chunchomunos:

chunchomunos:

I miss posting about rawhide and pasta now I only post about politics….

rowdy is a liberal

In my other group I once tried posting about what the characters’ politics would be, and was met with total silence from the other members (mostly baby boomers like myself, who probably don’t believe in mixing fandom with politics). 

Trying again here, from an older-and-slightly-less-optimistic perspective, for the characters I am sure about

Wishbone: staunch Republican, on the left side of the Republican spectrum because he is not uncompassionate

Favor: Republican, because he believes in authority, chain of command and zero consultation with the workforce

Rowdy: enthusiastically Democrat when he remembers to vote

Pete: also Democrat, but more thoughtful and less enthusiastic than Rowdy, because he has been around longer and witnessed a few betrayals

Jed Colby (Season 8, love of my life): see Pete above

Hey Soos: strongly Democrat, with a strong multicultural slant.

Mushy: confused, asks Wishbone for enlightenment, is not all that convinced; asks Rowdy, is more convinced and votes Democrat behind Wishbone’s back

Jim-and-Joe: ahem, I think both of them would vote Trump, because they would believe that T represents them (uneducated, basically powerless white men).

Am, of course, entirely willing to stand corrected.

chunchomunos:

the writers of rawhide never acknowledged that favor deffo owned slaves because they wanted him to be likable but I think there’s interesting potential in how that could have shaped his perpective on the his relationship with his employes and sexual/romantic parters and tbh women in general, since he sees women and his workers as inferier and he’s got a already set template on how he template on how to treat perceived inferiers. probably especally people working for him because ya know, white women existed when he had slaves but his drovers might be the first time he’s using labour that isn’t from slaves

like in one episode he puts rowdy in jail for trying to leave him that’s A Very Fucked Up Thing To Do! (especally considering rowdy was a pow!) but he never really shows remose for employing that kind of punishment

also he’s violently lashed out at his workers to keep them in line

like, i know most bosses at the time where even worse but they could have been impacted by slavery to

this is rambling and all but its just something I’ve been thinking about!

I’m not sure about Favor being a plantation (and slave) owner. His language is, more often than not, non-standard English, and in one episode he says he started droving at the age of 17 or so. He also responds with indignation when he and Pete come across a real slave owner (whose slaves, however, seem to be all white).

That said, I almost totally agree with your unfavourable view of Favor’s attitude to (1) industrial relations and (2) women. The whole industrial relations aspect could be discussed at length. The argument put forward by Favor fans is “but that’s the way things were in the 1870s”, which, however, the scriptwriters implicitly refute in Season 8, where Rowdy is a much less authoritarian trail boss. But Season 8 is a sort of Don’t Go There topic: hardly anyone likes it apart from me. Re. women, very occasionally he meets one he respects as a person, although I can only think of the Blue Spy, the nurse in the anthrax ep, the doctor in A Woman’s Place, and his old trail boss’s wife in Dry Drive.

I also think that Rawhide as a whole was fairly timid about black/white relations. In “Incident of the Buffalo Soldier” the eponymous character is noble and brave, and dies nobly and bravely. Poor Woody Strode, who was so good in John Ford’s Sergeant Rutledge (was that film made before or after Rawhide?) was cast as an ultra-stereotypical Australian Aboriginal “companion” in Incident of the Boomerang. I can’t think of any other significant black characters until Season 8, when the drovers included one black drover (interesting, if under-developed, character) and a British drover (unexplained and underdeveloped!)

This is long-winded. I would have put a cut if I had seen the options (the little wheel in the top-R-hand corner did not give me any cut options)

I wrote this in 2000. @stephantom enjoyed it this year. So, thanks to her encouragement and terrific editing skills, I have posted it on AO3:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12912816

I just watched it with some friends. A lovely ending, but the script (and the drovers) are ultimately way too lenient towards Favor. Throughout the ep, I kept thinking “He’s being unforgivable” and “I like Elfbert’s Gil better”.

bleak-nomads:

@mcicioni-blog replied to your post:

(I secretly quite like it, because it’s easy to “translate”. Ditto with “All right, let’s have it” = “I am beginning to worry about you”)

That’s interesting because I think it’s one of my least favourite tropes/traits in characters like Gil Favor. The idea that worry somehow leads to the response of ‘punish the bringer of this BAD emotional response’.

It strikes me as doubly :/// Since not only does it put the onus on Rowdy to mitigate his boss/boyfriend’s emotional outburst, it does so at a time when Rowdy needs the support. True caring about Rowdy would require him to put aside his own worry/negative emotional response to try and make things better for Rowdy. 

btw this is a no judgment statement on LIKING the concept– god knows I LIKE it when I have Angel react violently to Blondie having emotions towards him, but critically/as an irl concept, it’s a terrible thing XD

We may be lost (or at least wandering in different directions) in translation. Possibly because I don’t remember the actual context, I translate F’s words as “I see you’re bleeding. Go and get Wishbone to take care of you NOW. I am worried, and I wish you had been more careful, but I won’t show it because it looks like a flesh wound, unlike when I thought you had anthrax, or when you and I were in the ‘town in terror’ and I thought the villains had brained you.”

p.s. Rowdy semi-inherited this approach when he was trail boss. Watch the closing scene of “Ride a Crooked Mile” for a nearly-similar situation, except that this time Jed is wounded (through his own lack of wisdom), and Rowdy is in charge.

Any other takes?

For Favor/Rowdy fans. Fairly explicit sex scene.

It was written in 1999, when I was a passionate fan, and when I still wrote apostrophes instead of the last <g> in words ending in “ng”, to mark that the velar nasal transcribed as /ng/ is usually pronounced as a nasal /n/ by characters in Westerns (stops showing off her former training).

Thanks to Elfbert and Stephantom, for encouragements.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12633132

A few heterosexual couples that are in implicit parallels with Favor/Rowdy:

Incident of the Reluctant Bridegroom. It actually ends with the het couple riding away and the s/s couple waving goodbye and exchanging banter. Here both older men see the error of their ways (although if I were the lady I would run as far away from the het man as I could, as fast as I could).

The Peddler. Similar ending to Reluctant Bridegroom. Here all 4 people in question are honest, likeable and treat one another well. Additional bonus: the het man helps Favor out of a tight spot and actually outwits him 😏

Incident of the Boomerang. Already discussed in depth in chat. Absolutely love Guthridge (sp?) and his 19th-C Aussie slang. Problematic feature: the presence of the Faithful Non-White Bearer, ahem, mate, played by … Woody Strode.

If I think of more parallels I will not fail to let you know.