#anghraine's queue

[anghraine]

I just don't understand anonymous hate. I don't even send anonymous affection.

[anghraine]

crocordile replied to your post: 

Let’s name them “p&p 95 is the perfect adaptation” and “but in the EU…”

hahahaha, it’s true

[anghraine]

can you elaborate on how ppl overdo the parallels/opposites with finn and kylo?

Sure.

On the meta level—the shape of the story as a constructed thing—Finn and Kylo are the direct inverse of each other. Just off the top of my head:

- Finn is one faceless stormtrooper among many, stripped of all familial ties; Kylo is the last (known) Skywalker, beloved only child of heroes and sent to his uncle

- Finn is brought up in the First Order from early childhood; Kylo is recruited into it

- Finn’s birth name (and any name) was taken from him; Kylo rejects his name, and takes a new one

- Finn is relentlessly trained for one thing by external forces; Kylo is psychically stalked and torn between conflicting influences

- Finn innately distinguishes wrong and right—the very first time that he is faced with a moral choice, he instinctively chooses right; Kylo’s sense of morality is a jumbled mess that has led him to Light = seductive evil and Dark = hard but right, and obviously he made a very wrong choice at whatever his moment of crisis was

- Finn seizes his earliest chance to leave the First Order, at considerable danger to himself; Kylo, though tempted, refuses to leave the First Order

- Kylo regards Finn as a traitor; everyone regards Kylo as a traitor

Etc. 

But the thing is—these are meta connections underlying what’s going on with the people and choices within the story. Finn’s character and development is not limited to being Kylo Ren’s opposite. His relationship with Poe, for instance, has virtually nothing to do with Kylo. His relationship with Rey has very little to do with Kylo until they’re attacked (and that fight culminates in Rey-Kylo, not Finn-Kylo). Even Finn’s relationship with Kylo’s father has approximately nothing to do with Kylo. And the same goes for Kylo, whose fixation on his grandfather, conflict over his father, veneration for Snoke, etc are all largely or completely independent of anything whatsoever to do with Finn.

This is a contrast to something like, say, the much stronger links between Luke and Vader in the OT. Those parallels exist not only on the meta level (for instance, scenes shot to mirror each other) but involve very real similarities of personality and interpersonal connections in the story that the characters themselves are aware of and influenced by. So when Luke sees the wires in Vader’s hand, then looks down and opens his own robot hand, it’s not only structural subtext but text, something real and present and absolutely critical in Luke’s own mind. 

The closest thing I can think of to anything like that between Finn and Kylo is … Rey is frightened by her affinity with the Skywalker lightsaber and it’s instead passed to Finn, and then Kylo nearly kills him to get it back, except he loses it to Rey, who beats him up with it and passes it on to Luke. It’s not that there’s no significance in Kylo claiming the saber and Finn wounding him with it, just that there’s a lot going on there that is not about Kylo-Finn (I would personally argue that the lightsaber primarily represents the connection between Rey and the Force/Luke, in fact). And the characters themselves do not experience a significance to it beyond “hey, fuck you.”

And even Luke and Vader can’t be entirely reduced to character connections, even those literal, explicit, in-story connections. They both have plenty going on that’s indirectly connected or not at all. The growth of Luke and Leia’s relationship has very little to do with Vader beyond biology. Luke and Han’s relationship has even less. Vader in ANH is only lightly tied to Luke and does not himself perceive anything beyond “huh, really strong in the Force. Oh well.”

Yet with Finn and Kylo, there seems to be this idea that, because there’s a connection built into the framework of the story, their characters are wholly yoked together. Any development of one of them, any choice that either makes, any plot point, anything, must somehow connect to the other one. And they’re on some teeter-totter where any attention given to one would otherwise have gone to the other, even though it’s very improbable in the writing sense. 

That is: less attention to Kylo almost certainly would result in more attention to other villains, not Finn. Less attention to Finn would likely mean more to Poe, Rey, and perhaps others in the Resistance, not a transfer to Kylo. Common sense should tell people this, but somehow, nope.

(You also get this extended in a still more peculiar way to fandom. In particular, I see this constant insistence that people who write fic about Kylo would be writing about Finn if not for Kylo’s presence, when it’s much more probable that someone who writes about Kylo would otherwise be writing about… someone at least remotely like Kylo.)

tl;dr—Certain Parties appear to be of the opinion that Kylo’s and Finn’s characters are wholly bound up in the very real opposition that exists between them. But this is so obviously not the case that it’s genuinely bizarre. They’re separate characters whose plotlines only very occasionally intersect, who in-story are vastly more preoccupied with other people than each other, who occupy entirely different narrative functions, and who are primarily involved in different areas of the story’s structure.

[anghraine]

A symbolic leap occurs when you decide, without any support from the text, that some image you find in the text is a symbol, and then you develop an interpretation based on that symbol. In fact, once you make one symbolic leap in your reading of a text, you are very liable to make others in order to try to justify your first. [...]In other words, in the example I haven't been interpreting Hakim. I've been interpreting someone in real life whom I dislike and then ascribing those characteristics to Hakim. [...]Perhaps more important, however, we need to be aware that your judgment of a text's attitude toward such issues as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation will probably be influenced strongly by our own evolving attitudes towards these issues ... [t]he problem of how to know when we're analyzing the text and when we're responding, instead, only to a personal belief or experience that we've projected onto the text is not a problem we can solve once and for all. It's a problem that continually recurs for all readers. So think of it as an ongoing challenge.

Lois Tyson, “Using concepts from reader-response theory to understand our own literary interpretations,” Using Critical Theory: How to Read and Write About Literature

It gets better!!

[anghraine]

I am so tired of this conversation

person: We don't even have real options! I mean, we've basically got a moderate Republican president.

me: Obama is left of the entire Republican Party and most of the Democratic Party.

person: Yeah, because the Democrats are becoming the centrist party the Republicans should be, and the GOP are batshit wingnuts.

me: No? The Democratic Party has been moving left for years. It's becoming LESS centrist, not more.

person: That's why we picked another corrupt center-right Clinton as our nominee, huh?

me: Hillary is not Bill?????

person: But she's still part of their system! If Biden had run—

me: HILLARY IS LEFT OF BIDEN

person: She's just saying that to get elected.

me: She was left of 85% of the Senate when she was there and 70% of the Democrats! This is not a new development!! She was left of the Bidens and Bills even as FLOTUS!

person: That's because we're so far right. Like, 'left' in America is centrist in Europe.

me: Okay, but we're not in Europe?????

person: Really, Bernie would be center-right in Europe.

me: What are you talking about?

person: The far right in Europe is what's liberal here. It's awful.

me: THE FAR RIGHT IN EUROPE ARE FUCKING NAZIS

[anghraine]

accidentally discovering that your fave bloggers in a common megafandom are into the same dodgy ship from your middling fandom? 

:D :D :D :D :D

[anghraine]

hey Tumblr

tacking “uwu” onto a strawman version of an argument doesn’t actually refute it

[anghraine]

person: fans bullying creators is wrong

me: absolutely

person: fans sending cascades of vitriolic threats is especially wrong and a major problem with modern fandom care of the 24/7 access that social media provides

me: YES. SERIOUSLY.

person: really, the fundamental issue is fan entitlement. fans feel they have a right to directly tell creators what they think of their art, even to attempt to influence what gets produced, rather than acknowledging the total control and authority of the creator

me: ...bye