stupid very basic question: what does “coded” mean? Sorry, I’m lost.

diversehighfantasy:

lj-writes:

themandalorianwolf:

lj-writes:

It’s when a character is given the markers of a group affiliation that the character cannot actually have or is not explicitly stated to have. An example of the former is Sebastian from The Little Mermaid having a Trinidadian accent and being from Jamaica. A crab cannot be Jamaican (or Trinidadian), but he was coded as being from the Caribbean. A leading case of the latter is queer coding using stereotypical gay/queer traits, especially for villains.

I never knew that. Isn’t that technically what the characters from Steve universe are? Their not technically woman, but they are…I think.

I’m not going in that fandom.

So why is Kylo called a coded character?

Yeah they could be seen as examples of female-coded or nonbinary-coded characters, seeing how they’re aliens who come from a culture without gender. (If there’s any gender I’d say Pearls are coded as the pliant, objectified, subservient women.) The show is very queer, and recently they decided to take things way outside coding territory and make it explicit with a wedding scene and a big kiss. I agree it’s a good idea not to go anywhere near SU fandom, though, and I lost a lot of interest in it myself for other reasons. Still plan to watch it with my son, though.

If Kylo is coded as anything he’s coded neo-Nazi lmao. There’s even Word of God on this from JJ. There is a joke about him being “dumbass-coded” (link via @thehungryvortigaunt) but that’s not coding, he just is a dumbass.

Kylo is called coded as a weapon. It doesn’t take a social scientist to see that hyperfocusing on the white villain in a movie series with no young white male heroes and deciding he’s the hero has racist implications. If it was a fringe view, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but it’s everywhere, and as we’ve seen multiple times, kylostans (lbr, reylo isn’t about focusing on Rey beyond aesthetics) demand that he is respected for a perceived innate goodness, a demand not extended to the characters of color who make up the Canon group of heroes.

Invoking coding is an attempt to muddy the waters when people notice this racist pattern. If Supreme Leader Kylo himself is marginalized, well, then, his actions are justified and calling him a criminal for his actions is like, the same as calling an innocent Black guy a criminal just for existing (which reylo shippers have actually done). That’s not how marginalization works. That’s never been how it works. The popular suggestion that Kylo, who was introduced to us as a commander giving orders to slaughter an entire village of religious followers, is the good guy because he looks a certain way, is the opposite of marginalized.

And yet, one of the things kylostans love to do is to apply marginalization to him in order to “turn the tables” on fans who think it would be reprehensible for a character who is so clearly an allegory of modern white radicalization (as well as Nazism, e.g the village) to become the real hero in a story where the heroes we’ve been given are people of color and women.

One can defend the belief that Kylo is the true hero in one of two ways: By admitting they support the ideology (as some far right fans who believed the Empire were the good guys did in the early ‘00s ), or by telling us we have it all wrong and Kylo is the most marginalized of all, to the point where he’s coded as “POC” or femme or mentally ill. Fans unwilling to put in the effort it takes to see Kylo as the real hero are prejudiced against the marginalized. Check and mate. “Antis” are the Real Racists.

tl;dr: Whiteness is a HELL of a drug.