DELETED
- Thread starter deleted20220709
- Start date
You know, under normal circumstances, I'd tear this article a new one. These aren't normal circumstances. So, I'm just going to say that I think this article is really stretching things at best, and outright misrepresenting things at worst.
Somebody had run out of ideas when they needed to submit their weekly article.
It's actually the first article the author's written. On the other hand, this is Polygon, which found a way to criticize CoD: WWII for not having transgender characters in it.
In fairness, other game sites are doing similar things, and fair enough, but I think the article's thesis is really stretching things.
USA
Yea, I had read part of that article when I initially saw it and then skipped it because it was garbage. On the Xena note though, I was really irritated with what they attempted to do with her. I was a huge Xena fan when I was growing up, I loved how you could have a strong female friendship bond and represented women as strong and independent and multifaceted rather than " dependent on a man". But then they had to cater into satisfying the whole male fantasy BS of making Xena out to be " butch" and they get some girl on girl action with Gabriel and Xena diminishing the whole aspect of their bond as friends. Like it was somehow not okay for two women to legitimately have a strong friendship bond, but were instead secretly sexing it up in private as imagined by what teenage boys dream about what goes on at girls slumber parties instead. And like you can only be a strong female and not need men to take care of you if you are a butch lesbian. Seriously, that whole bit irked me and really diminished the context of their friendship. Not because I have a problem with lesbians or bisexuals, it was because they were not originally portrayed that way and the way it all came about was like just obvious catering to a heterosexual male fantasy of what men imagine women really have going on when they are close friends.
Then I had to listen to the entirely fabricated idea that they were just lesbians all along from people who apparently didn't follow the show because at the most, they would have been bisexual, but that was not how she was portrayed during much of the show to begin with while she was in love with Marcus, and Gabrielle was trying to hook up with other guys as well, If they actually had been bisexual or a lesbian from the beginning of the show it would have been one thing, but they didn't portray either of them that way and then instead made it like you couldn't be a strong woman or have a close female friendship unless you are a lesbian or have some underlying sexual motive when initially portrayed them as the example of true female friendship. /rant.
EDIT. I lied, I am not done ranting. It was also like Xena couldn't be portrayed as a sexually confident woman without having other motives for her close friendship. Before they changed it all up, she was one of the only examples in media I knew of a strong, sexually confident independent woman who loved men but was not subservient to them, and her friendship with Gabrielle was one of the only examples of a lifelong close female friendship. You do not see that portrayed in media, all too often you have women portrayed as being jealous, manipulating or backstabbing one another or gossiping, both terrible stereotypes imagined by men. It was nice to have a friendship where they relied on and helped one another rather than betrayed or had ulterior sexual motives. They changed it to have an underlying sexual motive, in the same way that some men tend to think that men and women can't just be friends because there is always an underlying sexual motive there. /rant .. maybe.
Then I had to listen to the entirely fabricated idea that they were just lesbians all along from people who apparently didn't follow the show because at the most, they would have been bisexual, but that was not how she was portrayed during much of the show to begin with while she was in love with Marcus, and Gabrielle was trying to hook up with other guys as well, If they actually had been bisexual or a lesbian from the beginning of the show it would have been one thing, but they didn't portray either of them that way and then instead made it like you couldn't be a strong woman or have a close female friendship unless you are a lesbian or have some underlying sexual motive when initially portrayed them as the example of true female friendship. /rant.
EDIT. I lied, I am not done ranting. It was also like Xena couldn't be portrayed as a sexually confident woman without having other motives for her close friendship. Before they changed it all up, she was one of the only examples in media I knew of a strong, sexually confident independent woman who loved men but was not subservient to them, and her friendship with Gabrielle was one of the only examples of a lifelong close female friendship. You do not see that portrayed in media, all too often you have women portrayed as being jealous, manipulating or backstabbing one another or gossiping, both terrible stereotypes imagined by men. It was nice to have a friendship where they relied on and helped one another rather than betrayed or had ulterior sexual motives. They changed it to have an underlying sexual motive, in the same way that some men tend to think that men and women can't just be friends because there is always an underlying sexual motive there. /rant .. maybe.
Last edited:
I always assumed the Star Wars humans evolved beyond racism. They don't need to be racists to black people when they can be racist to Wookie's or Gungans. The difference between humanity starts looking kinda tiny when you have filthy aliens to be racist against instead.
Well not exactly evolved beyond racism, but instead transferred much of it to other aliens as you suggest.
I'm not really into Star Wars, certainly not any more (we'll get to that). But I think this is really important.
Sure, motivations make things complicated. Disney is an awful company and its approach to diversity is highly questionable, and people who want Star Wars and Star Trek to deal with racial issues are generally much more well meaning. But I think there is something very preformatively woke about requiring every story with black characters to deal with the oppression faced by their actors.
Speaking of Uhura, I was reminded of this interview.
She's sugar coating a lot, particularly how badly she was treated on Star Trek, but it's still a very powerful story.
I think there's nothing more disempowering for marginalised people than to believe that no other society is possible. I think sometimes we need to remind ourselves that society could work just as well without racism (in fact, that it would work better without racism) and I think science fiction and fantasy has a unique ability to do that. I think it's possible to fuck it up and to be complacent and lazy, but there's an inherent value in letting marginalised people be in media without needing the justification of the story being about oppression.
Over the past few weeks, John Boyega has spoken out about racism very vocally, and put his own career at risk to do so. I think having him able to do that and still be there, and to still be visible, is far more important.
On the flip side, part of the point the article seems to be more that Star Wars as a franchise is inherently conservative and contains a lot of very unhealthy messaging about both politics and personal conduct, and.. yes. Star Wars is a franchise from the 1970s, it has some very 1970s values which are deeply ingrained and difficult to dislodge, add to that Disney's general risk-adverseness and yeah, Star Wars is lazy and cowardly. But it could be worse, it could be Star Trek Picard, which is lazy, cowardly and miserable.
On a side note, I'm really glad Amazon seems to have dropped the idea of a Culture adaptation, because I think that would have actually broken my heart..
If there's one thing could do wonders for ending racism, it's a whole different species to hate instead.
Where do humans even originate from in the Star Wars universe? Are they even called 'human'? And the amount of races depends on how long this humanity has existed for coupled with the geography, right? So assuming the planet they originated from isn't the same as Earth in either size, age, and lay of the land, does that mean there's other races that have evolved over time foreign to us as the viewer?
Or am I overthinking this space adventure with laserswords?
Well, from what I've gathered humans are mostly from the prosperous core worlds within the Star Wars galaxy while most aliens come from the impoverished outer rim.
They do seem to be called humans, I don't recall the movies ever really using the term but the expanded universe does use it and even delves into the human supremacy movement.
Humanocentrism
Humanocentrism was the tendency to view the galaxy from the perspective of a Human majority. While more passive than Human High Culture, Humanocentrism was pervasive and in many cases, subconscious. It was the source for the Human use of the term "alien" to describe nonhuman species and in some...
starwars.fandom.com
Fantastic Racism - TV Tropes
"Fantastic" as in "fantasy" or fictional, not as in "awesome", obviously. Now that we got that out of the way, Fantastic Racism is a subset of the old trick of dealing with thorny issues through metaphor. Instead of having The Hero encounter …
tvtropes.org
"Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green."
— Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
It's a notably common scifi/fantasy trope I've noticed. Nobody cares about skin color, especially since there are perfectly good elves to discriminate against. Granted, half the time the elves are just as jerkass/racist towards the humans.
Though I've been reading Brandon Sandersons Stormlight Archive, which has both. Lighteyed humans are considered inherently better then Darkeyed humans, but everyone looks down on the non-human humanoid parshmen, who are almost universally enslaved by the humans, who think nothing of it because Parshmen are incredibly docile and have almost no will of their own. This gets far more complex and uncomfortable when Parshmen who are free, have a society and culture are discovered living in a remote area.....
Last edited:
You're probably overthinking it.
Especially since, if you really want to blow your noodle, there's the fact they use spacecraft called "A-wing", "B-Wing", "X-WIng", "Y-WIng", because they look like the Latin Letters A, B, X, Y. The problem being....we've seen their wrting system on occasiona and those letters don't exist. It's not a latin alphabet so that whole thing makes no sense in that context.
They also have phrases like 'a sitting duck', when I don't think I've ever seen a duck of any kind in anything Star Wars.
So...the idea is that in a sci-fi universe "a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away" a African British actor should have spoken about their uh...struggles, growing up black in the United States in the 2000s?
Oh, those are fun too.
I've been playing Ace Combat 7 and there's a brief line where your mission control mentions eating Italian food. Which is kinda wierd when Italy doesn't actually exist in the game world. Like the history is different, the continental arraginment is different, etc. I kind of let it slide when they're making jokes about pizza delivery because I could kinda buy Pizza existing in this world(If F-22's and Mig-29s exist, sure, Pizza exists), but namedropping a nation that doesn't exist on their planet kinda breaks the suspension of disbelief a bit.