People who like a work and are open to criticism about it are awesome.

diversity-instarwars:

Hello everyone! As I’ve been saying–I finally made my first podcast/video for star wars. This one deals with ableism and star wars villains. I made a meta about this a while ago and decided to make it a podcast! Please give it a listen and like if you have the time !

I also have a twitter where I’ll be like discussing my future podcasts/videos and the progression of my podcasts (and just talking about social justice and fandom stuff!)

@diversehighfantasy and @lj-writes i hope you don’t mind me tagging y’all in this! But this might also be something you and your followers are interested in!

Definitely! Thanks for tagging me!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

I really appreciated the visual depictions of Middle Eastern and Arab people in the comic “Start-of-Century Experiences Compared” (link) from the September 3, 2018 issue of the Korean weekly magazine SisaIn.

For context, this comic series by Gupsinist visually represents different countries and groups with different animal and occasional plant heads on characters. From the panel below you can see that the terror group ISIS was represented as a goat separate from Middle Eastern people at large, who are shown with sheep heads. This depiction also acknowledges that ISIS’s primary victims were other Middle Eastern people, with the sheep-headed character running from the goat-headed character armed with a sword.

(The sunflower is Ukraine and the polar bear is Russia. The visual gag with the bear eating the ice cream comes from the Korean spelling of Crimean Peninsula, “Crim,” which is the same as Cream in Korean.)

You can again see the depiction of Middle Easterners with the sheep
head, with an acknowledgment that terror and war affect too much of the
Arab world.

(The rooster represents France in the visual language of this comic.)

You can see again the divide between ISIS and most people in the Middle East in the visual representation of goat and sheep respectively, together with the acknowledgment that it was primarily people in the Middle East, in this case Iraqis, who fought against ISIS and defeated them.

(The original comic had the sheep calling the goat Ilseong-Ilseong, which is a play on the letters, but I thought it appropriate to substitute it in translation with “Daesh,” the pejorative Arabic speakers have coined to refer to the group.)

Comic styles might seem like a small point to notice, but they can be potent symbolism and should be used responsibly. I liked the amount of thought the artist put into using that symbolism to make statements about Muslims and the terrorist group that terrorizes Muslims in the name of their highly repressive and heterodox vision of Islam.

elumish:

Five Common Harmful Representations of Disability

apersnicketylemon:

Full offense, but if your coping mechanism involves hurting others, or other people are hurt as a result of your coping, then it is in fact a shitty coping mechanism that you need to get rid of, and the people you hurt have every right to be angry with you and call you a shitty person.

starwarshub:

insp.

Everyday we dig deeper and find new things terrible about the ST extended universe/TLJ. This morning i open imdb, they’re showcasing a “what we know so far” video and they illustrate it with a pic of Rey and Kylo. Is there anything worth salvaging for Finn fans in this shitshow? TLJ was the worst thing but TFA had started throwing him under the bus. I just wanna be free of this pain but i just keep going back to lurking and it just breaks my heart a little every time.

On the one hand, fandom will find ways to focus on the white characters no matter what, and it’s to be expected that fandom would fixate on Rey and Kylo when much of the information released so far about IX has involved Finn, Poe, and Lando. That’s the schema that audieces are given in a white supremacist media environment, that the young white characters must be the leads and that any Black and brown characters are peripheral to the story.

On the other hand, it’s also true that TLJ and the end of TFA gave some validation to these fans’ expectations. It was awful for Finn to be the bait in an abrupt switch after driving the story with a very clear protagonist’s arc, and clearly Johnson had no idea what to do with Finn’s character except to position him as an object of mockery and instruction.

I think it’s incredibly cruel what the franchise has done to Finn’s fans, especially Black fans who were so excited about representation in an iconic franchise. They gave Finn a good and promising start and then yanked the carpet from underfoot for–what? To show that fans were foolish to expect Finn could be the special figure the story set him up to be? That we shouldn’t expect Black characters to be protagonists, period, and we deserve to be mocked for our expectations? RJ gets a lot of justified flack for mocking fans, but it’s really something that started with JJ. RJ just gave the larger SW fandom a taste of what Finn fans got from JJ at the TFA climax, except Finn and his fans got extra fucked over in TLJ because of course.

Fandom has piled onto the franchise’s existing horribleness, outright lying about what was on screen, laughing at fans for thinking Finn’s place could be anything but peripheral, talking shit about Finn and his actor, calling Black fans toxic antis for pushing back against fandom racism. The franchise and fandom together have helped push Black fans out of the fandom, so like mission accomplished I guess.

And the truly cruel part is that a lot of fans find it hard to let go because Finn is still an amazing character with a lot of potential, and there are just enough signs of hope together with the fear that it could be dashed at any moment and turn to yet more mockery at having expected anything but crumbs.

I’m not sure I have an answer. I know personally I’ve turned more to my original work because I have been taught the hard way that I can’t trust my favorite franchises to give me the representation I want (Asian representation in my case), and I’ve talked to other fans who are similarly putting more focus on their own projects. I’ve tried to get less attached to SW, although it’s not always easy because it’s such a huge fandom and franchise that has its own gravitational pull.

My responses are not an answer for everyone, of course. I think the classic line about hoping for the best while expecting the worst is a good general guide, personally, as is not putting all your eggs in one basket.

Give me simplicity and clarity in storytelling every time. Clever and complicated tales have their place, but 9 times out of 10 the stories that resonate and stand the test of time will be the ones that that stick to the basics, that build relatable characters and the world they inhabit, that follow through on conflicts and setups without trying to shock or impress. Simpler, clearer stories will even be more profound most times in handling serious real-world subjects than tryhard works; their depth arise organically from the characters and the unfolding of the narrative, not from the creators preaching at the audience. We’d really gain a lot from writers being less interested in showing off their brilliance and engaging more passionately with the characters, their relationships, and their world.

Wait, they character assassinated Mon Mothma too? Damn it all.

Idk if she even had enough character in the OT to be assassinated, but she certainly became the symbol of everything wrong with the Republic: its lack of moral conviction when it counted the most, its worship of expedience above all else, and its eagerness to compromise at the expense of principle.

When Leia said she’d burn down the galaxy if she thought it right she did so in opposition to Mon Mothma’s policy of only helping planets who had something to offer the New Republic instead of the once who needed help most and Leia here kinda implied strongly that she’d do what it took to help those who needed to be helped, even if that meant burning down the galaxy or going straight against Mon. Context is really important.

And even with that context that’s such a terrible, hyperbolic way to phrase her moral conviction because Chuck Wendig is a shitty writer.