finndeservesbetter:

With all the fuckery that’s been going on in the finnpoe fandom over the past month or so I figure now would be good a time as any to write about one of my most hated aspects of most finnpoe fanfics.

And that for me is the prioritization of Poe’s feelings over Finn’s.
I’m sure you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about when I bring up some examples.The few and far between fics that are willing to acknowledge that Finn has trauma in the first place (that’s a post for another day) will usually go out of their way to write about Poe’s feelings on the matter. Now that in itself isn’t inherently problematic, but a lot of authors make it so with how this type of scene usually plays out.

Finn mentions some of his abuse at the hands of the First Order and Poe responds by crying/having a panic attack/or otherwise making a scene that should be focused almost entirely on Finn’s feelings, suddenly center on Poe and how HE feels about Finn’s abuse.
I’ve seen it way too many times to come up with every single instance of this, but one that stuck in my mind in particular was a fic that’s been (thankfully) taken down. Finn is/or was in an abusive relationship with Hux, and you’d assume a hurt/comfort fic would focus on his pain or recovery or something right? Well maybe if Finn was white/white passing anyways…
In actuality Finn spent the majority of the fic comforting Poe who’s having a panic attack. WHY Poe’s having a panic attack? Not sure exactly but I can only assume it’s because Finn mentioned he was abused or something.
Finn, the abuse victim, the one that should be getting comforted….is doing all the damn comforting here.

And this is not the only time this has happened, it was just one of the worst of its kind.

@sithchirrut Said something a while back that described the finnpoe fandom perfectly: It’s Violently Poe Centric.

As sithchirrut has so helpfully pointed out recently here and here, Poe Dameron is a 32 year old man who has had a relatively normal life, an actual childhood, and his own support system, whereas Finn is a 23 year old who’s been abused his whole life, never had a childhood, and whose only friends he’s just recently made after escaping his abusers.

And yet, the average hurt/comfort finnpoe fic will have Finn taking care of or comforting Poe. Comforting him after a nightmare (because Poe ALWAYS has the nightmares), taking care of Poe after a panic attack, and always making sure Poe feels ok after he starts crying when Finn tells him something the First Order did…… to Finn.

Hell some fics even go out of their way to make sure Poe has more trauma than Finn! For every acknowledgement of Finn’s trauma Poe has to go through 3 times the trauma in order to justify focusing on Poe’s pain more than Finn’s.
Finn has an abusive family? Well Poe was a POW that was tortured for months nonstop. Finn is a trans man whose family is transphobic and abusive and he was even assaulted by a transphobe? Well Poe is a physically disfigured veteran that’s so mentally scarred he’s incapable of interacting with other people, so there!

(And yes these are all actual fics that are probably still up right now)

All of this stems from incredibly gross antiblack racism. Black characters (and by extension, people) are always expected to take care of everyone else, especially non black characters. Non black people consider our trauma as lesser than and this isn’t a problem that’s unique to fandom. Doctors and other medical professionals have been proven to believe that black people don’t feel pain the way they do!

And that’s the problem with fandom racism as a whole. I don’t care what the beautifullights, the Zoe_Damerons, and the BinahBees of this fandom says. Fandom racism is real racism and it affects real people. Now I’m sure they, and their friends don’t care either way about the brown and black people they are hurting,  but maybe someone out here does.

Finn doing all of the physical and emotional labor in the relationship is racist, and it’s inexcusable. Black people are subjected to this kind of racism everyday, and when you write fics like these? Yeah, you’re contributing to that racism.

The problem isn’t Poe’s sadness over Finn’s trauma, the problem is when Poe’s sadness is prioritized over Finn’s trauma.