An interesting thing I learned from Stargate fandom: notice that, in the credits, all humans have both full names and titles, while all aliens are first name only. It's especially noteworthy because they actually use Londo's surname in this very episode, yet we're still meant to think of him as just "Londo," not "Ambassador Mollari".
In a genre where species conflict is consistently and repeatedly used as a metaphor for race conflict, there's a subtle insult in regularly assigning names to aliens that code as more 'primitive' and treating them less formally than the humans around them. It's less blatant here than it was in Stargate because everyone is white, aliens included, rather than the "white humans, nonwhite aliens" thing the Gateverse was so fond of, but it still makes me raise an eyebrow whenever I see it.
They were wrong.
I don't mind it. The station kinda looks like it escaped from a Reboot episode, but not to a distracting degree, and I think the Starfuries look pretty cool.
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zvi and
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Date: 2010-06-19 07:27 am (UTC)An interesting thing I learned from Stargate fandom: notice that, in the credits, all humans have both full names and titles, while all aliens are first name only. It's especially noteworthy because they actually use Londo's surname in this very episode, yet we're still meant to think of him as just "Londo," not "Ambassador Mollari".
In a genre where species conflict is consistently and repeatedly used as a metaphor for race conflict, there's a subtle insult in regularly assigning names to aliens that code as more 'primitive' and treating them less formally than the humans around them. It's less blatant here than it was in Stargate because everyone is white, aliens included, rather than the "white humans, nonwhite aliens" thing the Gateverse was so fond of, but it still makes me raise an eyebrow whenever I see it.
They were wrong.
I don't mind it. The station kinda looks like it escaped from a Reboot episode, but not to a distracting degree, and I think the Starfuries look pretty cool.