To be fair I was barely able to make it through the pilot because the protagonists were so annoying and the dialogue was so bad (and the retarded setting clashed with the gritty tone and a million other things that bugged me), but they basically screamed Lost Cause and Southern grievance to me and CSA stuff is a common theme in the Western genre. Maybe they weren't intended to romanticize the CSA (I genuinely don't have a dog in this fight, the show was awful enough if that wasn't the intent), but just for the sake of argument let's say that they are.
Downplaying the importance of slavery to the CSA has long been a critical part of CSA apologetics, even during the Civil War, even by people who were personally invested in the maintenance of The Peculiar Institution and for SJWs (or the SJW adjacent like me) pretending that the Confederates weren't fighting to keep a race of people enslaved is not very different than defending their right to keep a race of people enslaved because, frankly, it depends on willful ignorance of slavery in the CSA (analogous to Holocaust deniers).
Of course, there are different degrees of downplaying slavery in the CSA, on the one end of the scale you have the people insisting that (despite the actual text of most of the declarations of secession) slavery was not a major reason for the Civil War and on the other end you have people who just think that the antebellum South was interesting and they'd prefer to not think about slavery since there's nothing that can be done about it now (ignoring the debate on reparations).
This is off topic for this thread, but...
Yeah, no. Despite some surface level similarities ("Lost cause" secessionists, basically), there's almost nothing similar between the CSA and the Independents, or the Union and the Alliance (Despite the name, in that case). It's a
very surface-level thing.
And in any event, that's still not a compelling argument that having a non-slave-holding CSA analog is tantamount to supporting slavery. If you remove the defining features of a bad thing and keep only the aesthetics... Well. Let's look another example. The Paul Verhoeven Starship Troopers movie. He went out of his way to try to make his presentation of the Terran Federation as explicit a Nazi analog as he could. Probably no more blunt a hammer to be found than
Oberfuhrer Doogie Howser. But... It wasn't. All of the sins that make the Nazis the Nazis were missing, and the new ones they had were a different kettle of fish entirely. So while one could have a reasonable argument about the pros and cons of the Terran Federation, trying to say that someone who thinks they were a good government is implicitly pro-Nazi falls flat.
Or to use a different analogy, and one relevant to RPG.net? Back a few years ago - and lord knows, this could have changed since then - the RPG.net mods had to explicitly tell some people that people who cosplayed as Imperials from Star Wars, or played video games where you played Imperial characters, or liked Imperial characters in the movies, or whatever, weren't equivalent to Nazi supporters.
Actually I suspect that discussion would go a different direction, now. Back then the discussion cropped up surrounding the release of that pretty awesome
TIE Fighter short some fan did, and some of the usual crowd started hand-wringing over how people who liked things like that bothered them.
