living in "satire" is.
I get that in USA racism is still a huge problem. So in Europe - with adding anti-Islam, homophobia, neo-Nazism and many other prejudices for good measure. I know we can not really compare two vastly different nations (and Europe is not just one nation to begin with), but still - it's some harsh reaction for TV show with somewhat risky premise. So I'm still under impression It's more Values Dissonance dilema,
Why, yes. It's shocking. But I could give you link to equally shocking articles about horribly treatment of Syrian refugees in some refugees camps on the Old Continent. We're Not So Different, really.
edited 1st Aug '17 9:31:20 AM by Misiael
I read the link, and I suspect I knew/know far more about prison conditions than you might expect, since I went to university for Criminal Justice. I'm well aware of racial disparities in arrests and incarceration.
But that's all just emotional plea, and if I'm totally frank, it doesn't even compare to the horrors of concentration camps, so my question goes unanswered. German eduction is utterly irrelevant to American reactions - I'm speaking to how Americans react to fiction that depicts Nazis vs Confederates, not how Europeans have reacted to WWII.
I am asking why a 2017 black American should be more offended by a depiction of a totally fictional person being enslaved than a Jew should be by depictions of a political movement that nearly exterminated them (and who made their extermination a primary political objective!) less than a century ago being victorious and holding power - and even conquering far beyond Hitler's wildest dreams, in many depictions (and most "Nazis won" alt histories are clear about Jews barely even existing anymore in Europe, so...). Especially since, as I mentioned, actual survivors of those horrors are still alive.
Look, when HBO and the producers behind Game of Thrones back something, it's getting made. It's getting a prime time slot, and it's gonna get a ton of promotion.
You can't stop that. At best, you can make sure it's a costly decision for them and boycott it outright.
>That the Third Reich was wrong
Yeah, when I was in elementary school and junior high they tried to drill it into our heads that the war was not about slavery, it was about state's rights. Yeah, a state's right to own slaves. The Confederacy seceded when Lincoln, an abolitionist who had made it very clear that if elected he would outlaw slavery, got elected president.
Of course I live in Texas so that's likely the reason why.
I'd also like the series to be a Handmaiden's Tale/Man in the High Castle setup. Yeah, everything seems all nice and cultured on the surface, but underneath the country is just one bad incident away from completely imploding. I'd imagine that the Union would be funding slave rebellions to try and destabilize it, blockading the country's coastlines, every other major power (France, Britain) would likely boycott their goods, or at least they'd experience chronic shortages.
After all, it was around this time that slavery was being outlawed in pretty much every modern country, and when the Scramble for Africa happens unless the Confederacy acts quick they'll very rapidly lose their one market for slaves.
edited 1st Aug '17 9:38:18 AM by theLibrarian
Pessimism!
I don't really have a problem because I don't think the show will display their America as a rockin' awesome place live. The premise didn't sound like a Utopian Confederacy, just like TMITHC wasn't a Utopian Reich.
She/her
Comparing over a hundred years of chattel slavery to the holocaust is not a fair comparison to either atrocity.
I do find it interesting how the holocaust is used to paint slavery as "not THAT bad." Yeah, the enslavement of millions of black people, the rape of thousands if not millions of black women, the torture and exploitation of black children- yeah, that's nothing compared to the Holocaust. /sarcasm
A black American in 2017 might be angry because of literally all the reasons I have posted here. Because black children still go to schools named after KKK members, yet a pair of white guys decided it'd be fun to imagine slavery *really* winning.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/opinion/hbo-confederate-slavery-civil-war.html
edited 1st Aug '17 9:40:54 AM by wisewillow
But you know that antisemitism and prejudice against Jews isn't particularly new thing? In fact, slaughters of Jewish diasporas in Europe is kinda middle-ages sick tradition. It's huge problem even now. It's way older than American racism.
She/her
Yes, I know. The comparison is unfair to both the holocaust and slavery. And again, the existence of one atrocity doesn't cancel out another.
edited 1st Aug '17 11:03:30 AM by wisewillow
Yes, but I'm still somewhat confused why sci-fi satire about Nazis ruling the world is acceptable, but kinda the same premise about american racists isn't.
Where's difference? V For Vendetta in The '80s was sorta similar thing - very timely, very Anvilicious satire. Now it is Cult Classic. So, why no Confederate right now?
And for gods sake, it seems like half the rules on TV for black actors are still cliché roles in period pieces set during slavery. Do we really need more of those set in the modern day? Do we really need more shows that luxuriate in black pain? Because honestly, the older I get, the more I notice it, and the more horrifying it gets. I read a review for the new Detroit movie but said that the film dwells at length on the brutalization of black bodies. The review author thought it was accidental, but she found it sickening.
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/detroit-2017
edited 1st Aug '17 5:05:11 AM by wisewillow