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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Aight, so I remain undefeated then. why are you so obsessed with calling mace windu slurs
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Apr 13, 2025 23:44
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Guy A. Person posted:did you read the substance of his argument or...? Okay okay sorry I admit it. I wouldn't call R2-D2 the n-word either
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Apr 14, 2025 07:50
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BiggestBatman posted:Ready to be wrong here, but is it stated anywhere definitively that droids don't have midichlorians? where would they be, the wirestream?
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Apr 15, 2025 04:27
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Blood Boils posted:For peeps somehow unfamiliar with the mace windu challenge ityool 2025, it arose when some nerd, in order to defend considering Chewie or the droids as unpersons, claimed that it's impossible to be bigoted towards a fictional character. Which is correct? If you call Mace Windu a slur, you're hurting Black people in real life, not fictional Jedi Mace Windu. I can actually guarantee you that you can call any fictional character anything you want and that character will not take offense
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Apr 15, 2025 20:04
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Blood Boils posted:u need to think about it for more than a second, otherwise ya end up implying that bigotry is only wrong if the victim feels bad Bigotry is wrong because it hurts people in real life. If you were to say that the Jedi are bad because they recruit child soldiers, there would be no serious consequences because the Jedi Order is not real. If you said that the Jedi are bad because they allow women to join, that statement would suggest that you believe real-life women should be treated similarly, which is bad, because they are real. This is an exceedingly simple concept to comprehend
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Apr 15, 2025 21:26
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You may also notice that the reason they're oppressed is because of other fictional characters, not real people on internet forums e: also, they're not actually oppressed because they're not real and therefore cannot be harmed or killed. We are pretending they are oppressed for our own entertainment RubiconCrosser fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Apr 15, 2025 |
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Apr 15, 2025 21:42
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I hate to tell you this, but you cannot prove that fake droids deserve fake rights by pointing out that if someone were racist in real life, it would be bad
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Apr 15, 2025 21:48
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:You are in real life, and Mace Windu is fake. So, dare you complete the Challenge? Why did you put "fake" in quotation marks Do you believe Mace Windu is real? Do you believe slurs are bad specifically because they harm Mace Windu?
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Apr 15, 2025 22:03
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FunkyAl posted:He does have a point and it's this: imagine explaining the mace windu thing to anybody in your real life who has not been reading this thread for ten years This is what I specifically am going through as we speak. I appear to have entered a thread in which 5+ people have deluded themselves into thinking the primary reason racism is bad is that it might contribute to the oppression of fictional characters
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Apr 16, 2025 05:48
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Guy A. Person posted:lol the hilarious thing about that post is that kids also dress up as Storm Troopers and Darth Vader and poo poo, who take their design and literal names from Nazi soldiers. I doubt many kids dress up as imperial officers but some do and more adults do and those are even more explicitly modeled after the clothing of real world fascists. do you agree that they should be arrested
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Apr 19, 2025 22:36
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Jerkface posted:I really dont want to defend TFA and JJ, but the First Order massacres like a peaceful force village on Jakku, destroys a peaceful bar, and blows up the new republic - which is basically as much as the Empire does in ANH The TFA FO commits atrocities, but not much (aside from the wholly unconvincing starkiller base scene) that couldn't be replicated by a particularly sadistic militia or gang. Meanwhile, the empire wipes out a shipful of trained soldiers ten minutes into their first movie
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May 10, 2025 05:46
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Me solemnly conceding that The George Lucas Racist Caricature Parade is immaculate cinema because doing otherwise would justify space apartheid
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May 17, 2025 05:31
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Which races are you talking about? Interesting that you specified "races" rather than "characters." This may be presumptuous, but it sounds a bit like you know exactly what I'm talking about and are trying to use the "pointing out racism makes you racist for noticing it" defense. If so, I have some great people to introduce you to who have very strong opinions on feminism in media
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May 17, 2025 05:38
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:You don't miss "the trap" by refusing to elaborate on your wild claims. That's already a failure. You appear to be entirely incurious about critiquing the problematic elements in the Star Wars prequels to the point of tacitly denying they exist or have ever been identified by academics and marginalized people and are using a dubiously-earned reputation as a debate mastermind and "trapper" to avoid engaging with them. I'm wholly certain that nothing I can say will convince you that George Lucas may have had some underlying systemic biases when directing the Star Wars films, but even so, I took the liberty of familiarizing myself with what some academics have had to say on the matter. When researching, I was particularly struck by Greg Grewell's "Colonizing the Universe: Science Fictions Then, Now, and in the (Imagined) Future." Grewell, who is particularly unsympathetic about the topic, uses The Phantom Menace (the only prequel which had been released at the time of writing) as an example of sci-fi media which perpetuates colonialism by "mapping" extant racial stereotypes onto imagined people and cultures. As he describes: "[With] Star Wars' use of earth-type racialized beings, aliens have become familiar types: the evil Asian-like Federation representatives trying to enforce a trade embargo on the mostly European-stylized Naboo, whose main urban-center is comprised of Greco-Roman architecture; the cake-walking, dread-locked, Caribbean-like speaking Gungans, of whom Jar Jar Binks is the type, and who, as literal subalterns, live underwater and retreat to a jungle, their "sacred" place, and go to battle with African-like spears and shields; the patriarchal knights templar called Jedi, who will save the day, if not the universe (some Jedi, mostly the elders, have a British accent, while the younger members of the Jedi community speak with an American accent, perhaps symbolic of an historical shift of empire and power on earth); and the future in the little Americanized Aniken, for a time nearly every adolescent American boy's hero. Hence, the familiar becomes alien." For a more comprehensive look at why these specific alien species were considered racist by marginalized communities, and what their inclusion may say about the films themselves, I'd recommend Will Booker's "Readings of Racism: Interpretation, stereotyping, and The Phantom Menace," which I sadly cannot link in full here. I can, however, source my favorite article I found on my excursion: "'Machines Making Machines? How Perverse.' Sexual Anxiety, the Droids of Star Wars and the Prequel Trilogy," which makes an extremely compelling argument on the racial coding of various droids in the movies. And if you'd prefer a more overarching look at how stereotypical and appropriative East Asian image was used throughout Star Wars as a whole, I'd recommend "The Tao of 'Star Wars', Or, Cultural Appropriation in a Galaxy Far, Far Away." Finally, if you're obstinate enough that you'll only be moved by personal narratives, Black SFF author Nalo Hopkinson's "Maybe They're Phasing Us In: Re-mapping Fantasy Tropes in the Face of Gender, Race, and Sexuality" includes a pretty touching excerpt about feeling excluded by depictions of aliens in Star Wars and Star Trek, particularly calling attention to Jar Jar Binks. It appears the alien's portrayal by Ahmed Best has not prevented others from viewing him as hurtful or even maliciously created. I hope you're willing to act in enough good faith to not insinuate that dozens of accredited scholars (including at least one PhD) and review boards are all secretly racist and injecting fantastical delusions upon the utterly incorruptible Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. The history of racism in American pop culture is a compelling field of academic study, but it's also a serious issue that, in my opinion, should not be blithely brushed off to feel good about enjoying an action movie. It's more than possible to enjoy something while also acknowledging that parts of it were inadequately constructed
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May 17, 2025 06:50
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Bongo Bill posted:In general it's a good idea to say what your position is directly, before supposing that someone is acting in bad faith by not assuming they know what you're trying to say. I ordinarily like operating in good faith, but the person I'm talking to has previously and was explicitly mentioning the rhetorical "traps" he was attempting to lay out for me/others in a particularly smarmy tone — and if you'll notice, the goal of these "traps" are not to make an airtight argument, but to paint the other party as secretly racist (hence Mace Windu n-word, etc.). I think it's safe to assume that I was not being asked a sincere question. And as for the second part, yeah, my claim is that the movies are imperfect. I've been seeing a lot of people, specifically SMG, tacitly paint them as a wholly flawless work of subversive art with no objectionable elements, and that pisses me off both because it's blatantly false and quite faux-intellectual. If we want to be pretentious while talking about Star Wars, we may as well at least start quoting journals
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May 17, 2025 07:40
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nemesis_hub posted:How does TPM perpetuate colonialism? You haven’t established a causal relationship, unless your definition of colonialism is the existence of stereotypes. It perpetuates real-world stereotypes used to justify colonialism. The work itself is anti-colonialist, because Star Wars is very politically confused, but the mere act of including those ideas lends support to the systems it's critiquing. Also, Taoism, cultural appropriation in the OT, etc. etc.
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May 17, 2025 07:54
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