anyway the best part of Celebration today, BAR NONE, was the 3-year-old girl who beat a grown man at Star Wars trivia in front of 5,000 people without any help and with complete confidence in her tiny little squeaky babygirl voice after the fanbro was kind of a douche
(AND, ok, the host -- another grown man, was condescending like “OK audience, whatever she says, let’s pretend it’s correct, ok?” and she just decimated the question and WAS RIGHT like SHE KNEW WHAT SHE WAS ABOUT! SHE WATCHED THAT MOVIE 5000 TIMES! We’ve all been there!)
you go, tiny tiny little girl who knew EXACTLY what kind of creature injured Luke Skywalker on Hoth and used your tiny tiny little girl voice to yell “WAMPA!” in the cutest and most confident way I have ever heard anyone say anything in this or any other lifetime
Why didn’t you post any links of the women’s work that explain and analyze the root of fanfics?
Mostly because it was 4AM and it was an intentionally hyperbolic emotional vomit post and not an academic paper that needed Cited Sources, but also because it was 4AM and I was on my phone and Tumblr Mobile makes adding sources to anything incredibly difficult. But mostly, because it was 4AM and Tumblr.
However, despite the fact that you’re asking in bad faith – and I know this because you spent the morning harassing my friend @yessoupy about my post even though she and I are, shockingly, totally separate women and she had nothing to do with my post?? – I AM going to serve up some links, because this is a subject that I love and I DO want to share some brilliant women’s work in acafandom.
Fic! Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (2013) – Edited by Dr. Anne Jamison, who teaches a class on fanfiction at Princeton University. Outdated now, especially re: which fandoms and pairings are covered, but still well-curated and an interesting read. Carte blanche, I have an essay in the book about RPF, but I wouldn’t even 100% agree with my own analysis now in the longer run, although I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. New information comes with time and should change your views and the ways you interpret additional information, etc. Not all of the contributors are female, but what I think is really interesting about most (all? I can’t remember and don’t have it open in front of me) of the male contributors is that they aren’t writing about fanfiction as creators, but as subjects. THAT is an area that I think has a really rich future in acafandom, although since I’m not a psychologist I don’t know how hard it would be to ethically research the long-term effects of being a subject of fanfiction. But the ways that Dan Howell and Lauren Jauregui, in particular, have both spoken about how being the subjects of fanfiction speculating on their queerness before they were ready to come out on their own harmed them is worth a lot more traction both in- and outside of fandom, and I think it’s part of my old and new takes on RPF (that you really have to remember you’re not actually writing about real people, or you’re going to hurt both them and yourself in the long run. Also rebuild the 4th wall and stop tweeting shit from fandom at literally anyone involved in anything media, people, jesus christ!).
The Organization for Transformative Works – Yes, the people behind your favorite ca:tws hs:au a/b/o pwp m/m/f h/c fics on AO3 are ALSO part of the vanguard of legitimizing fandom and fanfiction in the eyes of white male academic elitism through the peer-reviewed JOURNAL OF TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS AND CULTURES. Again, of course not every single article is by women, nor are they about men – nor should they be, that would be gross and dumb. But the vast majority of scholarly work about fanfiction, like the vast majority of fanfiction itself, is about and for women (and as time has passed over the last 50 years and people are able to come out and be themselves, especially in online spaces like fandom, other marginalized sexes and genders).
The Fan Fiction Studies Reader is a collection of fan studies essays edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse. It is a reprint anthology that republishes earlier scholarship. The Fan Fiction Studies Reader is part of the University of Iowa’s newly launched fan studies line (http://www.uiowapress.org/category/subjects/fan-studies).
The Fanfiction Reader: Folk Tales for the Digital Age by Francesca Coppa (2017) looks at the way that women relate to the fandoms they love by writing fic, but it’s not a particularly deep dive, nor is it necessarily groundbreaking work – Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth by Camille Bacon-Smith was making more or less the same arguments back in 1991, but centered on the OG of acafandom interest, Star Trek and Spirk. Both books put a lot of pagetime to the explanation of exploration of how fanfiction employs sex as a mode of deeper character exploration than is possible through visual media like television or film, which only show emotion through exteriority.
Gavia Baker-Whitelaw wrote a delightful article (with citations, but not An Academic Paper, anon, since you’re A Stickler For Such Things Apparently) about the enduring popularity of coffee shop AUs and the puzzling way they span every fandom even when it doesn’t make sense why those characters would be in a coffee shop. (2018)
Dr. Tisha Turk teaches a class about fanfiction and fan cultures at the University of Minnesota Morris and curates a tumblr for/with her classes about fannish Stuff at @fanculturesfancreativity. Her specific focus is on fanvids, which I have to admit I know very little about personally bc I just haven’t ever been invested in them compared to fanfiction, but they’re definitely fic’s more confident cousin and equally worthy of attention and study. (AND HOLY COW DO THEY TAKE TALENT TO MAKE, SO PROPS.)
@centrumlumina does the lawd’s own werk with her statistics series on race and gender in pairings on AO3 and how fandom-as-gestalt treats characters of color, female characters, and the extremely rare and oft-mistreated female characters of color who are paired with White Male Faves. Same with @toastystats by @destinationtoast.
Cara Diaconoff is a professor of creative writing at Bellevue College in Washington who teaches fanfiction courses and uses fanfiction-based exercises in her pedagogy. She also wrote this article for The Writers’ Chronicle in 2017. Sheenagh Pugh is another creative writing professor, although from the UK – formerly of the University of Glamorgan – who employed fanfiction in her methology and wrote The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context, which looks at (among other things) how fanfiction relies on preexisting audience knowledge rather than conveying full information, and how that is different from writing wholly original fiction (but they are complementary skills that can be used to strengthen each other).
Mafalda Stasi, in 2006, wrote the/a definitive Academic Proofe™ dissertation about the Slash Phenomenon of The Prissy Pale-Haired One With No Actual Canon Characterization Whom Fandom Just Shoves All Of Their Preferred Gay Traits™ Onto And The Grumpy Dark-Haired One Who Fucks Him, using the allegory of a palimsest. Kylux are Harry/Draco are Johnlock. They’re all just the same two dudes, over and over and over again (and the Prissy Pale-Haired Empty Vessel is kinda homophobic imo, but whatever).
Smitha Milli wrote her UC Berkeley undergrad thesis about natural language processing (a field of AI) and representation of gender, and it was accepted into the aforementioned peer-reviewed academic journal TWC. Gretchen McCulloch, the most notable linguist of our time and A Certified True Genius, reviewed and commented on Milli’s work and often writes about fanfiction and linguisitic phenomena at @allthingslinguistic (although acafandom is not her sole or primary area of interest).
Milena Popova is a doctoral researcher in Bristol, England, and writes extensively about the role of consent in fanfiction culture – and (disturbingly imo) the erosion of its importance over time as fanfiction has become more mainstream and subject to capitalism. ‘Dogfuck rapeworld’: Omegaverse fanfiction as a critical tool in analyzing the impact of social power structures on intimate relationships and sexual consent might be the first paper to look specifically at A/b/o in an academic context re: sexual consent and power dynamics (?), but ‘Slight dub-con but they both wanted it hardcore’: Erotic fanfiction as a form of cultural activism around sexual consent and Rewriting the romance: Emotion work and consent in arranged marriage fanfiction are also important reads, IMO, because to me, the Purpose of fanfiction is collectivist reacculturation outside of the kyriarchy, and reclamation of consent is the ::chef’s kiss:: key part of that, but that’s just me.
And because even Desktop Tumblr makes adding links kind of a pain, I’m just going to link here to a bunch of abstracts from Google Scholar in 2018-2019 of papers published about fanfiction that sound fascinating. GS intentionally obscures the gender and sex of papers’ authors, but dear sweet misogynistic anon, I’m going to preface this last bulleted list by paraphrasing what @yessoupy told you: this whole website is full of brilliant women talking intelligently about fanfiction as a woman-led phenomenon. I know that we don’t Cite Sources For Our Every Thought, but you ought to try reading what authentic voices have to say. It’s really worthwhile as a primary source.
The Diamonds and the Dross: A Quantitative Exploration of Integrative Complexity in Fanfiction by Hayley McCullogh (2018, Journal of Psychology of Popular Media Culture).
Reviews Matter: How Distributed Mentoring Predicts Lexical Diversity on Fanfiction.net (Cornell University, 2018).
Writing Outside the Margins: Racebending in Fanfiction by Parveena Singh (CalPoly Pomona dissertation, 2018).
Fanfiction Reviews and Academic Literacy: Potential Impacts and Implications by Regina Weiler (University of Central Florida master’s thesis 2019).
Exploring Explicit Fanfiction as a Vehicle for Sex Education among Adolescents and Young Adults by Donna Jean Barth (University of South Florida master’s thesis, 2018).
Gimp Sue Gets the Girl: Disability in Twilight Fanfiction by Olivia Dreisinger (Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 2019).
And then they boned: an analysis of fanfiction and its influence on sexual development by Lindsay M. Mixer (Humboldt State University master’s thesis, 2018).
Representations of Autism in Online Harry Potter Fanfiction (Journal of Literary Research, 2019).
Authentic Representation and Author Identity: Exploring Mental Illness in The Hobbit Fanfiction by Jennifer Rogers (Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 2019).
Enabling/Disabling: Fanfiction and Disability Discourse by Dr. AmyLea Clemons (Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, 2019).
And, of course, go read the entirety of the latest issue of the TWC, “Fans of Color, Fandoms of Color.”
Enjoy these citations and Proof That My Annoyance About People Being Up Two Old White Straight British Men’s Asses For Being OK With Fanfiction And Saying Stuff Women Have Been Saying For 50 Years is a valid annoyance to have as an emotion at 4AM. Happy reading! :)
Went to a round Rosh Hashanah challah-braiding class at shul with one of my old best high school friends! Much fun to be had, much flour on my ubiquitous black dress. These aren’t as bad as I feared, but I definitely wouldn’t fare well on GBBO...
Oy. I’m tempted to brush this off with an “ACK, I REALLY AM NOT THE PERSON TO ASK ABOUT THIS,” but I’m trying to ~believe~ that if you asked, then it’s because you felt like I WAS the person to ask. (Which feels terrible. Imposter syndrome, it is real.)
So. Or “but.” Whichever conjunction works.
Smut.
First off: do not feel like you have to write smut just because you’re writing fanfiction. It is not a necessary part of the category, it’s just one genre within the category, and you’re allowed to dislike it or not feel comfortable writing it!
If you try to force yourself to write it even though it makes you uncomfortable, that isn’t taking care of yourself, and you are a real person who matters infinitely more than the fictional genitalia you’d be forcing yourself to write.
Likewise, if you just can’t find a way to write smut into a story in a way that feels natural and like it serves the story, don’t feel like you have to wedge it in there just because it’s fic!
Honestly, my biggest tip for writing smut is the same tip that I have for every single thing in the universe that involves sex: only do what you are comfortable with, when you are comfortable with it, and don’t let pressure from anyone else make you feel like you have to take part.
Listening to your own internal voice saying yes or no and setting boundaries is like… the key most important, integral thing for every individual to practice.
That said, when you want to write smut, listen to your own “yes.” Listen to your own boundaries. And, because it IS one of the functions of smutty fanfiction, listen to your own wants and write to them. It’s your story! Write your characters how you want!*
* She said, knowing that SOMEONE is gonna be like “BUT YER AN ANTI” and like, yes. I am, insofar as THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEXUAL DESIRE AND HARMFUL PARAPHILIA AND EVERY ETHICAL HUMAN PERSON UNDERSTANDS THIS, YA DINK. STOP DRAWING CHILD CARTOON CHARACTERS IN BONDAGE PORN, EVERY MAN ON THE INTERNET. And stop deifying neo-Nazi rapists while you’re at it, white goyishe women. That’s nasty. Just go bang an ugly dude with an undercut and a tiki torch and leave the rest of us out of it.
::Cough::
Anyway. What I mean is, if you want to write “fic cliches” because they work for you, go for it. They’re considered cliches for a reason, and that reason is that they appeal to a lot of people.
There’s no net-negative in Poe Dameron stretching, arms above his head, and a strip of tanned skin peeking out above his ludicrously tight brown pants.
There isn’t a reason not to let yourself want to write Finn cupping his partner’s jaw in both hands, amazed that they’re alive, and surging forward to kiss them even as the battle keeps raging around them.
If you want to write Rey getting head every! single! day! of! her! life! and never, ever “returning the favor,” go for it!
You do not have to talk yourself into or out of liking what you like, or disliking what you don’t.**
** Again, unless you’re OVERTLY GROSS. In which case it isn’t so much “talking yourself into or out of things” as “getting real-life professional help from actual real-life therapists, not self-medicating through continual self-stimulation until you’ve convinced yourself that harmful paraphilias are widely accepted healthy things.”
::Coughs again::
Once you know the general shape of what you want to write – the pairing, the act or acts, the place it’s going to fit into your story – then I would honestly most suggest… not thinking about writing smut as being intrinsically different from writing anything else. I feel like one of the things that makes “Bad Smut Cliches” come across as BAD, besides that large groups of people inevitably are just mean about things five minutes after they’re popular, is that they’re often a sudden departure from the tone and voice of the rest of the story.
If you’re writing in a limited-third Poe POV, and he’s been fairly pragmatic and straightforward throughout the story, having smut that suddenly veers into really smushy and swooshy and purple prosaic and detailed will come across wonky. Even if the writing isn’t bad.
If you’re writing a historical AU and you’re trying to adhere to a more formal, almost stilted structure to make it “feel” more like [insert time period here], smut in which the characters are suddenly overtly Filthy and using really coarse modern language or slang or are lapsing into sex-possessed sweaty grunting half-sentences one paragraph after delicately unlacing their breeches, or whatever, is going to come across wonky. Even if the sex itself, in a different story, would be sexy.
Granted: if you’re writing PWP, then you don’t have to worry about fitting into a larger scope. Just get down with your bad self. Or your good self. Whatever.
I also think that smut is just a kind of condensed example of the platitude “show, don’t tell.” It does less for the reader to tell them what position your characters are fucking in than it does to show them how your POV character is reacting, physically or emotionally, to the sex. (This also helps with my personal smut Achilles’ heel of “keeping track of the legs.”)
Contrary to what every male showrunner on Earth seems to think, it doesn’t actually tell the viewer/reader anything of consequence to just mid-view show the position your POV character is fucking or being fucked in. What tells us something is how they feel about it. Good sex isn’t about noticing what position you’re in; it’s about NOT noticing what position you’re in because you’re lost in sensation and connection and the moment. That’s good smut, too.
And if you think about that, of course that is what differentiates really good smut from really mediocre or bad smut. One person’s favorite position is another’s trigger, and a third’s just “it doesn’t do anything for me but it’s fine” position. And those feelings are physical, yes, but they’re also mental and emotional.
A good sex scene is about the connection of your characters, and not just via their sex organs. Even a one-night stand one-shot PWP is about how the characters come together (pun intended because I LOVE A PUN.) One of the reasons that I think fanfiction, in particular, has such a reputation for being smutty is that a lot of the heavy lifting is already done – we KNOW how those characters connect, more often than not, because of canon and fanon material. We know how we, as people who chose to click on and read that pairing, see those characters’ emotional intimacy flowing.
But more than that, YOU, as the writer of that pairing (or OT3 or whatever), have an intimate emotional and mental connection to that pairing. It’s inevitable that it will bleed through in how you write their intimacy. Let it!
Like, I know 100fucking% that all of my technically “best smut” is, to crib from Poe Dameron because YIKES did he put into words the dynamic that has always been my fave in every fandom ever: “torture buddies” coming together after significant healing and self-work and finally feeling worthy of interpersonal intimacy again. I KNOW that’s my attachment to most of my favorite characters, and that that’s the context in which I tend to write them having sex. I could try not to lean into that and just write them fuckin’ willy-nilly, but it would come across even wonkier than my smut already does. (I get it, I get it, I overuse the phrasing of cocks blurting precome, I GET IT.) So I’m going to lean into it, and I’m going to write characters that I feel attachment and emotional intimacy towards as having sex that I feel emotionally and mentally attached to.
(Note, you do not need to be physically attracted to the smut you write. I have never written sex that I’d actually want to have, because that is just beyond any boundaries I’m comfortable breaching. Other people feel differently, and that’s OK, too! I’m just very unsexual as a person!!!)
So, uh, that’s… the advice I have, I think. I am honestly REAL AWK about smut, but I’m flattered that you’ve liked what I’ve written smut-wise!!
Making A Galaxy Far Far Away: An Aesthetic Photoset Tutorial
Requested by @geleixi (and varying amounts of time ago by @rockett-to-the-purple-moon, @thenameisgreed, @pizzaplanethq, and probably others who sent nice messages that I went “Oh, what a nice message this means so much I LOVE IT SO MUCH I’M TOO ANXIOUS TO ANSWER IT WRONG I’ll just do it later” and then promptly NEVER answered it.)
Brainstorming & Photo Collection
Picking a Color Palette
Choosing Images from Collection
Coloring
Textures & Effects
First off: I am not even going to remotely pretend like graphic design is a Thing I Am Better At Than Anyone Else, because that would be patently false and ridiculous, but I also get a fair number of Asks about making photosets/aesthetic posts, so here we are. I’m planning to do a separate one, maybe, for how I do the Cartoon Girls All Grown Up and Nancy Drew Dream Games series, because the “brainstorming and photo collection” part is so different that it inherently affects the rest of the process.
BUT I also feel like I don’t see a ton of tutorials that go through the brainstorming/finding images part of making aesthetics, and I tend to think of my Graphics Style(TM) as “DEEPLY Uninterested in washed-out faux sepiatone grimdark Tumblr Coloring?? + Not Good Enough At Masks To Do Negative Space Well,” which might be some people’s level of ~graphics design passion(TM)~ too, so. That’s the ride for which this ticket has been bought.
Brainstorming & Photo Collection
Obviously, the specifics of this are totally different for every aesthetic, but all of the GFFA/swworlds start from the same seed: Star Wars Aesthetic.
Star Wars itself has a very particular Lookque, imo: it’s not quite retrofuture, it’s not quite dirtpunk, it’s not quite scifi, even. There are the insanely sumptuous (and hella culturally appropriative) queens of Naboo and the ramshackle toppled AT-AT where Rey lives on Jakku and the not-even-subtle-at-all-jfc Nazi inspiration of the Empire and First Order and the straight-up millennial Tumblr witch Goffik look of the Dathomir Witches and Zabrak siths and the blue, blue water of Scarif. There “isn’t” a unifying aesthetic through Star Wars, and yet, as Gareth Edwards said, there’s a LOOK and FEEL to Star Wars: if you go a little too far to the left or right, it isn’t Star Wars anymore.*
*That said, this tutorial talks about Crait, which was invented by Rilo Jon, who went both too far left and too far right but mostly... too far-right. BA DUM BUM! Anyway.
So part of what makes Star Wars Look Like Star Wars, to me, is that it ISN’T ever Too Scifi. There’s a realism in all of Star Wars’ disparate planets -- their looks, anyway; like, talking about how Crait, in this case, makes NO ecological sense as a planet AT ALL is another post entirely. (IT MAKES NO SENSE.) It’s different from, like, Doctor Who, which I think revels in its “we can make these aliens and planets look like WHATEVER” more? Star Wars tends to be very like... “we want to use practical sets and effects.” Even for planets that only appear thus far in Clone Wars and Rebels? So it’s definitely part of the intention of SW’s Aesthetic.
ALL OF THAT TO SAY, my first step with each planet is to figure out the best way to represent it using as much real-world photography as I can and how best to channel the ~spirit of Star Wars~ in the graphic. Sometimes I fail miserably. CURSE YOU, NAR SHADAA. But most of the time it helps provide a Framework for the rest of the brainstorming and photo collection.
SO. FOR CRAIT. (For another example/totally different look and process, I wrote up a little about Haruun Kal on its post here.)
Crait has the definite benefit of appearing in one of the movies, so the first part of photo collection was to screencap TLJ. I took the caps using the 1080p digital release at a 20-frame frequency, so even once I deleted the aps that weren’t of Crait (moving the Canto Bight frames into a folder for Cantonica, of course!), I had like... 1500 images just from TLJ to start the brainstorming and collection with.
First, I trimmed down those ~1500 screencaps to 168 caps that were distinct enough from one another to give me a sense of “what happens” in the scene and, more than that, “What Crait Looks Like.” Then, because there’s additional canon material of Crait besides TLJ, I saved the unlettered images of “Star Wars: The Storms of Crait” from comic penciller Mike Mayhew’s blog @mikemayhew -- if those hadn’t been available, which they’re usually not for planets that appear in the comics (THANX MIKE MAYHEW!!!), I would have taken and cropped panels from the comic at both 100% and screen-fit/60% sizing that had utility for a graphic about planet scenery and not character.
THEN, I looked at Wookieepedia and MSW. Crait was based on the Salar de Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia, so I Google image-searched that. There weren’t actually very many images of the Salar de Uyuni salt flats that I super loved, so I ended up saving images of other salt flats as well, particularly the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.
THEN there was the issue of the red minerals, which were entirely fictional and not part of any real-world salt flat. BUT, there IS real red sand... so I saved some images of red-sand dunes (mostly Mui Ne in Vietnam). I also went through my Star Wars Stock Folder to find images of crystal caves and mines that I’d either saved for other planets in the past, but didn’t end up using, OR just saved because there are so fucking many crystal-based planets in SW.
Each of my big graphics series has its own Stock Folder for unorganized images that just strike the right Vibe~ and might be useful someday, in addition to every planet (or cartoon girl, or US state for the Nancy Drews, etc) having its own folder for specific/organized image collection.
My Star Wars Stock Folder:
So there were already a lot of crystals, star destroyers, blasters, and bunkers that were actually in snow but whatever it was white and crystalline, to work with. I added some workable Crait-like images from the stock folder to Crait’s collection, too.
AND THEN, finally, I LOVE the vulptices, so I searched for (and found!) some of the concept art and 3D modeling images from ILM, and I put those in the folder, as well.
I also saved this, hoping I’d be able to make it work because it’s SO CUTE, but I couldn’t, but here LOOK HOW CUTE:
And then, lest I stay in the image-collection rabbithole forever, I said, “OK, that’s enough.” I ended up starting to actually MAKE the Crait graphic from a collection of 272 images:
Picking a Color Palette
Obviously, the dominant colors of Crait are red and white, so the aesthetic had to be based in red and white. My first instinct was to make a duotone aesthetic using only red, white, and black/grayscale. Something like this:
Which... I don’t hate, or even dislike. It’s definitely more in line with popular Tumblr aesthetic, uh, aesthetics. But I usually don’t like landing on that kind of coloring because it ALWAYS, ALWAYS whitewashes people of color (and jeez, it even whitewashes white people -- look at the model in the fourth frame down on the left, or Luke in the bottom-left.) The “vibrance -100 + Selective Color Red>Red + 100″ always ends up doing the above example to, in this case, Poe: turning him into a licorice man.
So then trying to correct THAT either whitewashes the FUCK out of him/people in general:
(Toning down the red)
Or introducing other colors back into the graphic as a whole:
(Upped yellow and cyan.)
So I nixed that coloring before I even started. (These examples were made after the fact purely to serve as examples.)
I went back to the drawing board, AKA the Crait image folder.
But looking at the collected images -- especially the screencaps and the panels from the Storms of Crait comic -- I was struck by how much Crait also incorporates yellow and blue. (Note that I really, really wanted to try to include Trusk Berinato and Bail Organa... but we’ll talk through why that didn’t work out.) I LOVE @droo216‘s bright, almost jewel-tone edits which I 100% know I don’t have either the patience or skill to make, but I liked the idea of trying to make Crait’s aesthetics in a primary colors + black/white scheme.
Which I actually really like! (Again, made post-facto as an example.) But again, red vibrance DiD tHe tHiNG!!! to Poe and ESPECIALLY to Finn and Bail.
So a high-vibrance look emphasizing bright colors was a no-go. Besides, going back to the source material: high-vibrance and high-energy are the opposite of what the planet of Crait is about. It’s a dying husk of a planet, being killed slowly by its own ecology as the salt in its crust dries out everything beneath it, sucking up water until everything either evolves into living crystal-dogs or goes extinct (thank u Rilo for not including dune-worms, this is the one thing you did right). Crait wouldn’t be vibrant.
But... aha! It’s also distinctly layered. I’ve done three-panel swworlds aesthetics before, so I decided to do that for Crait, too: first a mostly-white graphic like the salt crust, then white+red+yellows in the middle, and finally a dark layer of almost entirely red like the mineral mines.
Choosing Images from Collection
With the color palette and “feel” decided (dying at the surface, then growing richer and redder and angrier as the photoset moved downwards), I was able to choose images.
NEKKID PHOTOSETS SANS ANY EDITING! XXX! But for reference to see both cropping and for reference on choosing.
TOP IMAGE, MOSTLY WHITE:
L-R, TOP-BOTTOM:
I saved this image from my dash at some point and have been tossing it into planets’ folders every time there’s a white-based color scheme. It almost got used for Ilum, but at the last second wasn’t. I felt like it fit the coalescence of Rey’s Force strength here, and also the kind of “last wisps” of Luke Skywalker, well.
“Lifting rocks.”
I’m actually still not 100% whether I should have landed on a vulptex here, but dammit they were one of the only good parts of TLJ. This vulpie baby is on the salt surface, looking out at the blinding sun, so she seemed like a good fit compared to the other caps of vulptices -- the ones loping on the canyon surface at the end were all very motion-blurry.
Carrie in that gorgeous coat in homage to Harrison in Blade Runner makes me weepy, and those were some of the most beautiful shots in the movie. This one had a good balance of white and black, so it could be placed around any level “busyness” in the surrounding photos. Especially since I suckkkk at negative space.
I saved this image to the Crait folder like the day it was announced as a planet in the upcoming Episode VIII and given its first peek. I love it!
Hi, salt flats, and also Star Wars spaceships. I actually had a lot of trouble with the level of green in this image, but the ~essence of Star Wars is PEW PEW SPACE BATTLE, so.
This is an ice sculpture in real life! It reminds me of the vulptices and is cool as hell.
The Millennium Falcon! I toyed with different caps that showed it in actual battle, but the blue would have been hardest to work with in this photoset compared to the others below. Plus, now I can save a bunch of Falcon-in-flight pictures for use on planets that only appear in the novels or comics.
NECESSARY, ICONIC, PERFECT, THE MOST IMPORTANT THING THAT HAPPENED ON CRAIT.
Fine, this is a snowy mountain and not a salt flat, but I liked the striations in color and gentle variations in grayscale.
This was the palest/least Bright Blue sky of all of the Falcon screencaps from Crait.
I tried a few screencaps of Crait from TLJ, but I landed on using the full-panel image of Crait from Storms of Crait. It has the cleanest definition of the “planet from space” options we have of Crait.
This is a promo image, not a screencap. It’s a much crisper view of the ski-speeders. I love the vivid color difference.
The blue-and-yellow additions to the color scheme didn’t work out, but I did still want to include Storms of Crait. This shot had a little more blue in it than I would have liked, but it has Leia in a ski-speeder back before the salt caused them to rust out, too!
Remember when it seemed like the Crait battle’s new AT-ATs would be super cool and like, do more than stand there menacingly behind Kyle? Me, too.
I tried out like five different tiny-frame-difference screencaps of the ski-speeders kicking up red minerals, and I decided that this one, with a clearly defined spray of red surrounded by white and bluish sky, suited the placement here best: there’s red in the panel to its left as the main color, but minimal red in the above- and below panels.
I wanted to include actual Connix, but she’s wearing yellow and only ever shows up surrounded in brownish-black darkness, so here, have one of my standard Fashion Rebel Officer Stand-Ins instead -- the red and white obviously played a part in picking this shot over the rest of the options from the photoshoot.
I LOVE this slightly mystical shot of a Rebel pilot slash astronaut on a rain-slicked salt flat. How perfect?!
As we get down to the bottom of this middle panel, I wanted to include more destruction and more presence of yellow and orange. This image has a good balance of “negative space” in the sky and salt flat, and then the explosion of Nodin Chavri’s ski-speeder (I think?) ties in well to...
Finn and Rose, post-collision. I wanted to include Rose, and the almost JJ Abrams-esque white starburst in the center of this cap is a good balance to the spray of red around a ski-speeder two panels above.
Luke on Crait in the Rebel Alliance...
And Luke on Crait in the Resistance.
This was a kind of “????” moment of characterization -- and general direction -- in TLJ, but Luke surrounded by red as an old man would fall right below Luke as a young man, on his first mission after the Battle of Yavin, when the three graphics were aligned.
I wanted to use the straight-up concept art of the vulptex, but the black around it was TOO black, if that makes sense? So I layered it over a darkened cap of the vulptex who leads Poe to Rey and freedom. This is one of the very rare shots that I use an edited base image.
Han and Chewie! I had to include Han and Chewie. The unlettered panels from Storms of Crait that show the mineral mines are stunning; I highly recommend heading over to Mike Mayhew’s page and taking a look. The detailing of the crystals is something I wish I could have captured better at this scale.
This is one of the red-sand dunes I saved! Crait doesn’t have any living vegetation, but the drama of the black, stormy sky and the red sand drew me in here.
Some CGI crystal caves... I saved these ages ago for use on Ilum or Dantooine, I think? (Same with what will be #11 below.) I don’t love using CGI, but I think the crags on these crystal growths suited the images from canon!Crait.
A screencap of the TIEs chasing the Falcon through the mines. This was honestly one of the most visually stunning parts of TLJ, and it’s so split-second that most people missed it AND most of the screencaps have a lot of motion-blur. I’m really pleased that this one came out so crisp, and I knew I had to use it as an “anchor image.”
Finn, full-on, in red. I’m realizing belatedly as I write up this tutorial that I showed Poe face-on and Finn face-on, but I stupidly chose to show Rey only from a distance. I AM A FOOL! A FOOL!
Aren’t these resin crystals amazing? The full-size image actually shows them surrounded by snow, by the tree-stump they’re on wouldn’t fit Crait, so I cropped in closer on this image than I did for most of the Crait set.
Another shot of the Falcon in the mines. I like the way the framing of white sunlight here echoes...
Leia’s face, a bright spot in the dark, watching out over the salt flat. :(
(See #5 above!)
And again, the homage of Carrie’s coat looking like Harrison in Blade Runner made me sad, so I THREW IN ANOTHER HAN AND CHEWIE. The mining equipment here shows more detail than in the screencaps above, too.
Coloring
Like I mentioned waaaay above, in the intro: I never use set colorings for photosets. (Except Halloween Spookstravaganza, because jeez so many of those screencaps are like 240p VHS rips and it’s just not worth putting in Effort(TM).)
That said, I think one thing that I do differently than I see in most tutorials is this first step:
I ALWAYS start Aesthetic photosets by arranging the images and then *BRINGING THE CONTRAST ALL THE WAY DOWN.* This is especially helpful on photosets that include a mix of real photography, CGI screencaps or art, and/or comics panels, but it’s also just useful in general for photosets that use images from a wide variety of places.
The reason I do this is because it helps to “smooth out” the differences in light source, color balance, etc., that are part of the raw base images. For this set, it also helps to define the variations in color between very similar shades: the craters on Crait, the wisps of clouds, etc.
In some cases, I’ll do two layers of Contrast -50. For Crait, I did a later of Contrast -50 and then a layer of Contrast -15.
Then, I Select All > Copy Merged > [Turn Off Contrast Layer View] > Paste As New Layer.
Now, the “smoothed” version is placed as a layer above the raw layer. From there, it depends on the look of the photoset what I do -- sometimes, I leave it as-is, but I almost always lower the opacity on the “smoothed” layer until the level of contrast and balance looks consistent across the whole photoset. For Crait, I ended up with the “smoothed” layer set to Lighten 100%.
Selective Color time. There are two ways I usually start this: either one color at a time -- especially for Aesthetics like Pheryon that will essentially be monochromatic -- or, in this case, I looked at the balance of the three main colors that would carry through the entire Aesthetic.
REDS
Cyan -100 (This brightens the vivacity of the red.)
Magenta +100
Yellow +100
Black +35
BLACKS
Cyan 0
Magenta 0
Yellow 0
Black +100
WHITES
Cyan 0
Magenta 0
Yellow 0
Black +100 -- This is NOT my usual setting for adjusting white, and since white is one of the main colors in the Crait Aesthetic, it might seem counterintuitive to make the white darker instead of brighter. However, this will help to make next step of color adjustments “take” on the white/whitish surfaces a lot more easily, and it will also help to balance out the bluish sky areas with the white background areas. (I’m not sure this explanation makes sense? But it’s what I did.)
Then, I Select All > Copy Merged > [Turn Off Selective Color Layer View] > Paste As New Layer > Either COLOR or HUE 100%.
“Hue” is more effective for smaller, more incremental color adjustments -- for BIG SWEEPING COLOR CHANGES, “Color” tends to work better. But it totally depends on the photoset! Try both, and see which you like better.
I feel like this is kind of the step where my process of making aesthetics stops being any different from most tutorials -- but this has been HUGELY helpful for me, a non-graphic designer-person, to be able to create a kind of “base image” that has very similar color values, brightness/contrast, and vibrance.
Sometimes this step helps to create really extreme color differences, such as in the Raydonia Aesthetic, and other times, I use it to just adjust one or two color-values so that there’s more consistency in, say, shades of yellow or shades of green, as in the Takodana Aesthetic, for which I just wanted to create a more cohesive palette of green in particular... it started out with a zillion greens, and I wanted to bring it all together into one “aesthetic.”
I think this step, and the reasoning behind it, are why SO MANY PSDs for aesthetics rely on a layer of either gray or sepiatone-ish set to Darken or Multiply as one of their key layers. But I’m just not about the grimdark life, and if I’m making an AESTHETIC OF A THING, I want the aesthetic POST to actually HAVE THAT THING’S AESTHETICS, you know?! I want to use the colors of the thing that I’m saying is meant to evoke the visuals of the thing!
Anyway. Now you have your BASE IMAGE. Often I’ll Merge All here, just for my own sanity.
Then I go in and make any other other adjustments on a “coloring” level that I think will help with the “vibe” I’m going for! For this Crait set, I definitely needed to bring the brightness up so that the white and red popped. However, bringing up the brightness also swallowed a lot of the detail in the white surfaces -- especially the planetary surface of Crait in that bottom-right space -- so I decreased the contrast again.
Brightness +70
Contrast -50
And then I go in for the macro-level adjustments of color using any mix of Selective Color, Hue/Saturation, and Color Balance that works. For Crait, that was more Selective Color, because since I had decided on my color palette, and it sadly did not include blue, I needed to start by taking out as much of the blue, cyan, and green that I could.
And I’m ngl, I told myself the WHOLE FREAKING TIME I was making this photoset that I needed NOT TO DELETE THE PSD RIGHT AWAY LIKE I USUALLY DO so that I could write up all the settings for this step.
But it was a reflex. And I deleted the PSD right away like I always do.
So suffice to say, I just futzed with the levels one at a time until the RED was brought up a little, the YELLOW was brought up a lot, and everything else was brought down and/or hue-adjusted to sliiiide into being yellow, red, or black/white.
Another Select All > Copy Merged > [Turn Off Selective Color Layer View] > Paste As New Layer > Either COLOR or HUE 100%. I think I also DUPLICATED this layer and set it to SOFT LIGHT 50% and then duplicated it again to SCREEN 50%.
I could have left it like this, but I am me and I am nothing if not Extra All The Time, so I opened up my folder of light textures (and other textures) and decided to Go To Town.
Textures & Effects
For your Aesthetic-Making Purposes, here are the three I used on the Crait set:
The first two were set to Screen 100%, and the bottom one was set to Burn 15%. I layered them in this order.
It still looked incomplete, so I decided to use this POWDR Element from Creative Market, which is actually like 5400x5400 pixels and which I’m not going to share here because I paid for it and don’t want CM to revoke my access or whatever, but it looks like this, only HUGE:
I also set this element to Burn 15% and moved it around the image until it looked the way I wanted it.
Textures and effects aren’t In on Tumblr anymore, but I really like using them -- they add, not to be cheesier than usual, texture to an aesthetic post, and I think that they can also help less-skilled graphic-makers like me to hide any myriad of imperfections in coloring, sharpening, whatever. I’m an especially big fan of this noise element (set as a pattern on Screen), so I’m going to share it here even though I didn’t use it on the Crait set:
Most of my textures have been saved over the last literally twenty years since I started making fannish graphics and photosets, largely from defunct old LiveJournals, but there also used to some great sources for them on Tumblr and still are live sources for them on DeviantArt. Just search around and you’ll find what you want! :)
In conclusion, I think it’s infinitely more fun NOT to rely on premade PSDs or standardized Settings, but I also recognize and fully respect that if I made graphics differently, I would probably get easily 5-10x more notes on each post than I do. But I make graphics the way that’s fun for me, and I just try to learn a little something from every set I make. The GFFA Planets/swworlds in particular have been something that I started, originally, because I wanted to catch up and learn about Star Wars planets that I felt like I was missing because I don’t have any fannish history with the Old EU, and I wanted to learn about them in a way that helped me feel like I was engaging with the SW source material AND making the enormity of the canon more accessible to other newish or casualish fans, like I was two years ago when I started this aesthetic series. I like making aesthetics that are genuinely inspired by the aesthetic of the thing that I’m calling it an aesthetic of, so even when it ends up just looking like rainbow barf (CURSE YOU, NAR SHADDAA!!!) I’m having fun.
THAT SAID, here’s how the time breakdown for the Crait set works out:
TOTAL TIME INCLUDING IMAGE COLLECTION AND SCREENCAPPING: Est. 20 hours.
COLORING AND ACTUAL GRAPHIC-MAKING PART: 7 hours.
WRITING UP THIS TUTORIAL: 5 hours.
So, um, if you are so inclined, here is my Ko-Fi link. I post at least two graphic sets every week, sometimes up to 25 (usually during October).
I hope this was helpful at all! I had a good time thinking about my process in-depth like this, and I would love to get tagged in any aesthetics you might try making using a similar method! :)
AN ALLCAPS ABOUT GODDAMN ROMANTIC STORYTELLING (AKA ‘HOW WRITING WORKS’) AND TWO SHIPS GIRDED BY MISOGYNY, ONE WHICH IS ACTUALLY ROMANTIC AND ONE WHICH IS DECIDEDLY NOT, AND BOTH OF WHICH ACTUALLY HAVE SHIPS IN THEIR MOVIES WHICH IS JUST A FUN FACT.
[Non-allcaps version here.]
LISTEN, THOUGH, I’M LITERALLY THE PERSON WHOSE MOTHER MADE TO WRITE A 5-PAGE ESSAY ABOUT HOW JACK/ROSE WAS INHERENTLY ABUSIVE BECAUSE HE TAKES ADVANTAGE OF HER VULNERABILITY IN THE MIDST OF HER SUICIDE ATTEMPT AND USES EMOTIONAL MANIPULATION ABOUT HER FEAR OF CAL’S PHYSICAL ABUSE TO HELP HER SELF-ISOLATE FURTHER FROM HER MOTHER AND EVERYONE ELSE SHE’S EVER KNOWN IN ORDER TO GET HER TO CHOOSE HIM, AS THE CONDITION OF LETTING ME SEE TITANIC WHEN IT CAME OUT IN 1997, AND I FULLY ACKNOWLEDGE THAT IS 100% TRUE. JACK ABSOLUTELY PREYS ON ROSE’S VULNERABILITY, AND IN REAL LIFE, IF THAT WERE HAPPENING TO YOU OR YOUR FRIEND, YOU SHOULD GET OUT OF THAT SITUATION.
BUT JACK/ROSE IS ALSO ROMANTIC AS FUCK AND TITANIC IS MY FAVORITE GODDAMN MOVIE OF ALL GODDAMN TIME BECAUSE IT IS ROMANTIC AS FUCK EVEN THOUGH ALL THE ABOVE IS TRUE, BECAUSE LEO AND KATE HAVE CHEMISTRY AND THE CINEMATOGRAPHY AND DIRECTION AND EVERYTHING WORK TOGETHER TO CREATE THEIR DYNAMIC AS A ROMANCE, IN SPITE OF THE ABOVE, BECAUSE THE ABOVE IS AN UNINTENDED TRUTH THAT UNDERSCORES THE STORY BECAUSE JAMES CAMERON IS A MISOGYNIST DOUCHE AND CULTURE REPLICATES ABUSIVE PATTERNS IN MOST TRADITIONAL ROMANCE TROPES (THE FAKAKTA IDEA THAT “LOVE SAVES” BEING THE MOST COMMON, AND THE ONE CLEARLY REPLICATED, HERE). TITANIC WAS CREATED WITH THE INTENTION OF BEING ROMANTIC, DESPITE BEING SADDLED BY A LEGACY OF INHERENT MISOGYNY, AND EVERYTHING OVERT ABOUT JACK/ROSE’S SCENES TOGETHER WORK TO CONVEY THAT INTENTION OF ROMANCE. ULTIMATELY, ALTHOUGH FLAWED IN ITS EXECUTION, JACK/ROSE BOTH WANT THE SAME THING: ROSE’S FREEDOM AND HAPPINESS. (Side note, MOM, Jack even says to her that only she can save herself, and YES I KNOW THAT THE FACT THAT HE’S POSITIONED HERSELF AS HER ONLY ALLY AND CONFIDANTE DURING HER SUICIDAL IDEATIONS ON THE SHIP MAKES HIM SUSPECT IN SAYING THAT BUT GAH). ROMANCE, AS A STORY CONSTRUCT, IS PREDICATED ON TWO CHARACTERS WHO WANT THE SAME ENDGAME GOAL AND WHOSE JOURNEY TOGETHER TOWARDS THAT GOAL HELPS TO ANSWER THE OTHER CHARACTER’S “ESSENTIAL WOUND,” THE UNDERLYING WANT OR GOAL THAT DRIVES ALL OF THE CHARACTERIZATION OF THAT CHARACTER.
SO IN JACK/ROSE’S CASE, WE KNOW THAT BOTH JACK AND ROSE WANT ROSE TO FIND FREEDOM AND HAPPINESS, THEY BOTH WANT TO FIND A WAY OF LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE CONSTRAINTS OF EDWARDIAN SOCIAL STRATA, AND THEY BOTH WANT TO SURVIVE. ROSE’S ESSENTIAL WOUND, WHAT DRIVES EVERY ASPECT OF HER CHARACTERIZATION, IS THAT SHE WANTS TO BE SEEN AND ACKNOWLEDGED AS AN INDIVIDUAL HUMAN PERSON, NOT JUST A “SOCIETY WOMAN” WHOSE TRAITS DON’T EXIST AND WHOSE ONLY ROLE IN LIFE IS TO BE AN ACCESSORY PROCLAIMING THE WEALTH OF A MAN. JACK’S ESSENTIAL WOUND IS THAT HE WANTS TO BE SEEN AS WORTHY, AS IN A PERSON WITH WORTH IN THIS WORLD, IN A WORLD THAT IS DESIGNED FROM THE GROUND UP TO VIEW PEOPLE IN HIS SOCIAL CLASS AS LITERALLY WORTHLESS. IN SPITE OF THE FLAW IN CAMERON’S EXECUTION OF THEIR INITIAL INTRODUCTION AND HOW THAT COLORS THE SCHEMA OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP IN THE CONTEXT OF RAPE CULTURE, JACK/ROSE ARE A QUINTESSENTIAL ROMANCE BECAUSE EVERY ACTION THEY TAKE BOTH TOGETHER AND SEPARATELY IN CANON (ON-SCREEN, IN TITANIC’S CASE) AFFIRM EACH OTHER’S INDIVIDUAL ESSENTIAL WOUNDS AND COOPERATIVELY REACH THEIR SURFACE-LEVEL GOALS.
THAT JACK DIES IS WHAT MAKES TITANIC A ROMANTIC TRAGEDY, BUT IT DOES NOT NEGATE THAT ALL OF THEIR ACTIONS ARE BASED IN MOVING TOWARDS THE SAME GOALS BOTH IN-WORLD AND OUT-WORLD OF THE STORY. THE ACTUAL STORYTELLING BEATS OF TITANIC CREATE ENOUGH CONFIRMATION OF ROMANCE AS THE DYNAMIC BETWEEN THESE TWO CHARACTERS THAT EVEN CAMERON’S DUNDERHEADED INHERENT MISOGYNY DOESN’T PRECLUDE JACK/ROSE FROM READING AS ROMANTIC. SO EVEN I, AN AVOWED ANTI(TM), AM LIKE, “YEAH I ACKNOWLEDGE THIS SHIT’S PROBLEMATIC BUT SIGN ME THE FUCK UP IT’S HOT AND I LOVE IT.”
SO IT’S NOT LIKE ~*ANTIS*~ CAN’T BE NUANCED ABOUT THIS KIND OF THING? IT’S JUST LITERALLY THAT REYLO IS NOT ROMANTIC.
NOTHING ABOUT KYLO REN+REY WAS CONCEIVED, OR FILMED, OR WRITTEN, TO INDICATE ROMANCE. THE ONLY INTERPRETATION OF THEIR SCENES -- INCLUDING, YES, THE LEAKED NEW ONE -- THAT COULD ALLOW FOR ROMANCE IS A FLAWED VIEWING PREDICATED ON A MUCH MORE VIOLENT FORM OF MISOGYNY THAN WHAT GIRDERS JACK/ROSE. TO SEE REYLO AS ROMANTIC REQUIRES 1) THAT REY NOT BE CONSIDERED HER OWN CHARACTER/PERSON, BUT AN EXTENSION OF KYLO REN [in the context of in-world viewing, ie seeing the story from the inside as though it were real]; 2) THAT REY NOT BE CONSIDERED TO HAVE HER OWN STORY, BUT TO EXIST ONLY AS SET DRESSING IN KYLO’S STORY [in the context of out-world viewing, ie seeing the story as a piece of media], 3] ABSOLUTELY PRIVILEGING THE WANTS/GOALS/PHYSICAL INTEGRITY/VALUES/ETC. OF KYLO REN ABOVE REY’S WANTS, GOALS, PHYSICAL INTEGRITY, VALUES, AND LITERAL SAFETY. FROM JUMP, KYLO IS PRESENTED AS THE ANTAGONIST TO REY’S STORY -- AND YES, OF COURSE THE INVERSE IS ALSO TRUE, BECAUSE THAT IS THE NATURE OF PROTAGONIST-ANTAGONIST RELATIONSHIPS, BUT KYLO IS NOT AND NEVER WAS THE PROTAGONIST, SO IT ONLY FUCKING MATTERS IN ONE DIRECTION. REY’S.
REY’S SUPERFICIAL GOALS IN TFA ARE TO SURVIVE, TO DELIVER BB-8 TO THE RESISTANCE, AND TO RETURN TO JAKKU. HER “ESSENTIAL WOUND” GOAL IS TO GET CONFIRMATION THAT SHE MATTERS. KYLO IS PRESENTED FROM JUMP TO BE AN OBSTACLE TO EVERY. ONE. OF. THOSE. GOALS. AND HE NEVER DEVIATES FROM BEING AN OBSTACLE TO HER ACHIEVING THOSE GOALS. IN TLJ, HER SUPERFICIAL GOALS -- AS FAR AS WE KNOW NOW, AND LIKE, IT’S A STAR WAR, SO, IT’S NOT THAT DEEP -- ARE TO SURVIVE, TO DELIVER LUKE TO THE RESISTANCE, AND TO RETURN TO FINN. HER “ESSENTIAL WOUND” REMAINS THE SAME BECAUSE, NEWSFLASH, IT’S ESSENTIAL AND FOR THE SWST TO HAVE ANY SEMBLANCE OF COGENT STORYTELLING, IT MUST REMAIN THE SAME FOR THE ENTIRE TRILOGY: REY WANTS CONFIRMATION THAT SHE MATTERS. GIVEN THE LEAKS WE’VE GOTTEN? KYLO. STILL. WORKS. IN. OVERT. OPPOSITION. TO. HER. EVERY. FUCKING. GODDAMN. ASS. GOAL. HE IS STILL. HER ANTAGONIST.
BY THE NATURE OF HOW PROTAGONIST-ANTAGONIST RELATIONSHIPS WORK, THEY CANNOT BE ROMANTIC, BECAUSE THEY CANNOT -- CAN’T, CAN NOT, ARE NOT ABLE -- TO BE PREDICATED ON ACHIEVING THE SAME ENDGAME GOAL. BECAUSE THE ROLE OF AN ANTAGONIST IS TO OPPOSE THE PROTAGONIST’S JOURNEY TOWARDS ALL OF THEIR GOALS, BOTH SURFACE AND “ESSENTIAL WOUND” AFFIRMATION, THE PROTAGONIST AND ANTAGONIST INHERENTLY, NECESSARILY, AUTOMATICALLY, CANNOT HELP EACH OTHER IN A ROMANTIC CONTEXT TO ACHIEVE THOSE GOALS IN ANY OF THEIR STORY BEATS.
AND THEY FUCKING DON’T.
NOT ONE FUCKING BEAT OF TFA CAN BE BROKEN DOWN IN ANY RATIONAL, ACTUAL, NORMAL, LEGITIMATE WAY, TO SUGGEST THAT KYLO DOES ANYTHING OTHER THAN OPPOSE REY’S GOALS.
HE PHYSICALLY HARMS HER. HE EMOTIONALLY/MENTALLY HARMS HER. IN THE FOREST ON TAKODANA, IN THE FOREST ON STARKILLER, IN THE CHAIR ON THE FINALIZER, KYLO REN ACTIVELY WORKS TO OPPOSE REY’S GOAL OF SURVIVAL. HE IS NOT HOLDING BACK DURING THEIR FIGHT IN THE SNOW, YOU NUTBARS. NOR IS HE MERCIFUL AND TENDER WHEN HE VIOLENTLY AND PAINFULLY PENETRATES HER BODY FOR HIS OWN GAIN DESPITE HER PROTESTS AND TEARS. FUCK YOU.
HE IMPEDES HER PROGRESS TOWARDS THE RESISTANCE WITH BB-8. ONCE SHE’S ON STARKILLER? SHE HAS NO WAY OF KNOWING WHETHER BB-8 MADE IT TO THE RESISTANCE. FINN’S GONE, AS FAR AS SHE KNOWS. UNTIL REY REACHES D’QAR AT THE END, AS FAR AS SHE IS AWARE, KYLO REN SUCCESSFULLY THWARTED HER GOAL TO BRING BB-8, AND THE MAP, TO THE RESISTANCE.
HE DOES ACTUALLY SUCCEED IN OPPOSING HER GOAL TO RETURN TO JAKKU: NOT ONLY DOES HIS EXISTENCE ULTIMATELY CREATE THE SITUATION THAT LED HER TO HAVE TO FLEE IN THE FIRST PLACE (IF LUKE WEREN’T IN HIDING, THERE’D BE NO MAP/IF KYLO HAD NOT LED THE MASSACRE AT TUANUL AND ABDUCTED POE, BB-8 WOULDN’T BE ON JAKKU WITH THE MAP) BUT HE DOES SUCCEED IN CREATING CIRCUMSTANCES THAT HAVE, EVEN AS FAR AS TLJ AS FAR AS WE KNOW, PREVENT REY FROM RETURNING TO JAKKU. HE HAS DEFEATED HER ON THIS ONE OF REY’S GOALS.
OF COURSE, REY ONLY WANTS TO RETURN TO JAKKU BECAUSE OF ANOTHER OF HER GOALS, HER ESSENTIAL WOUND: REY WANTS TO KNOW THAT SHE MATTERS. AND IN TFA, REY’S PATH TO THAT UNDERSTANDING, AS FAR AS SHE CAN CONCEPTUALIZE IT, IS TO BE FOUND AND WANTED BY HER FAMILY. KYLO CANNOT HELP HER WITH THAT, AND, IF YOU WANT TO GET TECHNICAL ABOUT THE TORTURE SCENE, WHICH Y’ALL NEVER DO BECAUSE YOU DON’T WANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT IT’S A GODDAMN RAPE METAPHOR AND TORTURE SCENE IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE, KYLO DOES ACTUALLY OPPOSE THIS GOAL IN THE MOMENTARY MENTION OF IT IN THEIR STORY BEATS TOGETHER: HE TAUNTS HER WITH HER OWN LONELINESS. SHE DOES NOT MATTER. SHE IS ALONE. IN TLJ -- WELL, I’VE TRIED NOT TO SPOIL PEOPLE SO FAR, SO I WON’T HERE, BUT SUFFICE TO SAY: HE DOESN’T EXACTLY GIVE REY ANY POSITIVE AFFIRMATION ON HER ESSENTIAL WOUND. “HE HATES HER, THIS GARBAGE-PICKER,” AFTER ALL.
BY THE NATURE OF THE ACTUAL STORY THAT WAS ACTUALLY HAPPENING ON THE ACTUAL SCREEN DURING THE ACTUAL MOVIE OF STAR WARS THE FORCE AWAKENS, AND AGAIN IN THE ACTUAL MOVIE OF STAR WARS THE LAST JEDI, IT IS LITERALLY NOT POSSIBLE, OR PLAUSIBLE, OR DEFENSIBLE IMO, TO SEE REYLO AS ROMANTIC. IT’S NOT. IT’S JUST LITERALLY NOT. IT IS LITERALLY, NOT A MISUSE OF LITERALITY, NOT ROMANTIC.
IF YOU’RE ALL TRYING TO SAY “WE KNOW IT’S NOT ROMANTIC, PER SE, BUT WE THINK THAT TORTURE-PORN AND SAD WHITE BOYS ARE SEXY ENOUGH THAT I DON’T REALLY CARE ABOUT REY AND JUST WANT KYLO TO GET SOME HOT WET HOLES AND REY IS THERE, SO, LIKE, THAT’S SEXY TO ME,” THEN JUST SAY THAT. BUT IT’S NOT FUCKING ROMANTIC.
IT’S ALSO NOT SEXY; JJ ABRAMS HIMSELF CONFIRMED THE TORTURE SCENE IS A RAPE METAPHOR, BUT WHATEVER.
Oscar Isaac playing peekaboo with his baby. He has his Poe Dameron hairstyle and just the right stubble.
John Boyega playing with TOO MANY KITTENS at once. TOO MANY. He laughs, delighted and overwhelmed, at the tickle of their tiny toebeans.
Diego Luna with sweaterpaws in a big cableknit cowl-neck, peeking out at me with sparkling eyes.
Alternately: Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal lovingly fixing each other’s hair and collars and glasses.
Harry Styles bashfully holding out a bunch of heart-shaped balloons. He’s wearing a floral suit.
Riz Ahmed floating past in a crystal-blue pool, laying atop a swan-shaped floatie. He tilts his sunglasses down to wink.
Harrison Ford looking vaguely maybe-disapproving but being a good sport about it.
George Shelley building a blanket fort for two. He wears a blanket cape.
Mahershala Ali having a tea party with gilded bone china teacups covered in fuchsia roses. The other guests are mostly teddy bears.
Andy Samberg making a giant banana split; he’s wearing a cardigan and his glasses, and he had to roll up the sleeves to his elbows.
Aziz Ansari playing with a Dog That Looks Like Tom Haverford, rip the cutest blog concept.
Tom Holland doing breathtaking fouettes and probably a pas de basque combo.
Harry Shum Jr. can come, too.
Richard Ayoade cleaning his glasses. He’s in a beautiful library. He shushes the camera.
Adam Scott eating a calzone, the cheese stretching entirely too long to be realistic. He laughs at himself.
John Cho riding a white horse like in Selfie, but in less of a shirt. Maybe in a light rain.
Ben Schwartz and Joe Keery brushing their teeth side-by-side.
Alfie Enoch frosting a giant pink cake with a smudge of flour on his perfect cheekbone.
Terry Crews painting a still life of flowers and various fruits.
Dev Patel and Andrew Garfield having a pillow fight in ridiculously-patterned flannel pajama pants and white undershirts. They lightly pluck stray feathers from each other’s shoulders.
Armie Hammer walking a moderately sized army of dachsunds in raincoats. He has a magenta umbrella.
Louis Tomlinson, clean-shaven, wearing suspenders. Freddie is dressed to match.
Donnie Yen polishing an apple on his shirt and taking a cheery bite. Or maybe a peach, and then then he wipes his mouth on his wrist.
Luke Pasqualino carving an terrible, terrible, but very cute jack-o’lantern. He’s too proud of it.
Tamal Ray eating a huge sandwich. Probably the number two best sandwich of his life, when they fried the pork with rosemary. I want to see his joy.
Nick Offerman reading “Make Way for Ducklings.” TO DUCKLINGS.
Alternately: Madeline. He’s probably wearing a tool belt.
