There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Confederate, a new series in development by Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. The premise is the present day, in a world where the South won the Civil War and slavery never ended.
Although it hasn’t been written yet — there’s really nothing except a concept — I’m hearing a lot of skepticism on social media for what Roxane Gay calls slavery fan fiction, especially in the current political climate.
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This premise — really, any premise — could be done well. The 2004 mockumentary C.S.A.: Confederate States of America managed to be both chilling and weirdly funny, especially the fake commercials. But there are some zombie tropes that Hollywood loves a little too much, and they’re too easy a fit for this new project. I’m hoping that the showrunners will hear the criticism now, when it can make a difference, and not fall into these trope traps.
Sympathy for the Devil. A staple of cable dramas is the villain who does horrible things and yet, somehow, we’re made to sympathize with them. See, for instance, The Sopranos, Oz, and Game of Thrones. I’m all for nuanced characters, and I’m well aware that people are complicated. But please spare us a David-Brooks-ish “balanced” portrayal where enslaver and enslaved are somehow equally right and wrong. I’ve already seen a few Twitter parodies of the morally conflicted (but super-hot) “good” master who owns other humans like livestock, but it’s ok because he feels really bad about it. To be contrasted, of course, with the inevitable “bad” master.
We see so many portrayals that concentrate on humanizing oppressors, that I found it refreshing when The Handmaid’s Tale chose to concentrate on humanizing the oppressed. We see through the eyes of June/Offred, the handmaid. While Fred and Serena Waterford feel like fully fleshed-out humans, they don’t come off as “good people who did a bad thing.” They’ve chosen to do great harm, and we get the point of view of the person most affected by it, with no attempt to balance with theirs.
Looking for Rapey Loopholes. Another overused trope is to act as if consent is terribly complicated, or it can be given retroactively, or it still counts when it’s coerced. This was bullshit when General Hospital did it in 1980, and it was bullshit when Game of Thrones decided Cersei’s no didn’t mean no. It was bullshit a few days ago when stories about Sally Hemings again referred to her as Thomas Jefferson’s “mistress,” when she had no legal right to say no. That isn’t consent.
Given the amount of rape in Game of Thrones, I suspect Confederate will be much the same. Please, can we not get any portrayals of “complicated love” between a man and his human property? (Again, let me offer The Handmaid’s Tale as an example: the rape scenes are not remotely sexy, not explicit, and do not cause June/Offred to develop any “conflicted feelings” toward Fred.)
An additional point raised is the current friendly political climate toward white supremacists. Despite good intentions, a show waving Confederate flags and other racist iconography can become a recruiting tool for them. Our dystopia is their fantasy.
Roxane Gay also wondered why alternate-history stories always seem to come back to the same premise, the Nazis or the Confederates winning. Does it reassure white people who that the actual racism happening today isn’t that bad? What about….
...say, things went in a completely different direction after the Civil War and, say, white people are enslaved. Or a world where slavery never happened at all. What would happen in a show where American Indians won the conflicts in which they were embroiled as the British and French and other European nations colonized this country? What would happen if Mexicans won the Mexican-American War and Texas and California were still part of Mexico?
Someone else — I think it was Ana Mardoll? — suggested another alternate history: one where the Confederates lost, accepted that fact, and moved on.
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From HedwigKos:
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In the diary by wagatwe, Michelle Obama reveals the most painful parts of being First Lady.
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