Mallory Ortberg has re-written scenes from Firefly as if authored by Ayn Rand.
This abomination must never be made.
One small grace we are given: at least she didn’t include any Randian sex scenes.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Fortunately Adam Baldwin already ruined the show for me.
There must be a faux-Chinese swear which sums this up.
Maybe it could be done with dubbing. Or with mechanima…
…which reminds me to go on youtube and watch “can dialectics break bricks”
Huh. As it was, I found that show – like pretty much all westerns – a bit too pro-libertarian for my tastes.
Pretty absurd, considering Mal is all about “doing what’s right, even if it’s stupid and/or illegal”.
@1 Tabby Lavalamp
Aw, really? I still like Jayne, despite the actor portraying him.
Oh Great Rat, no. Just no.
Would a Randian sex scene consist of sixty pages of the man shouting at his paramour?
No, it would be seventy pages.
The list of recommendations also included an Ayn Rand version of Marcus Aurelius. Just no indeed.
I guess that would have turned it into “Firefly: the story of some plucky, independent heroes and the villain they fly around with” or something? Wouldn’t have gotten it more seasons though. The movies of Rand’s novels tanked badly.
It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s tried to sneak Ayn Rand’s Objectivism philosophy into entertainment though. The last time I ran into it was in the Wizards First Rule series by Terry Goodkind. I’d read several of the novels before realizing the Randian connection. I thought he just ran into trouble writing good plots. I struggled partway through the first novel where essentially the entire plot was about the supposed secret evils of altruism and the sainted virtue of being a selfish bastard before I had the thought that kept me reading them for a time: this silly horseshit must be part of the fantasy of the story. I reasoned it the setting must be about portraying what a weird, horrid little world we’d have if those values were flip-flopped and we had to depend on whiny libertarian assholes to save us because we were stuck in groups that were all advancing awful agendas.
@1, @6: None of the characters in Serenity is out of place. Including Jayne (the Hero of Canton)!
The thing about Firefly is how many shitty things Mal actually does that we’re apparently intended to root for him over, like the way he treats Inara or the way he doesn’t go through with spacing Jayne because Jayne doesn’t want River and Simon to know he tried to double-cross them. I’m not even going to bother with a Randian rewrite of the series.
microraptor #12
I never felt obliged to ‘root for’ Mal when he was being a shit.
(Inara could take care of herself, I hated the way he treated Kaylee.)
@gijoel #8
No, rather the steely look in his eyes, together with his chiseled features and uncompromising devotion to his work and ideas, a savage rejection of any external control over his life culminating in a stark disregard, disdain even, for the heroine’s needs and wants would naturally lead to a violent and sudden physical coupling, but a mere reflection of their mutual recognition of each other’s rationality, a serious evaluation of their mutual passion. For to see in another one’s own true dedication to understanding the world as it is: that of doers, deciders, men cleaving to a single purpose, shaping metal and rock, hauling up and setting afire the very foundations of the earth and to fuel their unfettered bidding, is to truly ignite the spark of interest in the objective mind and transform disorganised and selfless “love”, that rotting instinct devoid of all logic, touted by the unthinking masses, into an interaction of pure reason, where the individual is truly free, can truly choose to follow their proper bodily expression, unbridled…
Yes, ok, 70 pages.
You’re FAR too good at that.
I never got into Firefly. Guess I never got into Wheadon material much either. Making it Libertarian would only have made things horribly worse for me.
actually …
I’d like a little more detail on that thingy.
I loved Firefly, but I can’t deny that it’s already pretty fundamentally libertarian in its message. Not to mention the Greyback/Browncoat analogy, that flew right over my head the first time around (as a non-USAian). I mean, Whedon worked very hard to make clear that Mal’s not a racist, and doesn’t approve of slavery, but as an archetype, he’s clearly the disillusioned confederate solder riding west to escape the federal government.
http://fraggmented.blogspot.ch/2010/12/what-haunts-me-about-firefly.html
https://firefly10108.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/the-confederacy-and-firefly/
https://faustusnotes.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/firefly-serenity-and-confederate-politics/
microraptor #12
& chigau, #13
Nearly everyone does crappy stuff in that show. I felt no desire to support Mal when he was being genuinely crappy, just as I felt no desire to support Kaylee when she (apparently, it’s not entirely clear) takes Book’s strawberries for herself in the pilot episode. She’s an employee of Mal, crewmates with Zoe, Wash & Jayne. On top of that, she’s supposed to be genuine friends with Inara (if a bit awestruck-distant). But she doesn’t sell the strawberries for fuel. She doesn’t hand them over to Mal. She doesn’t bring one to Inara’s shuttle. Nope.
Mal, of course, has more of these moments than Kaylee or Inara or Wash, who are all supposed to be less-complicated, more-pure-good examples of the hero-in-a-difficult-time archetype. But the show was such that even if I thought Mal (or someone else) was making a terrible choice, I could still either empathize with it (as with Kaylee and the strawberries, even if I might hope to make a different decision if I were ever in a situation where strawberries were so precious and all fresh food so rare), use it to develop an artistic appreciation of the character (Jayne turning on his previous gang cohorts to take up with Mal, as portrayed in a flashback), or just laugh at it as something whose moral import is lessened by the story-telling context (as with Mal kicking a man into Serenity’s engines – which shocked me, but then made me immediately laugh. That moment strangely made me acutely aware that this video drama was fiction and at the same time merged well with the rest of the show that encourages suspension of disbelief*1).
I don’t think it’s wrong to criticize Mal for the shitty, immoral choices he makes (Shooting a horse!?! What’s wrong with you, Mal?!?), and I respect that you, microraptor, felt the show was somehow excusing those choices (or encouraging viewers to excuse those choices). But I actually appreciated being given heroes that were human. Most people would say flawed heroes, but I don’t think it was that. I think it was a group of realistic heroes.
Some people who do good things are in it for the money. Some people who do good things would make much worse choices (and did, in the past, make much worse choices) if they weren’t in the middle of a group of others who consistently made it harder to do bad things and easier to do good things. Some people who do good things plainly objectify women and think that merely witnessing two women kiss is a good reason to excuse oneself with a not-at-all oblique, “I’ll be in my bunk.”
Some heroes are Jayne.
Some heroes are better than that, but no earthling is Kal-El. In fact, that’s part of the point of making Superman into an alien: real life heroes are all humans, and even the best of us fuck up. Putting those humans into a very difficult context just forces more difficult choices, more opportunities to fuck up. It doesn’t make us fuck up more frequently as a percentage of all our difficult decisions. But the more decisions, the more fuck ups. The more fuck ups, the more drama on the show.
I felt that Whedon wasn’t making up weird, unrealistic “flaws” that were then forced into the show’s plot. I felt that these people were created with different ethical codes and with different levels of adherence to those codes. The codes themselves were varying degrees of laudable. But the ethical codes, the levels of adherence, they all seemed to fall within the realm of real human experience. I very much appreciated that.
==============
*1: I felt almost the same about Mal stabbing a man with a sword after already winning the duel against him: it was, if anything, even more morally condemnable than kicking the other man through Serenity’s engine, b/c at least the man he killed had just promised to track Mal and his crew until he killed them or was himself killed. If Mal really believed that it would come down to killing him eventually anyway, doing it to the man now, even if he might in that moment be a helpless captive, arguably might have the same gross effect – killing someone – while preventing the violent jerk from hurting or killing others between the moment of his release and the ultimate lethal showdown. Bad. Condemnable. But understandable. Whereas stabbing the guy on the ground, even if the man was sure to get medical care and make a full recovery, that was just gratuitous infliction of punishment/torture. Fuck that.
@chigau (違う) #13
You mean the bit 10 pages later, where it’s all “..the wall of his torso rose above her, and he was to her as a city of smokestacks, pipe lines, biodomes, space-markets and inviolate vessels, which made her mind wander excitedly to the current fuel cell price index..” or the bit 50 pages later, which goes: “The action of his manhood was as the raising of cargo to the top of a distant loading bay, and she felt each mechanically accurate movement as if an inexhaustible number of small black lifters were riding out of the earth in a diagonal line across the sunset. ‘I. am. com. plete. ly. sel. fish. in. my. pleasure. he grunted…” or “..It had seemed to her that the glow shining from his eyes did not come from the spaceship engine outside, but from the flames of a burning oil field…”
(Enough! *slaps* himself)
I found this gem in “Nature: Futures”, subject: heroes full of themselves
“Simon Clash: The Galaxy’s greatest hero” http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7541/full/519124a.html
(but not enough Objectivism; the hero should demand that his rescuer pay for the privilige of rescuing a Hero)
=8)-DX #20
I’ll be in my bunk.
Crip Dyke @19:
I don’t expect the heroes of a story to be perfect all the time, or be 100% upstanding citizens who resolve conflict through legal means. But I do get annoyed when a character behaves badly while being portrayed in an overly positive light. Shindig, the dueling episode, is a good example. Mal is rude to Inara but tries to brush it off by claiming that he respects her, just not her profession- the obvious BS of this statement is never challenged. He challenges the other guy to a duel over Inara’s honor. Inara does not point out that she is a mature woman who doesn’t need anyone to protect her honor. This behavior goes on the whole show and Mal never really gets called on just how patronizing and sexist he really is. It just bugs me.
There’s a contrast to, say, Jayne, who’s always portrayed as a dimwit and a thug who’ll sell out the rest of the crew for money at the drop of a hat. He behaves badly too, but generally not in a way that’s portrayed as being heroic or appropriate.
For another Randian take on a Whedon property- Ayn Rand’s Buffy the vampire slayer.
Microraptor:
Inara challenges Mal’s attitude before he even says that line.
You have a strange sense of nobility, Captain. You’ll lay a man out for implying I’m a whore, but you keep calling me one to my face.
It’s blindingly obvious who has the moral high ground here. Having Inara respond to that directly would in no way have made her stronger. She’s already made her point, Mal’s response is obviously bullshit, and she clearly knows it.
Same thing with:
Inara doesn’t have to say that to make it clear. There’s no way having her say that makes her a stronger character. It’s the inverse of that beat in Avengers where Stark admits that Rogers is right about him (Stark) only caring about himself, and he does it with no words, just a reaction shot.
Shindig was written by Jane Espenson, who in my opinion writes even better Whedon than Joss himself. I guarantee that Inara’s wordless responses to both of the above were deliberately written that way to show her as more secure in her position than Mal is in his.
To quote Officer Lockstock from Urinetown, “Everything in its time, Little Sally. You’re too young to understand it now, but nothing can kill a show like too much exposition.”