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[–] 40 points 10 months ago (5 children)

As much as I enjoyed Firefly, the universe created was going to get very complicated and bad if it had been let to develop for the next few years.

They are going to have to explain a lot to justify that Confederate veterans deserved to be the heroes and I don't think that Joss Whedon was up to that task.

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  • [–] 26 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    The brown shirts coats?? I think the point was they weren't actually the good guys. The show kinda hits you over the head with that. Mal (which literally means bad) is the main character who goes out of his way to associate with other bad people, and do bad things. The show paints the Alliance as evil but if anything they're just authoritarian and they're up to some shady shit but 90% of the interactions with the alliance, Mal is actively breaking the law and has a reason to be afraid of them other than the alliance being evil.

    The Alliance is a simple allegory for the US. The brown coats an obvious allegory for the Confederacy which happened to spawn a bunch of old West outlaws that we turned in to folk heroes. The entire James Younger gang were confederate soldiers or their siblings.

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  • [–] 25 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    The show also hits viewers over the head that there are morals that the crew won't cross, like stealing medicine from that town. It is also in the opening song that, because of the war and his service, Mal can't exactly settle down and be a good law abiding citizen, so he takes jobs of dubious legality since they pay better.

    Mal is the same kind of bad that Han Solo was painted as in Star Wars. He's not a nice guy, but more neutral than evil and will perform good acts at times.

    The show also played up the Alliance as being more absolutely evil because it had to in order to justify Mal.

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  • [–] 11 points 10 months ago

    There is an unreliable narrator happening here. The source of most of the information about the Alliance is from the crew. Notably, Shepard and Inara do not share those views. Zoe and Mal have very strong opinions about the alliance and the Doctor and River help feed that narrative. But the things they don't say out loud paint a very different picture. I think had the show gone on, the brown coats would gradually have become another villain and Mal would have had to contend with the reality of who he was fighting for.

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  • [+] [S] 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    There's no indication that slavery was a factor, only political self-determination

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  • [+] [S] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    We're not told much about the Independant Planets, certainly nothing suggests that they themselves did anything wrong (other than secede). You seem to have a problem with their superficial resemblence of the confederacy.

    Mal and his crew are thieves and smugglers, not pirates or murderers. The 'Mal is latin for bad' line another commenter mentioned was a red herring in an episode. They aren't evil people intent on subjugation.

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