captainsaltymuyfancy:

lj-writes:

thehungryvortigaunt:

lj-writes:

thehungryvortigaunt:

lj-writes:

I started writing an au headcanon about how Poe’s story in TLJ would have been so much better if it had been in keeping with his established character, and he had started taking on extravagant risks alone in response from his trauma from TFA, unconsciously seeking suicide by enemy. Leia, who has been where he is, tries to help him but is dealing with her own grief.

Then it expanded to Holdo, herself haunted by the destruction of the Hosnia system, putting children kidnapped for the Stormtrooper program at risk to stop the First Order main fleet. Finn leaves the Resistance with Paige and Rose to rescue the children.

Rose in this reimagining intervenes with her sister to defend Finn and Poe from Republic officers who were harrassing Finn. She tases a Republic officer who was about to hurt Finn, and that’s how they accidentally discover Holdo’s plans. She and Paige join Finn on his mission because children were kidnapped from their home planet, too. Their parents settled on a mining colony but were originally from Jedha, whose refugees the New Republic did fuck-all for, and Holdo’s plan only confirms their conviction that the Republic doesn’t care.

Leia uses the Force at a pivotal moment when Kylo Ren is about to attack the bridge and Poe is about to stop him at the cost of his own life, moving the fighters in space to save her ship and Poe. When he returns she slaps him, overcome with her fear of losing him. He admits in tears that he is having nightmares and wanted it all to end. He promises to get help. She apologizes for slapping him, then for the pain he had to endure, and for Kylo Ren, for her life, for all the people she couldn’t save… they cry together, the first time they allowed themselves to.

I just… I want to read the story, but at the same time I can’t believe the movie didn’t go along these lines. Just how obstinately do you have to ignore the prior story, the established universe, and the characters to so completely refuse to deal with their trauma and pain? How broken does your empathy have to be to refuse to identify with people who are tortured, who were kidnapped and abused, who lost loved ones, who were forced to watch innocent people be destroyed? It’s a failure of craft, to be sure, but I can’t help but think it’s also a failure of humanity on some level.

I actually saw Poe’s behavior in TLJ as motivated by his very recent traumas from the previous film (witnessing the slaughter of an innocent village, being tortured, and of course the genocide of the Not-Coruscant system). Pretty telling that this behavior is dismissed as something intrinsic to his ethnicity or gender and worth humbling, while Kylo’s behavior is treated as something more individualistic and requiring of accomodation.

White man commits mass murder, torture, and other war crimes: The poor dear must be endlessly coddled, his inner life centered throughout the movie, and he deserves forgiveness and infinite chances to reform

Brown man reacts badly to the trauma of witnessing and experiencing mass murder and torture: He is a hothead and misogynist who must be slapped, shot, and humiliated at every turn

Poe suffering PTSD is a valid reading of TLJ, except–as with most of the more reasonable readings of RJ’s opus–it makes things worse rather than better.

Same thing goes for taking seriously the idea of putting a (false) moral equivalence between the authoritarianism of the so-called #Resistance and the fascism of the First Order, by seeing parallels in how Finn and Poe are treated with how the FO treats its underlings (and citizens, but we’ve yet to see any). If we actually were to take this seriously, we’d have to confront the fact that the film implicitly treats the Resistance as “““good”““ not by their actions or ideology but by mere authoral fiat.

I doubt it’s even Johnson’s own authorial fiat, but rather the constraints of the franchise he was working with.

There was a scene cut where Poe is on the Raddus and he’s talking to Connix, who’s still on the ground, and asks her if they are evacuated yet. She says no and they need more time. It’s implied that this is where Poe decides to take on the dreadnaught, meaning he probably intended to sacrifice himself. This would have added some dimension to his character and explained Poe’s decision to take on the dreadnaught but, you know, Rian Johnson was in control so it got deleted.

Wow, much as with Finn, Johnson cut a scene that actually makes sense for Poe and gives him depth. I wonder why he felt the need to do that.