Tag: ask

I’ll apologize if I’m misunderstanding, but in your post on Star Wars not being Buddhist or Taoist, you mention people distorting concepts from your culture. Are you referring to Buddhism or Taoism here? Or, by culture, are you talking about Asian cultures in general?

Yes, Buddhism and Taoism have both been part of Korean culture for
well over a thousand years, and they are also important parts of
numerous other Asian cultures. I spoke specifically about Korea because
it’s what I know best and I can’t speak for all of Asia, as there is a
great deal of diversity. From what I know Buddhism is also integral to
many Southeast Asian cultures as well, while Taoism has less influence
outside of East Asia.

“Finn was never demoted. he was meant to be secondary.” did they watch tfa? Or read anything about it? It doesn’t take a Ph.D in movie analysis to understand that finn was set up to be the male protagonist of the series. JJ told John he was the star of the st. English may not be my native language but It’s not hard to understand that he was never meant to be secondary. Rian is just a shitty director that is a space naz*s apologist with no respect for luke. (mark hamill said so).

Finn is the male lead of the sequel trilogy. That’s what the first movie set up. His protagonist’s arc in The Force Awakens was even clearer than Rey’s and the two had interlocking and contrasting character arcs, something that seems poised to
continue in The Last Jedi.

There is no world in which Finn is a
secondary character other than the one where someone slept through his
appearances or simply refused to believe the evidence from their own senses. Yet I’ve seen Re/los and Kylostans compare him to fucking Qui-Gon Jinn or Jar Jar Binks.

But yeah, these people “love Finn.” Sure, as long as he stays in his place, which to them is that of a lovable and funny sidekick or Rey’s sassy gay friend. Fuck them.

All the Finn discussion I’ve ever seen mentioning him lying are Kylie stans being horrible and others defending Finn’s actions. But I’ve never seen an exploration on what his lying means. He’s a stormtrooper. They don’t lie. They don’t doubt, they don’t hesitate, they don’t feel shame. They are raised communally. The idea of one having secrets doesn’t make sense. It is mentioned the periodically undergo psyche evals and reconditioning. (Continued on 2)

(Continued) when did Finn start? Did he learn to hide part of
himself while in the order? What could that have been like? His boss can
see into his mind. He is constantly being monitored. Or was his first
time to lie, when trying to get the ship to take them out? Or when he
told Rey he was resistance. He kept a part if his life he hated
separate, he was able to keep something to himself for perhaps the first
time in his life. And that makes Finn sharing it that much more
powerful.

Eggshells

FN-2187 isn’t sure what his first secret was. He knows secrets are corrosive and wrong, at least when kept from the Supreme Leader and the First Order. Secrets weaken them, like greddleback tunnels eaten into the foundation of a building. They should be transparent as flexiglass to each other and above all to the Order, they are taught, and not hold anything back.

Yet there is something he holds for himself, selfishly, shamefully, treasonously. It goes back all the way in his mind, before durasteel walls and clean, blinding white: smiling lips against his forehead, fingers tickling his tiny belly, even the echo of a name if he listens hard enough. He builds a shell around this little bubble of memory and curls himself around it like a bird sitting on an egg.

He can’t explain why he does this. He knows that what he has, the best training in the galaxy, his Stormtrooper sibs of one mind like the limbs of a giant organism, and above all the cause of the First Order, far surpass whatever backwater existence he left behind. Yet that small, stubborn part of him, beyond all reason, just settles down harder with a demented scream: Mine.

He does not expect to add to his furtive cache, but it happens anyway. One by one, thoughts that are too painful or dangerous crawl back, back, back and into his little egg.

He wishes he could see a sky and not the dark of space through viewports.

He wants a room of his own and to shut the door and not have all the other boys crowd in on him, body and mind.

FN-2000 would be pretty cute if he weren’t such a smug know-it-all.

Sometimes when Captain Phasma is talking to him he feels like he is disappearing, piece by piece, each disappointing bit of him fading out of existence for good.

On the darkest nights when sleep is a foreign thing he wonders if he is really on the side of good.

Most dangerously of all, he wants to find the touches and voices that haunt him still, his core of secrets that started it all.

Back, back they crawl into the far reaches of his mind and slip into his egg of thoughts like a reverse hatching, protected by a shell of secrets and treason.

He expects to be found out at every psych evaluation, for all his secrets to be thrown out to view mangled and half-formed, the shapes of dreams that grew twisted and stunted away from the sun.

Somehow that never happens. He passes evaluation after evaluation with top marks like he passes all the other tests. Sometimes he himself forgets he carries all these thoughts with him, the secrets so deeply hidden they are secret to himself. Maybe that’s how he does it.

Every time he gets away with it there’s a little thrill. Ha! I beat you again, again, and again!

He doesn’t know where this contempt comes from, but of course he cannot confide in anyone without blowing the whole thing. He keeps his mouth shut and the thought trudges to the back where his egg grows, an ovoid tower of treason.

He hears the first crack when the spark of Slip’s life goes out. The crack grows louder when he faces the captive villagers to shoot them, so loud he cannot aim and cannot fire. I don’t know if we’re on the right side Did my village look like this Are my parents His blood burns through my helmet that’s physically impossible but it’s true My face is burning off I can’t do this anymore I can’t stay here

Shoot, damn you! Shoot into the air if you can’t fire at them.

I can’t I can’t I can’t stay I can’t

By the time he is back on the Star Destroyer he is drowning in the quicksand of his thoughts, all the traitorous little secrets he had tucked away for so long. He takes off his helmet because he can’t breathe and his face is melting from Slip’s blood even though it is not.

“Report to my division at once.”

The words stab into his head wih the clarity of sunlight. He knows he won’t last a nanosecond in reconditioning. There’s no way to hide the flood of his thoughts anymore, no time to rebuild walls that took twenty years to raise and one night to undo.

They’ll take it all away, the smiling kisses, the sneaked glances at broad shoulders, his doubts and Slip’s blood.

He shouldn’t want these things.

MINE.

“So you’re with the Resistance?”

He looks up at the girl through the sun and the dust, the hope she holds in her rapid breaths, the soft yearning behind her hard-packed strength. He knows how to be what’s wanted, what would keep him safe.

“Obviously.”

He rises to the occasion through the pain that still glitters behind his eyes. The thrill of getting away with a lie is gone, though. He looks at how she smiles at him and wishes he could take the words back, wishes all his yesterdays away.

“I’m not Resistance. I’m not a hero.”

He hears the final cracks as the last of the shells in his mind shatter. He is naked before her eyes, exposed to his softest core, as he tastes his fullest truth for the first time since beyond memory.

“I’m a Stormtrooper.”

On Daisy, people are remembering the harrassment claims against John that Daisy’s representation actually had to denounce as untrue and the sexual predator lies that people spread on social media about John.

I have not been able to verify for myself the existence of such rumors, but I did find a mention of Daisy’s publicist strongly denouncing malicious rumors that she refused to do interviews with John because of his ego. Maybe there were rumors of sexual harassment as well that the publicist chose not to dignify in that statement with a direct response. It would not surprise me if people made up such tales without any basis in fact.

are you on ffnet? i recognize ur url but i can’t put my finger on it

My FFN handle is entirely different–I’m Lunatique over there, though none of my SW stuff is over there and it’s a giant mess overall. I’m ljlee with mirrored journals on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, which have likewise not been updated in a while. They’re also mostly centered around Avatar: The Last Airbender.

You may have seen another L.J. Writes around the internet–I know there was a series of posts under that title by somebody else from when I checked, but it was quite a while ago even back then so I went ahead with this url and handle.

can you not be a homophobe and say same-sex attraction when you mean homosexuality? same gender attraction is homophobic and transphobic. what about nonbinary and fluid genders? what about genders that exist in other cultures? there’s nearly as many genders as there are people, and you think it’s possible to be attracted to just one, only one, the one you happen to feel at one time? bullshit. same sex attraction (same sex marriage, same sex sodomy…) defines homosexuality.

Can anyone make heads or tails of this because I can’t

What about if you’re Korean and think that ying and yang can be symbolic for the opposite sides of the force like me? Or are you the only Korean opinion that matters?

I’m saying you’re wrong because, believe it or not, knowledge of philosophical concepts isn’t included in DNA. If you’ve ever glanced at the Dao De Jing (도덕경) or even paid attention to lay information floating around you’d know the yin = Dark Side and yang = Light Side spiel is total bullshit. (I discussed the issue in another post.) I mean, why would yin-yang even be used as a shorthand for sex if yin and yang were about good and evil? Because one party is good and the other is evil? Or one is filled with rage and the other is all tranquil, in which case the Dark Side would actually be closer to yang and the Light Side to yin? It’s just a completely distorted and nonsensical view of what the yin-yang duality actually represents.

It’s not only ignorant to validate shippers’ misunderstanding of yin-yang to fulfill their need to be “cool” and “philosophical” with their shipping, this kind of misinformation feeds into the idea that Taoist philosophy is analogous to the Western/Christian way of looking at the world as good and evil, light and dark, as though we’re all Westerners under the skin. It’s flattening and inaccurate. I don’t think a fictional ship is worth doing that for, but you do you.