#accidentally wrote a long ass essay about colonisation

[undisclosed-serendipity]

the english

did i watch The English recently? yes did i watch it again? yes will i stop watching it? maybe no. will i stop reblogging the english? no am i going to stop thinking about it? hell no.

am i going to recommend this show to everyone i know? actually no. I like this to be my little treasure. watch it if you want to feel your heart all the time.

there are so many things to talk about the show - obviously there's the topic of love, found family and true meaning of home but also there's colonisation and its effects and also like morality, destiny and fate. honestly i think this show has changed my perspective of colonisation? I mean I get that this is not the first time colonising is being used as a topic in a movie/series but I think this is the first time I'm watching a show that has an Indian American as a lead character and we get to learn quite a bit of the background and motivations and their feelings about colonisation.

and I think after watching the show I am thinking long and hard about all the effects of colonisation (amongst other aspects about the show) I'm wondering about the motivations of all the (white) people that went to start colony in US and how they are somewhat of a destitute state to begin with? Thomas Trafford didn't do anything harmful per se, but the reason why he came to America was because he kind of ran his own business to the ground in England and needed like a start over. He said he needed to see the business through which was why he stayed in America.

there's the aspect of land being taken, and given and taken again from the native americans. They have their own internal wars amongst themselves like what Eli said with the Pawnee in wars with the Sioux, Cheyenne and many others. How would their life have turned out if the colonisers never reached their shores? With the colonisers, nothing much good came to them - brought them diseases, over plundering /over-killing all the animals that brought them famine and starvation, taking over their land and not to mention all the mass-killing and destruction the whites has caused to their home, their family and their villages.

maybe i don't watch enough movies/series about this topic but i don't think i had seen any that portrayed the kind of terror white people has put on the native americans, like the scene where the army people and melmont went on a massacre at the cheyenne village. (and we also see the effects it had on the survivors - Kills on Water) A lot of the reason given for such killings were just because they had different skin color. It's just terribly tragic and horrible all in all.

i'm going to end this long-ish essay and probably would write a lot more about the other themes of the series. it is hauntingly beautiful and a series that I'm going to think about for months on end.