a conclusion on “sir”
Mar. 15th, 2016 01:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1pHOTNi:
I get wanting to make a society that is gender-neutral but Leia’s entire arc in the original trilogy hinged on them not taking the girl seriously, so I feel like it’s too late.
I can abolish homophobia in this ‘verse, I can get by with totally different ideas about sexual norms and so on, but I can’t get behind half-assing There Is No Gender in a series where the canon material is literally groaning with binary-gender bullshit.
Which is a shame, but I can’t abide the inconsistency. Sorry: the SW universe certainly has defined gender roles in at least the predominating humanoid cultures, given the preponderance of canon evidence demonstrating this– and while they could be significantly shifted from our expectations and I’d enjoy an exploration of that, no argument can seriously be made that they are absent.
Also: erasing the female form of address is not the way to go to neutrality. Making male the default is not neutral.
It’s fanfic, I’ll go with whatever bullshittery the canon universe dictates to us because those are the constraints we come up against. I get it.
But I’m not going to wholeheartedly adopt fanon interpretations that hinge on the assimilation of other fannish tropes from fandoms I’m not even *in*, unless they’re really good.
Which erasing “ma’am” is not.
So that’s my conclusion on it. And I’ll restate, you’re not a bad person if you do it and I’m not, like, mad at you. But it’s bullshit and I’m not going to budge from that.
Unless somehow it’s actually in-universe canon and I just missed it. In which case I’ll shut up about it, but you can be damn sure I won’t use it.
I get wanting to make a society that is gender-neutral but Leia’s entire arc in the original trilogy hinged on them not taking the girl seriously, so I feel like it’s too late.
I can abolish homophobia in this ‘verse, I can get by with totally different ideas about sexual norms and so on, but I can’t get behind half-assing There Is No Gender in a series where the canon material is literally groaning with binary-gender bullshit.
Which is a shame, but I can’t abide the inconsistency. Sorry: the SW universe certainly has defined gender roles in at least the predominating humanoid cultures, given the preponderance of canon evidence demonstrating this– and while they could be significantly shifted from our expectations and I’d enjoy an exploration of that, no argument can seriously be made that they are absent.
Also: erasing the female form of address is not the way to go to neutrality. Making male the default is not neutral.
It’s fanfic, I’ll go with whatever bullshittery the canon universe dictates to us because those are the constraints we come up against. I get it.
But I’m not going to wholeheartedly adopt fanon interpretations that hinge on the assimilation of other fannish tropes from fandoms I’m not even *in*, unless they’re really good.
Which erasing “ma’am” is not.
So that’s my conclusion on it. And I’ll restate, you’re not a bad person if you do it and I’m not, like, mad at you. But it’s bullshit and I’m not going to budge from that.
Unless somehow it’s actually in-universe canon and I just missed it. In which case I’ll shut up about it, but you can be damn sure I won’t use it.
