I always read Mars as portrayed in the Expanse as like, idk, a "rogue state" a la the DPRK or protectionist socialist states. They've got some war communism shit going on when they're constantly on the brink of war, but
spoiler
we witness after peace is all but guaranteed between Mars and Earth a systematic looting of the former including the destruction of productive industries based around defense/war leading to some service-economy type shit. All of this is IIRC as I haven't watched in a while.
I feel a little Kilmonger'd by the Belter revolutionaries. Maybe I shouldn't, idk. It just felt to me like the football was always just out of reach.
I think the show portrays Mars as China. The US is the declining empire, and China is on the rise. They also portray Marco Inaros as a sociopathic leader with a horrible temper. The show has a clear "both sides bad" vibe. Don't know if the books are the same.
Books are worse. Show portrays Belters more positive than books which are "all sides bad".
Or, more exactly, books are heavily "power structures bad" anarchist vibes, let's just have decentralised spacefaring civilisation (someone surely will make the spaceships as a hobby), though it's subverted in book 2 by that botanist having long speech about how hard is to have civilisation in space without Earth even for purely technical and logistic reasons and that belter extremists are nuts. Then Inaros bombs Earth and later Belters become Spacing Guild like monopolists and thus also becoming bad power structure.
That botanist was btw right in universe, humanity barely survived the closing of the gates. Ending show us severely depopulated Earth centuries later (i assume Mars died out by that time).
