Permanently Deleted
The Expanse is garbage politically.
The Belters are only nominally shown as this oppressed underclass, they’re mostly shown as just wild uncivilized rubes that need to learn to play nice with Earth and Mars. It’s another space liberalism show.
I mean no shit it’s liberal. The central theme is basically “We’re all human, we all just need to get along. When we simply trust each other and work together we can do incredible things.”
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth watching. In fact I love The Expanse precisely because it is distilled, old-fashioned, starry-eyed idealism. Sometimes it’s really great to just sit down and watch a show where people trusting in the altruism and innate good nature of other human beings and be rewarded for that faith is exactly the kind of heartwarming spectacle you need, especially in an era of extremely cynical and bleak television like now after Game of Thrones.
That I can also have a field day of watching it with a critical eye for ideological reasons is just a bonus. I have a lot of fun with what was already my favorite show, The Wire, today for the same reason.
The TV show is definitely more aggressively liberal than the books. The books portrayal of individual belters is usually extremely sympathetic and in most of the books like half the pov characters are belters. The OPA is also generally portrayed as a force for good, albeit flawed, except for Inaros and the Free Navy. Towards the end of the 5th book Holden even admits that everything Inaros said was basically right, aside from all the ethnonationalism and terrorism, and the belt ends up becoming the dominant power in the system because they’re given a monopoly on commerce through the gates.
They show the oppression and exploitation of the belt in much more detail and a a few times various OPA figures explicitly compare the inners’ exploitation to modern imperialism.
Also the aggressively liberal UN Earth is a shit hole and Mars is a hypermilitarized nationalist state that basically collapses as soon as the gates open.
I’m not saying it’s a perfect communist masterpiece or anything, but the books are very good and I enjoyed them.
