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I really ought to beposting about my week at VA beach (I swear said post will come), but I've decided to rant/lecture instead. Hey, people are probably getting tired of the distinctly non-fannish journal content of late anyway.
I recently read a post on metafandom wherein a lukewarm Firefly fan lays out all of her reasons for not liking Firefly, starting off with the brown filters and ending up with the fact that (in her view, at least), Mal and company have no real goals or defined character arcs, and come off as bullies and criminals much of the time. And she doesn't like the dialogue.
I'm fairly rare among most of my fannish friends in that I'm a longtime fan of both sci-fi and westerns, which gives me a slightly different perspective on Firefly than a viewer who's background is mainly sci-fi. I think (though, of course, I'm speaking as someone who, despite having never participated in the show's fandom, is a rabid Firefly fan), that part of the problem may be that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
meyerlemon simply isn't familiar with the aesthetic Firefly is working out of. You can't truly evaluate the show using the same set of expectations you would for Buffy, or even for the more noir-flavoured Angel, or for most other sci-fi shows. Because at its heart, Firefly isn't truly sci-fi. Firefly is a western. A western set in space, where the travelling gunslingers have a ship instead of horses, and the Apache/Comanche/pick an Indian tribe raiding parties are crazed spacers who eat people, and the Civil War was fought between various planets instead of between the North and the South, but still, a western.
That's why the sepia-toned filter (which is common in a lot of western shows and films) is used. It's also why the costumes often bear a vague resemblance to the sort of thing you'd see in Deadwood, rather than in Star Trek. And I can't be the only viewer who's noticed that many of the colonies Serenity visits bear a distinct resemblance to 19th century mining towns or other traditional Old West settings.
The characters, as well, are drawn at least in part from the Western tradition--there's the fussy "dude" from back east who's better educated than everybody else (Simon), the "working girl" a la Miss Kitty (Inara), the morally ambiguous drifter who's vaguely reminiscent of a Clint Eastwood character (Mal)… The Western has a strong tradition of main characters who are drifters, frequently drifters who operate on the shadier side of the law, such as hired guns or bounty hunters (I submit as evidence the complete oeuvre of Sergio Leone, plus numerous television series like Maverick and that one starring Steve McQueen as a bounty hunter). Jayne, of course, is a pretty much just a bully. Or, to put it more bluntly, a thug. But he is glorious in his thuggishness, and I love him to bits.
And, of course, as I said above, the war between the Alliance and the Independants was the American Civil War with the slavery issue left out (but other political and economic issues left in), and Mal and Zoe--Mal in particular--are meant to be a thinly-disguised version of embittered ex-Confederates. They fought a war against a more populous and better equipped foe for a cause they believed in, and not only did they lose, they suffered horribly in the process, and went home afterwards to find that their entire way of life had been destroyed, and many of their homes, burned to the ground. Now, like those ex-Confederates who went West to get away from Reconstruction, they resent the Alliance and refuse to have anything to do with it. To paraphrase a famous song, "They won't be reconstructed, and they don't give a damn."meyerlemon has protested that Serenity's crew are pretty much criminals--well, as far as other western folk heroes and fictional characters go, that puts them in good company. Just imagine Mal as a sort of futuristic Jesse James.
The whole post-Civil War thing may be one of the reasons why the Serenity's crew and the Alliance often fail to fit neatly into the good guy and bad guy slots--the Civil War was messy, and there were bad guys and good guys on both sides. Of course, the whole Lost Cause/Confederacy/Reconstruction theme might not win Firefly a lot of converts outside the South. Personally, every drop of Virginian blood in my veins set up a collective squee when I twigged to the fact that Mal was supposed to be a former Confederate officer (I think this was about seven minutes into "Serenity"--which was the first episode I saw, since I watched the series on DVD). I can't help it--it's a sort of inbred lust for anything in a grey uniform handed down through generations of politically incorrect, borderline-redneck ancestors. However, I've gotten the feeling over the years that a significant number of people north of the Mason-Dixon line (or, you know, people from some place like England or Canada, who probably don't care about 19th century American sectional politics) have trouble seeing the Confederacy as anything other than the bad guy--and certainly never as underdog heroes. For perfectly valid reason, I hasten to point out.
As for the dialogue, I personally felt it sounded very natural, rather than awkward, but then, people have told me that I tend to sound stilted and unnatural when I speak, so it's possible that what sounds perfectly all right to my socially inept ears may sound wrong to more socially aware/less vaguely Aspergers/ADD-type people. Or to people who aren't from my section of the Southeast, where "ain't" is far from an unheard of word.
And, of course, I've got a thing for anti-heroes. There are a lot of people out there who don't.
*sigh* And I've now outed myself as a Civil War buff. A Southern Civil War buff. Wank and fannish censure from more culturally sensitive fans is surely headed my way. It could be worse. I could be telling y'all I voted for Bush.
I recently read a post on metafandom wherein a lukewarm Firefly fan lays out all of her reasons for not liking Firefly, starting off with the brown filters and ending up with the fact that (in her view, at least), Mal and company have no real goals or defined character arcs, and come off as bullies and criminals much of the time. And she doesn't like the dialogue.
I'm fairly rare among most of my fannish friends in that I'm a longtime fan of both sci-fi and westerns, which gives me a slightly different perspective on Firefly than a viewer who's background is mainly sci-fi. I think (though, of course, I'm speaking as someone who, despite having never participated in the show's fandom, is a rabid Firefly fan), that part of the problem may be that
meyerlemon simply isn't familiar with the aesthetic Firefly is working out of. You can't truly evaluate the show using the same set of expectations you would for Buffy, or even for the more noir-flavoured Angel, or for most other sci-fi shows. Because at its heart, Firefly isn't truly sci-fi. Firefly is a western. A western set in space, where the travelling gunslingers have a ship instead of horses, and the Apache/Comanche/pick an Indian tribe raiding parties are crazed spacers who eat people, and the Civil War was fought between various planets instead of between the North and the South, but still, a western. That's why the sepia-toned filter (which is common in a lot of western shows and films) is used. It's also why the costumes often bear a vague resemblance to the sort of thing you'd see in Deadwood, rather than in Star Trek. And I can't be the only viewer who's noticed that many of the colonies Serenity visits bear a distinct resemblance to 19th century mining towns or other traditional Old West settings.
The characters, as well, are drawn at least in part from the Western tradition--there's the fussy "dude" from back east who's better educated than everybody else (Simon), the "working girl" a la Miss Kitty (Inara), the morally ambiguous drifter who's vaguely reminiscent of a Clint Eastwood character (Mal)… The Western has a strong tradition of main characters who are drifters, frequently drifters who operate on the shadier side of the law, such as hired guns or bounty hunters (I submit as evidence the complete oeuvre of Sergio Leone, plus numerous television series like Maverick and that one starring Steve McQueen as a bounty hunter). Jayne, of course, is a pretty much just a bully. Or, to put it more bluntly, a thug. But he is glorious in his thuggishness, and I love him to bits.
And, of course, as I said above, the war between the Alliance and the Independants was the American Civil War with the slavery issue left out (but other political and economic issues left in), and Mal and Zoe--Mal in particular--are meant to be a thinly-disguised version of embittered ex-Confederates. They fought a war against a more populous and better equipped foe for a cause they believed in, and not only did they lose, they suffered horribly in the process, and went home afterwards to find that their entire way of life had been destroyed, and many of their homes, burned to the ground. Now, like those ex-Confederates who went West to get away from Reconstruction, they resent the Alliance and refuse to have anything to do with it. To paraphrase a famous song, "They won't be reconstructed, and they don't give a damn."
meyerlemon has protested that Serenity's crew are pretty much criminals--well, as far as other western folk heroes and fictional characters go, that puts them in good company. Just imagine Mal as a sort of futuristic Jesse James.The whole post-Civil War thing may be one of the reasons why the Serenity's crew and the Alliance often fail to fit neatly into the good guy and bad guy slots--the Civil War was messy, and there were bad guys and good guys on both sides. Of course, the whole Lost Cause/Confederacy/Reconstruction theme might not win Firefly a lot of converts outside the South. Personally, every drop of Virginian blood in my veins set up a collective squee when I twigged to the fact that Mal was supposed to be a former Confederate officer (I think this was about seven minutes into "Serenity"--which was the first episode I saw, since I watched the series on DVD). I can't help it--it's a sort of inbred lust for anything in a grey uniform handed down through generations of politically incorrect, borderline-redneck ancestors. However, I've gotten the feeling over the years that a significant number of people north of the Mason-Dixon line (or, you know, people from some place like England or Canada, who probably don't care about 19th century American sectional politics) have trouble seeing the Confederacy as anything other than the bad guy--and certainly never as underdog heroes. For perfectly valid reason, I hasten to point out.
As for the dialogue, I personally felt it sounded very natural, rather than awkward, but then, people have told me that I tend to sound stilted and unnatural when I speak, so it's possible that what sounds perfectly all right to my socially inept ears may sound wrong to more socially aware/less vaguely Aspergers/ADD-type people. Or to people who aren't from my section of the Southeast, where "ain't" is far from an unheard of word.
And, of course, I've got a thing for anti-heroes. There are a lot of people out there who don't.
*sigh* And I've now outed myself as a Civil War buff. A Southern Civil War buff. Wank and fannish censure from more culturally sensitive fans is surely headed my way. It could be worse. I could be telling y'all I voted for Bush.