Article written by Samuel Burnett.
Trigger Warning: This article deals with the topic of toxic fandom and online abuse. Be Warned.
This past year has seen some of the most high-profile examples of toxic fandom, the most notable when racist and sexist Star Wars fans drove actress Kelly Marie Tran from social media.
Her crime? Being a woman of colour in Star Wars.
Now, I know that someone reading this is about to think, “I don’t care about her race or ethnicity, I just didn’t like the character she played.” To that, I respond:
Shut up. Seriously, shut the hell up. Do not open your mouth, do not open your browser. In fact, do not communicate to anyone in any way. You are an idiot and your opinions mean nothing to anyone.
Because if you think that your dislike of a fictional character gives you leave to abuse a real, living woman, then you are simply a terrible person.
I would use stronger language, but I am aware that children read these articles.
Over the past year, Tran has had her gender, her weight, and her worth as a person mocked and dissected for the twisted amusement of so-called “fans.” And she is not the only example of this taking place in the Star Wars franchise.
Before Andy Serikis wowed audiences with his motion capture performance as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, Ahmed Best pioneered the technology in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. However, unlike Gollum, his character, the bumbling Jar-Jar Binks, was not well received. Rather than concede that this was simply a character they did not like and move on with their lives, “fans” decided to punish him, ridiculing him and sending him hate mail, including death threats. As revealed only a week ago, this nearly drove him to suicide.
In 1999, ten-year-old Jake Lloyd achieved the dreams of many by landing the role of Anakin Skywalker in the first Star Wars prequel. The backlash and bullying from “fans” was so strong that it drove him from acting and lead to him destroying his memorabilia, as well as a psychiatric breakdown. Keep in mind, he was ten when he did this role.
Hayden Christensen, playing the same role at a later stage in the character’s life, was also ridiculed to the point that he left mainstream acting behind and took up farming.
The point is, these are actual human beings. Whatever you think of their characters or performances is, quite frankly, irrelevant. You are allowed to dislike a movie, you are allowed to dislike the way a character was presented, but when you graffiti someone’s wiki page with racist comments, don’t pretend that this is just about film criticism.
This brings us to a second major aspect of toxic fandom: the Mary Sue. A Mary Sue is a character who is supposedly perfect. All the other characters love them and they can never do any wrong. This is a label almost exclusively assigned to female characters, as you will rarely get this label aimed at characters like Batman and James Bond, men who routinely achieve feats that are literally impossible.
While this label gets thrown around in many fandoms, I will be focussing on its use in regards to Star Wars characters, as it has brought recent prominence to the term.
This description has lately been thrown around at Rey, the (what a shock) female protagonist of the new Star Wars films. Many “fans” have accused her of being a Mary Sue as she has been seen to fly spaceships, use the Force without training, and apparently never make a mistake.
Once again, my desire for the use of stronger language is held back by the possibility of children reading this.
As criticisms are so unbelievably stupid, they are incredibly easy to break down in steps:
1. In The Force Awakens, after she and Finn escape from stormtroopers in the Millennium Falcon, Rey excitedly says that she has been practicing in the simulator. Also, male character, Luke Skywalker, blew up the Death Star despite his only previously established vehicle experience being piloting a T-16 sky hopper (which he crashed) and a land speeder, neither vehicle capable of leaving the planet. Somehow, he manages to escape, being labelled a Gary Sue.
2. On multiple occasions, Rey subconsciously uses the Force, which enhances her reflex and intuition. During the film’s climax, she telekinetically pulls a lightsabre out of the snow and into her hand, despite a lack of training. First of all, it has long been established that Force uses can subconsciously tap into their powers without formal training. When destroying the Death Star, Luke Skywalker actually switches off his targeting computer and fires the killing shot, essentially blind as he trusts in the Force. And yes, he had received no formal training. As for the lifting the lightsabre moment, (once again) Luke had done the same thing under the same circumstances. When about to be eaten by a wampa, while hanging upside down, Luke summons the weapon embedded in the snow into his hand, and he fights off his adversary. Even more egregiously, the Force had not yet been established as something that gave its users telekinesis, so he essentially pulled a brand-new power out of nowhere. Once again, the label of Mary Sue failed to be thrown at him.
3. Finally, anyone who says that Rey is perfect and makes no mistakes has clearly not been watching these films as she makes several. The worst being that she is convinced she can redeem the masked villain Kylo Ren and bring him back to the good side despite no training. She fails miserably and actually leaves him in a better position than when she found him. Say it with me now, Luke Skywalker makes the exact same mistake. In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke rushes off to confront the masked villain Darth Vader, leaving before he has completed his training. He too fails miserably.
The point is that these criticisms could easily be thrown at male characters in the same franchise, but they rarely are as that would mean that criticisms were not inherently misogynistic.
Toxic fandoms need to die. They are killing what ought to be something that should be bringing us together, not ripping us apart.
That’s what politics are for.
Comments