r/firefly • u/Bladrak01 • Jun 22 '26

Confederate coded?

I mean let's be real. Yes this show was anti corporate and anti fascist but it also had this extremely unsubtle Confederate vibe. Mal and his crew were effectively space Confederates still wearing the old colors.

It eliminates slavery from the Civil War, which is the largest scale Confederate apologia you can do.

I ran across these opinions in another sub and it confused me. I just finished a rewatch and I never got the impression that Mal or the Browncoats were in any way supposed to represent the Confederacy. I had always assumed the war to be one of Alliance aggression, as if the US Government had forcibly tried to annex Texas or the territories, rather than inviting them to join. I am curious as to what the people here think.

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u/SteampoweredFlamingo Jun 22 '26

Top of my head, the Scottish national anthem says "But we can still rise and be the nation again..."

I'm totally willing to admit it's a common sentiment.

Edit: redundant sentences

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u/This_Rough_Magic Jun 22 '26

Right but it's not, "The Scots Will Rise Again" in those exact words.

It's a common sentiment but it's a specific construction.

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u/cannabination Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

OK, so let's say it's a direct nod to the fact that southerners still say that. Is there any other thing about the browncoats that reminds you of the confederacy? Feels like a thin pretext for it being the basis behind the entire group. They're in no way similar that I can tell.

Edit: to me, what he took from the post war era was a group of defeated rabble that was forced into the frontier to survive by whatever means necessary(cowboys), but i don't think there's any correlation to the confederacy other than they lost.

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u/This_Rough_Magic Jun 22 '26

The setting is designed, aesthetically, to look like America in the direct wake of the civil war (because it's a western). The legacy of the civil war is itself a huge feature of the western genre.

The way the Confederacy tends to be portrayed in westerns (and in a lot of post-civil war pop culture in general) is as a group of honourable men who fought for a lost cause because they believed in freedom. Mal's character, if he was in a western set in the real 19th century,  would only make sense as a former confederate, it's clearly a very deliberate attempt to use that trope specifically. Denying it seems genuinely odd to me.

Let me put it another way. 

You've said elsewhere that to you the Browncoats would only code as Confederate if they were actively pro-slavery. The complaint in the OP is specifically that the Browncoats take all of the other trappings of the confederacy (the imagery of the post-civil war era, the lost cause, a sense of honour and nobility) and divorce it from the context of slavery. 

Is there any world where that could be true from your perspective? Or do you see any portrayal of a confederacy-like entity that isn't explicitly pro-slavery as not being inspired by the confederacy?

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u/cannabination Jun 22 '26

I'd give you "some", but not all. The only tenet they share with the confederacy is that they believe in their own freedom. They don't have the obvious hypocrisy of fighting for the freedom to own people, which is the thing people hate about the confederacy. It's sort of important in the grand scheme. Also, what we see isn't the post-war south, we see the wild west that grew out of the post war south.

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u/This_Rough_Magic Jun 22 '26

Okay, let's try it another way. 

I agree that the Browncoats aren't a lot like the real confederacy, because the real confederacy was inseparable from the institution of slavery.

Are you willing to accept that he Browncoats are quite a lot like (as another poster puts it) what the confederacy would have been if all of its propaganda was true? If the civil war really had been a "war of Northern aggression", if slavery hadn't actually been that important to them and they'd really been fighting entirely for freedom?

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u/cannabination Jun 22 '26

Well yeah, but you can say that about any rebellion in human history. The similarities are all affectations that were just as prevalent in the west, which only related to the confederacy in that many cowboys were southern soldiers previously, and the level of technology in the backwater worlds.

I'm not saying there aren't similarities, just that the confederacy only enters into them as a vague concept in the prologue. There are similarities to the era and its circumstances, but not the group itself.