Folks, we still have troops in DC. They never left. What are they doing here? Being intimating bullies over people doing their ordinary things in public spaces. That’s the whole point of them & why Trump is squandering your money on them.
And because Whedon and team erased that analogy, that suddenly makes it OK? It's fine to sell a Fantasy Lost Cause, so long as the other side in the Fantasy are the slaveholders, is that what you're saying?
Yet I also know there was, for a time after the War, a period where people were working together to build coalitions. Imperfect, unbalanced, but real and wielding political power.
We've forgotten that. but it's am interesting place to pull from, for a "What If In Space" story.
I mean, if we're going this far, we can just throw in the usual bromides about the Women's Movement supporting Eugenics, among other attacks on the Suffragettes.
I don't condone Eugenics, or KKK ties. Indeed, it set us up, pretty directly, for modern Transphobia among problems!
By this point, we already have have Frederick Douglass split AND reconcile with suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony over prioritizing Women's and Black issues.
The KKK of the 20th century (not the same as the post-War one) was taking advantage of a gap.
www.nps.gov/articles/com...
In the 1910. Decades after the moment I'm speaking on, as a jumping-off point.
19thnews.org/2020/12/firs...
We, as a culture, have long worshiped at the feet of the "Noble Confederate Solider."
Why not just send him to space? That is, in essence, what Whedon pulled off.
Esp. since this glorification of Southern life isn't new. John Carter of Mars? Even in the Disney film, he's still a Confederate, mirroring his origins that align to when the Lost Cause Myth consolidated across America.
Jonah Hex, the same, decades later.
Need I mention Gone With The Wind?
...until I really started reading about the Civil War and its aftermaths (thanks to people like Kevin Kruse and Ta-Nehisi Coates for making that work easier!)
I didn't want to buy this. But once you actually dig into how the South got to Jim Crow, you see how Firefly is Lost Cause-coded.
I've read the "oh, it could be any battle" and "welp, Whedon made the Alliance the slave-holders" and a half-dozen other ways people try to mitigate this issue.
I don't buy it. Indeed, it was, in part, loving Firefly that pushed to do a lot of the research! I did think it was just a coincidence...
A key aspect of the post-War South, building to the Lost Cause myth, was that Noble Southerners were just "trying to live their lives", but the Industrial North kept bothering them. That the US gov't used it's overwhelming advantage in arms to force them to stay.
That's the Browncoats in Firefly.
The Browncoats are such obvious stand-ins for post-War Southern life as imagined thru Lost Cause myth, it's hard to express.
Even Zoe; I haven't finished reading Searching for Black Confederates, but it's a real myth I've run into multiple times: uncpress.org/978146965326...
It's well known that Joss came up with Firefly after reading The Killer Angels, a book on the Battle of Gettysburg. He clearly did more research; a character in the show is named after a Confederate General, as another point.
But Civil War works are rife with Lost Cause BS.
Gyllenhaal: anyway this is a retelling of frankenstein as a romantic bonnie and clyde gothic murder ballad
Poe: different! what do you think, mary?
Mary Shelley: is igor in this one
Gyllenhaal: no
Shelley: then i like it
Yeah, I don't have the story in my head, but I feel there's one in here, for sure.
Like, maybe Mal is a real-world version of the Southerns who resisted the Confederates: contingentmagazine.org/2019/03/03/w... but is just now understanding the wider 'verse, and people he'd looked down on before...
And now I've bought it! Thanks for the recommendation :)
I would be FASCINATED by a version of a Firefly-like story that told the story of post-war Abolitionists In Space. Esp. as the Abolitionist movement led fairly directly to the Suffragette movement in America!
A while back we were joking here about how a little over a year ago, some economist must've looked at a monkey's paw and said "I wish regular people appreciated textbook economics more."
In the 1997 dystopian scifi film Gattaca, rapid DNA testing is used to determine social class and job eligibility. In 2026 UK, women wanting to participate in athletics must pay a £185 gender tax to take part in a genetic lottery where some will be ineligble due to previously unknown chromosones.
Abolish the legal gender marker entirely. No government can be trusted to have a database of which people have changed theirs, no government has any business tracking what your gender is "supposed" to be in the first place.
Threads thread: thriller_instinct 3d Is it okay to bully 40 and 50 year olds who are on social media just for being on it, cuz like why are you here - 254 Q 3.1K G 28 746 corporateash 18h ••• My ICQ UIN is 7231680. That number is burned into my consciousness. I inadvertently learned that you could see private conversations in public chat rooms when using Telnet instead of a browser on GeoCities. I can tell you the difference in audible dial-up handshakes between 1200, 2400, 14.4 kbps modems. I needed a edu email address to join Facebook after my university was admitted. We were here at the beginning. We made social media. You wouldn't be in my Top 8. I have usernames older than you. 852 Q62 G6 72
“I have usernames older than you.”.
Holy shit
Bernard LaFayette, the advance man who did the risky groundwork for the voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, that culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has died.
I have now written more about FIREFLY than I have about the damned war we're in.
Anyone in that thread who wants a fight, will need to start punching themselves.
For all my fellow Firefly fans, I implore you -- it is 2026.
You can't stop the signal, but it's time for the signal to change.
If nothing else underlines how toxic Firefly is today, it's that that seem unable to bring in either the key creator (Whedon), or Adam Baldwin, into this...whatever it is.
Fillion knows this ground is soaked in rhetorical pain too many aligned to this show/movie have caused. AND YET.
I'm wrapping here, but can really go on for another round of posts about how much Firefly was built on a rickety foundation that would never fly even with mfers trying to attack "wokeness". And that's without going into the cast issues, or the waves of Whedon revelations.
6) Did I mention Firefly's Lost Cause shit? Did I forget the villain named after the Confederate General Jubal Early, played by a Black Man on the show?
I did fucking NOT!
(For Reference: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubal_E...)
5a) A nod to the Firefly fan film, made a few years after the show left the air, that actually aimed, in part, to ensure Asian actors had substantial roles. I still have that DVD among my collection.
5) The erasure of Asian people from a settling that, according to the lore that every Firefly fan worth their salt knows, is supposed to be a joint US and China situation. And no, the Tams DO NOT FUCKING COUNT!
I recall for the 10 year reunion Whedon acknowledged this failure. Way, way too late.
