star wars thread

[SHAMBA~1.SBB]

Oh, boy.  I'm just so tired of all these star wars.

[Nikaer Drekin]

Oh, boy.  I'm just so tired of all these star wars.

Someone needs to sign a dang treaty and get us some Star Peace already

[Moose]

Poe Dameron is also changed from the responsible and caring person he was in The Force Awakens to a reckless, disobedient, and glory-obsessed pilot. It’s very upsetting to turn one of the Latinx characters of Star Wars into a Latinx stereotype.

Poe had like three minutes of screen time in The Force Awakens, so we very well might just not gotten a full picture of him as a character. Also, I'm not sure when he's "glory-obsessed," even at his most reckless Poe is definitely in it for the sake of the Resistance, even if his perspective is misguided. And you'd have to think extremely broadly to consider those traits Latinx stereotypes, at least the way they're utilized in the movie.

yeah, as someone who is half-Latinx and very much against Latinx stereotypes in media, i don't really understand where the author is coming from here. it's not like Poe was pulling some Scarface or Blood In, Blood Out type shit. there have been plenty of white male characters in films that have been written as "reckless, disobedient, and glory-obsessed" (and Tom Cruise has probably played fifty percent of them), so to me, that takeaway seems like one hell of a reach.

[Nikaer Drekin]

So I made a Star Wars Video full of Star Wars Thoughts and figured, what better place to put it than the Star Wars Thread? Enjoy!

[Kaleidoscope]

“Star Wars” trolls drove Kelly Marie Tran off social media, exposing an ugly side of fandom

It's offical: The Star Wars fandom is garbage

[SHAMBA~1.SBB]

What's garbage is "fandom", not merely this particular strain.

[EYE OF ZA]

The whole thing is kind of garbage. The article's saying white male Star Wars fans should be doing more to speak out about shithead trolls, but that's not going to stop the shithead trolls, it's just going to give them more people to call cucks. If it was some sort of small, insular community, self-policing might help, but for something as huge as Star Wars you're basically dealing with the public as a whole.

[Nikaer Drekin]

What's especially rotten about all of this (not that it wouldn't be awful anyway) is that by all indications KMT is an incredibly sweet, positive person. That there are so many awful, hateful people commanding massive fanbases online and someone like Kelly gets singled out for doing nothing wrong feels deeply broken.

[Kaleidoscope]

We know why Kelly was singled out. Because she's a woman and they don't belong in Star Wars according to a large portion of the fanbase.

[SHAMBA~1.SBB]

We know why Kelly was singled out. Because she's a woman and they don't belong in Star Wars according to a large portion of the fanbase.

"The fanbase" isn't some enclosed space; it's a category that overlaps with countless others in everyone that it includes.  The operative categories here are harassers, misogynists, and fanatics (irrespective of object).  None of this has to do specifically with women "in Star Wars" or with "the Star Wars fandom" just because Star Wars happens to be the avenue for this particular expression of those much-wider-ranging personal qualities.

[Kaleidoscope]

Except it kinda does?

Like I know not every single Star Wars fan is a terrible, ugly, unloveable misogynists but ever since Daisy Ridley was shown to be one of the main characters of the new trilogy, people lost their minds. A group of MRAs tried to get The Force Awakens to fail because not only was there a woman in SW but also because a black man (John Boyega) was also a lead. Daisy Ridley also left her social media accounts due to harassment and people still want to claim that feminism ruined Star Wars. Yeah, not everyone is like this but these people have loud voices and try to drown out others.

Fandoms are extremely unwelcoming to women and with stuff like SW, it's worse because certain fans think it only belongs to men. Again, not every male fan is like this but there are enough of them and they are dangerous. Yeah, they just drove two female actresses off their social media accounts but imagine what they can do in real life. The issue is trying to just ignore them. By ignoring them, they're being told they're right and that what they're doing works. They need to be confronted. And I'm saying this as someone who has been active in the SW fandom. Yes, I well aware of how toxic fandoms can be but I love SW and fan-created content. I've seen how a certain sect of fans talk about certain characters and they just ooze sexism. So yeah, Kelly's harassment has everything to do with the backlash against women in Star Wars as well as the Star Wars fandom.

[Nikaer Drekin]

A group of MRAs tried to get The Force Awakens to fail

Key word here being "tried"- the actual impact of their efforts was laughably pathetic, considering the movie made just shy of a literal billion dollars. Not that I think these people should be ignored; by all means, their toxic attitudes should be called out whenever possible. But the idea that they're a "large portion" of Star Wars fans in particular doesn't really track. If they were really so significant and influential within the Star Wars fanbase, wouldn't Solo, the only one of these new Disney Star Wars movies so far with a white male lead, be doing better box office than it is?

[SHAMBA~1.SBB]

Except it kinda does?

You're missing my point.  This kind of thing is hardly localized to Star Wars, and I'd be willing to bet a lot of money (not that enough certainty for anyone to collect would be possible) that the new films have drawn out a lot of hateful people who otherwise wouldn't even care about Star Wars, purely because it's a massively visible target for their attitudes.  You even hint at this yourself when you attribute anger at The Force Awakens to "a group of MRAs".  If anything, I would expect the grievance of existing fans to be the new films' erasure of the old canon (which had plenty of female leads and writers).

[EYE OF ZA]

Yeah, it's hard to say that this is a problem with the Star Wars fanbase when this is is a problem that has happened to women who wanted to keep a woman's image on the back of the five-pound bank note, or who talked about feminism and video games, or who were one in four out of a random sample of Twitter users.

It sucks, but it's more of a problem with Twitter and its lack of moderation, and the insular echo-chamber effect of imageboards where dissatisfied shitheads convince each other that it's cultural marxism and the SJWs who have made their lives suck, more than it is a problem within any particular fandom.

To be fair, I'm not super in-touch with the Star Wars fandom, so maybe there are major fandom figures who are apologists for the angry chan dudes and are trying to push some narrative of "well maybe the truth is in the middle between 'we shouldn't harass Kelly Tran' and 'kill you're self'". But from the outside as someone who doesn't interact with the fandom, I don't see a difference between this and all the other times people have been harassed because of nerd outrage whipped up into harassment by imageboard and reddit shitheads.

[SHAMBA~1.SBB]

Fandoms are extremely unwelcoming to women

I also have a hard time believing this premise.