I think a lot of the discourse on here, esp about intra-community issues, comes from the perspective of people who are a part of pretty insular leftist queer communities and assume everyone else engaging w their writing is too. so you have stuff like “white trans people are celebrated when they come out” or “everyone wants to fuck transmasc genderqueer people” as statements people are making, which are very very true in some cases from within these really insular communities but seem like you’re blogging from another dimension to people who like, live in small town Iowa.
I think this is why we get a lot of the tumblr arguments we get. like one person’s like “ask every single person you meet for pronouns no exceptions or you’re a bad person” and someone reading that who isn’t part of an urban leftist queer scene is like??? you want me to as the aggressively homophobic straight men who live in my open carry state for their pronouns?????? but no one wants to add “disclaimer: I go to smith college/live in Montreal/have completely forgotten what fear feels like” to their posts
this post especially the last sentence should be required literature for every cultural studies program in the United States
There are some things in the “Rey is a Mary Sue”-debate that I think should be
differentiated.
First I’d devide it into two periods: Post-TFA
and Post-TLJ. Even though I think they should’ve explained how she acquired her
skills on Jakku in the movie better and not just leave it to books, I think a
lot of the talk back then was coming from a crowd who quite simply hated the
idea of a woman being brilliant at piloting, fighting etc. They weren’t even
willing to look up her background or speculate about how she could’ve
developped these skills… they called her a Mary Sue to bash her character,
ignoring for instance Anakins similarily wild skills…
Post-TLJ we’re left in a different situation. Instead
of further explaining her skills and slowly expanding them, showing her in a
training period… Rian Johnson & Co. decided to simply let her be much stronger
and more skillful at EVERYTHING in TLJ, literally a day after TFA took
place. Not only was there no further explanation for her Force skills in the
movie, she magically could do things she couldn’t do in TFA without any
learning curve. Then we find out through the novelisation that she essentially
downloaded all of these new skills from Kylo Ren. Something they didn’t even
fee like including into the movie, where her development is just completely
illogical. Thus I called this development turning her into a Mary Sue, when in
TFA I would’ve never called her that, simply bc she wasn’t one.
Secondly we must realize that it doesn’t just matter
whether a character is unrealistically strong and skilful and perfect… it also
matters who wrote the character that way. Before the ST whenever I’ve
encountered this term it was mostly when it came to fanfics. Writers, who were
to a large degree young girls, wrote unrealistically perfect female OCs they
put into fanfics to self-insert into. These young writers often didn’t know how
to write a fully fleshed character due to lack of experience but still wanted a
character to look up to. That might be bad writing but it’s innocent bad
writing. It’s coming from someone who doesn’t know any better, and who mostly
can’t know any better bc they’ve just started writing or simply aren’t
professionals.
Then there’s the case of male writers creating Mary
Sues. PROFESSIONAL male writers who want to or are being told to write a “strong
female character”: These male writers have never thought about a woman’s
mindset, feelings or storyline before… so what do they do? They magically make
her strong and capable without having to put much thought into her character.
Developing flaws and a background story takes time. You need to invest into
this character, figure out their motivations, feelings etc. Writing for
instance a detailed good training sequence for a character takes time. You need
to figure out their weaknesses and how they can realistically overcome them in
the story. But if you don’t want to take all of this time, yet still somehow
want a “strong female character” you just make her strong… with no background,
no development, no flaws. You can now point at her and go “look, I’ve written a
strong female character!” but in reality you’ve put no effort into writing her…
you’ve just turned her into a shell you can use. This is what Rian Johnson has
done to Rey. He hasn’t written her to self-insert into her and to admire her
like a young girl might do for a fanfic… he has written her this way because he
doesn’t CARE about her. She had to be strong, so he made her strong but he didn’t
think about her motivations, feelings, flaws, actual in-character fears – he didn’t
CARE enough to develop a training sequence for her. (and to top it all – he didn’t even let her have her OWN strengths… her powers are not HERS, she magically received a man’s skills!!!!!!!!!!!!)
This is SEXISM AND BAD WRITING. It’s bad writing by
someone who should know better… by someone who should have enough experience to
KNOW it’s wrong to write a character like that. And it’s bad writing coming from a bad mindset, it shows the bad intentions and thinking patterns of a sexist.
So when people make fun of girls writing Mary Sues
they’re sexist assholes. (bc, let’s face it, they wouldn’t make fun of boys doing the same thing!!!) However what Rian Johnson has done is the result of
him BEING a sexist asshole!
You can not like Wonder Woman or Black Panther, but you can’t deny the impact those movies are having across the world and in the hearts of the many that have felt unrepresented. Power moves and powerful movies like this make it easier for movies that will include characters or stories that you will hopefully like without needing a full cast of white men with white directors and white screenwriters and a whitewashed Hollywood for it to be successful or taken seriously. As always there’s still work to be done. It doesn’t end with a successful Wonder Woman movie. It doesn’t end with a successful Black Panther movie. However those movies have given us a place to start and sometimes that’s just as important.
Thor took groot as an elective which means growing up he was the rare combination of nerd and jock and idk why people are surprised i mean the boy talks astrophysics wirh bruce 7 phd’s banner like its nothing and when he drops down to earth which clique does he immediately join? Not shield!! Not the avengers!! Some podunk star scientists out in the middle of nowhere on an extended camping trip like!! Whilst loki was painting his nails to match his cufflinks, thor was studying foreign languages as he benchpressed heimdall. Thor isnt your garden variety jock he’s a bookworm jock, easily found stargazing or doodling in his moleskin journal
ok not to post a whole ass thinkpiece but. marvel is really obviously behind the times with having tony stark be the “heart” of the avengers because his kind of “fuck it, i’ll do what i want” style of masculinity is just. outdated at this point. like i definitely think as a culture in 2008 we were more open to reading that as fun and endearing, but over the past 10 years (and the last 2 or 3 in particular) that douchey-but-in-a-cool-way masculinity has really started to show itself as toxic in so many ways….
anyway. i think that if marvel let their writers have time to get closer with characters and somehow incentivized good storytelling we probably would have seen tony either a) pass the torch of true leadership to another avenger a while ago or b) grow more as a character and become a different kind of leader himself
tldr my hypothesis is that tony stark is becoming unpopular and stale not only because marvel films have less than stellar character dev, but because his kind of “rich douche who does whatever he wants with style” masculinity has ceased to be charming in our cultural climate
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