Of all the harm RJ did, emboldening and validating the racists in SW fandom may be the worst. Let’s see if JJ bears him out, because if he does then I am done with JJ and SW in general.
He’s a professional who did his job and did it well regardless of how he felt, but the way his enthusiasm dropped off was kind of obvious. I feel for him and truly hope Episode IX will be a vast improvement–not only over TLJ, which goes without saying, but TFA as well.
I know I haven’t talked about TLJ much recently – because I’ve kind of lost interest in Star Wars a little bit tbh – but I’m stillmad about how Rian handled Finn’s back injury.
Rian literally went from one extreme to the other in regards to how his injury from Kylo was handled. Rian initially wanted Finn to stay in a coma for the entire movie. All of it. The whole film. If that had happened Finn would have gotten virtually no screen time, no development, no chance to help with anything at all, no chance to shine. Which I think is what Rian was going for because Finn did get much less screen time and development anyway. He wanted Finn in a coma because he didn’t want to deal with Finn and so he could focus on other characters *cough*Kylo Ren*cough*
Rian only changed that plan because he was forced to. I have no doubt that he would have kept Finn in a coma if he could’ve gotten away with it.
So instead of Finn’s back injury causing him to be comatose, how was the injury handled? It wasn’t. At all.
There was no mention of it what so ever after the whole “Finn naked leaking bag” scene, which was just down right awful. You mean to tell me not one single person stopped to help Finn when he woke up? No one helped him until Poe and BB8 noticed? And the scene is shot in a way that makes it seem like Finn is incompetent about the bacta suit leaking. You mean to tell me Finn himself couldn’t change out of the suit and put on clothes?
He was seriously injured and the scene makes fun of him for being injured. Why did Rian feel the need to make Finn look incompetent? Finn is not incompetent. There was no reason to make him walk around in a leaking bacta suit other than to make a joke, which is super shitty because he could have died from that lightsaber wound.
What makes it even worse than it already is is the amount of time and attention given to Kylo’s wound. A wound that was much less severe. Finn’s back was cut open:
Kylo got a cut down his face:
What time was given to show Finn’s recovery? Nothing but a humiliating joke. What time was given to show Kylo’s recovery? A whole scene of him getting stitches and having Conflicted Emotions.
I just hate how much more care, time, and attention was shown to the villain receiving treatment and healing over the hero receiving it. And that really shows where Rian’s priorities were.
I’m not entirely sure if RJ truly intended to keep Finn in a coma or if it was just a horrible joke on his part, but I do think it’s not unlikely that Finn maybe was in coma longer in some versions of the script and those rewrites that were apparently done to include Finn and Poe more resulted into him waking up directly. This however doesn’t change that Rian didn’t give a damn about Finn’s injury and forgot it as soon as he couldn’t make stupid jokes about it anymore.
Logically Finn and Kylo should’ve been shown recovering at the same time, in parallel scenes. This would’ve shown their status as opposites both narratively and when it comes to their roles in the film. But RJ didn’t take the hero seriously but related to the villain and it shows.
It is, if possible, even worse than OP stated. Finn woke up in a storeroom.
In the novelization this is what he sees on waking up:
[He was surrounded by white, but it wasn’t snow–it was the walls and ceiling of a room. He was lying on a gurney, with a transparent medical cocoon above his head. Around him were crates and equipment, scattered haphazardly.
And there was no sign of Rey.]
This is, horrifically enough, borne out by the movie if you look closely at the scene.
Just as described in the novelization, medical equipment and crates are scattered around the room and it really does have the look of a storeroom, not an orderly medbay.
This is confirmed again when Finn recalls his awakening:
[Finn realized he felt guilty. He’d known what the Resistance hadn’t: that the Supremacy was out there somewhere, lurking in the Unknown Regions of the galaxy. Just as he’d known about so many other things he’d seen in his years of First Order service.
He knew it was ridiculous to blame himself–when he’d arrived on D’Qar there’d been no time for a thorough debriefing. There’d barely been time for him to tell General Organa and her officers about Starkiller Base before he’d left with Han and Chewbacca aboard the Falcon. And afterward…well, there hadn’t been an afterward. He’d woken up in a bacta suit, stashed in a storeroom aboard a ship that was being hunted.]
(And yes, the novelization totally does heap undeserved guilt on Finn for not warning the Resistance about the Supremacy and everything else. It has him wondering uneasily in another passage whether he would have warned them even if he did have the chance because he was so preoccupied with Rey. But if I start thinking too much about that I’ll put my fist through the screen, so let’s get back to the subject at hand.)
The idea that the Resistance would put a gravely wounded man in a storage space, that RJ contrived it this way, makes me want to throw up. Are you seriously telling me a ship as large as the Raddus didn’t have a medbay, including a secluded room for intensive care if one was needed? Yes, the evacuation was very rushed. That doesn’t mean Finn couldn’t be put in medbay, especially when he was already placed with the medical equipment necessary for him. If there was some manufactured reason we were never given why he couldn’t be put in medbay, at the very least a medic could be put on duty to watch him the… storeroom (barf).
This is just one of many reasonsTLJdoesn’t isn’t just bad but actively malicious, with the transparent intention to downplay Finn’s injury to a fucking unfunny joke. I hate, hate, hate this piece of shit and I wish nothing but bad things for RJ in life.
If you ever feel bad about taking a longer time than someone else to accomplish the same things, just remember that during the 1912 Stockholm Olympics Japanese marathon runner Shizo Kanakuri passed out in a garden party along the marathon route and, instead of notifying race officials of his inability to finish the race, he went back to Japan without telling anyone and was considered a missing person by the Swedish authorities for 50 years.
He didn’t finish the race until 1967 when a Swedish television station offered to help him complete the run, and he finished with a final time of 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and 20.379 seconds.
This post needs the picture of the man finally crossing the finish line.
I love how happy he is.
Mood: Leaving the country without telling anyone when you can’t finish a task
For example, the valid concern that diversity quotas value color
over merit is valid, but can skip into the bias that white people are
the most qualified. And the concern that racism against white people is
culturally acceptable is a rational concern, but then there are white
supremacists who equate it with genocide.
In conclusion, it is my personal conviction that untainted
individualism is they key to being unracist. Everybody respect Muslims
and people of Middle Eastern descent, ship Finnrey, and recognize that
Rogue One is not anti-white because it only has one white male hero
(Galen.)
So there’s a lot to unpack here, but first of all, it’s a false dichotomy that the right believes in individual merit and the left doesn’t. What many on the left do is acknowledge the reality that bigotry against certain groups cuts against the merits and achievements of individuals from these marginalized groups. I’m not sure how that translates into the kind of collectivism that is apparently opposed to individualism. Also if you think the only problem with the American dream lies in the distant past… well. Let’s just say it’s very much an ongoing problem.
At least you recognize the gap between theory and practice when it comes to individualism. In fact, talent and work ethic leading to success is far from the reality for many groups, to the extent that believing that individual merit will prevail in every case has been found to be detrimental to the long-term well-being of marginalized youth (link).
Colorblindness is the ultimate aspiration, yes, but it is not the reality we currently inhabit. We can’t just decide to be colorblind, we have to acknowledge and correct the systemic racism that both leads to large-scale inequalities and infects our own individual perceptions with bias and bigotry. Insisting that you are colorblind without realizing all the ways you are not amounts to self-deception and, in interactions with marginalized people, gaslighting. We don’t get to the mountaintop by pretending we are already there. First we have to realize where we actually are, which is a pretty deep pit in many ways. Only then can we start climbing upward.
Individualism vs collectivism is a very valid aspect of race studies (and it really has little to do with right vs left – white people across the political spectrum are individualists when it comes to things like education).
The main reason the US education system is so segregated is because the vast majority of white people see it as a way to get the most for their children and themselves. The Black community doesn’t see it that way – education is something has the potential to lift the entire community. (For more on this, check out the Speak Out with Tim Wise podcast Episode 48: “Educational Inequality is a Feature not a Glitch: Racism and Schooling in America”). White parents generally aren’t interested in improving the community as a whole through their children’s education, especially when they isolate themselves in “safe” suburbs (but not always – see Brooklyn NY).
Black communities, especially poor communities, know that the better their children do collectively, the better off the community will be. That is not the goal of the school system, which, historically has worked to sustain the inequity. It’s no surprise that white parents don’t want their kids in Black schools. They understand that Black schools aren’t meant for success. The whiter the school, the higher the chance that their kid will get theirs. Even some of the most liberal parents buy into this and are unwilling to challenge the status quo out of fear of disadvantaging their kids by not giving them every advantage.
In fandom, this dichotomy plays out like this:
Someone makes an observation about how measurable fandom patterns show that fans will choose an alternate all white ship if the canon has an interracial pairing.
Immediate reaction: I’m not racist! I love CoC actually! You can’t make assumptions about a person you don’t know just because they ship my OTP!
It wasn’t about individuals, but that will be the reaction every time. Who cares if there’s a cycle of racism? I’M not racist, and a lot of people I know who participate in that thing are nice, so it’s probably not racism at all.
I didn’t realize that collectivist aspect! I’m mostly used to “collectivism” being used as a pejorative by right-leaning people as meaning entitled, expects to free ride on others’ effort etc. I really wish more groups of people would see community improvement as a worthwhile goal because there is only so much individualism can do.
On the other hand, doesn’t white America’s individualism also result in a kind of communal uplifting, albeit at the expense of other groups? It looks like, in seeking individual advantage, white parents as a whole have used segregation as a group strategy.
And YES on this allaboutmeism spilling over into fandom racism defenses, I hadn’t even thought about that! It seems to be mainly a white people thing even among people who deny or minimize the existence of fandom racism, because in my experience fans of color who deny fandom racism at least engage at the same level and try to present community-level arguments, even if they’re wrong. It is by and large white fans who turn discussions about large scale phenomena into a trial of their own individual virtue.
Finn’s Squad from The Blood of Warriors! They’re based off from FN Corps from canon, but with some noticeable differences. I don’t know what their name might be, but I’m leaning towards Lyse Squad.
From left to right:
Slip, the Sniper of Lyse Squad, and the first death of the Sequel Trilogy. His character is roughly carried over from Before the Awakening. He does a lot of the dirty work, begrudgingly, while also not having the close combat skills of the others. He is close to Finn and less popular among the higher-ups. I modeled him after Pip Andersen, who played him in TFA, but made him look like he is Chiss.
Actinide, the Melee Specialist of Lyse Squad, modeled after FN-2099. He’s strongly loyal to the Galactic Union, and he is both the most difficult to break and eager to fight. Aside from that, he does focus greatly on the safety of the others in Lyse Squad, and is against killing people. He is modeled after Liang Yang, who played him in TFA, instead of his BtA appearance, which made him look like a Weasley.
Cypher, the Medic of Lyse Squad, modeled after FN-2000. Honestly, there isn’t too much to go off from BtA, and he didn’t show up in TFA. Appearance is from BtA.
Quickdraw, the Pilot of Lyse Squad, from the X-Wing miniatures game, which somehow made its way into canon. She’s a zabrak. Again, nothing to go by. (Moth)
If the straight girls in this scenario leave, gay men aren’t going to magically appear. The bar will just be empty, the bartenders will make less money, and if it keeps up like that for long enough, guess what bar won’t exist anymore? Yeah.
No offense hon but we’ve never needed the straights in order to keep our bars existing.
Gay people ain’t there because straight hoes maxed out capacity so thy can’t get in. No gay bar has suffered because straight people didn’t show up.
Straight people at gay bars are like the porn bots in your notes.
LMAO! Imagine thinking that the only way gay establishments will survive is with the patronage of straight people.
Hey guess what! Without straight people, no one would procreate, therefore all humans would die, thus gay people wouldn’t exist, nor would the rest of humanity.
Are you really dumb enough to think that straight people are the only ones who want or have kids? Do us a favor and get your head out of your ass.
Thandie Newton accepts the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series award for ‘Westworld’ onstage during the 70th Emmy Awards at Microsoft Theater on September 17, 2018 in Los Angeles, California
L.J.'s Obsessions 