galadhir: firstorderforceuser: “I’m
Oct. 18th, 2016 11:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2dxePbs:
galadhir:
firstorderforceuser:
“I’m totally against LGBTQ+ being demonized in fiction. But existence of gay leaders in the Nazi movement is a historical fact, so the [Anti-Kylux] argument is flawed.”
- from these additions by @millicentthecat
I think on a fundamental level, part of what’s going on is that fans are challenging the received wisdom that we “want“ (or should want) to see the bad guys getting punished. A lot of us believe that imprisonment, execution, etc. is a state-sanctioned atrocity, and that it’s mostly inflicted on minorities, PoC, and other scapegoat groups. Mainstream fiction lionizes policing. It portrays the criminal justice system as something that’s supposedly in the service of “victims of violence“ while actually running roughshod over their wishes. But the law and its enforcers have always been at the beck and call of the rich.
Anatole France put it very succinctly when he said “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.“
This impacts Hux and Kylux because, within the assumption that storytelling “has“ to keep bludgeoning its villains, you get people going “fine, but I’m really uncomfortable with the fact that these villains have things in common with me. Quit doing that!“ And I’m not entirely unsympathetic. But I don’t want fans to stop subtext-reading or headcanon-ing that Hux is gay. I want us to keep challenging the perceived inevitability of his demise.
I want canon to take Hux off Death Row.
He’s not a Nazi. And even if he were, I would not support his execution. I am tired of canon killing everyone the heroes don’t recognize as “one of us,“ and this being portrayed as something we’re supposed to celebrate.
I’m saying “I want stories where the positive outcome involves people being able to resolve their differences without beating each other.” And canon responds with “but-but-but this formula we’re trying to use (again) is even more justified than usual, because it’s is just like THAT TIME seventy-some years ago, when the US saved the whole world by murdering a lot of bad people! See, we even dressed up the villains like Nazis so you’d definitely get it!” And then I’m like “I get it. I just still don’t agree.“
Whenever an American canon wants to do an end-run around the question of whether it’s ethical to kill a particular villain, they dehumanize them in very stereotyped, predictable ways. Associating them with Nazis is just one of the most overused. And this does the exact opposite of opening up intelligent conversations about defeated, historical ideologies that have a habit of changing their trappings and reviving in the popular imagination. Instead, it creates this shallow caricature of something everyone is supposed to be able to hate together, guilt-free, but that most people don’t even understand.
Let me put this another way. Most of the people being killed, when America goes to war, are poor and non-white. (Hell. A disturbing amount of the people being recruited into the military and fighting for America are poor and non-white. Martin Luther King Jr. had some pretty choice things to say about that, like: “we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”) In the face of that, making Hux, Kylo, and - for anyone who’s seen actor panels or cast pictures, also Phasma - bone white is a way of trying to erase that context. It’s a way of trying to sell “fighting the First Order“ to liberals, on by catering superficially to an abhorrence for racism, while at the same time selling “these are definitely the villains” to conservatives, on the grounds that Hux is like a mix of Stalin and Hitler, only with more gay, and they must be against at least some of those. :/
That said, the US has to refer constantly back to a war that it fought nearly three-quarters of a century ago to find a conflict it participated in that most educated citizens aren’t against and ashamed of!
And also, whatever American saber-rattling onscreen, against Nazis, may have accomplished, it hasn’t ameliorated racism or classism or even managed to keep straight-up Nazi ideology from becoming very popular in the US. As long as neo-Nazis don’t wear uniforms and funny hats, most Americans don’t recognize them. And the US’s ignorance of most of history is a source of amusement and despair in the entire rest of the world, because sometimes, not even then. (Tangentially related cartoon by Phobs, a Russian Jew who knows his Third Reich.)
A country that bails out its bankers, at the expense of pushing ordinary people into poverty, is both unjust and morally illegitimate. The more of us know that, the less we allow it to burn straw men uncontested, or pretend that its preachy, good vs. evil melodrama is anything but sectarian bullshit.
Kylux is an expression of a strong and vibrant current in fandom, that finds value in characters that canon is pushing us to turn away from. While the fate laid out by default for fictional villains is a manifestation of the power exercised by a government: to single people out and say to the public “these criminals have no place in our society. It’s right to hate them, and it’s right to kill them.“
That train of thought is just as abhorrent to me when it’s coming out of the mouths of Americans.
Pretty much everything that the FO does has already been done by my country. I can’t look at Hux and see someone who is not one of us, because Domhnall has pretty much lifted his rabble-rousing voice from Oswald Moseley who was a British Nazi. We’re being told we have to sympathize with the heroes because we would never be as bad as the villain - but by now, we know we (as a collective) might easily be, and indeed from the perspective of other countries already have been that bad for a very long time.
So yeah, I can’t claim any moral high ground. I can’t gleefully hope the FO will be wiped out. I hope they can somehow be saved. In fact, I would very much like someone to tell me what the solution to fascism is before we get there. Right now putting the brakes on my country’s rush to become the FO (again) seems like a more pressing problem to me than demonizing any outer force.
galadhir:
firstorderforceuser:
“I’m totally against LGBTQ+ being demonized in fiction. But existence of gay leaders in the Nazi movement is a historical fact, so the [Anti-Kylux] argument is flawed.”
- from these additions by @millicentthecat
I think on a fundamental level, part of what’s going on is that fans are challenging the received wisdom that we “want“ (or should want) to see the bad guys getting punished. A lot of us believe that imprisonment, execution, etc. is a state-sanctioned atrocity, and that it’s mostly inflicted on minorities, PoC, and other scapegoat groups. Mainstream fiction lionizes policing. It portrays the criminal justice system as something that’s supposedly in the service of “victims of violence“ while actually running roughshod over their wishes. But the law and its enforcers have always been at the beck and call of the rich.
Anatole France put it very succinctly when he said “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.“
This impacts Hux and Kylux because, within the assumption that storytelling “has“ to keep bludgeoning its villains, you get people going “fine, but I’m really uncomfortable with the fact that these villains have things in common with me. Quit doing that!“ And I’m not entirely unsympathetic. But I don’t want fans to stop subtext-reading or headcanon-ing that Hux is gay. I want us to keep challenging the perceived inevitability of his demise.
I want canon to take Hux off Death Row.
He’s not a Nazi. And even if he were, I would not support his execution. I am tired of canon killing everyone the heroes don’t recognize as “one of us,“ and this being portrayed as something we’re supposed to celebrate.
I’m saying “I want stories where the positive outcome involves people being able to resolve their differences without beating each other.” And canon responds with “but-but-but this formula we’re trying to use (again) is even more justified than usual, because it’s is just like THAT TIME seventy-some years ago, when the US saved the whole world by murdering a lot of bad people! See, we even dressed up the villains like Nazis so you’d definitely get it!” And then I’m like “I get it. I just still don’t agree.“
Whenever an American canon wants to do an end-run around the question of whether it’s ethical to kill a particular villain, they dehumanize them in very stereotyped, predictable ways. Associating them with Nazis is just one of the most overused. And this does the exact opposite of opening up intelligent conversations about defeated, historical ideologies that have a habit of changing their trappings and reviving in the popular imagination. Instead, it creates this shallow caricature of something everyone is supposed to be able to hate together, guilt-free, but that most people don’t even understand.
Let me put this another way. Most of the people being killed, when America goes to war, are poor and non-white. (Hell. A disturbing amount of the people being recruited into the military and fighting for America are poor and non-white. Martin Luther King Jr. had some pretty choice things to say about that, like: “we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”) In the face of that, making Hux, Kylo, and - for anyone who’s seen actor panels or cast pictures, also Phasma - bone white is a way of trying to erase that context. It’s a way of trying to sell “fighting the First Order“ to liberals, on by catering superficially to an abhorrence for racism, while at the same time selling “these are definitely the villains” to conservatives, on the grounds that Hux is like a mix of Stalin and Hitler, only with more gay, and they must be against at least some of those. :/
That said, the US has to refer constantly back to a war that it fought nearly three-quarters of a century ago to find a conflict it participated in that most educated citizens aren’t against and ashamed of!
And also, whatever American saber-rattling onscreen, against Nazis, may have accomplished, it hasn’t ameliorated racism or classism or even managed to keep straight-up Nazi ideology from becoming very popular in the US. As long as neo-Nazis don’t wear uniforms and funny hats, most Americans don’t recognize them. And the US’s ignorance of most of history is a source of amusement and despair in the entire rest of the world, because sometimes, not even then. (Tangentially related cartoon by Phobs, a Russian Jew who knows his Third Reich.)
A country that bails out its bankers, at the expense of pushing ordinary people into poverty, is both unjust and morally illegitimate. The more of us know that, the less we allow it to burn straw men uncontested, or pretend that its preachy, good vs. evil melodrama is anything but sectarian bullshit.
Kylux is an expression of a strong and vibrant current in fandom, that finds value in characters that canon is pushing us to turn away from. While the fate laid out by default for fictional villains is a manifestation of the power exercised by a government: to single people out and say to the public “these criminals have no place in our society. It’s right to hate them, and it’s right to kill them.“
That train of thought is just as abhorrent to me when it’s coming out of the mouths of Americans.
Pretty much everything that the FO does has already been done by my country. I can’t look at Hux and see someone who is not one of us, because Domhnall has pretty much lifted his rabble-rousing voice from Oswald Moseley who was a British Nazi. We’re being told we have to sympathize with the heroes because we would never be as bad as the villain - but by now, we know we (as a collective) might easily be, and indeed from the perspective of other countries already have been that bad for a very long time.
So yeah, I can’t claim any moral high ground. I can’t gleefully hope the FO will be wiped out. I hope they can somehow be saved. In fact, I would very much like someone to tell me what the solution to fascism is before we get there. Right now putting the brakes on my country’s rush to become the FO (again) seems like a more pressing problem to me than demonizing any outer force.
