[OOC] Secondary Sources
Serenity: The Official Visual Companion (by Joss Whedon)
"Mal was supposed to be a hero, but in the loosest sense of the word, everything that a hero is not, and everything by the way that my hero is not, because he's somewhat of a reactionary, he's a conservative kind of Libertarian guy. ... he's the kind of person who has to be unutterably touch and sometimes cruel in order to survive."
"Zoe was there to represent a side of Mal that nobody else really understood--his honor and the fact that he was such a good leader that this person who is happily married and completely at peace with herself would still follow him into these serious and sometimes dumb situations."
"Malcolm Reynolds was on Shadow, living on a cattle ranch his mother ran, when he joined up. He was a smart kid but green. He joined out of belief and nothing more. Five years gone found his homeworld destroyed, his army beaten down and every shred of belief ripped out of him. He had made Sergeant by then, of the 57th Overlanders. Would have gone higher if he had ever kept a single opinion to himself. But he wasn't in the war to get a title. He was there to fight, and in the Battle of Serenity, waged for seven grueling weeks on Hera, he fought like nobody else. Some say the valley was the bridge between the worlds, and that when it fell the Independents fell with it. Surely Mal believed it, for he and his held the valley for a good two weeks AFTER the Independent High Command had already surrendered.
"When it was all done, there was some talk of holding the 'Browncoats' such as Mal who had held Serenity Valley as war criminals, since the war had officially ended. They were held in camps for a short time, but the Alliance considered it an important gesture to free them. The strain of criminality never left those few thousand -- but in some quieter circles, the legend of their tenacity made them heroes.
"Among those few thousand was Corporal Zoe Alleyne, also of the 57th Overlanders. She had been career Army, the opposite of Mal, but she had fought under him for the last two and a half years of the war, in more than a dozen campaigns. She also had the distinction of being the only other member of the 57th to survive Serenity...."
"The light on their faces:
Mal is cragged, often shadowed, but strong, sad-eyed, and kind.
Simon works in angles as well, coolly handsome and hard to connect with -- but ultimately he's a romantic.
Wash is light, playful -- often amongst his screens or slightly blown out by the sun of high atmosphere.
Inara's light is complex like Mal's. Hiding and beckoning."
"Back on the ship -- Mal's contemplation of Inara's picture might draw in a simple theme -- they are, after all, in love. Thwarted love, the bestest kind."
"My favorite moment came from Nathan and Morena, when we were talking about the comm video, where [Inara] invites [Mal] to come and it's a trap. I had added a line about stuff in a trunk, because she needed to have a weapon and that weapon used to be a bow and arrow ... I had to invent the necessity for her to be able to change clothes into something a little more fighter-y and to have something to fight with that was not a machine gun -- that's not Inara's way. So I added what I thought was a very clumsy piece of writing about a trunk. [Mal] says, 'You left some of your stuff in a trunk and I didn't look through the stuff' and they play a very sweet moment there, but I actually ended up going back and writing a bit more about it because Nathan said to me, 'You know I looked through all that stuff. I've smelled that stuff.' And Morena separately said, 'You know I left that trunk on purpose, that has all my best-smelling stuff, so he wouldn't be able to forget.' And they had both completely internalized and made useful to me what was something very clunky and made it very beautiful, and then it became a great moment between them... And it's clear that that thing represents the fact that neither of them has let go of each other, which, when I had written, wasn't there."
Nathan Fillion on Mal: "What I enjoy about playing him, and what I have come to discover about him, is that, as empty as he is, and as hard as he is, Mal desperately clings to and protects what makes him whole. Which is the ship and everyone in it."
"Serenity and Bobby McGee: Freedom and the Illusion of Freedom in Joss Whedon's Firefly" (by Mercedes Lackey)
"Scratch the surface of Captain Reynolds and you find Sgt. Malcolm Reynolds, who takes personal responsibility for the well-being of everyone in his command. It began with Zoe; it has not ended at River and Simon. Every time someone in 'his crew' is threatened, even when it is someone as untrustworthy as Jayne, to the best of his ability he steps between him or her and the threat. He wears his accountability like the uniform he thinks he left behind. Make an appeal to his instinct to protect and a set of Pavlovian responses snaps into place that will make him act entirely counter to his own best interests. He can never escape that particular prison and still remain the man he is now. He still has a lot left to lose, and that blinds him to his true estate.
He's not by any means alone in his illusions. Jayne demonstrates Mal's blindness taken to the furthest extreme..."
"If Mal's eyes are ever completely opened -- which will mean that he will have to give up a lot of cherished illusions about himself -- he certainly will attain that power [of gaining freedom]."
"Mal has to face the fact that he has been controlled by his own virtues and, aikido-like, turn those virtues against the controllers."
Serenity Roleplaying Game (written by Jamie Chambers)
From the Roleplaying Notes for Mal: "Find a ship. Find a crew. Keep flyin'. I found a ship, name of Serenity. I found a crew. Some I didn't go looking for, but they're here and so long as they work to keep us flyin', they'll stay.
"Name's Malcolm Reynolds. I'm captain of Serenity. Some call me 'Mal.' Others call me 'Captain.' I answer to both, so long as it's understood who's in command. Which would be me.
"I was born on Shadow. Family owned a ranch there. Mother raised me, along with a few dozen hired hands. She saw to it that I had a goodly amount of schooling, though that's nothing I brag on. My mother taught me to play the gentleman's part at a fancy dress ball. The ranch foreman taught me how to shoot my way out of that fancy dress ball, if I had to.
"Mother raised me to be a man of faith. I lost that faith in Serenity Valley. Found something else there, though. More on that to come.
"The central planets' government -- the Alliance -- was always trying to meddle in our affairs. Their meddling got worse and worse and finally some of us lost our stomach for it. When the Unification War broke out, I volunteered for the side that believed a man should be able to live his life pretty much as he wants, so long as he doesn't take to harming others, with no one havin' the right to tell him what to think or how to think it. Our side was called many things, 'Independents,' 'Browncoats.' Our side lost.
"I was Sergeant Malcolm Reynolds then, of the 57th Overlanders. We were stationed on Hera, in Serenity Valley, during what turned out to be one of the bloodiest battles of the war. We held out against overwhelming numbers for seven weeks -- two of those after our sorry-assed commanders had surrendered. Took sixty-eight percent casualties. Me and Zoe -- her as is part of my crew -- were the only two as come out of the 57th breathin'. I won't say alive.
"It was there I found that all a man should put his faith in is his ship, that which keeps him flyin'. Thus, the name, Serenity.
"As for knowin' some things about me. I'm a man of my word. If I take a job, I do the job. When I do a job, I get paid. If that don't happen, there's like to be trouble.
"I keep to the border planets, mostly. Stay away from the Alliance. I've been bound by law fives times and the experience was not pleasuresome. Charges never stuck, though.
"I'm still flyin'."
List of traits (game mechanic stuff):
-- Fightin' Type
-- Friends in Low Places
-- Leadership
-- Military Rank
-- Tough as Nails
-- Deadly Enemy
-- Credo
-- Loyal
-- Prejudice
-- Things Don't Go Smooth
"The Alliance promised they would send the manpower, money, and supplies needed to rebuild the bombed and burned-out cities. To give them credit, they did send some. Just not near enough. You see, some folk on the Core think the former Independent supporters should be punished for their rebellion. So when government folk start bringing up measures to help those out on the outer worlds, such measures usually find themselves voted down."
The Unification War: "The War for Unification was the most devastating war in human history. All those who lived through it are marked, like a scar left behind by an old wound. (Just that some happen to have big scars traced all 'cross their faces while others have tiny ones hidden away.) Outer planets, including Shadow, Persephone, and Hera, mustered forces and formed an alliance of their own -- the Independent Faction (known as "Browncoats," thanks to the brown dusters their soldiers took to wearing). The Parliament of the Alliance instituted a draft to build its forces. They were considerably astonished to learn that more than half of the Independent forces were composed of volunteers. The Alliance (known as the "Purple Bellies" for their style of dress) had the manpower, the ships, and technology to make the result of the war a forgone conclusion--but no one anticipated that freedom would be something so many folk would be willing to die and to protect.
"The war raged for just over five years, taking place on land, sea, and in the dark of space. The largest space battle in terms of scale and human cost was the Battle of Sturges, one in which countless ships were destroyed, creating a massive graveyard preserved in the vacuum of the black. The largest land battle, the one that brought about the end of the war, was fought on the planet Hera in Serenity Valley. The battle raged on for seven weeks before the Independent High Command surrendered. Even then, some of the Browncoats continued to fight on for two weeks after that. Those soldiers who continued to fight even after being ordered to lay down arms were captured and tried for war crimes. Ultimately, the Alliance released the soldiers as a peaceful gesture to those outer planets now under its rule. Some look upon those who fought in the Battle of Serenity as criminals. Others see them as big, damn heroes.
"Since the battles were mostly fought on the Border and the Rim, the Core planets escaped unscathed. To this day, many outer planets still bear terrible scars. Shadow was effectively destroyed, and remains uninhabitable seven years later. Major cities on Athens were bombed. Several key land battles were fought on Persephone. Moons that had no strategic value, such as Whitefall and Jiangyin, were untouched, but they still suffered as a result of the disruption of trade. Supplies had been hard to get as it was, and the war made it harder. Almost every person living out on those planets saw their homes leveled, their businesses fall into ruin, their loved ones killed or maimed -- all in the name of making their lives better.
"Small wonder folks are still bitter."