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rose_griffes) wrote2019-10-12 09:46 pm
things I've said because of Star Wars
December 2017: Wanna know what information Rian Johnson was given about Rey’s family when he started working on the script for TLJ?
There was no established origin that Johnson inherited when he signed on to the movie. He was free to resolve it as he liked.
Also, is this whole “Rey is nobody” going to stick?
“I can’t speak to what they’re going to do. And there’s always, in these movies, a question of ‘a certain point of view,’” Johnson said, invoking Obi-Wan’s line from Return of the Jedi, explaining why he told Luke his father was dead rather than the truth that he had become Darth Vader.
This next imported post:
May 2017 (before The Last Jedi made things even worse): This isn’t a call-out post for a specific person. I’ll just call her X. Fan X made a post to complain about mean anti-reylo fans, saying how reylo shippers were being unfairly accused of racism (among other things). She cross-tagged her post with the finnrey tag. (Anyone who’s spent time in the finnrey tag has seen similar posts, yeah?) I sent X a PM, politely asking her to remove the tag. Some people had already commented on the post, asking for the tag to be removed, but it was still there, and I figured a PM might get her attention faster. I mentioned in passing that her post was off-track as well as badly tagged, and thought that would be the end of it.
Instead it evolved into a conversation where X wanted to prove that she’s a fan of Finn, and she has NEVER EVER seen anything racist said about him on her dashboard from her fellow reylo fans.
So before I dove back into the conversation, I looked at her tumblr. One of her most recent reblogs at that moment was a post that talks about how Finn is a beta male and inferior to Rey, and Rey had to save him 100 times, and so forth. (Some of y’all know the post I’m talking about. And no, I’m not exaggerating on the wording of it, that’s literally what it said… along with a bunch of light-and-dark and Romeo-and-Juliet imagery about reylo.)
X hadn’t noticed it. She missed the blatant racism and erasure of Finn as a lead in the post. She liked the pretty wording about how epic reylo is going to be, and that was enough to make the racism not ‘visible’ to her.
That’s what I think of when I see someone say that they’ve never seen anyone being racist in [insert ship or character or movie/show name here] fandom: a fan who will reblog a blatantly racist post that comes across their dashboard, and then have the ignorant bliss to say that they’ve never seen any racism in their section of fandom.
Most of the time fandom (any fandom, not just Star Wars fans) is more subtle in its racism. It's a collective 'effort' of ignoring and / or denigrating the characters of color, rather than literally calling one inferior. So... there's that? Ugh?
Dang, I forgot to look up when I posted this.
Revisiting for a moment the whole monster carry discussion sparked by diversehighfantasy‘s post...
Whether bridal, damsel, or monster carry, there’s a combination of subtextual messages in support of or in contrast with the context of the carry, whatever the media source.
Bridal carries have context and subtext in harmony: the one being carried is awake and in love with the person doing the carrying; it’s explicitly romantic.
The damsel carry is more about the heroic nature of the person doing the carrying; whether or not it’s romantic depends on the context, but the subtext isn’t automatically romantic.
The monster carry has subtextual messages due to how it’s been used over the centuries: the horror of the (almost always white or light-skinned) woman being carried away by a terrifying monster, and the sexual/romantic undertones. That latter part is where there’s either contrast with or support of the visual of “scary monster carrying away a woman”.
- Sometimes the monster has or learns to have some kind of tender feeling for the woman. She represents an element of humanity within the monster.
- That often comes at a later point in the story: the text gives us reason to see the monster in a semi-sympathetic light in connection with the monster’s feelings for her... and it’s safe to do so because the monster is doomed to die. Or at the very least, live in isolation from humanity.
- The monster wants to consume her in some way, whether that’s rape or more literal. The monster isn’t humanized; instead the woman is an embodiment of (white) womanhood in peril.
Taking that back to Star Wars, the context for the way Kylo carried Rey in TFA:
- Rey had just met him, but was already scared of him
- Kylo Ren force-knocked her out so he could interrogate her for more information on how to find his uncle
- he carries her to his ship; Finn sees Rey literally in the clutches of the man who embodies Finn’s greatest fears
The subtext depends what kind of carry (relying on the context, in other words): bridal, damsel, or monster? This isn’t a trick question; Rey literally calls Kylo a monster during the interrogation scene. She may pity him someday (but not now). He may end up having (unrequited) romantic feelings for her. But this isn’t a love story between Kylo and Rey.