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Confederate: bad idea or the WORST idea?


Kalbear

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I like a bit of alt-history and there's a lot that can be done with that particular set up.

I'm surprised they aren't planning on following anything from the slaves POV. They mentioned abolitionists and surely there'd be ex slaves who crossed the border and try and lead the fight. It would be a missed storytelling opportunity, like Westworld completely doing away with the robots' stories.

Initially my main concern is that they'll play this as south bad, the rest good. They don't state this, so it's just a pitfall I'm wary of but it doesn't need to be so clear cut. I imagine both territories would still continue to do shitty things. It's not like post civil war slaves were suddenly treat with equal status so it'll be far too simplistic to have both "countries" operate that way. It'd also be naive to assume the northern territories would continue on the same trajectory as the USA. This is one of the things that Man in the High Castle does well - it doesn't make the Nazis or Japanese good/bad but different shades of bad (it even goes a step further and shows some of the "freedom fighters" are actually just "terrorists" wanting to see everything burn).

It might also be nice to draw some comparisons between slavery and slave wage between the two countries. Obviously owning someone and denying them freedom is still more wrong but having a class of people (usually of a minority ethnicity) doing the same shitty jobs and the employers giving zero fucks whether the salary allows them to even have enough food is wrong too. Maybe in such an alternate set up the North would argue even more paltry salaries for jobs in order to compete with the south?

I guess some might say "oh it's just a fun alt history romp" but I really can't see how you can choose this set up and not make it political. It'd be insulting to not think about it all. But I guess that's when it'd be nice if David Simon was announced as the showrunner for this show - or even Charlie Brooker (if you wanted to maintain some level of sci-fi "fun" to it). If Beniof and Weiss have been cooking this up for several years who knows, it maybe has had a lot of thought but into it and it'd be great to see them do a passion project.

But I still think the show has a lot of potential so I'm definitely in the wait and see camp.

57 minutes ago, Channel4s-JonSnow said:

This thread = Big overreaction or HUGE overreaction ?

It's all good. The show is over a year away. Huge (over)reaction = showrunners realise it would be a good idea to include a story from the slaves point of view and either announce it as a "we've listened" or a "sorry for the misunderstanding but this was always our intention". Some will then cry "pandering" but I don't care as I can't see how including this won't improve the show.

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Is there any indication as to what year it is set in? Is it going to be modern or will it still be 19th/ early 20th century?

I don't get the argument (made by Lord Varys) that a CSA couldn't survive or would inevitably be reabsorbed by the north. The Union failing to reconquer the south and then tolerating its existence afterwards might not be the likeliest outcome of the 1861 war but it's surely not an impossibility. Also, the south was not actually backwards in economic terms in the 1860s. It was only so if we compare it to the northern states, Britain, Holland, Denmark or France. In global terms it was reasonably wealthy. 

Anyway, I will not be watching this as I have had it up to the eyeballs with D&D.

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I tend to enjoy alternate history/timeline stories so on the surface I'm interested in the premise of this show.  American slavery adapted with the technology at the times so industrialization wouldn't have changed things.  Forms of slavery continue to exist today (I'm typing on a product that was created in part due to slave labor, and no I'm not going to have a debate with posters who don't understand that today's slavery doesn't look like 19th century American slavery, start another thread if you're confused).  The sex slave market, while absolutely illegal, continues to thrive.  

So I'm curious about a reimagining of American history if the south had continued with slavery.  How would corporations like WalMart have formed and been different to what they are today?  The world would obviously have to remain complicit (much like they do with certain markets today), how does that look?  I assume this is modern since it's the third civil war...What does the slavery look like?  Is it still entirely reliant on extreme racism?  Is slavery part of the penal code?  Rob someone and become a slave?  Are people born into slavery?  Do they still use religion to legitimize keeping people as slaves?

Then I start looking at who is creating this show and the types of character stories they want to tell and I begin to get disgusted.  D&D's body of work tells me they aren't the right people to head this thing.  They couldn't even be bothered to include actual slaves as character stories that would be explored.  I tend to automatically boycott certain things if created by certain people or groups.  This show would need to have favorable reviews by friends and folks that I highly respect for me to even consider watching the pilot.  

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Benioff, Weiss, and the Spellmans' respond to the backlash. Personally, I think they make reasonable points -- especially the fact that people are jumping the gun before they even have... well, anything beyond the very basic sketch of the concept. The Spellmans are involved from the ground floor. There's nothing in what little we have that says it's the story about "slaveowning rich people" any more than it's the story of every other group of people that it mentions, because right now there really isn't a story, just a concept for a TV series that basically says "We're going to come up with some sort of story about a cross-section of the societies of two nations in which one of them practices slavery."

Anyone who knows anything about my views of the faults of Game of Thrones knows that I do not think Weiss and Benioff always execute things well, and sometimes I think their instincts have been shown to occasionaly be awful. I stopped watching GoT two seasons back, I don't intend to watch it again. I doubt I will watch this show because of my views. But the outrage -- especially some of the outrage that has verged on calling the Spellmans race traitors (they deleted their Twitter accounts due to the flood of abuse they got) -- is simply foolish. Dubiousness? Sure. But if this isn't the ultimate "wait and see", I don't know what is.

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14 hours ago, Kalbear said:

I don't see why they need to. On its face, an alternate history where the South won that features zero actual slave stories and focuses on a rich family of slaveowners is just not a good idea. Having it be about the war between the North and South instead of  the slaves is also not a good idea. Benioff and Weiss do big spectacle well, but they have a poor grasp of nuance - which when you're talking about actual humans with actual ancestors that were slaves, seems like a pretty friggin big deal. 

There are potentially ways to make this a powerful piece; none of the ideas floated so far make it sound that way. 

I read something called the Southern Victory series by Harry Turtledove and the premise is that the South wins the war and they keep their slaves into the 1880's and then they rig the system after they're freed so that they are essentially still slaves and a major part of the story is a socialist uprising in 1916 during World War I while the Confederacy is fighting the USA.

While I'm not sure the series would be suitable for adaptation I do know it would be better than this.

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I'm missing where all the ideas have been floated. Read the Vulture piece. There's practically nothing. A movie script that they're basically going to harvest for the foundation premise but which will be vastly more iterated and complicated.

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10 minutes ago, Ran said:

I'm missing where all the ideas have been floated. Read the Vulture piece. There's practically nothing. A movie script that they're basically going to harvest for the foundation premise but which will be vastly more iterated and complicated.

The original press release described the types of character stories that would be told:

Quote

 The story follows a broad swath of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone — freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.

It left out actual slaves.  Maybe it will include slaves but it's a problem that their first discussion of this project didn't mention stories of the actual slaves at all.  Whatever follow up they've had, the initial press release makes it appear as though slaves are just props to tell stories about other people.  

I recognize that one could claim that "people in their thrall" could indicate the slaves, but it's a pretty problematic way of describing actual slaves.  

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I think this controversy is the internet in a nutshell. The amount of assumptions being made about something that HASNT EVEN BEEN WRITTEN YET, the enormous self righteous anger, the identity politics, the jumping on people and accusations of racism, the lack of evidence. 

In years to come there will be case studies about this when they try and work out where the internet went wrong 

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1 minute ago, Ran said:

It specifically mentioned people in the thrall of the conglomerates. Sounds like slaves are going to be main characters even from that brief sketch.

No, it mentioned families of the people in thrall.  It's already an unusual way to describe slaves, but it definitely isn't clear if the families of the thralls are also slaves themselves.  The release is very clear the type of people who would be given stories, except when it comes to the slaves.  They get vague.  

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37 minutes ago, Ran said:

Benioff, Weiss, and the Spellmans' respond to the backlash. Personally, I think they make reasonable points -- especially the fact that people are jumping the gun before they even have... well, anything beyond the very basic sketch of the concept. The Spellmans are involved from the ground floor. There's nothing in what little we have that says it's the story about "slaveowning rich people" any more than it's the story of every other group of people that it mentions, because right now there really isn't a story, just a concept for a TV series that basically says "We're going to come up with some sort of story about a cross-section of the societies of two nations in which one of them practices slavery."

Anyone who knows anything about my views of the faults of Game of Thrones knows that I do not think Weiss and Benioff always execute things well, and sometimes I think their instincts have been shown to occasionaly be awful. I stopped watching GoT two seasons back, I don't intend to watch it again. I doubt I will watch this show because of my views. But the outrage -- especially some of the outrage that has verged on calling the Spellmans race traitors (they deleted their Twitter accounts due to the flood of abuse they got) -- is simply foolish. Dubiousness? Sure. But if this isn't the ultimate "wait and see", I don't know what is.

I'm not opposed to waiting for more information in general, but in this day and age, in this climate, they jacked the roll out so immensely, they could be making the single most important piece of television since maybe Roots (?), and it won't matter.

For the record: I don't thing for one moment they're making anything that important.

As I mentioned elsewhere, from the article, it sure seems like they're taking and/or stealing from Turtledove (I don't think for a minute they're using Shelby Foote as their true starting point) And they're still managing to jack up the source material.

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17 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

No, it mentioned families of the people in thrall.  It's already an unusual way to describe slaves, but it definitely isn't clear if the families of the thralls are also slaves themselves.  The release is very clear the type of people who would be given stories, except when it comes to the slaves.  They get vague.  

There is zero chance that a slave isn't going to be a main character. The slave rising up to fight is a tried and true successful archetype.

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7 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

I'm not opposed to waiting for more information in general, but in this day and age, in this climate, they jacked the roll out so immensely, they could be making the single most important piece of television since maybe Roots (?), and it won't matter.

I think HBO (rightly or wrongly; I tend to think rightly though) felt that any internet backlash was irrelevant and the vast majority of their potential viewers will never hear anything about the show until the trailers start appearing in 4-5 years. This wasn't even a rollout really, it was a PR piece that read more like an invitation for various TV industry folks to start reaching out to HBO about working on the show. Not something meant to be consumed or analyzed by the general public.

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I think the roll out is really an HBO PR issue. I agree that it seems to have been a bit premature, but I think Fez is right that this was mostly aimed at the industry to see who wanted to join in. Still, were I them, I'd have sat on it for three-four months more while something more than the thin sketch of the idea was available, and maybe even get some directors or actors attached who could help carry the burden of explaining why they were involved and why they think this is a great idea. Right now it's vague enough that anyone can construe it to be anything they want.

 

 

 

 

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That's a given.  Which is why it's a good idea to create buzz in a positive way.  Now the community has seen the controversy.  Other producers, directors, writers, and actors might be wary about attaching themselves to such a project that could invite such backlash on them. 

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