Otter's Rock

Title: Eat, Drink, and be Merry
Author: beatrice_otter 
Fandom: Babylon 5
Rating: PG
Characters: G’Kar
Warnings: none
Spoilers: In the Beginning
Word Count: 1183
Written For: ryosato 
Prompt: One night at the disco

 

 

Title: Voices in the Dark: Earth
Word Count: 100
Fandom: Babylon 5/Buffy: the Vampire Slayer
Challenge: #72: Forgotten and Remembered
Spoilers: Babylon 5: The Lost Tales: Voices in the Dark

(  The Pope wishes to meet us.  )

Every so often, there's a lot of meta among fans about racism in science fiction. Anyone interested in the topic (or any science fiction fan who is interested in racism in general) should watch the special features on the Babylon 5: Lost Tales DVD. There's a very interesting talk with J. Michael Straczynski, the showrunner, in which he mentions a curious thing he noticed during filming of the series.

Babylon 5 needed a lot of aliens walking around in the background. Most of them belonged to three "species" of aliens: Narn, Centauri, and Minbari. All three species looked very different. Straczynski noticed that whenever there was a break in filming, the extras playing those background aliens self-segregated into distinct groups. Now, the extras did play the same species each week, so they spent long enough in their group to make friendships within the group. However, which group you had been placed in originally was purely random--there were no differences between the groups besides what prosthetic and costume they happened to be wearing. So there were no inherent prejudices or stereotypes at work in this self-segregation. Straczynski thought it was an interesting social pheomena, and so one day he told the director of extras that from now on he wanted a particular "Narn" to be a "Centauri." (It may or may not be relevant that on the show, Narns and Centauri are enemies and often at each others' throats.)

The first day, the Narn-turned-Centauri sat with his old friends in the Narn group during breaks in filming. But he wasn't included in the group as he had been before. The second day, he stayed with his fellow Centauri.

I'm in the mood to rec some vids. Here are a selection of my favorites for which I can still find download links that work. All links are to the pages you can find them on.

Stargate: SG-1
Bring Me to Life (Skaara)
Fall Guy (Siler)
Killer Queen (Osiris)
Time in a Bottle (Daniel/Sha're)
A Thousand Suns (Daniel/Sha're)
Sibling Rivalry (Sam and Teal'c, humor)
You're So Vain (Ba'al)

Stargate: Atlantis
Bad to the Bone (Ronan, Shep)
Missing (Michael)
Thriller (Ensemble)

Star Wars
Hurt (Vader)
Lulaby (Anakin)
The Girl All the Bad Guys Want (Obi-Wan/Padme)

Babylon 5
What About Everything (Ensemble)

Superman Returns
You Don't Know Me (Clark/Lois)

Battlestar Galactica
I Enjoy Being a Girl (Six)

Buffy/Angel
This One's For All the Suckers Who Still Believe in Love (Ensemble)
Lost Inside (Illyria)

Doctor Who
I'm Gonna Be (Ten/Rose)