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dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/3j2jvFu
ah I was looking up the quotations people have been mentioning in the responses to that askmeme https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/629959327385600000/alexs-prompt-folder-anonymously-or-not-tell and I just found the bit where I accidentally predicted The Rise of Skywalker and oh boy am I mad.
This is from Can’t Go Home This Way https://archiveofourown.org/works/6902065, completed in June of 2016.
He laughed. “Well put,” he said. “Well, I am, and it is. Anyway. I have this whole, fucking, mythology, and people are really stupid about it, and it’s fucking * racist*.”
“And it’s because of holonovelas?” Rey asked, dismayed.
“I mean, no,” he said. He’d turned the heat on under the pan, and something sizzled and smelled amazing. Rey’s stomach growled, and she redoubled her efforts to get the control panel to read from those sensors. “Partly. A little. People have this idea entrenched in their head, of the sexy, sensual, passionate Iberican man, maybe slapping his girlfriend around, making foolish and hot-headed choices, drinking to excess, failing at his job, becoming a smuggler, you know we’re all in gangs, with tattoos and gold teeth, and– do you know, one of my teachers at the Academy said right in front of the whole class that of course Dameron would become a drug runner in the end so all of this piloting aptitude would just turn against us.”
“That’s awful,” Rey said, shocked enough to pause and turn around to look at him.
“I was really upset,” Dameron said. “I mean– I was really upset. But even my friends laughed it off so, it just seemed crazy to kick up a fuss. And I’m– it’s been ten years at least and I’m still really upset.” He rubbed his face on the forearm of the hand still holding the knife. “I don’t know if I could tell you how many people over the years have just– expected that if I survived military service I’d wind up a rhyndo’d old beggar in a backwater trading outpost somewhere.” He glanced over at her, though his wandering eyes made it hard to tell if he was really looking at her or just at the viewscreen. “So this is especially charming for me, to prove them right after all.” The bitter twist to his features looked horribly out-of-place on his handsome face, and it moved her unexpectedly.
“No,” Rey said fiercely. “No, Poe, they weren’t right. You’re going to wind up the first person ever to get rhyndo’d and walk away from it and * spit on them*.”
He laughed, at that, and she could see then how people would describe it as like the sun coming up. When he smiled sincerely, the corners of his eyes crinkled, and it was possibly the most charming thing in the world. She tore her dazzled gaze away and went back to her wiring diagram.
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Date: 2020-09-23 08:33 pm (UTC)(GORGEOUSLY written. Gorgeously. I have been there -- not literally, but in the "racists told me I would fail, and I did fail, so I know they would feel vindicated if they knew" place, and this gets me through the heart.)
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Date: 2020-09-26 06:58 pm (UTC)This series is... complicated, about race, and I worry I didn't get it right, but I worry it's not possible to get it right entirely, but then of course I worry that naturally intentions aren't really enough etc. etc., and, well--
but some things are pretty relatable, and I've certainly been there with the 'my sexist teacher told me i couldn't do it and then I couldn't and UGH'--
and I am just so upset that THE CANON AUTHORS with the HUGE BUDGET and like PEOPLE THEY COULD HAVE ASKED went and did the very exact thing that my stupid unpaid dumb white ass had said would be THE WORST POSSIBLE THING three or four or whatever years before!!! it is truly amazing. Truly amazing.
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Date: 2020-09-26 07:30 pm (UTC)I think 'getting it right' is a spectrum rather than a single target. I mean, I have written about race and had other Black people disagree with what I wrote. :) But yeah, this particular pattern of bigotry echoes.
And needless to say I TOTALLY agree with you about that execrable bit of so-called canon. I need to write a story where Poe was actually undercover and that Leia smacked the person who sent him (in a way that references both Watsonian and Doylistic reasons why that was a BAD IDEA).