oh Star Wars (and by oh I mean I AM SICK OF YOU AND YOUR *ISMS)

[esmenet]

I go through these bouts of finding fairly good Star Wars longfic and wanting to keep on reading, maybe even take part in the fandom. And I just can't. The fic I've started reading may be interesting, but Star Wars is such a white boys' story that that one aspect of it overshadows everything. Unless the author is specifically dealing with that, but unlike (say) Harry Potter there don't seem to be a whole lot of Dealing With Canon Issues fics. And also unlike Harry Potter, it doesn't even make a token effort to not be a white boys' world. (Harry Potter: dudes still get to have all the fun and heroics, but women exist and get to actually do plot stuff sometimes. People of colour, there is more than one of them! Star Wars: not so much.)

I've posted about it before, but ugh. Star Wars, why you gotta be like this. Even the other boys-fandoms I complain about are way less sexist. Ai is a brilliant scientist who kicks off the whole plot! Sakura gets to punch giant holes in the ground! Lenalee gets to save everyone! Yuuko has all the fun! Even Bleach, for all its flaws, at least has more than two girls.


Going to go read some shoujo manga and write some Bechdel-test-passing fic now. I need a good healthy dose of POC and women.

Comments

[eisen]

Star Wars! A fucking blight upon the space fantasy genre forever!

That's what comes from giving one of the movie brats enough money to file the serial numbers off his Flash Gordon fanfic and make it look like he always wanted it to look, putting all his talent for cinematic creation to the task; you end up with a movie so stunningly realized, so distinctive, so absolutely style-as-substance that the story ends up genuinely not mattering as anything but a reinforcer/enhancer of the meaning of the images on screen, and people forget that there's a message to the madness and the message is, simply put, hideously cardboard, so whitebread even the superhero comics of the day would've been embarrassed to claim they came up with it (and were thus obviated of the need to, when Marvel acquired the right to put out comics based on Star Wars which was a movie based on a comic that later became another movie based on a comic that then got adapted into a comic and oh, this is kind of getting a bit ridiculous at this point, isn't it?) - but it had just enough narrative tissue to hang those indelible, popcult-searing images on the brains of two generations of moviegoers, and now we're all fucking stuck with it as a forever-praised masterpiece (of what? shitty space fantasy?) until the day that generation finally dies ... and probably a while after, because they infected most of us with the meme too ...

Still, if not for Star Wars Lando Calrissian would not exist, so I can't hate too much. (That and I genuinely like Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill as people and am glad the movie made them household names so I could find out I liked them.) But it's! So! Dumb!

[esmenet]

Yes. It is all based on the shiny, really, and while there is quite a bit of shiny, it cannot does not and will never make up for lack of actual substance underneath. Which becomes abundantly clear as soon as you actually look at the writing. But people didn't and don't and so it is a CLASSIC now, because apparently shiny is all you need for that. —No, I take it back, there is substance underneath, and it's the same old story they've been feeding us over and over again, where status quo is god and the only acceptable reformation is to replace it with an older version. (See also: LotR, Harry Potter, every mainstream fantasy book ever.) Same shit, different media format.

Then again. LANDO CALRISSIAN.