Star Wars' "Black Stormtrooper" to Critics: "Get Used to it"

[persopolis]

"Black Stormtrooper" sounds like a superhero from a parallel universe were the Nazi's won and decided to stop being racist.
Marvel, DC, whoever, get to work.
Although, something tells me this has already been done in the dark age of comics books.
...
...
I'm Not apologizing for that last pun by the way

 

[Evonisia]

If you consider the prequels non-canon, the Stormtroopers were always black, we just didn't notice.

I'm somewhat miffed at the lack of a nose of the actor's smiley face.

 

[Jadak]

I give little shit about the blackness, even if you wanted to argue that only movie canon counts and thus all troopers are Clones, we're still talking 30 years after RotJ and the Empire getting it's head chopped off (also, Jango was brown at best, looking native Hawaiian or Maori or something, not especially white). Even if you want to insist they were Clones until that point, it's not unreasonable to expect the Empire would have opened up recruitment as it declined.


I'm more annoyed about the look of the shot in which you see him (the one pictured above). I don't know if it's just the stupid expression, or some CG byproduct, but the quality of that shot makes it look like an amateur fan video and it distracts me every time the guy pops his head up.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Anyone else think that's a terrible pic of him? Like, when you pause a movie, the actors seem always to be stuck with stupid expressions on their faces...

 

[thebobmaster_v1legacy]

I tried to find a reason that his race would bother some people but I ain't found shit!

I don't know whether to feel ashamed that I got the reference, or to shake your hand virtually for making the reference. Ah, I'll meet you halfway with an Internet cookie.

As for the topic at hand...I don't care if he's a minor character (doubtful. They usually don't put minor characters in the FIRST TRAILER), I like the actor playing him. That was a refreshingly candid, non-PRed response to the critics. Also, just to point out to the people that say the stormtroopers should be white due to Nazi parallels...they are clones of this guy. Who is not white.

 

[Saulkar]

I tried to find a reason that his race would bother some people but I ain't found shit!

Spoiler: People of Colour make the best Stormtroopers in my opinion.

I guess we will have to jam the communications of anyone that says otherwise.

I don't know whether to feel ashamed that I got the reference, or to shake your hand virtually for making the reference. Ah, I'll meet you halfway with an Internet cookie.

Can I have it in raspberry flavour?

 

[RicoADF]

I always saw it as less 'white people only' but rather humans only, so similar idea to Nazi's that it's discriminating, but by species instead of race. Basically an intergalactic version of Nazi's. This is supported by the fact that Thorn was the only non human Admiral (and I'm certain one of only a few non human members of the Empire).

Talk about bitching for the most pathetic thing, esp as others have said the prequels (which are cannon weather you like them or not) show that the clones aren't whites anyway!

 

[Jadak]

Anyone else think that's a terrible pic of him? Like, when you pause a movie, the actors seem always to be stuck with stupid expressions on their faces...

Yep, but it's not just a case of 'bad pause momemt' picture, it looks stupid in the actual video as well, bit of an odd choice to include it in the trailer.

 

[Gali]

I thought the Empire was about the whole human race as a "master race". Where does it say only white people belong to the club? I've read a bunch of EU books and never encountered that...

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

I couldn't care less about his ethnicity, he just doesn't look like a soldier.

He looks like he did in Attack The Block, a delinquent punk kid.

Of course if the armor is merely a disguise, everything might be ok after all.

 

[MXRom]

In Star Wars Battlefront, it was already explained that the Empire continued to use clones(who aren't white) despite the rebellion at their cloning facility. To make sure that wouldn't cripple their steady supply of meat shields, they started recruiting more humans from everywhere in the Empire.

Since this takes place between episodes 3 and 4, it's technically still canon. Problem solved.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

Who has actually criticised the trailer for having a black stormtrooper? Citation desperately needed.

 

[Therumancer]

Seems totally cool to have a storm trooper as an actual character for once. Probably one of the most under developed groups in the Star Wars Universe (hell even the Dark Forces series didn't exactly elaborate much). So I think it's cool. That being said, I'm not quite sure why this was the opening shot in the trailer... The trailer kind of ramps up quickly but starts by trying to say "hey look how practical all these effects are!" "No CGI here!" then proceeds to sort of say OK here's the CGI stuff.

But I also never got the master race analogy to begin with, sure there were some parallels to the Nazis, but I never really got the impression that StarWars even really ever making the jump to "Master Race" at least not until the prequel trilogy, and even then as you pointed out, that "Master Race" wasn't exactly white...

But good for John Boyega though, I'm looking forward to seeing whatever it is he might be doing on Tatooine.

I believe the "Master Race" was supposed to be humanity and the inferiors were the alien races which is why you don't really see any aliens in service to The Empire. That said a black human is still a human from their point of view. The big question is whether they only use clones or if they have started recruitment and/or conscription. According to what is now accepted as canon all Storm Troopers would be clones, as recruitment and conscription would be from EU material. I believe right now the only canon is the movies and material George Lucas personally wrote which includes things like "Han Solo At Star's End". The novelization of the movies goes into some information not in the movies as well, things like the name of Darth Vader's personal Star Destroyer (Executor if I recall) and some other stuff but it
mostly follows the movies verbatim.

There are plenty of ways this could be justified, by either using some ideas from the EU, or simply by this guy not being a Storm Trooper despite wearing the armor, there is no context given which leads me to believe this is a stunt intended to rile up people, albeit I think there is less of a race angle here and more of an angle of consistency since people are trying to judge JJ's ability to handle the material and his respect for it. The actor telling people "get used to it" does not help matters either and leads me to believe he was expecting this to be about race, and not about Star Wars... which means that this could wind up back firing in a big way.

See, I have issues with things like how they made Heimdall black in Thor, or making The Human Torch black in the upcoming movie, and similar things when it comes to established characters and believe all of that is out of control PC stunts that do more damage than good on a lot of levels (among other things it means black characters that could be used are not being used). This on the other hand would not be one of them since it's a new character and until JJ opened his mouth about canon neither I, nor most people, probably would have blinked. To me it seems like a stunt that shows JJ unable to be consistent with his own statements, which causes me some concerns, a black storm trooper is meaningless, but turning Star Wars into an inconsistent mess that winds up satirizing itself (intentionally or not) is a definite fear, especially after what happened with "JJ Trek". That whole ending parodying the end of Star Trek 2 and using a khan-blood infusion by the way of s dead tribble was painful and insulting.

That said, let's just be happy Chris Pine isn't in the trailer unless that's secretly him with the cross guard light saber.

The best part of the whole thing is that apparently the narrator is Andy Serkis, and the guy does some great work, so at least we'll have some kind of cool FX-based character to look forward to. Of course not even he could save the movie if JJ decides "hey, I care less about Star Wars than money, and Jar Jar is great for kiddie merchandising, so we'll have Andy Serkis do an Eddie murphy role where he will play several generations of Jar Jar's family all at the same time... we can extend this to half the movie and just use the one guy....". Okay, okay, I shouldn't be giving JJ ideas normally I wouldn't be concerned... but you know... tribble transfusions.

 

[Dragonlayer]

While I understand what the critics are saying about undermining the Empire/Nazis analogy with a black Stormtrooper, it doesn't hold up in face of A) the Imperial ideology being based on anti-alien human supremacy and B) the Nazis abandoning large chunks of their ideological resistance to non-Aryans in their service in the face of horrific casualties (see Waffen SS foreign troops). Presumably the Empire is recruiting anyone they can, after losing two Death Stars, much of their fleet with all hands and countless troops in Rebel victories.

 

[PrinceOfShapeir]

Given that we regularly saw Stormtroopers of different heights and with different voices in the original trilogy it seems pretty obvious they were either not all clones or no longer all clones of the same guy.

 

[Therumancer]

Who has actually criticised the trailer for having a black stormtrooper? Citation desperately needed.

When the trailer first went up it was all over the news, came up on my Yahoo home page and everything, and as soon as you'd click on an article and scroll down to the comments you'd see tons of people all saying the same thing in terms of "WTF Black Storm Trooper". Very little of it seems to be racist so much as people commenting on what's now canon (Jango) and how it makes little sense as presented there.

It was quite hard to miss unless you somehow weren't paying attention or reading the comments when the trailer first went up. That said I have yet to see anyone actually write an official article questioning this, but PCness being what it is, I'd be surprised to see one. People commenting on the widespread reaction is about the best your going to see in a general sense.

As a general rule when it comes to common knowledge there is no real need for a citation. Especially nowadays when certain things and positions just aren't covered by the media. This is also the kind of situation where I tell people to do their own research, since if you want to find it, it's not all that hard to do. Especially when it's somewhat time sensitive, in this case the initial reaction phase is over with, and your seeing a reaction to the reactions (so to speak) you'd have to go back to the initial "first announcement" articles and then potentially read down thousands of comments if they store that many to see the initial reactions and discussions.

At the end of the day the bottom line is that a black storm trooper wouldn't have raised an eyebrow if JJ hadn't made a big deal about kicking the EU and everything outside of the movies and direct Lucas creations by the wayside. This means that by the current canon there is no recruitment or conscription since any comments or descriptions towards that end came from now non-canon EU sources. The Storm Troopers were cloned from Jango Fett, which means they all look like him as we've seen in the prequel movies.

Of course as I've said myself context is missing, maybe JJ has changed things so The Empire does recruit new Storm Troopers so they aren't all clones. While pro-human, they aren't racist within humanity according to anything I've seen canon or EU. The guy also might not be a Storm Trooper and simply wearing the armor. The comments like "get used to it" rather than explanation don't help matters and make it more controversial, and really I think what was a PC stunt seems to have back fired because it seems to be doing more to call JJ's consistency and stewardship of the franchise into question. He made some clear statements about what is canon, then his very first trailer contradicts what he said, and there is no clarifications forthcoming, needless to say fanboys (and let's be honest, almost everyone is a Star Wars fan boy to one extent or another) are up in arms.

To be honest since he could handle this easy enough (and let's be honest recruitment and conscription make sense, JJ should probably state he will be using some ideas from parts of the EU) I confess to being more concerned by that bloody rolling droid... it looks stupid to me.

 

[Olas]

In a Universe with giant fish head people and sentient AI, simply limiting your army to all humans seems pretty bigoted to me without narrowing it down to certain subsets of humans. You know it's possible for the Empire to be an analogy of white nationalists without actually BEING white nationalists right? Like how Avatar didn't need to use actual native Americans to make it's point.

Anyway, the thing that got to me was just how sudden and random it seemed when Boyega's his head popped into the middle of the screen out of nowhere, looking all exasperated and serious without anything visible around him to provide context of what was going on. It was almost comical. If he was a character or actor I recognized it would have been less weird, but I don't think I'd ever seen him before.

 

[Aerotrain]

It's an original character in a space opera there's absolutely no reason he can't be black.

 

[Alexander Kirby]

-snip-

Just thought I'd let you know, that made me laugh, thanks.

OT The game Battlefront 2 always explained the shift from clones of Jango Fett to clones from a variety of templates to be due to an entire army of genetically identical soldiers being "too susceptible to corruption", and there's a mission where some Jedi reactivate an old cloning facility that you, as stormtroopers, have to destroy. This probably isn't considered canon but I think it makes sense. I don't think the stormtroopers were ever meant to all be identical clones, since in the original trilogy they're all quite clearly different heights (the one who bumps his head, anyone?)

 

[Zacharious-khan]

I mean as long as there's a reason for it. The clone army is all dead or if he's not a real storm trooper. I guess it's ok if it's just the token black guy but they won't score any points with me for that.