Category: Uncategorized

How do you think the dynamic between Kylo Ren and General Hux will change in IX? I’m hoping for either a serious Vader/Tarkin partnership or an evil Bill/Ted friendship.

I can’t see them hating each other any less going forward, so I imagine them constantly wanting to kill each other and Hux in particular dreaming of overthrowing Ren. I hope Hux plays some role in Ren’s downfall before he himself dies horribly at Ren’s hands.

When TFA came out I was like, “Wait, people are shipping Rey with Kylo? Um that makes sense I guess but you know she likes Finn and Finn clearly likes her right” and literally no one online agreed with me and they were saying Stormpilot was telegraphed and that Finnrey was a platonic ship and Rey would redeem Kylo with her love and basically the further Reylo strays from canon the more I hate it which is why I can’t stand them three years later

They can ship whatever they like. What I can’t stand is the fact that they call their shitty headcanons and theories canon and insist that the rest of us treat it as such. Also, while I love my Finnpoe their relationship is not presented anywhere nearly as romantically in canon as Finnrey was. That’s just a fact.

The whole “Kylo must be a Dark Side villain because he gets angry/throws tantrums” vastly misinterprets the whole role of anger as it plays out in TFA. (I’m ignoring Rian’s white Xtian bs, he can keep it.) Because yes Kylo has angry outburst, self-righteous and self-entitled angry outburst. Finn and Rey has angry outbursts too, but theirs are born not out of a sense of self-entitlement or self-righteousness, but out of anger at injustice or abuse. TFA takes a much more complicated 1

tack than the usual Xtian bs of George’s era that anger=Dark
Side=bad. This isn’t about anger, or fear, or whatever “Dark Side
emotion” Yoda would babble about. It’s about WHY you get angry and what
you get angry about. So calling Kylo Ren a Dark Side villain complete
fails to encompass what TFA shows the Dark Side to be. And for that
matter how JJ was talked about it (as tyranny, oppression and
self-centeredness.) (end)

I’ve gotta say I’m feeling pretty good about the pushback I’m getting for my recent Force metas. It’s almost like I’m being subversive or something! 😂 Whatever the Dark Side of the Force is–a discussion not helped by different directors having different conceptions of it–it seems to be a little more serious than “I’m fragile and entitled and therefore throwing a tantrum.”

I mean if we read the Dark Side as anger and fear, Kylo is definitely using or fueling the Dark Side here. He is not driven by the DS, though, but rather using the DS for the ends of his own arrogant self-entitlement. While he can definitely be angered and hurt from not getting what he believes he is entitled to, things like perfect success, unquestioning obedience, and complete deference, it’s not anger and hurt that are motivating him; it’s his entitled beliefs that cause him to be angered and hurt.

I can get behind JJ’s conception of the DS as matching Kylo, though, because we’ve seen how his temper tantrums do in fact serve to frighten and bully those under his power. He casually and deliberately spooked a heavily traumatized Finn, literally making Finn jump by firing a blaster bolt near him after staring at him for a long moment. We’ve also seen Stormtroopers just turn around and walk away from Ren
having a tantrum, which tells us that his rages are considered dangerous enough that two Stormtroopers, raised to obedience their entire lives, consider it worth deviating from their route to avoid him. Scenes like these are emblematic of Ren’s relationship with the Dark Side of the Force: He is not in its thrall but rather uses it to intimidate and control others. It is his weapon, not his master.

One of my characters, an elven knight, has an Asian skin tone (Donnie Yen is cast in my head.) He’s not Asian because this fantasy story is comprised of my own races rather than real world ones, so how do I describe him without saying “in the film adaption he’d be played by an East Asian man, most likely of Chinese or Japanese descent?”

You could describe his looks, such as his lean and lanky build, tawny skin, dark short hair, narrow face with high cheekbones, long straight nose with wide wings, dark and well-defined eyebrows, unsually long thick earlobes, big forehead, thin lips, pointed chin… you get the idea. Some of these features are racialized but most aren’t, they’re individual to the person.

Of course, personal descriptions aren’t likely to be a list of discrete features but a note of general impressions, such as the knight seeming severe and even austere with his strong eyebrows and long straight nose ending in thin lips, but then breaking out in a boyish, joyful smile that transforms his whole face. If the viewpoint character is sparring him or watching him fight/train they might marvel at the lightning reflexes and terrifying strength in every move of his lean, hard form.

If your viewpoint character hasn’t seen many people with features that people in our world would associate with East Asians they might note that fact, such as this character’s eyes being smaller than they are used to, or the skin being darker/lighter. Other than this, though, they are likely to note the character’s individual features. There’s a lot more to Donnie or any other person than looking like his race.