I think one of the major tropes present in the show was to demonstrate how there aren't simply white hats vs. black hats (to use cowboy terms). Mal is a criminal, "forced" into living that way bc the government won't "allow" him to live legitimately (except... really? Why won't they again?). Therefore, the presence of great darkness within his lightness, or as you might prefer the presence of occasional boughts of lightness within his darkness, is not a "bug", it's a "feature" of the show, to walk out that yin and yang in a fantasy space opera setting.

Nobody is perfect. Some are far less so than others. Those at least tend to be aware of their imperfections, as opposed to e.g. The Galactic Empire muwhahaha, ahem cough, anyways they seem so stolid, so absolutely certain of their moral righteousness, that unlike the criminal Mal who often isn't such a bad guy once you get to know him, commits atrocities the likes of which would turn people's stomachs, if they knew (hence those are kept as closely guarded secrets).

So I think you missed that: from the perspective of the show, that was no accident - that was literally the entire point of what they were attempting to convey. Mal was not a "good guy". He just had light in his darkness, the same way that the empire has darkness in its light (or is it rather the other way around?).

Yay Jayne was fairly simplistic. The dude barely had any morality bc he was more animal than man. So in that way he played a "straight man" to Mal'a greater level of complexity? He even gave voice to what many of the others were thinking, including Mal himself, but they had the grace to not say it.

True evil requires a minimum amount of "character" in order to achieve anything at all - great or otherwise. So it's less like Jayne was "bad" and the government was "good", and more like Jayne was simplisticly animal-like, while the true evils rose up much higher. With great power comes great responsibility, or whatever.

Jayne is like a wall painting in the background - he's scenery?

As far as Whedon, I dunno, I like a lot of his works, I don't like his character. The two aren't entirely connected in my mind, though perhaps they should be more so, I just don't know.

On the other hand, wasn't all of this pretty much happening even while the show was still in production? You mentioned that it had "aged", so I wasn't coming at this from a perspective of bad show vs. good show, but from it having been a good show where something external caused its goodness to have tanked. If it had been bad at the start, then we wouldn't say that it "aged", just that the show sucked. Which it didn't... and yet, also... didn't it always though? That yin and yang seemed to me to have not been so much changed by the passage of time?

Edit: oh, I haven't heard of whatever has been revealed about the actor who plays Jayne. Maybe that's what you meant. It might change my own perspective of the show in that case. I would hope not actually... but it might.

like what features are you wanting?

Lemmy already has the "New Comments" sort, which is the biggest feature of forums vs Reddit

Lemmy also has the "Chat" view for comments, which is good but needs to show context with them as my feature request here says github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/i…

Chat view could show single comment of context · Issue #2544 · LemmyNet/lemmy-ui

Requirements This is a feature request and not a bug report. Otherwise, please create a new bug report instead. Please check to see if this request (or a similar one) already exists. It's a single ...

^GitHub

Yeah, what features? Polls? Community flairs? The ability to restrict downvotes to only members of a community? The ability to combine multiple communities into one overarching category? And then customize that without needing admin support, and then also share that with other users? The ability to personally block every user from an instance, again without requiring admin approval? The ability to automatically label every user that has a brand new account, less than two weeks old? Or that posts 10x more often than they comment, hence might be an unregistered bot account? Or that gives and receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes, so is at best a controversial and at worst a highly toxic personality - but again, independent of an admin or moderator, and instead being totally in control of the user? Or the ability to block posts based on keywords, but perhaps not all such posts, and instead having granularity of All vs. None vs. Some? Or offering hashtags for content discoverability beyond communities and categories of communities? Or the ability to follow anything you want - a community, a user, a post, a comment (even not made by you) - and arguably far more importantly, the ability to NOT receive notifications for something that you wrote?

PieFed has all of that, and more. Lemmy has none of it. Do as you please, but now you know. Check it out: piefed.social/ .

Edit: even Reddit lacks many of these features. As it enshittified, it kept adding features that attempted to boost its profitability, like various forms of irl coinage, rather than provide stuff that people actually wanted to see.

It started as a suggestion, then we compiled it and made phases of polls. (The instance clised shop, unfortunately.)

Based on those, the most that got the votes was the suggestion "Mycelium". It was inspired by Star Trek: Discovery and the real-world mycelium.

The second one, I can't remember but it was also related to nature's fungi or plants.

The list of suggestions and votes were based on who participated. And at the time it was done, it was the Twitter Migration, and people were complaining loudly about the name "Fediverse". And yet, those who participated were mostly pre-Migration people (who generally didn't have a strong issue with "Fediverse"). 😄