Where do I begin?
To start, here are some quick and easy results from googling “firefly confederate”:
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Direct quotes from the Firefly wiki [link]:
“The confederacy of planets and moons that formed the Independent Faction was doomed from the start.”
“While leaders among the scattered outer worlds expressed concern over the formation of the Union of Allied Planets, most folk didn’t much care, figuring it wouldn’t affect them.”
Note the use of the terms ‘confederacy’ and ‘union.’
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“A CIVIL WAR NOVEL INSPIRED THE FIREFLY UNIVERSE. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels from author Michael Shaara was Joss Whedon’s inspiration for creating Firefly. It follows Union and Confederate soldiers during four days at the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. Whedon modeled the series and world on the Reconstruction Era, but set in the future.”
~ Rudie Obias, “23 Fun Facts About Firefly” [source]
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Note similarities between Malcolm Reynolds’ character biography and the biography of actual confederate general Jubal Anderson Early.
From the Jubal Early entry on Wikipedia [link]:
When the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered on April 9, 1865, Early escaped to Texas by horseback, where he hoped to find a Confederate force still holding out. He proceeded to Mexico, and from there, sailed to Cuba and Canada. Living in Toronto, he wrote his memoir, A Memoir of the Last Year of the War for Independence, in the Confederate States of America, which focused on his Valley Campaign. The book was published in 1867.
Early was pardoned in 1868 by President Andrew Johnson, but still remained an “unreconstructed rebel”. In 1869, he returned to Virginia and resumed the practice of law. He was among the most vocal of those who promoted the Lost Cause movement.
From the Malcolm Reynolds entry on the Firefly Wiki [link]:
His contempt for the Alliance never completely disappeared (although he once said that he “wouldn’t mind makin’ a buck off ‘em”, and was shown in multiple episodes willing to steal Alliance supplies for a job, as long as it doesn’t affect the people), and, although he was on the losing side of the Unification War, years later he still wasn’t convinced it was the wrong one. Mal expressed what seemed to be his manifesto—"[The Alliance] will swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. So no more running. I aim to misbehave.“[1] His anti-government attitude was reflected in his choice to live on a spaceship, drifting from world to world, as far away from Alliance interference as possible.
See also:
Firefly Wiki article on the Battle of Serenity Valley
vs
Wikepedia article on the Battle of Shenandoah Valley.
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The name Jubal Early probably sounds familiar to you even if you know nothing about Civil War history.
“The bounty hunter in ‘Objects in Space’, the final episode of Joss Whedon’s series Firefly is named Jubal Early because Joss Whedon knew from Nathan Fillion, who played the main character Malcolm Reynolds, that he was his ancestor. For dramatic irony regarding his name, he is played by Richard Brooks, an African-American man.”
~ also from the Jubal Early wiki page
Yes, that’s right. Joss Whedon asked a black actor to play a lunatic rapist bounty hunter named after a real life confederate general. Joss Whedon has even stated in an interview that he “loves that character.”
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Now I mentioned “cowboys vs
injunsreavers” earlier:In the unaired pilot Simon Tam explicity refers to the reavers as “savages” – one of the more popular Native American slurs used by settlers in the North American “Old West.” In the same episode we see Mal and Zoe riding through an open plain on horseback wearing chaps and carrying shotguns. Right from the get go we have protagonists dressed like cowboys in a spaghetti western, shit-talking an entire culture of supposedly “mindless savages” (yet not so mindless they can’t still practice guerrilla warfare in a fairly organized fashion).
Recommended reading: The Culture of Violence in the American West: Myth versus Reality
The episode “Bushwhacked” features a character – the lone survivor of a reaver ambush – who’s “gone native” and become a reaver himself. He completes his transformation from sane pilgrim into savage reaver by “cuttin’ on himself’ to making himself “look like one of them” – which he accomplishes by giving himself facial piercings which I, for one, found oddly reminiscent of those warn by certain Native American and Pacific Islander cultures.
He proceeds to attack the Firefly crew using guerrilla style tactics.
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People want to believe that they can weed out the Orientalism, shovel off the bastardization of the Chinese language, and jackhammer their way through the thick crust of cultural appropriation to reveal a better, purer show buried underneath.
But they can’t.
Firefly’s bedrock is racist.
Firefly is racist all the way down to its molten core.
Just go watch Killjoys already.
Fuck’s sake.
None of this registered with me, maybe because I’m not from the US so my knowledge of Civil War stuff is limited (I only found out what ‘Manifest Destiny’ was after you know which movie brought up a discussion) I obviously thought the lack of Chinese characters in a future where everyone speaks Chinese was…fucked up? But this??
How the fuck.
I want a reboot of Firefly that has nothing to do with Whedon, and which corrects his bigotry, racism, and misogyny.
Hi. OP here. I wrote this post because I saw people on my dash saying exactly what you’re saying – “We want a non-racist, non-sexist Firefly reboot.” I wanted them, and you, to realize that racism and sexism is so intrinsic to every single aspect of Firefly’s composition that by the time you take out all the bigotry, racism and misogyny, there’s nothing left to reboot.
Look at the show’s core team dynamic, for example:
- Mal is a reboot of Rhett Butler.
- Zoe is nouveau!Rhett’s loyal hand (notice she doesn’t call him by his name as one would a friend, but instead always refers to him as Sir – and then consider what it means for a black woman to be constantly referring to her white confederate superior by a title that signifies dominance).
- Wash, Zoe’s husband, is the nerdy self-insert though which Joss racially fetishizes Gina Torres and projects his sexual/romantic insecurities (remember how Firefly devoted an entire episode to Zoe reassuring Wash that her relationship with Mal wasn’t a threat to their marriage?) (remember how Wash spent a scene sexually objectifying his wife’s body parts to an audience of Alliance interrogators).
- River Tam is a whitewashed anime archetype.
- Inara is a whorephobic westernized caricature of a geisha. I’m not going to go into that here but there are plenty of essays that describe the problematic Asian elements of Firefly in greater depth
And that’s just the main protagonists. That doesn’t even take into account the minor characters, villain archetypes, politics, narrative tropes, worldbuilding, etc. of the Firefly universe, all of which are also racist and misogynist.
Also, consider that Joss Whedon thought “rebooting” colonialism as men vs. zombie freaks was less racist than honestly representing the exploitation and genocide of Natives by colonizers.
Racist history needs to be told. Erasing the racist truth of a historical situation doesn’t “take out the racism.” That’s whitewashing. Whitewashing is in and of itself a form of racism. Firefly is racist because it tries to whitewash a racist history. Any Firefly reboot that attempts to whitewash Firefly’s racist premise will only be perpetuating the cycle of whitewashing and erasure.
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I think what people really want is another show about a quirky band of leather wearing gun slinging rebel merchants with snappy dialogue going on adventures in outer space. You don’t need to reboot Firefly for that. Killjoys fits that description, and it’s not a Firefly reboot. Cowboy Bebop and Farscape both fit that description, and they both pre-date Firefly.
Fandom doesn’t need a Firefly reboot.
Fandom needs to give Firefly the boot.
It makes me sad to realize everything you say, @lierdumoa, is true. You have a brilliant analytical mind for sniffing out this sort of thing.
Sorry, @international-asian, it just got worse.
All the conversation lately about Confederate statues and Civil War history made me go back to find this series of posts.
It also led me to read this interesting piece that really gets one to re-examine the narrative of American history that even those who grew up in the North were fed.
Turns out that General Sherman’s often-criticized “total war” campaign in the final weeks of the war – which finally put down the rebellion and saved the nation – might not have been the atrocity it’s depicted as in movies, and was far from the brutality exhibited by the famous American generals of the 20th Century who waged campaigns of true total war.
Yet Sherman’s still considered a villain by many modern Southerners, while our much-worse recent generals are considered heroes.
And this Confederate propaganda has been so successful in shaping our view of the Civil War that douche-canoes like Joss Whedon can get away with creating much-loved shows based on glorifying the villains of US history, and few notice until later.
I feel ashamed now that I once adored this show so much. I blame my lack of knowledge of US history at the time, and I was far from alone among ignorant Northerners who loved it.
A positive conclusion: Gonna have to find Killjoys!
This stuff really does fly right over your head if you’re not from the South. I learned most of what I know about the confederate imagery/storylines/politics of Firefly because I was researching to make a fannish songvid for Firefly, back when I was still a fan, and I fell down a wikipedia hole.
We’ve definitely hit a turning point in politics where Americans living in the North and on the coasts can no longer afford to remain ignorant of confederate history, or remain oblivious to confederate iconography/ideology/propaganda in the media.
What pisses me off the most is that Firefly has such cult status in fan communities – Whedon essentially made it acceptable for racists to cosplay as confederates in fan spaces.
Nick Spencer (what is up with dudes named Spencer being nazi apologists?) has control of the Captain America comic. Now HBO is making an alternate reality genre show where the confederates won and I can only imagine it will get worse. It’s getting to the point where I don’t know if POC will be able to feel safe at Comicon anymore.
Even as a Black Firefly fan aware of most of the deep problems with the show, I’ve always been beyond incensed that Joss Whedon named a Black man Jubal Early, after a real life, virulently white supremacist, pro-slavery Confederate general who had a major role in structuring the ridiculous Lost Cause narrative. And then he made the Black man a sexual predator of White women. Like.
Like real Jubal Early believed Black people to be barbarians and a threat to the safety of White people. And then Joss Whedon basically made Black Jubal a barbarian that’s a threat to a White woman. 😒
Firefly is deceptive because if you don’t look close enough, it seems like a cool diverse show. A few years ago when this blog was just starting out, one of my first asks was wondering what shows/movies I thought had good representation for Black women. I put together a list with a note that people could suggest shows I missed. Almost immediately, people wanted to add Firefly. It has a badass Black woman! And she also has love! And it’s interracial!
People were surprised at the oversight, but I was not happy about the suggestion. Like many people, I couldn’t put all of my aversion to Firefly into words, but, despite the fact that I’d just made a long post about intersectionality in media and how Black women having love stories in media is feminist and progressive, I could not stand ZoeWash.
It seemed amazing at first glance, but it became clear that Zoe was Wash’s ultimate Black Amazon fantasy, and that the pairing was meant to be weird. Worse, it became clear that Wash pretty much existed as her husband to make sure no one got the wrong idea that she might become romantically involved with great white Mal. Zoe was supposedly Mal’s equal, but she never got her own story arc.
So yeah. I wish I’d had this thread to link to at the time, because there was a lot of confusion about why my diversity in genre media blog didn’t support Firefly.
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