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By David Futrelle
Over on the right-wing culture war blog One Angry Gamer, the highly excitable Billy D is absolutely losing it over a lesbian kiss in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Because apparently it doesn’t correctly represent the demographic realities of Dagobah or Tatooine or wherever the movie is set (I really haven’t been paying much attention).
Take it away, Billy boy:
Despite making up a tiny minority of the population, and having practically zero mass-market buying power, corporations and large brands continue to foist upon the general public niche fetishes to indoctrinate and normalize aberrant behavior. In a rush to maintain their trend of cutting out the legs of the Star Wars brand from beneath itself, Disney and director J.J. Abrams followed through with including an LGBT kissing scene in Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker.
The kiss doesn’t even involve any of the main female characters in the film like Rey or Princess Leia or Lt Commander Bleep Bloop from the Grbsnort Sector; it’s a brief “celebratory kiss” between two lady rebels.
But Billy is so pig-biting mad over this fleeting kiss that he launches a weird attack on the authoritarian government of China for not being authoritarian enough — because it chose not to censor the scene in versions of the film shown in that country.
To make matters worse, Disney managed to sneak the scene into the Chinese version of Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker …
[T]he Ministry of Culture and its off-shoot, the Ministry of Culture [sic], apparently did not require Disney to make any edits to the scene, despite China having laws prohibiting the promotion of LGBTQIA+ content .
He then shares some of what appear to be his own sexual fantasies, which were actually sort of hot:
[M]aybe China is a-okay with lesbians lip-locking on the big screen but hate it when two half-naked men are racing their tongues up and down each other’s sweaty bodies like a Dodge Demon and a Camaro SS racing up and down a drag strip?
He concludes by comparing LGBTQ people to Nazis.
[I]f this becomes a trend, and China begins allowing LGBTQIA+ propaganda into films distributed across the mainland, then it’s yet another region brought to yield under the boot-heel of the Rainbow Reich.
Let’s get this straight (no pun intended): The government of China is currently rounding up hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims and putting them in concentration camps — sorry, “re-education camps” — but it’s the Culture Ministry’s act of non-censorship of a kiss in a PG-13-rated Disney film that makes Billy think of fascism.
I have to say, I did Nazi that one coming.
What, Threepio the butt monkey isn’t enough gay representation for you? You actually want a guy who can not only feel physical attraction to another guy, but is capable of acting on it too? That’s getting too far into icky politics, don’t ya know? /s
Though more seriously, why anyone thought Abrams would be any good showing decent representation of minorities is a bit of a mystery to me. This is the guy who decided that the role of Khan in Star Trek: Into Darkness was best played by a white actor instead of an Indian actor, and excused it by saying that the role went to the best actor who auditioned for it. Yeeeaaah. >.<
A move that was defended by the proto-GamerGaters as passionately as they defended everything else that was threatened by the approaching SJW brigade. Mostly by swarming any blogger that tried to discuss their upset over that casting by claiming said bloggers were ‘spoiling the movie’s major plot twist’ and weren’t allowed to say anything about it until at least a month had passed from the premier. At which point it would’ve been too late to affect ST’s ticket sales, which suited the proto-GGers just fine, I’m sure.
@Redsilkphoenix
Lucas wasn’t exactly good at minority representation either. In the original movies there are quite a few nasty racial caricatures disguised as alien species such as the Naboo (a caricature of Jamaicans), Watto (a literal “Happy Merchant” antisemitic caricature), and countless others.
The prequels are quite guilty of that. Doubly so because in the prequel, the alliance of evil is mostly composed of extraterrestrial, but whose secret master is of course a white human.
In a sense, the prequel is the ultimate far right fantasy : the assembly of white men (the jedi) are besieged and destroyed by diversity (the separatist, who are mostly non humans). And of course, the only guy good enough to pull that off is a white guy, manipulating everyone. Pretty sure just changing names you could make a correspondance with the average great replacement theory.
@Ohlmann – Don’t forget that this white guy, after succeeding in his master plan, basically abolishes a(n admitedly very flawed, kinda failing) democracy with a totalitarian dictatorship explicitly based on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Some would say that this “proves” it’s not far right, but the far right loves using Nazis as the bad guys as much as anyone (just go on most of their non-Stormfront hangouts, or read through all the comments by neo-Nazis in all but name claiming that Nazis has “socialist” in their name so they themselves aren’t Nazis because they’re not socialist), so…
@Naglfar – Ah, yes, Watto. I remember 20 years ago in the cinema, wondering to myself: “Are they really unaware how ridiculously stereotypical he is?”. Wonder how Lucas’ Jewish buddy Spielberg reacted to that one. There’s a reason he’s used as the page image for “Space Jews” on TVTropes.
This was true of the original trilogy, though. The three films all had different directors, and George Lucas was only minimally involved with _Empire_—the plot outline was his, but the actual writing and directing was done by others.