Is anybody else watching The Expanse?

ok I may take this show from the top again. It's really so very good.

squash klaxon

"not dead! [exultant pause] becoming!!"

does the "becoming" trope come from red dragon? like when weirdos are excitedly explaining why they do horrific stuff? "it's not me, i'm becoming"

"i've heard that shit in bars, i thought it was just bad music"

(insert amos in cafe oto gag here_

has there been IRL mormon comment on the nauvoo hijack? i mean it's fiction but i's still a bit of a burn

I know I said this before, but the show is full of the most interesting faces

it's very well cast

Amos in particular, the way his face seems to flicker back and forth between wide-eyed innocence and dead-eyed sociopathy is amazing.

amos really really really reminds me the young steven wells in look and now (and then in manner)

BONE DENSITY ENHANCER

welcome back to earth dudes

gunny is a slur

(i mean i guess it's not but it feels super-patronising whenever anyone uses it)

I still haven't figured whether to read the second book or start with the second season. Hmm

The first season finished about half way through the second book, but the plot started to diverge. If that helps.

super-patronising?

I had a uncle in the US Marines who made E-7 before mustering out. Some gunnery sergeants are indeed still called gunny, with affection.

i'm sure but in the show

a good thing is that s2 and s3 are both 13 eps long (10 is a bad and stuid number which shd fuck off)

also: the way her superior officers treated bobbie in the U confirms my sense that gunny is a slur (to them)

Probably officer vs. enlisted tensions.

of course but these are kind of baked into the situation in any case

"is there a plan b?"
"yeah! make sure plan a works!"

other enlisted marines will use gunny as a term of respect because duh, that probably means they’re your boss

navy officers use gunny as a replacement for the second person pronoun, with baggage

that probably means they’re your boss

wait who's whose boss?

this wasn't at all obvious as i originally wrote it but my abreaction was purely in response to its usage in this show: where lines of are somewhat corrupted by the fact that the high-ups are all* scheming arseholes who treat lower-downs as contemptible pawns and worse (so that even if neutral or affectionate usage occurs here -- as y'all say it does IRL hoss -- it's poisoned by viewer doubts abt the users and their agendas)**

*even the "good" ones
**noticed at all bcz "gunny" is more a regional term perhaps than other possible names for ranks (but this is probably why it was chosen in the first place)

a gunnery sergeant in the USMC is in the upper echelon of the enlisted hierarchy

bobbie's strength as a character is possibly that she's the only (lasting) person who actually believes in military ideals as ideals (and martian military ideals as ideals): everyone else is more or less sardonic or cynical towards same, so that their appeals to esprit de corps always ring hollow (amusingly when yr one of her men i guess, and nastily when yr one of her superiors)

Alex believes in in Them too but for him it was just a means to an end, flying spaceships, whereas Bobby, at least at the start, is a true believer in the Martian project.

ok but that's not quite the same thing as i'm talking about really: she can break with the martian hierarchy bcz she's drawn to the professed ideals, it's not so much the project she believes in as what she's been brought up to believe the project represents

(she prefaces her turning point with a story abt her dad telling a lie, albeit a comfortable lie)

the crew of the rossie are all also idealists sorta-kinda but not really inflected thru an official ideology? alex is martian and certainly has residual martian loyalties -- and can get riled up when martian stuff is dissed -- but i don't think he gives a stuff abt the project or what it represents

(his deep loyalty is to the rossie itself: at the close of s2 he has a very fireflyish speech abt "she's beat up but she'll fly right")

Can't read this thread until I catch up, but man is this show good—pacing, music, characters, themes, direction. I keep waiting for it to go south like Star Trek: Discovery or Battlestar Galactica, but it's as if the whole series had been created as a whole before airing, without a care in the world for whether it gets canceled.

I never thought of "gunny" as being derogatory? I thought it was a reference to common US military nicknames? Like calling a Lieutenant "El-Tee" -- you would call a Gunnery Sergeant "Gunny"?

And the Gunnery Sergeant would be "Gunny" to differentiate them from a Staff Sergeant or other Sergeant who would be "Sarge"?

outside this show: likely not derogatory much of the time (caveat: i have not served and have only encountered this term in the context of fictio)
within this show, as said by others at bobbie: often if not always somewhat sneering in my opinion

i dunno mark! i just watched S2E1 last night and bobbie's CO calls her that a couple of times and i never felt that. he is always kind to her and generous with his experience. i guess what people used to call 'paternal' (in a good way)

ooh i will go back and check that out

red kibble

the invention of mpbile phones were you can see the message from both sides is a great step forward for privacy and security

scene where alex thanks bobbie for saving everyone: when he calls her gunny it is (i entirely accept) not sneery

i do however think it's an index of how he hasn't yet clearly worked though his relationship to his martian loyalties (since he only recently nearly got the roci and the razorback seized by three very cross martian children)

the slingshot vessel which cones to grief in the ring is call y que, which is the equivalent of " so what" but of course translates as "and what" :D

many redditors want a full release of the not-yet-identified version of "highway star" that manéo jung-espinoza is playing before he does the kessel run in under 11 parsecs, some on the grounds that it slams more than the deep purple version

a low-key virtue of this high-key grebt series is that the TV news ppl watch now and then is evidently just as shitty as our own

(provoked into the observation by the moodly collage of holden and tbe ring, with the legend "james holden to visit the ring", which inspires manéo jung-espinoza ito lol do the same, but there's several earlier examples)

the encounter between drummer (and naomi) and klaes ashford (and diogo) is terrific, given that it's also largely exposition and introduction

ashford cracks me up every time he's on-screen, esp. his accent, which is more like a weird ironic riff on scotty in star trek than any of the other belters

(in general this is a thing i like abt the belter accent, that a good percentage of it is actually consciously performative on the part of the individual belter: as in "i am now going to speak in a totally fucked-up way that fucks you up, for piratey lulz bcz i am in fact a pirate")

Ashford sometimes spoke a bit like Papa Lazarou.

I'm a bit disappointed the Martians aren't given any kind of defining accent. The first few we ever met (Alex excepted probably) had a kind of Germanic thing going on which I thought was quite cool.

alex has an accent!

back to klaes ashford: when he's confiding with e.g. naomi he has almost no evident belter accent at all, of any kind, which is what i mean by "performative" -- it's like code-switching in the wrong direction, to position yrself

(i mean obviously since it's all being performed -- by david strathairn -- so it can't help but be "performative" but there's a self-conscious outsizeness to it being deliberately signalled. it's not necessarily fully realised but i think the idea is that accent is actually mostly political in this context, rather than "natural" if you see what i mean) (this may also explain mars?)

i like when ppl regain consciousness and their nose blood is floating in pretty little blobs in front of their face

what's the little fleet of baby bits and bobs that tags along with the nauvoo aka the behemoth, i don't remember this ever being explained? i mean self-built salvaged belter shit but is there a reason they need it like space navally, or whatever

question for readers of the book i guess

They're automated drones that act like tugs.

ah! ok

why are tugs needed at all times in deep space?