Tag: chirrut imwe

stardust-rain:

it is honestly keeping me up thinking about how many asian bodies are treated with so much brutality in death so I really do not have time for Baze and Chirrut being stuck next to typical white male narratives.

Just in sci fi alone off the top of my head: Wen triplets in Pac Rim – killed by Kaiju. Toshiko Sato in Torchwood – shot in the gut. Glenn Rhys in TWD – baseball club to the head. Maggie Chen in OB – backstory fodder. Vincent in AOS – I can’t actually remember but burnt to death, I think. Skye’s mother, cut to threads.

And so on and so forth. Their deaths are for shock value and they get mourned but after that there’s not more to it. Not counting: all the cannon fodder and Yellow Peril movies and Oren Ishii and Beverly Katz and Daredevil and Iron FIst and all the others from media that I don’t watch or gave up long ago.

And they could be well-developed characters in otherwise decent media but their death is always so fucking brutal. So of course we build immunity to that pain, of course we’re less sensitive to seeing the same bodies on the news – it grates you down, after a while. It is so so tiring.

And on top of that I’ve never seen two Asian men openly show affection and bicker and tease eachother and make jokes with history behind them except for in LGBT movies (and I guess recently Star Trek). because it’s a cultural taboo to be too emotional or too affectionate or too afflicted in front of non-familiars and that has turned us into Inscrutable Orientals.

So if I have to have a death scene – give me one that is fucking tender, dammit. Give me one that has meaning and emotion behind it, that does justice to the historical emotional baggage between the two characters. Give me the fact that Baze and Chirrut – their relationship, the narrative space they took up, their history – was something that fucking mattered instead of just another body because compared to all others, this death scene was by far least uncomfortable to watch.