Permanently Deleted
i just wanted my socialist space utopia show to have a series with some queer representation but instead we have liberalism in space. :doomjak:
Take The Expanse pill.
You notice they put an Anarchist A :anarchy: behind Marco Inaros when he’s giving his victory speech after he murdered millions of innocent people for a purely nationalist/supremacist cause. This character distills how the (I believe libertarian) authors view lefty revolutionaries: cult of personality narcissists who use the excuse of liberating an exploited people to seize power and commit genocide. They could have done so much more with the obvious colonialism/imperialism in the show, but they cash it in for a hot Che Guevara rip-off baddy. Still enjoy it though.
:anarchy-a-white: is the OPA symbol.
Also Marcos Inaros is Space Trotsky. No I won’t explain.
Yeah I thought that might have been the case. But I remembered in the books the OPA symbol just being a split circle. Maybe someone on the tv show just couldn’t resist using the design, cause it is awesome, but idk I can’t help but think they are intentionally doing a lib ‘spooky anarchism is violent’. Also they had a scene where Inaros talk about building agricultural stations to sever their reliance on the inners for food lmao. :kropotkin-shining: Conquest of Space Bread.
Is there a name for this trope? It shows up a lot. “We need to make an obviously good socialst/leftist argument sound bad, so we’re going to have the villain espouse this argument then inexplicably do a lot of murders”
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.
NuTrek is more troubled than original Trek, but it tries (not necessarily successfully, which is where a lot of leftist analysis tears it a new asshole) to hammer home the Federation’s ideals as worth believing in and fighting for.
Thank you! I like Discovery despite it’s flaws, and while I keep expecting it to turn grimdark doomerism, it’s relentlessly idealistic and optimistic, even in the new grim arc they created for Season 3. Is it better than DS9? Hell no, but I also think it’s a perfectly fine Trek show (didn’t bother to watch Picard, though). I particularly enjoy the Emperor Puyi character development they managed to include.
What makes Osyraa’s debate with Vance interesting is that she’s basically saying that sure, the Federation might have some good ideas, but if they pretend like there aren’t some advantages to capitalism, then they’re hypocrites.
:agony-mescaline:
Why does everything need to be grittily deconstructed?
Gritty deconstruction can be an excellent way to seriously and critically tackle issues but also offer unique hypotheses and takeaways. Sadly, most of it amounts to nothing but Grimderp, defeatist shite which only reinforces the whole “life is always going to suck and you’re a fucking dolt if you want better”.
But, despite Osyraa being a horrible person who uses captured space animals to kill her family members, she’s kind of right about the Federation
“Hitler was right about one thing”
The writers of NuTrek clearly don’t want to do the actual work of imagining a better future. It’s why there’s poverty and shitty working conditions on Star Trek Picard.
