Talking up a storm about Adora and Catra (link to Mastodon thread) only confirms my initial impression that Catradora is Finn/Slip if they had been a lot closer and Slip had lived (there’s also a lot of Nines and Zeroes in Catra, too). Despite what some random anti-anti yelled at me before blocking me (wtf?), Catradora isn’t about one of them abusing the other but rather about two victims who were torn apart by favoritism, fell into an unhealthy but stable dynamic as a result, and are still dealing with the fallout.
For decades, thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Karl Polanyi, and many others
have repeatedly warned us that fascism is the direct consequence of
subordinating human needs to the needs of the market. Having willfully
ignored the lessons of history, we have allowed corporate greed to
transform our media ecosystem into one that structurally favors
authoritarian populism.
The formal connection between personality and body type in
academic research goes back to 1940, when the psychologist William
Sheldon established the somatotypes, which are three generalized body
shapes that he theorized could be linked biogenetically to personality:
ectomorphs, mesomorphs, and endomorphs. Ectomorphs are people who are
tall and thin, and Sheldon expected them to be shy and anxious.
Mesomorphs are muscular and broad, and they’re expected to be
domineering and competitive. Endomorphs are soft and round, and they’re
assumed to be lazy and affection-seeking.
Since 1940,
the somatotypes’ links to personality have been broadly debunked on a
scientific level, with everything from Sheldon’s study methods to his
assumptions about personality being called into question. And for good
reason: Somatotypes were a direct result of the academic popularity of
anthropometry and eugenics before World War II.
So fatphobic stereotypes trace back to discredited bad science and eugenics! How (not) surprising.
I don’t get why people think Finn both being a military leader and having the Force is somehow strange for Star Wars. After all, we have a rather outsized example of this already.
It’s not just the combination of Force and military abilities either, but also the characters’ story positions. Finn being the “war” part of the triad gives him the position Leia should
have occupied in the OT, the character with ties to both the military
and the Force who embodies what the war is about: The human face of the
Empire’s atrocities, the survivor who chose to fight. Leia should have
been the central figure of the war and not Han’s plus-one on what
were essentially his plots and missions.
Done right Leia would have been
more like Katniss in The Hunger Games, damaged and traumatized from her
experiences, inspiring by her story and example. RO tried to shoehorn
Jynn into Katniss’s Mockingjay role except it never worked because Jynn
didn’t have the representative story. Obviously the Mockingjay figures
were Cassian and the Jedhans (Bodhi, Chirrut, Baze), but yet again SW
shied away from giving center stage to victims of wide-scale atrocities.
It shied away again with Finn in TLJ.
This refusal to have central Mockingjay figures, I believe, reflects SW’s basic ambivalence as a franchise that is more comfortable with destined saviors than with exploited and destroyed peoples saving themselves. Maybe that comes of SW being a USAmerican franchise dealing with fascism, the contradiction of a country that is fundamentally fascistic and imperialistic trying to tell itself a story of being antifascist and anti-imperialist. America can’t face the full implication of truly upending its fascist underpinnings, in fiction as in reality. Instead the brutal form of fascism is replaced by the “soft” fascism of worshipping benign supermen.
Then along comes JJ Abrams, someone in a position to know the contradictions and falsity in the story America tells about itself. He shows the New Republic’s compromise with fascism destroying it morally as well as physically, a year ahead of the 2016 election. He shows how the worship of the Skywalkers as the chosen line gave us Kylo Ren. He gives us Finn, one of the First Order’s victims, as a strong and central figure.
Finn in IX could be the character that Leia could have been–the one who ties it all together, the military plot and the Force plot, the story of war with the story of spirituality and morality. He could be the character that embodies both the evil of the First Order and the determination, on a personal, visceral level, to fight it. He could be the character that brings audiences face to face with what it means when people who are considered expendable in the quest for greatness stand up and fight back. He could solve the Star Wars dilemma and finally break the vicious cycle of destruction the galaxy far, far away has become trapped in. I certainly hope so.
That speculation was not baseless at all, given that John was saying in July 2017 that Finn would be in “another form of training” alongside Leia (link). This is so wildly out of line with what we saw in TLJ that I have to wonder if John was led to believe TLJ was going to be a different movie altogether. Or maybe it’s the way his answer was edited and the “alongside General Leia” comment wasn’t meant to go together with the training comment at all. It’s still really weird and yeah, either way a big opportunity was lost to have Finn interact with and learn from Leia.
I mean sure Nazis spouted socialist buzzwords for political reasons while undermining actual socialist tenets, but who cares when you can buy into and repeat propaganda that they spread to peel off leftist support (link)?
Recent studies
have also shown that corporal punishment is associated with increased
aggression and makes it more likely that children will be defiant in the
future. Spanking alone is associated with outcomes similar to those of
children who experience physical abuse, the new academy statement says.
There are potential ramifications to the brain as well: A 2009 study
of 23 young adults who had repeated exposure to harsh corporal
punishment found reduced gray matter volume in an area of the prefrontal
cortex that is believed to play a crucial role in social cognition.
Those exposed to harsh punishment also had a lower performance I.Q. than
that of a control group.
A white man was throwing racial slurs at a Black FedEx Driver. He started Punching the driver, the FedEx driver punched him back one time, killing the man with One Punch.
He wont be indicted for the racist scumbags death either! Win!
Magnuson’s death from the fall was precipitated by “extremely poor health,” a medical examiner concluded, and the punch itself was not fatal, Senior Deputy District Attorney Adam Gibbs wrote.
Warren was within his legal right to challenge Magnuson’s “racist vitriol,” Gibbs noted, and said that Warren’s decision to confront Magnuson — rather than ignore him — was not legally significant.
Please keep up this energy of racists dropping dead on my dash.
On an August morning in 2012, about 150 men, women and children gathered at a sacred spot in the village of Biacou, in northern Timor-Leste. With sacrifices of a goat and a pig and the blessing of the land and sea spirits, the community inaugurated the village’s tara bandu, a customary law of the indigenous Maubere that governs how people interact with the environment.
Tara bandu was outlawed under the Indonesian occupation that lasted from 1975 until 1999. Since then, Maubere communities across the country have been bringing tara bandu back to life as a way to guide more sustainable use of their local natural resources.
In Biacou, at least, the tradition appears to be resonating with residents as there has been just one violation of the tara bandu in the six years since its inauguration.
This is the third story in Mongabay’s three-part profile of the Maubere’s revival of tara bandu.
Read the other stories in Mongabay’s three-part profile of the Maubere’s revival of tara bandu:
L.J.'s Obsessions 