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

[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.