An ever-present element was Whedon's injection of anti-totalitarianism, writing into the show a historical analogy of the Battle of Gettysburg, the "Battle of Serenity Valley". The beaten soldiers were called "Browncoats" after the brown dusters they wore as their uniforms. Whedon said, "I wanted to play with that classic notion of the frontier: not the people who made history, but the people history stepped on—the people for whom every act is the creation of civilization". "Firefly" was written as a serious character study, encompassing what Whedon called "life when it's hard". He went on to elaborate that it was about "nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things".