Perhaps the best illustration of what I mean would be the Operative because although played by the Black British Chiwetel Ejiofor the character is *written* and styled as a very stereotypical ninja antagonist. As well as the martial arts fighting skills and samurai sword he embodies all the Zen lack of effect, honorable fanaticism and inscrutable over civilized philosophizing, which is never ultimately a match for the rugged American libertarianism of a Mal or a Han or a Flash.
The thing is the Operative isn't just a one movie villain he's supposed to represent the whole Alliance and all its controlling anti-individualist conformist works. Granted it is a little unfair to use the movie, the show was more nuanced politically-speaking and according to interviews intended to become more so. Yet it remains a thing - if the Asians aren't there because they're the government that government has suspiciously Orientalist tendencies. [...]
Westerns are famously about those big empty landscapes and space (without aliens) has the advantage of actually being empty instead of filled with other peoples as the real promised land turned out to be. A space Western is a way to have your John Ford cake and eat it, to go to the final frontier and not come back weighed down with colonialist's guilt.
These are really astute remarks. I've been thinking about Orientalist cultural appropriation and Firefly/Serenity for a while; I like how you tied that into the role that literal and cultural genocide plays in westerns, and into how there's a certain sanitization and (unsuccessful to the point of problematic) inversion of those tropes in the Firefly universe, especially in Serenity.
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The thing is the Operative isn't just a one movie villain he's supposed to represent the whole Alliance and all its controlling anti-individualist conformist works. Granted it is a little unfair to use the movie, the show was more nuanced politically-speaking and according to interviews intended to become more so. Yet it remains a thing - if the Asians aren't there because they're the government that government has suspiciously Orientalist tendencies. [...]
Westerns are famously about those big empty landscapes and space (without aliens) has the advantage of actually being empty instead of filled with other peoples as the real promised land turned out to be. A space Western is a way to have your John Ford cake and eat it, to go to the final frontier and not come back weighed down with colonialist's guilt.
These are really astute remarks. I've been thinking about Orientalist cultural appropriation and Firefly/Serenity for a while; I like how you tied that into the role that literal and cultural genocide plays in westerns, and into how there's a certain sanitization and (unsuccessful to the point of problematic) inversion of those tropes in the Firefly universe, especially in Serenity.