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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.
It’s so brief I completely failed to spot it. And apparently this is what J J Abrams considers representation…
I’m just gonna mock him and say he’s probably envious that he can’t get women without being an asshole and finds that women who can get with women are competition to him or an affront to his whole sense of being, which I think is deserved.
Well it’s not like Disney are having to hock the family silver…
https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2019/12/17/star-wars-rise-of-skywalker-box-office-reviews-dark-knight-harry-potter-twilight-avengers-endgame-box-office/
All the things wrong with The Rise of Skywalker, and this is what they have a problem with?
The interesting thing here is that Rise of Skywalker has also been getting some angry notices from liberal and progressive reviewers, who seem to read the movie as kind of creative capitulation to some of The Last Jedi’s critics.
Obviously I haven’t seen the movie (actually, I haven’t seen any of the Disney Star Wars films), but it seems like J.J. Abrams may have committed a cardinal creative sin: he’s tried to please everyone, and in doing so pleased no one.
I have it on good authority that Lt. Commander Bleep Bloop is actually a robosexual, which I believe the Space Pope considers an abomination.
@Katamount
HERESY!!
…sorry i hadda
@Aaron
Or that switching from one director to another in mid-trilogy causes some unsightly whiplash, so to speak.
This sounds like the familiar MRA complaint that sexualities images of gay men are censored more than those of gay women. I’m not sure if that’s true, but the real issue is that MRAs love to complain about how this is a sign of male oppression, but never actually do anything to reduce homophobia or help gay men. Indeed, other than when they can use them as a card, MRAs seem to hate gay men and be quite homophobic. Sort of like how the only time alt rightists complain about rape, it’s when they can use it in twisted xenophobia.
Not to mention that I’m sure that if Billy D throws this much of a fit about women kissing, I can only imagine the tantrum he would throw if a movie did contain the scene he describes. I can’t say that a man who complains about the “Rainbow Reich” seems like the biggest ally to the gay community.
@Katamount
The Reverend Lionel Preacherbot also considers it an abomination, because it says so in the Good Book 3.0.
Lesbian kissing on Dagobah – or kissing of any sort on Dagobah – is to be done with extreme caution.
Well, Disney had the high ground, so what did Billy expect?
An L, G, B, and T kissing scene? Count me excited for this movie! (Wait, it’s not that exciting? Damn!)
Which, of course, has its own offshoot… it’s Ministries of Culture all the way down!
Oh, manospherians, you find the most artistic ways to describe sexual activities……
I’m just sad there’s obviously still some mileage in the “angry gamer” shtick for this chud to still be grinding it out. What is this, the 2000s?! We have creators doing some genuinely innovative stuff on YouTube now and this guy is still ploughing the disaffected edgelord furrow like a poorly-written chatbot. Begone!
@Cat Mara
It’s not just gaming youtube. On the section of YouTube devoted to guitar, people like SteveTereberry and Jared Dines (probably not related to Pro Liar Gail) do the same stuff and make misogynistic jokes (there’s a lot of that in music, sadly) and have millions of subscribers while people like Kevin from Said Too Much Productions are doing interesting experimental instrument work and yet only have 10,000 subscribers.
Yes. There is ZERO dollars in films portraying women doing sexual things with other women :rolls eyes:
I bet this guy just blew through the single digits on his IQ exam.
I love how showing a same sex kiss is fascism, but China demanding that movies be censored and media companies capitulating to those demands is a great thing.
However, as we all know Finn and Poe should be boyfriends and Disney didn’t let it happen, so one kiss between two random women is not satisfying anyone.
@Naglfar
I just deem YouTube to be full of Nazi scum anyway and YT to care only about money. I generally try to avoid watching it, or if I can’t, find other means around YT’s algorithm, so YT doesn’t benefit from me watching, at least as much (I recommend invidio.us).
I have my own issues with the music industry, and I avoid getting into music as such, but it’s a shame those smaller guys aren’t getting as much attention.
@WWTH
I’ve seen someone who identified as a traditional conservative and complained that men were becoming more feminine AGREE with Chinese state media on how men should be more “masculine”.
This man complains about social justice warriors destroying free speech, but China is a country that censors men wearing earrings on TV by blurring them out as well as stuff like the Tiananmen square protests!
Last I saw this man, he’s called Dave Cullen, resides in Dublin, Ireland and runs (or ran) a channel named Computing Forever (which mostly is him complaining about liberals).
What I’m just living is how anything outside if the traditional heterosexual ideal Hollywood romance is a “niche fetish”.
For examplke, I am a fat woman. Now if a woman lives a fat man, that is fine and normal and healthy,but apparently if any man lives a fat woman like me–oarticukarly if he himself thin–it automatically means he is some perv with a “fat fetish”.
And, of course, if a man nearly twice my size is with me, it means headstrong until he can get someone better and he should be pitied for being a 400 lb man saddled with a worthless 250 lb woman.
Because no one ever wants a fat woman,they’re always either settling for the moment or have a “niche fetish”.
Notice how few of these supposed fetishes go the other way. 110 lb woman with 400 lb man is never a problem, even totally natural–at worst, they assume he’s rich and she likes him for that, but never assume fetishes or perversions or “settling for the moment” on the part of the woman. Not common in my irl encounters though, everyone assumes that “maybe she just loves him for who he is inside” but that any thin man with a fat woman has “mental problems”. More so if hes also handsome.
@Demonhype
I know what you mean.
I’m a fat AFAB person and I prefer skinnier guys than myself, butif they date me people think it’s “wrong” or something is wrong with him.
I’m waiting for a conservative to string ten words together without two of ’em being
“the liberals”
Like liberalism is some kinda monolith, and conservatism is just a WELLSPRING of inclusiveness
@Demonhype
Catch me as a pansexual fat enby who’s into near every shape and size, but has a special appreciation for the larger ones…hence subverting that paradigm, right there. Give me more to love!
then again i’m sure the non-binary are barely considered by these fucks and generally assumed by default to be SJWs and probably female
@Weird Eddie
But…conservatism can be inclusive of all kinds of ideologies. From capitalism, to fascism, to patriarchy, to white supremacy… /s
@Troubelle
I doubt that conservatives recognize the NBs. Or they probably lump them in with binary trans* people because conservatives are incapable of seeing beyond a binary.
The numbers of the Pride festival in Montreal kinda contradict your analysis there, bucko. Also, if you consider vanilla lesbianism a “niche fetish” and “aberrant behavior”, then you got a problem. 9/10 cis/het males not part of the manosphere think girl-on-girl is hot, and 9/10 manospherians who claim not to think that are lying, probably.
The Ministry of Culture and its off-shoot, the Ministry of Culture[lol] apparently considered the kiss so minor that they couldn’t be assed to act offended, which given that Winnie the Pooh is hellbent on making the PRC as socially Orwellian as possible within a capitalist system, is probably significant (of the scene being insignificant).
…Are you familiar with the trope “Armored Closet Gay”*? Because very few cis/het males would use that language to describe two imaginary gay men having an imaginary make-out session, no matter how hot and heavy. And from what I know of you you usually don’t seem to be particularly in favor of male homosexuality.
*Thank you, TVTropes!
…This… is just… so wrong on so many levels… Ladies, gentlemen, and esteemed members of other affiliations, we bear witness to a most rare, strange, and wonderful spectacle: Fractal Wrongness. Every part of that statement is exactly as wrong as the whole statement. Feel free to gawk at the freak.
@Paireon
Regarding the manospherians, maybe they hate women so much that the idea of women getting pleasure upsets them? Then they wouldn’t like lesbians sex scenes. Or heterosexual sex scenes where the woman orgasms (as should be desired), either.
FWIW, I think both girl-on-girl and guy-on-guy stuff can be very hot, but I’m not very representative of the manosphere seeing as I’m not cis, het, or a man.
@Naglfar – You have accidentally stumbled upon what was once the truth. once upon a time, the right wing/republican side of the voting block in the US was a big tent with many ideologies – you had the fundamentalist Christian crowd, the fiscal conservative crowd, the paleoconservative crowd, the neoconservative crowd, the right-libertarian crowd, the NRA crowd, the racist shitbag crowd (many of whom were former Dixiecrats who left the Dems in the 60s-70s due to a combination of the progressives in the party steadily winning out over them since the FDR days and the GOP’s “Southern Strategy”), the anti-abortion crowd, the anti-feminist crowd, the anti-LGBT crowd…
It may be hard to believe, but they were distinct groups (although definitely with some overlap) until at least the Reagan years; then in the 80s they all started hanging around each other without protection, and their ideologies cross-contaminated each other like a passel of intellectual (so to speak) STDs, resulting in the barely-functional, held together only through shared hatred and enmity of anyone unlike them as a desperately-holding wallpaper over their dislike of each other over silly things, like the alt-right and manosphere which are microcosms/fractals of it.
I spotted that fleeting kiss and had a chuckle to myself thinking “some terrible people will loose it over that!” and they did.
I had more problems with a slightly earlier kiss that had more screen time but then I thought it left Finn free to kiss Poe…
All we are left with ia what I assume is an excerpt of Billy D’s Foe/Pinn? fan fiction:
Finn has been so poorly utilised that I thought they might… throw him a bone at the end.