Ryujin
Legend
That's at least partially because they thought that they had the time to do a slow reveal and character building, which never happened.
Firefly Reconsidered: Why Firefly Isn't "Hall of Fame" Great
MGibster
Legend
The worst of the Inara stuff never actually made it on screen so far as I can remember and I'm not going to fault anyone for having a terrible idea that never made it past the drawing board. Whedon's an naughty word but not so much so that I can't enjoy projects he's been a part of. I can understand why that turns some people off though. As for the Lost Cause thing, well, is it any worse than other works of fiction where the rebels are portrayed as the good guys? Star Wars comes to mind.
I thought 5 was pretty good and would have been an excellent place to end the series. And the Mayor was my favorite Buffy villain. So I'd go with 3 & 5 myself. 6 was terrible though the musical was good and season 7 was just horrible.
payn
He'll flip ya...Flip ya for real...
There is a bucket of context that could fill the grand canyon on the differences here. I'll leave it at that.
let's consider for a moment. Rebels. Yes, we who hate racism and slavery know gosh dang well the Civil War was absolutely about the South seceding so they could have slaves. period. It's been discussed as its own thread within these hallowed halls even.
So. Is every dang story that's got rebels or civil war in it going to get compared to the Lost Cause? At some point, a body's got to look at why they were fighting. Now it probably didn't help that Mal's side had southern accents, but I don't get the feeling Mal trafficked in slaves. The similarity was skin deep.
Continuing that line. Notice how folks pick up on that for Star Wars and Firefly, and only like recently has anybody ever challenged the fact that all the vampires fought for the South. Twilight. Interview. Diaries. All those sons of blood suckers fought for the south and kinda white-washed over the whole "didn't mind enslaving people" it was just the "drinking blood" they couldn't abide.
Throw rocks at people aligned with evil. Not because of their southern accent.
Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
Yes.
Look, I'm not going to pillory people who love it. I'm not going to say that it needs to be canceled, or that it is irredeemable, or anything like that. That's not me- after all, I would go to the mat to defend my enjoyment of Lovecraft, even though I fully acknowledge that he was a racist through and through. I think great art is great art- you can enjoy JoJo Rabbit even though it has Hitler.
But I would say that for me, the specific Lost Cause allegories are so glaringly obvious that they take me out of the show.
For me, and possibly for others as well, this is one of those things that skirts by because the series ended young. The references were fleeting enough that we don't really know the details of either side of the war. If the show had gone on long enough, they would have eventually been forced into flushing the backstory out. But because they never got there, we can be blissfully unaware of what direction they might have gone in.
Also, keep in mind that that 2002 was at a very peak time for a racially sanitized version of the Old West. Movies like Wild Wild West and Shanghai Noon were some of the biggest western movies preceding Firefly, and they blatantly re-write the western backdrop to be much more racially friendly for the sake of telling a story. The grittier, in-your-face western style that's currently vogue wouldn't take hold until years later, and would have been very out of place at the time.
Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
I'm not going to yuck on your yum; but Westerns, as a genre, did not usually traffic in Lost Cause tropes.
If you like it, that's great. For me, no can do. It detracts from my enjoyment, because periodically I have to say, "Wait, I'm rooting for the Confederacy? No thank you."
Thomas Shey
Legend
See, its just hard for me to do that when the reaction Mal has to the most "Southern Gentleman" type he ever runs into is he's scum of the first water, when they go out of their way to free a bunch of people who've been enslaved at one point, and where the second browncoat you ever see with any frequency is black.
Yeah, since they're fishing in some old Western tropes, some of those are going to evoke the Confederate South, as is any set of characters in that context where a civil war ended and their side lost. But I think you have to ignore a hell of a lot of the presentation to see it as Lost Cause apologism.
Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
Look, please stop. I've been being super nice about this. I keep saying that I don't like it. But please stop trotting out this whole, "What? How can anyone possibly not like this? It's just a Western!"
Whedon based it on a CIVIL WAR book. He has stated, on the record and before it became controversial, that Killer Angers was the inspiration*. None of this is remotely in dispute. It's not just Western Tropes ... it's specific to the Civil War in America.
He has also repeatedly stated that he envisioned Firefly as having been modeled after the RECONSTRUCTION era during the Civil War.
"I was taken with the idea of a civil war and rebuilding from the point of view of people who had lost the war." -Whedon.
I mean- Browncoats. C'mon, man. Like what you like, but don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining. If I don't like something, then I don't like it, and telling me to ignore what I see with my eyes isn't going to change that.
EDIT- Kinja'd by @dragoner
EDIT 2- My footnote got chopped- I had put in that Killer Angels was actually a good book, and the basis of a good movie- Gettysburg. Just inarguable that it planted the seed to make this a post-US Civil War show.
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