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#basically a lot of tropes we all grew up with are steeped in the values of an unsustainable worldview?
hay-bails · 2 years
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Please please please self-indulgently talk about your characters’ lore and tidbits and relationships
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OK SO SORRY THIS IS LIKE THREE WEEKS LATE I’VE REWRITTEN IT LIKE FIVE TIMES. ALSO THANK YOU FOR THIS ASK IT MEANS A LOT :’) I can’t even begin to express how happy i was to receive it
word vomit below the cut <3
Alright so: I’ve written drafts about Saga and Delilah, I’ve written drafts about Johnny, but I can’t seem to do this without talking about all of them actually, so that’s what I’m going to do.
I definitely have less answers than most people on how to create good characters, but I do think I figured out my OWN formula for character creation. i grew up watching old Saturday morning cartoons (specifically the really retro ones on Boomerang for some reason) as well as obsessing over the comic strips in newspapers. I think that, along with just the simplicity demanded of animating, made it so that I just naturally gravitate towards exaggerated or stereotypical caricatures when I’m looking for ideas. 
It’s fun because once there’s a solid and clear caricature identified for each character, you can start inverting the tropes associated with that super strong image of how they are “supposed” to be!
Saga and Delilah in themselves are kind of a weird combo of tropes. Like, roguish pirate and hard-working corporate woman are not really two stock characters you’d ever expect to find together, especially since we associate them with totally different time periods. But as soon as I realized there was an opportunity here for me to put a spin on my beloved criminal-and-government-official-are-in-love ship dynamic (vastly underrated imo LOL. the tension! the implications!) I got super excited about it. 
The dynamic between the two of them also feels like a fun inversion though! It felt like it would just be ~too easy~ to do the expected: have Saga be this valiant and dashing pirate who comes and sweeps Delilah, a damsel in distress, off her feet at the first sign of crisis. Instead, even though Delilah was a side character at best I wanted to give her a crazy amount of agency. In fact, it is Delilah with her pen and her terrifying knowledge, not sword-wielding Saga, who is to be feared, who frequently saves the day when they get themselves into deep trouble. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense that THAT would be the kind of girl who would’ve stolen a fearsome pirate’s heart: a challenging girl who was even scarier, not someone who wilts at the sight of danger.  Furthermore, it was also fun to in turn give the kindness and loving attributes more to Saga; the contrast between her job as someone who basically kills and pillages for a living and her puppy-love towards Delilah has been really, really fun to explore. 
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Johnny’s also been a super fun mashup of tropes. I desperately love the obvious one: the deal with the devil. For the purposes of Johnny, to stay accurate to the story, and for my own sentimental value, I really wanted to be as traditional as possible with Johnny’s devil. Just a good old-fashioned cartoon Devil. Johnny, as someone who grew up in the Bible Belt, much like myself, almost certainly has spent their whole life hearing adages about the Devil all the time and has such a ridiculously simple image of what that looks like in their mind. However, since Johnny’s all about music (and the trope of the deal with the Devil is SO steeped in music!) it is cool to sort of merge that cartoon Devil with the evil/predatory music producer character. Even if that’s not the role that Johnny’s Devil actually plays, the implication is clearly there with the controlling nature of the relationship and the promises of big stardom at a terrible cost. It felt like a fun way to pay at least a little bit of homage to the history behind deal-with-the-devil tales (ask me about how Johnny is named after like 5 different people--and knows it!).
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And moving on to Johnny, there’s sort of a fun remix of the most basic character type of all time: naive farm boy is called on life-changing adventure. But everything about Johnny’s call to adventure seems contrary to the normal one; it’s no magical mentor or beautiful stranger who convinces our main character to leave all that is familiar behind and journey off into the unknown, it’s the literal, terrifying, evil, DEVIL, someone Johnny’s been warned against dealing with for the entirety of their life. So what convinces them? Trying to answer that question basically unlocked all of Johnny’s characterization for me.
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Finally, my newest addition to the group, Millie, has been an opportunity to go in a totally new direction. Without giving away too much, Millie has given me the chance to explore mixing a bit of ‘Mad Scientist’ and ‘Goody-Two-Shoes Overachieving Honors Student’ and I’m obsessed with the result. She’s a complete perfectionist and totally preoccupied with following the rules...until it comes to her personal obsessions, in which all that self control is thrown out the door in seconds.
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starsailorstories · 3 years
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I feel like “things that are good storytelling” and “thinks that are politically/morally/philosophically responsible and meaningful in this world” are two circles of a real tricky venn diagram and I’m interested in everything that’s close to the middle even if it’s not in the middle proper. It’s REALLY hard to 1. determine what’s in the middle and 2. stay in the middle long enough to get through a whole story. But I think the reason I’ve been stuck about that is that I haven’t been articulating it so maybe now that I have I’ll make progress at it
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thedeadflag · 5 years
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so this is something I've been mulling over for a while now - do you reckon it'd be possible to make a version of a/b/o that isn't fundamentally transphobic, or would it reach the point of "this is so different that you might as well not call it a/b/o" before that? off the top of my head you'd have to take out all elements of g!p, mpreg, and biological essentialism, and it'd probably be possible to write a version of a/b/o with that framework, but I don't know if I'm missing anything.
a/b/o is a reactionary trope that relies on cissexism-derived biological essentialism to function. Like, that’s the engine that powers the bdsm/power dynamics, cisheteronormative breeding/family building, “dub/non-con”, etc. elements that draw people to it, and led people to create it in the first place. 
Like, my best attempt at describing a non-transphobic, non-shitty typical a/b/o adjacent fic would include:
Werewolves (let’s face it, werewolves can be really cool if written well, and there’s a lot of really good ways to write them, a lot of ways to subvert tired subtropes within the trope)
Found Family-focused family/pack building (because wolves often adopt wolves from other packs into their own, blood lineage isn’t really a thing; much like vampires being created, newly turned werewolves of any age can be considered their sire’s child; if it needs to have a pregnancy arc between two men or two women, there’s IVF/IUI, or magically/spiritually-induced pregnancies, and of course writing a fully fledged complex trans character with their own non-pregnancy arc and virtues/flaws/goals/etc. and getting relevant trans beta writers who aren't your friends to keep it on track if you’re a cis writer)
A flexible, non-binary gendered society (rather than the rigidly structured biology-is-destiny a/b/o society) that’s trans inclusive either explicitly, or implicitly if it’s a new social universe with different rules. 
If mating seasons have to exist, they’re cultural more than biological, and no biological processes that could impede or trouble a person’s ability to properly consent. 
No inherent, glorified or reified power dynamics, certainly none rooted in or fostered through biology. 
That doesn’t seem very much at all like a/b/o to me. It’s a werewolf AU, which is the reason why a/b/o was created in the first place. It wasn’t enough. It needed something more than just a supernatural bent
I’ll continue on below for a bit on some simplified functions of a/b/o, but it’s mostly just some ramblings.
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Like, to quote the originators of the genre/trope:
I'd like to see Alpha male Jared, and Bitch male Jensen. Jensen is a snotty prude (think Lady from lady and the tramp) he may be a bitch male but he's not just going to let anybody take a go at his sweet little ass...until he meets Jared...then prudey little Jensen turns cock slut for Jared. Bonus points for J2 being OTP, Jensen was a virgin before Jared, and now that they met each other, it's for life.
...
There are three types of men, alpha males, beta males, and omega males. Alpha males are like any ordinary guy with the exception of their cocks, they work just like canines (the knot, tons of cum, strong breeders, etc) The beta male, is an ordinary guy without the special cock. Omega males are capable of child bearing and often called bitch males.
Like, I want you to look at that real close and see what’s going on in there.
This was created to be a trope where there’s a world where women, as we explicitly know them, don’t exist, but where a subgroup of men take up the functional role of the woman in the heteronormative social structure of the world. It’s also not surprising that (assumedly cis) women created and initiated the spread of this trope.
Look at the language used. This is heavily, explicitly gendered for a reason. If you’ve read much of anything about how the male gaze impacts female sexuality, you’ll know a common response is for women to position themselves out of the proverbial frame entirely, so that no part of them can explicitly exist as an object, where they can take on the role of a subject. There’s no women whose experiences will directly link to her own and her own perceptions, comfort/discomfort/etc.
However, many of these women also have been heavily affected by the male gaze and heteronormativity, and that combined with not knowing what a real gay male relationship is like, what it looks like, what experiences might be unique to it...they fill in the blanks with their own conditioning. 
And maybe seeing a lot of that toxic masculinity in media content was unsettling because of how women get treated in that content, and how they in turn might feel in those shoes. But if a MAN, even if it’s a heavily female-coded man, were to undergo that...well, it’d be easier to appreciate those tropes and dynamics they’ve been force-fed to believe were arousing, hot, desirable. Especially if they can have two hot men in it. They can enjoy that self-created taboo, bypass their own discomfort and insecurity, and project it onto a type of person different enough to suspend their disbelief and maintain that difference, even if they’re pumping that guy full of all the typical misogynistic tropes and experiences they’re not comfortable having directed towards them and other women.
In short, it’s a way to get off on heteronormative norms/tropes, using another as a vehicle in order to keep up their cognitive dissonance.
Of course, this eventually spilled out into the Het fandom (makes perfect sense, since many of the a/b/o originators and proponents were het women), and then worked its way into Femslash fandom by piggybacking on g!p in order to meet the necessary criteria for PiV sex. 
Just, in this case, you necessarily shift some of the puzzle pieces around. Trans women take the place of the “alpha”, acting as an acceptable vehicle for a toxic masculine cis man, since lesbians aren’t into men. Even if the trans woman is generally written, in nearly every way aside from part of her body, as a toxic cis man. The original a/b/o’s “Bitch Male”/Omega Male is swapped out for the  Omega Female, usually a spunkier, more in your face version outside of romantic/sexual contexts in the media content, but let’s be real here, she’s still by and large submissive when it comes down to it. 
In a world where more wlw grew up feeling predatory for their attraction to other women, for feeling sinful, for being rejected from female intimacy het women enjoyed with each other after coming out, etc., it’s pretty common for a lot of lesbians to lack initiative, not be able to read or communicate romantic/sexual cues between each other...to essentially be “useless lesbians’ as the joke goes,and to feel isolated and undesirable. 
So writing a F/F fic where some hot woman modeled in the image of some hot cis woman pursues you? Takes the initiative sexually/romantically? Doesn’t beat around the bush, but is blatant? Who can’t control her lust around you? Who can give you the perfect nuclear family you’ve been conditioned to want in order to feel value in our heteronormative world, but were told you weren’t worthy of or could never feasibly attain? Who gives you a sexual encounter you have some education in and some emotional stake in due to common conditioning of PiV sex > all else? Who can give you plausible deniability for a number of contexts due to a lack of ability to explicitly consent? etc. etc.
Like, yeah, that’s going to feel comfortable for a lot out there. That’s going to seem pretty hot/arousing. It’s a way to get off on the norms and expectations thrown on women in society, but in a way that lets them distance themselves ever so slightly from men by shifting it from text to subtext, explicit to implicit.
Don’t just take my word for it, though. Here’s a few snippets from one of the most popular g!p/omegaverse femslash writers (if not the most popular) that help illustrate how/why this trope has found an audience
Why Do I Write G!P?The elephant in the room. It arouses me, but it’s also a form of self-comfort. I grew up in a very fundamentalist home. Women being with women was at first unspoken, and then derided, both by my church and at home. I felt insanely guilty for my attractions, so I developed ‘cheat codes’ to deal with it.
It was okay if the woman I had sex with in my dreams had a penis, for example. It was okay if she forced me to have sex with her. It was okay if we basically simulated heterosexual sex.
Because of my childhood (which included conversion therapy), I found myself falling into heterosexual roleplay patterns, at least sexually. It was a lingering thing from my childhood.
It’s still there, and I know I’ll never be rid of it.
...
I associate penetration with power. You know, being steeped in sexism from an early age turned some problematic thoughts into kinky lemonade. And since I’m a femme sub, taking power away from the top by ‘penetrating’ them can ruin the mood for me. I mean, I can write power bottom scenes with the best of them, and I enjoy them, but… *shrug* if I’m going to write omegaverse or g!p, someone’s getting fucked, and it’s not the top.
There are rules to a/b/o. There are specific reasons it’s sought out, read, and created, and that’s why it’s hard to imagine a version of it without those harmful elements, because the trope requires them for the audience to be satisfied.
It’s why all gay male a/b/o fits a pretty specific pattern. it’s why femslash a/b/o fits a very specific pattern. There’s nearly no deviation as a rule, because there are so many parts that have to be in play and functioning in a specific way in order to get the desired result. 
I could go on for hours about this, and the above is all a pretty damn simplified take of what’s going on in a/b/o for it to exist in the way it does and meet the needs of the audience, and I’ve already written a lot about this in the past, so I’ll try to cut it short here.
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him-e · 6 years
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hi i’m really confused why people who hate ben say the first order/ben is/are nazis? like ???? how does that even exist or work in this story? am i just dumb and don’t ~see it~? i hope you don’t think this is me baiting you into something else (regarding your last ask) that’s what made me ask this since it mentions nazis in the article. i really am just confused since i loved tlj and didn’t see any problem with it.
It’s okay, don’t worry. First off, don’t let the discourse get in the way of your enjoyment of fiction, especially when it’s comprised essentially of guilt-tripping, manipulative buzzwords. 
Now. The nazi coding in the First Order (and the Galactic Empire in the OT) is there—from the uniforms to the insignia to Hux’s speech to the troops in TFA, everything screams “evil space nazis”—but it’s mainly for the aesthetics. It’s window dressing. It’s a literary trope. 
It’s make up, essentially, a shortcut to help the audience identify easily the bad guys as, indeed, Bad Guys. It’s the equivalent of dressing up your villains as monstrous, stinky orcs in tolkienesque fantasy. That’s because Star Wars is a mash up of different literary and cinematic genres, and one of those is classic WWII movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s, the ones that established the trope of nazis as action/adventure/historical drama villain material. The original trilogy in the late ‘70s was targeted to a young audience, an audience entirely born after wwii, who grew up with the imagery of nazi as fictional villains rather than present, tangible real world threat.
So basically the nazi imagery in Star Wars is a homage to a certain movie genre and its tropes and trappings more than a political statement. And the sequel trilogy deconstructs those tropes, which adds an extra layer of distance from actual political discussion of *real life* nazism. (please note that both TFA and TLJ were written before Trump’s election and before alt-right became a pressing matter in the us political scene).
This doesn’t mean Star Wars doesn’t have a political message. It absolutely has one, and it’s powerful precisely because it’s universal, not necessarily localized to this or that specific ideology or political climate: it’s a statement against imperialism, militarism and antidemocratic oppression, which applies to WWII nazi Germany just as much as it does to other (present-day) dictatorships or to the current rise of populism across the world, BUT most of all it refers (in its original intent) to post-wwii US’ politics. In fact, despite the undeniable pseudo-nazi-fascist aesthetics, George Lucas conceived the Empire as a parody/criticism of the united states’ imperialistic politics in the 60′s–70′s and of the Vietnam war, with Palpatine as a Nixon-like figure.
The superficial nazi metaphor, decontextualized from the other influences and taken in isolation as the only possible real world parallel to the First Order, is neither a particularly deep nor an accurate political reading of it. I would also add it comes from a shallow, imprecise idea of what makes nazism different from other fascist ideologies. Consider this: the most defining aspect of the nazi party—the belief in a superior race and the systematic extermination of Jewish people through the Holocaust—has no recognizable in-universe equivalent neither in the Empire nor The First Order ** (we can guess both are sorta racist—the term would be speciesist—towards non-human species, given the fact that you can’t see a single alien among their ranks, but it’s never a Plot Point, and in any case I hope nobody is under the impression that alien, aka non human or subhuman, creatures can be an acceptable metaphor for Jewish people. Right?). 
** and by the way: no, the destruction of Alderaan or the Hosnian System is not an equivalent to the Holocaust. The intention there was to wipe out a political/military target, not an entire race because of their race. The real life equivalent to the death star and starkiller would be the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Guess who dropped those?
So what makes a nazi analogy effective, exactly? Just generic imperialism and world domination? Evilness™? War crimes? The use of weapons of mass destruction? Aren’t other real life ideologies and military superpowers guilty of those things too? How do you strip a fictional representation of nazi ideology of its most important and atrocious aspect, antisemitism, and still expect the audience to take that metaphor literally? 
Spoiler: it isn’t supposed to be taken literally.
It doesn’t have to, in order to speak to the heart of the audiences all over the world. The nazi coding might be superficial, but this doesn’t mean that the First Order as presented by the new trilogy isn’t absolutely, unequivocally bad. Why is it bad? The narrative doesn’t get too specific about it—in fact many criticized how vague the politics both in tfa and tlj are—but we know they’re bad: they have a rigid militaristic structure, they blow up planets and entire solar systems, they oppose democratic-looking entities called the Resistance and the Republic (names are important just as coding is), they summarily execute prisoners. We just KNOW that those things are bad—we aren’t sure what their political vision is (beyond obvious galactic domination. To quote GRRM, what is the First Order’s tax policy?), but if they do those things, it must be bad, period. That’s all we need to know to understand this story.
The nazi aesthetics help broadcasting this evilness to the audience loud and clear, because we’re all children of the same culture that (thanks to the aforementioned movies and tropes) taught us to instantly recognize those black-dressed, seriously-looking guys marching in lines and swearing allegiance to an ominous-looking red-and-black symbol as evil incarnate (except we fail to recognize fascist and nazi ideology when it manifests in other, less obvious forms).
BUT here’s the thing that antis constantly get wrong, like abysmally wrong. While the First Order is portrayed as bad and unsympathetic, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo isn’t. 
Kylo Ren being made of a different cloth was clear since TFA (you cannot deny the truth that is your family) and insisting to claim otherwise at this point is willfully misinterpreting canon and loudly communicated authorial intent.
Aside from the stormtroopers (who were groomed into their role and are used as cannon fodder by the Order, and who I think will be eventually liberated by Finn), Kylo is the one part of the First Order who is clearly REDEEMABLE, because his nature is essentially extraneous to it. He’s a Skywalker. He’s the last of a breed of wizard-warriors who worship the Force and whose political views, for better or worse, will be always secondary to the way they perceive this energy in the galaxy and their role in it. His enormous power might be dark, but it’s not evil, and right now he’s misplacing it in the hands of an evil organization which he erroneously considers as a chance to bring “a new order” to the galaxy.
Is Kylo a nazi, or at least is he as superficially nazi-coded as the rest of the first order is? Let’s see:
there is no indication of Kylo being racist (or speciesist). Classist? Hell yeah, you can see it mostly in his interactions with Rey (which are, however, complicated and in part contradicted by the fact that Kylo seems to respect and value force users more than “regular” people, including those on his own side). Racist? There’s zero reason to believe that. Or at least there’s no satisfying in-universe equivalent of real world racism emerging in Kylo’s character.
the only group of people Kylo wants to exterminate (like Snoke, and like Anakin before him) is the Jedi order, but the Jedi aren’t an ethnicity or a species. You aren’t born a Jedi. You become one. Destroying the Jedi order is a purge, not a genocide. It’s like killing all the members of a political party, or the supporters of a religious heresy. STILL BAD! (and definitely something nazism, as many other dictatorships, did.) But not steeped in racism or eugenetics. It’s interesting that upon meeting Rey and discovering her force powers, Kylo proposes to teach her. He doesn’t have a problem with force sensitive people per se, he has a problem with those who adhere to the Jedi order. This grudge against the Jedi exists in the context of the eternal hostility between lightsiders and darksiders in star wars canon. It’s not the first time that one side of the Force tries to completely destroy the other, and yes, the Jedi have tried to exterminate the Sith too.
Kylo’s outfit marks him as different than the rest of the First Order, and specifically different from Hux (who is, in many ways, the epitome of the “evil gay nazi” trope, which in turn is a bastardization, mostly for the lulz and/or for fictional purposes, of nazism). Kylo doesn’t wear an uniform or display any official first order insignia indicating that he is, indeed, a believer of that ideology. His TFA costume is reminiscent of a monk or a knight templar (see also how his saber is essentially a red cross shape) while also evoking the classic image of the Grim Reaper (when he’s in full cowl+mask attire), while his TLJ one, while not very different from its earlier version, gives him a dark prince vibe, with the long, willowy black cape and the elegant shorter tunic resembling a medieval/renaissance doublet. Not a lot of nazi coding here, and believe me, how a character looks is very, very important to convey this sort of messages.
So.
What makes a(n allegedly) nazi-coded character convincing, aesthetics aside? 
His politics.
Do we know what Kylo’s politics are? 
No.
If the First Order’s political vision is vague because it works essentially as a stand-in for “evil organization” and we don’t need a lot of details about it, Kylo’s political views are more than vague, they’re non-existent. That’s because Kylo isn’t a political figure, at all. He got involved with this organization because his dark side master was the Supreme Leader, but we have no way of knowing whether his political ideas really align with those of the First Order, or if he has any at all. We believe they must align, to an extent at least, because why would he stick with them for so long if they don’t. The problem is that Kylo is too fucked up to discuss him this way. We actually see in TLJ how he keeps doing things that “split his spirit to the bone” just because his master asked, and because he sees no choice. He just keeps rolling like a wrecking ball towards complete (self) destruction. He’s a mess. He’s the opposite of a political thinker.
Antis insist to see Kylo as the embodiment of the first order when he’s actually (probably) the seed of its destruction. He exists at the margins of the organization, as a scary, but essentially extraneous presence, who follows his own rules and whims (proof of this is Hux’s seething hatred and distrust for him). We now see him rise as its Supreme Leader, but he, like Snoke before him, is an outsider, a custodian and wielder of an ancient magic/religion that the First Order is very willing to use for their own profit, but seems to be inherently skeptical of. And this conflict is 100% going to come to fruition in IX, make no mistake.
Framing Kylo as a nazi is such a massive misunderstanding of how his character is constructed, his role in the story and what he’s meant to represent to us. And of course it creates a VERY unfortunate dissonance in the fact that we’re EVIDENTLY meant to sympathize with him and root for his redemption. 
This is a character who isn’t meant to represent a political allegory, but an existential one. He’s an archetypal figure—the prodigal son, now become the Usurper. His political views remain largely unexplained and unexplored because they don’t matter. What matters is the archetypal ball of negative, destructive energy he represents, as well as the psychological horror of his personal and familial drama, which is the bulk of his motivation in everything he does. Kylo lashes out because of his unresolved trauma with his family and with Snoke, not because he knows what he’s doing or because he wants to achieve a specific goal. Even at the end of TLJ, he’s using the First Order war machine as a weapon to enact his personal, and deeply masochistic, vendetta against Luke, who tried to murder him, and Leia who (in his mind) rejected and betrayed him for the Resistance. He’s also externalizing the blind terror, the hurt, the confusion of having just killed his mentor and long time abuser to save someone who (from his point of view) only used him and then dropped him like a sack of potatoes (yeah, that would be Rey).
There’s no sound military strategy or even logical thinking in his almost delirious attack on the resistance base on Crait, to the point that even Hux is appalled. This isn’t a man who is pursuing a political ideology. This is a deeply broken individual who is fumbling to deal with some major unresolved issues from his past and childhood and who for some reason believes that burning everything to ashes is the only way to achieve some sort of peace. The “order” he wants to restore is more on a personal scale than on a galactic one. The galactic scale is always a byproduct of the personal, as it’s always the case with these thrice damned Skywalkers, tbh.
so to summarize
the nazi aesthetic is superficial and is meant to convey that the first order is Evil
the political message of sw is more universal than “fight the nazis”, not because the nazis aren’t bad, but because the nazis aren’t the only form of political evil people should fight against, and depending on where and when you are in the world, there might be more immediate forms of imperialism and oppression that the local audience might want to see reflected in the First Order (note that the current nazi discourse is incredibly westerncentric and especially us-centric, because that’s where we’re unfortunately experiencing a resurgence of these ideologies, but other parts of the world might have their own oppressive powers to fight that have nothing to do with nazism)
the First Order is 100% evil but Kylo isn’t integrated within it, and even as the Supreme Leader he represents an outsider
Kylo’s relevance in the story is broader than his affiliation with the First Order
in fact, the main themes of his character aren’t political at all
Kylo matters as an archetypal and tragic figure, the continuation of the very archetypal and tragic familial saga of the Skywalkers
Kylo is neither a “literal” nazi nor nazi-coded
insisting that Kylo is a nazi makes you (not you, anon, those who propose this interpretation) look stupider and stupider as it becomes increasingly clear that he’s a HUGELY sympathetic character who is on a redemptive (and romantic) arc
seriously, disney ain’t gonna “normalize” nazis
stop saying that
stop worrying about that
this is the least of your problems
the first order will eventually be destroyed as it should be. Kylo, who is not a nazi, will not
end
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bharatiyamedia-blog · 5 years
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As Kabir Singh battles brickbats, a have a look at Malayalam cinema's latest subversion of poisonous alpha males- Leisure Information, Firstpost
http://tinyurl.com/yxdlm6xr On this 12 months’s Kumbalangi Nights, one of many primary leads Saji (Soubin Shahir), believing himself chargeable for the surprising loss of life of his good friend, is nearly on the verge of a meltdown when he turns to his little brother—”I believe I’m shedding it. I need assistance. Can you’re taking me to a health care provider?” Within the second that he confides to the Physician and sobs throughout him, we’re witnessing the overhaul of the poisonous masculinity that has been celebrated in Malayalam cinema for ages. The scene concurrently subverts one among its oldest and most profitable tropes—the highly effective, protecting elder brother. In any case, Saji is the eldest in that dysfunctional household of 4 brothers. In the identical movie, his youthful brother (Shane Nigam) proves to be a by-product of poisonous masculinity and will get enraged when he realises that he isn’t entitled to take possession of his girlfriend but. The girlfriend, in the meantime, calls out her misogynist brother-in-law who considers himself the protector and the legislation of the household. “In our household we give ladies affordable freedom” being the fixed chorus. The brother-in-law, Shammi (Fahadh Faasil), the image of an “supreme household man” who can also be casteist, snobbish and misogynist, finally ends up being the psychopathic antagonist within the movie. Kumbalangi Nights, directed by Madhu C Narayanan and written by Syam Pushkaran, not solely succeeds in overthrowing the celebrated alpha male but additionally factors out that in idea he’s the villain of the story. “However I want they hadn’t made him right into a psychopath. He truly represents the typical chauvinistic Malayalee male,” says CS Venkiteswaran, movie academician. A nonetheless from Kumbalangi Nights. Having stated that, the movie nonetheless doesn’t drift away from the bigger narrative in Malayalam cinema — exhibiting ladies as nurturers, about ladies anchoring the boys and providing them objective in life. Agrees movie critic Sreehari Nair, who says Kumbalangi Nights was additionally about “what number of sturdy, gifted, impartial ladies willingly hand over their very own character to grow to be captives of bushy brutes.” “In Kumbalangi, the reactions of these ladies within the Shammi family, the best way they virtually tense up in his presence, how they, by conditioning, cower down earlier than his masculine grandeur, is a actuality in lots of Indian and Malayali households. These reactions, I believe, are as vital to review because the character of Shammi. The reality is that quite a lot of ladies, by placing love earlier than their very own honour, carry slavishness upon themselves. I personally don’t suppose this is a component that wants ‘correction’. It merely is one among our nation’s many poetic insanities,” Nair observes. Malayalam cinema, which has been on a studying curve publish WCC and New Wave, is consciously making an attempt to rephrase the century-old conditioning layered within the basically male-centric narrative. Although Malayalam cinema has not at all times glorified the poisonous male, it can’t be discounted that standard cinema at all times gave credence to him over the feminine voice. There have been the occasional KG George (thought of one of many most interesting filmmakers of all instances) movies (1980s) with advanced women and men who fell from the excessive pedestal of morality, obtained up and continued with their lives with out being judged. Whereas the 1980s had a mix of real looking portrayal and endorsement of the poisonous male hero, it was in the direction of the mid-1990s that it grew out of hand. A lot earlier than Ranji Panicker-Ranjith-Shaji Kailas trio scripted their alpha male icons, Director Balachandra Menon (between 1979-mid 1990s) had created and popularised a story the place the best girl was somebody who bowed to her man and was not able to making large selections in the home. He made positive that every time the standard position play obtained disrupted (or every time a girl spoke towards this male-order), he introduced them again within the patriarchal order, as he believed solely that stabilised the right household. A number of of his movies rallied across the “actual man” syndrome. Maniyan Pillai Athava Maniyan Pillai has a hero who rapes a girl to reveal his masculinity, whereas Prashnam Gurutharam’s protagonist opts for suicide over residing as an impotent man. “Within the 1980s there wasn’t a lot age parity between the hero and the heroine, which helped to carry an equality within the relationship, not like post-2000. Be it Jayabharathi-Soman, Venu Nagavalli-Jalaja or Shobha. However after superstardom, the age hole between the hero and heroine drastically widened, making the creation of alpha males simpler. Now after all, we see the age hole decreasing,” observes CS. Director Padmarajan has depicted poisonous masculinity in a number of of his movies. In Kariyila Kattu Pole, we see a hero (Mammootty) raping a girl to “educate her a lesson” and to point out her “what an actual man” can do. And worse, her trauma is hardly addressed within the movie which opts to digress into the bond between the daddy and youngster. In the meantime, his 1983 movie Koodevide has an entitled misogynistic hero who results in jail for murdering the scholar of his lover. In Thoovanathumpikal, his most celebrated work, the main man, Jayakrishnan is a product of poisonous masculinity, unable to take a woman’s rejection leading to a one-night stand with a name woman. However even there, his fragile male ego makes him responsible of coveting a woman’s virginity as he believes like each patriarchal male that it defines a girl’s existence, prompting him to supply her marriage. Within the late 1990s, when heroines have been being sidelined, alpha males rose in prominence. Director Rajasenan’s standard mainstream movies that includes Jayaram had appalling plotlines woven round middle-class households. In all his celebrated movies, be it Ayalathe Adheham, Meleparambil Aan Veedu or Njangal Santhushtaranu, males steeped in patriarchy mocked, judged or introduced the “drifting ladies” again into the household. In Ayalathe Adheham, the hero is a grouchy sexist who believed that exhibiting affection or flaws earlier than his spouse would make him much less of a person. So, they find yourself demonising the one who overtly made a present about loving his spouse. Whereas Meleparambil Aan Veedu makes an announcement that society considers a girl virtuous as alongside as her unborn youngster is claimed by the daddy. The heroine in Njangal Santhushtaranu is the stereotypical trendy spouse who can’t prepare dinner or be motherly and wears trendy garments. She is named out for not being the standard obedient spouse. However the minute she “realises her errors” she wears a sari and turns into the motherly determine he needed her to be. Sathyan Anthikad made positive his heroines have been the catalyst for his heroes to know their objective in life. As soon as that’s completed, the women go into the standard gender roles. In Priyadarshan’s Mithunam, it’s once more a hero who doesn’t speak in confidence to his spouse concerning his financial points, as he both thinks she is simply too dim-witted to know him, or she would suppose much less of him as a person. Finally, she is pressured to apologise for not empathising along with his silent remedy of her. Lohithadas’s Kanmadam has a hero (Mohanlal) who thinks he can weaken a girl’s (Manju Warrier) defences with a kiss, as he feels that’s all she yearns for. However then she can also be proven as a daring, grumpy girl who’s being pressured to shoulder the accountability of her household within the absence of her brother. The overall thought being sketched is {that a} girl is happiest when a person takes care of the home and she or he performs the spouse and mom. A minimum of the hero’s motion and her response reinstate that idea. Although Malayalam cinema has had comparatively fewer romantic films, the notable ones had stalking (Vandanam, Chithram, Annayum Rasoolum) getting used as mandatory instrument for wooing. Whereas these are largely depictions, the narrative took a disturbing flip by the late 1990s and early-mid 2000 when superstars (Mammootty and Mohanlal) have been crafted as demi-god alpha males and their heroines the place diminished to arm sweet. They adhered extra to hegemonic and hyper masculinity. There was Renji Panicker, who created heroes who at all times judged the “trendy lipstick sporting girl with a thoughts of her personal,” gave them a category on self-discipline, traditions, and household. After which there was writer-director Ranjith who made positive he created ladies who prostrated earlier than their main males and eagerly jumped at their flippant, sexist marriage proposals. In all these narratives, a person’s value is at all times weighed on the paternity scale — “If you’re born of a single father, carry it on,” is the ISI mark of heroism in Malayalam cinema. Dileep movies endorsed misogyny and sexism within the guise of household entertainers, passing off crude humour concentrating on ladies in each movie. As soon as the development of alpha male superstars began to say no (although this 12 months, one of many greatest hits is a celebrity glorification car known as Lucifer), the New Wave set in. That and social media collectively prompted the emergence of girls writers in movie criticism and the formation of WCC. Conversations started on ladies’s illustration and misogyny in older Malayalam movies, leading to extra insightful discussions. Political correctness was thought of as essential to a movie’s acceptability because the story, medium and method. The change is clear in latest instances, when audiences are woke in the direction of misogyny, racism, and casteism being glorified on display screen. A nonetheless from Varathan. The result’s the likes of Varathan and Ishq. In final 12 months’s Amal Neerad directed Varathan, the hero is a metrosexual, the subversion of poisonous masculinity. He’s mild, type, giving, and doesn’t react to conditions like how society perceives a person ought to. He’s additionally susceptible, emotional, and compassionate, traits typically seen as weaknesses in a person. Of their marriage, he makes no fuss about being helpful within the kitchen or in not being the salaried associate. “It’s an fascinating depiction, however his climactic transformation is that of a celebrity’s, which I believe was deliberate,” says CS. Whereas director Anuraj Manohar’s Ishq has a extra advanced layering. It’s a few younger couple who tries to rescue themselves from the clutches of a creep who harasses them within the garb of ethical policing. However as soon as the issues tide over and the vengeance has been extracted, comes the reality concerning the hero. It’s solely when he’s reassured that the villain didn’t contact his girlfriend that he decides to stroll again into her life. He endorses machismo and has all of the particular traits of a poisonous male who thinks his manliness has been mocked and challenged when he couldn’t “shield and defend” his girlfriend. It’s that alone which makes him plot a revenge plan that goes utterly towards his character. However in the long run when that façade falls in entrance of her, it’s heartening to observe her take a stand. Between all that is the baffling indisputable fact that Arjun Reddy, the 2017 Telugu movie which has been remade in Hindi as Kabir Singh (and is at the moment operating in theatres) which in flip has been aggressively slammed by North Indian movie critics for its blunt glorification of poisonous masculinity was effectively acquired in Kerala. Shahid Kapoor in a nonetheless from Kabir Singh. YouTube Most likely we should always simply take coronary heart in the truth that Malayalam cinema and a piece of the discerning viewers has although belatedly acknowledged poisonous masculinity and the dangerous, abusive methods it’s reared its head, the conversations are in full swing. The change may even be effectively on its means. 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