"Game of Thrones" creators announce new show set in a world where slavery still exists https://t.co/qDPuHC2osE
— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 19, 2017
Me, a writing teacher: There are no bad ideas, just bad execution–
HBO's Confederate: *exists*
Me: *opens mouth, shakes head, walks away*— Shana Mlawski (@ShanaMlawski) July 19, 2017
Dear @HBO, if you want to spend millions on a show about slavery, pick up @UndergroundWGN. Not this #Confederate shit. Signed,ALL the Blacks
— Kellee Terrell (@kelleent) July 19, 2017
Yeah, as the CBC phrases it: “‘Sounds stupid as hell'”.
I am not and probably never will be an HBO subscriber (I explicitly subscribed to Netflix, back when it was just a disc-rental service, to watch cable shows without having to deal with cable companies), so the HBO suits won’t care what I think, but still. Yeah, the pseudo-historical intersection between “But what if the monster… isn’t actually dead?” and “Our chivalric dream shall never die!” can always start an argument, but how many people want to pay money to watch a cosplay version of the one we’re living all too vividly right now?
My prediction is that a Confederate “win,” 150 years after the original arguments, would’ve resulted in a continuing breakdown of the United States — bad ideas have consequences, too, and if one region “escapes” than a lot more states get fractious. Most of New England would’ve departed by the 1870s, possibly ending up as a Canadian province. The breadbasket area from Minnesota to the Rockies would be a bunch of possibly-allied semi-Calvinist networks (immigrant Scandinavian Protestant & Russian Orthodox farmers, Mormons, and versions of all the other fringe cults of the Second Great Awakening). Mexico would’ve successfully reclaimed parts of Aztlan, including most of Texas. Big chunks of the Rockies-adjacent areas would be just as underpopulated as they are today, but there would be more Native American tribal units, not to mention feral refugees from all the adjacent regions. Goddess only knows what northern California/Oregon/Washington would’ve come to, but I suspect the lingua franca would be either Russian or Mandarin. New Orleans would be the center of an ever-fluid “Black Free State”, probably doing better financially than its ‘Confederate’ neighbors. There would be dozens of tiny “free” baronies dotting the Appalachians, with more scattered in the adjacent fringes, wherever a handful of ‘Scots-Irish’ hillbillies or other malcontents felt called to resist the big gubmint encroachment of war-depleted, tax-starved state authorities. And the Mason-Dixon DMZ between the remaining United States (Connecticut through Indiana, approximately) and the Confederation would make the one now separating the Koreas look like a holiday resort.
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Stupid popcult ideas or otherwise, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Thursday Evening Open Thread: Bad Idea TVPost + Comments (208)