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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

I liked season 1 of the Expanse - the settings and production were fantastic, but I found the characters just became overwritten and annoying as the show went on.

I am worried that Game of Thrones ruined a generation of sci-fi and fantasy - everyone tries to copy the dark, morally compromised, postmodern, realpolitik tone. Even besides the fact that we are manifesting a world where progress is impossible, it has turned genres that is traditionally very positive and escapist into bleak emotional slogs.

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> I liked season 1 of the Expanse - the settings and production were fantastic, but I found the characters just became overwritten and annoying as the show went on.

I recommend reading the original book series. In my opinion the writing only gets better as it goes on, and it’s obvious the writers had a plan in mind from the beginning rather than just writing more books for the sake of continuing a series where the ideas were all used up in the first book or two

> everyone tries to copy the dark, morally compromised, postmodern, realpolitik tone.

GoT was a late-comer to this. For me, William Gibson’s _Neuromancer_ (1984) was my first exposure to dark and morally-compromised Sci-Fi. I am sure it predates this in novels. _Neuromancer_ inspired a couple of movies in the 90s: The Net and Johnny Mneumonic come to mind.

In US TV shows, I think Babylon 5 started the lean into the dark tone, and the reimagined Battlestar Galactica of the 2000s is a better example than GoT.

Like 24 and several other shows, Battlestar Galactica is very 9/11 coded. Everything took a turn towards Darker And Edgier in the aftermath.

Stargate SG-1 in their episode Wormhole X-treme, which released Sep 8 2021, so just before 9/11, made fun of the TV industry trend of pushing everything towards darker, edgier, "extreme" styles.

Babylon 5, with the white-knight Rangers, the captain who single-handedly saved humanity in the war with the Minbari AND THEN went on to build friendships with them, and the completely monotonic, both-sides-of-the-coin moralities of the Shadows and the Vorlons?

Yes, the Narn and the Centauri were not so pure, but it reads as a pretty mythic Good V Evil world to me.

Expanse is a very strange tv show. Their main cast is utterly bland and have absolutely no chemistry with each other, the only interesting character is maybe Amos, but almost all secondary characters are top notch, with lots of great actors and tons of charisma. It is typical for some belter captain who appears in 2 episodes to effortlessly outshine the whole Rocinante crew.

Yeah. It boggles the mind how unlikable the Rocinante crew is. Why were they written like that?

What are you talking about? I liked them as people. Amos was comedic relief, a psycho, the rest of them are ... people with human personalities.

Like the GP said, they were bland, sort of jerks (and not really even Jerks With A Heart Of Gold), and had no chemistry together. As far as I can recall, they just had petty drama all the time that felt like it was written just because there’s supposed to be drama.

To me, they seemed closer to normal people with normal relationships that yes, have some conflict too. Especially in a small group living together all the time where majority is not submissive, so will assert themselves here or there.

But like, Amos is a psycho.

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