shel

The Transsexual Chofetz Chaim

Mutant, librarian, poet, union rabble rouser, dog, Ashkenazi Jewish. Neuroweird, bodyweird, mostly sleepy.


I write about transformative justice, community, love, Judaism, Neurodivergence, mental health, Disability, geography, rivers, labor, and libraries; through poetry, opinionated essays, and short fiction.


I review Schoolhouse Rock! songs at @PropagandaRock


Website (RSS + Newsletter)
shelraphen.com/

Anonymous Guest asked:

Fascinated by what you said about farscape's politics - could you elaborate? It's a show that's broadly sympathetic to prisoners, where the ship (at least in mid season 1) is a noncombatant, and most situations up to that point have been resolved via talking things out until violence becomes needed to preserve life. I'd love your perspective on this, if you're down to share! No worries if not!

Caveat I'm only on season 2 but I don't think Farscape has bad politics it's just worse than DS9 when it comes to political plot lines. The gender politics in particular are horrendous. John Crichton is this patriarchal gary stu who is always right and all the women need him to shout sense into them in this way that like, if your husband spoke to you that way it would be extremely toxic and it's implied that 100% of the women in the show was to fuck him or are in love with him in some how despite him acting like that. Plus just the characterizations we get of women are so.... like OK as a fucked up transsexual I like Chiana but her entire personality is "nymphomaniac who throws herself at men to manipulate them" and she's only seen through a male gaze. Maybe they'll give her more complexity later but for now she's such a classic misogynist trope it can sometimes be painful. It's also the case that despite having three female main characters somehow all they mostly ever talk to each other about is the men in their lives.

When it comes to the characters having all been prisoners, while I do like this idea, the show isn't making a political statement with it because it firmly establishes for us that none of them are "actually guilty of anything wrong." Besides Chiana, they're all only political prisoners. It's not challenging the concept of prisons or incarceration at all really and every cruelty they go through involving prison they emphasize that it was some Peacekeeper practice and not that incarceration itself is inhumane. It's not that prisons are bad, Peacekeepers are bad. We know that we're not meant to challenge incarceration logic because the show is pretty pro-death penalty and retributive justice in many episode plot lines.

I definitely don't think issues are worked out "through talking unless violence is necessary" there's a lot of episodes where issues are worked out by a man taking away a woman's agency over her body and life decisions because men know better than women. A lot a lot a lot of episode arcs are about encountering some culture that has a practice John disapproved of and him using a combination of "logic" and violence to force everyone to change their ways to whatever John thinks is the correct way to be. He has no respect for local cultural differences and we aren't meant to either. There's no "prime directive" in this show. It's a lot of like... John telling everyone that they've been wrong for centuries about their Unamerican ways of life. Even when you think John will be in the wrong for once, he ends up being right.

When it comes to politics itself, the show isn't particularly concerned with particular political ideologies. The Peacekeepers aren't really a specific kind of fascist. They're abstractly authoritarian. Their logo is based on the iconic Bolshevik propaganda poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge implying that the Peacekeepers are supposed to be the Bolsheviks? Communists? Or something? So far at least we don't have any sense of Sebacean culture or economy outside of the Peacekeepers which operates entirely as a military does. It's identical to any military except that you're drafted as a child and your children are conscripted as well. There's one episode where the Peacekeepers are revealed to have a labor camp where they use a mind control drug to make docile workers destroy their planet with monocropping. So I guess that's sort-of imperialism? It's not really depicted as a proper society though so much as one camp. Peacekeepers are also repeatably described as being mercenaries or "for hire" it's unclear to what extent they're their own government. Since we're in the Uncharted Territories we don't really see any sort of international economics or international relations because everything is just isolated planets. Everything operates under old fashioned mercantilism or capitalism as the natural order and things like class disparity and material needs don't come up at all.

Generally when we see political systems on other planets, they're always like, "we have been following The Old Ways for as long as anyone remembers mmmm yes" and then John proves that they Old Ways are some sort of lie that someone made up. The exception would be the episode with the Pa'u Anarchist Cell which was very confusing and was sorta like "ah... but the anarchists get their hands dirty so they're just as bad as the fascists..." (also what does it mean to be "the Lead Anarchist" and why do these anarchists have so much hierarchy in structure.) The "90% of the planet is lawyers" episode even followed this and the problem was solved through trickery and superstition exploitation not by like... organizing the working class (which is only 10? of the planet? how?) the commentary on the justice system seemed to just be like "don't we hate lawyers" and not really about an actual system.

To be clear, I'm really enjoying Farscape and it does a lot of really cool things especially with the character writing of every character except John. but if you want politics then DS9 is just better for that. DS9 actively engages with politics and tries to speak to bigger themes in the process. It creates ongoing lasting complicated political cultural systems and asks questions about decolonization rooted in real life. DS9 has episodes about how hard it is to move from rebel leader to civil servant after you win the war. What to do about colonies on borders. It challenges you to respect cultures that value things you think are wrong. It challenges you to consider how even Ferengi society has merits and deserves the self-determination to improve and change through Ferengi organizing and not by the Federation deciding how it should work. DS9 is very concerned with material resources that different powers fight over and how resources are distributed within a society. Farscape isn't too concerned with anything this complicated. In Farscape there's the presence of authority (probably bad) and the absence of authority (different bad things will happen instead).

I do find it very refreshing that Farscape is the rare space opera that doesn't have a militaristic command hierarchy. But I don't think that's the same as like... it being good at discussing politics.


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in reply to @shel's post:

yeah this is kinda where i'm at with Farscape. it's confusing with John, because sometimes he's presented as correct and good and other times he's a chaos gremlin, and the chaos gremlin stuff only sometimes has some sort of special plot reason for him to be acting out of character. it's difficult to figure out where the writers are positioned with him, because there's definitely a read on him just sort of forcing his views through on most episodes and the Gary Stu thing being an intentional parody, especially given how he can be clueless and seemingly deliberately ignorant of things the show treats as genuinely sacred or worthy of respect. the Peacekeepers seem to me to be a pretty blunt and deliberate parody of the USA's foreign policy at the time, given the name "Peacekeeper", which is what gives me the most pause in taking any of the "good ol' boy wins again" stuff with John at face value.

If they're supposed to be America then why is their symbol a reference to the Bolsheviks. Idk even if there's more subtle references or symbolism or parody going on it's simply not tackling issues as directly and expertly as DS9

ive been watching babylon 5 the last few months and reading this is like seeing a mirror image where every cool nuanced thing B5 does is instead a bad, boring, unnuanced choice. Like, B5 doesnt have a prime directive but it has many episodes dealing with "alien culture doing something the audience might find morally wrong" and the commanders (the show lead changed after season 1) show an innate respect for other cultures as well as it being part of their diplomatic role to not judge alien cultures by human standards. The characters who dont have that respect innately are shown to be, if not fully wrong, then acting in a way which is counterproductive to their goals by forcing their culture on aliens. its also hoo boy very specific in its critiques of US-style authoritarianism and is still VERY relevant, like painfully so haha. anyways B5 is great and also has great characters, tentacle penises, and bullshit-shaped doors

I wanna watch B5 at some point. Farscape is really amazing at character design and set design and has really fun character writing and lots of other good qualities it's just bad at gender and the main character is boring