Browncoat history

[nightshade]

Ok I'll admit I have little knowledge about history, I didn't study it at all really. However I'm currently reading a biography that talks about Germany when it was the beginning of the Nazi occupation. They are referred to as brownshirts, which obviously made me think of browncoats. Now I'm obviously not saying Mal, Zoe etc were Nazis, but there was a world war and they're the losing side, so is a deliberate reference? I'm sure someone will tell me that I have it completely wrong, but it was interesting to me.

 

[Hunga Munga]

As I understand it , it's more a reframing of the Union and the Confederacy from the American Civil war , except without the slavery making them look bad . Mal is the plucky Southern gentleman's son , going off to war with his own weapons , to claim independence from the Union .

It can't be that evocative though , because Firefly hasn't become patriot porn for present day American secessionists .

 

[Hunga Munga]

There was another show I watched recently , Kripke's 'Revolution' , that used similar American historical themes , transposed into sci- fi . I personally think history mining is a rich fruitful story technique , as long as you're not trying to 'say' something profound with the subtext . It's more about creating a veneer of authenticity to a fantastic imaginary world ... in my opinion 😉

 

[thrasherpix]

There is a wealth of complex and fascinating stories just waiting to be stolen by uncreative writers from history. The hardest part is trying to get it to make sense when sometimes it just doesn't (or it's so mind boggling complex that if it doesn't confuse the writers, it probably would general audiences, and/or lacks hero/villains, though I've seen good shows that didn't focus on heroes vs villains). Fiction has to make sense, unlike real life.

And it's far more graphic than most shows would ever dare to be (and not at all boring like school make it out to be trying to remain uncontroversial and to make "good citizens" which apparently requires lying to them, no matter what country you're in).

 

[AlphaFoxtrot]

The way I recall, Mal was written as a libertarian viewpoint character, and Tim Minear is a libertarian, so the influence is not unintentional. The short answer is, Libertarians consider both slavery and war to be an exercise of state violence, which is immoral, and to what degree slavery would have been naturally dismantled by market forces.

I don't mind fiction stealing from history. George Martin's "A Song Of Ice & FIre" is probably the most consequential piece of adult literature written this century, and it's heavily inspired by the English War of the Roses, and nobody would call GRRM uncreative, just lazy and easily distracted. The problem is, most television writers lack the subject matter expertise to do so, and frankly, aren't nearly as good of writers as Martin is.