Okay, we've had the big reveals for Episode 8, Season 4 of Rebels, and Battlefront II. The majority of the official love-in is over, so it's time to talk about what's consistently occurring in the panels- made explicit in this little thing put out just before Celebration.
There it is, folks. There is the SocJus Death Cult memetic disease, doing their "Strong Female Character" scam again, and you can hear it in the weasel word of Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. It's identity politics being soft-shilled, using that ever-popular "We need more girls in (X)!" not-argument.
The panels for the films, the series, the games, etc. all had varying degrees of Muh Strong Wimmins going on, with "Strong" as code for "masculine" and femininity downplayed and depreciated. This wretched excuse for Muh Progressivism--the castigation for proper heroes, of manly men and womanly women--got called out being the fraud that it was on today's Geek Gab episode which covered related topics such as how pozzed companies can keep this up as they do. (Hint: Parent companies let them, and will go on until the parent feels the pain- severely.)
George Lucas has his issues, but at least he got that manly heroes and womanly heroines are things that audiences respond to and long for- especially his target audience of children approaching adolescence and the accompanying transformation into the emerging generation of men and women. (And yes, for all his flaws, Leia was feminine and so was Padme; Rey, by comparison, isn't so and its presence is only due to the actress who very much a girly girl.)
The poz is still soft, for now; there are plausible excuses for a lot of the elements in the media. The most blatant examples (Rey, Jyn) get a hell of a lot of pushback usually because the characters rely too much on their identity and thus fail to get the proper characterization needed to make audiences care. (The plan is to rely on the targeted audience of girls to invest in these characters as proxies for themselves; again, we have Sanctioned Fanfic going on, and Self-Inserts are tells for such- especially for Mary Sue trainwrecks of boredom and suck.)
At least "princess culture" still has girls being told that being feminine is good for them, and promotes masculinity in boys, but this gets into "I don't need no man" territory- and we all know how that works out by now, don't we?
Kathleen Kennedy's whole shtick is about making Star Wars a feminist thing. She has been pretty straight forward about that from the beginning. I think a lot of fans outside the sjw types were looking the other way with hopes that the franchise wouldn't be dragged through the mud. Two movies in now and that's clearly not the case.
ReplyDeleteYep, this is policy coming from the top. Can't be ignored anymore; both Rey and Jyn are Men With Tits (there is not one damned thing about either that demands femininity to overcome their challenges), which is a reliable tell for that form of pozzing.
DeleteHey, I just wandered in and have been reading your posts on this in particular. Just to ensure I'm not misunderstanding you. The problem isn't that Rey is more of a "masculine" character as a general rule, is it? I don't really see why a masculine female character is necessarily a bad thing inherently, but I'm not sure if that's what you mean. Is it the execution of Rey as a character? I could understand that readily - she does sound like a bit of a Mary Sue, as much as that term gets tossed around.
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