Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
Firefly and/or Joss Whedon
Is it cold in here?:
It's not positive discrimination to hire actors who reflect the premise of your series.
ayvah:
--- Quote ---Whedon developed the concept for the show after reading The Killer Angels, a novel chronicling the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. He wanted to follow people who had fought on the losing side of a war and their experiences afterwards as pioneers and immigrants on the outskirts of civilization, much like the post-American Civil War era of Reconstruction and the American Old West culture. He intended the show to be "a Stagecoach kind of drama with a lot of people trying to figure out their lives in a bleak pioneer environment." Whedon wanted to develop a show about the tactile nature of life, a show where existence was more physical and more difficult. After reading The Killer Angels, Whedon read a book about Jewish partisan fighters in World War II that also influenced him. Whedon wanted to create something for television that was more character-driven and gritty than most modern science fiction. Television science fiction, he felt, had become too pristine and rarefied.
Whedon wanted to give the show a name that indicated movement and power, and felt that "Firefly" had both. This powerful word's relatively insignificant meaning, Whedon felt, added to its allure. He eventually wound up creating the ship in the image of a firefly.
Wikipedia
--- End quote ---
My favourite episode of Firefly was the one where they visited the Forbidden City.
Akima:
--- Quote from: ayvah on 06 Mar 2011, 23:15 ---If you see Firefly as a missed opportunity for some positive discrimination, then I can appreciate that. But I don't believe that at any moment, they chose to not cast Chinese actors.
--- End quote ---
I see Firefly as a missed opportunity to cast actors consistent with the background that the series creators decided upon. I see Firefly as an example of a long-running tendency in American (and Australian is worse) TV and film to exclude Asian characters and actors from stories in which they might have been expected to appear. I see Firefly as a product of a creative team that simply did not think that there was any problem with furnishing their world with Chinese stuff while including next to no Chinese characters. Above all, I see in Firefly evidence that the creators never thought it was important to have any Chinese characters.
Comparing casting for a TV show to rolling dice is simply an evasion of responsibility. Casting is not a random process. Effort, time and resources are needed to recruit a cast and create a TV show. Regardless of the budget, these are necessarily limited, so I assume (I've never worked in the field) creators prioritise and spend those resources on what they think is important. For the Firefly team, creating Chinese characters, and casting East Asian actors, were just not important enough to do. Except once. The evidence is in what they put on the screen.
The message I received from Firefly's treatment of the Chinese elements in its universe was: "We think Chinese stuff is cool, but Chinese people are not important." This echos Orientalist and colonialist attitudes towards Chinese people which have a long and ugly history. I'm pretty sure nobody involved in the show ever intended that, or even considered it, or engaged in some sinister conspiracy, but that is perhaps the most worrying thing of all. That the near-total exclusion of Chinese characters, and denial of roles to East Asian actors, happened because of shared unspoken assumptions and priorities. That the production team apparently never saw a problem, never thought about the history, never considered that there might be issues of cultural respect and appropriation involved. The Firefly fandom apparently shares the same assumptions, and sees no problem either.
Carl-E:
I'll just preface this with stating that I've never seen Firefly or anything else Whedon has done (I've been TV intolerant for the last decade or so, only seeing things my kids happen to be watching over their shoulder, mostly crime stuff - my younger daughter's apparently planning a perfect murder).
That being said, I have to agree with Akima. There are more than enough hot, young and talented asian actors available for a show like this, you see them all over TV and movies - mostly cast as LA gangsters or asian mafiosi, playing right into the stereotypical casting that's been done to every racial minority since Hollywood began.
Unfortunaltely, "fan" is short for "fanatic", and by definition, such people won't be convinced that the object of their fandom is wrong in any way. They'll rationalize and/or defend it to the bitter end, and that's what we're seeing here. It's not a matter of agreeing to disagree - the Firefly/Whedon supporters who think nothing's wrong with a show that appropriates such culture not having culturally consistant actors really don't have a leg to stand on here. The same was true for Airbender, and even though my kids loved both the movie and TV show, they at least acknowledged that the lack of asian faces in the movie was really jarring.
Using "colorblindness" as an excuse is no better - anti-racism, or progressive casting, or whatever you want to call it leads to some pretty silly decisions as well (the hubbub over Thor comes to mind, though I'm not sure of the details - at first blush, a black Thor sounds a bit silly). When race is important to the story, even tangentially, it should be incorporated.
My favorite example was a local college production of a musical called Once on this Island. It's a tale set on a French Colonial carribean island, and the majority of the cast was to be black lower classes, with a few white colonials. Thier interaction was crucial to the plot. The college has (like the rest of the area) a much smaller black minority than the national average, and so a deliberate race reversal was done - the villagers were cast white, with the colonials cast black. A deliberate race reversal is usually done to challenge stereotypes (which may be the case with Thor), and make the audience think more carefully about such things. I'd expect nothing less from a college production, and it worked surprisingly well. But casting them all white (for a "lack of talented black actors") or casting racial mixes in both groups (colorblindness) would have been disastrous. Well, at the very least, just plain silly looking.
It really sounds like something broke in Firefly's creation, and if I ever do see it, the racial makeup will certainly be in my thoughts, rather than just being a nagging feeling at the back of my mind that somethig's wrong.
akronnick:
I think the majority of Firefly's problems were due to the fact that they were trying to make a space opera for network television.
That rarely works, and the fact that the network in question was owned by Rupert Murdoch probably didn't help.
The show had many good ideas, including the Asian fusion design concept, which were not followed through with.
What resulted was a mediocre show with decent special effects and a better than average ensemble cast, but was never able to carry through with its potential due to not being able to live up to unreasonable network expectations.
If it had been done three years later and on a cable network, it could have been Battlestar Galactica.
Would Firefly have been better had they cast Grace Park rather than Jewel Staite?
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