Firefly characters you DON'T like

POSTED BY: BYTEMITE
UPDATED: Wednesday, July 13, 2016 05:55
VIEWED: 17508
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EBFIDDLER

Thursday, February 21, 2013 5:00 AM

Manatee's got a great point, about Inara and Atherton and "the social event of the season." Inara's profession requires that she work her contacts, network, be seen in the right places. Have you ever been tempted to go on a date because of what the date was (tickets to [fill in interesting event here]) rather than who it was with? Inara complains to Mal often enough about NOT being seen in the right places (backwater moons without so much as a temple built), I imagine she'd recognize the professional value of appearing at this Persephone event, maybe enough to override any misgivings she had about Atherton.

Back on main topic of the thread: Characters you don't like.

I said before that I didn't like Tracey, because he's such a screw-up. I was telling my husband about this thread, and he said he liked Tracey, because he's a nuanced character. He is a screw-up, he's mixed up, he does a bad thing, but he's not 100% dislikable. He's also kinda sweet and charming, as well as making stupid mistakes.

Also, I could probably point out dislikable characteristics of each and every one of the main characters, even though I love them all so much. I think it's to the credit of Joss, the writers, and the actors that these characters came across as so complex and multi-layered. Despite this, I laughed (and sighed and shook my head) at Wish's comments about the 98-lb Wonder Woman trope. There are still stereotypes within Firefly. Just not as many as I've seen in other shows.

RIONAEIRE

Friday, February 22, 2013 12:46 AM

I agree with you regarding their origin story being kind of anticlimatic, mainly because it only happened ten years ago and in order for Simon to have grown up hearing about them I reckon they'd be older than that, campfire stories during childhood etc. If it had happened 50 years ago that would have lent credibility. I also agree regarding the fact that it would probably be hard to get such rabid entities to cooperate. The only way that works is in an animalistic sort of way, like wolf packs etc. it might be possible if you look at it from that angle.

Where I disagree with you is in the idea that Reavers are a poor concept. I really enjoyed the concept of Reavers in the show and partly in the movie too, not seeing them though was way better, what you don't see is way scarier than what you do see in a context like that. having them be an off screen threat that is shadowy and little known and mysterious is better and scarier than actually seeing them.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

EBFIDDLER

Friday, February 22, 2013 2:22 AM

I'm with you in not liking Reavers. I don't mind having a vague, threatening, unseen menace that can come out of the Black and strike you when you're not expecting it -- that's a useful thing in a drama. But the Reavers themselves? Ick. I'd rather never see them. All kinds of unanswered questions about them, things that don't make sense, things that make me scratch my head, as a biologist, and say, oh really?

Also, I agree there'd be space-lanes, just like there were shipping lanes for seafarers. Not all parts of space are equally likely to contain spaceships!

BYTEMITE

Friday, February 22, 2013 3:15 AM

Joss wrote Miranda and Reavers as starting ten years ago to correspond with the start of the Unification War. If you squint, there's a suggestion there that the war was an attempt to cover up Miranda.

But yeah it does create continuity issues with Simon's comments. Unless Simon was being figurative and meant "campfire stories" in the same sense as "boogeymen."

BYTEMITE

Saturday, February 23, 2013 3:16 AM

I could see that. I also kind of have the vibe from Reavers that they have a very tribalistic mentality - that they are humans after all, but they've turned too savage in just ten years for any of their actions to be anything but incomprehensibly violent to anyone else.

And that would also explain the putting victims on their ships, as certain cannibalistic tribes where known to use the bodies and bones of their enemies to construct both effigies, fetishes, and warnings.

BYTEMITE

Thursday, February 28, 2013 4:40 PM

For that matter, what if Firefly is Mal's dying dream as he's laying in a ditch in Serenity Valley? He wakes up from a coma in a med-tent, Simon's the doctor, River's a tech specialist/assassin, Inara's a nurse, Wash is a pilot, Jayne's a mercenary, Kaylee's a mechanic, Book's a chaplain, and Zoe is still Zoe. It's a near thing but there's still a chance to win the war and expose Blue Sun for what they are.

All are fascinating ideas to explore, though I think if Joss tried to pull an "all a dream" on us for Firefly, the entire fandom might revolt. Unless it retconned the movie as a precognition River had, MIGHT be acceptable, though people might be slightly bothered that they paid to see a movie and spent two-ish hours watching something that never actually happened.

There's a fine line to walk.

STORYMARK

Thursday, February 28, 2013 5:44 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:

All are fascinating ideas to explore, though I think if Joss tried to pull an "all a dream" on us for Firefly, the entire fandom might revolt.

Maybe not. He pulled that with Buffy, essentially negating 6 years of storylines - and the fans just ignored it.

Excuse me while I soak in all these sweet, sweet conservative tears.

"We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." -- Rick "Frothy" Santorum

"Goram it kid, let's frak this thing and go home! Engage!"

EBFIDDLER

Thursday, February 28, 2013 6:00 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by MANATEE:
Reavers, continued:
It's not the "not seeing them" that bothers me -- that just makes them scarier bad guys. If they were simply bad guys with a taste for plunder & human flesh, no problem. My difficulty is with the mindless frenzy they always are shown in.

/
I like Reavers better when they are an unseen menace. Seeing them in action makes them less scary, not more. When it's all in your head, what they COULD do...then they're truly scary.

Quote:
If they decorate their ships with corpses as a matter of policy, it would fit. It's the equivalent of the Jolly Roger. If they are the ravening lunatics portrayed in the BDM, why waste all that food? Freeze-dried jerky, for hard times?

Reavers use terror as a weapon, like Blackbeard, who just had to sail close to shore with the Jolly Roger flying and the townspeople would surrender their goods, just to avoid the fight, his reputation was so bad. Used terror as his first weapon, used violence only if the terror didn't work.

I have lots of other questions about Reavers, besides the freeze-dried jerky one!

Quote:
I have a hypothesis: Miranda--population 30 million; one-tenth of one percent goes hyper-aggressive from the pax in the air systems. There is a *range* of aggression induced within the 30,000 reavers-to-be. The worst-affected attack anything that moves, and are destroyed in self-defense by the reavers-that-are. The reavers-that-are only go full-on bats**t crazy when they have prey; otherwise they are sane enough (if you'll pardon the expression) to cooperate with each other. They are like the Norse berserkers who, in heat of battle-frenzy, could sustain and inflict unbelievable amounts of damage.

Here are some of the questions that bug me about Reavers, that I put into the mouth of one of the characters in my fanfic (apologies for the mix of headcanon with the questions relevant to this thread):

"They studied questions like, if Reavers fly without core containment, why don’t they all just die of radiation poisoning? Are there female Reavers?—there are, by the way—If there are female Reavers, are they perpetually raped? Or do the female Reavers also rape others? Can Reavers reproduce, or are their genes too severely damaged by the radiation for that to be possible? Since Reavers cut on themselves, why don’t they die of infections? Where do Reavers get fuel for their ships? What do they eat—strictly cannibals, or are they omnivores? Do they raid perpetually or just occasionally? How long do they live? Are there juveniles? Are Reavers enough different from other humans to be considered a separate species?”

Simon had never considered Reavers from a purely scientific standpoint—somehow, he’d been too busy worrying about the prospect of imminent death to consider them so abstractly—and his shock began to manifest itself in his expression.

Ip was continuing on in the same vein. “And since seeing the Miranda broadwave, I’m sure the researchers have added a few more questions, like, what triggers certain members of the population to turn Reaver and not others?”

And another question worth adding...Is Miranda really the only instance of Reaver-generation in the 'Verse? Because Simon talking about "campfire stories" when he was young indicates that they existed prior to 10 years earlier. And it doesn't make sense that Pax would be used on Miranda (30 million people) without a series of preliminary experiments to develop, refine, and (one would hope) test the safety and efficacy of the Pax compound. There should have been smaller-scale uses of Pax before Miranda. Perhaps some of those prior experiments failed as well? Then there would be Reavers, smaller waves of them, from previous instances of failed Pax experiments.

BYTEMITE

Thursday, February 28, 2013 7:40 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Storymark:
Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:

All are fascinating ideas to explore, though I think if Joss tried to pull an "all a dream" on us for Firefly, the entire fandom might revolt.

Maybe not. He pulled that with Buffy, essentially negating 6 years of storylines - and the fans just ignored it.

Point. Although he kind of ignored it too, for obvious reasons - interesting as the idea is that Buffy's just crazy and she's been in a hospital for six seasons, Joss isn't all that interested in writing stories about NORMAL crazy girls. He likes his supernatural elements and universe domination conspiracies.

Firefly has less of the supernatural element, and he'd have less to lose by doing a revert, but, I don't think he would, because I don't think most writers would. While doing that can open up new story potentials, you end up losing whatever effort you've put into the existing story by making it kind of irrelevant, you lose the emotional impact of the character deaths, you lose any character development... Anyway, there's just problems with it, and there's a reason why when it happens, the writers always have it happen at the end.

RIONAEIRE

Monday, March 4, 2013 5:31 AM

As someone who isn't a fan of the BDM I'd be perfectly happy with it being a dream. It could be anyone's dream though, it wouldn't necessarily have to be River's dream. I know whenever I have bad dreams (which is most of the time) I wake up and I feel sooooooooo relieved that it was just a dream, because during the dream I think its real, because I can't lucid dream, I've done it a couple of times but it never lasts for long, usually within the dream I lose the awareness I momentarily gained. But again that has only happened a handful of times, so I really think its all happening until I awaken and am so thankful it wasn't real.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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