Maybe I'm being too generous, but I've always seen Holden as at least partly Asian / East-Asian. In-universe he has the DNA of 12 different adults, but I concede that he looks pretty white.
Personally, where I had seen whiteness as a subject (if at all) was in Amos and (in season 4) Murty, as acknowledging whiteness as a colonialism and brutality hidden by marks of authority.
In general, Season 4 is a bit more relevant. Although both the "official," corporate interests and the refugee-coded settlers are ethnically diverse, the Belters are much *more* diverse and the corporatists are strongly coded white. In general I feel that season did a good job of threading a needle between current issues and the theoretical potential issues of the show's premise.
The actor Steven Strait is white; he has some Italian heritage which may be why he reads possibly POC? obviously if they wanted a non white actor they could have cast one though.
Amos is I think insistently positioned as a servant/retainer/bodyguard, not as an authority figure. There's maybe something about working class whiteness there, but I don't think it's very thoughtful if so. haven't gotten to season 4 yet so I can't speak to that!
Reading this, I started thinking of Chloe Bennet (Skye/Daisy in MARVEL AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D.)—who is originally presented as White though the actor herself is mixed-race Chinese/Anglo-American (her birth name is "Chloé Wang", and she was a pop singer under her birth name in China when she was younger). As the series went on, her mixed-race parentage became more overt, and they had her dealing more with Ming-Na Wen's Melinda May.
I remember saying the show could use more non-White representation in Season 1, then somebody pointed out to me Bennet's heritage.
Thanks so much for this! I just finished all of The Expanse’s novels recently and haven’t watched the show, but everything you and others have said about it seems to indicate that the show is a faithful representation of the novels, problems and all. You really put into words a lot of the same points that I was feeling reading the stories but didn’t know how to express.
Just like the show apparently, the novels get MUCH better at depicting prejudice and gender representation than they were starting out in the first novel/season, and as the novels progressed they also took frequent opportunities to point out the Earthborn White Guy Protagonist’s implicit assumptions and subtle bigotry that he wasn’t even noticing and how obvious it was to everyone but him. But still, I’m in total agreement that the story definitely suffers at least a good bit from not confronting real world prejudice as directly as it could have with its new fictional prejudice, or mixing the two properly— and absolutely, UNARGUABLY suffers from its choice and constant elevation of its “Normal” Good-Hearted Go-It-Alone No-Government Straight White Guy Hero Protagonist and how constantly and aggressively it feels as if the acclaim and fame gloms onto him like deserved privilege. The way the later novels point out how everyone in the crew has become a celebrity in their own right to their respective “home nationalities”, ie. the Martian pilot to Mars and Naomi to the Belters, is constantly undercut by both how infrequent it is and just HOW STUBBORNLY and reverently the words “James Holden” constantly come out of everyone’s mouths and thoughts 20 times as much.
It reminds me of how often CEOs and Directors agglomerate all the credit deserved for the skill, creativity, and invention of everyone below them they employed who did most of the actual work and thinking, like rich Lords used to for all their servants and the freedom their privileged lives allowed them to dick around with silly science experiments or write novels that said servants doubtless facilitated and kept from screwing up as badly as the rich bozos would have done solo. It’s like rich people of privilege intentionally become Leviathans larger than themselves who hoard the benefits and sense of fame and immortality from the vast beasts at their commands forced to help them indulge their whims.
that's interesting; they may play up Holden's fame less in the tv show. there is still that dynamic where he's the most important one for reasons that are very unclear though.
Thanks for the excellent piece. Worth noting that in the books, the Belters are very tall and very lanky, so much so that any real amount of gravity is too much for them. The show had to find real 21st-century actors, so no weirdly shaped Belters who couldn’t even handle visiting Earth.
Absolutely-- the novels are still at fault for not mixing enough original racism into the distribution of Belters to really highlight and call out real-world racism as functionally as they could have, with only hints to their underclass ethnic origins being the “Belter Creole” dialect, etc. But much of the prejudice in the show would probably have read stronger if it were more like the books and thus at all possible to show Belters as having the impossibly-lanky; swollen-skulled physiology that makes them utterly impossible to hide their origins outside a gravity well and read as knee-jerk, uncanny-valley disturbing to Earthborn and even Marsborn folks not accustomed to it. When I heard the were adapting a show and started the novels, I was wondering how practical it’d be to 3D Render all that but you’d wed an Avatar-level budget.
I'll be interested to hear, as you continue to watch later series, whether your analysis changes. It's always going to be a space opera, whose basic trope is good vs evil, but as I recall it gets more complicated than it first appears.
I have watched the first two seasons and especially in the first season I was uncomfortable with the depiction of the UN woman as heartless and brutal. Her character improved in the second season, but I agree with your point that there’s plenty of people who don’t need more reasons to dislike the UN and women. I have been considering watching more seasons. I like the mystery of the substance, the name of which I can’t remember as it’s been a couple of years since I watched it. Will you be watching and writing more about it?
I love sci fi and I tried to watch this because so many people recommended it but all this stuff really bugged me (in a more inchoate way than you describe) so I couldn’t get into it.
Maybe I'm being too generous, but I've always seen Holden as at least partly Asian / East-Asian. In-universe he has the DNA of 12 different adults, but I concede that he looks pretty white.
Personally, where I had seen whiteness as a subject (if at all) was in Amos and (in season 4) Murty, as acknowledging whiteness as a colonialism and brutality hidden by marks of authority.
In general, Season 4 is a bit more relevant. Although both the "official," corporate interests and the refugee-coded settlers are ethnically diverse, the Belters are much *more* diverse and the corporatists are strongly coded white. In general I feel that season did a good job of threading a needle between current issues and the theoretical potential issues of the show's premise.
The actor Steven Strait is white; he has some Italian heritage which may be why he reads possibly POC? obviously if they wanted a non white actor they could have cast one though.
Amos is I think insistently positioned as a servant/retainer/bodyguard, not as an authority figure. There's maybe something about working class whiteness there, but I don't think it's very thoughtful if so. haven't gotten to season 4 yet so I can't speak to that!
Reading this, I started thinking of Chloe Bennet (Skye/Daisy in MARVEL AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D.)—who is originally presented as White though the actor herself is mixed-race Chinese/Anglo-American (her birth name is "Chloé Wang", and she was a pop singer under her birth name in China when she was younger). As the series went on, her mixed-race parentage became more overt, and they had her dealing more with Ming-Na Wen's Melinda May.
I remember saying the show could use more non-White representation in Season 1, then somebody pointed out to me Bennet's heritage.
Thanks so much for this! I just finished all of The Expanse’s novels recently and haven’t watched the show, but everything you and others have said about it seems to indicate that the show is a faithful representation of the novels, problems and all. You really put into words a lot of the same points that I was feeling reading the stories but didn’t know how to express.
Just like the show apparently, the novels get MUCH better at depicting prejudice and gender representation than they were starting out in the first novel/season, and as the novels progressed they also took frequent opportunities to point out the Earthborn White Guy Protagonist’s implicit assumptions and subtle bigotry that he wasn’t even noticing and how obvious it was to everyone but him. But still, I’m in total agreement that the story definitely suffers at least a good bit from not confronting real world prejudice as directly as it could have with its new fictional prejudice, or mixing the two properly— and absolutely, UNARGUABLY suffers from its choice and constant elevation of its “Normal” Good-Hearted Go-It-Alone No-Government Straight White Guy Hero Protagonist and how constantly and aggressively it feels as if the acclaim and fame gloms onto him like deserved privilege. The way the later novels point out how everyone in the crew has become a celebrity in their own right to their respective “home nationalities”, ie. the Martian pilot to Mars and Naomi to the Belters, is constantly undercut by both how infrequent it is and just HOW STUBBORNLY and reverently the words “James Holden” constantly come out of everyone’s mouths and thoughts 20 times as much.
It reminds me of how often CEOs and Directors agglomerate all the credit deserved for the skill, creativity, and invention of everyone below them they employed who did most of the actual work and thinking, like rich Lords used to for all their servants and the freedom their privileged lives allowed them to dick around with silly science experiments or write novels that said servants doubtless facilitated and kept from screwing up as badly as the rich bozos would have done solo. It’s like rich people of privilege intentionally become Leviathans larger than themselves who hoard the benefits and sense of fame and immortality from the vast beasts at their commands forced to help them indulge their whims.
that's interesting; they may play up Holden's fame less in the tv show. there is still that dynamic where he's the most important one for reasons that are very unclear though.
Thanks for the excellent piece. Worth noting that in the books, the Belters are very tall and very lanky, so much so that any real amount of gravity is too much for them. The show had to find real 21st-century actors, so no weirdly shaped Belters who couldn’t even handle visiting Earth.
they do say that belters can't handle earth's gravity...but yeah, they don't try to make them physically different.
Absolutely-- the novels are still at fault for not mixing enough original racism into the distribution of Belters to really highlight and call out real-world racism as functionally as they could have, with only hints to their underclass ethnic origins being the “Belter Creole” dialect, etc. But much of the prejudice in the show would probably have read stronger if it were more like the books and thus at all possible to show Belters as having the impossibly-lanky; swollen-skulled physiology that makes them utterly impossible to hide their origins outside a gravity well and read as knee-jerk, uncanny-valley disturbing to Earthborn and even Marsborn folks not accustomed to it. When I heard the were adapting a show and started the novels, I was wondering how practical it’d be to 3D Render all that but you’d wed an Avatar-level budget.
I'll be interested to hear, as you continue to watch later series, whether your analysis changes. It's always going to be a space opera, whose basic trope is good vs evil, but as I recall it gets more complicated than it first appears.
I have watched the first two seasons and especially in the first season I was uncomfortable with the depiction of the UN woman as heartless and brutal. Her character improved in the second season, but I agree with your point that there’s plenty of people who don’t need more reasons to dislike the UN and women. I have been considering watching more seasons. I like the mystery of the substance, the name of which I can’t remember as it’s been a couple of years since I watched it. Will you be watching and writing more about it?
I seem to be hooked for now! So may write more about it...
the substance is the protomolecule, fwiw.
I love sci fi and I tried to watch this because so many people recommended it but all this stuff really bugged me (in a more inchoate way than you describe) so I couldn’t get into it.