new vid - "People Got a Lotta Nerve" - Firefly/Serenity - River
People Got a Lotta Nerve
Fandom: Firefly/Serenity
Song/Artist: People Got a Lotta Nerve by Neko Case
Duration: 2:48 minutes
Summary: River and the war. It will end again in bullets fired.
Spoilers: Whole series and film, R. Tam Sessions.
Kindly commissioned by hannahorlove for help_haiti.
Thank you to bradcpu for betaing.
Click to viewSo the saying says
An elephant never forgets
Standing in the concrete cave
Swaying side and sing
They walked over the ocean
And their dreams they dreamed awake
Until the lights grew dim
Until the cop cars came
Everybody tells me this is crazy, yes I know
But I'm a man… eater
But still you're surprised… when I eat ya
You know they call them killer whales
But you seem surprised
When it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank
Where you can't turn around
It took half your leg and both your lungs
And I craved I ate hearts of sharks, I know you know it
It will end again in bullets fired
hannahorlove sent me this song and requested a River vid showing her progression from ingénue to killer. I loved the core idea and asked if it could be expanded to include a commentary on the Alliance generally. Hannah graciously agreed, and here we are.
Joss Whedon sure loves his corporate-backed global superpower. It seems fairly obvious that Blue Sun and the Alliance are deeply linked, even if it was never explicitly stated. I love the ubiquity of Blue Sun always just hovering in the background, together with the Alliance’s sanitised version of history permeating the Cortex, the encyclopaedias and the schools, and the occasional subliminal message buried in animated octopus advertising. It’s all so deliciously conspiratorial. (Disturbingly, some of this definitely resonates with my early childhood in China.) Meanwhile River sits on the sidelines, alternating between observant and methodically crazy - collating data, as they say.
And then we get the big payoff in the form of Miranda, and suddenly everything becomes connected from the Browncoat war through to the Academy to the Reavers.
It paints the Alliance as hopelessly 2D, but look at Whedon’s other ultimate villains (The First, Wolfram & Hart, Rossum etc) and you get the feeling that this kind of blanket evil inevitably exists because it arises from intrinsic evil in the hearts of men. In the end, it’s not so much a collection of people as it is an idea that always comes back in one form or another. It can’t be killed and it can’t be defeated in a large-scale way. All that you can hope for is to win a small battle on your own front and walk away relatively unscathed. But that’s another topic for perhaps another vid sometime. :) (ETA: this be that vid. Sort of.)
I started out vidding in the Firefly fandom, and would be remiss if I didn't specifically mention heresluck's New Frontier as the one vid that tremendously influenced my development. Some of the influences may be seen here, although I hope more in a fan-derivative way rather than in a plagiarism way! :D