Tag: blog stuff

I hate to be a killjoy, but I’m kind of leery of the “reverse Abel” interpretation of Finn; romanticizing rural living is a heavily rightist notion, used to contrast with the degenerate, mixed hellholes they claim cities to be. My confused feelings about Judeo-Christian mythology might even see Cain as a heroic figure in a way, for setting the precedent of humanity seriously advancing its technology and greater enabling its ability to seize its own destiny.

Ah, I can see how it came across that way. I was thinking more in terms of the FO having to be destroyed and then going back to the beginning to build something new, without necessarily discussing how it needed to be built (though I’m building up to thoughts on that elsewhere). I didn’t word it very well, though.

Also you might want to rethink using the term Judeo-Christian, though I know it’s incredibly common. Here are a couple of quotes from a rabbi explaining why it’s inaccurate and harmful (link, link).

You know, there are a lot of reasons The Last Jedi is objectively bad, but “modern art is bad because it rejects objective standards in favor of subjective self-expression” is not one of them. I won’t be posting the submitted video (link if you want to see it for yourself) because it’s intellectually dishonest in using a sheen of scholarly credibility to push a political agenda of modern Western cultural decadence. See a blog post that picks the video apart and particularly calls out the selective and misleading quote of art historian Jakob Rosenberg (link).

Ironically, Rosenberg was born in Germany and was fired as part of the purge of Jewish curators in 1937 before he immigrated to the United States (link, see page 3 of PDF), where he spent the rest of his career teaching art history at Harvard University and as a curator at the Fogg Art Museum (link). He was, in other words, a target of exactly the kind of rhetoric that blamed the decadence of the modern West on international intellectuals and makers of culture. He did not deserve to have his name associated with this shit. Seriously, anyone harping on the good old days of Western civilization  activates my fight-or-flight response.

@ anon, max katana sounds like the most badass postapocalypse samurai ever tho. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be posting your Rey Dameron (as in Poe’s sister, not his wife of course) submission for now because I’m not comfortable portraying a white woman as the daughter of a brown Latinx couple.

I’ve been having a few conversations about an ask that I answered a couple of days back (link), and how I responded to a passing comment in the ask that I perceived as being sexist against Rey when the larger point was about racism against Finn. Looking back I would have handled things much differently, such as by asking the anon to clarify or just not answering the ask. Whatever the intent or context, I made a conversation about antiblack racism into one about sexism against a white woman and I regret that. I can’t change what I did but I’ll try to do better in the future.

@ Moth, I really appreciate your submission but I won’t be posting the submission of Teros art because the history of nonwhite and especially Black actors disproportionately playing non-human roles (or half-human, in this case) wearing prosthetics and body paint gives the art Unfortunate Implications. Besides, Terry Crews is too handsome to wear facial prosthetics ;_; I’m all for alien Mandalorians but I’d rather they not be portrayed by Black actors. If you make revised art of Teros I would be happy to publish it!

Ask policy announcement

I will no longer be publishing speculations about celebrities’ private lives. I published the last ask out of fairness since I had not announced the policy and had published others that were actually objectionable in content. However, I also realized that I’m not equipped to fact check these allegations and am uncomfortable discussing unconfirmed facts of real people’s lives beyond their creation of SW. I may publish asks that relate to the last one for additional insight/closure, but afterward I will stick to Star Wars and other fiction.