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Fandom, it seems, never gets tired of wanking about race (and is it just me, or does SGA fandom seem particularly prone to it?). It's the wank that will not die, almost as never-ending as the warnings-vs.-no-warnings debate, but with a higher potential for defriending and personal insults.
And yet... you know, though the SGA race discussions keep on coming, I have yet to see any for Battlestar Galactica, fandom's other currently popular sci-fi show.
(Obviously, I feel compelled to start wanking on race, too--it's contagious, kind of like the plague).
I'll be fair, and admit up front that I don't like and don't watch New BSG--mostly because back when it first came on, I heard one too many people going on about how it "wasn't really sci-fi" because it was "serious drama," which filled me with an irrational resentment. Also, remakes that aren't a loving homage to the spirit of the original generally don't do much for me, especially if I happen to have fond feelings towards characters from the original version.
That said, many other people in fandom and on my flist like and watch it, and produce meta about it: meta on the gender implications of someone named Kara, meta on the ethical implications of humans trying to wipe out Cylons, meta on whether Roslin was justified in shoving Girl!Cylon!Boomer out the airlock... and yet I haven't seen any race meta for it yet. Which is curious, because I've been expecting for a while now to see someone bring up the fact that most of New BSG's cast, and all of their non-Cylon main characters, are white.
To be fair, I didn't notice the all-white-ness either, until![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seanchai pulled up the imdb page on it in an attempt to find out who the hell this Kara person people on lj kept talking about was (she's apparently someone pretending to be Starbuck, just as "Lee Adama" is Lt. Kennedy pretending to be Apollo) and said, "Hey, where did the black actors go? Is it just me, or did this show have a lot more diversity in the cast back during the '70s?"
"Good point," I said. "Why is Admiral Tigh white now? And where did Boomer go?"
"Oh," she said, "Boomer turned into an Asian woman who was secretly an evil robot."
"The robots aren't all clunky and silver anymore?"
"No," she said. "Now all the Cylons now look like hot women."
And we rolled our eyes and returned to watching downloads of original BSG, because it is full of glorious space-opera cheesiness, and entertainly bad late-70s hair.
Obviously, I'm not qualified to do serious meta on the new show, but it seems to me that someone who actually watches it could write something interesting about the implications of Boomer's transition from black, male pilot to female, Asian (Evil!Robot) pilot, about Tigh's transition from competant (black) admiral to apparently evil (white) colonel, and about the fact that the writers chose to cut Sheba (the female pilot who serves as Apollo's love interest in the original) and replace Starbuck with... a female pilot who could be a love interest for Apollo (so, what was wrong with the one they already had?).
After all, people meta on SGA, which is basically fluff posing as military sci-fi, and New BSG, from what I hear, is actually trying to be a serious show.
And yet... you know, though the SGA race discussions keep on coming, I have yet to see any for Battlestar Galactica, fandom's other currently popular sci-fi show.
(Obviously, I feel compelled to start wanking on race, too--it's contagious, kind of like the plague).
I'll be fair, and admit up front that I don't like and don't watch New BSG--mostly because back when it first came on, I heard one too many people going on about how it "wasn't really sci-fi" because it was "serious drama," which filled me with an irrational resentment. Also, remakes that aren't a loving homage to the spirit of the original generally don't do much for me, especially if I happen to have fond feelings towards characters from the original version.
That said, many other people in fandom and on my flist like and watch it, and produce meta about it: meta on the gender implications of someone named Kara, meta on the ethical implications of humans trying to wipe out Cylons, meta on whether Roslin was justified in shoving Girl!Cylon!Boomer out the airlock... and yet I haven't seen any race meta for it yet. Which is curious, because I've been expecting for a while now to see someone bring up the fact that most of New BSG's cast, and all of their non-Cylon main characters, are white.
To be fair, I didn't notice the all-white-ness either, until
seanchai pulled up the imdb page on it in an attempt to find out who the hell this Kara person people on lj kept talking about was (she's apparently someone pretending to be Starbuck, just as "Lee Adama" is Lt. Kennedy pretending to be Apollo) and said, "Hey, where did the black actors go? Is it just me, or did this show have a lot more diversity in the cast back during the '70s?""Good point," I said. "Why is Admiral Tigh white now? And where did Boomer go?"
"Oh," she said, "Boomer turned into an Asian woman who was secretly an evil robot."
"The robots aren't all clunky and silver anymore?"
"No," she said. "Now all the Cylons now look like hot women."
And we rolled our eyes and returned to watching downloads of original BSG, because it is full of glorious space-opera cheesiness, and entertainly bad late-70s hair.
Obviously, I'm not qualified to do serious meta on the new show, but it seems to me that someone who actually watches it could write something interesting about the implications of Boomer's transition from black, male pilot to female, Asian (Evil!Robot) pilot, about Tigh's transition from competant (black) admiral to apparently evil (white) colonel, and about the fact that the writers chose to cut Sheba (the female pilot who serves as Apollo's love interest in the original) and replace Starbuck with... a female pilot who could be a love interest for Apollo (so, what was wrong with the one they already had?).
After all, people meta on SGA, which is basically fluff posing as military sci-fi, and New BSG, from what I hear, is actually trying to be a serious show.
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