Why is there no race wank for BSG?

[elspethdixon]

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 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.

Comments

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

New BSG has always had the annoying attitude of "Look at the crap those people made in the 70s. This is how you make science fiction," not to mention Ron Moore being convinced he invented tight-continuity, plot-driven, "dirty," epic s.f.

*eye-rolls* I guess he never saw Babylon Five. Or read pretty-much any good space-opera novel. I just don't get writers/prodicers/etc. who sneer at their forerunners in a genre; for example, Original Trek may have had dirt cheap special effects, but it paved the way for pretty much every sci-fi show that followed it.

It's like the new-wave slash fans who sneer at old-school zine h/c epics for being "out of character wish-fulfillment" or "subconsciously homophobic" or whatever--hello, without those K/S, S&H, and MfU writers, slash fandom would not exist, and then were would you get your porn?

One thing I really like/liked about Next Gen Star Trek was that it managed to keep the spirit of the original, but with more polished special effects and (sometimes) more sophisticated writing. Ditto for Peter Jackson's King Kong--I know some people disliked it for being a celebration of the original movie rather than, say, a deconstruction and/or criticism of the imperialist/racial/general-"filmed-in-the-1930s-ness" themes of the original, but I thought he did a wonderful job of updating and extending the script while still keeping the 20s/30s pulp adventure feel of the old movie. Plus, it had a giant gorilla fighting a T-Rex, which, like DMC's giant tentacle monster, is practically a guarantee of cinematic greatness (My sekrit movie fantasy is now to see Peter Jackson direct and produce a new film verion of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, in all it's late-Victorian "Lost World" glory).

It reads like they only had the plot worked out to a certain point, and once they got past that point, panicked and threw in prostitutes and magic babies.

So, basically, the same thing that happens when comics writers run out of ideas? (Well, except for X-Men. When X-Men writers run out of ideas, they just have Apocalypse come back again, or have Wolverine fight Sabertooth for the 237286th time).

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

I don't follow Moore's statements that obsessively, but I do think it's more the media than RDM who is making the "good, not sci-fi" statements, as Moore is more than happy to talk about both the positive and negative aspects of his Star Trek roots (he worked on Deep Space Nine). Honestly, I think it's just as natural and important for writers to react to things that they don't like in their in influences, as the things they do, and it's possible for fans to take that out of context and think he's unreservedly dissing the original. But there's always a balance to strike.