Is Toxic "Star Wars" Fandom Imploding?

[jaime]

I rather like being called an SJW, it's certainly preferable to the alternative....

Yeah it's very hard to see the Empire as being a positive progressive influence, much less the victims of the Rebellion's "terrorism". This idea's been knocking around for decades admittedly but typically as a tongue in cheek observation, a playful wrongfooting of the assumptions inherent in the film's protagonist/antagonist relationship. I've never really thought anyone took it seriously?

I think the problem is it’s a vague fairy tale set up. Evil empires work in fairly shallow stories, but the way Star Wars is set up, the empire is technically the legal government. We know the rebels are the ‘goodies’, but on paper...we don’t necessarily see that. Alderaan is about the only evil thing we see the empire do. So yeah, you can have a laugh with that...Luke as the radicalised war orphan committing acts of terrorism against the state.
I think an overtly real world political view of the dynamics in Star Wars falls at all sorts of hurdles...especially because it’s all very silly in places. We have British actors being dubbed into American, because to George, the ‘old republic’ was some kind of England from war movies...which in turn becomes basically the coruscante accent. We can talk about the rebellion as multi-ethnic, but it really isn’t until return of the Jedi, it’s mostly white dudes with moustaches, and Lando turns up later. We see mon mothma, but she’s not out there in the ships...it’s ultimately a princess getting rescued from the big cloaked baddie. Any attempt to map too much real world stuff onto it, especially the OT, will pretty swiftly fall into ‘what’s a Nubian?’ Territory.
Which yes, as we see, some people take waaaaay to seriously.
(And as others point out, way too many people get turned on by the Jack boots.)

SJW...some days it’s ‘yeah, I fight for good things!’ Other days, it just looks like a rebranding of ‘mob rule’, so that’s a daft acronym that has so many meanings it has none. Mind you, I had to have white knighting explained to me after being accused of it, largely because it turns out I am getting old.

I do wonder sometimes if Star Wars monolithic place in modern culture causes problems...we automatically assume ‘rebels’ and ‘underdog’ to be ‘good’...and proceed to get horrified when the reality in our world can often be very very different.

 

[Awesome Possum]

Anything can be framed the way you want it to by distilling it down to a slogan like you did. But it doesn't make it so.

Star Wars is a throwback to 1930s style swashbucklers and draws upon the hero's journey all the way back to Gilgamesh. That is not progressive at its core. It's reactionary in being steeped in nostalgia for an earlier, more "civilized" time.

The moral landscape of the 70s was just as cynical if not moreso than today, thanks to Vietnam and Watergate. Star Wars presented an appealing escape from the seemingly intractable malaise of the 70s. Good was good. Evil as evil. And nobody sat around pontificating about identity politics.

Leia was a princess and the Jedi were knights in order to evoke fantasy tropes. There's nothing progressive about royalty or feudalism.

Leia was STILL a damsel in distress through most of Star Wars' runtime. It was only after she was freed did she grab a blaster and start mouthing off like a screwball comedy and then reassert herself as a military leader at Yavin.

So Star Wars tried to have its cake and eat it too. It was that delicate balancing act of presenting a world that felt old fashioned without feeling politically incorrect (at the time). This is also why there is no true organized religion in Star Wars. The Force is more of a philosophy than a religion. So it has the warm fuzzies of a Normal Rockwell painting without beating you on the head with outdated cultural dogma.

This is also why, for instance, E.T. was such a hit, as E.T.'s message was nothing more than "beee goood".

It's only when post-modernists start deconstructing media to an anal-retentive degree and drawing little hash-marks, white men here, women there, blacks there, that everything just turns into a massive pain in the ass rather than the uplifting feel-good entertainment Star Wars was always supposed to be.

/rant

George Lucas himself said Star Wars was politically influenced, even comparing to the Ewoks beating the Empire to the Vietnam war. And as Spot pointed out, the Empire is clearly heavily inspired by the Nazis. It's impossible to not pick up on that, where do you think the term "stormtrooper" comes from. But I'm going to defend Leia, she quits being a damsel after the first movie even then she's far more than your standard damsel trope. She blasting as many Stormtroopers as the guys. She is basically running Echo Base, issuing orders to pilots and giving the final command to abandon the base. She's no longer a Princess given her planet is gone, it's pretty much a title of respect at this point because she's a military leader at that point. I don't know if you've ever looked into how the military operates, they don't really take commands from a dead leader's kid unless they're in the chain of command. Leia later kills Jabba and is part of assault team on Endor (you don't traditionally send royalty on secret assault missions). Star Wars is taking traditional fairy tale tropes, but interpreting for modern audiences at the time. Something that the current films are also doing, which really shows how much things have changed since 1977. Leia has gone from the Princess to the General.

For what's it's worth there's a lot of stuff in E.T. about divorce. Elliot's parents are divorced, it's commented on several times in dialogue and is basically a sort of lingering element of the film. E.T. is basically coming in to help this broken family. Divorce and parental abandonment (especially the father) is fairly common in a lot of Spielberg's early work since he has discussed him using his films as a way to process his own childhood memories of his parents divorcing. It goes away by the time he's raising his own kids and has said that if he made Close Encounters now, Roy wouldn't leave his family to run off with aliens.

Movies aren't just simple stories, there's a lot of subtext and influences both external and internal. The current politics, the creator's past and what they are currently going through go into it. This isn't modern deconstruction, a lot of it is the direct word from the creator. You can't ignore or dismiss it because you just never picked up on it. It's why people study film.

 

[Mach5]

But I'm going to defend Leia, she quits being a damsel after the first movie even then she's far more than your standard damsel trope.

The only "damsel in distress" element in ANH is the fact that she's a prisoner (obviously a political prisoner) who is getting rescued by two guys (one of which is the Campbellian "hero boy on a journey" type). However, there's nothing "damsel in distress" about the way she immediately stands up to Vader and Tarkin, two legitimately scary villains and mass murderers. Leia is the embodiment of bravery from the first moment she appears on screen, and as it would later turn out, the brains of the bunch (it doesn't even occur to Han or Luke that the Empire intentionally let them go).

 

[Awesome Possum]

The only "damsel in distress" element in ANH is the fact that she's a prisoner (obviously a political prisoner) who is getting rescued by two guys (one of which is the Campbellian "hero boy on a journey" type). However, there's nothing "damsel in distress" about the way she immediately stands up to Vader and Tarkin, two legitimately scary villains and mass murderers. Leia is the embodiment of bravery from the first moment she appears on screen, and as it would later turn out, the brains of the bunch (it doesn't even occur to Han or Luke that the Empire intentionally let them go).

She lies to Vader's face (mask?) about their mission and Vader is treated as the scariest being in the galaxy in that movie. It's a disservice to Leia as a character to call her a damsel. She's even insulting Luke and Han and taking charge as they're supposed to be rescuing her because she recognized these guys were in way over their head.

 

[Refuge]

Insulting someone is empowering? Yeah, I guess it is.

 

[jaime]

The only "damsel in distress" element in ANH is the fact that she's a prisoner (obviously a political prisoner) who is getting rescued by two guys (one of which is the Campbellian "hero boy on a journey" type). However, there's nothing "damsel in distress" about the way she immediately stands up to Vader and Tarkin, two legitimately scary villains and mass murderers. Leia is the embodiment of bravery from the first moment she appears on screen, and as it would later turn out, the brains of the bunch (it doesn't even occur to Han or Luke that the Empire intentionally let them go).

She is literally a damsel (young noblewoman) in distress (help me Obi Wan kenobi). That she’s the breaking with the cinematic trope a fair bit from the very beginning is great. (I have this feeling she’s not the first...not least as in some ways she’s got a chunk of Deja Thoris in her character DNA.) her imagery, in ANH, is princess. Damsel. Chained by the Dragon essentially. After that she’s more warrior queen (as she literally is, since her mother and father, from whom she gets the title, are both dead, making her exiled queen of a now destroyed place.) than damsel. Because this a story where the crazy old space wizard isn’t a wizard, the pirate isn’t a pirate (and certainly not on the sea) and even the farmboys farm doesn’t have livestock or planted crops. Even the knights aren’t knights as such.
Is Princess Leia a blaster toting heroine? Yes.
Is she a damsel in ANH? Yes.
One does not preclude the other.
Maybe it’s because we have damselflies, but when I was a kid damsel did t automatically come with a train track to be tied to. And that trope was being subverted before movies went full colour I think.

 

[Mach5]

She is literally a damsel (young noblewoman) in distress (help me Obi Wan kenobi).

Help me by getting those plans to the Rebellion, not please rescue me from the bad people.

 

[Awesome Possum]

Insulting someone is empowering? Yeah, I guess it is.

Imagine just seeing your planet blow up and you're awaiting your execution, then some farm boy a knucklehead smuggler and his buddy come to rescue you as you quickly realize they don't have a plan or clue about what they're doing. They actually alerted the entire base to their prison break of the Empire's most valuable prisoner and they don't really have an escape plan.

 

[jaime]

Help me by getting those plans to the Rebellion, not please rescue me from the bad people.

Sure. The rescue was an accident in terms of the in universe story, but it was always gonna happen, that’s the way it was written. And ‘distress’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘captured by baddies’. It’s a trope sure, maidens chained to posts with mean old dragons, blonde heroines screaming on the train tracks...buts it’s being subverted here by losing some of those aspects, while keeping others. It keeps the literal meanings, for certain. But it’s a trope that was often subverted, particularly in SF, prior to Star Wars. How often do we see the ‘rescued Heroine, daughter of some old man with standing’ slap the hero, declare she doesn’t need rescuing, pick up a weapon, fight, but still end up falling for the hero anyway? The real subversion for Leia comes in Empire/ Jedi, where she doesn’t (and can’t) settle down with the ‘hero from a humble beginning’ but settles down with the ‘pirate’ instead, and then to top things off, she rescues him. (Again, that’s been done by then too, but doesn’t mean it’s not still a good thing.)
But then that’s Star Wars (and a few other things...Princess of Mars is from 1917, and isn’t quite the problematic text some people seem to think. That it is one of George’s biggest influences is also beyond doubt. Check out the names and characters.) showing that it’s not necessarily the archetypes that are staid, problematic or stale, but what you do with them in the story.
Being a damsel doesn’t take anything from Leia, in fact, it adds to her character. You don’t have to Lady Macbeth a character (unsex me...) to make them empowered or strong. To pick another film from a few years later, Aliens, we have Vasquez literally asserting her femininity when she is being treated as such, right next to Ripley, whose traditionally feminine traits are actually a massive source of power and drive the story more than the guns she later carries. Ironically, in some ways, Newt is the damsel there.
Queen Amidala in the prequels is also quite literally a Damsel, but she is mostly repeating Leias subversion (in both cases it’s their people that are in greatest distress.)
Star Wars is like a series withnits deepest roots in the early 20th century, not just the serials of the forties. It’s Preraphaelites, Barsoom, it’s War one initially of treaties and betrayals ultimately.
Princess Leia is that ultimate ‘girly’ figure, the Princess. But a fair chunk of the world does not equate Princess with ‘weak’ and didn’t even then. In Leias case, she’s a princess with a blaster. No bra though. Apparently they don’t have those in space. But poor Luke didn’t get much in the way of a vest either. I bet they were both chilly as feck on that Death Star.

 

[jaime]

Imagine just seeing your planet blow up and you're awaiting your execution, then some farm boy a knucklehead smuggler and his buddy come to rescue you as you quickly realize they don't have a plan or clue about what they're doing. They actually alerted the entire base to their prison break of the Empire's most valuable prisoner and they don't really have an escape plan.

On the plus side, she wasn’t in the cell anymore. And I guess they shouldn’t have bothered with the rescue, because the rebellion would have been along any minute with a much better plan....
I think you do Han and Leia both a disservice. For a start, Han could have just handed Luke and Obi-Wan and the droids over to the empire, got paid by Vader, and probably got his ship back and gone on his way. He claims financial motivation, (and as we the audience know, he has good reason for wanting that money, beyond simple avarice) but ultimately he’s the guy who stays, risks his life consistently for his passengers, risks it again for the unseen by him Leia, and is judged poorly by Luke and Leia even at the end. He then comes back again to save Luke, but that’s not a change of heart so much as it is an expression of what he’s been showing throughout the film...he is on the side of the Angels, always was. That he then hangs about with the rebels for a few years, putting himself at more risk, not paying off Jabba, shows that his convictions beat out his self-preservation consistently.
Same as Leia. Why? Because he’s the diamond in the rough. He’s Aladdin, with at one time, hints of being the Prince in Exile poked in his backstory (I have half a memory of him supposed to be sort of space gypsy royalty, I think it’s in one of the supplements that popped up when Phantom Menace was coming out, but was apocrypha even then. The old EU sort of does some of it. Solo was a noble family etc.)

But yeah, must have sucked for Leia, this knucklehead showing up so she didn’t have to be tortured and executed. She was probably really looking forward to being the romantic martyr. She probably got changed into the flowing white frock as the Tantive IV was being boarded just so she could look the part
Though, that’s sort of jokey, it is amusing to think of young Leia as a sort of Anne of Green Gables character. Alderaan even sounds a bit like Avonlea.

 

[dahj]

 

[SPCTRE]

we sure are a high maintenance gender/sex

 

[Spot261]

I'm really not buying the fact of her (forgivably bumbling) rescue, where she takes charge as being enough to define her by the "damsel in distress" trope. On the contrary she was imprisoned precisely because of the threat she represented on her own terms, her competence and military credentials, not to mention her covert activities. She wasn't a helpless victim, she was a combatant captured by the enemy. These observations would only make sense if there were a pattern of helplessness, of her being portrayed as somehow dependent on the male characters to make her relevant. That isn't the case at all.

Throughout the franchise virtually every major character is at some point imprisoned or captured and rescued by their comrades, that's the nature of the films and it would seem strange not to have that happen in a variety of forms. That she happens to be a female being rescued by males does not by itself render the entire trilogy as somehow regressive or politically neutral, merely sets the scene for her becoming a key part of the central ensemble. We don't see Han Solo as being helpless or incompetent for being encased in carbonite, or Luke for being caught dangling from Bespin, both instances where she was instrumental in rescuing them.

 

[Awesome Possum]

Most damsels are kidnapped for hostage or negotiations or to feed to a dragon. Leia is a military accent full of information they try to torture out of her, which they don't get. They blow up her planet to get her to talk and even then she lied to them. All of this while she knew they were going to execute her.

 

[jaime]

She’s a combatant in a war, who in some ways caused the destruction of alderaan by seeming the rebel base more important than Tatooine. Mind you, she’s probably experienced loss over and over and is a bit battle hardened.
24 hours ago he was a farmer, he’s just found out his dad was someone different to what he thought, found his dads best friend, learned his dad was killed by an evil dude, lost the only parental figures he had in his life and seen their burning corpses, then lost the best friend of his father who was the only long-standing adult relationship in his otherwise until now peaceful life.
I’d call them about even, and were their genders reversed, I’d call it the same way. But we’d probably be talking about how terrible it is that girl Luke is only suffering and weak because she’s girl Luke, or something like that.

Personally, I think it’s a nice moment of empathy from the ‘older than her years’ warrior princess to the boy now growing up fast who turns out to be her brother.

 

[jaime]

Most damsels are kidnapped for hostage or negotiations or to feed to a dragon. Leia is a military accent full of information they try to torture out of her, which they don't get. They blow up her planet to get her to talk and even then she lied to them. All of this while she knew they were going to execute her.

My favourite Damsels are Beatrice and Hero in much ado about nothing.

 

[jaime]

Most damsels are kidnapped for hostage or negotiations or to feed to a dragon. Leia is a military accent full of information they try to torture out of her, which they don't get. They blow up her planet to get her to talk and even then she lied to them. All of this while she knew they were going to execute her.

I'm really not buying the fact of her (forgivably bumbling) rescue, where she takes charge as being enough to define her by the "damsel in distress" trope. On the contrary she was imprisoned precisely because of the threat she represented on her own terms, her competence and military credentials, not to mention her covert activities. She wasn't a helpless victim, she was a combatant captured by the enemy. These observations would only make sense if there were a pattern of helplessness, of her being portrayed as somehow dependent on the male characters to make her relevant. That isn't the case at all.

Throughout the franchise virtually every major character is at some point imprisoned or captured and rescued by their comrades, that's the nature of the films and it would seem strange not to have that happen in a variety of forms. That she happens to be a female being rescued by males does not by itself render the entire trilogy as somehow regressive or politically neutral, merely sets the scene for her becoming a key part of the central ensemble. We don't see Han Solo as being helpless or incompetent for being encased in carbonite, or Luke for being caught dangling from Bespin, both instances where she was instrumental in rescuing them.

My point is that she isnt the trope. But she is literally a damsel in distress. In order to subvert the trope, she has to be. Otherwise there’s no subversion. My other point is that ‘damsel’ in the truest sense, does not necessarily mean ‘weak’ in any way.

 

[Awesome Possum]

My point is that she isnt the trope. But she is literally a damsel in distress. In order to subvert the trope, she has to be. Otherwise there’s no subversion. My other point is that ‘damsel’ in the truest sense, does not necessarily mean ‘weak’ in any way.

The original argument was that she was a simple damsel which we both disagree with. I’m not arguing that she isn’t a subversion of a trope, but calling her that does imply that she is the trope. I’d list her on the Damsel tvtrope page, but I couldn’t use it to describe her. It’s why people remember Star Wars and not Krull.


Krull rules.

 

[Grendelsbayne]

She’s a combatant in a war, who in some ways caused the destruction of alderaan by seeming the rebel base more important than Tatooine. Mind you, she’s probably experienced loss over and over and is a bit battle hardened.

Yeah, it's nice that she's caring enough to share others pain as well as dealing with her own, but you can't seriously compare losing a few people to losing your entire planet (yeah, Luke's family is obviously important to him, but Leia's family was on Alderaan, too).

And Leia being 'responsible'? Seriously? The Empire and its leaders are the ones who built a damn planet killer. Even if she (understandably but wrongly) blamed herself, that would make her pain worse, not better.

 

[jaime]

Yeah, it's nice that she's caring enough to share others pain as well as dealing with her own, but you can't seriously compare losing a few people to losing your entire planet (yeah, Luke's family is obviously important to him, but Leia's family was on Alderaan, too).

And Leia being 'responsible'? Seriously? The Empire and its leaders are the ones who built a damn planet killer. Even if she (understandably but wrongly) blamed herself, that would make her pain worse, not better.

I don’t say or think it makes her pain better. It makes it different. She, however, had some agency in events that befell her. Luke bought some droids and took them to Obi Wan. He didn’t even want to leave home, until it was razed to the ground. Which makes it different. Leia is a different person to Luke, she’s been fighting longer. She’s ‘stronger’ for a given definition of the word. So it’s fine, in this instance, for her to be able to not give in to the emotion she’s feeling...she has a job to do, I am going to assume she grieves later. Luke has everything catching up to him in this one moment. In the next he’s whooping and blasting ships...because this is fantasy. But if we are going to give Leia realistic weight in her grief, then we have to do the same for Luke. Leia lost her whole world, literally, Luke lost his whole world, metaphorically. There’s no sliding scale, where tragedy x trumps tragedy y (someone losing their family in a pub bomb vs losing their family in 9/11...is there a ranking system? I hope not.) so we are left with the characters. We know Leia to be a warrior. We know Luke to not be a warrior yet, whatever his fantasies are, this is the reality.

Luke has lost everything. He doesn’t even have a support network of friends like Leia has in the Rebellion. Of course...he’s then reunited with Biggs, and loses him too, very quickly.