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  • ElHexo [comrade/them]
    ·
    11 months ago

    Have you picked up that the reavers are the most racist ideas about Native Americans come alive in space?

    • emizeko [they/them]
      ·
      11 months ago
      spoiler

      not sure if it matters but the movie explains that the reavers are Alliance colonists that got experimented on by the Alliance

      • ShimmeringKoi [comrade/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        I had never thought about Reavers in the context of the western allegory and now it makes complete sense to me why they probably felt the need to address it in the movie

      • ElHexo [comrade/them]
        ·
        11 months ago

        In the context of Firefly as Western, the answer to Watt-Evans' question is obvious: on the edge of the frontier, where settlers stake their claims and outlaws ply their trade, there are always the Indians. With their ritualistic self-mutilation, pack behavior and barbaric practices, the Reavers embody the most paranoid images of the native Other that colonizing whites could devise. The image of the Indian as predatory savage stretches back far into the roots of the Western's development, beyond the first actual films and novels of the genre to the original tales of the blood-stained American frontier, the popular and often propagandist Indian captivity narratives that appeared from the seventeenth century until the end of Western expansion. Thus, the Western roots of Firefly's Reavers can also be traced back to these early texts, and we can see in them the images and ideologies that have developed over the centuries to give the Reavers their unnervingly familiar and deeply disturbing presence on the series, in the film, and in our collective imagination.

        The Firefly episode "Bushwhacked" brings these connections into focus particularly well because it features many of the same conventional elements of the early captivity narratives, and it also parallels later Western films that share the continuing obsession with the idea of Indian captivity and its effects. To illustrate the connections between the Reavers and Indians as whites imagined them

        Etc. https://virtualvirago.blogspot.com/2011/12/bushwhacked-by-nightmare-native-western.html?m=1

        • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
          ·
          11 months ago

          To be fair, if done well, the plot from the film used as material for more seasons of show could have drawn on the falsehood of the narratives as a major plot arc, rather than just tying up loose ends.

      • oregoncom [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        Joss Whedon, creator of the Firefly series and director of Serenity, has said of Reavers, "Every story needs a monster. In the stories of the old west it was the Apaches".

      • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        11 months ago

        right, but that's the myth pushed by the central planets of the alliance, not the true history of the reavers.

        hegemonic discourses do be like that.

        • UlyssesT [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          11 months ago

          I may reluctantly agree with you there except I can't help wonder if it was a much-later-than-the-show retcon tacked on by the movie.

          Besides, would discourse about "savages" on the western frontier be more acceptable if someone wrote that smallpox-infected blankets made them evil that way?

          • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
            ·
            11 months ago

            oh come on. literally the movie was made to close a bunch of threads that were opened in the only season, which was cut off.

            if you're going to assume bad faith, go bigger.

            just say that Captain Malcolm Reynolds was literally a double secret slaveowner and that the finale of the series after 12 seasons was originally going to be him assaulting his human property on his own private planet for 45 minutes to the tune of Dixie on a loop while shouting "Serenity Now!"

            because who can say that isn't what they had in mind all along??

            • ElHexo [comrade/them]
              ·
              11 months ago

              just say that Captain Malcolm Reynolds was literally a double secret slaveowner

              Wasn't the entire conceit of Firefly that Mal was a space confederate soldier but without any of the slavery of the actual confederacy?

              If Whedon hadn't wanted to whitewash his source inspiration, Mal would definitely be a slaveowner

            • UlyssesT [he/him]
              ·
              11 months ago

              No need to blow up at me. I don't know that much about the show and only speculated and was open to being wrong there.

              I'm less interested in exploring it further after your post.

              • GarbageShoot [he/him]
                ·
                11 months ago

                I'm less interested in exploring it further after your post

                I'm pretty sure I've seen people pull this sanctimonious affect on you multiple times. He who fights monsters, etc.

                • UlyssesT [he/him]
                  ·
                  11 months ago

                  Maybe.

                  I'm not sure how else to phrase what you call a "sanctimonious affect" when I really don't want to further discuss it with someone that blew up on me before trying to continue the discussion in the same post.

                  • GarbageShoot [he/him]
                    ·
                    11 months ago

                    I'd say you just don't need to narrate being huffy with them. Express that you are upset and why (as you did) and just leave the announcement that their media sharing attempt failed left unsaid because any reasonable person can figure it out and the conversation is no longer really about that. If they somehow need to ask or are oblivious, then of course there is no begrudging you giving such an account.

                    At least, that is how I would personally approach the issue since you express uncertainty of how one could.

                    • UlyssesT [he/him]
                      ·
                      edit-2
                      11 months ago

                      If you think I'm "huffy" I could with similar evidence say the same about your two posts here. If you sent them as personal messages the stated claimed purpose would still get received without the "you're huffy, I don't approve of how you post" public part.

                      Showing up just to post about how you don't like how I post, "huffy" or not, can cut both ways.