🌜i believe in superiority of farm boys🌛

literally no idea how tumblr works how do u use tags oml

[sinswearslaughter]

Luke Skywalker, a farm boy who grew up on Tatooine, with the worst scum of the Galaxy around him any time he goes to any town, would not be a naive wimp.

He is a kind kid, yes, Owen was a bit overprotective but that would NOT be enough.

Realistically speaking, Luke would have :

- enough stamina to work for a few hours in the sun, without breaks (so possibly even longer in a more gentle climate)

- an alcohol tolerance rivaling that of most Rebellion veterans (I refuse to believe blue milk is his go-to and that drinking age on Tatooine is even a thing),

- quite possibly knowledge on how to make moonshine out of dirt, sticks and a little water, because what else did they have on Tatooine,

- street intelligence, not highlighted enough in the movies I feel - he is a trouble magnet and if he lived to be 17 then, he had to have something to make up for it,

- large amounts of knowledge about slave trade, water trade and Hutt politics, because whether he likes it or not he would pick them up casually, just by living in a society,

- a lot of random everyday skills that people like Leia would not have, mending clothes, creating makeshift tools, home health remedies etc.

Say it with me - LUKE IS A FARM BOY.

Farm boys rarely can afford to be naive or trusting for no reason. Farm boys have to be street smart. Luke would be more competent than some people like to think.

[gamlain]

So much of this.

Also: Anakin did not get those skills. And not a lot of the knowledge either, just because of the combination of: His age on leaving Tatooine (A kid as young as Anakin doesn't get to /hear/ many of those things; he's too likely to tell someone innocently who will get a lot of people killed) -

and the fact that Anakin grew up actually in Mos Eisley. Anakin is a city boy.

If you timetravel crossover these two, remember this.

(Luke will be /insufferable/ about it, but Luke Skywalker Being A Little Shit is one of his best character traits.)

[sinswearslaughter]

CONTINUING THIS SPLENDID POINT YOU MADE

Anakin would have a whole new unique perspective from Luke - agreed. And yk what? I will be making a whole post about that because you have made me think and you will be tagged when I do write it down. I will both agree and disagree with you, beware. I do love Luke saying to Anakin that he is "one fancy, big city boy". I imagine it will be a discourse on how to milk banthas and what is the usual behaviour of an anooba.

[sinswearslaughter]

Hiding in my room because my parents spontanously are having people over without warning me. No, mother, I shall feast later because I barely know these people and I don't want them to see my naked feet. I also am strongly discouraged by the perspective of them including me into a conversation that I am in no mood for.

[fire-on-fuel]

boba fett mandalorian cultural disconnect Core Experiences

- yeahh I understand my language. tries to say more than a single sentence and completely forgets all grammar rules

- related: knowing all the words for whatever your parent talked about the most and nothing else

- pffft I dont subscribe to Well Known Cultural Values I have free will 🙄 Anyways here's one of my normal values that everyone has (its a Cultural Value)

- standing in the corner awkwardly at the function like yeah you all have fun being the things that I am literally also here for being

- inexplicable Soul Duty guilt pit in your stomach over percieved betrayal of you're not even sure what actually. But it's important. youre gonna throw up

- ohhh I'm forgetting (agonizing)

- realizing something you thought was a cultural thing was in fact. a family specific problem. maybe even a parent specific problem

honorable mention: people talking shit about you and you understanding everything but not being able to talk shit back to them so you have to sit there and seethe

[prokopetz]

It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?

[veteratorianvillainy]

#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)

[persephoneshadow-deactivated202]

I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.

[prokopetz]

Totally.

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?

[observethewalrus]

YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!

[ainedubh]

Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.

[slitthelizardking]

I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.

[lierdumoa]

This doesn’t even account  for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well. 

But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.

[destinationtoast]

Yay, mathy arguments. :)

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het).  (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.

[olderthannetfic]

All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.

When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.

Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.

If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…

And then we will ship an OT3.

[kyraneko]

I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.

As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.

In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.

And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.

And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.

When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.

And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.

It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.

They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.

And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.

[whetstonefires]

Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.

You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.

The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.

That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.

[headspace-hotel]

Guys read this this is an amazing breakdown of it

[totallysilvergirl]

ALWAYS reblog.

[esuterunokitsune]

And then you can compare it to a show that has actually well written female characters and

Huh. First three spots are taken by F/F, M/M and F/M in descending order. Afterwards are platonic ships.

Just so we have the stats, what are the top 10 most written characters?

Wow. A perfect split, five to five. And the top three are women. (By about 200 fics to Jayce and Viktor, the runner ups, might I add)

That’s out of 29,590 works.

So about third of those (very roughly) are CaitVi.

[the-haiku-bot]

Just so we have the

stats, what are the top 10 most

written characters?

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[sinswearslaughter]

Forever reblogging, while shuffling my love for star wars away for the total of 5 seconds and awkwardly hiding the statistics of its fanfiction

[sinswearslaughter]

I need Obi-Wan to be more traumatised by his childhood.

I need him to have a deep understanding of who Anakin is based of his own experiences with abandonment and slavery.

I need him to be able to create easy rapport with clones based of his own experiences with child soldiers and fighting a war.

I need him to be able to say "No" to the older members of the Council and trust his Padawan very deeply because he has already lost trust in adults so many times that growing up shouldn't immidiately fix it.

I need him to be Obi-Wan in a way that he was Obi-Wan for Maul more often.

I need him to show me that he is not ignorant, that he still remembers what happened, that he also didn't have it easy but that he chose the light. He knew more than the light and therefore he could choose it.

[buckygasm]

Two dumb bitches telling eachother exactlyyyy

[liketolaugh-writes]

Someone: Man, why is DPxDC so popular? What's the appeal? Me, watching author after author gently carry Danny away from his awful life and drop him near adult heroes who can and will help him: no idea

[catnykit]

If i do write the "humans are exotic creatures" story, i'll likely make it as a comic. bc i usually imagine it. as a comic.

@sinswearslaughter you🫵 you are now in the taglist. yes u can ditch taglist. but ur now in the taglist. if i write this. wawa

[sinswearslaughter]

I AM NOW IN THE TAGLIST. I AM NOT DITCHING THE TAGLIST. I AM NOW IN THE TAGLIST. FOR WHEN YOU WRITE THIS.

[nonbinary-octopus]

Touch Starved

A ‘Humans are Weird’ story

Summary: Humans require physical contact for their health. Michel, stationed on a ship with primarily touch-neutral and touch-averse aliens, forgot this.

Wordcount: 3.3K

[more Humans are Weird]

[More stories]

~~~

For lack of a better word, Crew Michel was wilting. Medic X’nthmm fretfully looked through eir medical records again. Tests showed that the human was physically healthy, but Michel had become more and more withdrawn over the past weeks, and X’nthmm was concerned for him. Desperately, ey called the Interspecies Behavioral Information Center and asked to speak with a human representative.

Czytaj dalej

[luunarmoonar]

Humans being the first. Not the strongest or the smartest or the weirdest or the most violent. Just the first.

We called out into the dark over and over. We sent out messages in hopes. We searched every planet we could reach, in hopes of any sign of life. Any at all.

We thought, hoped we were the last, because we couldn’t bear the idea of being the one ones this awake and alive in a world as vast as this.

And we died alone.

When the others are born, many many years later, they find us, everything we left for them.

They recover The Golden Record and look at it a million times over, they dig up our fossils and put us in museums, they study us for years and years, loving us as we love our ancestors’ painted hands on cave walls.

In a lot of their languages, the word they use for us has the same root for “mother”.

[sinswearslaughter]

I stumbled upon this tag through a complete accident, but this, connected to my Star Wars obsession is making me feel things.

Because every piece of sci-fi makes us so sure - aliens and humans will meet one day. But exactly, what if they won't? What if we leave this world, uncertain and still looking, all that's left of us being letters that have been lost to the Galaxy, to the cold dead space until that day?

What if they find records of us, sitting in our homes, centuries, millenias before they arrived, writing about them? Will they see how excited we were to finally meet them? We loved and hated them, were curious, looked for them, yearned for them. And there they appeared - much later and much different, but they did. Did the Universe answer our prayers? Did it recognize the need for them just as humans did?

Some say you can change everything about the future with thinking a slightly different thing at a slightly different time. Some claim that if you strongly believe in something for long enough, the Universe will make it happen. Are we their creators? Was our yearning for another sentient truly strong enough to influence the vastness of the Galaxy? To create life? To create someone like us?

Are we the parent? The first one? The one who started it all?

Have we been this "God" all along?

[sinswearslaughter]

NSFW Luke Skywalker discussion

I've already spoken up about the issue of making Luke naive, innocent and inexperienced, but reading another shy/virgin/beginner Luke made me do it again. So here are some general opinions I saw and why I think they are wrong :

"LUKE IS A VIRGIN"

This boy fucked around AND found out - ages 14-19 this boy's and his friends' only entertainment on Tatooine was shooting womp rats, threading the needle in Beggar's Canyon and tinkering/taking apart machines. Of course they fucked around! Bored hormonal teenagers can come up with more ways to do it than anybody else and that's exactly who Luke and his friends were.

"LUKE IS THE GENTLEST MOST VANILLA LOVER"

No hate to anybody who headcannons him that way, but realistically? Be it as a 19 year old farm boy or 28 year old Jedi Master - he is a barely-contained storm held together only by his own, incredible self-control. Given a partner who can handle it, Luke would go all out. Not saying he would have to neccesarily be dominant but he would be eager, willing and aggresive. And c'mon, he has all the parental issues and teacher issues in the world. If you think he wouldn't call anybody Daddy then you are wrong.

"LUKE IS INEXPERIENCED"

Being a virgin and inexperienced is two different things, but I feel like Luke is neither. I have a whole post about this but shortly - I doubt Tatooinians see sex as a taboo topic.

Luke would grow up with no shame surrounding the topic and getting action, which would probably continue into his Rebellion days. After all, who in this pseudo-militaristic organisation wouldn't want to distract themselves by sleeping with a very attractive, young hero.

All in all Luke would probably be more experienced than Leia and Han counted together (because I did read some fics where they teased Luke about his lack of experiences) (not to say he would be a complete barracks bunny - he doesn't strike me as a nymphomaniac, just a young guy who occasionally enjoys casual sex).

So, your honor, as you can see, there is no way my client could be the virgin the fandom portrays him to be. C'mon.

[batrachised]

this will be my last sw post for a while (rest, i need), but I think it's worth remembering that while Luke is cheerful and bold, he also canonically nearly killed Vader in a blind rage. He canonically viciously snaps at people. He canonically throws things in anger. He canonically is so impatient Yoda nearly dipped. Even in episode 6, which is the basis for a lot of the characterization I see, his calmness comes across an iron control, not necessarily gentleness. I do think a lot of the former is due to immaturity, so gently serene Jedi Luke is a reasonable characterization, but I also think it's worth remembering why Luke grew up so fast, why that iron control has appeared in episode 6, and why he is the furthest thing from careless.

[sinswearslaughter]

YES YES YES

[padmestrilogy]

anidala + hortus conclusus: "a place we cannot go"

anis mojgani / notes for my shakespeare class / "the medieval hortus conclusus: revisiting the pleasure garden” - liz herbert mcavoy / "the meaning of gardens: idea, place, and action" / valentina petrucci / "the argument of comedy” - northrop frye / mandi jane reed / jonathan bate on shakespeare's a midsummer night's dream / justin bettman / dressing a galaxy: the costumes of star wars / mitski

[morganmnemonic]

Star wars discourse about the jedi is hard. Because on one hand you have people saying that the Jedi were right about attachments, and Anakin proves it. If he'd been more okay with not owning the things he cared about, none of that would have happened.

Which ignores a lot of what's going on there. Like. The jedi got their hands on a kid who'd spent nine years in slavery, who owned nothing, not even himself, and had to leave his mother behind in a horrible situation because there was no way for them to both be free. And the issue they have with this child. Is that he clings too tightly to the things he loves.

I don't think there is anything intrinsically wrong with the jedi view on attachments. It probably works great for temple raised jedi with happy childhoods. But those teachings fall really flat when applied to anakin in particular. The sheer audacity to tell a former slave that he needs to learn how to give things up. I promise you he knows. I promise you that he learned that lesson in some of the worst circumstances imaginable.

Like. That could be read as part of the point of that whole ark where his mom died. He tried to be a good jedi, to ignore his fear and let her go. But those lessons mean next to nothing when applied to his homeland. Tatooine doesn't have peaceful partings. It doesn't have gentle goodbyes. It has violence. You have to fight for the things you love, or they will be torn apart. He's never quite able to reconcile between the part of him that is a jedi, and the part of him that is a child of the desert, and in the end he chooses to become the latter and become a part of the same system of violence he was born into.

But then on the other hand people will be like "the jedis view on attachment was bad. The jedi were bad. They are the ones who made Darth vader by messing up anakin so bad".

And like, no! The jedi didn't make Darth vader. That honor goes to the manipulative sith lord who had unsupervised access to Anakin since he was nine years old.

[madisnotonfire]

Wanted to compare Anakin seeing Shmi die vs Luke seeing Beru and Owen die. Just some food for thought.

[sinswearslaughter]

I need to read a work in which the Stormtroopers are still there when Luke arrives - a Force-sensitive with no training whatsoever, blind rage, need for vengence, sand, random rocks and probably half-decent hand-to-hand combat skills? This state evolved into his determination to stop the Empire, but what if he had an option to immidiately seek retribution?

Luke wouldn't go strictly dark - but he would kill, touch the darkness and be one with the Force. The entire Force - all sides of it. Potential for Grey Jedi Luke? Both sides unlimitedly available for the Force's beloved?

And what could Obi-Wan do to stop him? Help stormtroopers? He would be desperate to do anything and stop Luke from becoming like his father, but how far would he go and how would Luke react?

Just a lil thought that was fed by the food.

[sinswearslaughter]

A thing about people who don't speak english as their first language and writing fanfiction is that if some character doesn't know about something (usually an organization) they will not make associations based on the name alone. They will just ask "Huh, what is that?". But you would make an association in their place. Example.

Guy : He joined the marines.

Guy, who is from a world with no marines : As in marine biologists? What do you mean? (He knows the word and would associate it with anything else he knows rather than just being confused about a normal word)

And this phenomenon exists for other languages too! Example.

Ninja : There is an organization that calls themselves the 'Akatsuki'. (Very dangerous criminals)

Somebody : What are they? Poets? (Akatsuki usually sounds very poetic as it means 'dawn' or 'daybreak' and is a symbol of hope, change, beginning and a wholesome motif in literature)

Very funny when you think about it.

[cheemscakecat]

Luke’s first interaction with Han.

Every time you make a purchase on Tatooine, you must assume the seller is trying to scam you. And so you learn to be self reliant.

Jawas will steal any tech that isn’t bolted down, take it apart, and sell it back to people with the best parts removed, barely functioning. You learn to watch your belongings and repair things fast.

Street vendors will literally sell meat from a corpse and cook it in gutter oil. You learn to eat at home when possible, or find friends on the other farms who know how to cook.

Need a job done? Do it yourself, whenever you possibly can. It’s better to deal with a mediocre result than accept highway robbery from so-called professionals.

Luke telling Ben not to agree to Han’s terms and saying they can find another way isn’t him being stupid or naive. He thinks old man Ben, the hermit, is the one being naive and getting scammed by some sleazy criminal.

“I’m not such a bad pilot myself”

He was fully prepared to cobble together some way off Tatooine and drive Obi Wan, even knowing it was risky, and he’d never flown off-world, and they needed a ship.

Meanwhile Obi Wan can sense that Han and Chewbacca are actually decent under their smuggler personas, so he’s willing to take the bad deal anyway.

And Han knows he’s their best bet, so he’s upcharging like crazy for a simple task. He also knows the old man is the one with the final say, since Luke’s trying to convince him not to agree to the price.

When you really think about it, it makes all of the sense that the honest and discerning farmer and the self-serving smuggler would butt heads.

Anyways Luke’s inherited Skywalker sass comes out as “I’m a trustworthy and hardworking guy and I’m not putting up with you treating me like I’m stupid for that.”

Leia’s comes out as “I’m a competent leader and you will not talk down to me like a damsel/child.”

[sinswearslaughter]

YES