Firefly

[rachelmanija]

Yesterday I visited sartorias and watched the two-hour pilot and regular first episode of Joss Whedon's Firefly. Woo-hoo! Going over to work watch more of it today. I know absolutely nothing about the show except that it was canceled after thirteen episodes and that there's a movie which isn't out yet but has been previewing all over, so spoil me and die.

I did read a couple non-spoilery comments, and remember yhlee being annoyed that there were no significant Asian characters even though the future was so Chinese that all the characters are fluent in Mandarin. Yes, yet another example of TV-land's fear and loathing of casting actors who are neither white nor black. I worked there and believe me, it is an uphill battle. You can't even think of casting non-white or black leads, so I used to write the entire supporting cast as Asian or Hispanic, except that the supporting characters were all cast out of Vancouver where apparently everyone is white, because I'd always get reports that no minorities had auditioned so they had to cast white anyway. I am getting revenge on this in my manga, but that's not going to help any out-of-work actors, alas.

However, I hope yhlee enjoyed Mal's cheerful willingness to kill people who needed killing, because it provided two of my very favorite moments and I thought of her every time he very sensibly killed someone who was clearly going to otherwise cause horrible trouble later on and probably kill some of his crew or him, rather than doing the usual "Oh no I must not kill a human being even though there's no justice system I can turn him over to and he's standing there informing me that the second I turn my back he's going to rip out my throat and present it to his wife in a chocolate box, because that would be wrong." My feeling is that when people are regularly presented with that sort of situation, they develop flexible ethics.

Special love for Mal for that and getting the best lines, Zoe for being female and kick-ass and having the sense to marry Wash, Wash for being adorably geeky, Jayne for being hilarious, and River for embodying one of my very favorite plot points, the half-crazy traumatized psychic who was experimented on by the government that wants her back. I love that plot so much that I have written an entire manga about it. Actually, I don't know if River is psychic or not, but I assume she must be because she was already a supergenius, so what else could the experiments have possibly done?

Comments

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

The series never had the chance to reveal the full extent of What They Did to River, though you do get more clues, and the Serenity trailer has still more.

I hate to fault Joss for his white-and-black cast, because he and JJ Abrams are the only producers I see casting Asians in even recurring roles in non-cop shows. It really was an excellent show.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I got the impression that Simon and River are supposed to have some Chinese blood in them, kind of like Caine on Kung Fu.

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Good question. It's certainly possible, especially as I never saw all the episodes.

[kate_nepveu]

I don't think there's any explicit evidence in favor of this, and their parents certainly look much more like Simon than River, but I'll buy it anyway as fanwank.

[rilina.livejournal.com]

...except that the supporting characters were all cast out of Vancouver where apparently everyone is white, because I'd always get reports that no minorities had auditioned so they had to cast white anyway.

Vancouver has a huge Asian population. At least that's what I saw out on the streets when I went there last year, and that what my Vancouver-raised Taiwanese friends tell me. I even saw signs for Asians running for political office, which is generally a reliable indicator of the presence of s significant minority community.

You've got to wonder where they were putting out those casting calls...

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Let's just say that I always suspected them of not looking too hard.

[fiveandfour.livejournal.com]

Welcome to the world of Firefly love. Now you can sit back with the rest of us in eager anticipation of the movie this fall :).

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I did like that about Mal and cheered it on. With caveats later.

However, I am one of three people in the universe who have seen Firefly and are, on balance, more irritated by Mal than fond of him.

I loved Wash. I liked Zoe. Jayne was entertaining (and keep him away from me). I grew fond of River. Oh, and Simon grew on me.

I won't speak further of Mal and/or Inara.

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Mal got on my nerves after a while. Though some of the most unacceptable stuff he did was the stuff I loved about him most.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

I was annoyed that I had trouble understanding the Chinese phrases. Are we to understand that Chinese pronunciation has changed among native speakers, that Chinese phrases have been Americanized as they spread, or that the actors suck at parroting?

If you tell me to "biz way" or however Mal mangles it, you die!

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

oyceter speaks Chinese and had similar difficulties.

Cynically, given Whedon's worldbuilding track record, I doubt any such idea of diachronic linguistics occurred to him, and that it's that the actors have difficulty parroting.

[kate_nepveu]

The DVD extras indicate that the actors had a really hard time with the phrases (I recall a shot of the language coach wincing extravagently).

[minnow1212.livejournal.com]

Firefly!

Hmm, yes, that's all I have to say. *g*

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I want to marry Wash, but Zoe would beat me up.

[(Anonymous)]

I too joined the love-of-FIREFLY club at the end of the spring.

SERENITY is the film I'm looking forward to this autumn!

tu amiga (Constance)

[(Anonymous)]

Welcome to the Black, hon. Heck, I had no idea you hadn't flown this part of the 'verse yet. You'll like "Out of Gas." You'll fall off the couch and spit coffee over "Jaynestown."

Hey, why isn't anybody talking about Kaylee? The woman who pats Serenity and murmurs, "Good girl. Good girl." She is sooooo cool.

I agree about the casting of Asians in TV and film, and the casting of Hispanics, for that matter.

That said, I have to weigh in on the language issue. Apparently Whedon wanted the Chinese to be Cantonese, but there was an early translator screwup, and they were stuck with it. And yes, after six, seven, eight takes, the actors' pronunciation went a little Xerox, no matter how close it was on the first take. They didn't have much time to study their lines, and no time to actually learn Chinese.

But at the risk of indulging in shameless spackling, the characters shouldn't be speaking fluent Mandarin. Or Cantonese. Or whatever. Think of the Hawaiians, native and Anglo, speaking pidgin. Think of the last time you were on a bus in L.A. and heard a bunch of high school girls speaking Spanglish. Language, like water, follows the path of least resistance. Leave a big pile of it someplace for people to use and mess with, and if you come back fifty years later it will be different. In a century or two, it's likely to be almost unrecognizable.

Not to mention geographic shifts. Even in our communications-enabled age, British and American English and Mexican and Spanish Spanish are different in sentence construction, word use, and slang. And in spite of movies, TV, and standard broadcaster usage, they continue to become more so. Imagine that effect spread over an area the size of galaxies. The likelihood of maintaining the purity of an elegantly complex, nuanced language like Mandarin Chinese is, well, astronomical.

Though Firefly's producers may not have set out to produce a linguistically-convincing 'verse, I think they did a pretty good job by accident.

Sorry for the essaylette--I've been thinking a lot about this lately.

--Emma

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

I thought of her every time he very sensibly killed someone who was clearly going to otherwise cause horrible trouble later on and probably kill some of his crew or him, rather than doing the usual "Oh no I must not kill a human being even though there's no justice system I can turn him over to and he's standing there informing me that the second I turn my back he's going to rip out my throat and present it to his wife in a chocolate box, because that would be wrong." My feeling is that when people are regularly presented with that sort of situation, they develop flexible ethics.

My favorite character summer up nicely in a nutshell.

Also, Mal is hot.

[slashpile.livejournal.com]

Everyone in Vancouver is white? Hmmm. In Double Happiness, I remember that Jade (Vancouver actress) is up for a part, and there's some crack about "the two of you," or something. After ten years of TV-land, I should hope that there are a lot more Asian actors.

Pre-Firefly, the superpowers were China and the US. I think they're trying to do the reverse of how American English gets used around the world. It's also post-war, so it makes me think about all the stuff that soldiers bring home with them, and all they leave behind.

Lucky you, though, seeing the pilot first. On TV, they skipped it because they thought it was too boring for a first show. And, yes, you'll choke on Jaynestown.