This is hands down one of my favorite scenes in the Force Awakens. One reason being it helps to validate the theory of a force sensitive Finn. He is able to hears the screams of the people in Hosnian system. Before he ever turns around to see the red beam in the sky.
Second and most important this scene is where I feel Finn truly shows us how much of a hero he is. Seeing the destruction of the Hosnian systems he knows the F.O. is behind it. Meaning there more than likely on there way to attack. So what does he decide to do?
He chooses to be selfless and go back to help Han, Chewie, and Rey. Something he has absolutely no obligation to do. Finn rightly deserve to leave behind all of this destruction and heartache. He deserves to be somewhere safe after all of the horror he has been subjected to in his life. He doesn’t owe anybody hes not with the rebellion there is nothing for him to gain by helping Rey, Han and Chewie. Yet he chooses to go back and protect a group of people he’s just met. He does this because he is a kind and compassionate man. A man who has every right to leave all this destruction behind yet still chooses to save others at the risk of his own life. Finn is a truly kind and amazing person and this scene helps cement that fact.
“you shouldn’t apply morality to shipping and fandom” you should apply morality to everything you idiot. you can’t remove yourself from the concepts of right and wrong at your own convenience
people in the notes are completely missing the damn point. theres a difference between writing characters who do bad things and romanticizing characters doing bad things
having a rapist character in your story doesnt mean you condone rape but making your entire story about how ‘sexy’ and ‘forbidden’ the rapist and their victim is fucking disgusting and should not be justified through ‘its just fiction.’ same goes for the glorification of child porn+gore, pedophilia, incest, ect. shut up lol
I’m intrigued by the fact that you genuinely think people are labeling r//yl//os as racist because they’re annoyed their ship isn’t happening, and not because of the fact that r//yl//os have consistently proven themselves to be racist time and time again.
Some pertinent examples under the cut (STRONG trigger warning for racist slurs, multiple instances of anti-blackness and repeated use of the n-word):
This is the result when people stick to R*ylo metas and stay completely in the R*ylo bubble, becoming convinced that nothing has ever happened and that it’s all just about Finnrey shippers whining bc their ship won’t be canon… (reminder: R*ylo isn’t canon at all, there is no proof whatsoever that it will be and Finnrey has never been debunked, so there is literally no reason why this should even be the case… ) people have really been attacked, John Boyega has really been attacked… every time someone mentions Finnrey on more public social media people who state they prefer R*ylo write racist comments. It’s a fact and people should stop trying to cover it up or try to explain it away… bc they’re just SUPPORTING and PROTECTING the people who make this comments…
Overtly racist comments about Finn and Finnrey are common on social media, it’s true, but I always feel like focusing on them lets too many fans off the hook.
Shippers will say these are “bad apples” (but not in the sense that a bad apple quickly causes the whole barrel to rot, in the “#notme” sense). Not using slurs is easy for most people. The Last 50 years has been an exercise in avoiding slurs and open negativity toward Black people and replacing them with benign-sounding code. Greatschools and other school rating sites were created to covertly support antiblack racial segregation. Proximity to “good schools” in real estate means few to no Black people, and even well-meaning Obama-voting white people buy into it. That’s just one real world example of everyday white supremacy that thrives without slurs. (Of course, if those schools become integrated, you’ll hear all kinds of open racism.)
Point being, the most insidious racism is not the most obvious.
The Star Wars fandom has a huuuge racial empathy gap problem (which is addressed in OP’s link). A white person who does terrible things is seen as a victim, while a Black person who’s been victimized is either vilified or ignored. When Finn was in most scenes of TFA with Rey and Kylo was in just a few, fans hyperfocused on the Kylo scenes. When Finn had his own arc in TLJ, he all but disappeared from fandom consciousness, except to say that Finn is Taken by Rose, so therefore Reylo is inevitable. As if Finn’s arc was in any way about reylo.
Just the fact that the majority of the fandom has decided that Kylo matters more than Finn, not only to Rey, but to the entire story, says just as much about racial prejudice as the slurs that everyone agrees are racist.
“this character did a problematic thing-” its a story helen, commonly including things like conflict and drama
The thing an astonishing amount of people keep ignoring is framing. It’s not enough that a character Did A Bad, how does the piece of media present that action?
There’s a world of difference between: a) this character Did A Bad and That’s Bad b) this character Did A Bad and the creators don’t seem to be aware of this so it’s Just A Thing That Happens c)
this character Did A Bad and That’s Great, people who think Doing A Bad is Bad are Wrong.
Like, both Atlas Shrugged and Bioshock are about a guy who’s sick of people and their “rules” and “caring about people other than yourself”, and decides to build his own paradise hidden away from the world where he doesn’t have to kowtow to any of that tedious ~morality~ other people seem to have for some reason. In this kind of reductive mindset, both must be equally hashtag problematic.
In Atlas Shrugged, the book is so keen to trip over itself in glorifying the mindset behind the story that it literally stops dead for sixty solid pages of the author giving up what little pretence of actual narrative the story has to just pasting The Objectivist Manifesto into the mouth of one of the book’s many, many empty mouthpieces. The guy is so right, he’s a genius and could revolutionise the world if only those pesky normies with their ~ethics~ would just get the fuck out of his way and let him do whatever he wants.
In Bioshock, the guy’s glorious monument to self-interest falls apart into a hellish dystopia only a few years after being constructed because, shocker (heh), gathering an entire city’s worth of amoral “rational free thinkers" would result in everybody turning on each other and their unchecked scientific experiments turning everyone into barely-human monsters. Because safety laws and the bounds of ethics are for squares!
One of these is an unabashed advertising tool for the ideology behind it, one of these is a satire of that same ideology by presenting a realistic prediction of how the original set-up of an objectivist “paradise” hidden from the world would actually play out anywhere on Earth that isn’t inside Ayn Rand’s head.
Framing, my lovelies. It’s very important, far more important, in fact, than the immensely shallow surface-level reading of “in media A character B did thing C and thing C is bad therefore everyone who so much as thinks about liking media A is literally worse than Satan”.
Then again, actually engaging with media on any level beyond the immediate surface isn’t conducive to holier-than-thou Hot Takes so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
So correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s my understanding the Stone could be destroyed–except, without the help of Wakandan technology, it would kill Vision. So yeah the whole Wakanda detour sounds like it was more about saving Vision than the universe lol.
Also, racism in media seldom manifests that explicitly. By your metric no work would be racist except maybe Birth of a Nation. Yes, there may be plot reasons for it (though pretty flimsy in the case of Wakanda), but the end result is that the audience got to see a whole lot of Black people die on screen, and a country set up as a shining beacon of Black excellence was wrecked in the very next movie. I find that distasteful as hell and people have every right to be upset.
Sounds like the anon needs to be acquainted with the “Thermian argument.” Fiction doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but is created in a world with pre-existing biases. Wakanda was conceived as an African utopia unspoiled by foreign intervention – so to reduce them to a convenient source of tools for the white heroes and as cannon fodder to cheaply establish the villain’s “power” is a grim reflection of how colonists continue to treat dark-skinned folk IRL…
Since it’s Finn Appreciation Week here’s my small contribution.
In TFA, I always got the impression that Kylo believed Finn to be Force sensitive. People have used this scene as evidence of that for years now:
Kylo sensed SOMETHING from Finn. And then later, as we know, he knew immediately that it was Finn who had defected. People like to talk a lot about how Kylo was fixated on Rey, and I suppose he was, but they ignore how focused he was on Finn as well.
It’s my opinion that in Kylo’s scene with Snoke where they talk about an “awakening” in the Force that Kylo was referring to Finn, specifically the scene at the beginning where they looked at each other on Jakku. That, I think, was the awakening Kylo was talking about.
Then, at the end, once again we see Kylo’s fixation on Finn, and I think this stems partially from his belief that Finn is Force sensitive. People like to pretend he was looking at Rey in that bridge scene, but the camera specifically zooms in on Finn. They were the ones making eye contact in this moment, not Kylo and Rey.
So…yeah. Kylo sensed that Finn was Force sensitive and they were the real hero/villain dynamic in this movie thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Honestly vegans who are like “hey the factory farm system is fucked up, our way of animal farming is cruel and unsustainable, we need to think about how we approach food and how we treat animals, acknowledge that this is a capitalist problem but also try our best to work towards better local farming alternatives” i’m like
Vegans who are like: anyone who isn’t vegan is morally bad esp poor ppl and ND ppl who have sensory and diet issues with that because I can do it so why can’t you do it also I’m gonna make slavery/holocaust comparisons now about it.
Another one while I’m thinking about it: not attacking indigenous people for hunting
culturally significant ways to give their tribes food (as opposed to the ridiculously overpriced food they sell up there).
I am really so against any movement that tries to vilify indigenous people and the way they obtain food so like… yeah….
If Kylo truly had a abusive childhood then wouldn’t he feel more empathy and sympathy for Finn who was kidnapped from his family and was forced to be raised with the first order to do their evil bidding. Wouldn’t Kylo understand Finn wanting to escape the side which stole his childhood away from him and mentally/emotionally abusing him by forcing him from a loving family. And raising him under the brutality of the first order.
Instead what does Kylo do to Finn knowing that the first order kidnaps babies and forces them to be stormtroopers. He calls Finn a traitor and slices him down the back with his light sabor to punish Finn for t trying to protect Rey(Something that Kylo should appreciate Finn doing if he truly cared for Rey like Reylos says that he does.)
So for someone who went through a so called abusive childhood. Kylo Ren nor Reylos take into account the childhood that Finn suffered through. They don’t care about the neglect that Finn went through. Both Kylo Ren and some Stans completely disregard Finn’s suffering and pain. When Kylo calls him a traitor and wants him dead. And when Reylos demonize Finn, attempt to make Finn the bad guy, attack Finn and when they celebrate Kylo slicing Finn down the back.
Then they want everyone to take Kylo’s feelings and pain into account and spare him judgment for the evil acts and murders that he choose to commit as an adult man. But, if they only care about the white man’s pain and suffering and ignores everyone else’s, then why should we have to consider Kylo’s childhood when we are calling him out for his wrong doings?
It’s also really telling how this type of Stan are usually the same ones asking why Finn doesn’t have sympathy for Kylo since they are supposedly in the same boat (they aren’t).
They expect the Black man to have expend the emotional labor it would take to have empathy for someone like Kylo but they sure as hell don’t expect Kyle to do the same. Awfully convenient isn’t it?
L.J.'s Obsessions 