I’m so glad Poe is Leia’s new son
ahahahaha oh these people I swear. I SWEAR.
I love how these people so desperately want leia to be a terrible mother xD
almost as if they hated her.
Y’all do realize Leia has no obligation to “be a good mother” to Kylo anymore after he murdered children, kidnapped other children and brainwashed them to kill for him, blew up an entire planet (which is what happened to Alderaan, Leia’s home), and murdered his father, the love of Leia’s life, right??
Like if Leia wants to forgive him and get him to turn back into the light, then that’s fine, it’s her choice.
But calling her a “terrible mother” for saying Poe is like a surrogate son to her and possibly not wanting to call Kylo a son anymore after what he has done is ridiculous.
Kylo is a grown man who directly engaged in the massacre of a village, murdered two unarmed old men (one of whom was his father), aided in the genocide of five planets, stood by with the knowledge that the planet destroying weapon was aimed directly at his mother’s base, and defended said base from the people trying to stop further genocide. ALL ONSCREEN.
Leia owes him nothing. And if Leia does choose not to recognize her son after these acts, that doesn’t make her a terrible mother.
It makes her a human being. And as a Leia fan, I value her as more than just Kylo Ren’s all-forgiving mommy.
maybe… just maybe… the responsibility shouldn’t be ON LEIA at this point… maybe… it’s not that she’s a bad mother… but that Crylow is a terrible son… given that he’s a fucking grown up who CHOSE to cut ties… maybe don’t accuse “these people” of hating Leia when you’re treating her as a fucking tool, a doormat that has to once again find it in herself to be strong and forgiving after being cruelly stepped on BY HER FUCKING GROWN ASS SON.
also, a person can care about multiple people, and multiple children, even if they’re not their children by birth, FLASHNEWS. And Poe’s mother died when he was still a child, so no, saying that Leia is a mother figure to him isn’t meant to erase Shara Bey or to say she “forgot” to care for Ben because she was too busy with Poe (???)
but maybe that’s too simple and straightforward for the reylos’ “superior” subtext analyzing skills *snort*
I felt the need to reblog this again because…
How in the hell is Leia a “terrible mother” if she doesn’t want Kylo Ren back and instead wants a son like Poe?
Huh?
Please come on over and answer me that one. How is she a “terrible mother’ if she doesn’t want him back? Really, how? I mean, I thought collective you had already decided she was a terrible mother for sending him to train with Luke or not hanging on his every word and deed or some such that “caused” Kylo to go off and be a murdering fascist.
But please explain.
Because how is she a “terrible mother” if she doesn’t want back a fascist, genocidal manchild who murdered his uncle’s students and murdered an old family friend and tortured people back? I mean…all he did for an encore was murder his father? Y’know, the man she loved, who loved her? And let’s not forget, aimed a damn super weapon at her.
Why wouldn’t she want him back?
No, the question, is WHY WOULD SHE?
I’ve seen this garbage way too much. How it’s going to be “good” for Leia and Luke, after all they’ve suffered, to have Kylo back/
So, what, they can see every day the man who destroyed their lives and murdered Han?
How does that make them feel any better?
Not that one damn thing that happens to Luke, Leia and Han makes anything “right” in this whole movie, but seriously, you tell me how welcoming back Murder Boy makes Leia’s life good in any way.
Lines are open and operators are standing by.
Yes, I also wanted to point out, that it seems no matter what Leia does, in the eyes of reylos, she always be a bad mother. No matter what she does, she can’t win. Either she’s seen as a neglectful mother, who causes Kylo to fall, or when it turns out that canonically Leia, Han, and Luke! were loving, caring parents to this bastard, then the narrative shifts, and she is blamed to be a bad mother just because of acts like a great! mother figure to other young people.
Leia Organa, adopted daughter to Bail, who was tortured by her biological father, who was almost killed by Kylo, who lost her husband by Kylo’s hand, who’s brother is being hunted down to be killed by Kylo is seen as a bad mother because she knows it’s not genetics that makes you a family. Classy…
Tag: long post
Katrina stans. Erasure in fandom
When I check the Into the Badlands tag I often see people who are / were watching the show solely for its supporting white characters and supporting white ships – either they stan the Widow or Jade or Quinn or ship Jade x Ryder. And… Into the Badlands, with all its faults (looking at you s2 finale), is a show lead by two Asian male leads, a show with a central romantic storyline (s1-2) featuring a Black woman and an Asian man.
And it’s not like I want to say that the Widow / Jade / Quinn or Jade x Ryder are not worthy of stanning or that people aren’t allowed to like them, but the thing is that all the above are far from being rarity in media and fiction – you can find those kind of white characters and white ships in almost any given Western book, film, tv show. Whereas MK, Sunny and Veil are the examples of those few representations that we have. Sunny and MK being Asian male leads in a genre show on big US network is unheard of, they are unique. SunnyVeil as a Blasin (AM/BW) couple centering romantic storyline of seasons 1-2 is rarity.
And it reminded me of something – of those Katrina stans from Sleepy Hollow. You know, that show that had a great first season and a disastrous continuation after.
Abbie Mills is not the first Black woman lead on US TV (though she’s shamefully close to it), but she was a main lead on a genre show, and in 2013, that was unheard of. […]
Simply put, The Sleepy Hollow fandom was the first major genre TV fandom that was not explicitly white dominated. – DiversehighfantasyAbbie Mills as a Black woman lead was important representation, and not just for Black women fans but to all of us. And yet, there still were the part of the audience that watched the show for a supporting white character Katrina Crane and supported the romantic storyline between Katrina and her estranged husband Ichabod (the show’s male lead). These people hated Abbie and wanted her gone off the show or become a supporting character to Katrina’s lead. The thing is that Katrina is a character that you can find by opening any book, by turning on TV and seeing in any show, you can go to a theatre and pick almost any play or a movie and you’ll see a Katrina and Ichabod x Katrina romance. So the defining feature of Katrina stans is that they are people who want the status quo – they watch the diverse films / shows, read the diverse books and latch onto the generic white characters and relationships that one can find in any genre of any piece of Western media / fiction.
You can find Katrina stans in any fandom, really. They are the Westallen / Richonne / Ichabbie haters who ship the white ships with the white men from those respective fandoms. They are the Rey.los, they are the Maggie/Daryl shippers. They are the people who claim that Finn is nothing more than a comic relief character, while Kylo is the “true male lead of the SW”. They are the people who insist that Scott is not the true lead of TW, but Stiles is. They are the people who watch Into the Badlands for its supporting white characters, they are the people who watch Cleverman for Iain Glenn only, they are the people who watch Marco Polo for its white male lead and couldn’t care about anything else in the show, they are the people who will watch Black Panther for M@rtin Freeman only. Katrina stans are people who erase Blade, John Luthor and Luke cage from their own canon narratives.
They are the Cl@lecs and J@lecs. And no, the latter are not “progressive” just because they’re not erasing Alec’s sexuality, like the former homophobes do. Because as rare LGBT representation is even nowadays, the shows featuring white gay lead characters and white gay / LGB relationships are still more represented than the shows featuring non-white gay characters and gay / LGB ships of color. I can name dozen of shows off the top of my head right now that star white gay characters and have central white gay / LGB romance. I can only name two that feature Asian GB characters – Shadowhunters and HTGAWM, and Oliver was a recurring / background character in s1-2.
Katrina stans are the people who erase characters of color from their own canon narratives. A person doesn’t need to be white to be a Katrina stan. They just need to support racist patterns of erasure and prioritize whiteness. “It’s really easy to be a little bit racist.” ©
And to a point I can see where these Katrina stans are coming from – never having the luxury of racial representation, from my very childhood I’m used to watching shows and films or reading books for one background character of color (not even an Asian character in particular, just the ones they can offer), who rarely has a central storyline, and is lucky enough if they don’t die horribly in the middle of the story. And you learn to cherish even those scrapes of representation they give you.
That’s why it hurts seeing when white fans, or fans with white worldview (not necessarily white themselves) try to erase those little scrapes of representation that we are starting to have. It’s not about “ship wars”. It’s about racial erasure. Racism hurts and it is always personal to a person of color.
White fans who indignantly ask “why does it matter what color of skin those character have?!” really don’t understand the mere concept of what it’s like never seeing yourself represented on screen / in fiction. They remind me that legend about “Let them eat cake” saying – the rumor states that when French queen Marie Antoinette was informed that the poor country people had no bread, she replied, “Then let them eat pastry!” The moral of the legend is that with all the luxury surrounding her, she didn’t know the mere concept of starving and having nothing but bread to eat.
White fans having the luxury of representation surrounding them everywhere they look, simply don’t get that we don’t have the metaphorical pastry. We barely can afford a loaf of “bread”, we don’t have the luxury of choice. So, basically Katrina stans are the people that come to your home, steal your last and only loaf of bread and then innocently wonder why are you mad.
If we continue the food metaphor, imagine this: you live in a world where all the bakeries offer only one pastry – the jelly bean cake. You like the jelly bean cakes, but you also crave for a raisin cake, after all, you are a raisin person. But you are surrounded with jelly bean people, so you adapt. You eat the jelly bean cakes. And when you’re lucky you see a jelly bean cake with one raisin in it, and you are the luckiest person alive, you buy the jelly bean cake with that single raisin and you eat the whole cake and cherish that one raisin. And then one day the bakery bakes a jelly bean cake with lots of raisins! You’ve never been happier. But then you see how jelly bean people come into the bakery, they buy the raisin cake, they take out the jelly beans and throw away the raisin cake into the trash bin. All in front of the baker, and then they make complaints about the raisin cake to the baker, because there aren’t enough jelly beans in it, even though the shelves of the bakery are full of jelly bean cakes.
That’s how I feel.
And if someone takes this post as a personal attack and “policing the fandom”, congratulations, you’ve missed the whole point.
in terms of kylo though i dont think it matters if what he did would be a war crime or not. the international courts never bring white people to justice, too many africans to terrorize i guess
If you’re talking about the International Criminal Court established by the Rome Statute you’re absolutely right, every single person indicted or wanted by the ICC has been an African and, other than Libya, all of them concern situations in Sub-Saharan Africa.
To be clear I absolutely support bringing to justice perpetrators of these heinous crimes. At the same time I question the fact that an institution created by Europeans purports to bring justice to Africa when European colonial practices used systematic brutality to rule Africa, the same kinds of atrocities such as mass murder and mutilation that these defendants are accused of. I question the fact that Europeans were able to destroy and weaken indigenous systems of governance in Africa, which led to the chaos and conflicts in the first place, and then rush in to fill the institutional void. I question the fact that Europeans and descendants of Europeans still use violence with impunity in Africa, Latin America and other resource-rich “poor” regions of the world and you never see and I predict will never see a white face in the docket of the ICC, at least not for killing people of color. (There is one European situation under investigation, in the context of the civil war in Georgia.)
Now if you expand the question to other international tribunals the answer gains a few wrinkles, since the main precursors to the ICC are the Nuremberg Tribunals after the end of World War 2, the International Criminal Tribunal for the formal Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the United Nations Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). All of these were ad hoc tribunals set up to address specific conflicts and meant to close shop when their mandates were done, as opposed to the ICC which is a permanent tribunal whose jurisdiction covers potentially any conflict happening anywhere (in practice exclusively in Africa so far, as discussed above). The Nuremberg Tribunals and ICTY did in fact indict and convict white people, but for crimes committed against other Europeans. It should be noted, though, that the bulk of the genocides were committed against groups whose claim to whiteness is contested and complex, such as European Jews, Romani, and Bosnian Muslims.
In addition to international tribunals there are also domestic courts, which also have jurisdiction over war crimes and which actually try the bulk of war crimes due to problems of jurisdiction and sheer volume. The United States, for instance, has not ratified the Rome Statute so the ICC has no jurisdiction under normal circumstances over war crimes committed by U.S. personnel. In fact the United States has said it is willing to use force to rescue any citizen arrested by the ICC. Also international tribunals such as ICTY, ICTR, and the ICC try high-profile defendants such as heads of state and generals. If they tried to convict every defendant they’d quickly be overwhelmed, which leaves the small fry to the domestic courts. And countries like the United States do prosecute and convict their personnel for war crimes, although it’s not nearly enough in my opinion and too many get off without consequence.
On some occasions nations try foreign nationals for crimes against its people, what might be called victor’s justice, as in the case of Israel trying Eichmann. In Israel’s case the “victory” was that the Jewish people were not entirely destroyed, not to mention victory against the British Mandate and the Palestinian people in setting up their own state, rather than military victory against Nazi Germany. Victor’s justice is usually discussed in a pejorative context as not being justice at all, such as the way many Allied personnel faced no charges for war crimes committed during and after World War 2. In Eichmann’s case I think it actually worked, though, both morally and legally, since his trial wasn’t some kangaroo court but rather was fairly conducted.
The above is a long setup to say: with regard to Kylo Ren or someone like him, history tells us that the best hope for justice is actually victor’s justice. His situation is unlikely to go to an international tribunal because there will likely be only one state left after the end of the conflict, either a successor to the New Republic or whatever state or state-like entity is set up by the First Order. This means Kylo Ren would be tried by a domestic court rather than an international tribunal. If the First Order wins he’s not going to face any kind of justice for his crimes, except possibly for insubordination or treason if Hoax wins the internal struggle. If the Resistance wins Kylo Ren will face charges and most likely be convicted with the sentence being capital punishment or life in prison, unless the bench is entirely staffed by Reylos and Kylostans of course.
Third Impressions (and a Coda)
For the @finnreyfridays prompt “Crush.” Warning for angst toward the end, sorry about that.
Rey can’t believe someone like Finn is her friend. He’s a Resistance fighter just like the heroes she used to dream of. What adventures he must have had, what battles he must have been in! He has an almost supernatural sense for danger–he knows trouble on sight, just listens and knows an air strike is coming. And his marksmanship! Even as she made that hairpin turn she thought he couldn’t do it, not against a TIE fighter in that sliver of time, but he was brilliant. Finn is the most amazing being she has ever met and she can hardly believe he’s real.
Finn can’t believe someone like Rey is his friend. She fights like a boss (and he has the ringing In his head to prove it), and who’d have thought a scavenger on this forsaken dustball of a planet could pilot like that? In the First Order pilots are a class apart, nothing like him and the other ground grunts, and he can’t believe one would talk to him, much less travel with him and think he’s… brilliant? The way she used her knowledge of the terrain and the wreckage of the Star Destroyer to shake their pursuers, her hair-raising maneuvers, the way she lined up that shot, it’s like everything and nothing he learned in tactics classes. Rey is the most amazing being he has ever met and he can hardly believe she’s real.
Then Finn becomes real to her and not a giddy dream. It hurts that he lied to her and hurts even worse that he’s leaving, but his story, the truth of the man poured out to her, breaks something open in her heart and fills her with sweet aching for him. She thinks of the Stormtroopers who shot at them at Niima outpost, how Finn was brought up to be one of them–but he found the strength somehow to walk away and be an even greater hero than the ones she dreamed of. What kind of courage did that take? What was his life like? She wants to hear his story, all of it, but the time they shared is ending all too soon and she doesn’t know how to hold on, how to make him stay.
Then Rey becomes real to him and not a boyish dream. He can’t believe she wants to go BACK to Jakku, that a creature with such majestic wings refuses to fly away. The mystery of her only deepens when she is so profoundly moved at the sight of Takodana. So she’s no sand enthusiast after all, why won’t she leave?
When he tells her the truth he expects her to hate him. Instead she begs him to stay, just as he begs her to go, to leave their prisons behind and seek their tomorrows far away. She can’t go, her great wings chained by a greater longing, and he can’t stay, chased by the shadows of his past.
Then the shadow becomes real, snatches Rey up, and carries her away. Memories of Poe’s bleeding and broken form flash through Finn’s mind and he screams as though a part of himself were cut from him. Too long Rey was in her prison of sand and sun, he won’t leave her in another of steel and pain. The time they shared may end all too soon but not like this. Wings like that were not meant to be caged and he will see her free.
Rey can’t believe Finn is here. He was supposed to be far away in the Outer Rim, free of all this and seeking his own life. Why would he come back to this place of all places, into the heart of his terrors?
With a joy so sharp it is pain she embraces him, her heart bursting with the truth. She knows then that no matter where she goes, no matter where they are in life or in death, this embrace will never be broken and she is not alone.
Finn can’t believe Rey is here. How did she escape her cell and make it this far in enemy territory? He knows how the First Order works, and it’s precisely because he’s done it himself that he knows it was impossible for her. Her eyes are haunted as though the way she left her cell is as fearful to her as what she must have suffered there and he aches at the thought.
Then she is in his arms, full and real, and it doesn’t matter anymore. They are together and nothing can get between them except, it turns out, Han Solo. It’s okay, though, they’re okay. He remembers thinking that all he ever wanted was not to be alone and now, in a place that is likely to be his grave, he finally has that.
Rey turns on the lightsaber. She swore before never to touch it again, but Finn swore not to go anywhere near the First Order, either. He faced his deepest fears for her and she can, she MUST, do the same. She will not let this monster with the face of a man touch Finn, whether he lives, or- no, he lives. He lives! She doesn’t know if it’s the Force Maz spoke of or just her own inability to face a universe without Finn, but the pounding of her heart, the steel in her back, the heat in her eyes all sing–Finn is alive. Maybe not for much longer, but at least she can be with him when it happens. She charges the nightmare of shadow and fire, Han’s murderer, for a chance to die with Finn.
Finn turns on the lightsaber. He doesn’t expect to win, hell no, but maybe he can earn enough time for Rey to get away or for Chewie to get here. His limbs keep trying to freeze and his knees to give out because he knows this creature, how freakishly powerful he is, what he’s capable of, but the fear is a distant background noise. If he can’t end Kylo Ren at least he will give the man something to remember him by. He has lost too much, run too far, seen too much and NO MORE he must fight back or this fire inside will consume him.
“Come get it!” he snarls, and charges to his death.
Somewhere on a dying planet a shadowed figure collapses onto another in the snow, their heartbeats merging, their grief as one. They are together at the end of all hope, and they will never be alone again.
Thank you for this perfection, I love it!
Awww thank you you’re so nice! ❤
L.J.'s Obsessions 