Though the all male, all First Nations version of As You Like It sounds cool.
*blinks*
Yeah, I think that would be interesting to watch. Heh. (Atlantic Rim? Yeesh.)
I knew going in that the aliens were only going to be alien in the same way that people of different cultures are alien from each other, which is what, from a Doylist perspective, the showrunners wanted them to be; they're stand-ins for "the other". From a Watsonian, in-show perspective, they couldn't be too alien, because, to survive on even a terraformed Earth, they'd almost certainly have to be oxygen breathing bipeds.
From a writing point of view, we can only posit aliens that are somewhat similar to us by looking to cultures we know of, whether that's intimately or only coincidentally. So the alien cultures were going to be imprecise mirrors of Earth cultures, no matter how creative the writing team. And I think that one always has to walk the knife edge, as a writer, between incorporating bits of culture from which you don't come into your creation, and simply appropriating things wholesale, in a way that's disrespectful of the cultures from which you borrowed. In the case of Defiance, I think they walked that knife edge successfully.
(For instance, you mention one of the races that you called a rip off of First Nations cultures ... I assume you meant Irisa's species, the Irath? When I watched, I was thinking "hippy rip-off" which, to be sure, means some sort of second hand appropriation of First Nation, since hippies borrowed, willy-nilly, from everyone. But once it's second-hand appropriation, I tend to think that it ends up in the "simply borrowed" category.)
I'm intrigued that you mention Elizabethans; are you thinking of the Castithans? I was thinking that the original Castithan culture was a mash-up, then boil-down of all of Earth's most gender-essentialist and clan-centric cultures (particularly Japanese culture.)
no subject
*blinks*
Yeah, I think that would be interesting to watch. Heh. (Atlantic Rim? Yeesh.)
I knew going in that the aliens were only going to be alien in the same way that people of different cultures are alien from each other, which is what, from a Doylist perspective, the showrunners wanted them to be; they're stand-ins for "the other". From a Watsonian, in-show perspective, they couldn't be too alien, because, to survive on even a terraformed Earth, they'd almost certainly have to be oxygen breathing bipeds.
From a writing point of view, we can only posit aliens that are somewhat similar to us by looking to cultures we know of, whether that's intimately or only coincidentally. So the alien cultures were going to be imprecise mirrors of Earth cultures, no matter how creative the writing team. And I think that one always has to walk the knife edge, as a writer, between incorporating bits of culture from which you don't come into your creation, and simply appropriating things wholesale, in a way that's disrespectful of the cultures from which you borrowed. In the case of Defiance, I think they walked that knife edge successfully.
(For instance, you mention one of the races that you called a rip off of First Nations cultures ... I assume you meant Irisa's species, the Irath? When I watched, I was thinking "hippy rip-off" which, to be sure, means some sort of second hand appropriation of First Nation, since hippies borrowed, willy-nilly, from everyone. But once it's second-hand appropriation, I tend to think that it ends up in the "simply borrowed" category.)
I'm intrigued that you mention Elizabethans; are you thinking of the Castithans? I was thinking that the original Castithan culture was a mash-up, then boil-down of all of Earth's most gender-essentialist and clan-centric cultures (particularly Japanese culture.)