Speculating here is fine. All he asks is that no story ideas are posted where he hangs out - his Twitter feed and Facebook page. Not so hard at all and a matter of courtesy, not censorship.
Everyone post what you don't want to have happen so JMS can't use it! IDK, seems a bit over the top to me. EDIT: nvm see above, that makes more sense
What I'm looking forward to if this does become a series is having our expectations inverted. Make the Shadows angelic beings and the Vorlons demonic. Have Lyta be the first B5 telepath only to have Talia replace her. Have Bester be a good guy and Lyta be the person Our Heroes trust who turns out to be running a secondary agenda. Have Sheridan go full dark side and need to be ousted. Have it be the Narns who ally with the Shadows (or Vorlons!). These are obviously some rather extreme ideas, but I love it when I watch a reboot and they do stuff like this that long-time fans wouldn't have anticipated.
Yeah. I still wouldn't post anything EXTREMELY specific, since the forums are publicly accessible, but shitpost-speculating and dreaming is probably fine here
...rather than them being nuanced alien cultures with antithetical philosophies? The Vorlons aren't angels, they just know how to cynically manipulate younger races through religious memes. We're just cannon fodder or war horses to both. Having saddled us, they look down their prosthetic noses and say, "gee up, Dobbin". At least have the events of Mind War have some payoff down the line. Make Bester be more likeable so that his devotion to Teeps over Mundanes is more disquieting. Lyta did have to be restrained before she left. Perhaps combine her with Talia's character and have her overcome her conditioning through Kosh and the ViCaR - another thread that went nowhere. Well he does have this tendency to nuke everything... ... or the Minbari warrior caste with the Shadows.
I would generally hope that all the major alien races are a lot more alien this time round. Make more use of different artificial environments aboard the station beyond some colored steam in otherwise empty living boxes. and take a page out of The Expanse playbook with the underlaying physics of space travel (artificial gravity, etc)
I wouldn't say they were exactly nuanced, as basically the Shadows were Chaos and the Vorlons were Order...not that we really got much insight into their cultures in any case. They were archetypes. But my point was that the Vorlons were clearly played to be the "good guys" who literally projected themselves as angels, while everything about the Shadows seems to have been intended to project menace. It could be interesting to shake that up a bit.
You see I never saw them as intrinsically good or evil - just as more advanced races who treated us as useful, expendable proxies in their struggle against each other. The Vorlons manipulated the younger races by planting religious memes and using genetic engineering to create Teeps; the Shadows used bribery and coercion, and also direct modification to create cyborgs. Both races are equally harmful viewed in that light. That the Shadows look a bit like spiders makes most of us inherently distrust their motives compared to the Vorlons. In a way, the Shadows are more honest in being overtly rather than covertly manipulative.
Very good point about the Shadows being the more honest of the two. B5 really did make you wonder... which side do you lean more toward?
Woot! Heard of the B5 reboot today. I'm surprised by the amount of detractors. A new rendition of this epos won't make the hard copies/digital copies/novels of the 20th century B5 vanish from our shelves. The original BSG remains a beloved classic without taking away from modern BSG, and vice versa. Enjoyed B5 as a kid but found it un-rewatchable because it came across at goofy and the effects were so "Windows 95". I hope they have engaging stories to tell and cool ships (Eaglemoss Babylon 5 Starships Collection? ).
Eh, I dunno. Babylon 5 was an awesome concept, but frequently dodgy in execution. I can see the logic in retelling the same story with higher budgets, a more consistently talented cast, and better overall planning of the five-season arc. As I said, you can almost look at the original Babylon 5 as being a rough draft that happened to be published, and that this is a chance to "fix" the mistakes of the former series, along with putting a more modern spin on the overall arc (tighter serialization, explicit LGBT characters, references to current events, etc.) As long as he actually gets a decent cast, I expect it would work pretty well. CW isn't known to interfere much with what showrunners desire, and in a lot of ways it would be more like a serialized drama based upon an existing book series rather than something being written on the fly (meaning the chance of the arc spinning out of his control should be nil).
Yeah, I just heard about it too. The reboot thing is kind of a no-brainer, since 75% of the main cast are now deceased. I mean they could have done another spinoff, but look how well all of those ended up.
I didn't say they were good or evil...I actually get annoyed when people inherently associate Chaos with Evil...just that that's how they tried to spin themselves and perhaps how the show itself spun them to some degree (to set up audience bias?). As you noted, if you make a race of aliens that's pitch-black spiders and killed (or worse) the captain's wife, you're going to have to do some pretty heavy lifting to make them seem anything other than malevolent. While we later found out via Lyta in particular that the Vorlons were just as bad, perhaps their badness was painted with a softer brush. Both races had lost their way to the point that the younger races were just tools to prove their dogma superior, and I wouldn't say either had the moral high ground in the end. I wouldn't say the Shadows were overt (TBF you did say "more" overt). They used proxies rather than present themselves openly through mid-S3 or so, and Londo was certainly manipulated and didn't realize what he was setting his people up for, even if the deals he thought he was making were ones he made of his own free will. They also killed Londo's girlfriend and allowed him to believe someone else was responsible.
I probably pass on this. But I hope JMS has become a better writer and there will be a lot less exposition in his scripts.
I can imagine modern CGI making for quite vivid scenes (assuming a decent budget). I'd be interested in either a re-telling or even a continuation of the story in the almost 20 year period after the formation of the Interstellar Alliance and Sheridans passing. There were a few things glossed over and left ignored. What I would like to avoid though is contemporary references to anything highly political. Not only would it date the series, it might turn off 1/2 of the audience and reduce viewership resulting in a premature cancellation.
You do understand that there had to be that exposition because a multi-season arc was new to American TV and they didn't have the luxury of Buffy-style 'Previously on Babylon 5' sequences very often. That means that all of the information needed *had* to be in each individual episode, especially during the universe-building. And anybody who's been following his work knows that he's grown as a writer.