RED SCARE SLEEPER AGENT FACTORY

matthew | he/him | 22 | star wars sideblog | header by ralph mcquarrie

[fakewedge]

sideblog of @transkholins for star wars posting. combination of gay fanart and metatextual work. see my fanart under art, original textposts under talking, and meta + fic under writing. more tags here.

long-time tie-in novel connoisseur. currently stuck thinking about the first five-ish x-wing books. love a dayglo orange flight suit. love characters who just don't exist in newcanon. love to critique works I enjoy and to take legends probably a little too seriously.

no formal dni because I'm not convinced they work, but if you're a transmisogynist or a zionist, I will just block you. I've also been around the block with star wars, and my patience for racism in the fandom and source material is gone.

[fakewedge]

"You’re always talking about getting past people’s surfaces to what’s inside, and that’s what you call real. But you can’t just break through a person’s defenses like that; the defenses are part of the person, they are the person. It’s our nature to have hidden depths. It’s like—” my eyes searched the room for a metaphor “—like skinning a frog and saying, ‘Now I understand this frog, because I’ve seen what’s inside it.’ But when you skin it, it dies. You haven’t understood a frog, you’ve understood a corpse.” “The cable doesn’t ‘skin’ anything. Besides, it doesn’t have to be one way.” “Oh yes, that’s even better. People swapping souls on the first date. Once you’ve done that, what the hell do you talk about for the rest of your life?” She tried to break in with an answer; I cut her off. “Nothing, that’s what. There’s nothing left to say. There’s no wonder, no unfolding, no chance to gradually grow into each other...”

The Fortunate Fall, Cameron Reed

[weltenwellen]

Chen Chen, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

[fishing-princess]

I Defeated the Demon Lord but it Turns Out the Demon Army was Largely Unaffected and I Fell Victim to a Flawed Belief in Great Man Theory

[stagbeetleboy]

Kill all starwars fans we’re ready

[fakewedge]

also everyone go here

[fakewedge]

"I believe she is a girl but not anytime soon" is kind of my take on newcanon wedge. my armchair assessment that I cannot explain or justify. just trust me.

[fakewedge]

that being said, it is a little frustrating knowing that my fics are being read through a "doomed yaoi" lens when part of "the point" of and so it goes as a series is that, like, the characters' perspectives on love and their own ability to be loved as expressed in the source material (the krytos trap, truce at bakura, etc.) are flawed. when they say or think things like "I'm just incapable of understanding this person" or "no one understands me" or "I can't be who this person needs" or "there's no one who can meet my needs," they are wrong. and those perspectives are a significant barrier and problem in their relationship, certainly, but they're not evidence that they are Doomed on a cosmic level. if that's "doomed yaoi" then every gay couple that breaks up is doomed yaoi or yuri.

[fakewedge]

witnessing the shift in the default w/l interpretation from "domestic bliss husbands forever" to "doomed yaoi" over the course of a decade has been fascinating. in no small part because those interpretations very obviously reflect these broader shifts in the fandom zeitgeist: in the kinds of character dynamics - and, more than that, the kinds of discussions about character dynamics - that are popular on sites like tumblr and twitter. like around 2016 (to my memory), one of the main ways you talked about a m/m ship you liked was calling them husbands and calling them cute. and today it's more centered on doomed or toxic yaoi and talking about how there's, like, no hope for them or whatever. the actual characters and source materials being talked about haven't really changed in the last decade, but how people talk about shipping has, and the interpretation has shifted to mirror those broader trends.

needless to say: I find the doomed yaoi approach exactly as reductive as the domestic bliss approach, even if it is a little more appealing to my own artistic preferences. we will only be free from misinterpretation when we can talk about the text as it actually exists without relying on whatever the present trend is to grease the gears. alas, this will probably never happen.

[fakewedge]

May the Happy be Birthday with you or however it goes (Happy birthday!!! 🥳🥳🥳)

may the birthday be fourth... (thank you :^))

[fakewedge]

I really like drawing book characters in ways that differ from the generally-accepted Fandom Consensus, but the downside is that I forget that my visions of truth are not universally understood. primarily in the sense of "images of white tycho and thin mara jade just simply don't scan to me as The Characters They Are anymore."

[tonysopranoproskater69420]

[jayaorgana]

They're the main characters of Star Wars right?

[fakewedge]

the temptation to do an april fools type of bit on my birthday and change my theme to be Not Star Wars for a day is strong but my will is weak. #mycrosscountrymove. tomorrow (or today in certain time zones) just imagine I'm posting about things other than star wars 👍 for the bit 👍

[fakewedge]

the appeal of w/l lies predominantly in the fact that they have an all-time classic young adult friendship dynamic. you meet someone and get along like a house on fire for a couple of years and then inevitably one of you goes to a prestigious school or gets a good job or just moves somewhere else. and later you reconnect and it's just like it was before in some ways and yet not at all in others. now because this is star wars the "moving somewhere else" is "becoming a jedi knight" but that's beside the point. the point is that all of that is a kind of standard thing to have happen to you.

[horrorlesbians]

after you read the poem “the woman dies” a lot of media makes you mad

[horrorlesbians]

Excerpts from The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda

[imsobadatnicknames2]

Things that will never make me think less of someone: Enjoying media, entertainment, or aesthetics with ideologically reactionary elements

Things that will IMMEDIATELY make me think less of someone: Insisting that the ideologically reactionary media, entertainment, or aesthetics they enjoy are actually Le Hecking Epic Wholesome Leftist Praxis

[imsobadatnicknames2]

To draw upon a semi-recent Discourse topic, if you encounter a claim along the lines that, idk, for example, the imagery and cultural idea of Knights as it exists in pop culture is entrenched with a long history of islamophonia (due to how much of this cultural imaginary comes directly from the narrative of the Crusades) and your response is "I still think knight imagery is cool, I don't enjoy things based on how ideologically correct they are" I'll respect you infinitely more than if your response was "Actually liking knights is leftist because there's nothing more leftist than protecting those weaker than you"

[imsobadatnicknames2]

"I don't engage with this thing to have my politics parroted back at me" will always be 1000x more graceful and productive than trying to argue that everything you like is Fundamentally Leftist, Actually.