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Iris Van Herpen spring/summer 2019

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The Sending Wolf by Lily Seika Jones

watercolour painting

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star wars is so fucking stupid, I love it

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Polish Constitutional Court ruled in favour of almost total abortion ban.

If you're in need of abortion please use this number for help.

FUNDACJA FEMINOTEKA is also in need of 150k PLN for its fund dedicated to rape survivors, please consider donating via this link!!!!

https://pomagam.pl/150tysiecy

Please SHARE and BOOST this, the foundation is well known for being often the only siurce of help for rape nad abuse survivors and all the funds will be WELL USED

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i am fucking WHEEZING  (x)

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i am fucking WHEEZING  (x)

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i know i post a lot about racism and other fetishy/orientalist themes in Star Wars media, past and present, but in light of John Boyega's most recent interview, as well as previous statements from Kellie Marie Tran, i believe that now is the time, now more than ever, to hold creators, writers, and directors accountable for this:

and this:

and one of the best ways you can do this, especially if you are not a fan of colour, is to boost the voices of people of colour who are speaking out against this. listen. learn. provide space and treat others with dignity. stop praising creators for being inclusive when they only give crumbs of diversity and fall short of true inclusivity and proper representation. use your platform to elevate voices of colour instead of drowning out the cries, even if your own cries are well intentioned

sometimes the hardest part about being an ally is knowing when to be quiet

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rose tico is such a difficult character to talk about bc firstly wow a southeast asian woman in the biggest movie franchise ever! secondly kelly marie tran was racially abused to the point of being driven off the internet before tlj even came out for having the audacity to be a southeast asian woman in the biggest movie franchise ever while disney did nothing to protect her and it’s fucked up that john boyega and domnhall gleeson i think were the only cast members to speak up about that??? thirdly rian johnson gave her such a stupid condescending and kinda sexist story arc that i couldn’t even enjoy seeing her in the movie despite how happy i was to see someone like her (like me) involved. fourth, disney then cut her screen time in tros to like 80 seconds total as if to reward/comply with all the racists who abused her online, as if to apologise to them. fifth, 90% the rightful backlash of sidelining an asian woman character became not about defending kelly marie tran, but about riding rian johnson’s dick as if he was oh so great and magnanimous for allowing her 13 minutes of inconsequential screentime, as if he personally decided that there should finally be an asian woman supporting character in star wars (a story that was originally copied from hidden fortress 1958, which an asian woman LEADS) as if people of colour aren’t tokenised and focus-grouped and run through a million algorithms before having the right to exist in major hollywood franchises.. anyways someone outside of disney pls give kelly marie tran a job in something GOOD

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“When you’re a person of color or a woman of any race, you can be labeled in a way that can change the trajectory of your life, health and career,”

There was this point in time where a lot of Black fans saw Sleepy Hollow and the Sequel Trilogy as this sort’ve paradigm shift for Black actors. Where DCTV and everything else was only ever offering side or supporting character roles (or worse, emotional support beaus for the white heroes), SH and TFA just dropped two Black leads on our laps. And while some of us were waiting for Lucy’s football trick, others genuinely didn’t suspect malicious intent would come of this.

It means something for Nicole Beharie and John Boyega to open up (repeatedly in Boyega’s case) about the emotional distress of being mistreated and gas-lit over their positions as major actors in Sleepy Hollow and Star Wars, and watching all of that blow up in their faces because FOX and Disney (now one entity) chose to uphold whiteness instead of doing right by them.

There’s definitely something to be said about how both SH and the ST just imploded on themselves at almost the same time. (The commonality is exactly what happened in the 90s with the Black Sitcom boom. Draw in certain audiences, cancel content that drew them in and replace it with the status quo.)

It’s nightmarish how their circumstances parallel each other, but are radically different based on sex. Sexism and misogynoir probably keeps Beharie’s commentary a little more guarded than Boyega’s (and she has been blackballed because of SH’s executives), but their experiences are bound up in how their environment and the people within dehumanized them.

And on the flip side you had white and non-Black fandom doing the exact same thing to Black fans who peeped the shit before either of them were comfortable or safe enough to be as honest as they’ve been thus far. It’s fuckin’ wild, man.

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Always remember this:

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““It’s so difficult to manoeuvre,” he says, exhaling deeply, visibly calibrating the level of professional diplomacy to display. “You get yourself involved in projects and you’re not necessarily going to like everything. [But] what I would say to Disney is do not bring out a black character, market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are and then have them pushed to the side. It’s not good. I’ll say it straight up.” He is talking about himself here – about the character of Finn, the former Stormtrooper who wielded a lightsaber in the first film before being somewhat nudged to the periphery. But he is also talking about other people of colour in the cast – Naomi Ackie and Kelly Marie Tran and even Oscar Isaac (“a brother from Guatemala”) – who he feels suffered the same treatment; he is acknowledging that some people will say he’s “crazy” or “making it up”, but the reordered character hierarchy of The Last Jedi was particularly hard to take. “Like, you guys knew what to do with Daisy Ridley, you knew what to do with Adam Driver,” he says. “You knew what to do with these other people, but when it came to Kelly Marie Tran, when it came to John Boyega, you know fuck all. So what do you want me to say? What they want you to say is, ‘I enjoyed being a part of it. It was a great experience…’ Nah, nah, nah. I’ll take that deal when it’s a great experience. They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley. Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.“”

— John Boyega: ‘I’m the only cast member whose experience of Star Wars was based on their race’ by Jimi Famurewa, GQ September 2020.

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Finn Deserved Better

I made a post the other day (link) on how John Boyega deserved better, but I don’t think people are aware of just how dirty he was done actually playing Finn in Star Wars. As the first Black protagonist in a franchise that has been dominated by white characters, this meant a lot to many people. There was a reason you saw pictures like this:

You see, when people talk about represenation in Star Wars, for some reason-

They usually leave off John Boyega’s Finn unless they’re just half handily throwing him in there, but this character meant something to a lot of people. It still does. 

I want to make this clear, these movies while being enjoyed by generations of fans, myself included who had been introduced to Star Wars as a youngling by my pops, are for kids. Not because they’re dumb, not because they’re childish, but because kids are supposed to see themselves in these characters and have a story that can stick with them for years.

We’ve heard for years how much Rey meant to little girls, but what could Black kids, Black people look to? A character that somehow even transcended race to the point that it didn’t matter if you were Black or not? Well, that’s where Finn came in:

Let’s just jump into it, the sequel trilogy ended divisively. We had a handful people fighting over what the story should be, who should be related to who, and who should end up with who, but if there has been one shining example of the most original and heartfelt character in a trilogy that if we’re being honest, ended up just copying and pasting aspects of the original trilogy into its story, it was John Boyega’s Finn.

Rey became a Luke stand-in

Kylo a diet Vader/Anakin 

And for some reason the universe just wanted Poe to be like Han

Yet Finn was something we’ve never seen before in the films. A stormtrooper with a heart who chose to betray his masters because he didn’t want to become a senseless murder. 

And I can label criticism against The Force Awakens where it deserves, but at the end of the day people walked away from that at least having a hero to look to in both Rey and Finn. Everyone had some to look to.

Then we get The Last Jedi and I’m not gonna spend too much time on that movie. If you loved it, good for you, but it 100% sidelined Finn, erased his arc from TFA, and as a film, took away people had in The Force Awakens by re-contextualizing that story as “Finn just being selfish” when it was anything but that.

Even John Boyega had disagreed with it:

But things didn’t get better after The Last Jedi, if anything, things got worse with how bad Finn was treated:

The EU, which is basically comics, books, etc, went out of its way to erase Finn’s status as one of the best Cadets and even an important character in Star Wars by taking every chance they had to either sideline him by leaving him out of books, comics, promotional material, making him small in promotional material or just disrespected him around every turn.

And then, just when both John Boyega and fans of the character Finn, a good deal of the people of color, had hope that the Rise of Skywalker would finally deliver and do right by this hero many looked it, it all went to hell with multiple re-writes, re-shoots, and people behind the scenes fighting tooth and nail.

Now, if you interested to actually know what went wrong on a deeper level with Finn’s role in The Rise of Skywalker and the trilogy, I made this video actually deep diving into that mess: 

But even then, I don’t think people realize just how much this character getting done as bad as he did hurt others. 

We have people in one breath saying “Black Lives Matter” then in the other breath cursing John Boyega’s name for believing that he was done dirty, cursing the very idea of his character being important in Star Wars because either they didn’t want to see a Black man as a protagonist in the story or they didn’t want him getting in the way of how they felt the story should be.

And the horrible part is, a good deal of Finn’s treatment was brought on because of this fandom’s reaction to the character. That’s not to say Lucasfilm didn’t encourage this behavior, they 100% did, but no one fought against it.

Every attempt at Where Is Finn always faded away with a whisper. 

Any talks of how John Boyega or Finn Deserved Better would always get brushed aside. 

You mention Kelly Marie Tran deserving better and everyone agrees. You mention Rose needing more Screen time and everyone agrees. 

You say Oscar Isaac fought against Disney and everyone praises him and says Poe deserved better.

And of course, Daisy Ridley’s Rey will always be in the conversation of deserving better.

And YES, these actors did deserve better, their characters deserved better, all of them did. Driver, Gleeson, Christie, Hamil, Fisher, Williams, Ackie, all of them!

But when the conversation comes to John Boyega’s Finn, it always dies there.

I don’t know if anyone still cares. I don’t. But, even if I’m the only one that actually does still care about John Boyega’s Finn and how he deserved better, I’ll keep saying it every chance I get

Because as much as people don’t think so, how we treat ficitonal Black Characters and the Black actors who portral effects how people see Black people IRL.

Because as much as people don’t think so, how we treat fictional Black Characters and the Black actors who portray affects how people see Black people IRL.

Reblog this so everyone knows: 

Finn DESERVED BETTER

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Daisy Ridley behind the scenes of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

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NOT AGAIN

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Luke be like "no premarital hand touching in my house" *tears down hut*