#super screams

[winkingrain]

Obviously this wouldn’t solve ALL the problems in star wars but like.  Imagine how much in star wars would be better if adults treated children like, dare I say it, actual children.

Like, if 9 year old baby Anakin Skywalker is brought to the Jedi Council and they say “you are practically an infant and require so much therapy for literally growing up in the worst environment in the world and regardless of what happens next we’ll make sure you end up somewhere safe”... idk what would HAPPEN but at least you wouldn’t be questioning this 9 year old’s right to like, exist outside of slavery.

Or! Obi-Wan in TPM! Granted, he’s like, 25 or something, but he’s also a dude who just became an adult in the eyes of the Jedi because his pseudo-dad died, so maybe don’t saddle him with responsibility right off the fucking bat.  Maybe he’d have fewer issues? Obi-Wan’s canonical childhood is already so incredibly fucked up, he doesn’t need more of this.

The clones! Those are children in adult’s bodies! Don’t send them to WAR are you KIDDING me they’re TEN.  Not to mention they have no rights, aren’t paid, are barely considered sentient, and aren’t given a choice about being cannon fodder in the eyes of the government.  THEY’RE CHILDREN.

The padawans! ALSO CHILDREN.  And you don’t even have the excuse that they look like adults here or that they’ve been trained for war since ever (again, what the fuck).  Ahsoka was FOURTEEN when people said “yeah we can send this kid into an active war zone” and DID.  And initiates can become padawans as young as ten years old! Somewhere in the clone wars there are FIFTH GRADERS running around getting shot at and some of them have probably died because they’re IN A WAR ZONE.  If the Jedi pressured the senate a little and was like “no, actually, you can’t put CHILDREN in BATTLE there are LAWS against that”... well, they might not be successful, but the fact that they were just like, “I mean, lesser of two evils, its our duty to the republic, must be done I suppose” about the ENTIRE ORDER being-- what? conscripted? into the GAR is just... idk.  How can you possibly justify putting kids in war zones when they’re literally there as students who aren’t fully qualified, and then REPEATEDLY left to deal with things like this on their own.  I can understand it if the galaxy was a little chiller and it was more of “yes padawan mine sort out this trade disagreement I’ll be monitoring but it’s your show” that’s fine.  That’s a good learning experience.  But you can’t leave the equivalent of a high school freshman in the middle of hostile territory and be shocked when something goes wrong.

Also, just in general, the idea of children being capable soldiers at all is awful! And, I would think, something that the Jedi Council would disapprove of! Oh, you look out for the interests of other people? Hm, why do you, General Jedi #6, have a middle schooler with you? HOW DO YOU RECONCILE THIS

More specifically... Ahsoka was the age of a high school sophmore/young junior when she was ARRESTED AND TRIED FOR TERRORISM as the Jedi Council tried to make a point about not being soft on their own members during war.  How callous do you have to be to not show compassion to a, again, LITERAL NON-ADULT who must have so much PTSD already and then just go “in fact, we’re going to arrest you for MURDER” as if her life couldn’t get any worse, only to then not give her ANY support after leaving.  That’s not an adult, there! That is a TALL CHILD with laser swords and a lifetime voucher for therapy!

And looping back around to between TPM and AOTC, people let Palpatine talk to a ten year old? Repeatedly? Like, the amount of interest that this elderly man is showing in a middle schooler should definitely raise some eyebrows, regardless of sithy dramatic irony.  Anakin is a CHILD and, if I recall correctly, Palpatine, like, threatens the Jedi order in order to speak with him alone? No one said, “no actually we’re calling the police because this REEKS of come into my white panel van child I have toffee energy”? No one wondered why on earth this guy who runs the galaxy wants to speak to this random snot nosed kid? For crying out loud, no one says “hey mr. Chancellor, I think you probably have like 5 million better things to do than chat up an infant”? hell on earth, no one even does THAT much, which isn’t so much looking out for Anakin as it is wondering why the chancellor isn’t doing his job! TAKE CARE OF YOUR FUCKING CHILDREN, STAR WARS UNIVERSE, BEDAMNED HYPERFIXATION

[winkingrain]

You know what's funny about Star Wars? The fact that they go “oh the Jedi purge wiped out basically all the Jedi, you know, almost immediately, there’s hardly any left” and then you hang out on the wiki for an unrecommended amount of time and you find like 50 adult, super dangerous Jedi who survived the purge and presumably just.  Hang out? Around the Galaxy? And obviously there were copious amounts of child murder involved in the purge, but it seems like if you survived the initial attack, your odds of living for quite a while afterwards is NOT TERRIBLE.  No way in hell am I going to list them all, but you’ve got Obi-Wan, who lives for a good 19 years afterwards;  Ahsoka, who lives both nearly that long and way longer due to shenanigans; Jocasta Nu, who I don’t remember how long she lives but its a time AND she goes head to head with Vader; and Kanan Jarrus and that red-headed guy in the video games and MORE, definitely, and so I’m just wondering (other than the obvious Doylist answer, which I’m not interested in) where the hell they were for ANH.  Like, they could be anywhere in the galaxy.  What were they doing? We know SOME of them took padawans, so there are MORE Jedi by the time the original trilogy rolls around.  Idk, I think it would be funny though if they show up (from Luke’s perspective) around the end of the war, id Luke as a member of Yoda’s funky lineage, and immediately collectively groan, because they have ANOTHER one now.

[winkingrain]

where do I go to complain that there’s basically no scholarships for trans people and FORGET about being nonbinary, and that most of the STEM scholarships are only for women? like, no, I’m not a woman.  I’m not a man, either.  I’m not anything, actually, that is useful for getting me a scholarship, which is such a  ridiculous concern that I don’t even know how to feel about it.  But it also makes me think “huh.  I am a marginalized gender in STEM and I am often perceived as being a woman, if a very butch one, should I apply for this anyway? the concern of supporting gender minorities in STEM would SEEM to apply to me, except that it is defined as women” and then I think about the WiSTEM events I’ve attended where I tried to bring that up, and the only change it brought about was all the attendees and hosts started saying “female identified” instead of women, which was worse, and then I feel like the only way to get anywhere with this whole fucking mess is to write an open letter trying to make WiSTEM more inclusive, but then I don’t know where I’d send that letter, and then I think of 100 reasons not to and then I get frustrated and bang out this fucking post instead.

[winkingrain]

It’s a real bummer that Mando’a isn’t super fleshed out with, like, different classes of nouns because it would be super neat to use the LANGUAGE to represent the ideology/concept of armor and weapons as a part of a Mandalorian.  In one language (which of course reflects culture), horses are INalienable, but wives are alienable.  Wives don’t need to belong to anyone, but a horse is like an arm or a leg; it will always be part of someone.  I can imagine Mando’a having a similar function with armor/weapons because those are a part of a more traditionally-minded Mando’s self.

It would also be really neat to do this because then there would be not just loss/denial of culture when the New Mandalorians took over but they might try to change the language to conform to their ideology by separating armor and weapons from a Mando individual.  This could create/be an aspect of a dialect (admittedly, it’s a very small change, but I could see it happening with a lot of other elements as well) between different sects of Mandalorians.

Imagine how weird it would be if someone said something like “the leg got hurt in that game.”* Most people would say “whose leg?” because legs don’t just wander around getting hurt in games on their own, and there’s no way it doesn’t belong to someone.  But in this hypothetical Mando’a, Mandalorians think of their armor in the same way.  Armor doesn’t exist on its own.  It can’t, within their concept of language and the world.  So if the New Mandalorian’s tried to change this concept, they would be disrupting cultural and linguistic assumptions.  (Would they think to do this at all? I argue they might, because linguistic change has historically occurred following social change; on a small scale, think of the expansion and contraction of the usage of “they.”  On a larger one, think of the movement in Spanish to use the gender-neutral marker -e.)

I don’t know, man, I’m guess I’m just bummed that Mando’a (given how many people have the ability to contribute to it) doesn’t have the linguistic complexity of, say, Quenya (WHICH YES IS A HIGH BAR THAT’S WHY I SAID GIVEN HOW MANY PEOPLE CONTRIBUTE TO IT), so that we can make extremely detailed metas and linguistic analyses of it.

*also think of how we say “I hurt my leg,” even if the injury isn’t your fault

[winkingrain]

I’ve become obsessed with stories that are about loss not in the “someone died” way but in the “we’ve both changed and our relationship and desires and needs have also changed so dramatically that there’s no place in our lives for each other anymore” way.  How much more does that hurt.  How much more painful is it to see someone you loved so dearly and maybe even still love so dearly and know in your heart that your lives don’t mesh anymore? Particularly if one person has accepted this, knows they need to move on and have, and the other one keeps striving to regain something that’s lost? How much more meaningful is it to have several discrete parties that look at each other and know that they want the relationship they once had, or want a relationship they could’ve had, but know that the other people aren’t the people that can make that possible? Death is so final, so static, but this, this, THIS! This is dynamic and vicious like playing tug-of-war with an open wound and it makes for such a different story.  Imagine if the dead were characters beyond the fact of their death and the grief they left behind.

[winkingrain]

It’s really, really interesting seeing antis and pro-censorship people argue about what should and shouldn’t be allowed in fandom, because most of the criticisms of the sort of “read what you like” crowd read exactly like formulaic criticisms of New Religious Movements (hereafter abbreviated to NRMs).

You’re Doing Sex Wrong

In the case of fandom, this comes down to the over-generalization of things like “abuse” and “pedophilia” which really extend to everything the individual author isn’t a fan of.  Say a fic has kinky sex in it, and the critic doesn’t vibe with that--not only does accusing that kink of abuse or pedophilia or the like legitimize the criticism (in the minds of the author and, they would hope, the consumer of that criticism), it also delegitimizes the use and writing of that kink (in the minds of people inclined to these kinds of arguments).

Likewise, with NRMs, people who are inclined to the “mainstream” religions often accuse those in NRMs of violating whatever sex is supposed to be.  Sometimes it’s because they practice free love.  Sometimes its because the rules around sex are so extreme that those not involved in the NRM feel like it’s too constrained.  Some of these criticisms of harm might be just.  Many are not.  Either way, sex and how people do it is a pretty common general argument against things outside the mainstream, because it’s an emotional topic and easy to get a visceral response from.

Think of the Children

In fandom discourse, you will see this phrase, both as an ironic descriptor of arguments and, in one form or another, as a genuine sentence.  Arguments under this umbrella include the “if people read about rapists they’ll think rape is acceptable” argument and similar.  It’s paternalistic, and assumes no responsibility or agency on the part of the people involved (which is further discussed in point 3).  But it’s also largely abstract; sure, there are children out there who have read sexually explicit texts, but the arguments extrapolated from this fact are generally disconnected to reality and unrepresentative of the actual issues.

With NRMs, the involvement of children is a hot issue.  For those involved, they’re raising their children in their faith, just as Christians, Muslims, Jews, and everyone else who participates in religion.  It’s often argued by those not involved that the children have no choice here (partially correct, but generally not any less true for other religions) and that this is a kind of brainwashing.  However, this applies less to fandom due to the fact that no one’s really born into fandom spaces.  Regardless, the arguments take very similar shapes.

They’re Brainwashed

Fandom antis don’t often use the word “brainwashed” to describe members of the “read what you like” crowd (so far as I’ve seen), but they are inclined to a mindset that says that:

Not-antis are either ignorant of the harms, hilariously misinformed, or malicious (or all three!)

Antis, if given total control, will be better suited to making decisions for these people, as they are clearly incapable

This looks a LOT like how people discuss people they believe to be brainwashed (brainwashing has a lot of problems, scientifically speaking, but that’s not the point).  Brainwashing claims deny the agency of the “victim,” deny their ability to make decisions, and argue that an outside influence knows better and should be deferred to for decision making (for further information, the Wikipedia article on deprogramming is a good start).

Brainwashing claims regarding NRMs function similarly.  NRMs are violate the orthodoxy of our social structures and conventions and challenge the necessity or validity of these structures and conventions, often leaving people who live more in the “mainstream” to feel under threat.  Fanworks that are heavily criticized also tend to defy expectations and conventions, thus finding themselves under similar scrutiny, though the critics in the case of fanworks are more often masquerading as progressives when they do.

The claims here are also very interesting because they represent a very American criticism.  These are the multitudinous criticism of a couple centuries of American religious explorations distilled into a single, ready-to-use formula.  Like horoscopes, these criticisms are flexible and can easily apply to anything, if you stretch the definitions of words enough, and they’re designed to be like that.  Seeing these arguments automatically makes me skeptical because, by their very nature, they are one-size-fits-all complaints puppeted by an initial emotional reaction, which is not logical and has little chance of being taken seriously in a debate.

I know at least a dozen people have said that a lot of anti rhetoric is really just American Puritanism in a liberal hat, but it’s also American Protestant anti-cult rhetoric in a liberal hat, which looks really similar but endorses kidnappers and torture.

[winkingrain]

I love the scene in the first episode in FMAB when we meet Ling, and Fu says something like “a cannon in her [Paninya’s] prosthetic limb? This country is something to be reckoned with” and you have to admire his composure for not just saying “you lot are fucking lunatics, alchemy or no alchemy!”

[winkingrain]

Current high point of my life was getting to hold a king snake for 20 minutes during a biology lecture about DNA translation