honestly, yeah, and i’m glad he’s actually being as forward as he can manage with it. this is so outside the boundaries of any conversation I’d expect to have in my life and I don’t think I could handle it well, either. It must feel impossible to unpack.
I always characterized it as “It was nice they let JJ Abrams do his ideas for Episode 8 AND Episode 9, but it was kinda cruel to force him to try to cram them both into one movie.”
That’s funny – pretty similar to how I talk about it, except I usually blame Abrams for being petty enough to try to rewrite The Last Jedi instead of just. working with it. Making a movie, especially a franchise blockbuster, is a collaborative effort. Regardless of personal feelings, if you can’t work with other writers and directors and respect what they make, then like… Find a new job, maybe?
I have a bit of a grudge with Abrams anyway (squints at 2009 “star trek”)
What if I dislike The Last Jedi because I think its “imaginative” front is a total lie and that its main goal is to once again reestablish the same status quo that every single past movie has done?
Then honestly, I’d doubt your cinema critic capacity. Last Jedi has a LOT of flaws, specifically with pacing and dialogue, but adhering slavishly to the formula of the prior 7 films ain’t one of them.
The entire point of it is to pretend they’re going to do something different and go in a more morally grey direction, but by the end of the film it firmly reestablishes that the Jedi are good, the Sith are bad, and there’s no nuance in between. Yoda burning the Jedi tree didn’t mean anything, because Rey had already rescued the texts, the Jedi order is once again held up as an ideal of light and purity, when they’re actually just a cult who have made nothing but mistakes in their entire history. I don’t want it.
Then you have eyeballs and can watch something. Also the way it treated John Boyega that people constantly seemed to overlook. It dumped everything from the first film for the sake of the film that he wanted to write about the white boy.
This and the treatment of Luke are the two issues I have with Last Jedi and the sequel franchise as a whole. The Last Jedi is still a good movie but we forget what they took from us.
Pretty much the same here. If Rian wants to tell his own kind of SW story, go for it. But I’d much rather he hadn’t used a numbered movie (and Carrie’s last one) to do it, or done what he did to Luke, or killed off the (existing) Resistance until what was left could fit aboard the Falcon.
Last Jedi didn’t exactly deal Rise of Skywalker the best hand it could’ve (and Carrie Fisher’s death before the filming of a movie that was supposed to focus on Leia was a downright death sentence) but it’s still the best damn Star Wars since Empire and I love it with all my heart.
I dunno about Force Awakens dealing TLJ a bad hand, but one complaint I’ve heard often is that it pulls the rug out from shows set in the interim, since the wholesale destruction wrought by Starkiller Base renders so much meaningless.
(Also, I’m probably the only person who thinks like this, but why the hell could it be seen in real time from Jakku? I hardly expect scientific accuracy from what is in effect a fantasy series that sometimes goes “beep,” but even [Disney canon] Star Wars has generally acknowledged that the light barrier is something that must be overcome by technology – but in that scene it seems they even forgot its effect on light?!)
JJ Abrams doesn’t care for things like “time” and “distance”, or “talking”, or anything else that slows down the action or gets in the way of the next Visual Spectacle.
One of the Last Jedi criticisms I’ve seen is the treatment of Luke. But The Force Awakens created a scenario where the galaxy had gotten very bad again, so where was Luke? The answer that The Last Jedi gave may not be satisfying, but it answers the question of why Luke is in hiding while staying relatively true to the Luke who we saw almost giving in to the dark side while wailing on Vader at the end of RotJ.
You are FAR from the only person who thinks like this. One of the worst aspects of TFA is that, like every J.J. Abrams “science fiction” movie, it basically ignores the concepts of time and space in favor of sap, bang, pow.
Abrams is an enthusiastic fanboy, but he utterly doesn’t care at all about the time and space aspects making the slightest bit of sense, and it shows in his Star Trek films and also TLJ and (to a lesser extent, but how was the secret fleet supplied and mustered again) RoS. So yes, it’s irritating in that the echo/homage/straight out copying that TFA did, where the original had us only know a planet had been wiped out with a jedi “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced,” in TFA, suddenly lightspeed limits don’t exist in the Star Wars universe and people can see death beams being fired across hyperspace to completely different planets.
For my money, TLJ > RotJ > TFA, largely because TLJ attemps to do new stuff. It’s not a great series, or even a good one (although all of it is better than the prequel series), not least because of the directoral whiplash, but TLJ at least made interesting choices (which the following movie ignored), sent things in interesting directions (which the following movie reversed), and introduced at least one cool new character (who was written entirely out of the following movie).
The Force Awakens: Pure nostalgia bait. But tasty.
The Last Jedi: “This is not your father’s Star Wars anymore.”
Rise of Skywalker: “LOL JK! Yes it is!”
There’s a lot that kind of sucks about the Last Jedi (although the stuff that’s good is some franchise best stuff) but almost everything I dislike about it stems from bad decisions made by JJ in the first movie
Yeah, the biggest problem with TFA is that it fails to introduce a group of main characters who work together, a group who we’ll want to reunite in the second installment. It just us Poe and his boyfriend and girlfriend, who never meet.
They should have actually shown the old heroes fall apart. If you’ve gotta keep going after the happy ending at least let us see it go wrong and don’t skip past all the interesting tragedy to tell the same story again with a new cast
Also maybe more than one Solo kid? I guess they didn’t want to copy the EU
I felt like it was… serviceable. At least it wasn’t a virtual scene-for-scene remake (and I never saw Rise, but I haven’t heard a good word about it). People get really weird about it, though, from both directions. Honestly, Legends will always be the true Star Wars to me.
Meanwhile, people are angry at Paramount because Picard season 3 was basically “Jean Luc gets the gang back together for one more adventure”, even though that’s what some people wanted from that series from the beginning.
I think the first two seasons of picard just soured everyone on the franchise and there as nothing the third season could have done to make people like it.
Picard is a really great example of a show running entirely off the rails for using nostalgia to paper over the fact the plots were thin and incoherent.
see i didnt like picard season 3 because it spent too much time on jack crusher being a very special boi who is also a fucking plank of generic milktoast lumber that just had to be borg as well. The borg worked when they were used sparingly you literally dragged them out every fucking season of this show. Also the least you could have done is bring back benatar singing borg queen jiradi.
/rant
the second season also still rankles me so much because have all these flashbacks to picard as a kid :grabs screen writer by the lapels: Where is picard’s goddamn brother at?
Nah, I’m annoyed at Picard because it leans (IMO) way too far into the Federation being bad/compromised/incapable of doing anything good without Great Man Jean Luc and his current crew of heroes. A whole lot of decent, innocent people die in terrible ways in all three seasons so that JLP et al can swan in and save everything. It’s so self-indulgent that I’ve actually lost a bit of my respect for Sir Patrick.
I think it’s entirely possible for a show to be bad, and then try to change to address criticism and still end up being quite bad, just in a different way.
Frankly Picard is a bad idea of a show that probably shouldn’t exist.
Yes, I think that’s exactly what he’s referring to. The heroes of that movie included Finn and Rose, a Black man and an Asian woman. That’s one of the things that pisses off the racists the most about that movie. I’m certain that’s what Walky is referring to here. He’s not referring to fans of the movie.
My main complaint with the last jedi is that they didn’t give the backstop on how Luke got to where he was emotionally wise. As a well known main character from the earlier series, I am not a fan of a drastic personality switch without showing how you got there. Especially when one of Luke’s most known traits is that he still thought that there was good in his father (basically the well known death dealer of the universe) even after everything, and yet some nightmares/visions that were briefly covered caused him to doubt his nephew? I don’t mind that we go there, just spend the time taking me there rather than giving me whiplash with no explanation. I get that you want the shock, but shock without spending time to explain it well just feels like bad poorly thought out writing. Give me the feeling of the endless terror of the visions, the loss of sleep and the stress, and the build up to the breaking point. That would be a lot more interesting than a chase in space (not even planet hopping) or the racetrack scene.
Return of Skywalker just felt campy and I treated it with the same seriousness as Princess Bride.
People go on and on about Luke trying to redeem Vader and conveniently forget that he ditched that to go straight to murder the second that he threatened Leia.
I agree that we could’ve been given a better sense of how long the visions had been going on, same as how Revenge of the Sith should’ve made it clearer that Anakin was on almost negative sleep the whole time.
He did ditch it until he was at the point where he could have killed Vader, and he didn’t. He backed off. That was how he passed the jedi test. That was also a younger, and thus more impulsive, Luke. You would think that after he was proven right about his dad, especially after the temptation he gave into to charge in and fight in order to protect, he would be wary of jumping to such things in the future. I sort of think that his whole arc was about that (as the vision in the swamp showed him rushing in to attack and then regretting it). So while it isn’t odd that it would still be having trouble with it, it can leave a bad feeling about his accomplishments/character arc in the previous series by washing away his progression on it without an explanation. It’s why you have to be more careful with established characters, as while you might understand how it progressed to that point in your head, if you don’t show the audience too, it can cause bad feelings.
Revenge of the Sith was a bad build up too, but Attack of the Clones didn’t exactly start off the romance on the best footing either. I don’t know if they were just trying to cover too many things in a short amount of time or covering the wrong things (as in cabinet meetings).
TLJ had the most interesting developments for the world and for the relationship between Kylo and Rey. To the point I didn’t mind the casino detour.
Buuut RoS was built to get specific moments. I REALLY enjoyed those moments, but they did lead to an overall weaker end result.
@DrunkenNordmann
Oh my gods, thank you for explaining that. I am not a Star Wars fan and cannot keep track of the titles (beyond the original trilogy), so I had no idea what the implication there was supposed to be.
(Disclaimer: I have not watched any Star Wars myself but I follow several people who are big fans)
Just in case it helps, Last Jedi is the first one of the new trilogy, and one reason for the far-right’s hatred of it is that the three main characters are a woman, a black man, and a Hispanic man. Basically, you can boil down their opinion on it to “woke culture ruined everything,” because the only reason to have women or people of color as main characters is to be politically correct apparently. (Meanwhile, a lot of people who liked Last Jedi were deeply disappointed by the next two movies, because they pretty much failed to do anything interesting with all the cool stuff that fans liked.)
Correction: TLJ is the second in the Trilogy, and the main complaint about it is that it focuses on the Black dude having a space adventure with the Asian girl introduced in this film, and the White girl trying to get Luke to train her but Luke actually followed the logical conclusion left in the previous film and had forked off in retirement because he now has hang-ups about the Jedi because he once sensed darkness in his nephew and a moment of hesitation turned Kylo fully to the dark side (but maybe not really) and led him to destroy the school Luke had been building.
Also, it claims that Rey is actually not a super special Jedi born from one of the three families that are allowed to produce Super Special Jedi (which many people liked because it meant that the franchise finally stops being about Just Three Families but weird dudes hated because Random Chick From Nowhere “doesn’t deserve Special Jedi Powers”)
you must’ve been looking at different criticisms than I was. Most of the people I saw who didn’t like it had big isssues with “admiral holdo’ and her ‘plan’, the magic hyperspace ramming technique, and the pacing of the movie as a whole. A few took issue with when marysue went into the dark place and discovered she was nobody (which was actually the coolest outcome possible) and a few had issues with how Luke was portrayed, and as for the dog-racing thing, that was mostly disliked for being so obviously aimed at the under-ten crowd, not because of the actors used. (There’s also the logical flaws in the equipment, the ‘icescatespeeeders’ and such).
But then, I generally tend to watch people who don’t make “Race” or “Racial Justice” the only lens they look at anything with (including their opponents).
Fun fact, orbiting a planet is not, in fact, “null gee.” You’re still very much in the planet’s gravity, which is the entire reason orbit even works. The reason astronauts are “weightless” is because they’re falling but also moving extremely fast, and there’s no ground to counteract gravity. If you’re above a planet, and there’s a thing below you, dropping something straight down would absolutely cause it to fall directly towards that thing.
And anyway, Star Wars ships clearly have some sort of artificial gravity inside them. Even if it were “null gee” outside, inertia is still a thing, and the bombs you dropped would continue to move in the same direction and speed as when you dropped them. There’s no magical force (ha) that would cause them to suddenly stop and float away in random directions upon exiting the ship.
Frankly, it makes much more sense than Han flying the Millennium Falcon into Starkiller Base’s atmosphere at light speed and somehow being able to stop before crashing into the surface at relativistic speeds and obliterating everything within a few miles of the impact.
Oh, the pacing in TLJ is abysmal, and they waste so much damned time on the horsedog race bits–partly because it kept interrupting the main action. It’s the single most valid complaint about the film.
I also think Rose was generally served poorly as a character. Her dialogue was downright painful at times (but that’s not the actor’s fault). And her death was straight out of the Refrigerator Handbook for Female Romantic Interests.
On the other hand…
Gravity bombs in space are no worse than audible explosions. If you made it this far in the series without screaming at every battle sequence, then you should be able to handle that one. I can come up with a dozen explanations for the bombs to work as headcanon, the easiest being that they use a kind of reverse-tractor-beam technology to accelerate the bombs even after deploying.
Similarly, Hondo’s plan worked for me. I was less impressed with the plot-devices that made it necessary, especially the whole ‘track through hyperspace’ thing, but I was willing to allow it.
Another common complaint (not mentioned here, so far) was the ‘new Force powers are bullshit!” cry. Bunk. No one complained when the Emperor started tossing around Force Lightning, or when Yoda suddenly became a lightsaber-equipped ping-pong ball in the prequels. The two powers most commonly mentioned are Leia’s suspended animation and Luke’s astral projection–both of which have vastly more legitimacy as a faux-Eastern-religious practice than lightning bolts from the fingertips.
And yes, there was a vast amount of whining on the internet about Luke’s fall from grace, and about all these female and PoC characters suddenly being important. Those of you who missed it can be grateful for that, but it really was quite common.
I consider there to be a major difference between “people who didn’t particularly like The Last Jedi” (I honestly just thought it was okay and agree that they didn’t do well by Finn throughout the trilogy) and “people who have made their entire brand about hating The Last Jedi and through it all the OTHER stuff about modern pop culture they hate, which coincidentally is all the parts of modern pop culture that aren’t white, straight, male, and cisgender.”
I have seen enough evidence of those manifestos’ existence to know that they exist, and hoo boy do you NOT want to go there.
I get that but as much as there are those on the far right that hate it for those reasons there are also those on the left that think if you hate the movies it must be because you hate woman and people of colour
Okay, and those people aren’t worth listening to. They’re too busy eating their own jaws to form a coherent thought, regardless of their political leaning.
Sure, this just specifically mentions “manifestos about The Last Jedi” in particular rather than even “the sequel trilogy”, and that suggests a VERY specific subtype (ie, the “racists who harassed an actress off Twitter” subtype). Not just “hated the sequel trilogy” but “hated TLJ”, not just “hated TLJ” but “has a manifesto about it”. Generally speaking most people I’ve encountered who dislike the trilogy as a whole for non-bigoted reasons can be pretty succinct about what they felt was done poorly. (And from what – admittedly, VERY VERY LITTLE – I saw about The Rise of Skywalker, everyone agreed that was a hot fucking disaster of a movie.)
Honestly I don’t even think they’re worth the time and energy I’ve expended thinking on them tonight. TLJ was five and a half years ago. TROS was four and a half years ago. I could be spending this time thinking about something I actually like. I feel bad for Star Wars fans who aren’t bigots who received The Rise of Skywalker as a movie product, but the movies you liked still exist. Focus on them instead. If Disney’s willing to pretend the sequel trilogy doesn’t exist, then let them. It’s more rewarding to enjoy something than to expend THAT MUCH ENERGY hating it.
Yeah, hating Last Jedi specifically is a red flag. The sequels are not good, but Last Jedi is the one that’s like an actual movie with cool shit happening and actual themes
Well, the trilogy wasn’t a trilogy. It was a duology with a filler movie in-between. The duology, being an Abrams film, was long on spectacle and short on substance, with a lot of Mystery Box bullshit for good measure.
TLJ, meanwhile, was a completely unrelated film because it was driven by a completely different creator.
But the Sheev came back the very next day
The Sheev came back, they thought he was a goner
But the Sheev came back, he just couldn’t stay away
Away, away
Saying that people who don’t like TLJ are right-wing makes my blood boil. I’m as left as you can be (not even American, so not that fake left Americans have) and I despise TLJ with all my heart.
and that’s (part of) why I’m not a YouTuber, because my complaints about the ST fall entirely outside that Venn diagram and under the category of “deep nerdery”.
It’s important to note that one does not mean the other. A lot of far right assholes shut on it, but that doesn’t mean everyone who hated it is a far right asshole.
Yeah, I hated it and I’m a hopefully-leftish asshole.
Idk how to measure the left/right thing. Like, I’ve heard I’m probably right-leaning on a global scale since I’m technically an American, but that was on Twitter, where nobody’s opinion matters anyway.
Also I didn’t “hate” the movie, but that’s just what we’re required to call it when something isn’t our absolute favorite now.
Ah, yeah, that comment. Its about our career politicians and their voting records. The war on crime and or drugs was Biden’s pet project. Sarah Palin says that congressfolks dont need any more restrictions to the stock market when they are policy makers and trend setters. While they are not screaming facists who literally knew and loved Nixon and his crookedy ways, they are no role models. And once the country would not actually start a civil war if we elected bernie sanders, we “can start focusing on cleaning up the party.” Which has always reminded me of a few climatic lines of the Letter from Birmingham Jail, about waiting and promises. Not to get all appropriating or anything, but really if you feel like you should be more left, the Letter is a good read to remind you of how long this ABSOLUTE CARP has STAGNATED.
Yes, but the non-racist people who don’t like the sequels don’t actually matter in the context of this conversation because the original question was specifically about what Walky meant in panel 3.
How come non-racist people never get to matter in conversations anymore? When did racists get to be the center of attention all the time, the spoiled fucking brats?
In this particular case, because I’m not sure the non-racists who disliked The Last Jedi have written any manifestos about it, to avoid being lumped in with the racists. Pretty sure most people will just bring up what specifically they disliked about it and then move on, to quickly prove that they can be normal about The Last Jedi.
The specific reference, again, is about “manifestos” about the movie. Again, that suggests a VERY SPECIFIC subtype of hater.
See also people who have issues with the writing of the last 3 Doctor Who seasons but don’t want to get lumped in with the “feeeeemale Doctor bad!” group.
The extremists make it hard to have nuanced conversations about media.
Oh, it’s the Ghostbusters 2016 thing all over again, then? Man, how you manage to make Melissa McCarthy unfunny is a mystery to me. Kate McKinnon’s scenes are the only good part of that movie.
If I were cynical, I’d almost wonder if part of the reason Disney keeps being more “inclusive” with it’s live action remakes is to have a defence against anyone who calls them “cynical” or “cash grabs” or “terrible souless husks that miss what made the originals good”.
“Why is the lighting in the Little Mermaid remake so bad?”
“Ahh, but little black girls are inspired. How can you hate that? You monster!”
(Although I realise this is getting close to conspiracy theory territory and also exactly what the right regularly accuses the left of, so I’m not sure I believe it)
It’s probably far more that, despite the alt-right whining, being inclusive is popular and profitable. And the controversy likely also drives buzz and thus views.
Being able to use it as a defense against criticism is only a minor bonus.
You can’t really be too cynical about Disney. They don’t care. It’s all profit driven. But them going for inclusion is good anyway.
Because unfortunately, they’re the loudest and most petulant, and their knee-jerk emotional response is too deeply rooted for them to be open-minded about any aspect of the thing they don’t like.
I’m really looking forward to seeing how his parents handle the inevitable confrontation. Maybe not this storyline, but that’s too spicy not to have EVENTUALLY, right?
“you know what? i’m going to start dating her even harder”
without the parents in the equation i can imagine it sorta fizzling out drama but i suppose it might be good if lucy decides to end things and finds someone that’s a better fit
Actually, people who are this hypocritical generally have just enough self-awareness to not get caught actually voicing their opinions.
Walky can bring up all her good points and his mom will just say, “There’s just something about her I don’t like” then begin hinting that Lucy is using him and he can do better. All without coming out and saying exactly why she doesn’t like her.
And if Walky points it out explicitly, she will counter with “That’s nonsense. Your father is black and I am married to him.” And she will completely brush over the fact that what she likes about him is the fact that he doesn’t act stereotypically black.
I’m curious if anyone would bring up the counter that Lucy is very dark skin while Charles is biracial and has closer proximity to whiteness. We dealt with texturism re- sal and walkys hair, I’d kinda love to see more colorism conversation
I mean, the last two times he had sex right away, the relationships imploded so hard he actually had to grow as a human being, so him not fucking Lucy within the first week of their relationship isn’t the red flag people keep making it out to be.
When someone gets your jokes and references, that’s gold.
I once knew an old Mennonite pastor who said he could predict which marriages would succeed; “When they both laugh at the same things”
That might be enough for a friendship, but Lucy’s made it very clear that she wants sex (as soon as possible, within the “rules” she subscribes to). Girl be thirsty.
True, that seems to be the source of their discontent with Sal’s hair. I think the joke is that it would be only the hair that mattered. Untrue, possible I guess to as some Irish have curly hair as well (though then I guess Mr. and Mrs. Walkerton would just be 1800s racist rather than 2000s racist).
No, she let her hair regain some its natural waviness. She normally goes to a salon to have her hair straightened. She considers that to be her normal hair.
You might be remembering that she used going to get her hair straightened as an excuse to get away from her shitty parents. Which unfortunately meant that she then had to go do it or they would wonder why her hair was still curly if they saw her again before they left.
It “FOOMP”-ed like that before freshman family weekend, then she made the excuse of straightening it after making a brief appearance. (Charles paid a little attention to her, Linda didn’t.)
But Charles has curly hair! And Linda married a guy with curly hair! And both their kids are rocking at least 4a texture, you could maybe argue Walky’s type 3, maybe.
I always read Walky’s hair as messy and uncombed not curly. At least not black curly which is the problem Sal’s parents have with her hair. His hair usually looks like my 2a or 2b hair gets when I try to wear it shorter than shoulder length and don’t use product to make it lay down.
And unlike Sal he’s never mentioned as getting his hair artificially straitened. Have we ever seen him in a strip where someone (maybe Dorothy? Seems like she would have tried at some point) got him to comb his hair neatly?
There’s at least one strip where Walky says his hair is “more obviously curly” when it’s longer, and there’s also a moment where the curls come out for comedy/drama (as Sal’s had done in a similar setting, going from straightened to natural). So the implication is it being curly. Although I’m not going to comment on texture, because firstly that’s not something I know much about and secondly stylised drawings can make it hard to tell exactly what the real life equivalent of features would be.
I thought there was a prior comment (either in the strip or from DW) that one of the many reasons that their parents prefer Walky is that he has “straighter/whiter” hair than Sal.
Walky himself has curly hair too! But only as an indicator of him being stupid (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/congrats/), which is one of those strips that got brought up a lot the last time this storyline came up, which is the controversy Walky’s alluding to here. Back then, Sal accused Walky of being whiter that her, despite them having the same skin color and similar hair, because he had whiter vibes, which was a lot of racial nuance for a gag-a-day strip and led to a lot of discourse, as you can imagine.
I’m sure the return to the storyline will lead to absolutely no bad takes in the comment section whatsoever, Walky will just keep mentioning Star Wars and everyone will complain about that instead.
Yeah I was really not expecting a full half of the comments here to be arguments about wether or not TLJ is good (many of the comments from people who have never even watched Star Wars?)
Wasn’t Linda previously married? So childhood sweethearts seems unlikely.
I was thinking that she met him professionally and found that he did not fall into her assumed stereotypes and, rather than assuming that her stereotypes were wrong, instead assumed that he was ‘different from other girls’.
My mother was hella racist and my (step)dad is black and they were kind of childhood sweethearts. Honestly they act a lot like Linda and Charles, only my mother tended to be way worse. She has mellowed out tons recently and changed, but like… it was bad.
Grew up in the 60’s and 70’s together, married other people because mom’s family was much more racist, they both married lots of other people, met back up in the Obama administration and fell in love, been married ever since (though very unhappily for most of it). Linda and Charles might have a more contemporary version of that love story, minus five marriages and six kids.
Honestly, this Sal storyline (and to a lesser extent, the Walky/Lucy one too) is hitting hard because while I never got into trouble, my mother and I had a very similar relationship of constant disappointment meeting never ending goalpost moving. She’s very sick now, and it’s just very complicated to deal with emotionally.
Still set on “Drunken one night stand after the divorce, leading to the twins being conceived, go go shotgun wedding because Charles is a mostly good guy.” being the reason.
Can someone explain the star wars joke to me? I haven’t seen any of the new films, but I don’t care about spoilers. So don’t worry about ruining my experience. 😛
Wow, that sucks. I’m glad I didn’t have to watch it happen live. I am too exhausted in life to debate anyone, especially over the internet. Thanks for the info.
Yikes, really? I thought they just didn’t like the shallow political commentary, the fact that half the plot of sort of pointless, the way they treated Luke, the fact that going “light speed” in Star Wars does not actually accelerate the ship but moves it into hyperspace, or Kylo’s very strange choice of pajama pants. I feel the later is a little petty, but he is a villain so maybe he is seeing if he can destroy the “no shirt, no service” dress code system by wearing pants with a waste so high they are basically a backwards shirt?
For fuckin’ real. BBCC didn’t even talk about criticism of the movie due to racism (which was a factor, even if someone else desperately needs to defend their unchallenged right to dislike it for nonracist reasons); she specifically said “were racist to the cast”– yknow, the actually human beings who didn’t make most of the decisions being complained about.
No. I never saw these reviews – if you guys say they were racist I believe you. The “Yikes, really?” was merely an expression of shock that so Star Wars had managed to cultivate that kind of toxic fan is large numbers. I had, I suppose naively, assumed Lucas Film and Disney, as companies that largely targeted kids as their primary audience, didn’t hold much interest for those sort of people. Therefore, I assumed that any general dislike for the film was due to cinematographically shortcomings or sci-fi nerd pedantry.
If it helps, try thinking of toxic fans as literal children. Then you’ll have a ready explanation for why they’re always so attracted to “kid stuff”. Well, that or they’re pedos.
For future reference, the way you wrote your paragraph was full of red flags. You generally don’t want to respond to things with “was it prejudice or was it really because they didn’t like this laundry list of specific and vague subjective bullet points?”.
A good chunk of the problem is that Disney did target kids as the primary audience, but a lot of older fans of the series were upset that it wasn’t really for them. It’s for today’s 12 year olds, not to make you feel like you did when you were 12.
But that overlaps a lot with the branch of fandom that tears into any modern incarnations of what they loved as kids with accusations of it having “gone woke”.
A lot of those problems are also true of the first six movies. Pretty much everything besides your Luke and Kylo issues really unless I’m misunderstanding your hyperspace issue.
There’s two basic camps with some overlap on the Disney trilogy hate:
The one in the comic, is the racist assholes who hated Rose and Finn being poc, and use the shitty writing to blast them for being “the things what ruined the story”
And the other groups are the people who just hate it for it’s terrible writing, lore breaking plot contrivances, and character assassinations.
It also makes it basically impossible for those of us who aren’t, but have other issues with (some of) the newer Wars and Treks, to discuss them in any but the most carefully curated spaces. The signal gets lost in the noise.
(The stupidest argument by far, IMO, is that either or both have become “too political” recently. As a fan of both since the 70s, I can assure you that they always have been, and quite unsubtly so.)
i did hear from a podcast about another person’s friend/acquaintance listening to rage reviews about movies and said something like “i feellike i’m being indoctrinated into the alt right” or something like that ll
Yeah, there’s a particularly noxious strain of bigotry that gets associated with “people who hate The Last Jedi, specifically” that lends itself to alt right indoctrination VERY well.
Yeah that’s why it’s so dangerous. The alt-right’s prime means of bolstering their numbers is to find pockets of normies who haven’t hitherto engaged much in politics and then radicalizing them to the cause, then pitching themselves to more mainstream politicians as a demographic now large enough to sway a narrow election.
Framing their problems that can definitely be solved with liberal policy, as conservative problems. To put it the most wild way possible, “Its not the system of unregulated capitalism that’s lowered your status in the world, its *whispers* the jews.” Gods that line still makes me sick, because I know people believe in this. I know my uncle who DOES AND SAYS SO. he actually says Jooez on FB so they don’t ban him.
Yeah nice quotes from Alt Right Playbook, I’ve been trying for almost a year, people don’t like being told white moderates are part of the systematic racism in this country, and I try and quote them the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, but they dont wanna hear it. I say “racist” in their direction and they shut down.
Given we’re on the edge of the next election cycle, if theres any a time for the left to leave behind centrists who slow down anti-bigot efforts, it’s now.
It’s not unique to centrists or moderates unfortunately.
You find it in economic left circles as well – generally masked behind “no struggle but the class struggle” rhetoric.
“no struggle but the class struggle” still doesn’t hold up that centrist desire to “ease off the race card; given over half the working poor are POC, there really can’t be any class solidarity that doesn’t address race.
Really it’s intentional discord sowed by the right who want to sell themselves as “better on class” than socialists 😑
Oh absolutely there can be. The pretense is that just helping the working poor will make all the racism (and for that matter the sexism and homophobia) wither away.
A lot of the Last Jedi backlash was pretty fucking racist, because people who get really defensive about the objects of their childhood nostalgia tend to be pretty fucking racist
A “third rail” in politics is an especially “charged” issue that’s seen as dangerous to bring up, referencing the electrified rail of a subway train, which is deadly to touch. Willis is presumably referring to racism and The Last Jedi
The third rail is literally the electric rail that powers many subway trains, and touching it is dangerous
Metaphorically, i think Willis is saying they’re introducing two dangerous topics.
Haha I got TLJ and was wondering what the other one was! I guess I was thinking of the racism as already the overall theme of this arc, rather than something specific to this strip?
A ‘third rail’ is a thing you don’t touch because it is so charged as to be deadly. Literally in the case of electric railways, leading to it’s figurative use in topics of conversation
It prominently features an Asian character and a woman with colourful hair, among other things.
Point being, a lot of the people bashing The Last Jedi (and the sequels in general) on YouTube are horribly racist and generally part of the far-right online sphere.
They went way racist on the actress. That said, it was a bad character that was being rushed. I didn’t like the character or the attempt to force her as a romantic partner for Finn, but that’s not the actresses fault.
Specifically to force her as a romantic partner for Finn to prove to the shippers that Finn and Poe weren’t dating each other. Still not the actresses fault and that’s not what she was getting shit on for anyway as I recall.
That’s *mostly* not what she was getting shit on for, from what I remember. There were some shippers– the yaoi fangirl types, it seemed– who didn’t seem to care who they were aligning themselves with in their already fucked up efforts to attack this woman.
At the time of release the more unsavory element of the Star Wars fandom threw a lot of racist and sexist abuse towards the cast, iirc they drove a few of then off of social media altogether
A nasty portion of the internet wants to treat disliking specific movies as not merely evidence but proof of being far-right. It’s a shibboleth.
Some of the movies that you aren’t allowed to dislike, or you’ll be labelled far-right, is Captain Marvel and The Last Jedi. Because they have female protagonists, see, and that means that everyone who likes them is a good person, and anyone who dislikes them is a bad person.
David Willis is part of that nasty portion of the internet, and he has just proclaimed that if you dislike The Last Jedi, you are a far-right racist bigot. That’s all.
Nobody said you’re not allowed to dislike a movie and that you interpret people talking about the SW fandom’s far-right infiltration problems as if they were a personal attack says a lot.
Α personal attack? I think I prefer the Last Jedi to the other two sequel movies frankly. Not that it actually matters whether I like it or not, but I certainly despise the fact that according to you or Willis or many other people like you, I’m not actually allowed to dislike it.
“Nobody said you’re not allowed to dislike a movie”
Really? Here’s what someone (actually you) said above: “the Venn diagram between YouTubers shitting on The Last Jedi and the far-right is a circle.”
So basically you yourself actually said any youtuber not liking The Last Jedi is automatically far-right, that’s the necessary and sufficient condition. Anyone who shits on The Last Jedi is far-right (and anyone who doesn’t shit on it isn’t).
You yourself said it, recognizing and explaining what David Willis also meant, that liking or disliking The Last Jedi proves you to be on the far-right or disproves it.
Stand by what you said or repent it, but don’t pretend you didn’t say it. You and Willis are both part of the nasty portion of the internet which has actually decided we aren’t allowed to dislike certain movies or it makes us bad people.
It’s certainly cute how Willis had Walky effectively use “people who dislike The Last Jedi” as a way of saying “racist”, people in the comments confirmed that’s EXACTLY what he meant — and now after seeing that lots of Willis’ readers also dislike The Last Jedi, there’s a bunch of hasty backpedalling that no you didn’t meant to lump the people who dislike The Last Jedi with racists, you didn’t mean to say that disliking The Last Jedi makes you a racist, you accidentally were merely commenting on the problem of racists usurping criticism of The Last Jedi.
It now suddenly became okay to dislike The Last Jedi, instead of it being exactly equivalent with an accusation of racism, and so equivalent to one that the characters and the readers of the comic both know exactly what it means.
In fact I was implicitly accused of being a racist just a couple comments above, just because I didn’t like how people used dislike for The Last Jedi as an obligue way of referring to racism. It’s recursive. You’re not allowed to dislike The Last Jedi (says Willis). You are not allowed to dislike comics who conflate The Last Jedi dislikers with racists (says DrunknenNordmann and Needfuldoer). You’re probably also not allowed to dislike comments who accuse as racists the people who dislike comics who conflate The Last Jedi dislikers with racists.
Hey, Willis, if you don’t want to be perceived as a prejudiced bigot yourself, stop bashing random portions of the population (in this case people who dislike The Last Jedi) not for any actual sin, but because of statistical overgeneralized correlations you make.
you’re clearly an annoying troll like you’ve always been and I hate taking the bait but fuck it
There’s a difference between going “man that movie fuckin sucked it was garbo. Anyway…” and making 57 videos looking like you’re popping a gasket in the thumbnail REEEEEing about how Finn and Rose ruined the franchise and how Kelly Marie Tran is an awful bongo, and clearly Disney’s infected by the woke mind virus and blah blah blah
Walky said “YouTubers spitting their manifestos.” Fucking, obviously we are only talking about that latter camp, who dedicate their entire careers and personalities to having a seizure every time a black person or woman exists in media. And there’s no way you don’t know that we are exclusively talking about shitty reviewers and not regular movie goers. You’re a fucking redditor troll debate pervert and all I’ve ever seen you do here is try to bait people into arguments. Get a real hobby
It doesn’t matter how Willis insults groups of people, because you know he only meant the *bad ones* in that grouping, not the good ones. /s
And even when a person like DrunkenNordmann actually says there’s not a single person who bashes The Last Jedi and isn’t far-right, that’s okay too.
So, tell me, a non-racist person that wants to put out an anti-TLJ video, do you think will they be motivated by you implying they are racist before you even see their video?
Do you think that Willis will EVER show in any of his comics ANYONE who dislikes The Last Jedi and who isn’t a racist far-right bigot? You already know he won’t, because that’s the prejudiced correlation “Last-Jedi-disliker”=”racist” that he deliberately and actively chooses to spread.
Willis has been doing this for a while — people liking or disliking works of art IMMEDIATELY puts them into “bigot” groupings according to Willis, it’s never a matter of mere taste and preference or any other critique.
The short version: a lot of reactionary nerds didn’t like the second movie of that trilogy because they felt it had “forced diversity,” including a mixed-race kiss. I believe Walky’s saying that his parents view Lucy as too black for him.
I do wonder why they have this prejudice. Is it learned behavior from parents or others that they just had ingrained and are now copying? Did they struggle in the past due to being an interracial couple and are now trying to make their children more “white” (or focus resources on the one who is) in some sort of messed attempt to increase the kid(s) chance of success? Racism is never logical, but I am very interested in seeing if some twisted form of reasoning lies behind it all.
Correct, but to really get the full picture, it’s worth noting that the whole racist / non-racist binary is mute. In today’s framing, there are several layers to systematic bigotry and there’s anti-bigotry; there is no “non”.
Racism isn’t always a passion, but it is tolerable, usable and easy to disregard. In a white supremacist world, it’s the cost of doing business. People like Linda (and previously Robin) won’t necessarily agree with self-identified bigots on a questionaire or paper trail, but will seek out their votes / attention / approval / money. Regardless of anyone’s given position on it, racism works. Or to put it another way,
“Nobody ever went bankrupt appealing to the ignorance of white people.”
It happened to my high school best friend, whose parents were Dominican and Peruvian. Because her Dominican father was darker, everyone focused on the family members who had “good hair” and told her how pretty she was when she straightened hers. When her little brother was born, she said, “I hope he doesn’t come out dark like me.”
It’s so sad.
You see it in that flashback where Linda takes both David and Sally to a casting call and, when there is only room for one child actor, says, “Take him.”
So I think that’s how somebody like Charles could swallow it. The idea that, “If you marry someone with whom you could have a child with lighter skin, our grandchild will have an easier life. So I’m going to dissuade you from dating someone with darker skin, for the sake of my future grandchildren.”
That’s how Charles’s situation looks to me, anyway.
A friend of mine, whose family is Indian, experiences the same kind of colorism. It’s so sad. Because it shrouds itself in so-called “good intentions”: “I just want what’s best for the children.”
…Please note: in NO WAY am I justifying it. ABSOLUTELY NOT. Not sympathizing, not explaining, not contextualizing, NOTHING. I only mean that it’s how someone like Charles could delude himself that, when he tells his daughter how pretty she looks with straighter hair, he’s “teaching her what she needs to know in this world,” etc. etc.
Yeah, the cost of doing business principle also applies to parenting, teaching your kids to “blend-in” with and use systematic racism under the premise that it’s an easier life to submit to “traditional” social expectations than it is to change a broken system. It’s still bigotry, just not the kind that white / “”normal”” people are attuned to picking up on, or to speak with a sharper edge, the kind that they often downright refuse to acknowledge.
Never live your life in fear of what some dipshit YouTuber might potentially say about you. They’re not real, and the ones that are real make Gollum look well-adjusted. Talking to yourself about iCarly for 8 hours as a job is not something people with useful opinions do.
kinda waiting for the punch line to be their parents are racist they are just not able to see that their daughter needed help and attention rather than being sent to jail and then away from home like some problem
Given how explictly characters are talking about their racism and all the actions that demonstrate it, I cannot imagine the resolution being “actually they have no racial prejudices at all and just didn’t know how to take care of their delinquent daughter”
Why am I suddenly obligated to repeat someone else’s comment in order to reply? That doesn’t make any sense. They already made the comment, I’m not your personal tape recorder.
Not to rain on the parade here, but I’m pretty sure Taffy has a habit of getting high off their ass and posting strange replies like this. That first response is borderline psychedelic.
I blame the threading in this comments section. This morning I’ve (so far) dragged myself through three or four (I’ve lost count) loooong threads on Star Wars haters that are absolutely indistinguishable, wondering why we keep coming back to exactly the same arguments, and then remembering that the roots of these threads were probably posted seconds apart by people who hadn’t seen the others, and followed by people who had already scrolled past the others before getting het up enough to join.
On some subway systems, the third rail is maintained at a high voltage, so there are signs saying if you find yourself in the gutter (though let’s be honest, if you’re down there and not working for the transit authority, something has already gone very, very wrong) to avoid it, and as such it’s become a metaphor for something that must be avoided.
thank you, this is actually a helpful reply
but how does that relate to this strip and the way it’s being presented? is Willis saying that by having his characters avoid the word racism, he’s metaphorically posting a “danger high voltage” sign? I feel like I’m missing something
It’s a metaphor, by way of analogy to the ‘third rail’ of some kinds of electrified rail systems. They can be extremely dangerous when energized, electrocuting people upon contact. As a result, ‘touching the third rail’ of something has come to mean, metaphorically, doing something that is likely to generate an intense backlash. Social Security, for example, has been called “the third rail of American politics” fairly often.
Here, it is being used in reference to the comic’s discussion of two such topics likely to make people angry: Racism and The Last Jedi.
I mean. I guess? But you would think that holding a grudge against a literal child for multiple years (even after she was assaulted so badly she lost her voice) simply because she and her parents committed the crime of…being brown and potentially undocumented immigrants would be enough to signal to people that Linda’s got some internal biases that she doesn’t necessarily feel like she needs to confront in any way.
Nah. If you aren’t literally hatecriming someone while screaming slurs then there are a billion other explanations. And even then, hey they could’ve just been having a really bad day. Racism is a big scawy boogie man, it can’t be subtle. If it’s not just spamming the n word and screaming “I hate black people!!!!!” Then, oh no, people I know could be racist! I mean, sal is a thug she did crime and she’s so mean to her parents. It’s not racist to think that. I mean, IM not racist. No no, no way her parents arent racist, theyve been totally rational and understandable this whole time. Sal’s the problem here 🙂
/S if it wasn’t obvious
Thanks for the person who pointed me to Occams Big Paisley Tie yesterday, I love it and will use it forever
Whatever happened to the parental wisdom from the good old days, that if you disapprove of your child’s SO for any reason, never let on that you do, it will only encourage them?
man, I’m REALLY not a fan of this comic’s characters talking like they’re aware of the commentariat or the fact that they’re characters in a story that people react to. When I’m having intimate conversations with my partner or my family, my mind never goes to “wow racist assholes would sure have a field day with this topic huh”, I’m more likely having panicked thoughts about how this conversation about abortion/neurodivergence/racism/homophobia is affecting my relationship with the people I’m close to and whether I have to reevaluate how I think about their values or mine.
it makes sense Walky would say that he doesn’t want to speak the name of the evil thing thats been wrecking his parents’ relationship to his twin sister for many years because thats a hard topic to discuss! it’s a realization that he’s been coming to grips with for a short time compared to Sal and he’s famously not good at introspection or talking about his feelings
what does not make sense is for him to frame like he’s afraid that racists on youtube comments are going to shit on this topic. Huh??? this is a private conversation between him and Lucy, how in hell would anyone else find out about this and make anonymous mean comments? why on earth is he talking like he’s a vlogger who constantly streams live so he can’t do controversial topics because the comments become unbearable?
in-character Walky would be trying to avoid this conversation because it’s a hard topic and he has a hard time verbalizing that the parents that he loves have also actively caused harm. I have no idea why he is framing this as if he’s a public figure with enough influence to spark a flame war. it’s so bizarre.
Why? Walky is a nerd, he resents racists taking over his spaces to talk about star wars like a sane person, nerds built that space and n@zi’s ruined it, it bothers him. Heck it still bothers me!
I have heard stuff like this from my friendly shut in neighbors. It IS awkward, that is basicLly Walky’s entire personality of being awkwardly loudmouthed about things few people know or WANNA know.
Lucy is a nerd too. She will understand, even if she doesnt hang out in the same spaces. HER Harry Potter spaces were rotted from the top down and truncated from all things canon, Rowling is disgusting on feminism and gives feminists a bad name everywhere. For perspective of where she finds herself, skinheads and TERFs arrived at a trans rights rally to protest. The TERFs proceeded to stand behind the skinheads for “safety.” They had not in name actually came to protest but to spread doubt more from within, but they were booted. And decided that they needed those men. Which violates their core stated beliefs, revealing them to mostly be recidivists, and thus for feminists the R in terf, Radical.
Also, be honest with yourself. Normal is a setting on a dryer, not anything tangible or describable. You can do statistics and find the median, you can do polls and find the winner, you can make psychology profiles and philosophize the meaning of the meridian political belief, but none of those singular things helps you understand normal in the slightest. The three together dont help much more. Ultimately we can merely say what is Not Normal, and for that I choose facist demagoguery that crawls from the dark depths of 4chan and.must be beaten back away from Star Wars forums and such.
you’re not wrong about any of this, in fact I really like how you’ve described these fascists. What I’m not wrapping my head around is Walky or Lucy knowing any of this or having these opinions. Early comic Walky barely had the language to talk about overt racism, let alone more insidious stuff like racist star wars fans “just saying” they don’t like how the characters of Finn or Rose were presented and getting reasonable people to agree with them because those movies were badly written. Walky would say “yeah that story went nowhere” and not analyze the conversation further and then be surprised when the more overt racism shows up .
Early Lucy was an avid Harry Potter fan.
If these two characters were made aware of the horrible problems with the fandom/author of those movies later on , we never saw it, and we never saw them develop an opinion on it. And this a slow burn comic that usually shows us characters having epiphanies about political and social issues.
Having Walky and Lucy have the opinions you state above would be a retcon. one can’t be surprised when readers don’t know about the retcon and are confused by it
Any speculative fiction geek would get Walky’s comment, probably. So this is just his way of saying what he knows but his family has aggressively ignored all his life: even thoughnhis family is biracial, his mom has issues. Walky doesn’t want to call her “racist” because It’s Complicated (boy, is it ever), but there’s no getting around the fact that this is what it is in this case. And remember: Walky just woke up to this fact himself. He’s still having trouble naming it. So I don’t see this as breaking the fourth wall at all. He’s just trying to signal the problem to Lucy in a way he knows she will understand.
(for people who believe in the absolute garbage of quote “great replacement” unquote wash my hands, they sure as hell think it’s ok for them to butt into random ass places they ent welcome to replace the tone of the convos there)
But then he dated Dotty, and he was recently told the loudmouthed confidence WAS charming, and its not like he is unaware of these things happening. Tbh in my view its fully within his personality to have this idk, such an inability to be serious enough to talk about milquetoast racists LIKE HIS PARENTS which he likely STILL LOVES, that he has to couch it in metaphor and in memetic reference.
Repeatin to you again, I have more than once heard someone say it like this before. Fourth wall ish is the alt text about the double third rail of internet politics, Walky is just trying to avoid scraping the pain of a recently recalled and pretty subtle but undeniable 1) racism to his mother and 2) race apologist thing going on with his dad. The knappy hair problem and the casting him not Sal because he’s slightly more “passing,” and in essence this all snowballing to the point where Sal becomes fully under a degree of oppression, and he becomes a degree of privilaged at home.
None of that is something he’d LIKE to mentally touch directly, he’d rather avoid any potential heartbreak where he has to shout at his mother that her little quirks are not defined as the opposite of what they basically are, MERELY because shes marries to and has black kids.
With his visceral awkward half refusal to touch the issue in thought and be hesitant to bring Lucy into it at all, the third rail reference is the fourth wall far more than this awkwardness my brother, my HS friend, and my smoker class-neighbor from college would totally say, or say even more disjointedly.
I mean yer allowed the opinion im in no way sayin you’re disallowed, fell free, just saying that ive seen far worse fourth walling even in this comic. And that I consider it more natural and realistic than all that.
The time scale also messes with this. Early Lucy was a HP fan, but that was before JKR was publicly out as a transphobe. Now of course she was out for years before Lucy showed up. There’s never a point where it really makes sense for Lucy to be made aware and have an epiphany.
Early comic walky didn’t have the words to properly describe racism because it was 2010 and everyone was bad at discussing racism, probably specifically the white Midwestern author writing him. It’s 2023 now and these kids are Zoomers, sliding time scale. It’s literally impossible not to learn about these topics and absorb the language as a north American 18 year old unless you’re being severely sheltered and cut off from online spaces. Walkys talking like a normal black nerdy teenager in the 2020s
have you genuinely say someone say they don’t want to talk about racism or a hard topic like iI because they don’t want to trigger a completely hypothetical flame war in a non existent comments section?
do you and your friends often talk like you’re characters in a show instead of real people?
yep! i know you wrote that like it’s over the top hyperbole, but sorry, that’s just a real thing that people do some times. i’ve mugged for cameras that aren’t there. i’ve had friends stop what they’re saying because they’re worried they’re putting too much exposition early in the episode. i’ve had coworkers debate who is the audience favorite. my own mother has refused to talk about her medical history because she doesn’t want to retcon her backstory. acting to an audience that doesn’t exist is a super super super common thing that people do. have you never had someone bow to an audience that isn’t there? or joke that a crowd is going wild?
lol, yeah, this isn’t out there at all. “I feel like I’m going piss off by saying this, but” is definitely a way of going into something I’ve used before. As are things like talking about real people/myself acting in or out of character, imagining a laugh track or audience in a particular moment of comedic timing, thinking in terms of story beats, etc.
Walky’s way of dealing with emotions he has trouble expressing is retreating into pop culture. He literally threw a toy at Dorothy because he couldn’t figure out how to tell her he liked her.
Yeah, and in this case, it’s also him saying this with a girl whom he has hung out with for months now and knows she would immediately understand what he’s saying because, well, he knows how it’s been for her, being a black girl into Star Wars. Like that’s the world the two live in, though I am saying that as a queer person into a lot of nerdery that has seen/experienced lots of pushback, too.
Yeah, it’s a way he can get through to Lucy what the problem is, but without having to say the words out loud and also making a joke about it because comedy and avoidance are his coping mechanisms for dealing with his family dysfunction (and have been since before he was made consciously aware of the racism at the heart of it.)
Also, he’s a communications major. Everything is “meta” to him. Performance. A series of tropes. He pictures his life as having an internal commentary voiceover, laugh track, and soundtrack. Like in the early “Doonesbury” cartoons.
I really REALLY want to see evidence that Lucy is aware of horrible fandom shit in general and how she reacts to it. It’s been questioned in the comments before how much she knows because her bubbly attitude is at odds with what most black women experience in fandom spaces. Not saying it’s impossible for her to be a cheerful character and also be conscious, it’s just that we have literally never seen her say anything about this at all
She’s a dark skinned black woman in white male predominant spaces. She’s aware. No way she hasn’t seen miles morales and captain marvel getting ripped to shreds by shitty child’s
at least he hasn’t internalized any bad thoughts, i’ve seen some mixed raced couples/parents that seem perfectly fine (though granted not like i know them too well) but their kids ended up thinking /having slightly biased/bigoted opinions themselves more vocally
The 4th wall is overrated. I mean, sure, it’s there most of the time to make the story flow, but sometimes it would be a relief to find out I’m just a character in a comic strip and my screwups were canon in some bigger story.
I mean, I do that. Like, a lot, it’s funny. My partner and I talk a lot about how we’re accidentally often the token brown folk in our friend groups. When you see idiot child’s all the time it’s hard not to make fun of them in your free time
I don’t actually know much about the discourse around The Last Jedi since the closest I’ve come to watching the latter two movies in that trilogy is through Lego Star Wars. But I find it weirdly endearing that Lucy is able to instantly identify the problem from that explanation.
I honestly detested all of the sequels. TFA was insultingly uncreative, TLJ was a depressing morass, Rise felt like it was shot out of a goddamn unstoppable tilt-a-whirl. I don’t have any respect for people that want to use them as a bounce board for their theories about white genocide, but that doesn’t make them into movies I like.
I like that Walky knew exactly how to say this to Lucy without having to say it, like it does show that the two do know each other pretty well by now. It’s sweet, despite the topic being anything but.
It reminds me of how he avoided directly talking about P.M.S. and still managed to get the point across. It’s cute, but also kinda motivated by his own discomfort.
Talking about Star Wars online is like tossing a grenade into the DashCon ball pit. It’s noisy and colorful and now there’s piss everywhere when there didn’t need to be piss anywhere.
Had to look that up, but it reminded me I had an electronic Star Wars Simon toy as a kid. It was so fucking heavy I could have beaten the other second graders into submission with it, easily. Card games are way safer.
I’m imagining a Sith following the Rule of Two but they get too into their studies and just sort of let the whole “Eventually you will kill and replace your master” schtick fall by the wayside.
“Aren’t–aren’t you going to try to kill me? I think you’re stronger than me now, it’s sort of what we do.”
“Are you joking? I’m learning so much!”
Eventually the master tries to kill the apprentice, but the apprentice is too good and easily fends off any attacks.
A problem which is absolutely solved by paintbrushing people who dislike TLJ as racists. Then there is no need for further discourse, anyone who dislikes it a racist, and anyone who likes it is a non-racist, problem solved. /s
I was gonna say that 193 manifestos comments within 3 hours of posting feels like super predictable irony, but the two previous installments both have well over 200 comments (even though I’m sure it took more than 3 hours), so clearly this community is just CHATTY. Sometimes, about Star Wars. (Please don’t make me listen to your manifesto.)
This reminds me of how my parents (who, on paper, couldn’t possibly have any issues with homosexuality — my dad lived in GREENWICH VILLAGE in the 1970s, for chrissake) turned out to be not at ALL prepared to deal maturely with having a gay son. It’s amazing how moving to the suburbs, raising two kids and a mortgage, and aging a couple of decades can just suck all the liberal right out of people.
Oh gosh, Lucy needs a hug, WALKY, LUCY NEEDS 500 CC OF HUG STAT CMON!
Since the comments have insisted on making this actually about starwars and not the stochastic terrorism machine the bastard n@zis have made. Here. My Manifesto, bereft of racist f###ery:
It trivialized what the Dark Side really is. How much it takes for a force user not only to Fall but also become Sith, who do not just take in all that hate and anger and let it warp them, no, they reach and twist back and make the universe a darker and colder place by using, abusing, corrupting the pure selfless and sourceless force for their selfish ends, and it bites them back, warps them in many ways, they say peace is a lie there is only passion, they just mean They Get To Do All The Fun Things And Damn All Consequences. The prequels made this distinction and so did Word of God. A Fallen Darksider is chaos, Sith are god damned Millitary Industrial Complex levels of evil. That shit has some sort of order, it is not good, it is not even to the nature of the dark side. They force it to be that way, and there Is No Balance with that.
They handwaved some of Kylo’s fall saying “oh Snoke was just in his mind his entire life or so” but they completely dashed the gravitas the prequels took so long to build up, into what it actually takes to make a good person drink in the hate and anger of the entire Galaxy. AND. To make it serve them. So! I can only enjoy fanfiction now, like this:
They slandered my precious bb Luke and they must pay. HE was the second jedi in history to unleash Electric Judgement, lightsider lightning, HE was the Chosen One who did actually bring balance to the force. Lucas himself says that two sith two jedi is not balance. The sith are force parasites who bend and corrupt the force to the will of one or two beings, the force is for everyone, they are actually sucking the damn life out of the universe with their facist Empire garbage. Balance is No Sith. Anakin might have reverted for half a moment and rid the galaxy of Palpatine, but Luke rid the galaxy of Vader, the actual work horse of that parasitic relationship within a parasitic relationship. Luke got the ball rolling. The force shook it’s head at Vader and moved to Luke. Canon, luke is Chosen, Anakin is just tacked on to that with vague forgiveness enough to become a force ghost.
The fact that the dang chosen one pouts on a tiny island with drones and brainless cutie floofs bogarding the ancient jedi texts to himself because that nonsense never gave him aught but pain, forgetting the entire war that pivoted to victory on his short twink shoulders, is, utterly, intolerable. Funny to watch, but makes my blood boil to, this, day, and I must drain this venomous wound or I will explode.
The characterization of Luke is so bad I barely remember anything else in the movie, and the other adventures were actually awesome, the bit of milk the movie desperately needed to choke down the dusty raw cocoa powder that was merely good visuals and no brain whatsoever behind it. The gambling planet was not only So Vegas, it was also So WA DC too, and that makes me laugh in cathartic pain. Finn is a new precious bb I must hug and kiss on de head, Poe is a glorious bastard who really shouldnt be worshiped and REALLY SHOULDNT BE SO DAMN EFFECTIVE but its funny how he is, and Rose is the kind of Heroine everyone needs to see in action, damn it.
But dat Luke doe.
Ok but now can we get to not the particular fandom but the trend of far right Infiltration?
I think given the setup in Force Awakens, they did the best they could have with Luke. It doesn’t make a cohesive story with the originals, but that’s because Episode 7 sucks, Episode 8 is doing the best it can with a shitty foundation.
And the Luke stuff is good! Hamill plays a good reluctant mentor, they really make the most of shooting on a spectacular old irish monastery, and his final ‘duel’ with Kylo makes the movie going on for another half-hour after the climax tolerable.
Aspire: Obi Wan, the warrior monk, the Light of the Order, the sassy bastard and the hardened general who loves his men as parts of his own being.
See myself: Chewbacca, the prince of a shattered tribe, who just goes along with who understands my language and has fun adventures spiting the ones who destroyed my clans. The english! But mostly finances, weed (off the green for 2 years today it was not right for me in particular) and the capitalist hellscape who refuses to read the fkn definition of socialism and rule out anything but goddamn anarcho capitalism wealth-oligarchy, in the definition of “not socialist.”
Its still hard when someone comes in clearly from hotboxing somewhere up the street, and expects me to know their parts measurements while I try and find the right distance to stand to balance not getting a contact high and my itty bitty bitta hearing loss. But its been good, it does help that I distanced myself from people who would not stop offering every time I seen them.
But thanks! I am pretty proud. Hope you do well with your endeavors too!
Thanks, pal. I appreciate those kind words. It’s a slog! But we just take it one day at a time. You know? Just one little hill to climb at a time.
Thanks for sharing that. I’ve got a little hearing loss too. Makes things difficult! Plus being around second-hand smoke all the time. But we keep on trying…
I kind of see myself as L3-37 from “Solo: a Star Wars Story,” or RO-GR from “Trenches to Wrenches: the Roger Story”.
I’m probably quite a bit like C3PO.
But I aspire to be like that monk who kept repeating, “I am one with the Force and the Force is with me” while walking through a hail of bullets. To me, that kind of unstoppable calm is something I’ve always sought.
I’m probably one of the tech.s, sitting at his board, turning his particular cog so that the whole mechanism can function. My aspiration is that I’m doing this for the Good Guys.
I aspire to be Cassian Andor, but I am probably more like Marva. By the time I see the problem, it’s too late for me to do anything about it. Except I’m about as well-loved as Cassian is. Cassian’s relations to people are spot on for me.
Nah, because it loses the inflection, used as a title like that. It’s not “I know”. It’s, “I KNOW!” (It also needs something, some obvious truth — spoken or un- — that it’s responding to, for proper effect.)
So a thing that kind of helps square the circle of “how the fuck did they wind up together if they wouldn’t approve of Lucy for being black” is the term “colorism.” At least within the African American context, there’s definitely folks who draw a distinction between “light-skin” and “dark-skin” black people, and I don’t want to go into too much detail since I’m just a white guy whose had black friends acquaintances and colleagues complain about, but suffice to say that its a genuine form of prejudice that gets very messy and can go in many directions (like I have one friend who gets shit because some of her family members think because her skin is relatively light she’s ‘not really black’) and Lucy IS darker skinned than Charles. You’ve probably heard of “the paper bag test” as an infamous line between “fine” and “too dark,” and turns out that some people will draw that line at darker (or lighter!) tones than just that one.
It fucking sucks. And I don’t know if Willis is intentionally going for that or if Linda and Charles are irrational in a different way, but if he is then he’s talking about a pretty real, studied phenomena that sucks.
You’re right, but I think classism is also a big part. Charles is doing whatever Linda thinks is a respectable career (“one of the good ones” probably also comes in here), where as Lucy is just a student (and, due to colourism, Linda would assume she couldn’t possibly come from a ‘good’ family or be going anywhere in life)
(we also have evidence about classism (and xenophobia/racism (not that we needed more evidence)) from their compared reactions to Billie vs Marcie)
If Pinkie Pie and Deadpool have taught us anything, it’s that it’s OK if the 4th wall has a few holes in it.
(Depresses clutch, shifts gear, releases clutch) It’s really easy to be racist without acknowledging it. I think of it like lead poisoning.
Lead is kind of shiny and gray. Easily recognizable. But it’s still toxic in invisible amounts, and when consumed it gets in your bones and takes forever to leach out. It has neurological effects.
My mother was hella racist – I’m not gonna even repeat shit she used to say to me – but she would have denied it to her dying day.
I’m a big fan of “Narbonic,” a webcomic which regularly took a sledgehammer to the 4th wall.
Yeah, there’s this myth that racism is all goose-stepping Nazis, when really it’s something that normal people learn to be in our normal lives, all the bloody time.
Yeah, there’s this myth that racism is all goose-stepping Nazis, when really it’s something that normal people learn to be in our normal lives, all the bloody time.
Racism doesn’t even require that, necessarily. (Though there is a LOT of that, no question.)
So much of “white America” bristles at any mention of racism, because… well, because racism is a Great Wrong™, and surely we’d know if a Great Wrong™ is being committed, wouldn’t we? (Goose-stepping isn’t exactly subtle, after all!) I mean, for sure we’re Absolutely Not Racist™, we know that much. So it feels right to presume the same of the majority of other people. It’s certainly easiest for us, so rock that boat at your own peril.
Except.
Systemic racism — which is the form a lot of racism actually encountered “in the wild” takes — is, as the name suggests, built right into the systems and institutions of society; it doesn’t require anyone being “actively racist” to perpetuate it. It also can’t be addressed with any of the easy fixes we prefer: Scapegoating, perhaps, or identifying and removing those apocryphal “bad apples” who’re responsible for it. Thing is, nobody’s directly responsible for systemic racism. That’s. What. “Systemic.” Means!
Take policing. (Settle down, my whole point here is that this conversation doesn’t have to involve vilifying or blaming anyone.) Policing is an institution that, unfortunately, exhibits clear patterns of systemic racism. There’s a mountain of evidence that, when someone has an encounter with law enforcement, that person’s skin color is a disproportionately strong predictor of how that encounter is likely to unfold, and what the outcome will be.
But you know what’s not nearly as influential a predictor? The officers’ skin color.
The systemic racism in policing isn’t something that’s solely coming from consciously racist white cops. Nor is it solely due to the unconscious biases of casually-racist white cops. It isn’t even something that can solely be blamed on any white cops. It’s literally The. System. Itself.
(Which isn’t to say that there aren’t any consciously-racist white cops, actively committing racist acts. There absolutely are. And one of the major systemic flaws is how aggressively that system insulates (all, but particularly those) cops from being held accountable for their decision-making while on duty. Under those conditions, problems are allowed to metastasize; they can’t simply be excised cleanly.)
We need to work, as a country, on getting better at being able to have difficult conversations about things like that. Ideally without people reacting to it as a personal accusation or indictment, because then they either resort to aggressive defensiveness (usually by launching a counter-offensive), or immediately retract into their shells. Neither is especially productive.
Of course prompts for much needed discussion about it are often met with less than ideal reactions, especially among white normie folk.
The primary reason is probably that most of them grew up with the other definition of racism, the one given to white grade-schoolers where the gist is to not say mean things about skin color. Albeit ignorance and apathy are still harmful, under the bigotry paradigm taught to most white grade-schoolers, harm done to minorties isn’t “”real”” bigotry if it isn’t deliberately and directly cruel. But apathy and ignorance can be reasoned with, you just have to sit down and discuss things as long as it takes (“we ~ALL~ in this together”, #democracy, yada yada yada). Under this paradigm, “”real”” racism is constrained to the realm of emotional distress and interpersonal violence, where it’s rare and it’s a hearts and minds issue.
What this definition leaves out is any notion that racism / bigotry is about POWER; that this society was built for the straight white cis binary neurotypical non-disabled Everyman™, and where being the Everyman™ confers power upon you, and where bigotry is a large, centuries-old pervasive system where every white “””normal””” person is bound up in it and privileged by it whether or not they want to be, and where addressing it required thinking about themselves and their place in it.
Some white normie folk do the responsible thing and acknowledge that the definition of racism they were originally given as 7-year-olds is less than complete. But of course a lot of the time they just go “uuuuuuugh you just can’t change the definition of racism”.
To them, all racism / bigotry period exists ONLY in the realm of card-carrying Klansman and other self-identified fascists out to hate for hatred’s sake. The entrepreneurs, property-owners, pundits and politicians who seek to benefit by cooperating with these bigots? They are but fellow American Patriots™ who OBVIOUSLY share their ultimate vision for the future but have just “lost their way”.
White moderates don’t see themselves as flawed individuals with a long way still to go; having already graduated middle school means they’re already where they need to be, and where everyone else needs to get to, living proof that racism is something that can easily and painlessly be opted out of.
They may be willing to help minorities, but only in ways that don’t forepart their privilege. For there is no definition of systematic bigotry that includes those who can and do profit from bigots that doesn’t also include themselves, and having to alienate some fellow white “”normal”” folk is just too painful for them. Therefore, they stick to the more familiar, more comfortable definition of bigotry that’s carried them since grade school, and fixate on the social justice equivalent of diet soda — gestures that feel like moving forward, but that have little change of actually getting anywhere.
“How about instead of defunding the police, we give them more money than ever, BUT BUT, Juneteenth is now a National Holiday. Something for ~~EVERYONE~~!!! Yay compromise!!!”
Pinkie Pie is a very good example because she rarely broke the fourth wall, yet people acted like she did it all the time because she:
a) told jokes.
b) made references to pop culture.
c) acted silly.
Like, do these people never tell jokes or reference pop culture when having a discussion? Am I breaking the fourth wall if I compare something to Back to the Future?
Disney failed the new Star Wars trilogy by not commiting to a vision at the beginning and instead letting JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson improvise badly and trample all over each other’s ideas.
Anyone who felt the need to write a manifesto about it though makes me leery.
Yeah. There are problems with each movie beyond that, but the biggest issue is squarely on trying to do a trilogy with no planning. No overall arc or editorial control.
my biggest manifesto is how they wasted Ackbar. They could have replaced Holdo with Ackbar and so many issues I had with the “running away” plot could have been forgiven.
They could have done a lot. I’d have loved to see what Rian Johnson would have done if the entire trilogy were his from the beginning. Or any director with a vision beyond one film, really.
The Admiral in that plotline being a character the audience knows and respects breaks the mutiny plotline completely, and it’s already a little flimsy as is.
It’s always amazing that people don’t see that. That entire plot might be a mistake, but it relies on the audience not trusting the admiral and thus sympathizing with the obvious heroes going to try a ridiculous gamble. It’s a neat piece of genre subversion, because by genre rules they should be right.
It’s not clear to me even now that Star Wars is actually a good place to subvert genre though.
I didn’t even know Ackbar was in this but maybe they figured someone with a name like that doing a 9/11 on the First Order fleet *might* have been a bad look
I have to say, this is such a good and sensitive portrayal of racism. I am really glad it’s here. Too many people think anti-racism is some sort of venereal disease: fuck a person of the appropriate color and BAM! You’re no longer racist.
Some people really love telling on themselves, it’s kind of amazing how often people will leap to conflate themselves with objectively terrible people or movements when no one else really was.
LOL. Walky acts like theee’s an audience listening in when it’s a private convo between him and Lucy.
But sure it must be the racism of the racists who made people say that he was breaking the 4th wall. You heard it folks, if you thought this was a 4th wall break, that’s again proof you are racists.
* It made Reylo canon
* It broke up Flynn and Rey, which could have been the highest profile interracial relationship in genre fiction.
* It really treats Flynn like crap throughout
* Yes, the Luke treatment.
* It has the rest of the galaxy ignoring the fight against the Nazis
* It kills Snoke without ever explaining anything.
Which is slightly different than hating The Last Jedi because Rey can kick ass with a week of training and the introducing of another Woman of Color.
Poor Walky, all that attempt to avoid controversy and Lucy pointedly doesn’t say that HE’S, which IIRC was the thing that was controversial the first time around
Can’t find it now, but there’s that other strip when Sarah said she didn’t want to be one of only two Black folks present when the police arrived, and Walky asked her who the other one was. (IIRC)
Controversial opinion: Star Wars is just not that Big a Deal, and it never was. So whatever you think of any part of it, it’s not worth getting worked up about.
(Speaking as a former Star Wars-obsessed 80s kid, and still a fan of the whole universe. And with apologies for adding to the already excessive number of comments about SW.)
That said, with some exceptions here, it’s refreshing to find a corner of the internet where there are reasonable prevailing views about what is Good, what is Bad, and what is Not Bad about the sequel trilogy, and where my personal fondness for TLJ tempered by recognition of its real flaws is not an outlier.
Speaking as an outsider to Star Wars fandom, Star Wars’ popularity has always been driven by its owners’ desire to sell merch. It’s a toy commercial, which is why it has no cohesive vision, just a weird mishmash of ideas that don’t really gel together because George Lucas was trying to combine a bunch of shit he was really into in the 50s and 60s.
So you’re right, it’s just not that big a deal, it’s just that some people really want to feel like they’re a part of something, even if that means spending hundreds of dollars on merch for a series of middling sci-fi movies and occasionally dressing up as the leader of a genocidal fascist empire that’s technically fictional.
Yeah, i shamefully ain’t that much a Star Wars fan either, but alongside other like media with similar controversies, it is worthwhile to pay attention at least somewhat for the sake of alt-right litmus tests.
Fair. A corollary to Star Wars being Not a Big Deal is that when someone does try to make a big deal of some aspect of it, it tells you far more about their own issues than about Star Wars.
I liked TLJ… because it broke the Star Wars formula that had begun to calcify. But both the movie and apparently the people making the movie have some real problems with fucking with Finn and Rose, and even with Poe, plus the whole pacing thing and other more minor nonsense.
Essays written by alt-right crybabies who attempt to justify their position on The Last Jedi that basically boils down to “I’m not racist but it Star Wars sucks now.”
Hey, I might need someone to explain like I’m 5 here. What is a “The Last Jedi manifesto” in this context / what does it it have to do with Walky’s parents’ racism/colorism?
I think I get it… is this Walky’s way of describing their casual racism via fandom reference, because fandom references are how Walky describes everything?
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“It’s that ‘into the exact same things’ part, they don’t like that I don’t want to be a doctor”
“…oh… so should I switch to pre-med?”
[insert “You know why!” gif]
Ah I get the awkward convo between Lucy and Walky as my birthday strip, awesome lol
Loving Lucy’s expressions in this one.
I love how Walky is only slightly less confused than Lucy is by this whole issue.
honestly, yeah, and i’m glad he’s actually being as forward as he can manage with it. this is so outside the boundaries of any conversation I’d expect to have in my life and I don’t think I could handle it well, either. It must feel impossible to unpack.
Happy birthday!
Happy Birthday!!!! : D
Happy birthday!
🥳 🪅 🎉 🎂 🎈 🎊
Happy birthday to you!
The world is a zoo!
Wish you a great party!
And some sweet presents too!
Hope it’s a great day for you, Sol.
Happy Birthday!
Also, apologies, due to cat jumping on desk when I first tried to do this the flag button was hit instead.
Birthday buddies! Hope you have a good one.
Heeey, it’s my birthday tomorrow!! Happy Birthday! ♥
Thx for the birthday wishes everybody :3 <3
I liked The Last Jedi. Rise of Skywalker was a mess but that ain’t on Last Jedi.
Yeah, I was enjoying the movies enough, but then I never bothered with the last one based on some things I heard.
It’s fun in a “this is all nonsense” sort of way. Cool visuals, fun action. Just don’t try to make sense of anything.
Aye – it feels like they went into shooting with less of a finished script, and more of a bucket list of “random scenes it would be cool to have”.
I always characterized it as “It was nice they let JJ Abrams do his ideas for Episode 8 AND Episode 9, but it was kinda cruel to force him to try to cram them both into one movie.”
That’s funny – pretty similar to how I talk about it, except I usually blame Abrams for being petty enough to try to rewrite The Last Jedi instead of just. working with it. Making a movie, especially a franchise blockbuster, is a collaborative effort. Regardless of personal feelings, if you can’t work with other writers and directors and respect what they make, then like… Find a new job, maybe?
I have a bit of a grudge with Abrams anyway (squints at 2009 “star trek”)
it was a whiteboard, apparently. but yes.
Watch it with a friend and talk shit the whole time. It’s a fun Bad Movie.
It’s fuckin sucks but I enjoyed it, in an angry “wtf” way.
Star Wars is rarely boring to talk about, and Rise of Skywalker has a trainwreck quality that makes it a lot of fun to analyze.
Agreed. Last Jedi was too imaginative for Star Wars. The series is very rigid in its OH NO I’M DOING IT
It’s as if Days of Our Lives suddenly was made exclusively of musical numbers.
Anything can happen in soaps. Any outlandish thing, but not that.
What if I dislike The Last Jedi because I think its “imaginative” front is a total lie and that its main goal is to once again reestablish the same status quo that every single past movie has done?
Then honestly, I’d doubt your cinema critic capacity. Last Jedi has a LOT of flaws, specifically with pacing and dialogue, but adhering slavishly to the formula of the prior 7 films ain’t one of them.
The entire point of it is to pretend they’re going to do something different and go in a more morally grey direction, but by the end of the film it firmly reestablishes that the Jedi are good, the Sith are bad, and there’s no nuance in between. Yoda burning the Jedi tree didn’t mean anything, because Rey had already rescued the texts, the Jedi order is once again held up as an ideal of light and purity, when they’re actually just a cult who have made nothing but mistakes in their entire history. I don’t want it.
Then you have eyeballs and can watch something. Also the way it treated John Boyega that people constantly seemed to overlook. It dumped everything from the first film for the sake of the film that he wanted to write about the white boy.
This and the treatment of Luke are the two issues I have with Last Jedi and the sequel franchise as a whole. The Last Jedi is still a good movie but we forget what they took from us.
Pretty much the same here. If Rian wants to tell his own kind of SW story, go for it. But I’d much rather he hadn’t used a numbered movie (and Carrie’s last one) to do it, or done what he did to Luke, or killed off the (existing) Resistance until what was left could fit aboard the Falcon.
I was hopeful the franchise had shed that tendency when Lucas sold out completely to Disney.
Turns out The Mouse is even more allergic to shades of gray than Lucas.
I have one word for you: Andor.
Last Jedi didn’t exactly deal Rise of Skywalker the best hand it could’ve (and Carrie Fisher’s death before the filming of a movie that was supposed to focus on Leia was a downright death sentence) but it’s still the best damn Star Wars since Empire and I love it with all my heart.
Rise still sucks bantha bollocks, though.
The Force Awakens sort of dealt TLJ a bad hand, too, so maybe fair’s fair.
I dunno about Force Awakens dealing TLJ a bad hand, but one complaint I’ve heard often is that it pulls the rug out from shows set in the interim, since the wholesale destruction wrought by Starkiller Base renders so much meaningless.
(Also, I’m probably the only person who thinks like this, but why the hell could it be seen in real time from Jakku? I hardly expect scientific accuracy from what is in effect a fantasy series that sometimes goes “beep,” but even [Disney canon] Star Wars has generally acknowledged that the light barrier is something that must be overcome by technology – but in that scene it seems they even forgot its effect on light?!)
JJ Abrams doesn’t care for things like “time” and “distance”, or “talking”, or anything else that slows down the action or gets in the way of the next Visual Spectacle.
If there’s one thing Star Wars and Star Trek fans can agree on, it’s mutual anger at JJ Abrams.
Lens flare!
One of the Last Jedi criticisms I’ve seen is the treatment of Luke. But The Force Awakens created a scenario where the galaxy had gotten very bad again, so where was Luke? The answer that The Last Jedi gave may not be satisfying, but it answers the question of why Luke is in hiding while staying relatively true to the Luke who we saw almost giving in to the dark side while wailing on Vader at the end of RotJ.
You are FAR from the only person who thinks like this. One of the worst aspects of TFA is that, like every J.J. Abrams “science fiction” movie, it basically ignores the concepts of time and space in favor of sap, bang, pow.
Abrams is an enthusiastic fanboy, but he utterly doesn’t care at all about the time and space aspects making the slightest bit of sense, and it shows in his Star Trek films and also TLJ and (to a lesser extent, but how was the secret fleet supplied and mustered again) RoS. So yes, it’s irritating in that the echo/homage/straight out copying that TFA did, where the original had us only know a planet had been wiped out with a jedi “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced,” in TFA, suddenly lightspeed limits don’t exist in the Star Wars universe and people can see death beams being fired across hyperspace to completely different planets.
For my money, TLJ > RotJ > TFA, largely because TLJ attemps to do new stuff. It’s not a great series, or even a good one (although all of it is better than the prequel series), not least because of the directoral whiplash, but TLJ at least made interesting choices (which the following movie ignored), sent things in interesting directions (which the following movie reversed), and introduced at least one cool new character (who was written entirely out of the following movie).
The Force Awakens: Pure nostalgia bait. But tasty.
The Last Jedi: “This is not your father’s Star Wars anymore.”
Rise of Skywalker: “LOL JK! Yes it is!”
It’s definitely your father’s Star Wars, please stop shouting slurs at us on Twitter!
There’s a lot that kind of sucks about the Last Jedi (although the stuff that’s good is some franchise best stuff) but almost everything I dislike about it stems from bad decisions made by JJ in the first movie
Yeah, the biggest problem with TFA is that it fails to introduce a group of main characters who work together, a group who we’ll want to reunite in the second installment. It just us Poe and his boyfriend and girlfriend, who never meet.
They should have actually shown the old heroes fall apart. If you’ve gotta keep going after the happy ending at least let us see it go wrong and don’t skip past all the interesting tragedy to tell the same story again with a new cast
Also maybe more than one Solo kid? I guess they didn’t want to copy the EU
I felt like it was… serviceable. At least it wasn’t a virtual scene-for-scene remake (and I never saw Rise, but I haven’t heard a good word about it). People get really weird about it, though, from both directions. Honestly, Legends will always be the true Star Wars to me.
The fact they didn’t put the big three in the same shot, pref on the bridge of the Falcon, shows just how dumb makers of Dusney Star Wars really were
Disney, not Dusney…I’m beginning to really dislike phones
Meanwhile, people are angry at Paramount because Picard season 3 was basically “Jean Luc gets the gang back together for one more adventure”, even though that’s what some people wanted from that series from the beginning.
There’s just no pleasing nerds.
I think the first two seasons of picard just soured everyone on the franchise and there as nothing the third season could have done to make people like it.
Picard is a really great example of a show running entirely off the rails for using nostalgia to paper over the fact the plots were thin and incoherent.
see i didnt like picard season 3 because it spent too much time on jack crusher being a very special boi who is also a fucking plank of generic milktoast lumber that just had to be borg as well. The borg worked when they were used sparingly you literally dragged them out every fucking season of this show. Also the least you could have done is bring back benatar singing borg queen jiradi.
/rant
the second season also still rankles me so much because have all these flashbacks to picard as a kid :grabs screen writer by the lapels: Where is picard’s goddamn brother at?
Nah, I’m annoyed at Picard because it leans (IMO) way too far into the Federation being bad/compromised/incapable of doing anything good without Great Man Jean Luc and his current crew of heroes. A whole lot of decent, innocent people die in terrible ways in all three seasons so that JLP et al can swan in and save everything. It’s so self-indulgent that I’ve actually lost a bit of my respect for Sir Patrick.
I think it’s entirely possible for a show to be bad, and then try to change to address criticism and still end up being quite bad, just in a different way.
Frankly Picard is a bad idea of a show that probably shouldn’t exist.
I think that Walky’s getting at the racist tirades that neckbeards throw at TLJ.
Yes, I think that’s exactly what he’s referring to. The heroes of that movie included Finn and Rose, a Black man and an Asian woman. That’s one of the things that pisses off the racists the most about that movie. I’m certain that’s what Walky is referring to here. He’s not referring to fans of the movie.
Finn’s actor got fucking robbed by Disney and I hope he’s doing better.
Fences have apparently been mended. There are rumors he is returning for another Star Wars movie.
I’m not exactly boycotting them, I’ve just never gotten around to watching them.
Even though I do have Disney+.
I resent the Last Jedi for giving the Sequel Trilogy redeeming qualities
My main complaint with the last jedi is that they didn’t give the backstop on how Luke got to where he was emotionally wise. As a well known main character from the earlier series, I am not a fan of a drastic personality switch without showing how you got there. Especially when one of Luke’s most known traits is that he still thought that there was good in his father (basically the well known death dealer of the universe) even after everything, and yet some nightmares/visions that were briefly covered caused him to doubt his nephew? I don’t mind that we go there, just spend the time taking me there rather than giving me whiplash with no explanation. I get that you want the shock, but shock without spending time to explain it well just feels like bad poorly thought out writing. Give me the feeling of the endless terror of the visions, the loss of sleep and the stress, and the build up to the breaking point. That would be a lot more interesting than a chase in space (not even planet hopping) or the racetrack scene.
Return of Skywalker just felt campy and I treated it with the same seriousness as Princess Bride.
People go on and on about Luke trying to redeem Vader and conveniently forget that he ditched that to go straight to murder the second that he threatened Leia.
I agree that we could’ve been given a better sense of how long the visions had been going on, same as how Revenge of the Sith should’ve made it clearer that Anakin was on almost negative sleep the whole time.
I once again beg everyone to read Stover’s Revenge of the Sith novel. it turns a decent-ish movie into an amazing story.
If you have to read a book in order for the movie to make sense, what is the point of the movie?
it’s Star Wars. the bulk of it’s lore was in books for the last 50 years of it’s life. it also adds more then the movie was able to do.
If you thought revenge of the sith needed more love to be good, then read the book, it’s what you’re looking for.
My library has an ebook of the whole prequel trilogy. Do you know if the others are any good?
He did ditch it until he was at the point where he could have killed Vader, and he didn’t. He backed off. That was how he passed the jedi test. That was also a younger, and thus more impulsive, Luke. You would think that after he was proven right about his dad, especially after the temptation he gave into to charge in and fight in order to protect, he would be wary of jumping to such things in the future. I sort of think that his whole arc was about that (as the vision in the swamp showed him rushing in to attack and then regretting it). So while it isn’t odd that it would still be having trouble with it, it can leave a bad feeling about his accomplishments/character arc in the previous series by washing away his progression on it without an explanation. It’s why you have to be more careful with established characters, as while you might understand how it progressed to that point in your head, if you don’t show the audience too, it can cause bad feelings.
Revenge of the Sith was a bad build up too, but Attack of the Clones didn’t exactly start off the romance on the best footing either. I don’t know if they were just trying to cover too many things in a short amount of time or covering the wrong things (as in cabinet meetings).
TLJ had the most interesting developments for the world and for the relationship between Kylo and Rey. To the point I didn’t mind the casino detour.
Buuut RoS was built to get specific moments. I REALLY enjoyed those moments, but they did lead to an overall weaker end result.
It was good for the most part, but I felt that they sidelined Finn too much. Where was his Jedi arc?
I watched them solely to help me understand Darths and Droids.
I liked The Last Jedi, didn’t care for Episodes 7 or 9.
Who cares? The Star Wars movies are only important in so far as they establish background for the Mandalorian.
I mean the Mandalorian also sucks. Very pretty cinematography, very empty characters and plot, and it ruined Ahsoka.
Well, now she gets it, at least.
Oof, poor kids, though.
I don’t quite understand the particular Star Wars community reference, but yes, I concur. 😟
Basically, the Venn diagram between YouTubers shitting on The Last Jedi and the far-right is a circle.
Oooooooh, the “I’m not racist but it sucks now” crowd, got it. 👀
“I’m not racist but we got the Asian off the twitters!”
@DrunkenNordmann
Oh my gods, thank you for explaining that. I am not a Star Wars fan and cannot keep track of the titles (beyond the original trilogy), so I had no idea what the implication there was supposed to be.
(Disclaimer: I have not watched any Star Wars myself but I follow several people who are big fans)
Just in case it helps, Last Jedi is the first one of the new trilogy, and one reason for the far-right’s hatred of it is that the three main characters are a woman, a black man, and a Hispanic man. Basically, you can boil down their opinion on it to “woke culture ruined everything,” because the only reason to have women or people of color as main characters is to be politically correct apparently. (Meanwhile, a lot of people who liked Last Jedi were deeply disappointed by the next two movies, because they pretty much failed to do anything interesting with all the cool stuff that fans liked.)
Correction: TLJ is the second in the Trilogy, and the main complaint about it is that it focuses on the Black dude having a space adventure with the Asian girl introduced in this film, and the White girl trying to get Luke to train her but Luke actually followed the logical conclusion left in the previous film and had forked off in retirement because he now has hang-ups about the Jedi because he once sensed darkness in his nephew and a moment of hesitation turned Kylo fully to the dark side (but maybe not really) and led him to destroy the school Luke had been building.
Also, it claims that Rey is actually not a super special Jedi born from one of the three families that are allowed to produce Super Special Jedi (which many people liked because it meant that the franchise finally stops being about Just Three Families but weird dudes hated because Random Chick From Nowhere “doesn’t deserve Special Jedi Powers”)
Also I have screwed up the HTML, damn
you must’ve been looking at different criticisms than I was. Most of the people I saw who didn’t like it had big isssues with “admiral holdo’ and her ‘plan’, the magic hyperspace ramming technique, and the pacing of the movie as a whole. A few took issue with when marysue went into the dark place and discovered she was nobody (which was actually the coolest outcome possible) and a few had issues with how Luke was portrayed, and as for the dog-racing thing, that was mostly disliked for being so obviously aimed at the under-ten crowd, not because of the actors used. (There’s also the logical flaws in the equipment, the ‘icescatespeeeders’ and such).
But then, I generally tend to watch people who don’t make “Race” or “Racial Justice” the only lens they look at anything with (including their opponents).
Oh, and the supreme stuipidity of using gravity bombers in NULL GEE.
The gravity bombs in space were the moment I checked out of that film.
I’m glad that as a result I have no first-hand knowledge of what everyone else is talking about here.
Which is kind of sad, given that the original trilogy is burned into my retinas.
Fun fact, orbiting a planet is not, in fact, “null gee.” You’re still very much in the planet’s gravity, which is the entire reason orbit even works. The reason astronauts are “weightless” is because they’re falling but also moving extremely fast, and there’s no ground to counteract gravity. If you’re above a planet, and there’s a thing below you, dropping something straight down would absolutely cause it to fall directly towards that thing.
And anyway, Star Wars ships clearly have some sort of artificial gravity inside them. Even if it were “null gee” outside, inertia is still a thing, and the bombs you dropped would continue to move in the same direction and speed as when you dropped them. There’s no magical force (ha) that would cause them to suddenly stop and float away in random directions upon exiting the ship.
Frankly, it makes much more sense than Han flying the Millennium Falcon into Starkiller Base’s atmosphere at light speed and somehow being able to stop before crashing into the surface at relativistic speeds and obliterating everything within a few miles of the impact.
Oh, the pacing in TLJ is abysmal, and they waste so much damned time on the horsedog race bits–partly because it kept interrupting the main action. It’s the single most valid complaint about the film.
I also think Rose was generally served poorly as a character. Her dialogue was downright painful at times (but that’s not the actor’s fault). And her death was straight out of the Refrigerator Handbook for Female Romantic Interests.
On the other hand…
Gravity bombs in space are no worse than audible explosions. If you made it this far in the series without screaming at every battle sequence, then you should be able to handle that one. I can come up with a dozen explanations for the bombs to work as headcanon, the easiest being that they use a kind of reverse-tractor-beam technology to accelerate the bombs even after deploying.
Similarly, Hondo’s plan worked for me. I was less impressed with the plot-devices that made it necessary, especially the whole ‘track through hyperspace’ thing, but I was willing to allow it.
Another common complaint (not mentioned here, so far) was the ‘new Force powers are bullshit!” cry. Bunk. No one complained when the Emperor started tossing around Force Lightning, or when Yoda suddenly became a lightsaber-equipped ping-pong ball in the prequels. The two powers most commonly mentioned are Leia’s suspended animation and Luke’s astral projection–both of which have vastly more legitimacy as a faux-Eastern-religious practice than lightning bolts from the fingertips.
And yes, there was a vast amount of whining on the internet about Luke’s fall from grace, and about all these female and PoC characters suddenly being important. Those of you who missed it can be grateful for that, but it really was quite common.
Freemage, Rose doesn’t die in either TLJ or any other of the Starwars films.
Don’t feel bad, the titles are all wrong anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oqYhRT-A8s
And they can go on about it for longer than the movie’s actual runtime.
But you just put it far more succinctly than I could, thank you for that!
Bollix.
The Disney Star Wars trilogy was horrible, full of poor choices and far too many plot holes.
“And suddenly the Emperor returned.
Finn should have been the main character. Imagine how cool it would have been to see Luke train a former stormtrooper
I consider there to be a major difference between “people who didn’t particularly like The Last Jedi” (I honestly just thought it was okay and agree that they didn’t do well by Finn throughout the trilogy) and “people who have made their entire brand about hating The Last Jedi and through it all the OTHER stuff about modern pop culture they hate, which coincidentally is all the parts of modern pop culture that aren’t white, straight, male, and cisgender.”
I have seen enough evidence of those manifestos’ existence to know that they exist, and hoo boy do you NOT want to go there.
I get that but as much as there are those on the far right that hate it for those reasons there are also those on the left that think if you hate the movies it must be because you hate woman and people of colour
Rather than the trilogy was bad, really bad.
Okay, and those people aren’t worth listening to. They’re too busy eating their own jaws to form a coherent thought, regardless of their political leaning.
Sure, this just specifically mentions “manifestos about The Last Jedi” in particular rather than even “the sequel trilogy”, and that suggests a VERY specific subtype (ie, the “racists who harassed an actress off Twitter” subtype). Not just “hated the sequel trilogy” but “hated TLJ”, not just “hated TLJ” but “has a manifesto about it”. Generally speaking most people I’ve encountered who dislike the trilogy as a whole for non-bigoted reasons can be pretty succinct about what they felt was done poorly. (And from what – admittedly, VERY VERY LITTLE – I saw about The Rise of Skywalker, everyone agreed that was a hot fucking disaster of a movie.)
Honestly I don’t even think they’re worth the time and energy I’ve expended thinking on them tonight. TLJ was five and a half years ago. TROS was four and a half years ago. I could be spending this time thinking about something I actually like. I feel bad for Star Wars fans who aren’t bigots who received The Rise of Skywalker as a movie product, but the movies you liked still exist. Focus on them instead. If Disney’s willing to pretend the sequel trilogy doesn’t exist, then let them. It’s more rewarding to enjoy something than to expend THAT MUCH ENERGY hating it.
Yeah, hating Last Jedi specifically is a red flag. The sequels are not good, but Last Jedi is the one that’s like an actual movie with cool shit happening and actual themes
Well, the trilogy wasn’t a trilogy. It was a duology with a filler movie in-between. The duology, being an Abrams film, was long on spectacle and short on substance, with a lot of Mystery Box bullshit for good measure.
TLJ, meanwhile, was a completely unrelated film because it was driven by a completely different creator.
But the Sheev came back the very next day
The Sheev came back, they thought he was a goner
But the Sheev came back, he just couldn’t stay away
Away, away
Sheev just couldn’t stay dead when there was Fortnite to play!
Saying that people who don’t like TLJ are right-wing makes my blood boil. I’m as left as you can be (not even American, so not that fake left Americans have) and I despise TLJ with all my heart.
and that’s (part of) why I’m not a YouTuber, because my complaints about the ST fall entirely outside that Venn diagram and under the category of “deep nerdery”.
There’s a LOT of overlap between “people who didn’t like The Last Jedi” and “Racist/Misogynist Internet Chuds”
It’s important to note that one does not mean the other. A lot of far right assholes shut on it, but that doesn’t mean everyone who hated it is a far right asshole.
Yeah, I hated it and I’m a hopefully-leftish asshole.
Idk how to measure the left/right thing. Like, I’ve heard I’m probably right-leaning on a global scale since I’m technically an American, but that was on Twitter, where nobody’s opinion matters anyway.
Also I didn’t “hate” the movie, but that’s just what we’re required to call it when something isn’t our absolute favorite now.
Ah, yeah, that comment. Its about our career politicians and their voting records. The war on crime and or drugs was Biden’s pet project. Sarah Palin says that congressfolks dont need any more restrictions to the stock market when they are policy makers and trend setters. While they are not screaming facists who literally knew and loved Nixon and his crookedy ways, they are no role models. And once the country would not actually start a civil war if we elected bernie sanders, we “can start focusing on cleaning up the party.” Which has always reminded me of a few climatic lines of the Letter from Birmingham Jail, about waiting and promises. Not to get all appropriating or anything, but really if you feel like you should be more left, the Letter is a good read to remind you of how long this ABSOLUTE CARP has STAGNATED.
Uh. Is that “Sarah Palin” supposed to be “Nancy Pelosi”? Because Palin is definitely and unarguably a right winger even by US standards.
…. Ys.
Posting at 2am. Not a recipe for absolute clarity. Yea pelosi, my bad.
Yes, but the non-racist people who don’t like the sequels don’t actually matter in the context of this conversation because the original question was specifically about what Walky meant in panel 3.
How come non-racist people never get to matter in conversations anymore? When did racists get to be the center of attention all the time, the spoiled fucking brats?
In this particular case, because I’m not sure the non-racists who disliked The Last Jedi have written any manifestos about it, to avoid being lumped in with the racists. Pretty sure most people will just bring up what specifically they disliked about it and then move on, to quickly prove that they can be normal about The Last Jedi.
The specific reference, again, is about “manifestos” about the movie. Again, that suggests a VERY SPECIFIC subtype of hater.
See also people who have issues with the writing of the last 3 Doctor Who seasons but don’t want to get lumped in with the “feeeeemale Doctor bad!” group.
The extremists make it hard to have nuanced conversations about media.
Oh, it’s the Ghostbusters 2016 thing all over again, then? Man, how you manage to make Melissa McCarthy unfunny is a mystery to me. Kate McKinnon’s scenes are the only good part of that movie.
Re: Dr Who, RIGHT?!?!? They go straight from “I’m not sexist but it sucks now” to “I’m not racist but it sucks now”. 😑
If I were cynical, I’d almost wonder if part of the reason Disney keeps being more “inclusive” with it’s live action remakes is to have a defence against anyone who calls them “cynical” or “cash grabs” or “terrible souless husks that miss what made the originals good”.
“Why is the lighting in the Little Mermaid remake so bad?”
“Ahh, but little black girls are inspired. How can you hate that? You monster!”
(Although I realise this is getting close to conspiracy theory territory and also exactly what the right regularly accuses the left of, so I’m not sure I believe it)
It’s probably far more that, despite the alt-right whining, being inclusive is popular and profitable. And the controversy likely also drives buzz and thus views.
Being able to use it as a defense against criticism is only a minor bonus.
You can’t really be too cynical about Disney. They don’t care. It’s all profit driven. But them going for inclusion is good anyway.
Because unfortunately, they’re the loudest and most petulant, and their knee-jerk emotional response is too deeply rooted for them to be open-minded about any aspect of the thing they don’t like.
The important thing is she understands the problem is *them,* not her. We don’t get to choose our relatives…
That, and the likes of Walky and Sal can come from something so…It’s too late at night to come up with something….Ugh…
I feel this Lucy. So hard.
That is a fascinating 3rd panel Walky face.
It is indeed. It shows us what’s under the blasé calm Walky always projects.
Maxwell Edison, majoring in Medicine…
Welp I know what I’m about to have in my head on loop for the next couple days
…Maybe I can trick my brain into looping the whole album instead. It’s lodged pretty firmly in the deepest part of my subconscious.
Ah, that catchy tune of a serial killer’s misdeeds.
I’m really looking forward to seeing how his parents handle the inevitable confrontation. Maybe not this storyline, but that’s too spicy not to have EVENTUALLY, right?
“you know what? i’m going to start dating her even harder”
without the parents in the equation i can imagine it sorta fizzling out drama but i suppose it might be good if lucy decides to end things and finds someone that’s a better fit
Actually, people who are this hypocritical generally have just enough self-awareness to not get caught actually voicing their opinions.
Walky can bring up all her good points and his mom will just say, “There’s just something about her I don’t like” then begin hinting that Lucy is using him and he can do better. All without coming out and saying exactly why she doesn’t like her.
And if Walky points it out explicitly, she will counter with “That’s nonsense. Your father is black and I am married to him.” And she will completely brush over the fact that what she likes about him is the fact that he doesn’t act stereotypically black.
I’m curious if anyone would bring up the counter that Lucy is very dark skin while Charles is biracial and has closer proximity to whiteness. We dealt with texturism re- sal and walkys hair, I’d kinda love to see more colorism conversation
race aside, Walky’s other ex being a “Yale potential hopeful that wanted to be president” would be hard to measure up to
Im very glad everyone is on the same page about this
I know Lucy is in love with Walky, but of the few things that could lead to them breaking up, this is certainly one of them.
I’d put bigger bucks on it being how Walky doesn’t seem to want to have sex with Lucy, but yeah, this one’s a candidate.
I mean, the last two times he had sex right away, the relationships imploded so hard he actually had to grow as a human being, so him not fucking Lucy within the first week of their relationship isn’t the red flag people keep making it out to be.
But does Lucy realize that?
They need to have an honest conversation about it, and Walky doesn’t really love having honest conversations, as evidenced in this strip.
Does *anyone* like saying their mom is a racist dbag and he was the golden child for the bulk of his life?
“.. last two times he had sex right away …”
Dorothy and who else???
Amber.
On the other hand, they’re clearly very much in sync on the pop culture references.
When someone gets your jokes and references, that’s gold.
I once knew an old Mennonite pastor who said he could predict which marriages would succeed; “When they both laugh at the same things”
That might be enough for a friendship, but Lucy’s made it very clear that she wants sex (as soon as possible, within the “rules” she subscribes to). Girl be thirsty.
Certain attributes… of course!
The Walkertons…. are curly hair haters.
As much as that would be a major rug pull, it would kind of make sense. Sal even straightened her hair for them on the Parents Weekend.
People hating curly hair for being “too Black” isn’t really a rugpull so much as part of the package.
True, that seems to be the source of their discontent with Sal’s hair. I think the joke is that it would be only the hair that mattered. Untrue, possible I guess to as some Irish have curly hair as well (though then I guess Mr. and Mrs. Walkerton would just be 1800s racist rather than 2000s racist).
Oh no. My previous comment is riddled with typos and spelling errors. Sorry about that. I really need to proofread more carefully.
Yeah it’s an established part of the problem with Linda and Chuck
No, she let her hair regain some its natural waviness. She normally goes to a salon to have her hair straightened. She considers that to be her normal hair.
Really? Sorry, my memory of earlier strips isn’t great. Thanks for catching my error.
You might be remembering that she used going to get her hair straightened as an excuse to get away from her shitty parents. Which unfortunately meant that she then had to go do it or they would wonder why her hair was still curly if they saw her again before they left.
It “FOOMP”-ed like that before freshman family weekend, then she made the excuse of straightening it after making a brief appearance. (Charles paid a little attention to her, Linda didn’t.)
https://www.dumbingofage.com/surprised-2/
https://www.dumbingofage.com/appointment/
But Charles has curly hair! And Linda married a guy with curly hair! And both their kids are rocking at least 4a texture, you could maybe argue Walky’s type 3, maybe.
I always read Walky’s hair as messy and uncombed not curly. At least not black curly which is the problem Sal’s parents have with her hair. His hair usually looks like my 2a or 2b hair gets when I try to wear it shorter than shoulder length and don’t use product to make it lay down.
And unlike Sal he’s never mentioned as getting his hair artificially straitened. Have we ever seen him in a strip where someone (maybe Dorothy? Seems like she would have tried at some point) got him to comb his hair neatly?
There’s at least one strip where Walky says his hair is “more obviously curly” when it’s longer, and there’s also a moment where the curls come out for comedy/drama (as Sal’s had done in a similar setting, going from straightened to natural). So the implication is it being curly. Although I’m not going to comment on texture, because firstly that’s not something I know much about and secondly stylised drawings can make it hard to tell exactly what the real life equivalent of features would be.
I thought there was a prior comment (either in the strip or from DW) that one of the many reasons that their parents prefer Walky is that he has “straighter/whiter” hair than Sal.
And Jennifer has straight hair! Danny, too.
Here it is:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/kinky-2/
Oooo thank you!
Re: alt text of “Kinky”, that ain’t misleading, Sal is really hot in that first panel ☺️
Ahh, so actually the opposite of what we thought… His hair is curlier when it’s shorter.
Walky himself has curly hair too! But only as an indicator of him being stupid (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2015/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/congrats/), which is one of those strips that got brought up a lot the last time this storyline came up, which is the controversy Walky’s alluding to here. Back then, Sal accused Walky of being whiter that her, despite them having the same skin color and similar hair, because he had whiter vibes, which was a lot of racial nuance for a gag-a-day strip and led to a lot of discourse, as you can imagine.
I’m sure the return to the storyline will lead to absolutely no bad takes in the comment section whatsoever, Walky will just keep mentioning Star Wars and everyone will complain about that instead.
Wait I don’t like this comment I want to delete it but Gravitar won’t let me.
*Bracing for The Last Jedi discourse*
Yeah I was really not expecting a full half of the comments here to be arguments about wether or not TLJ is good (many of the comments from people who have never even watched Star Wars?)
Seriously though, how did Linda and Charles become a thing? I’d love to see a flashback explaining how the fuck that went down.
Worst (maybe?) case scenario: she fetishized him.
BINGO. My though, too.
I’m picturing a solid few years of Tom and Sarah Bubois
Man I’m sure Linda would’ve been thrilled if sal had come out looking like Jasmine
maybe childhood sweethearts? most kids don’t think twice about it unless a rly diff transfer student moves in with a heavy accent
Wasn’t Linda previously married? So childhood sweethearts seems unlikely.
I was thinking that she met him professionally and found that he did not fall into her assumed stereotypes and, rather than assuming that her stereotypes were wrong, instead assumed that he was ‘different from other girls’.
My mother was hella racist and my (step)dad is black and they were kind of childhood sweethearts. Honestly they act a lot like Linda and Charles, only my mother tended to be way worse. She has mellowed out tons recently and changed, but like… it was bad.
Grew up in the 60’s and 70’s together, married other people because mom’s family was much more racist, they both married lots of other people, met back up in the Obama administration and fell in love, been married ever since (though very unhappily for most of it). Linda and Charles might have a more contemporary version of that love story, minus five marriages and six kids.
Honestly, this Sal storyline (and to a lesser extent, the Walky/Lucy one too) is hitting hard because while I never got into trouble, my mother and I had a very similar relationship of constant disappointment meeting never ending goalpost moving. She’s very sick now, and it’s just very complicated to deal with emotionally.
Heavy.
Here’s an internet hug (if you want and consent to it).
Her racism might have a sexism component. Like, black men are fine and attractive, but black women should be light-skinned and look more European
:/
I don’t think Linda thinks she’s racist? Probably would have voted for Obama a third time, y’know.
Still set on “Drunken one night stand after the divorce, leading to the twins being conceived, go go shotgun wedding because Charles is a mostly good guy.” being the reason.
Can someone explain the star wars joke to me? I haven’t seen any of the new films, but I don’t care about spoilers. So don’t worry about ruining my experience. 😛
A lot of fans were horribly racist to the cast after it came out is what I’m guessing this refers to.
Wow, that sucks. I’m glad I didn’t have to watch it happen live. I am too exhausted in life to debate anyone, especially over the internet. Thanks for the info.
Yikes, really? I thought they just didn’t like the shallow political commentary, the fact that half the plot of sort of pointless, the way they treated Luke, the fact that going “light speed” in Star Wars does not actually accelerate the ship but moves it into hyperspace, or Kylo’s very strange choice of pajama pants. I feel the later is a little petty, but he is a villain so maybe he is seeing if he can destroy the “no shirt, no service” dress code system by wearing pants with a waste so high they are basically a backwards shirt?
If you look closer I’m suspecting the reason he had high waisted pants on was to hide more of his stomach
His chest area was bulked up but to me it looked like he hadn’t got rid of all the excess around his gut.
The rest of your comments are on point. I mean Disney criticising capitalism and rich people is more than a little hypocritical
…. was your knee-jerk response really to go “was it racism OR was it [insert all of my personal criticisms]?”
For fuckin’ real. BBCC didn’t even talk about criticism of the movie due to racism (which was a factor, even if someone else desperately needs to defend their unchallenged right to dislike it for nonracist reasons); she specifically said “were racist to the cast”– yknow, the actually human beings who didn’t make most of the decisions being complained about.
No. I never saw these reviews – if you guys say they were racist I believe you. The “Yikes, really?” was merely an expression of shock that so Star Wars had managed to cultivate that kind of toxic fan is large numbers. I had, I suppose naively, assumed Lucas Film and Disney, as companies that largely targeted kids as their primary audience, didn’t hold much interest for those sort of people. Therefore, I assumed that any general dislike for the film was due to cinematographically shortcomings or sci-fi nerd pedantry.
If it helps, try thinking of toxic fans as literal children. Then you’ll have a ready explanation for why they’re always so attracted to “kid stuff”. Well, that or they’re pedos.
For future reference, the way you wrote your paragraph was full of red flags. You generally don’t want to respond to things with “was it prejudice or was it really because they didn’t like this laundry list of specific and vague subjective bullet points?”.
A good chunk of the problem is that Disney did target kids as the primary audience, but a lot of older fans of the series were upset that it wasn’t really for them. It’s for today’s 12 year olds, not to make you feel like you did when you were 12.
But that overlaps a lot with the branch of fandom that tears into any modern incarnations of what they loved as kids with accusations of it having “gone woke”.
It’s like they don’t remember the kid-oriented marketing blitz ahead of Phantom Menace‘s debut.
A lot of those problems are also true of the first six movies. Pretty much everything besides your Luke and Kylo issues really unless I’m misunderstanding your hyperspace issue.
There’s two basic camps with some overlap on the Disney trilogy hate:
The one in the comic, is the racist assholes who hated Rose and Finn being poc, and use the shitty writing to blast them for being “the things what ruined the story”
And the other groups are the people who just hate it for it’s terrible writing, lore breaking plot contrivances, and character assassinations.
yyyyup.
After the trailer came out…
A lot of Star Wars YouTubers who get a lot of their views from sequel-bashing are racist dirtbags.
In fact, said racism is usually part of why they bash the sequels.
It also makes it basically impossible for those of us who aren’t, but have other issues with (some of) the newer Wars and Treks, to discuss them in any but the most carefully curated spaces. The signal gets lost in the noise.
(The stupidest argument by far, IMO, is that either or both have become “too political” recently. As a fan of both since the 70s, I can assure you that they always have been, and quite unsubtly so.)
Especially Trek.
War is Bad!
Drugs are Bad!
Racism is Bad!
Sexism is Woo, Check Out the Headlights on Her!
… it’s finally starting to get better on that last, but … 🙁
I blame Rick Berman for a lot of the sexism of the TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT era.
he learned it by watching Gene. :p
I envy your heretofore ignorance.
The joke is Star Wars fans. And it’s funny every time.
i did hear from a podcast about another person’s friend/acquaintance listening to rage reviews about movies and said something like “i feellike i’m being indoctrinated into the alt right” or something like that ll
Yeah, there’s a particularly noxious strain of bigotry that gets associated with “people who hate The Last Jedi, specifically” that lends itself to alt right indoctrination VERY well.
Yeah that’s why it’s so dangerous. The alt-right’s prime means of bolstering their numbers is to find pockets of normies who haven’t hitherto engaged much in politics and then radicalizing them to the cause, then pitching themselves to more mainstream politicians as a demographic now large enough to sway a narrow election.
Framing their problems that can definitely be solved with liberal policy, as conservative problems. To put it the most wild way possible, “Its not the system of unregulated capitalism that’s lowered your status in the world, its *whispers* the jews.” Gods that line still makes me sick, because I know people believe in this. I know my uncle who DOES AND SAYS SO. he actually says Jooez on FB so they don’t ban him.
Yeah nice quotes from Alt Right Playbook, I’ve been trying for almost a year, people don’t like being told white moderates are part of the systematic racism in this country, and I try and quote them the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, but they dont wanna hear it. I say “racist” in their direction and they shut down.
Given we’re on the edge of the next election cycle, if theres any a time for the left to leave behind centrists who slow down anti-bigot efforts, it’s now.
It’s not unique to centrists or moderates unfortunately.
You find it in economic left circles as well – generally masked behind “no struggle but the class struggle” rhetoric.
“no struggle but the class struggle” still doesn’t hold up that centrist desire to “ease off the race card; given over half the working poor are POC, there really can’t be any class solidarity that doesn’t address race.
Really it’s intentional discord sowed by the right who want to sell themselves as “better on class” than socialists 😑
Oh absolutely there can be. The pretense is that just helping the working poor will make all the racism (and for that matter the sexism and homophobia) wither away.
A lot of the Last Jedi backlash was pretty fucking racist, because people who get really defensive about the objects of their childhood nostalgia tend to be pretty fucking racist
Oh thank god she knows now.
I’m having trouble understanding Willis’ comment, could someone explain it to me please?
I think it’s a term for the gaps between panels
and in real life it’s an extra rail the powers the train and would kill you if you stepped on it.
I’m pretty sure the gap between panels is called the gutter though…
It is?
That’s the term for the edges of book pages that come together near the binding, so adapting it to comic panels makes sense…
A “third rail” in politics is an especially “charged” issue that’s seen as dangerous to bring up, referencing the electrified rail of a subway train, which is deadly to touch. Willis is presumably referring to racism and The Last Jedi
The third rail is literally the electric rail that powers many subway trains, and touching it is dangerous
Metaphorically, i think Willis is saying they’re introducing two dangerous topics.
What Kitro said about a train’s power track.
Which is why it’s also a metaphor for subjects that wise people don’t touch with a ten-foot pole, because the instant they do bad things happen.
Ahh, and the two dangerous topics in this case are racism and the last jedi. Got it.
Many thanks to everyone who commented and explained it to me! I learned something new today!
Ohhh the last Jedi. I was wondering what the second one was.
Haha I got TLJ and was wondering what the other one was! I guess I was thinking of the racism as already the overall theme of this arc, rather than something specific to this strip?
A ‘third rail’ is a thing you don’t touch because it is so charged as to be deadly. Literally in the case of electric railways, leading to it’s figurative use in topics of conversation
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_rail_(politics)
Thanks for the link! Very informative!
I adore Walky’s expression thinking about…… those humanoids….
… wouldn’t one of them be a fourth rail?
Wasn’t that some old Orson Wells movie?
Okay, opening up a can of worms here, but what does last Jedi have to do with anything? Please educate me.
It prominently features an Asian character and a woman with colourful hair, among other things.
Point being, a lot of the people bashing The Last Jedi (and the sequels in general) on YouTube are horribly racist and generally part of the far-right online sphere.
Character played by an Asian woman, I meant. Really wish we could edit comments.
They went way racist on the actress. That said, it was a bad character that was being rushed. I didn’t like the character or the attempt to force her as a romantic partner for Finn, but that’s not the actresses fault.
Specifically to force her as a romantic partner for Finn to prove to the shippers that Finn and Poe weren’t dating each other. Still not the actresses fault and that’s not what she was getting shit on for anyway as I recall.
That’s *mostly* not what she was getting shit on for, from what I remember. There were some shippers– the yaoi fangirl types, it seemed– who didn’t seem to care who they were aligning themselves with in their already fucked up efforts to attack this woman.
At the time of release the more unsavory element of the Star Wars fandom threw a lot of racist and sexist abuse towards the cast, iirc they drove a few of then off of social media altogether
A nasty portion of the internet wants to treat disliking specific movies as not merely evidence but proof of being far-right. It’s a shibboleth.
Some of the movies that you aren’t allowed to dislike, or you’ll be labelled far-right, is Captain Marvel and The Last Jedi. Because they have female protagonists, see, and that means that everyone who likes them is a good person, and anyone who dislikes them is a bad person.
David Willis is part of that nasty portion of the internet, and he has just proclaimed that if you dislike The Last Jedi, you are a far-right racist bigot. That’s all.
Nobody said you’re not allowed to dislike a movie and that you interpret people talking about the SW fandom’s far-right infiltration problems as if they were a personal attack says a lot.
No, don’t you see? Muh both sides aw da same, you guys!
/s
Α personal attack? I think I prefer the Last Jedi to the other two sequel movies frankly. Not that it actually matters whether I like it or not, but I certainly despise the fact that according to you or Willis or many other people like you, I’m not actually allowed to dislike it.
“Nobody said you’re not allowed to dislike a movie”
Really? Here’s what someone (actually you) said above: “the Venn diagram between YouTubers shitting on The Last Jedi and the far-right is a circle.”
So basically you yourself actually said any youtuber not liking The Last Jedi is automatically far-right, that’s the necessary and sufficient condition. Anyone who shits on The Last Jedi is far-right (and anyone who doesn’t shit on it isn’t).
You yourself said it, recognizing and explaining what David Willis also meant, that liking or disliking The Last Jedi proves you to be on the far-right or disproves it.
Stand by what you said or repent it, but don’t pretend you didn’t say it. You and Willis are both part of the nasty portion of the internet which has actually decided we aren’t allowed to dislike certain movies or it makes us bad people.
Learn how to read before you try writing a novel.
It’s certainly cute how Willis had Walky effectively use “people who dislike The Last Jedi” as a way of saying “racist”, people in the comments confirmed that’s EXACTLY what he meant — and now after seeing that lots of Willis’ readers also dislike The Last Jedi, there’s a bunch of hasty backpedalling that no you didn’t meant to lump the people who dislike The Last Jedi with racists, you didn’t mean to say that disliking The Last Jedi makes you a racist, you accidentally were merely commenting on the problem of racists usurping criticism of The Last Jedi.
It now suddenly became okay to dislike The Last Jedi, instead of it being exactly equivalent with an accusation of racism, and so equivalent to one that the characters and the readers of the comic both know exactly what it means.
In fact I was implicitly accused of being a racist just a couple comments above, just because I didn’t like how people used dislike for The Last Jedi as an obligue way of referring to racism. It’s recursive. You’re not allowed to dislike The Last Jedi (says Willis). You are not allowed to dislike comics who conflate The Last Jedi dislikers with racists (says DrunknenNordmann and Needfuldoer). You’re probably also not allowed to dislike comments who accuse as racists the people who dislike comics who conflate The Last Jedi dislikers with racists.
Hey, Willis, if you don’t want to be perceived as a prejudiced bigot yourself, stop bashing random portions of the population (in this case people who dislike The Last Jedi) not for any actual sin, but because of statistical overgeneralized correlations you make.
you’re clearly an annoying troll like you’ve always been and I hate taking the bait but fuck it
There’s a difference between going “man that movie fuckin sucked it was garbo. Anyway…” and making 57 videos looking like you’re popping a gasket in the thumbnail REEEEEing about how Finn and Rose ruined the franchise and how Kelly Marie Tran is an awful bongo, and clearly Disney’s infected by the woke mind virus and blah blah blah
Walky said “YouTubers spitting their manifestos.” Fucking, obviously we are only talking about that latter camp, who dedicate their entire careers and personalities to having a seizure every time a black person or woman exists in media. And there’s no way you don’t know that we are exclusively talking about shitty reviewers and not regular movie goers. You’re a fucking redditor troll debate pervert and all I’ve ever seen you do here is try to bait people into arguments. Get a real hobby
Oh, they’re already known for pulling that?
Good to know for the future.
It doesn’t matter how Willis insults groups of people, because you know he only meant the *bad ones* in that grouping, not the good ones. /s
And even when a person like DrunkenNordmann actually says there’s not a single person who bashes The Last Jedi and isn’t far-right, that’s okay too.
So, tell me, a non-racist person that wants to put out an anti-TLJ video, do you think will they be motivated by you implying they are racist before you even see their video?
Do you think that Willis will EVER show in any of his comics ANYONE who dislikes The Last Jedi and who isn’t a racist far-right bigot? You already know he won’t, because that’s the prejudiced correlation “Last-Jedi-disliker”=”racist” that he deliberately and actively chooses to spread.
Willis has been doing this for a while — people liking or disliking works of art IMMEDIATELY puts them into “bigot” groupings according to Willis, it’s never a matter of mere taste and preference or any other critique.
@drunkennordmann he’s an annoying reddit ass troll who likes to stir shit with his oh so special and unique edgy opinions
I’m not reading that, but you could probably print it out and wipe your ass with it.
Don’t be so mean to paper.
This is honestly hilarious.
It’s like hearing a baby say “fuck”.
The short version: a lot of reactionary nerds didn’t like the second movie of that trilogy because they felt it had “forced diversity,” including a mixed-race kiss. I believe Walky’s saying that his parents view Lucy as too black for him.
“And you mom is–” what? What is being omitted here?
My assumption was “your mom is married to a black man”
“married to a black man”
“married to someone black” I’m guessing
She basically where Walky was at before asking Sal how an interracial couple could be racist?
“Your mom is so old, her first Christmas was the first Christmas”
“–trans!” HUGE diversity win.
I bark-laughed and scared my cat, lol
Imogen gets the prize for today’s funniest comment. 🏆
At times prejudice isn’t easy to wrap your head around.
And at other times, it’s securely wrapped inside someone’s head and getting it UNWRAPPED is what isn’t easy.
I do wonder why they have this prejudice. Is it learned behavior from parents or others that they just had ingrained and are now copying? Did they struggle in the past due to being an interracial couple and are now trying to make their children more “white” (or focus resources on the one who is) in some sort of messed attempt to increase the kid(s) chance of success? Racism is never logical, but I am very interested in seeing if some twisted form of reasoning lies behind it all.
Racism/prejudice is always a twisted form of reasoning.
Correct, but to really get the full picture, it’s worth noting that the whole racist / non-racist binary is mute. In today’s framing, there are several layers to systematic bigotry and there’s anti-bigotry; there is no “non”.
Racism isn’t always a passion, but it is tolerable, usable and easy to disregard. In a white supremacist world, it’s the cost of doing business. People like Linda (and previously Robin) won’t necessarily agree with self-identified bigots on a questionaire or paper trail, but will seek out their votes / attention / approval / money. Regardless of anyone’s given position on it, racism works. Or to put it another way,
“Nobody ever went bankrupt appealing to the ignorance of white people.”
Colorism.
It happened to my high school best friend, whose parents were Dominican and Peruvian. Because her Dominican father was darker, everyone focused on the family members who had “good hair” and told her how pretty she was when she straightened hers. When her little brother was born, she said, “I hope he doesn’t come out dark like me.”
It’s so sad.
You see it in that flashback where Linda takes both David and Sally to a casting call and, when there is only room for one child actor, says, “Take him.”
So I think that’s how somebody like Charles could swallow it. The idea that, “If you marry someone with whom you could have a child with lighter skin, our grandchild will have an easier life. So I’m going to dissuade you from dating someone with darker skin, for the sake of my future grandchildren.”
That’s how Charles’s situation looks to me, anyway.
A friend of mine, whose family is Indian, experiences the same kind of colorism. It’s so sad. Because it shrouds itself in so-called “good intentions”: “I just want what’s best for the children.”
…Please note: in NO WAY am I justifying it. ABSOLUTELY NOT. Not sympathizing, not explaining, not contextualizing, NOTHING. I only mean that it’s how someone like Charles could delude himself that, when he tells his daughter how pretty she looks with straighter hair, he’s “teaching her what she needs to know in this world,” etc. etc.
Yeah, the cost of doing business principle also applies to parenting, teaching your kids to “blend-in” with and use systematic racism under the premise that it’s an easier life to submit to “traditional” social expectations than it is to change a broken system. It’s still bigotry, just not the kind that white / “”normal”” people are attuned to picking up on, or to speak with a sharper edge, the kind that they often downright refuse to acknowledge.
Never live your life in fear of what some dipshit YouTuber might potentially say about you. They’re not real, and the ones that are real make Gollum look well-adjusted. Talking to yourself about iCarly for 8 hours as a job is not something people with useful opinions do.
This.
The harassment their riled-up fanbases can engage in is very much real, though.
kinda waiting for the punch line to be their parents are racist they are just not able to see that their daughter needed help and attention rather than being sent to jail and then away from home like some problem
That’s not a great punchline tbh. Maybe don’t keep that one in your tight five.
Keep waiting homdogg.
How is that a punchline?
Given how explictly characters are talking about their racism and all the actions that demonstrate it, I cannot imagine the resolution being “actually they have no racial prejudices at all and just didn’t know how to take care of their delinquent daughter”
There should not be anything to rationally quantify.
Keyword is “should (not)”
This strip has been poking at the fourth wall a few times recently. They know it’s there, but they’re not going smash through it Kool-Aid Man style.
Explain immediately or I’ll make a 5-hour YouTube video accusing you of trying to cancel this comic.
Remember you said that when Robin shouts “Oh Yeah!” and smashes through the screen.
Epic!
since when was acknowledging star wars & youtube exist breaking the fourth wall
The fourth-wall breaking is that Walky is speaking to Lucy as if people are observing them, even though they’re having a private conversation.
two third rails? what does that mean?
It means one third rail and then a second third rail. Total of six rails, but only two of them are “third”.
thanks? that genuinely explained nothing
I didn’t wanna repeat what other people had already said, so I decided to take the sentence in a vacuum.
if you didn’t want to repeat what other people said, then you could have not replied?
Why am I suddenly obligated to repeat someone else’s comment in order to reply? That doesn’t make any sense. They already made the comment, I’m not your personal tape recorder.
Not to rain on the parade here, but I’m pretty sure Taffy has a habit of getting high off their ass and posting strange replies like this. That first response is borderline psychedelic.
You’re borderline psychedelic.
Dw it’s funny
That’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Bruh, CHILL
I mean, they ain’t wrong. I’m surprised any of my comments last night were legible.
It’s a good way to be. 😊
I blame the threading in this comments section. This morning I’ve (so far) dragged myself through three or four (I’ve lost count) loooong threads on Star Wars haters that are absolutely indistinguishable, wondering why we keep coming back to exactly the same arguments, and then remembering that the roots of these threads were probably posted seconds apart by people who hadn’t seen the others, and followed by people who had already scrolled past the others before getting het up enough to join.
On some subway systems, the third rail is maintained at a high voltage, so there are signs saying if you find yourself in the gutter (though let’s be honest, if you’re down there and not working for the transit authority, something has already gone very, very wrong) to avoid it, and as such it’s become a metaphor for something that must be avoided.
thank you, this is actually a helpful reply
but how does that relate to this strip and the way it’s being presented? is Willis saying that by having his characters avoid the word racism, he’s metaphorically posting a “danger high voltage” sign? I feel like I’m missing something
I think the idea is that bringing up either racism or The Last Jedi will lead to a flamewar, so as such they’re both metaphorical “third rails.”
He knows that both racism and Star Wars are topics that cause a lot of arguments, hence referring to them as third rails.
aaah that makes more sense, thank you
It’s a metaphor, by way of analogy to the ‘third rail’ of some kinds of electrified rail systems. They can be extremely dangerous when energized, electrocuting people upon contact. As a result, ‘touching the third rail’ of something has come to mean, metaphorically, doing something that is likely to generate an intense backlash. Social Security, for example, has been called “the third rail of American politics” fairly often.
Here, it is being used in reference to the comic’s discussion of two such topics likely to make people angry: Racism and The Last Jedi.
Poor Lucy. She’s not even getting any halfway decent sex out of this.
Linda probably isn’t into her like that anyway.
But to be fair…
I don’t like being fair. I have bad judgement and always end up being fair to the wrong person.
Yet.
Does the comment section know? Yesterday’s comment section sounded like there were a few people who didn’t. Maybe they’ll admit it today.
Yeah but if we admit it’s so much as a possible factor, [idfk, probably something]
If there’s even the slightest bit of wiggle room, some people will always deny something is going on, in my experience.
Well, you know, the more heinous and inhuman the charge, the more some people want an ironclad case before accepting it.
I mean. I guess? But you would think that holding a grudge against a literal child for multiple years (even after she was assaulted so badly she lost her voice) simply because she and her parents committed the crime of…being brown and potentially undocumented immigrants would be enough to signal to people that Linda’s got some internal biases that she doesn’t necessarily feel like she needs to confront in any way.
Nah. If you aren’t literally hatecriming someone while screaming slurs then there are a billion other explanations. And even then, hey they could’ve just been having a really bad day. Racism is a big scawy boogie man, it can’t be subtle. If it’s not just spamming the n word and screaming “I hate black people!!!!!” Then, oh no, people I know could be racist! I mean, sal is a thug she did crime and she’s so mean to her parents. It’s not racist to think that. I mean, IM not racist. No no, no way her parents arent racist, theyve been totally rational and understandable this whole time. Sal’s the problem here 🙂
/S if it wasn’t obvious
Thanks for the person who pointed me to Occams Big Paisley Tie yesterday, I love it and will use it forever
Whatever happened to the parental wisdom from the good old days, that if you disapprove of your child’s SO for any reason, never let on that you do, it will only encourage them?
Wisdom is highly unfashionable just now.
It’s not like parents have ever commonly applied that wisdom, even back in the good old days.
I KNOW!
“He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know.”
– Lao Tzu
Sounds like Lao Tzu didn’t know.
man, I’m REALLY not a fan of this comic’s characters talking like they’re aware of the commentariat or the fact that they’re characters in a story that people react to. When I’m having intimate conversations with my partner or my family, my mind never goes to “wow racist assholes would sure have a field day with this topic huh”, I’m more likely having panicked thoughts about how this conversation about abortion/neurodivergence/racism/homophobia is affecting my relationship with the people I’m close to and whether I have to reevaluate how I think about their values or mine.
it makes sense Walky would say that he doesn’t want to speak the name of the evil thing thats been wrecking his parents’ relationship to his twin sister for many years because thats a hard topic to discuss! it’s a realization that he’s been coming to grips with for a short time compared to Sal and he’s famously not good at introspection or talking about his feelings
what does not make sense is for him to frame like he’s afraid that racists on youtube comments are going to shit on this topic. Huh??? this is a private conversation between him and Lucy, how in hell would anyone else find out about this and make anonymous mean comments? why on earth is he talking like he’s a vlogger who constantly streams live so he can’t do controversial topics because the comments become unbearable?
in-character Walky would be trying to avoid this conversation because it’s a hard topic and he has a hard time verbalizing that the parents that he loves have also actively caused harm. I have no idea why he is framing this as if he’s a public figure with enough influence to spark a flame war. it’s so bizarre.
hy·per·bo·le
/hīˈpərbəlē/
noun
exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.
even for a purposeful exaggeration, it’s a really weird thing say. It’s a weird way to frame this
Weird? As you earthlings say “what is normal, anyway”?
Why? Walky is a nerd, he resents racists taking over his spaces to talk about star wars like a sane person, nerds built that space and n@zi’s ruined it, it bothers him. Heck it still bothers me!
I have heard stuff like this from my friendly shut in neighbors. It IS awkward, that is basicLly Walky’s entire personality of being awkwardly loudmouthed about things few people know or WANNA know.
Lucy is a nerd too. She will understand, even if she doesnt hang out in the same spaces. HER Harry Potter spaces were rotted from the top down and truncated from all things canon, Rowling is disgusting on feminism and gives feminists a bad name everywhere. For perspective of where she finds herself, skinheads and TERFs arrived at a trans rights rally to protest. The TERFs proceeded to stand behind the skinheads for “safety.” They had not in name actually came to protest but to spread doubt more from within, but they were booted. And decided that they needed those men. Which violates their core stated beliefs, revealing them to mostly be recidivists, and thus for feminists the R in terf, Radical.
Also, be honest with yourself. Normal is a setting on a dryer, not anything tangible or describable. You can do statistics and find the median, you can do polls and find the winner, you can make psychology profiles and philosophize the meaning of the meridian political belief, but none of those singular things helps you understand normal in the slightest. The three together dont help much more. Ultimately we can merely say what is Not Normal, and for that I choose facist demagoguery that crawls from the dark depths of 4chan and.must be beaten back away from Star Wars forums and such.
you’re not wrong about any of this, in fact I really like how you’ve described these fascists. What I’m not wrapping my head around is Walky or Lucy knowing any of this or having these opinions. Early comic Walky barely had the language to talk about overt racism, let alone more insidious stuff like racist star wars fans “just saying” they don’t like how the characters of Finn or Rose were presented and getting reasonable people to agree with them because those movies were badly written. Walky would say “yeah that story went nowhere” and not analyze the conversation further and then be surprised when the more overt racism shows up .
Early Lucy was an avid Harry Potter fan.
If these two characters were made aware of the horrible problems with the fandom/author of those movies later on , we never saw it, and we never saw them develop an opinion on it. And this a slow burn comic that usually shows us characters having epiphanies about political and social issues.
Having Walky and Lucy have the opinions you state above would be a retcon. one can’t be surprised when readers don’t know about the retcon and are confused by it
Any speculative fiction geek would get Walky’s comment, probably. So this is just his way of saying what he knows but his family has aggressively ignored all his life: even thoughnhis family is biracial, his mom has issues. Walky doesn’t want to call her “racist” because It’s Complicated (boy, is it ever), but there’s no getting around the fact that this is what it is in this case. And remember: Walky just woke up to this fact himself. He’s still having trouble naming it. So I don’t see this as breaking the fourth wall at all. He’s just trying to signal the problem to Lucy in a way he knows she will understand.
(for people who believe in the absolute garbage of quote “great replacement” unquote wash my hands, they sure as hell think it’s ok for them to butt into random ass places they ent welcome to replace the tone of the convos there)
But then he dated Dotty, and he was recently told the loudmouthed confidence WAS charming, and its not like he is unaware of these things happening. Tbh in my view its fully within his personality to have this idk, such an inability to be serious enough to talk about milquetoast racists LIKE HIS PARENTS which he likely STILL LOVES, that he has to couch it in metaphor and in memetic reference.
Repeatin to you again, I have more than once heard someone say it like this before. Fourth wall ish is the alt text about the double third rail of internet politics, Walky is just trying to avoid scraping the pain of a recently recalled and pretty subtle but undeniable 1) racism to his mother and 2) race apologist thing going on with his dad. The knappy hair problem and the casting him not Sal because he’s slightly more “passing,” and in essence this all snowballing to the point where Sal becomes fully under a degree of oppression, and he becomes a degree of privilaged at home.
None of that is something he’d LIKE to mentally touch directly, he’d rather avoid any potential heartbreak where he has to shout at his mother that her little quirks are not defined as the opposite of what they basically are, MERELY because shes marries to and has black kids.
With his visceral awkward half refusal to touch the issue in thought and be hesitant to bring Lucy into it at all, the third rail reference is the fourth wall far more than this awkwardness my brother, my HS friend, and my smoker class-neighbor from college would totally say, or say even more disjointedly.
I mean yer allowed the opinion im in no way sayin you’re disallowed, fell free, just saying that ive seen far worse fourth walling even in this comic. And that I consider it more natural and realistic than all that.
The time scale also messes with this. Early Lucy was a HP fan, but that was before JKR was publicly out as a transphobe. Now of course she was out for years before Lucy showed up. There’s never a point where it really makes sense for Lucy to be made aware and have an epiphany.
Early comic walky didn’t have the words to properly describe racism because it was 2010 and everyone was bad at discussing racism, probably specifically the white Midwestern author writing him. It’s 2023 now and these kids are Zoomers, sliding time scale. It’s literally impossible not to learn about these topics and absorb the language as a north American 18 year old unless you’re being severely sheltered and cut off from online spaces. Walkys talking like a normal black nerdy teenager in the 2020s
rad! every single person i know talks this way. your experiences are not universal.
have you genuinely say someone say they don’t want to talk about racism or a hard topic like iI because they don’t want to trigger a completely hypothetical flame war in a non existent comments section?
do you and your friends often talk like you’re characters in a show instead of real people?
yep! i know you wrote that like it’s over the top hyperbole, but sorry, that’s just a real thing that people do some times. i’ve mugged for cameras that aren’t there. i’ve had friends stop what they’re saying because they’re worried they’re putting too much exposition early in the episode. i’ve had coworkers debate who is the audience favorite. my own mother has refused to talk about her medical history because she doesn’t want to retcon her backstory. acting to an audience that doesn’t exist is a super super super common thing that people do. have you never had someone bow to an audience that isn’t there? or joke that a crowd is going wild?
lol, yeah, this isn’t out there at all. “I feel like I’m going piss off by saying this, but” is definitely a way of going into something I’ve used before. As are things like talking about real people/myself acting in or out of character, imagining a laugh track or audience in a particular moment of comedic timing, thinking in terms of story beats, etc.
Walky’s way of dealing with emotions he has trouble expressing is retreating into pop culture. He literally threw a toy at Dorothy because he couldn’t figure out how to tell her he liked her.
Yeah, and in this case, it’s also him saying this with a girl whom he has hung out with for months now and knows she would immediately understand what he’s saying because, well, he knows how it’s been for her, being a black girl into Star Wars. Like that’s the world the two live in, though I am saying that as a queer person into a lot of nerdery that has seen/experienced lots of pushback, too.
Stop understanding the characters and story, you’re hurting my feelings.
Yeah, it’s a way he can get through to Lucy what the problem is, but without having to say the words out loud and also making a joke about it because comedy and avoidance are his coping mechanisms for dealing with his family dysfunction (and have been since before he was made consciously aware of the racism at the heart of it.)
Also, he’s a communications major. Everything is “meta” to him. Performance. A series of tropes. He pictures his life as having an internal commentary voiceover, laugh track, and soundtrack. Like in the early “Doonesbury” cartoons.
Yeah! Great catch! =D
Laura, your comment makes the most sense
Thanks, buds.
I really REALLY want to see evidence that Lucy is aware of horrible fandom shit in general and how she reacts to it. It’s been questioned in the comments before how much she knows because her bubbly attitude is at odds with what most black women experience in fandom spaces. Not saying it’s impossible for her to be a cheerful character and also be conscious, it’s just that we have literally never seen her say anything about this at all
She’s a dark skinned black woman in white male predominant spaces. She’s aware. No way she hasn’t seen miles morales and captain marvel getting ripped to shreds by shitty child’s
It’s funny to see this because that was basically the origin of the character back in SP!
Why do you need explicit evidence of her not being an idiot? Have you seen evidence to the contrary in the comic?
It would only be breaking the fourth wall if this were on YouTube. He’s being metaphorical because he doesn’t want to flat out say his mom is racist.
at least he hasn’t internalized any bad thoughts, i’ve seen some mixed raced couples/parents that seem perfectly fine (though granted not like i know them too well) but their kids ended up thinking /having slightly biased/bigoted opinions themselves more vocally
The 4th wall is overrated. I mean, sure, it’s there most of the time to make the story flow, but sometimes it would be a relief to find out I’m just a character in a comic strip and my screwups were canon in some bigger story.
Maybe you should read Typewriter in the Sky. Or maybe not.
I mean, I do that. Like, a lot, it’s funny. My partner and I talk a lot about how we’re accidentally often the token brown folk in our friend groups. When you see idiot child’s all the time it’s hard not to make fun of them in your free time
webcomics are often written and planned out loooooooooooooooooong in advance. the comments have 0 affect on plot.
I don’t actually know much about the discourse around The Last Jedi since the closest I’ve come to watching the latter two movies in that trilogy is through Lego Star Wars. But I find it weirdly endearing that Lucy is able to instantly identify the problem from that explanation.
Long story short: The Star Wars fandom has a problem with far-right infiltration (especially when looking at spaces like YouTube).
The Star Wars fandom and every other aspect of contemporary life.
I honestly detested all of the sequels. TFA was insultingly uncreative, TLJ was a depressing morass, Rise felt like it was shot out of a goddamn unstoppable tilt-a-whirl. I don’t have any respect for people that want to use them as a bounce board for their theories about white genocide, but that doesn’t make them into movies I like.
I like that Walky knew exactly how to say this to Lucy without having to say it, like it does show that the two do know each other pretty well by now. It’s sweet, despite the topic being anything but.
+1
It reminds me of how he avoided directly talking about P.M.S. and still managed to get the point across. It’s cute, but also kinda motivated by his own discomfort.
Talking about Star Wars online is like tossing a grenade into the DashCon ball pit. It’s noisy and colorful and now there’s piss everywhere when there didn’t need to be piss anywhere.
Is it better or worse to say I miss the Decipher CCG?
Had to look that up, but it reminded me I had an electronic Star Wars Simon toy as a kid. It was so fucking heavy I could have beaten the other second graders into submission with it, easily. Card games are way safer.
dang, there’s a deep cut.
I understood these references, and I hate myself a little for it.
But you’re not wrong.
I was wondering how he was going to explain that.
Me? I would’ve gone this route?
Walky: Ever see Imitation of Life?
Lucy: Which version?
Walky: Doesn’t matter. Just know my parents are both Sarah Jane.
Lucy: …Yikes.
I absolutely love how the mention of TLJ was what clued her in.
Yup. These two belong together in an alt-universe where they both don’t have the hang-ups that they do.
“Studious”
Excellent.
… now I’m actually wondering if there ever was a Darth Studious.
… runs off to commit fanfic.
I’m imagining a Sith following the Rule of Two but they get too into their studies and just sort of let the whole “Eventually you will kill and replace your master” schtick fall by the wayside.
“Aren’t–aren’t you going to try to kill me? I think you’re stronger than me now, it’s sort of what we do.”
“Are you joking? I’m learning so much!”
Eventually the master tries to kill the apprentice, but the apprentice is too good and easily fends off any attacks.
Damn it, Willis, 75% of the comments are about Star Wars!
Talking about racism is a pretty depressing and sensitive subject.
Arguing about Star Wars on the other hand, is fun, or at least less serious
The problem arises from all the racists polluting the Star Wars discourse.
A problem which is absolutely solved by paintbrushing people who dislike TLJ as racists. Then there is no need for further discourse, anyone who dislikes it a racist, and anyone who likes it is a non-racist, problem solved. /s
Telling on yourself a bit there, bruh.
I dont paintbrush all TLJ haters as racist, I hate TLJ myself
Now whether you’re one of those people who made hating TLJ I to their entire personality thats when I get suspicious
I was gonna say that 193
manifestoscomments within 3 hours of posting feels like super predictable irony, but the two previous installments both have well over 200 comments (even though I’m sure it took more than 3 hours), so clearly this community is just CHATTY. Sometimes, about Star Wars. (Please don’t make me listen to your manifesto.)Lesson one: asking bigotry to have any sort of logic is futile.
This reminds me of how my parents (who, on paper, couldn’t possibly have any issues with homosexuality — my dad lived in GREENWICH VILLAGE in the 1970s, for chrissake) turned out to be not at ALL prepared to deal maturely with having a gay son. It’s amazing how moving to the suburbs, raising two kids and a mortgage, and aging a couple of decades can just suck all the liberal right out of people.
Panel 3 is beautiful for its faces
oh no ! not the youtubers !
Oh gosh, Lucy needs a hug, WALKY, LUCY NEEDS 500 CC OF HUG STAT CMON!
Since the comments have insisted on making this actually about starwars and not the stochastic terrorism machine the bastard n@zis have made. Here. My Manifesto, bereft of racist f###ery:
It trivialized what the Dark Side really is. How much it takes for a force user not only to Fall but also become Sith, who do not just take in all that hate and anger and let it warp them, no, they reach and twist back and make the universe a darker and colder place by using, abusing, corrupting the pure selfless and sourceless force for their selfish ends, and it bites them back, warps them in many ways, they say peace is a lie there is only passion, they just mean They Get To Do All The Fun Things And Damn All Consequences. The prequels made this distinction and so did Word of God. A Fallen Darksider is chaos, Sith are god damned Millitary Industrial Complex levels of evil. That shit has some sort of order, it is not good, it is not even to the nature of the dark side. They force it to be that way, and there Is No Balance with that.
They handwaved some of Kylo’s fall saying “oh Snoke was just in his mind his entire life or so” but they completely dashed the gravitas the prequels took so long to build up, into what it actually takes to make a good person drink in the hate and anger of the entire Galaxy. AND. To make it serve them. So! I can only enjoy fanfiction now, like this:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/25871575/chapters/62863183
They slandered my precious bb Luke and they must pay. HE was the second jedi in history to unleash Electric Judgement, lightsider lightning, HE was the Chosen One who did actually bring balance to the force. Lucas himself says that two sith two jedi is not balance. The sith are force parasites who bend and corrupt the force to the will of one or two beings, the force is for everyone, they are actually sucking the damn life out of the universe with their facist Empire garbage. Balance is No Sith. Anakin might have reverted for half a moment and rid the galaxy of Palpatine, but Luke rid the galaxy of Vader, the actual work horse of that parasitic relationship within a parasitic relationship. Luke got the ball rolling. The force shook it’s head at Vader and moved to Luke. Canon, luke is Chosen, Anakin is just tacked on to that with vague forgiveness enough to become a force ghost.
The fact that the dang chosen one pouts on a tiny island with drones and brainless cutie floofs bogarding the ancient jedi texts to himself because that nonsense never gave him aught but pain, forgetting the entire war that pivoted to victory on his short twink shoulders, is, utterly, intolerable. Funny to watch, but makes my blood boil to, this, day, and I must drain this venomous wound or I will explode.
The characterization of Luke is so bad I barely remember anything else in the movie, and the other adventures were actually awesome, the bit of milk the movie desperately needed to choke down the dusty raw cocoa powder that was merely good visuals and no brain whatsoever behind it. The gambling planet was not only So Vegas, it was also So WA DC too, and that makes me laugh in cathartic pain. Finn is a new precious bb I must hug and kiss on de head, Poe is a glorious bastard who really shouldnt be worshiped and REALLY SHOULDNT BE SO DAMN EFFECTIVE but its funny how he is, and Rose is the kind of Heroine everyone needs to see in action, damn it.
But dat Luke doe.
Ok but now can we get to not the particular fandom but the trend of far right Infiltration?
I think given the setup in Force Awakens, they did the best they could have with Luke. It doesn’t make a cohesive story with the originals, but that’s because Episode 7 sucks, Episode 8 is doing the best it can with a shitty foundation.
And the Luke stuff is good! Hamill plays a good reluctant mentor, they really make the most of shooting on a spectacular old irish monastery, and his final ‘duel’ with Kylo makes the movie going on for another half-hour after the climax tolerable.
…Would anyone be up for a game?
Here’s the question:
What Star Wars character do you see yourself as?
Or, what Star Wars character would you aspire to be?
Aspire: Obi Wan, the warrior monk, the Light of the Order, the sassy bastard and the hardened general who loves his men as parts of his own being.
See myself: Chewbacca, the prince of a shattered tribe, who just goes along with who understands my language and has fun adventures spiting the ones who destroyed my clans. The english! But mostly finances, weed (off the green for 2 years today it was not right for me in particular) and the capitalist hellscape who refuses to read the fkn definition of socialism and rule out anything but goddamn anarcho capitalism wealth-oligarchy, in the definition of “not socialist.”
Hey, congratulations on your 2 years! What an accomplishment! You deserve to feel very proud of yourself.
Its still hard when someone comes in clearly from hotboxing somewhere up the street, and expects me to know their parts measurements while I try and find the right distance to stand to balance not getting a contact high and my itty bitty bitta hearing loss. But its been good, it does help that I distanced myself from people who would not stop offering every time I seen them.
But thanks! I am pretty proud. Hope you do well with your endeavors too!
Thanks, pal. I appreciate those kind words. It’s a slog! But we just take it one day at a time. You know? Just one little hill to climb at a time.
Thanks for sharing that. I’ve got a little hearing loss too. Makes things difficult! Plus being around second-hand smoke all the time. But we keep on trying…
I kind of see myself as L3-37 from “Solo: a Star Wars Story,” or RO-GR from “Trenches to Wrenches: the Roger Story”.
I’m probably quite a bit like C3PO.
But I aspire to be like that monk who kept repeating, “I am one with the Force and the Force is with me” while walking through a hail of bullets. To me, that kind of unstoppable calm is something I’ve always sought.
I’m probably one of the tech.s, sitting at his board, turning his particular cog so that the whole mechanism can function. My aspiration is that I’m doing this for the Good Guys.
That is beautiful, Mark.
I aspire to be Cassian Andor, but I am probably more like Marva. By the time I see the problem, it’s too late for me to do anything about it. Except I’m about as well-loved as Cassian is. Cassian’s relations to people are spot on for me.
Wow, though. Two inspiring role models!
Poor Lucy gets to have the double Meet the Parents date.
I feel ya really missed a beat here not titling this strip, “I Know”
Nah, because it loses the inflection, used as a title like that. It’s not “I know”. It’s, “I KNOW!” (It also needs something, some obvious truth — spoken or un- — that it’s responding to, for proper effect.)
Plus, “studious” is *chef kiss*
So a thing that kind of helps square the circle of “how the fuck did they wind up together if they wouldn’t approve of Lucy for being black” is the term “colorism.” At least within the African American context, there’s definitely folks who draw a distinction between “light-skin” and “dark-skin” black people, and I don’t want to go into too much detail since I’m just a white guy whose had black friends acquaintances and colleagues complain about, but suffice to say that its a genuine form of prejudice that gets very messy and can go in many directions (like I have one friend who gets shit because some of her family members think because her skin is relatively light she’s ‘not really black’) and Lucy IS darker skinned than Charles. You’ve probably heard of “the paper bag test” as an infamous line between “fine” and “too dark,” and turns out that some people will draw that line at darker (or lighter!) tones than just that one.
It fucking sucks. And I don’t know if Willis is intentionally going for that or if Linda and Charles are irrational in a different way, but if he is then he’s talking about a pretty real, studied phenomena that sucks.
You’re right, but I think classism is also a big part. Charles is doing whatever Linda thinks is a respectable career (“one of the good ones” probably also comes in here), where as Lucy is just a student (and, due to colourism, Linda would assume she couldn’t possibly come from a ‘good’ family or be going anywhere in life)
(we also have evidence about classism (and xenophobia/racism (not that we needed more evidence)) from their compared reactions to Billie vs Marcie)
Bigotry do be like that
I appreciate that Walky’s hoodie pull string jumps a little when he throws his arms down in the last panel
It’s nice
If Pinkie Pie and Deadpool have taught us anything, it’s that it’s OK if the 4th wall has a few holes in it.
(Depresses clutch, shifts gear, releases clutch) It’s really easy to be racist without acknowledging it. I think of it like lead poisoning.
Lead is kind of shiny and gray. Easily recognizable. But it’s still toxic in invisible amounts, and when consumed it gets in your bones and takes forever to leach out. It has neurological effects.
My mother was hella racist – I’m not gonna even repeat shit she used to say to me – but she would have denied it to her dying day.
(Its not all on her; whole society’s racist AF)
Poor Walky.
I’m a big fan of “Narbonic,” a webcomic which regularly took a sledgehammer to the 4th wall.
Yeah, there’s this myth that racism is all goose-stepping Nazis, when really it’s something that normal people learn to be in our normal lives, all the bloody time.
Racism doesn’t even require that, necessarily. (Though there is a LOT of that, no question.)
So much of “white America” bristles at any mention of racism, because… well, because racism is a Great Wrong™, and surely we’d know if a Great Wrong™ is being committed, wouldn’t we? (Goose-stepping isn’t exactly subtle, after all!) I mean, for sure we’re Absolutely Not Racist™, we know that much. So it feels right to presume the same of the majority of other people. It’s certainly easiest for us, so rock that boat at your own peril.
Except.
Systemic racism — which is the form a lot of racism actually encountered “in the wild” takes — is, as the name suggests, built right into the systems and institutions of society; it doesn’t require anyone being “actively racist” to perpetuate it. It also can’t be addressed with any of the easy fixes we prefer: Scapegoating, perhaps, or identifying and removing those apocryphal “bad apples” who’re responsible for it. Thing is, nobody’s directly responsible for systemic racism. That’s. What. “Systemic.” Means!
Take policing. (Settle down, my whole point here is that this conversation doesn’t have to involve vilifying or blaming anyone.) Policing is an institution that, unfortunately, exhibits clear patterns of systemic racism. There’s a mountain of evidence that, when someone has an encounter with law enforcement, that person’s skin color is a disproportionately strong predictor of how that encounter is likely to unfold, and what the outcome will be.
But you know what’s not nearly as influential a predictor? The officers’ skin color.
The systemic racism in policing isn’t something that’s solely coming from consciously racist white cops. Nor is it solely due to the unconscious biases of casually-racist white cops. It isn’t even something that can solely be blamed on any white cops. It’s literally The. System. Itself.
(Which isn’t to say that there aren’t any consciously-racist white cops, actively committing racist acts. There absolutely are. And one of the major systemic flaws is how aggressively that system insulates (all, but particularly those) cops from being held accountable for their decision-making while on duty. Under those conditions, problems are allowed to metastasize; they can’t simply be excised cleanly.)
We need to work, as a country, on getting better at being able to have difficult conversations about things like that. Ideally without people reacting to it as a personal accusation or indictment, because then they either resort to aggressive defensiveness (usually by launching a counter-offensive), or immediately retract into their shells. Neither is especially productive.
Basically all this 💯
Of course prompts for much needed discussion about it are often met with less than ideal reactions, especially among white normie folk.
The primary reason is probably that most of them grew up with the other definition of racism, the one given to white grade-schoolers where the gist is to not say mean things about skin color. Albeit ignorance and apathy are still harmful, under the bigotry paradigm taught to most white grade-schoolers, harm done to minorties isn’t “”real”” bigotry if it isn’t deliberately and directly cruel. But apathy and ignorance can be reasoned with, you just have to sit down and discuss things as long as it takes (“we ~ALL~ in this together”, #democracy, yada yada yada). Under this paradigm, “”real”” racism is constrained to the realm of emotional distress and interpersonal violence, where it’s rare and it’s a hearts and minds issue.
What this definition leaves out is any notion that racism / bigotry is about POWER; that this society was built for the straight white cis binary neurotypical non-disabled Everyman™, and where being the Everyman™ confers power upon you, and where bigotry is a large, centuries-old pervasive system where every white “””normal””” person is bound up in it and privileged by it whether or not they want to be, and where addressing it required thinking about themselves and their place in it.
Some white normie folk do the responsible thing and acknowledge that the definition of racism they were originally given as 7-year-olds is less than complete. But of course a lot of the time they just go “uuuuuuugh you just can’t change the definition of racism”.
To them, all racism / bigotry period exists ONLY in the realm of card-carrying Klansman and other self-identified fascists out to hate for hatred’s sake. The entrepreneurs, property-owners, pundits and politicians who seek to benefit by cooperating with these bigots? They are but fellow American Patriots™ who OBVIOUSLY share their ultimate vision for the future but have just “lost their way”.
White moderates don’t see themselves as flawed individuals with a long way still to go; having already graduated middle school means they’re already where they need to be, and where everyone else needs to get to, living proof that racism is something that can easily and painlessly be opted out of.
They may be willing to help minorities, but only in ways that don’t forepart their privilege. For there is no definition of systematic bigotry that includes those who can and do profit from bigots that doesn’t also include themselves, and having to alienate some fellow white “”normal”” folk is just too painful for them. Therefore, they stick to the more familiar, more comfortable definition of bigotry that’s carried them since grade school, and fixate on the social justice equivalent of diet soda — gestures that feel like moving forward, but that have little change of actually getting anywhere.
“How about instead of defunding the police, we give them more money than ever, BUT BUT, Juneteenth is now a National Holiday. Something for ~~EVERYONE~~!!! Yay compromise!!!”
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. (Not your podcast. I’m all set on those.)
Pinkie Pie is a very good example because she rarely broke the fourth wall, yet people acted like she did it all the time because she:
a) told jokes.
b) made references to pop culture.
c) acted silly.
Like, do these people never tell jokes or reference pop culture when having a discussion? Am I breaking the fourth wall if I compare something to Back to the Future?
Disney failed the new Star Wars trilogy by not commiting to a vision at the beginning and instead letting JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson improvise badly and trample all over each other’s ideas.
Anyone who felt the need to write a manifesto about it though makes me leery.
Yeah. There are problems with each movie beyond that, but the biggest issue is squarely on trying to do a trilogy with no planning. No overall arc or editorial control.
my biggest manifesto is how they wasted Ackbar. They could have replaced Holdo with Ackbar and so many issues I had with the “running away” plot could have been forgiven.
They could have done a lot. I’d have loved to see what Rian Johnson would have done if the entire trilogy were his from the beginning. Or any director with a vision beyond one film, really.
Or someone other than the director organizing and plotting out the whole thing. A “showrunner” kind of role.
The Admiral in that plotline being a character the audience knows and respects breaks the mutiny plotline completely, and it’s already a little flimsy as is.
It’s always amazing that people don’t see that. That entire plot might be a mistake, but it relies on the audience not trusting the admiral and thus sympathizing with the obvious heroes going to try a ridiculous gamble. It’s a neat piece of genre subversion, because by genre rules they should be right.
It’s not clear to me even now that Star Wars is actually a good place to subvert genre though.
I didn’t even know Ackbar was in this but maybe they figured someone with a name like that doing a 9/11 on the First Order fleet *might* have been a bad look
I have to say, this is such a good and sensitive portrayal of racism. I am really glad it’s here. Too many people think anti-racism is some sort of venereal disease: fuck a person of the appropriate color and BAM! You’re no longer racist.
I love the way Lucy is trying to puzzle out how that makes any donkey-boning sense and Walky is just increasingly like “yes, correct.”
Damn you, Willis!! I want the twins to have twin joy, for once!
Nope, much like Joyce and Sarah, there is a finite amount of joy in the Walkerton clan and if Sal experiences some, than Walky must suffer the cost.
I’m happy to see that Walky is finally explaining to Lucy what’s the problem with his parents.
I mean just referencing recent developments in popular culture isn’t breaking the fourth wall?
IMO if a reader thinks that it’s speaking directly to the audience here, it probably says something about the reader 😛
Some people really love telling on themselves, it’s kind of amazing how often people will leap to conflate themselves with objectively terrible people or movements when no one else really was.
LOL. Walky acts like theee’s an audience listening in when it’s a private convo between him and Lucy.
But sure it must be the racism of the racists who made people say that he was breaking the 4th wall. You heard it folks, if you thought this was a 4th wall break, that’s again proof you are racists.
Sir this is a Wendy’s.
Art.
[applause]
It throws me off a bit seeing the “Is this…?” line in the top left and not the bottom
Under protest, anyway
I hated the Last Jedi but that was because:
* It made Reylo canon
* It broke up Flynn and Rey, which could have been the highest profile interracial relationship in genre fiction.
* It really treats Flynn like crap throughout
* Yes, the Luke treatment.
* It has the rest of the galaxy ignoring the fight against the Nazis
* It kills Snoke without ever explaining anything.
Which is slightly different than hating The Last Jedi because Rey can kick ass with a week of training and the introducing of another Woman of Color.
His name is *Finn*.
No, Finn is the gay one who used to be a Stormtrooper.
Yep, 100% this all the way haha.
TLJ didn’t make Reylo canon, ROS did that right before killing off Kylo
Also “ignoring the fight against the nazis” is actually a common occurrence in real life right up until it’s not convenient to do so
Also there was never really anything to explain about Snoke, he was basically the Emperor 2.0 and we never learned much about him in the OT
The Luke treatment starts and ends with JJ who decides he peaced out and let a new empire rise up in the decades of his absence
Poor Walky, all that attempt to avoid controversy and Lucy pointedly doesn’t say that HE’S, which IIRC was the thing that was controversial the first time around
I’m not certain Walky self-identifies as such.
See, e.g.:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/03-answers-in-hennessy/kinky-2/
Can’t find it now, but there’s that other strip when Sarah said she didn’t want to be one of only two Black folks present when the police arrived, and Walky asked her who the other one was. (IIRC)
Sorry, I hate that smarmy Danny avatar.
Controversial opinion: Star Wars is just not that Big a Deal, and it never was. So whatever you think of any part of it, it’s not worth getting worked up about.
(Speaking as a former Star Wars-obsessed 80s kid, and still a fan of the whole universe. And with apologies for adding to the already excessive number of comments about SW.)
That said, with some exceptions here, it’s refreshing to find a corner of the internet where there are reasonable prevailing views about what is Good, what is Bad, and what is Not Bad about the sequel trilogy, and where my personal fondness for TLJ tempered by recognition of its real flaws is not an outlier.
Ha, yeah, my controversial take is pretty similar… that TLJ is fine, like most Star Wars movies.
Speaking as an outsider to Star Wars fandom, Star Wars’ popularity has always been driven by its owners’ desire to sell merch. It’s a toy commercial, which is why it has no cohesive vision, just a weird mishmash of ideas that don’t really gel together because George Lucas was trying to combine a bunch of shit he was really into in the 50s and 60s.
So you’re right, it’s just not that big a deal, it’s just that some people really want to feel like they’re a part of something, even if that means spending hundreds of dollars on merch for a series of middling sci-fi movies and occasionally dressing up as the leader of a genocidal fascist empire that’s technically fictional.
Yeah, i shamefully ain’t that much a Star Wars fan either, but alongside other like media with similar controversies, it is worthwhile to pay attention at least somewhat for the sake of alt-right litmus tests.
Fair. A corollary to Star Wars being Not a Big Deal is that when someone does try to make a big deal of some aspect of it, it tells you far more about their own issues than about Star Wars.
A+
I liked TLJ… because it broke the Star Wars formula that had begun to calcify. But both the movie and apparently the people making the movie have some real problems with fucking with Finn and Rose, and even with Poe, plus the whole pacing thing and other more minor nonsense.
Ok, I clearly missed something. What are The Last Jedi Manifestos?
Essays written by alt-right crybabies who attempt to justify their position on The Last Jedi that basically boils down to “I’m not racist but it Star Wars sucks now.”
Thanks for the short and sweet explanation!
Hey, I might need someone to explain like I’m 5 here. What is a “The Last Jedi manifesto” in this context / what does it it have to do with Walky’s parents’ racism/colorism?
I think I get it… is this Walky’s way of describing their casual racism via fandom reference, because fandom references are how Walky describes everything?
Wait is this comic Pro-Last Jedi? That’s worse than Walky’s parents. That’s like, Joyce’s mom bad.
I… don’t get it ?