ShieldWife
Marchioness
Well, if you’re familiar with it at all, you’ll know that Scientific American is mostly trash. I’ve known that for a while, but this surprised even me with the utter depths of stupidity this article reaches.
Let me give you some choice quotes:
There is more, but this is enough to get the general sense of the article.
Though really, I hope that the kind of woke imbeciles who are into this kind of stuff stay far away from Star Wars, and other sci-fi and fantasy franchises too. That’s too much to hope for.
Let me give you some choice quotes:
They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.). The Jedi are also an exclusionary cult, membership to which is partly predicated on the possession of heightened psychic and physical abilities (or “Force-sensitivity”). Strikingly, Force-wielding talents are narratively explained in Star Wars not merely in spiritual terms but also in ableist and eugenic ones
Think, for example, of the so-called “Slave Leia” costume, infamous for stripping down and chaining up the movie series’ first leading woman as part of an Orientalist subplot. Star Wars arguably conflates “alienness” with “nonwhiteness,” often seeming to rely on racist stereotypeswhen depicting nonhuman species. The series regularly defaults onto ableist tropes, memorably in its portrayal of Darth Vader, which links the villain’s physical disability with machinic inhumanity and moral deviance, presenting his technology-assisted breathing as a sinister auditory marker of danger and doom. What’s more, the bodies and voices centered in Star Wars have, with few exceptions, historically been those of white men. And while recent films have increased gender and racial diversity, important questions remain regarding how meaningfully such changes represent a departure from the series’ problematic past. Indeed, a notable segment of the Star Wars fandom has aggressively advocated the (re)centering of white men in the franchise, with some equating recent casting decisions with “white genocide.”
There is more, but this is enough to get the general sense of the article.
Though really, I hope that the kind of woke imbeciles who are into this kind of stuff stay far away from Star Wars, and other sci-fi and fantasy franchises too. That’s too much to hope for.