Apparently if a movie series has female protagonists some of the time, it’s an outright cultural assault on men. At least that’s what one Men’s Rights Redditor is arguing. About Star Wars. Take it away, Vinniikii:
Most men lost Disney decades ago, the ethnic men and other non cis white heterosexual men lost Disney even earlier. We didn’t get to enjoy misandrist animations, we had to find stories that celebrated men on our own.
For most of many men’s life, Star Wars was the gold standard for that entertainment.
I did not know that Star Wars was the only force, heh heh, holding up masculinity in the west.
While Lucas lost his way in the 2000s with the movies, men online used video game technology to create huge communities. Star Wars meant imaginative freedom and complicated accomplishment.
MALE SAFE SPACE!
Now, Disney has begun the misandrification of Star Wars.
“Misandrification,” huh?.
The foregrounding of evil old man Palpatine and abandonment of huge open galaxy for feminist, single mother ruins. The constant ideology and purposeful teaching moments.
Er, I’m admittedly a couple of Star Wars movies behind but what the fuck are you talking about, dude?
Even many of the feminists this is supposed to cater to, reject it on sight as false, a rehash of rehash, so resolutely insistent on hating men that it refuses to allow them to succeed or prosper in any way.
How are these movies male hating?
Do you have the conditioned response to pervasive Disney influenster misandry? I know whenever I see their pseudo original memes I cringe, the same reaction I used to have to fratty homophobic presentation, this material is going to hate and demean men without warning. The “safe target” is evil no matter who the scape goat.
I’m completely lost at this point. Maybe give some examples of this terrible misandry of which you speak?
So much of gamer hate is simple misandry. They are so reactionary and attack focus they forget to achieve or accomplish. So sad to see Disney become the locus of current hate, using false narrative of “accessibility/inclusion” to profile and exclude. Changing Star Wars bc they couldn’t compete.
Well, that answers precisely none of my questions.
In the comments, though, Vinniikii gives a couple of examples of the misandrificationizing of which he speaks. After accusing one critic of “gaslighting,” he declares that
Padme is high key the star of 2 and Obi/Qui are gay so you don’t really have a point. Jar Jar is a misandrified Chewbacca. Also the whole single mother plot line in 1. … Ewoks are neutered Chewbacca. Every movie had less virility.
Ewoks are “neutered?” They’re murderous forest monsters who may be eating the stormtroopers they kill. Don’t mess with Ewoks.
Elsewhere in the comments Vinniikii suggests that
we’ve finally started to come out of the total man-hating era where a man couldn’t even wear the traditional symbol of masculine pride, a fedora.
This made me wonder for a moment if Vinniikii was a troll, but a scroll through his comment history suggests that, nope, he’s serious. Ridiculous, but serious.
But what do I know? I’m a misandrificationalist.
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The fedora? The one first worn by Sarah Bernhardt, and named after her leading role in the play she wore it in?
The one that was being worn by women (and *ghasp* feminists at that) in the 1880s and only became a men’s hat after the Prince of Wales wore one 40 years later in 1924?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora#History
And try not to think on the implications of how they got that dress that Leia wore.
Err… While I suppose you could say that both Chewbacca and Jar-Jar Binks both served the role of “nonhuman sidekick”, they weren’t the same type of character, nor did they serve the same role in the story. It would probably make a bit more sense to compare Jar-Jar with C3PO (yes, I know, blasphemy), as their in-story roles were a bit closer.
It’s also worth pointing out that A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back had people whacking George Lucas on the head when he got stupid (metaphorically speaking), Return of the Jedi had less of that, and the prequels were pure, unrestrained Lucas. He didn’t “lose his way”. He was always like that, for better or worse.
The words are (mostly) English, but they aren’t in any order that makes sense.
Agreed about Ewoks. They look to be eating anything, and it was only a little Force use by Luke and some quick talking by C3PO that kept Our Heroes out of the stew pot. The Stormtroopers at minimum got beheaded. Those little furballs are DEADLY.
Also, this guy has a really weird definition of “gay” if he’s considering the man who’s flirting with Darth’s mom and Has A Particular Set Of Skills gay. Not to mention a full beard, and you can’t get any whiter than Liam and Ewan (even their names!)
I was under the impression that Evil Old Guy Emperor Palpatine was a big part of the original movies. I mean, the second one’s called “The Empire Strikes Back”, and the close to the end bit in ROTJ is all about him cackling evilly as Luke and Darth fight.
Mando’s a white guy who’s willing to go anywhere and shoot anyone in an Old West milieu, and Boba Fett’s a bounty hunter turned crime lord, all of which is pretty macho.
Quoth the raven: Wait, what?!
They are male hating because some of the more recent ones have a female protagonist, which means men are no longer center stage 100% of the time.
@ Chris Oakley
…Okay, I’m going to ask a simple, but obvious question here.
Has this guy ever even actually seen Star Wars?
Joke’s on you. I saw Star Wars in Los Angeles before it was released nationwide. It was the norm back in those days — and maybe now — to release movies in LA and NYC two weeks before they were released to the rest of the country. I went with a friend who had loved it and wanted to see it again. I hadn’t heard of this movie and certainly hadn’t read a review. And I was completely surprised and thrilled to see Princess Leia, a princess who kicked ass.
I was less thrilled about the gold bikini they put her in for a later movie — but that’s another story.
To be fair, Jar-Jar is bad news in my book. I can’t believe little kids like him.
Perhaps the fedora thing is referencing Sean Connery’s Bond. I mean, I recall it was actually a Trilby, but most people don’t know any different.
So this is my problem.
If this were Starship Troopers or even Asimov, some property that leaned right-wing from the start but really did get hijacked by the left wing, I could see their frustration.
But… uhhh… Star Wars and Star Trek were made by SJWs for SJWs.
I don’t like the idea of fandoms owning a property. No one really owns an idea. We honor originators of ideas, but they had that creativity thanks to others and their ideas are taken by others into themselves, inspiring change the originator could never anticipate.
But if we’re going to talk about the evolution of a property, or what kind of perspective it’s appropriate to adopt… Star Wars should be feminist, and anti-racist, and anti-colonialist, and everything else. Like it always was. It was about space hippies beating space Nazis with the power of love and grooving out.
Right-wingers think nothing of invading others’ spaces while screeching in defense of their own. If they want to play this game, they should be told to go back to their side of the apartment. Fuck you, right-wingers. You don’t own Star Wars.
@Fred B-C : Yes. This. Exactly.
Of course, the guy’s rant made very little sense to begin with. It reads as though he saw a completely different Star Wars franchise than the one I saw. W the actual F?!?!?
@ GSS ex-noob:
Their actors (Pedro Pascal and Temuera Morrison) are Latino and Maori respectively, so maybe these guys don’t think they count?
This guy’s writing style seemed familiar, then I realized why: Like so many other manospherians, he is trying to sound academic and “highbrow” without the least understanding of those things. Or of basic grammar and syntax, apparently.
And he probably thinks that his writing looks impressive.
@Nequam:
Heh. I’m not even a gamer, but in the last couple of months I’ve been quite enjoying TF2’s tie-in web comics and shorts, and the truly enormous quantities of fanart out there.
Obi-Wan and Qui Gon Jinn are supposed to be monk like. So gay/not gay is sort of irrelevant to them. Also, has this guy actually ever watched Star Wars? He seems to have missed some vital points.
I guess he’s trying to make a portmanteau between “influencer” and “hipster” here, but it comes across as if he thinks this is the actual word.
Golly, that must have taken an entire minute of searching to find movies and novels where the main characters are men.
Imagine being so thin-skinned and narcissistic that you refuse to consume media unless the main character resembles you and is also heroic and successful. Star Wars is set in a freaking different galaxy populated with a huge variety of imaginative creatures and robots, and they’re still insisting that it’s unrealistic not to have white men at the center of it all.
Interestingly, the trilby is also named after a female character who popularized the style: Trilby O’Ferrall, the bohemian heroine of George du Maurier’s eponymous 1894 novel and its myriad stage adaptations, in one of which the actress playing Trilby introduced the now-famous hat.
I hadn’t realized that both versions of this stereotypically “masculine” hat, the fedora and the trilby, are actually named after the fin-de-siecle female fictional characters for whom they were created! The manospherians are just continuing a century-old male borrowing/imitation of a female fashion style.
@Alan Robertshaw:
I may have asked this before, but have you read There’s a Hair in My Dirt! by Gary Larson, the cartoonist of The Far Side? It made a similar point about a lot of birdsong being territorial posturing, implied threats, and pick-up lines. The story-within-a-story is all about a princess marvelling at the beauty of nature while completely misunderstanding what was actually going on; the book as a whole is very much a poke at the ‘save the cute animals’ form of shallow interest in ecology.
@ Nequam and Kimstu
Slime-producing Vinn and his mates should stop purloining our many great hats, as an owner of both a fedora and a trilby among other hats I am chuffed to bits to hear that they always were womens hats. I’d guess that as well as being popularised by actresses they were created by wardrobe mistresses, so ours all round.
Of course those who think that people should be allowed to be what they are without regard to their sex or gender have the requisite style to wear fedoras and trilbys. Besides being inherently stylish both are excellent for keeping rain off your glasses with none of the danger of poking others in the eye that an umbrella brings.
Ok lets see if two edita are enough . . .
AAAAAAAARRRRRRGH
I own neither a trilby nor a fedora, but I do own a Stetson, because I’m a Texan.
Though I admit that non-Texans can also wear Stetsons – see Hayley Atwell as Agent Peggy Carter, who rocked a Stetson Aviatrix.
https://lwlies.com/articles/i-met-a-film-bro-heres-what-i-learned/
I just wanted to put this here, because while I don’t agree with everything in the article, it pretty much perfectly describes this guy. he’s the kind of fifteen-year-old minded guy who hasn’t watched enough of the history of film to be able to talk about modern film with any credibility, has perhaps seen and even heard of things like film criticism, but has no idea what it entails, or the research and knowledge involved in doing it.
I remember being in that stage when was fifteen, but I also had the benefit of growing up during a time when film critique had some great writers in it, like Roger Ebert, and hence, I eventually grew out of it. I definitely remember having this attitude when I was young of having very emphatic ideas about movies, yet refusing to watch anything that had been made before 1975. I grew out of that too, and I did so by watching earlier and earlier film, reading a lot of the work about film, understanding the why of films, their history, and what role corporations played in the making of films.
This guy knows none of this, but he is so nonsensical that I wouldnt even classify him as a film bro.
@ Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Setting aside the fact that one has to be pretty privileged to be able to only (or even mostly) consume media with protagonists that mostly resemble them, I have very vivid memories of watching Star Wars as a young child and deciding that I want to be R2D2. I seem to have had a habit of identifying whichever cast member was smallest, but needless to say I was not actually made of metal or speak in beeps.
Childhood imagination and all that, but I feel like if I could enjoy my best life as a tiny droid, maybe adults could also be expected to step outside of themselves for entertainment purposes.
I guess stuff like this can also be more about what you remember about a thing and less about what it actually was. Maybe Vinniikii really just saw bros being bros in SW, and that means that there wasn’t anything else there. Some people will also tell you Captain Kirk bangs every woman he meets in TOS Star Trek, and won’t listen to you even if you tell them that he isn’t even the romantic interest for all of the guest star ladies, never mind having a new romantic interest himself in all of the episodes.
@Moon: But the best character in Boba Fett by far was played by a very white man, basically reprising his role from Justified to a degree so comical I just call the character Raylen. So even that won’t cut it. Nor does it matter to the people shrieking about forced diversity in Marvel that, even in the era where white men supposedly don’t exist, we get a Spiderman sequel, a Dr. Strange sequel, a Guardians sequel with Chris Pratt and probably Thor, a Disney series about the feels of white Goth Daddy (and, yes, a stealth additional protagonist in the form of Sylvie), a Disney series where a black man shares equal billing with a white man, and a series about someone played by Oscar Isaac but who I believe is canonically white (based off of the names Marc Spector and Steven Grant). Even Eternals has two of the diverse main Eternals as white men and an additional white man in the form of Dane. White men as far as the eye can see. It’s just that they’re maybe only 25% of the movies, rather than 100%. And even that was only won by Feige going up against an old racist sexist lunatic Trumpist billionaire. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but this is actually pretty close to what diversity should look like: a pretty even mix of races and genders. (And LGBTQ representation is still piss-poor).
I mean, just the fact that “white genocide” people can dare to complain when it took 13 years for there to be an Asian main character in a Marvel series (and where the kung fu guy they had in the Netflix show was white – and yes I love Danny in the comics and he’s a great character, Finn Jones’ mixed performance aside) even given the size of China as a market is super telling.
And TF2’s lore is incredibly funny and interesting.
@Kimstu: Wow, I did not know that. How totally unsurprising.
@Masse: I too tended to identify with the person people weren’t paying attention to, though I tend toward the big galoot over the small one. I remember how playing Luke on the playground was actually sort of a weird choice.
And, yes, of course there’s mythology around properties that builds up… but even that mythology comes disproportionately from the dominance of white cis-het American middle-and-upper-class men. It’s what they see and remember that gets put into the mainsteam. But that doesn’t entitle them to fact-free temper tantrums based off of their imagined nostalgia, obviously.