Is anybody else watching The Expanse?

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?

Because the Nauvoo wasn't outfitted with thrusters (it being a generation ship) and firing up its engines would've melted Tycho Station into space slag. Some neat details here, I don't think it's too spoilery: https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Tycho_Manufacturing_Accelerator_Tug

ah i get it, like external micro-steering :)

(aka tugs lol)

i was reading them more like the reaver ships in serenity, but i guess if you look carefully they all look the same

"lids on and load up"

alex has an accent!

Just like a Texas-y accent though no? None of them have a wacky made up space accent like the Belters.

the all-blue protomolecule room inside the nucleus inside the ring reminds me (inexplicably, given the colour scheme) of cult 1957 east german TV fairytale the singing, ringing tree

http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/spotlights/2007/rtuk_obscura_0803.jpg

actually there's quite a lot of blue there i guess

here's the entire thing (which i haven't seen since the night thatcher resigned lol)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhVFcy4ZMIg

yes that's true chap, but in my (evolving) theory, belter-speech isn't so much an accent as a syncretic urchinspeak patois* unrolled as a political act of defiance and subversion: mars was officially settled (in discrete communities which largely retained their speech-of-arrival even despite the fight for independence) whereas the belterworld is much more fluid and piratical and marginal and etc

also in dramatic terms it makes sense for earth and mars to be on a level language-wise for the big set pieces, which a third accent would probably fuck with

(also lol belterspeak being extremely unstable of manifestation is acceptable in one made-up way of speech if you can give it a rationale -- if that's what i'm even doing -- but i think two of them would tend to suck a bit) (a LOT)

and getting the mars one to be stable wd just end up annoying

for me the true Martian accent is Bobbie's Australian one. i kind of pretend everyone else has one. making the best of an inhospitable desert world.

dude it's NZ-samoan

DAMMIT

shohreh aghdashloo meanwhile has a BA in international relations from brunel

i still think it's weird how quickly she became a good guy given that we saw her literally torturing a belter in person in S1

brunel's very well regarded

"regrowing a spinal cord is a delicate procedure even under the best circumstances"

trudat!

Alex comes from mariner valley which was colonised by Texans and Indians so he has the classic mariner valley drawl. The writers make a big deal of this in the books.

Bobby is from Londres Nova which clearly doesn’t have a distinctive accent because I’m not sure it is mentioned once.

nu-coquenie