#tlj is toxic

[swsequelsalt]

"Why The Last Jedi Isn't Just Bad - It's Toxic" by M. Krasava

DISCLAIMER: This editorial was originally published on Scavenger's Holocron, a sadly-now-defunct Star Wars news site. I feel like it's a tragedy to have it deleted from the Internet and only accessible to dedicated parties who know about it via the Wayback Machine, so I'm reposting it here as a form of greater preservation/availability.

Currently being regarded as the most controversial Star Wars film to date, fans of the popular franchise seem to have settled into two groups: this is either the best Star Wars film ever made, or the worst. Cinematically speaking, the movie has stunning visuals and a great cast of actors, but that’s not the problem.

The problem is that while The Last Jedi is being branded as the most feminist Star Wars film to date, its “feminism” seems like a cheap marketing ploy to appeal to a wiser audience and downplays some of the key problems within the film itself: it’s built on a foundation of sexism, misogyny, and racism. In other words, if you’re anything other than a white male, this film isn’t made for you.

And director Rian Johnson hasn’t exactly been shy about his opinion regarding the film’s white male villain, Kylo Ren. Rian told Empire Magazine that, “We can all relate to Kylo: to that anger of being in the turmoil of adolescence and figuring out who he’s going to be as a man.”

The only problem is that we can’t. Despite Rian’s insistence that this film is about the “transition from adolescence into adulthood,” Kylo Ren is already a well-established adult with a history of bad choices. We know from the canon Star Wars novel Bloodline, written by Claudia Gray, that Kylo Ren was at least 23 years old when he destroyed Luke’s Academy. At this point, he’s already an adult capable of making his own choices.

The film reveals that the final push towards the “dark side” was when Ben Solo awoke to see Luke standing over him with his lightsaber while he was sleeping. Without considering the possibility of a miscommunication, Ben Solo brought the roof down on the last Jedi, and then systemically went about converting or eliminating the rest of the students in Luke’s school before burning it to the ground. From there it can be presumed that he officially took on the role of Snoke’s apprentice, dubbing himself Kylo Ren as he joined the ranks of the First Order.

The problem is that it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing relateable about being a white adult male who decides to sign up with a Nazi organization and the very premise that we should try to have sympathy for such a character is chilling, especially when you consider that he murdered Han Solo not more than a week prior in film time.

(PUTTING THE REST UNDER A CUT)

But there’s another element to Kylo Ren that makes him harder to relate to. He comes from a place of privilege in society. Ben Solo was born to two war heroes, and while those might be big shoes to fill, there’s nothing that would indicate that Han and Leia were terrible parents to their son. In The Force Awakens, Leia admits that she sent Ben to train with Luke because she feared Snoke’s growing influence on her son (turns out, she had a right to be concerned). In Chuck Wendig’s canon novel, Empire’s End, from the Star Wars: Aftermath series, we see Han excited, if not a little daunted, about the possibility of becoming a father.

In other words, there’s nothing relateable when you think about a wealthy white male growing up sure of his place in the world and deciding to leave it all behind to join a fascist organization.

Compounding on this, there is someone who is relateable: Finn. Finn was not born from a place of privilege. If anything, we still know very little about Finn’s origins aside from the fact that he was abducted from his parents and raised to be a Stormtrooper. Despite years of conditioning and being ranked as the top cadet in his class, Finn was able to maintain his sense of self and when it came down to his first battle, he decided not to shoot and kill an unarmed villager.

This is the character that most people should be able to relate to. Finn is a character that isn’t sure of his place in the world. He grew up with the First Order and left everything that he knew behind him in order to try to do what he thought was right. Although he initially planned to seek a quick exit from the conflict at Maz’s castle, he didn’t hesitate to rejoin the struggle when he discovered that Rey was in danger. Finn spent most of his time in The Force Awakens running away from something – the First Order, from Jakku, from delivering BB-8 to the Resistance, but we see his progression throughout the movie to the point where he risks his life for Rey and helps the Resistance destroy the Starkiller base. At this point, Finn has rightfully earned his status as a hero.

Until The Last Jedi where Finn is again painted as selfish and cowardly, and the film does not shy away from this fact. Initially branded as a traitor by Rose when he tries to get the beacon as far away as possible to prevent Rey from falling into a trap, he is consistently belittled by Rose throughout the film. She consistently calls him cowardly and self-centered, and Finn’s characterization seems to shift in order to fit this description. When Finn is explaining his plan on hyperspace tracking to Poe, he is excited and confident: he can do this. When he gets to Canto Bight, he suddenly regresses, becoming immature and distracted by the glitz and glamour all around him. Finn knows what’s on the line. Rey is on the line. Poe is on the line. The Resistance has less than 24 hours, and yet he suddenly becomes bumbling and distracted.

This becomes Finn’s character throughout the rest of the film. Brash, impulsive, and worse, being frequently portrayed as the butt of everyone’s jokes. When we first see Finn, he is wandering about the halls of the Resistance in nothing but a bacta suit, as if Finn has suddenly forgotten how to care for himself. The film plays into the stereotypes that many people have about black male individuals. Instead of being treated as the hero of the Resistance, Finn is relegated to a comedic side role based on slapstick humor and unfunny comedy that ultimately doesn’t contribute anything to the plot.

In other words, Finn’s side plot reflects the film’s stance of diversity: we’ll wave it in your face for a few minutes before we wave it aside to make way for the two white protagonists. It’s a bold statement, but not untrue. Rian Johnson first joked that it would be “funny” to leave Finn in a coma for the entire film: “We did at some point joke that it would be great to just have him be in a coma for the whole movie and keep cutting back to him.” He explains that each of these cuts back to Finn would have him uttering some nonsense in his unconscious state, and at no point in the entire run time of the movie would the former Stormtrooper wake up. 

When John Boyega first accepted the role of Finn, JJ Abrams told him that he was going to be the new star of Star Wars. Rian Johnson blatantly admitted that it would be “funny” to simply delegate the black lead to the sidelines, where he doesn’t have more than a few scenes of incoherent babbling to serve as comic relief.

Not to mention, it’s Rose who ultimately has to teach Finn about the seedy belly of Canto Bight and how it operates: through slave labor. Another character shouldn’t have to explain to Finn, of all characters, the tortures and ills of slavery. After all, that’s the only life Finn’s known, taken as his family and raised in a life of servitude as a Stormtrooper to the First Order.

The underlying racism in The Last Jedi does not, unfortunately, stop with Finn’s character. We know a lot more about Poe Dameron’s character from the popular Poe Dameron comic series that highlights Poe’s adventures with Black Squadron before they find Lor San Tekka.

In fact, Poe’s arc is highlighted by its racism, as Poe’s character is reduced to a mere stereotype of his ethnicity. From the Before the Awakening, piloting flight logs, and comic series, we have a complete picture of who Poe is as a character. He tells L’ulo, “I’m the best. But you’re the best too” which highlights who he is as a person. He is a gentle soul that sees the best in people, trusting Finn not only to help him escape, but to lower the shields on the Starkiller Base when he said he could. Poe is a genuine nice guy who would give the shirt, er, jacket off their back to help a stranger.

And we see absolutely none of this in The Last Jedi. 

Poe is described as rash, dangerous, and aggressive by Vice Admiral Holdo, played by veteran actress Laura Dern. She’s dismissive of him, and while a part of it does play into more harmful stereotypes that I’ll get into later, in this instance, it’s hard not to. In the opening first scene, Poe is prepared to let everyone, everyone die just to take out a First Order Dreadnought. Even though successful, Poe seems more focused on the success of his mission than the countless deaths of his fellow Resistance fighters.

And that is not who Poe Dameron is. To say so makes a complete mockery of a fantastic character whose character has already been set and esteemed by fans. Changing his character to comply with stereotypes in order to try to advance the plot isn’t “moral ambiguity” or “challenging the character” – it’s just bad writing.

In short, Poe becomes aggressive, dangerous and hotheaded, all to fulfill the stereotypical role that the narrative wants him to play. His character attitudes are changed in order to fulfill a plot device, and that’s the conflict set up between himself and Vice Admiral Holdo.

This conflict is disappointing. It focuses on a female leader putting an aggressive, chauvinistic male in his place. It’s supposed to be empowering, but it’s not, especially when you have to have one character act so differently in order to get to that point. The problem is that the kind of feminism this movie is preaching is white feminism, which is dangerous in and of itself.

But what does white feminism mean in this case? Vice Admiral Holdo, and even Rose, both undermine and belittle Finn and Poe, treating them like children. This concept of infantalization upholds racist stereotypes of black and Latino men being both incompetent and irrational. In Poe’s case, it works to also uplift the alleged moral superiority of white women over people of color. And it’s not feminism.

It’s just disgusting.

Holdo is held up as someone that people in the Resistance are supposed to respect as a leader, and yet she refuses to tell the very people she’s leading what their plan is, citing Poe’s earlier reckless actions as an excuse. Even according to the Navy’s Leadership Principles, keeping your people informed is the second principle on the list. In other words? It’s pretty important. Vice Admiral Holdo’s refusal to do so is driven by petty motives, and while Poe is painted as ridiculous and childish the entire movie, he’s actually proven right when the First Order does the very thing he was afraid they would do.

One of the “lessons” from Poe’s story line is you should always blindly trust authority figures even when they provide no valid reason for doing so, and this is an extremely dangerous and topic example to set, especially in today’s society when people of color are so often made targets of police brutality, which again feeds back into the movie’s underlying theme of systematic racism.

Holdo herself seeks redemption from her mistakes by turning around and ramming her ship through theirs – an admittedly cool move, although it would be cooler had we not seen Admiral Raddus suggest the idea of plowing through a ship no more than a year earlier – and dies so that Leia can explain to Poe that Holdo was a good leader (without really stating how) because she was more concerned with fulfilling the mission without getting credit for it.

The problem with this? It means that Holdo had to die in order for Poe to “understand” what it meant to be a leader. This doesn’t work for two reasons. For one, Poe is a decorated Commander who had already served as a leader in the Republic Navy before joining the Resistance. Painting him as a cocky flyboy with a chip on his shoulder just doesn’t work when it goes against everything we’ve been told about his character. The “lesson” Poe was supposed to learn was one he already knew.

The second problem is that it meant that Holdo had to die in order for Poe to learn this lesson. In other words, we’re back to that age-old trope: a woman had to die in order to advance the plot/characterization of a male character.

And that’s where we get to our final topic: sexism. For a movie that preaches itself as so overtly feminist, it is rich with sexist undertones that are immediately apparent on the surface. Most of these are notably in the interactions between Rey and Kylo Ren, but there’s another character that I wanted to touch upon first. Rose Tico.

Despite Kelly Marie Tran’s boundless enthusiasm for her role, Rose Tico is ultimately underwhelming as a character. Despite mourning the death of her sister, her ultimate presence in the film seemed to be reduced to a girl with a bad crush on Finn.

I’ve already touched upon how poorly Rose treats Finn, but Rose herself seems to have gotten the short end of the stick in terms of the plot. Her character exists only to serve Rian’s image that your heroes aren’t what they seem, tazing Finn when she sees him trying to escape. From then on, Rose’s status seems to be downgraded to “Finn’s crush” as seen in the description of this deleted scene:

Originally, the film spent some more time clarifying the dynamic between Rey and Finn, and further setting up Rose’s crush on the Resistance “hero.” Rose chastises Finn for “pining for Rey,” which Finn quickly denies, claiming that he was “raised to fight” and that he finally found something to fight for in his friend, Rey. “Whatever,” responds Rose with a hint of jealousy.

Rose’s constant nagging of Finn and being catty about Rey enforces a negative female stereotype that has no business in a Hollywood blockbuster that claims to be catered to young girls, especially when it seems that Rose’s role has been reduced to working the love triangle dynamic between Finn and Rey. This seems like it could only lead to a destructive end for the character, especially considering how she attempts to save Finn’s life by almost sacrificing her own at the end of the film. Rose presents us once again with the trope that a female character must sacrifice herself in order to advance the plot of the male character, in this case, to prove her love for him. It’s a frustrating trope, made all the more exhausting when you consider what her role might be in the next film.

If you focus on the look Rey gives Finn putting a blanket over the unconscious Rose, it sets up tension for the next film: assuming Rey and Rose engage in competition for Finn’s attention, putting the two girls at odds with one another.

Because if the sexism in this movie wasn’t blatant enough, that’s just what Star Wars needs: two girls fighting over a guy. While frustrating to watch, it’s also extremely degrading to both characters and reduces both of their arcs into nothing more than instruments to direct the story of a male character.

Hopefully JJ will take the next episode in a different direction, but the damage that has already occurred in this film cannot be understated. There is, unfortunately, a lot of ground to cover regarding Rey’s story, so I’m going to start with the most visually striking one: Rey’s costume.

In The Last Jedi, Rey adopts what has been dubbed her “Jedi Training” outfit, trading out her three signature buns for a simpler hairstyle and trading out her light Jedi garb for a bit of a darker color. It’s a way for Rey to separate herself from the girl we saw crying desperately over her parent’s retreating ship on Jakku, keeping the same appearance a decade later in the hopes that they would come back to recognize her.

Many who speculated that Rey would undergo this physical transition after she discovered the true origin of her parents and worked to free herself of that disappointment found themselves disappointed. Rey didn’t change her clothes and her hair after she learned about her parentage from Kylo Ren, she learned about it after.

Despite being wet from the rain, another reason for this change is that she was shipping herself off in a box to see Kylo Ren, prompting those who want them to be romantically involved to start citing the Snow White parallels. It’s not hard to believe that the reason for this change was to make Rey appear more feminine. With her hair down, she looks more like a girl and less like the hardened warrior who had to fend for herself back on Jakku.

But wait, wouldn’t that mean that Rey’s entire role in the movie basically focused on developing Kylo Ren as a character? It does, and you wouldn’t be wrong to think that way. Even during Rey’s training sessions with Luke, the conversation is always geared back to Kylo Ren in some way, whether it’s Luke talking about his past or Rey assuring Luke that she won’t end up like Kylo. Either way, we hear Kylo’s name spoken more times between them than we actually hear anything about the Jedi or the things that Luke learned about the Force on his travels (say, Pillio, perhaps?)

It becomes clear early on that despite Rian Johnson saying that the film isn’t about what the fans want, that certain scenes were added in to appeal to a certain demographic. For example, Adam Driver’s uncomfortable shirtless scene?

Rian himself says that the scene had a “specific purpose” of creating an increasing feeling of “uncomfortable intimacy.” In other words, Kylo Ren’s shirtless scene is basically synonymous with a dick pic: no one asked for it, but there it is, one of the most subtle forms of sexual harassment. Think about this another way: if Rey’s character was really a boy, would the shirtless scene still be present? Or necessary?

Hint: it’s not.

The fact that Rey’s character only seems to exist to play a role in Kylo’s story is concerning, considering that she is touted as the protagonist of the sequel trilogy. Even though she witnessed him murder Han Solo no more than a few days prior, she becomes emotionally intimate with him pretty quickly, opening up to him about the strange experiences she had in the “dark place” beneath the island.

And therein lies the problem. When they touched hands, Snoke gave her a vision of Kylo Ren turning back to the light side to compel her to rush off to the Supremacy in the hopes that she could turn Kylo Ren back to the light and turn the tide of the war.

There’s only one problem with that.

It’s not her problem.

Rey was a civilian. As Kylo Ren himself told her, “You have no place in this story.” She has no part in the conflict between the First Order and the Resistance, and yet she was swept up in it all the same. It shouldn’t be necessary for her to rush off and turn the tide of the war, and while it fits with the Star Wars theme of how one person can make a difference, the trope that a woman must rush off and sacrifice herself in order to progress a man’s character and offer him redemption has been a long-running frustrating trope. If Rey wants to help the Resistance, that’s her choice, but it shouldn’t be necessary to rush off and try to save the person who kidnapped and abused her.

It’s one of the things that makes any sort of Kylo Ren and Rey team-up so off-putting. In The Force Awakens, he kidnaps her and invades her mind in order to try to find the location of the map. After she escapes, he confronts her in the forest, throwing her into a tree several feet up in the air in a move that could have potentially killed her. Then she wakes up just in time to watch him slice through Finn in a move that could have killed him.

Oh, and did I forget to mention how she watched him murder a defenseless Han Solo right before her eyes only moments before? The man who, as Kylo himself taunted, presented a father figure that she never had?

In other words, Rey has absolutely no reason to trust Kylo Ren. She has no reason to even want him to get redemption. For all of Rian’s talk about how he wanted to keep this film “morally grey,” trying to make a genocidal murderer relateable, or even redeemable, was not a step in the right direction. Wouldn’t it have been more compelling to watch Rey wrestle with the ramifications of eliminating Kylo Ren once and for all? Instead of trying to find redemption for the dark side, wouldn’t it have been far more interesting to explore a situation in which Rey realizes that good people must sometimes do bad things for an overall good to result? 

Perhaps, but that’s not the film we got. Instead we got a team-up between Kylo Ren and Rey where, moments after they work together, their alliance is quickly severed. Rey asks Kylo to call off the attack that is sure to eliminate the Resistance, including Finn. Kylo, however, refuses and tells her to move on and join him in ruling. He tells her, “You come from nothing. You’re nothing. But not to me.”

Fortunately Rey grabs the lightsaber and rejects his offer, and the final scene of her closing the Millennium Falcon doors on him seems to confirm that she has severed her connection for good. The problem? The damage has already been done.

Rian Johnson has already set up the Kylo Ren and Rey dynamic to be potentially romantic, between the shirtless scene, the hand touching scene, to be filled with an uncomfortable kind of sexual tension between the girl that declared to Maz, “I don’t want a part of any of this” and the man that murdered his father.

As troubling as that notion is, it does get worse. Kylo Ren tells Rey, “You come from nothing. You are nothing. But not to me.”

The problem is that Kylo Ren’s frequent gaslighting and emotional manipulation throughout the two films reaches its climax: he has discarded Snoke and wants to use the powerful, yet naive Rey, to further his own power. Still, the sexual if not romantic implications are there, pushed along by a group of shippers that call themselves “Reylos,” who desperately seek for Rey to redeem Kylo through, well, you get the idea.

There are several problems with this. One of the first ones is the fact that Kylo Ren is 32 years old, whereas Rey is only 19. While many are quick to claim that age is just a number, Rey is emotionally immature, having been isolated on Jakku for most of her life. There is absolutely no good reason to try to push her into any sort of relationship with someone who is so destructive, especially when the sole reason for doing so is to help Kylo Ren find redemption.

The line, “You’re nothing…but not to me” is a quote that unfortunately most women have heard far too often. It’s an emotional manipulation tactic in order to try to isolate a woman from her friends and family until she only relies on her abuser for support, and this is exactly what Kylo Ren is trying to do here. With Luke unwilling to teach her, Kylo wants Rey to rely on him, and solely him, so that he can use her power and manipulate her to further his own goals (which is to lead the First Order to…conquer the galaxy? It’s not quite clear.)

It’s a frightening message, especially when you think about who this movie is supposedly marketed to. Think about how many children dressed up as Rey for Halloween. How do we explain to girls that the man who killed Han Solo, the man who emotionally manipulated her and tried to use her just to validate himself, is the person that she should ultimately fall in love with? It paints a dangerous picture that girls internalize before they have enough experience to make their own decisions regarding their own relationships.

Remember Edward Cullen’s creepy manipulation in Twilight? Apparently that’s crept into Star Wars as well.

And this gets to the heart of the overall problem. The Last Jedi is ultimately soaked in sexism, misogyny and racism, and yet Kathleen Kennedy and Bob Iger widely praised the film before its release. How can Kathleen Kennedy, who said that she was proud to have a feminist icon in Rey, be willing to reduce Rey’s entire story to “the love interest?” If the executives and storygroup approved such blatant racism and actively worked to rewrite characters in order to fit their stereotypical narrative, what hope do we have that the next trilogy will be better, especially when they gave Rian Johnson full control over its content?

Rian himself believes that Darth Vader was worse than Kylo Ren, and while that is probably a conversation as controversial as the movie itself, Rian still wholeheartedly believes that despite what happened in The Last Jedi, that Kylo Ren can be redeemed. It shows that the storyline that JJ Abrams set up has been reduced to simply furthering the narrative of the white villain, and the rest of the characters are simply players in his story, which is why they exist as nothing more than stereotypes in Rian Johnson’s version of Star Wars.

And that’s the disappointment. While The Force Awakens received criticism for being too similar to its predecessor, A New Hope, JJ did set up some interesting and mysterious characters. While Captain Phasma’s role was ultimately underwhelming, fans were assured that she would have a much bigger role to play in Rian Johnson’s world.

Unfortunately, we all know how that turned out. 

Phasma’s quick dismissal wasn’t the only disappointment. Snoke was killed off without any satisfying explanation to who he was or even what he wanted the First Order to do. The Knights of Ren, which were mentioned in The Force Awakens and played a role in Rey’s vision, disappeared from the narrative entirely, instead being replaced by Rian’s Praetorian Guards.

For many, Luke Skywalker’s return was the biggest disappointment. Mark has made no secret in recent weeks citing how he didn’t agree with Rian Johnson’s vision of Luke and how he wished George Lucas had directed the sequel trilogy instead, a mere three days before The Last Jedi hit theatres. It fits into Rian Johnson’s grim version of reality: our heroes can be defeated, and idolizing legends is ultimately unsettling and disappointing when faced with reality.

But by disappearing into the Force, did Luke not himself become a legend, the very thing that Rian seems to chide against? The film’s “message” seems to give audiences such mixed signals, it’s not surprising that audiences claim that the film seemed better after a second viewing: basic elements of the plot just doesn’t make sense, like how the First Order has suddenly developed hyperspace tracking despite the film only taking place a few days after the events of The Force Awakens. 

There are other plot holes that point out the flaws in logic in the story: where did Rey learn to swim on Jakku? How can bombers drop bombs in space when there’s no gravity for the bombs to fall? Since space exists in three dimensions, why didn’t the First Order just have a ship drop out into hyperspace in front of the Resistance Star Cruiser and blow it to bits? And why was General Hux, a serious, straight-faced villain in The Force Awakens, who ordered the destruction of the Hosnian System, delegated to a comedic side role who’s only function was to serve as a cheap laugh and be the butt of an awkward your mom joke? Instead of using the antagonism between Kylo Ren and General Hux to show the crumbling of the First Order and how the small band of Resistance heroes we’re left with at the end of the movie might stand a chance against them, it seems that the First Order’s army, which was flowing with Nazi imagery in The Force Awakens has just been reduced to campy slapstick humor.

Despite these obvious problems, the most glaring ones still remain in the fact that Star Wars is a film that claims to market itself to the people it exploits and ultimately rejects. It’s no wonder that merchandise and ticket sales have dropped when the movie is back to focusing on a white male lead, like so many other before it. Kylo Ren tells Rey that you have no part in this story, that she doesn’t belong – something that minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ community have been hearing their whole lives.

But if this movie isn’t made for these people, then why does Disney keep trying to insist that it is? Most people who have been critical of the film have been met with the chorus of, “You’re just upset that you didn’t get what you wanted” as if it’s somehow wrong to expect more from what you receive. The story was set up so that we would get answers. How someone as powerful as Snoke managed to manipulate Kylo Ren from the womb and grow the First Order from the seeds of the Empire, Phasma’s increased involvement, and especially the question of Rey’s parentage, has been dangled in front of us like a carrot on a stick for the past two years, and it’s ultimately unsatisfying to see all those threads being clipped off and brushed aside with a, “Oh! It didn’t even matter!”

If it didn’t matter, then why feel the need to keep up the secrecy and suspense for two years, when the final product is ultimately disappointing? (Point not withstanding, Kylo Ren tells Rey that Snoke showed him that her parents were buried in a pauper’s grave on Jakku. Why her parents would actually return to Jakku, or whether Snoke was actually telling the truth, is a matter that JJ has yet to resolve.)

It’s not wrong to be a critical consumer of the media that we consume. It’s not wrong to say that we deserve something better. Minorities and women can and should demand to be treated with more respect than they were shown in this film, and the overwhelming amount of racism and misogyny in this film is something that most avid fans of the film have not provided an answer for.

People who claim that The Last Jedi is a good movie, while at the same time acknowledging how deeply misogynistic and racist it is, are contributing to the larger problem we have as a society. It’s saying, “I know it’s racist and misogynistic, but it entertained me, so I’m okay with it.”

It might just be fiction. It might just be a story. But all media we consume influences us, subconsciously or not, in ways that we may not even be aware of. Star Wars may not be real. These characters may not be real.

But it still affects how you feel, and that seems pretty real to me.

#anti-tlj #anti-the last jedi #anti-disney star wars #star wars negativity #star wars sequel negativity #star wars #why the last jedi isn't just bad - it's toxic #last jedi toxic #the last jedi is toxic #tlj toxic #tlj is toxic #scavenger's holocron

[sjbattleangel]

#hiding from bullies meme #meme #star wars #star wars memes #the last jedi #tlj #star wars tlj #pro tlj #i love the last jedi #toxic fandom #relatable #me in pic #star wars fandom #sw fandom #fan culture

[the-force-awakens]

so I had to use bing to find that article instead of google bc that's how broken google is, and i don't know about you guys but i think bing might have a crush on poe/oscar isaac

#nym speaks #'he depicted his brilliant acting skills when he played the role of poe dameron' #sounds like something i would say about oscar as poe fasofjoasfjoas #i will say i would absolutely love if i could search poe on the internet without immediately getting hounded by articles/vids on how he's t #perfect example of toxic masculinity in tlj and 'needs to be held accountable' #[glances at dj and ren and hux] yeah okay /poe/ is the perfect example of toxic masculinity okay yeah totally sure mhm one hundred percent #[randy meeks voice] FUCK YOU

[theworldsforgottenboy]

It’s been exactly three years since I last saw my wife, I miss her every day

(Reminder I have a star wars sideblog at @rey-gf, don’t be shy come say hi)

#Rey #rey nobody #rendering is hard but I think I did all right #there are a million flaws here but let’s ignore them #my art #random doodle #the star wars sequels are my toxic ex girlfriend that hit different so i keep hooking up with her from time to time #star wars #sequel trilogy #the rise of skywalker #tros #tfa #tlj #rey skywalker #rey palpatine #rey whatever her last name is #rey of jakku #reylo

[yurironin]

okay. i hate to say it but. reylo would be hot if it was wlw

#amanda.txt #guess who just watched tlj #god they would be such a toxic lesbian couple it would be super fun #sometimes things are better gay

[clone-bar-79s]

i just saw a post talking about how they love the trope where the guy and the girl are endgame from the beginning and then they tagged it... reylo. REYLO!

#what movie were they watching #and im not even talkng abt the toxic love story they bring up on tlj #im talking abt tfa #she and finn are clearly the couple the movie is referring to the entire while #kylo is like... random and on the side

[reylogirlie]

“That’s abusive”

“That’s manipulation”

I’m gonna explain why it’s not in this context:

Now, is this how you should address your love interest irl? Definitely not. Is Ben Solo truly back to the light at this point? No. Is Kylo’s mindset still twisted? Yes. However, some don’t seem to understand what Kylo/Ben meant.

“You’re nothing.” Kylo/Ben didn’t mean Rey was actually nothing. Hell, he legit tells her she’s anything but that. “Nothing” , in his terms, means she’s seen as worthless by the people who are supposed to love her.(I know Rey’s parents are actually good people, I’ll get into that) means that they saw her as someone- something, honestly, to get rid of.

This is what Ben thought Leia and Han saw in him; that he was worthless and they needed Luke to off him. That nobody loved him. At least, that’s what he felt before he met Rey. He knows Rey grew up thinking no one loved her, and thought that she possessed nothing of value.

At this point, Ben hasn’t fully come back. He still feels like he was a victim to the light (when he was actually a victim to the dark) and he’s telling Rey “those people”- her parents, his parents, Luke, etc consider her nothing. “Real abusers brainwash victims into turning on their friends and family” Kylo/Ben doesn’t consider the resistance Rey’s friends. He thinks they’re just going to use and discard her the way he thought he was. He thinks he’s looking out for her. Real abusers typically know their victims loved ones care but wanna get rid of them so they can have said person all to themselves.

(And before you come at me like “actually a lot of abusers don’t get what they’re doing but it’s not an excuse” yea I got that, doesn’t apply here)

“But not to me”- This is Ben telling Rey that their view on her is wrong. That she’s not nothing. That’s she is, in fact, everything. To him especially. He’s not just saying this so she can be on the dark side, that’s not his main concern here even if he still is on the dark side. His main concern is what’s best for Rey, and he believes joining himself is what’s best for her.

His mind set isn’t “I’m gonna isolate her from her friends so I turn her evil and use her for my growth” it’s actually “Those people tried to kill me and use me for my power and they’ll do the same to her so I’m gonna protect her while I still can” he thinks he’s helping her. It’s pretty fucked, but he’s not trying to manipulate her.

“He lied about her parents” no he didn’t. Was Kylo/Ben wrong about Rey’s parents? Yes. But what you people fail to remember is YOU REALLY SHOULD NOT USE THE FORCE AS A FORTUNE TELLER. The future/ past visions are often vague and altered. He only saw parts of what happened. He had no clue that her parents were actually protecting her from evil, he saw them leaving and going to shady ass places and thought they were actually trading her for alcohol. That’s why when he found out the truth he told her!!! If he was manipulating her so he could have her all to himself, he would’ve never told her the truth. Notice how when she left at the end of TLJ he let her and didn’t form a plan to force her back or hurt her. He aggressively tried to persuade her, yes, but he never seriously threatened her. He even snitches on the dark side for Rey and offered to kill Palpatine instead of killing her to complete his mission.

So, bottom line- When Kylo/Ben called Rey nothing, he wasn’t saying she was actually worthless. He was saying that’s what her parents and the people who felt turned on him saw her as, but he considered her to be everything and the most important thing to him. You don’t have to like Reylo or agree with me, but I could go on about how Rey and Kylo/Ben don’t exactly fit the “toxic relationship” boat.

#star wars #star wars sequel trilogy #rey nobody #rey skywalker #ben solo #rey x ben #reylo #rey x kylo ren #ben x rey #the last Jedi #you’re nothing #but not to me #OTP #i will die on this fucking hill #i will die on this hill #pro reylo

[thrilling-oneway]

I’m here there the all time top 100 ships AO3 (you can search the user in ao3 that made this list centreoftheselights if you want to see more data, it is really interesting the user the writer has been writing this this type list since 2013 for fandom studies)

Follow up to this

this list hurts my brain for a multitude of reasons but at least i saw spots 1-3 coming from a mile away so the impact was minimal until we got to terf wizards in 4th. wincest in 15th i want to burn things people disgust me. reylo in 21st makes me want to throw rocks at people i hated reylo with a passion from TLJ onwards and it's been 6 years and i still hate it. it's just the whole emo boy x good girl with an attitude i hate how everyone waters it down to that and the whole dynamic is weird as fuck anyway like that fucker fully murdered his father/her mentor in front of her eyes and then they fought and i'm meant to view that as sexual tension? it gets worse in VIII and i know that movie is shit anyway but like the whole thing was engineered by guy who amounted to nothing and then they battled together and wow there's the romantic tension but then it's still toxic and then they fight each other and destroy anakin's lightsaber and that pisses me off that lightsaber deserved better and then the third movie at least wrote the relationship better but like what happened to it being horribly toxic why does it actually function now? what's going on? i hate it why are they kissing now?? wait why does she get the skywalker name so like she's the next skywalker is this like a she kissed ben so now she's in the lineage because he's leia's son or did she just get adopted in if so that's kinda weird what's leia's thoughts on this i know she was into bad boys but like at least her and han's relationship was i dunno actually fucking good. did you know there's published reylo fanfiction like the harry styles and twilight ones? Why is this ship so fucking popular???? I know i have terrible taste in everything but the only things i personally think deserve to actually be on here are lumity, catradora and also spirk because they're the fathers of modern fanfiction. where is narumitsu.

#asks #... #sorry

[agir1ukn0w]

as per anything that exists ever people on the internet have to make things sour and try to ruin enjoyment because they don’t go outside. like girlypops this is all fiction it’s not real!! the harassment of actors and negativity is just frankly bizarre, and looking at those early anons you got, i wouldn’t even be surpised if that was the same person. seriously what you posted shouldn’t even need to be said, bridgerton is a bodice-ripper series and i have to laugh at how seriously people take it — just enjoy something without feeling the need to spoil it!! i also don’t get this discourse between kate/anthony and colin/penelope shippers, speaking to them just treat it as an anthology series and stop watching when your faves aren’t the focus if the thought of two diff characters getting it on makes you so mad…

honestly i would just turn off your asks for the time being if i were you just seems like a toxic environment

also og reylos unite 🦋 lol guess i find these kind of reactions baffling from being in the tlj trenches

I don’t even know what to say, you’re so wonderful for saying this!!! at least I feel like I’m not alone here. And YESSS those tlj trenches stay with you don’t they😅👌👌👌🦋

I may well take your advice and turn off my asks (tho hearing from people like you has truly been making my day a lot less shitty💖)

#reylo #ben solo #bridgerton #ben solo x rey #rey x ben solo #rey x ben #ben x rey #bridgerton netflix #bridgerton s3 #bridgerton season 3 #bridgerton season three #bridgerton series #kanthony #polin #tlj #star wars tlj

[abnerkrill]

VIOLENCEEEE 23, 24, 25

hello and thank you for today’s dose of violence 🔪

23. ship you've unwillingly come around to

Dinbo in the Mandalorian. I called Bo an asshole numerous times before S3. I have come around. (It might have helped that the hardcore Dinbo antis were so horrifically annoying. Like, don’t ship it, whatever, but Din is Literally the fandom bicycle. I ship him with lots of people. People were acting a tiiiiny bit sexist towards Bo!)

Reylo, like, certain interpretations of Reylo, all of which have to do with sub!Kylo and not making them Generic Hatefuck Couple. Also, like, I don’t really like woobifying or redeeming Kylo. Let him be a messy disaster.

Haladriel, again, only specific interpretations, all of which have to do with sub!Halbrand. Do you see a theme here?

…I think the trend is “these heterosexual ship fandoms are varying degrees of toxic/annoying/boring but the ship itself can be fun if you have a good imagination”

24. topic that brings up the most rancid discourse

hmmm…. (willingly steps into pit of vipers) “canon” is an arbitrary construct and fidelity/faithfulness in media adaptations is a conservative way of thinking. open your minds 👍

also white queers telling me, a woman of color, how to fix fandom racism. next!

25. common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

I mean, I have a couple. Complaining about short-haired elves in TROP—we as the fandom ~should know better~ (Treebeard voice.)

That new Tolkien fans ~haven’t read the Silm yet~ (geez, give people a second. Besides, not everyone finds it as compelling and accessible as LOTR/TROP.)

That Star Wars fans haven’t read tie-in EU book #3784 (or haven’t interacted with other properties at all.)

Or that some of us like TLJ. I actually appreciated what that interpretation of Luke was doing; I know some didn’t and that’s valid, but stop calling people fake fans lol?

okay that’s enough violence for now. i am not asking for debate I stg we just need to learn how to live in harmony with people who think differently but also learn to draw the line between “different valid opinion” and “I am going to block you for my mental well-being”

#wildwren #ask games

[campingwiththecharmings]

your tags on my set were a gem to wake up to and I wish I lived in the world where everyone thought it, but sadly yes! It was a huge thing after tlj came out, that Poe was a misogynistic asshole who didn't respect women and that was why he disobeyed Leia and Holdo's orders/didn't like Holdo. The backlash against Poe after that movie was immense, you couldn't go anywhere without seeing it, and a lot of people loved painting him as the movie's example of toxic masculinity. Luckily, that seemed to have died down in the last few years, but I still see some lingering remnants for it here and there 🥴

wowwwwwwwwwww, that is unreal! how anyone could misunderstand his character so much they'd label him a misogynist is beyond me. 😕 almost like they were watching a completely different set of movies tbh. suddenly i'm very glad i was not participating in the online sw communities when those movies were coming out lol because that would've pissed me tf off!

#anyone trying to call poe a misogynist now finna get slapped. #then again #tlj (which is arguably the most-hated sw sequel) is my favorite of the sequel trilogy so #maybe i shouldn't be surprised that i didn't see what the haters saw lmao

[redrascal1]

Adam Driver celebrated his 40th birthday last month. And looks better than ever. Like Harrison Ford and Hugh Jackman, he's maturing like a fine wine!

Meanwhile...it will be exactly four years this month that Kylo Ren/Ben Solo faded into the Force and took my four decades plus love of the SW franchise with him.

As a woman in her fifties, I'm too old to 'fall in love' with another franchise. And I intend to avoid ANY Disney products in future, another franchise that I loved as a little girl, because they are no longer entertaining but promoting what I see as a highly toxic agenda.

The more I see of Adam's performance in the ST the more I simply cannot believe Disney did what they did to him. His outstanding portrayal of the broken Ben Solo dominated the entire trilogy. The others gave good performances but Adam was sensational - only matched by Mark Hamill in TLJ, both of them easily as good as some I've seen win Oscars - and better than some of the said winners.

The way they treated him in TROS was diabolical.

That whole mess of a film was from start to finish just a two hour plus promotion of how great Rey's character is, and how we must all WORSHIP her, as the rest of the cast did.

Unfortunately it had exactly the opposite effect on me.

I have completely lost all interest in Star Wars. I don't want to watch any of the spin offs. As for further Rey adventures to quote 'frumfrumfroo' ...you couldn't pay me to watch them. Especially if Boyega is in them after his treatment of Loan Tran and his behaviour on twitter.

His fans tediously drone on about hard done by he was in the ST, but he had far more screen time than Adam. Heck, all three of the Trio did - despite Poe and Finn being the supporting characters (no, 'J' of the JCF, Finn was not meant to be 'Black male lead' as you told me before getting me banned). Finn was conceived as a supporting player right from the start.

Adam was playing the last descendant of the OT heroes. He shouldn't have just had a major role, the entire saga should have been HIS story. Not that of a rogue stormtrooper. Not that of a Han clone pilot.

And certain not that of the daughter of a failed Palpatine clone.

Adam's behaviour has been a masterclass in dignity since aTROSity. No ranting on twitter. No moaning about hos 'hard done by' he was. Domhnall Gleeson and Loan Tran have been equally classy, with Domhnall making just one lighthearted joke about his shameful abrupt exit at the beginning of TROS(he SHOULD have been Big Bad) and Loan making no complaint over her truly racist erasure from TROS (she was a MAJOR character for crying out loud.) The three of them deserved better.

As Kylo/Ben did. As Hux did. As Rose Tico did.

As anyone who truly loved SW did.

They let every single one of us down.

And I am so very sorry for Rian Johnson, whose beautiful film was the most critically acclaimed of all three and who reacted to it's brutal retcon with good humour, joining its three stars in class.

#I will never forgive them.

[the-force-awakens]

Yeah, that's a pretty good analysis. I don't see Poe included hardly at all, in fandom or in canon to a degree, and I think it's safe to say he has one of the least number of fans who are specifically fans of him. Like I don't see many blogs/accounts that are specifically Poe centric.

Oh man, I actually got up to answer this on my computer rather than my phone, so we'll see how into it I'll get into this ask, but yes! It's vastly unfortunate that he often gets excluded or overlooked when he's the entire catalyst for the sequel trilogy. He is, archetypically and narratively within the story, the Leia of our generation: if it was not for Poe and BB-8 (who is really like an extension of Poe), then Finn wouldn't have been able to escape the Finalizer, and Rey would have never left Jakku.

While yes, it's true that Poe wasn't initially meant to survive The Force Awakens (and other nine word horror stories for me), Poe is still one part of the primary trio of the trilogy and has been since 2015. He is not only Leia's first protégé, but the eventual leader of the Resistance, and according to the Rise of Skywalker novel, the heir to the legacy of House Organa (cue me loudly proclaiming him a Disney Prince). Yet, somehow, at the same time......no one seems to ever want to include him as part of the saga, and an important one as that?

(@dameronalone points out ever so often how much they love the shot where everyone leaves Exegol for this reason, because we see Poe flying alongside the Falcon, which really hammers in that Poe is an important player in the history of the saga).

More thoughts below the cut, because I have more and this is already lengthy.

The worst thing is that Poe was extremely popular. Lucasfilm and Marvel pretty much immediately greenlit a comic series for him, and while that was definitely to flesh his story out, if my memory serves, it was so popular that I believe the first printing sold out? And it was originally only meant to last 25 issues (which personally I think it should have stayed at, because I don't super vibe with 26-onward and it feels off and tonally disconnected to the rest of the series and also the ending of TLJ, and the characterization for Poe also feels off, but that's!! a different rant!!!) but the title was so popular that Marvel decided to extend it for two more storylines!

The issue was the fandom backlash to TLJ.

You don't have to look too far into my blog to know that I adore Poe in TLJ, and that I like his arc in the movie, and that I avidly defend him for it, but the internet in 2017-2019 was an entirely different universe from that. You could not go anywhere - Tumblr, Twitter, Youtube, fucking hell, even most major media news outlets and clickbait websites - without hearing about how much everyone hated Poe Dameron.

Why? Because they walked away from his arc deciding that he was sexist and the movie's perfect example of toxic masculinity (although, lmfao, the First Order clowns are right there). It went further than that, with headlines about how everyone hated him, how he was personally responsible for everything that happens in the Resistance in the film, and how he was the worst character in Star Wars since Jar Jar Binks (because clearly the Star Wars fandom never learns from its previous toxicity, right?). It was to the point that, to my immense horror and frustration, even as far as into promoting TROS, a reporter described Poe as a "secret villain" in TLJ to Oscar (and man do I hope that man knows Poe is loved, actually).

Fandom wasn't much different. Fanon Poe prior to TLJ was....a lot different. In some ways, a lot of fics hit the nail on the head on who Poe was, but there was a definite unifying idea of who Poe was: a pure cinnamon roll who never, ever swore, and always listened to Leia and never argued with her - let alone disobeyed her orders or put a toe out of line (this is even illustrated in canon, with the first Poe Dameron annual, where the author has Poe declare that Leia is "always right" and instantly caving in an argument).

And TLJ Poe is about....as far removed from that vision of Poe as you can possibly get - although nothing about him in TLJ is ooc. We see the bare bones of it in The Force Awakens, and Before the Awakening and the comics further flesh out Poe in a way that perfectly leads into the Last Jedi. But the cinnamon roll fanon was made so common and leaked so far into fandom consciousness, that there was this strange concept that Poe was never, ever angry even in expanded material, which...he does. He gets pissed off plenty of times in the comics, and with the Defense Fleet while arguing with Deso.

So, canon Poe did the unthinkable and, y'know, didn't fall in line with how fanon saw him, which resulted in a huge backlash over the fact that he was a character with agency and a personality (that is NOT sexist thank you), which resulted in us getting books like Resistance Reborn, by authors who can't stand him or describe him as anything besides "supremely arrogant" and spends three hundred pages emotionally torturing him, claiming he needs to die, physically assaulting him, and you know...having the person who attacked him and the other person who claimed he needed to die flirt with him, because it also spends an ungodly amount of time sexualizing him to an uncomfortable degree, because the one thing fanon could agree on outside of the fact that he had been "ruined" or that he was a jackass or a "fuckboi" (yeah that went around too), was that Oscar Isaac is really goddamned fine in the Last Jedi (he is, I'll give them that, there's something about tlj!Poe, scientists remain baffled).

And on top of all of that, a particular fraction of the fandom developed an interesting habit of taking new pieces of canon and spreading them around online out of context, claiming that the writers were now intentionally writing him as sexist and as a jackass, and ruining his character further. I don't know for certain if this had any effect overall on the fandom's perception of him, but I know that it did almost break my spin in him for a while because I thought people were being very genuine, and it wasn't until 2020 that I got curious and started doing my own research into the panels/paragraphs being shared online, and sure enough, discovered that the angle had been falsified to paint Poe into a worse light (which, if anyone is curious, is why I did my deep dive into everything that he was in, because I didn't want to be fooled again. You can't trick me if I know everything lmfao).

So essentially, his popularity nosedived after the Last Jedi. It seemed to bump up a little bit, or at least there definitely seemed to be more people interested in him/writing for him in 2020 coming off the lockdown, but obviously that has very much dwindled. But I've definitely not seen any blogs dedicated to Poe as a character since 2017, and you don't ordinarily see him in miscellaneous Star Wars gifsets that go around either, let alone solo Poe gifsets (I know because I lose my shit anytime there's a new one that's not by me), and Poe creations that have nothing to do with a ship is.........even less likely to be found.

I definitely think canon is at least trying to keep him in our minds though. He was the second character to lead one of the Lego Specials, and that Rey short story ("Through the Turbulence") was focused on her friendship with him. Whether or not that's because of the possibility of Oscar returning for the Rey movie (which feels fairly tangible, considering he's been kind of shady about it after mentioning he'd come back for a good story, and doing that Halcyon video), or if it's just because of Lucasfilm maybe warming up to him as a character again*, I don't know, but I hope it means we get good-faith content for him again soon.

*Because I'm tired of the story group constantly being a little bitch about him, and the same goes for the Topps Trading Card App. Maybe people wouldn't think he was a villain if you stopped describing him like a terrible person? Just a thought.

#ask box #i-belong-to-the-stars #i am so sorry for this motherfucking ESSAY #sometimes the 'ex article writer' jumps out #this was one of those times

[qqueenofhades]

WE HAVE BEEN SO BLESSED BY THE KENOBI SERIES, Star Wars redeemed!! That is all, I'm going back to crying over Anakin / Obi Wan now BYE ILY

I AM SO SHOOK, I AM A HEAP OF SHOOK, I AM A SHAKING HEAP OF SHOOK BECAUSE, BECAUSE, BECAUSE

/SOBS AGGRESSIVELY

Like... this whole series.... I was not prepared in the LEAST? I swore off anything else SW-related after the sequel trilogy (I didn't even watch TLJ and ROS because TFA left me so fucking furious), I took a long time to want to watch Mandalorian even when everyone was cooing over Baby Yoda, and I was NOT expecting to be thrown for SUCH A LOOP by Kenobi but here we are???

Lots of other people have produced far more eloquent and intelligent meta than I can right now, but I am SHOCKED at how well this entire series understood the assignment. I just reblogged another meta about it.... but it is genuinely dark, traumatic, filled with grief and horror, and focused around the unbearable necessity of somehow finding a way to fight and survive when you've lost everything that made you into yourself and that you used to believe in. But at the same time, it's incredibly tender, beautiful, lovely, devastating, and ultimately uplifting. It's focused so deeply on love -- love for the source material, love for the fans, love for the characters, the love that the characters share in all its various forms -- and therefore, it's the utter antithesis of the "Everything is Bad Now Lol" ham-handed grimdark of the sequel trilogy, which ruined beloved relationships, plots, and characters just because.... well, Things Are Bad Now. Even when it tried to be redemptive, it totally missed the point, because it was cliche, perfunctory, disrespectful, and badly plotted (if it was even plotted at all). It borrowed Star Wars names and characters, but it didn't GET any of it. It had no love or respect for the source material or its messages or its core themes and what the story has always been about, and it made you feel stupid for investing your time and emotion in this fictional universe at all. It was just so BAD.

And then... Kenobi. Where you see familiar actors returning to their beloved characters and BEING ALLOWED TO RESPECT THEM? When they play them with so much love and obvious joy to be part of the story?? It doesn't massively change anything, narratively speaking. We know that ANH takes place nine years later and therefore we're aware of where everyone is going to have to end up. But what an astonishing coda to Revenge of the Sith, which is by far the darkest and most emotionally violent of the prequel movies. To show Obi-Wan's journey from the depths of the dark into the Ben Kenobi wise-old-hermit who's ready, by the time he meets Luke as an adult, to guide him toward his destiny. It fills in the emotional blanks with such gentle mastery and it makes you actually FEEL everything that the prequels wanted you to, but weren't adept enough to pull off, thanks to their clunky writing and directing. It's fanservice, but in a way that makes you HAPPY to be a fan, even while it's pulling your heart out and eating it in front of you. And that is hard to do!

And Obi-Wan and Anakin.... GOD. I'm so unwell over them, and all the choices that were made throughout the show. I recently wrote this meta about how Obi-Wan himself takes every toxic-masculinity trope and throws it straight out the window. He's non-confrontational and gentle and required to provide fatherly care for a little girl and spends his time being sad about losing his male life partner, and the narrative places that love at the CENTER OF THE ENTIRE STORY.... I am Shook. Maybe it's because I'm a middle-aged sad queer person, but watching the gentle, delicate queer subtext in a story about a middle-aged sad person (familial or brotherly or queerplatonic or romantic or whatever, however you care to read it, all interpretations of their relationship are valid to me at this point as long as you acknowledge that they loved each other more than anything and in some ways still do) is really getting to me, all right. Anakin was the center of Obi-Wan's WHOLE WORLD and even now, when he finally sees Anakin's burned face.... he gazes at him with a desperate little smile because somehow he's seeing his love again, and then cries and cries and apologizes to him for everything and is utterly unable to even try to finish him off. Obi-Wan climbs out of the pit (both metaphorical and literal) by drawing on his LOVE for Luke, Leia, and Anakin, and that's why any idea that Luke would later tell anyone to reject their feelings and attachments is just.... wrong. In Star Wars, love always saves the day and is always the right choice, unless it's the toxic, possessive love that caused Anakin's downfall in ROTS. The fact that it was honored and cherished so deeply by the acting, directing, and writing for Obi-Wan and Anakin is just.... ack.

Seeing how much Obi-Wan loves Luke and Leia, both for being the last remnant of Anakin and Padme and also for themselves, has also made the original trilogy hurt so much more (especially when you consider that Luke rescues Leia on the Death Star and she doesn't even get to see Ben again properly before Vader kills him! DON'T SPEAK TO ME). Also: REVA!! Moses Ingram killed it the whole time, and the parallels to Vader, her conflict, and her ultimate rejection of the dark side of the Force, bringing Luke back to his family and crying about how she was unable to avenge hers -- only for Obi-Wan to tell her gently that it was the right choice and help her to her feet and tell her that she's free....

/PAUSE FOR MORE AGGRESSIVE SOBBING

And like... the small things! How much Joel Edgerton sounds like Uncle Owen in the original trilogy! Beru being ready to fuck a bitch up if they lay a single hand on Luke! Little Leia being absolutely perfect in every way (oh how I wish Carrie Fisher could have seen her). All the hugs between Obi-Wan and Leia and the way he tells her about her parents and it's clear how much love he still has for both of them! QUI-GON JINN JUST CHILLING IN THE DESERT AS A FORCE GHOST WAITING FOR OBI-WAN!!! (WHEN I TELL YOU I SCREAMED!) LEIA DRESSED LIKE A JEDI AND REUNITED WITH BAIL AND BREHA AND SHE CAN'T HAVE A BLASTER BECAUSE YOU KNOW SHE WOULD RUN OUT AND SHOOT PALPATINE IN THE GODDAMN FACE AND THEN WE WOULDN'T HAVE AN OT, OOPS --

In short, this series was so wonderful, so authentic, so deeply heartfelt, so utterly willing to embrace love and hope and redemption as the ultimate message of its source material, so respectful of its fans and its characters, and I am going to cry forever over it. Farewell.

#terribletinkereroftaldorei #ask #star wars #sw meta #kenobi #kenobi spoilers #obi wan x anakin #i just have a lot of feelings

[midnighthangintree]

Reasons why I don’t really ship Reylo anymore.

I know that is how I got followers a few years ago but here are my reasons in a randomized bulleted list: 

The hate from other star wars fans.

Most of the Reylo’s from tumblr left during the porn ban and went to twitter where they really showed off their toxicity. 

I stayed on Reylo twitter for too long and the toxicity ruined it for me. 

I lost interest in Star Wars.

Everyone was into dark fics and I was not. 

Some shippers hate Rey -- Why are you hating the other half of your ship wtf?

Some members of the fandom are ultra mega conservative and brought up their politics all the time. Then they complained about losing followers. Like bro look at yourself for a sec. 

It’s an overglorified Adam Driver fandom.

Got very annoying after TROS. Yeah that movie is bad but not unwatachable. 

Refused to admit characters are dead. 

Didn’t want Rey to move on. Like have you ever met a widow or something? Let her move on. 

The fandom got way too big too fast.

Got too mad about antis. I am unfortunately guilty of this. Sorry to those who saw it. 

Said the torture scene in TFA didn’t have rapey undertones. Yes, it does. I joined the fandom after TLJ and refused to read anything involving that scene and interpreting it as romantic. 

The throne room scene being a metaphor for sex. What? It’s just a cool fight scene calm down. 

I found the Ben Swolo scene funny and I got hate for it.

The same “hot takes” were repeated over and over again. 

Getting outraged over the clearly fake Reylo bathroom story. 

I may think of more later but yeah. I’m going to stay in my own Reylo bubble and ignore everything else. If you followed me after I left the fandom I’m sorry to put this on your dash. 

#anti-reylo #<<< my own post will be blocked by my tags lol #i wasted 5 minutes of my life typing this #same as engaging in the discourse lol #reylo #former reylo #may delete this later though...

[aimmyarrowshigh]

For the WIP meme. You knew I would zero in on this one...

Star Wars - Damerey.docx (This is In Screaming Color)

Of course! :P

First off, if you haven't read what's been posted yet -- it's here on AO3.

I'm not going to lie, the main reason that I stopped working on it, and stepped away from SW/Damerey as a whole, is because the Damerey fandom became an especially toxic mudhole in a particularly toxic fandom. I still love this story, and I have a lot more written than is posted, but

a) I don't write longfic in chronological order, so I can't post what I have without writing the in-between bits that aren't as interesting to me, and

b) I stopped particularly wanting to give Damerey fandom nice things because it stopped being a place of people who deserved nice things.

The mass bullying of my bb @dracosollicitus in particular, who BUILT that ship on her BACK p much, was my kind of last straw, and at the same time, TLJ/ROS didn't follow through on the goodness of TFA, and also WandaVision came out, so my brain was just like, "I GUESS WE'RE A MARVEL NOW INSTEAD."

But, like I said, I DO still love this story and man, I have a lot of it already written and it doesn't totally suck, so I do intend to SOMEDAY finish it. But I literally mean "someday." Like, it may well be for The Force Awakens' 30th Anniversary Rerelease With The Poe/Rey Hug Scene, or something. It definitely isn't on my immediate TBW pile. But it IS still in the WIP folder and not the WIP Amnesty pile.

Here's a clip of the unposted-yet stuff:

“You,” Poe says, setting his tray down beside Rey’s, “Need to have a talk with your droid.” Rey looks up from her bowl of porridge. She’s covered it with so much sugar that it looks like Hoth in a bowl. “I don’t have a droid, Poe.” “Artoo,” Poe says. He takes the sugar shaker from her scavenger cache and tips some into his caf. “It’s corrupting Beebee-Ate!” Rey actually stops chewing at that, and she wipes her mouth first on the back of her wrist, and belatedly, a napkin. She’s learning. “Is Beebee-Ate alright? I didn’t even think about bugs when Artoo came back online, but do you know, I don’t think it’s been defragged since before the Clone Wars. I’ll take a look through its databank and give it a good wipe as soon as I’ve finished eating. Beebee, too, if you like?” “No, not—really, the Clone Wars?” Poe shakes his head. “Not corrupt like programming. Corrupt like—like—” Poe leans down towards his tray and starts to maim his toast with butter. “It is exposing Beebee-Ate to concepts that Beebee is too young for.” “Beebee-Ate’s much newer than Artoo.” Rey still sounds baffled. “If anything, wouldn’t Beebee-Ate expose Artoo to new material and concepts? Especially after so long in hibernation?” Poe stabs the joganfruit jam. It oozes satisfyingly. “I mean that Beebee-Ate is a child and Artoo is being inappropriate with it.” Rey makes a very strange sound. When Poe looks over, she is very kindly hiding her laughter in her knuckles, but her eyes are bright. “Poe… I don’t think droids work that way. Beebee-Ate’s got a cute little personality, but it’s not actually—” “I don’t want Beebee-Ate to swear and know about—merging programming,” Poe huffs. Of course Rey doesn’t understand this; she’s couldn’t possibly feel the same kind of compunction to protect vulnerable little star-bright things from the shameful, dirty realities of being an old, battered veteran. Like R2D2. (The kriffing Clone Wars, and it’s never been defragged? No wonder it went offline so long.) “Oh,” says Rey, sitting back in her hard plastic chair. “So that explains why Beebee-Ate rolled straight for Threepio this morning.” “What?” Poe half-stands to crane his neck and look around the mess. “I thought Beebee was in the hangar!” “No, they’re right over there.” Rey points to the far corner of the mess. Poe can just barely hear the words “parts assembly” and “motherboard,” and then BB-8 gives a surprised [beep!] and rolls back a half-measure. Its dome swivels in a circle that looks embarrassed, or maybe like the droid’s concept of ‘self’ has changed, which is entirely likely. Poe raises his eyebrows at it when Beebee’s optical finds him. He mouths, “You’re in trouble, buddy.”

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