Space Confederates

     I'm going to say something that will likely shock and appall many: Firefly/Serenity are not my favorite pieces of science fiction.
     Don't get me wrong, they're quite entertaining as these things go. They certainly make my top twenty (so long as we're only counting TV and movies). But, alas, I am far from being able to associate myself as a Browncoat (for those of you unfamiliar, this is the adopted term of rabid fans of the show).
     The problem is, this is one of those universes that rubs me the wrong way the more I think about it with my logical, grown-up mind. What it all boils down to is that the universe of Firefly/Serenity is attempting to mirror the western genre. And it does this fairly well with all the frontier aspects, just substituting space for the western half of the American continent. What the show also does is give us the ex-Confederate soldiers that litter most Westerns.
     That's what the Browncoats are in the show. They are a group of militant separatists that lost a civil war against the prevailing unified government. Not that they're bitter about it, except for all of them who totally are (i.e. pretty much all the main characters).
     I've mentioned this before, and the fans of the show seem to get all bent out of shape when you suggest that the Browncoats are really just the Confederates of the American Civil War. Honestly, I thought that was part of the appeal. I mean, I live in south (at least, as "south" as Atlanta is considered). Most people around here still have Confederate flags plastered on their pickup trucks and hanging from their front porches. Rednecks still declare that the "South will rise again," so I just assumed that people want to like Confederates.
     No, what I've found is that people like underdogs, and they want to empathize with somebody who is being oppressed and downtrodden. And I'm all for that, to an extent.
     The Browncoats, unfortunately, exceed that extent. See, in the show, the Browncoats fought a war because they wanted freedom from an Alliance that was presumably infringing upon their rights. I say presumably, because that's not actually part of the show. We never really get any reasoning for the fighting aside from "evil empire is evil." Oh, sure, we find out later there are factions of the Alliance that are experimenting on children to breed psychic supersoldiers or that are experimenting with plagues that will make people docile and more easily governed. But that was all discovered years after the war was over. So what was the justification of the bloodshed at the time? Was there taxation without representation? Or did some people just decide that they didn't want any more of this civilization crap and wanted to go off on their own. And really, in a universe with dozens of habitable worlds (most of which are dusty hellholes that are barely capable of sustaining life), would the Alliance really fight to keep the hillbillies from striking out on their own?
     Of course, we'll never know, since the entire thing was just 13 episodes and a movie, and there will never be anymore. But anytime I try to watch it again, I can't stop this nagging feeling in the back of my head that the crew are just rebels without a cause. And nowadays, that crap just doesn't float with me. I get frustrated with people who are so divorced from reality that they think grand gestures (like fighting futile wars against vastly superior armed forces) are going to make any difference at all. I can only imagine how many lives were lost in vain just so that some people could make a point about how they were grumpy that the Alliance was cutting into their dirt farming ventures.
     It's like the realistic moral and ethical dilemmas of blowing up the Death Star in Star Wars...but I think Clerks already covered that philosophical debate well enough, so I won't bother.