Comment on What're your strong opinions from an aged / dead fandom?
SippyCup@lemmy.ml 23 hours agoThe 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.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 15 hours ago
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.
SippyCup@lemmy.ml 14 hours 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.