There's a land to burn out everything that you've learned

[sovay]

Internet! I am looking for a good database and/or personal recommendations of science fiction media foregrounding characters of color. My father was expressing his disappointment in the latest season of Doctor Who tonight and he is quite right (among other complaints) that reverse-fridging a male character reads much less cleverly and much more sketchily when the male character is black. I should like to be able to recommend him some antidotes.¹ More than one person of color in the cast preferred—who are not the canaries in the coal mine or the sacrifices on behalf of the white characters, if there are any white characters; there don't need to be. Bonus points from my perspective if there are women with agency and queer characters. (I should just hand him Janelle Monáe's back catalogue, right?) He is a hard sell on animation and does not play games, but enjoys things that are not in English. I can do this a lot more easily with books.

1. It is not like my father has never seen science fiction with protagonists of color; he followed Eureka for a while just because it contained Joe Morton. I just know there's always room for more. A lot of room.

Comments

[sovay]

a black man and his son, a Sudanese man, four or five humanoid aliens and one white guy who is often not foregrounded.

(And if that's O'Brien, has a traumatizingly strange life as far as I can tell.)

but the fact that the most prominent human faces that you see on the show are brown is still pretty refreshing -- especially since one of them is the guy in charge.

No argument. That's pretty cool.

I feel kind of like I missed the window for Deep Space Nine—I was already watching Babylon 5 when it came to my attention in the '90's, so it seemed like the significantly less interesting of two competing shows about human and alien politics on a space station and I watched a couple of episodes, but it never stuck, whereas Babylon 5 I taped religiously every week and wrote fanfic for, which you can still find on the internet if I am dreadfully unlucky. (It provided my first experience of dubious editorship! The site maintainer partially rewrote the story without checking with me! Dammit, I thought, I know how to spell "lavender"!) I have sporadically good memories of a couple of episodes, like the one where we learn that Bashir was genetically enhanced as a child and has been dealing with really complicated impostor syndrome/survivor's guilt ever since, and I must have seen enough to form opinions of the characters, because I remember liking Bashir, Garak, and Odo, but I'm not sure I could tell you much else about the show that I haven't picked up either from reading or from derspatchel being in the middle of a marathon rewatch when I met him in 2012.

[skygiants]

BEING O'BRIEN IS SUFFERING. Pointless, annoying suffering. But, I mean, if you want a show where it's not the characters of color who are the designated chew toys, I guess that's something ...

For me it was actually the reverse -- a friend launched a campaign to get me to watch Babylon 5 about a year or two before I started watching DS9, and I got through the first season veeeeery slowly but had not managed to make it further, even though I knew very well that after the first season was meant to be when it got good. And then a bunch of people I knew started doing DS9 watches, and it looked intriguing, and Debi offered to watch with me, and suddenly we were zooming ahead in DS9 while B5 languished on the shelf. This was probably the combo result of imprinting more quickly on the characters (I fell instantly in love with Kira Nerys, furious ball of ex-terrorist rage) and having someone to watch it with with the same sense of humor as me so that we could crack jokes through the dull bits. Maybe when I'm through DS9 I'll go back to B5, now that I've accustomed myself to the pace of nineties sci-fi.

[sovay]

even though I knew very well that after the first season was meant to be when it got good.

I got lucky: I discovered Babylon 5 an episode from the end of the first season, so I missed a lot of the early thematic groundwork and basically all of Sinclair, but I also missed most of the episodes that really sucked and scared early viewers off. I went back and caught up on it in the hiatus between Seasons Four and Five when TNT was marathoning the first four years and, yeah, there is some terrible television there. The first season is primarily useful as a benchmark for character development: the starting points from which radical change can be measured. And some foreshadowing, but I figured that out in the second season just fine.

I have now grown enough as a writer to be able to tell that J. Michael Straczynski's ability to write dialogue is wildly variable—there are just some registers he shouldn't attempt, because he can't pull them off—and he's significantly better with complicatedly difficult relationships than he is with straightforwardly progressing ones, romantic or no, and as a worldbuilder he falls slightly prey to planetary monocultures, although I could tell even at the time that he was trying to work against that tendency. But I was in high school. I imprinted on Ivanova and the Centauri. They'll be with me for life. I can live with that.

(I fell instantly in love with Kira Nerys, furious ball of ex-terrorist rage)

That is an appealing thumbnail.

[skygiants]

It's all about timing, isn't it? I mean, aesthetically, I deeply appreciate a plot structure that goes "we set up a chosen one! ... NOW HE'LL BE OFF DOING OTHER CHOSEN ONE THINGS OFFSCREEN FOR THE REST OF THE SERIES." And I'm pretty sure I have the potential to fall in love with Ivanova and Delenn; it's a matter of time and motivation.

[sovay]

I mean, aesthetically, I deeply appreciate a plot structure that goes "we set up a chosen one! ... NOW HE'LL BE OFF DOING OTHER CHOSEN ONE THINGS OFFSCREEN FOR THE REST OF THE SERIES."

And it works! He reappears and has a perfectly legitimate excuse for not having been running a space station for the last [x] seasons! It is a tribute to the show's structural skills that while I missed some of the impact because I had seen him for maybe one episode before then, his absence (and the mystery surrounding his reappearance) was sufficiently built up by that point that I still understood the importance of the reveal

I remain genuinely impressed by the amount of long-range planning and payoff JMS was able to pull off given the normal exigencies of television and his show in specific being yanked around by its funding. Some of the subplots that were patched in on the fly are brilliant. Third season and first half of the fourth season are still the best, in terms of intensity, pacing, and character work; second half of the fourth season and all of the fifth season were badly affected by the rapid-fire cancellation/de-cancellation of the series and both pull out some wonderful moments, but story-wise there's a lot of disjointed compression and the fifth season especially is marred for me by some wait, seriously? character moments. Nonetheless, I still recommend the entire thing. Either you'll turn out to be allergic to JMS' style—and you'll know once you've watched a couple of the good episodes; if it's not taking, it's not taking—or I'll look forward to your LJ-recaps. I hope it's the latter. I have not actually discussed Babylon 5 with that many people since high school, and even then, I didn't belong to a fan community: I found one person on the internet and we e-mailed feverishly until I left for college and she moved on to a fandom I was completely indifferent to.

And I'm pretty sure I have the potential to fall in love with Ivanova and Delenn; it's a matter of time and motivation.

I did not fall in love with Delenn, but I am unreasoningly fond of Londo Mollari, despite the fact that he is canonically a terrible idea.

I am also unreasoningly fond of Vir Cotto, but he is canonically actually a pretty decent person, even if he occasionally overestimates his capacity to process human fast food.

Ivanova is awesome and that's all there is to it.

[edit] I have never made anything resembling a formal study of it, but I wonder sometimes if there is an actual generational thing with Ivanova. I cannot be the only person who found it valuable, especially in high school, to have a queer woman—a queer Russian-Jewish woman—front and center in a science fiction story airing on a major network. There are ways in which I didn't even think about it at the time, and then I looked back and, you know, it actually mattered.

[skygiants]

AND ON ANOTHER NOTE, since you said he's cool with subtitles and no one's been reccing Japanese sci-fi yet, I'll throw in a rec for Spec 2, which is sort of X-Filesish and about as nominally sfnal as Dr. Who. (I mean, it's TERRIBLE science. But science!) Gleefully antisocial genius female science cop and glum male skeptic cop partner investigate superpowered crime; cases-of-the-week eventually develop into a deeply bizarre plot about metahumans, mind control and time travel. Ten episodes, all of them jam-packed with genius female science cop making wonderful faces and having the BEST TIME while everyone else has the WORST TIME.

(There is also a Spec 1 which is in the same vein, but it's only loosely related and stars different characters, and I haven't seen it.)

[sovay]

since you said he's cool with subtitles

Yes. He has randomly recommended me Korean sci-fi that he found while browsing Netflix. (It was good, too.)

and no one's been reccing Japanese sci-fi yet, I'll throw in a rec for Spec 2, which is sort of X-Filesish and about as nominally sfnal as Dr. Who.

And I've never heard of it!

Gleefully antisocial genius female science cop and glum male skeptic cop partner investigate superpowered crime; cases-of-the-week eventually develop into a deeply bizarre plot about metahumans, mind control and time travel. Ten episodes, all of them jam-packed with genius female science cop making wonderful faces and having the BEST TIME while everyone else has the WORST TIME.

Well, I'd watch that.

Thanks!

[skygiants]

You should watch it! Science fictionality aside, it's gloriously surreal in style and tone, and the protagonist is the best female variant on the familiar model of detective-genius-asshole-trolls-murderers-for-the-lulz that I've yet seen. Also, I really can't stress enough how great her faces are.

[sovay]

Also, I really can't stress enough how great her faces are.

"Surprisingly he looks normal."

Heeeeeeee.