Darthvoxpo - Refugee From The Great Twitter War

“You clap for us now.”

— Britain’s immigrants and children of immigrants who are key workers 

Credit: created by Sachini Imbuldeniya

Just finished listening to Guards! Guards! again and the scene with the Watch asking for compensation really hit me this time around. Vetinari does his big speech about the absolute evil and darkness in humanity and then Fred Colon and Nobby Nobbs, who we know are not heroes, are not particularly nice people, are not, in short, “good” and they ask for barely any money and a new kettle and a dartboard and they worry that they’re asking for too much.

And Vimes just laughs and laughs at all the upper crust diplomats and Vetinari who can’t understand it. Can’t understand ten dollars a month raise. Can’t understand a kettle. Can’t understand a dart board.

I forgot how much I loved these books.

For the love of…

Look. Let’s address the obvious first off: Fandom has problems with women. We all know this. We also know that “has problems” is putting matters rather mildly.

That is a fine premise. Plenty to go on from there.

What is NOT a fine follow up is defending the idea that “fandom hates women” by pointing to the reaction to R*ylow. Because that entire ship? That is a dumpster fire in its own right even before getting to the whole dust up where, because of him making a harmless joke about sex, specifically his character in Star Wars and Rey, another fictional character in Star Wars, having sex, there’s a movement within that group to discredit and tear down John Boyega. 

Like, we’ll get to that business in a bit. But let’s address the fact that the majority of R*ylows are shipping CHARACTERS THAT ARE NOT SHOWN. 

The whole business of this ship is to use Rey to “redeem” “Ben Solo,” a character who metaphorically killed himself in TFA through the literal killing of his father. The two meetings of Rey and Kylo Ren in TFA were first him rendering her unconscious and kidnapping her, and then her attempting to kill him for his murder of Han Solo and attack of Finn - killing her mentor and attacking her friend.

But those who ship this transplant the characteristics that defined Finn onto Kylo Ren, who they refer to as Ben Solo, a name he rejects until about the last hour of the most recent movie. They make him into a tortured character who is tragically torn between the light and the dark, has not made a decision on where he stands and needs to be pulled back. EXCEPT Kylo Ren was introduced ordering the slaughter of an innocent village - a slaughter that Finn refused to participate in. 

All of this is, let’s not mince words, based off the fact that Kylo Ren is a white man and Finn is a black man. Because we saw, back before TFA released, a heaping TON of abuse hurled towards him purely for BEING a black man - I remember vividly all the anti-blackness going around when we had no more than a trailer for the sequel trilogy. 

I am not - let me repeat this NOT - shaming anyone, male, woman, enby, whatever you identify as, for wanting the narrative of “saving the monster.” As a queer person, yeah, I get that, considering that a lot of my narratives growing up that I can identify with have all kinds of queercoding throughout them, even when involving straight pairings. But the defining difference has always been that in those stories, the monster wanted to be accepted as a person. TFA gave us a monster who chose to be monstrous.

And TLJ only added into this narrative - Rey refused to join Kylo. ONCE AGAIN, he spurned her offers of coming back to the light, choosing to take the leadership of the First Order. We also saw in flashback that he chose to respond to Luke briefly flirting with the idea of killing him by BURNING THE ACADEMY TO THE GROUND. Whatever you want to say about Luke’s moment of weakness, that is definitely overreacting, that is taking out your pain on innocent others.

TRoS even brings this to a conclusion, a similar one to the redemption of Anakin Skywalker, being unable to live in the world that he saved, that no act he could do could balance the scales to allow him to be a part of that world, considering the deaths and pain at his hands in specific.

So that - THAT - is who Kylo Ren was on screen.

The R*ylow version of him, however, is some scared teenager/young adult, who has been ignored, emotionally neglected by his parents, nearly murdered by his uncle, and drowning in the darkness, in need of a rope.

The canon version of him, to sum up, is a roughly thirty-ish adult man, raised by loving parents who had a galaxy to rebuild and couldn’t devote every second to him, his uncle had a moment of weakness where he pointed a weapon at who he perceived as a threat (I can give this, or I would, had Kylo stayed and even TRIED to get answers, but the indications are that he ran and proceeded to destroy the academy), and at every turn gave in to the darkness until his mother gives her life to drag him back to the light side.

I don’t care what your fantasy is, what bothers me is the ignoring and VERY HIGHLY SELECTIVE reinterpreting of the on screen material to justify this idea of Kylo Ren being a broken and abused bird in need of kindness. Because on screen, he spurns all the kindness he gets until Leia sacrifices herself. And THAT I only accept because of the filming limitations of Carrie Fisher’s last content.

And then we return to the issue of this backlash to John Boyega’s tweets. All of this is because he made a joke about sex, implicitly his character and Rey - the character that R*ylows have designated “belongs” to Kylo - having sex. And this has led to him being harassed (and not for the first time, because TFA did seem to be building to something between Rey and Finn), and by these same people.

We led with “fandom has problems with women.” This? This is “fandom hates black people.” And “fandom REALLY hates interracial couples.”

Like, take a stroll through AO3. How often do you see interracial M/F couples in the top of the listing of pairings? About the only serious example I can come up with off the top of my head is Sleepy Hollow and Ichabod/Abbie, which ended up never being canon. Because of the white showrunners and producers getting cold feet about it and deciding to repeatedly throw white women at Ichabod while continually sidelining Abbie until her actress finally decided to leave - given that she hadn’t even been invited to be part of the special features for the season two DVDs, and the fact that she’d already gotten reduced to the sidekick on a show where she should have been the lead.

Or even on a show where a non-white man is the lead - let’s look at Teen Wolf for another fine example. The show’s lead was a Latino teenager. The favored fandom pairing involves two white guys who, the initial episodes featuring them interacting showed, didn’t particularly care for one another. This led to the fandom turning that dynamic into “they secretly want to fuck,” and, as we see with Finn and Kylo, transplanted characterization and dynamics onto the other characters to prop up their ship.

I repeat myself above. I am not judging fantasy. Hell, I’m not even against writing alternate universe variations where the good guys are bad guys and vice versa. The problem I am seeing here, the reason that I cannot abide R*ylow, the reason that I see that specifically as a toxic fandom element, is because it actively diminishes the black man involved in matters - MANY fics will either downplay or completely trash Finn’s canon character in the name of making him the villain who Kylo must defeat to claim Rey.

These people claim to love “Kylo and Rey,” but frequently they are treating her as his redemptive sexy lamp, her purpose is to be his reward for reaching the bar that is basic human decency, having no interest in her beyond her being there to reward him for finally rejecting the darkness, when she has no canonical romantic interest in Kylo and only knows Ben as an idea. Even when the canon has her trying to reach to him, she is NOT doing it because of her intense love - love is not a switch, it is not some snap decision. It comes about because of knowing a person. Lust is instant. Attraction is instant. Love? That requires time. The ideal of Ben as a person could be attractive. But Kylo is not who Rey is or would be attracted to. 

All of this is still secondary to the fact that, because of an actor making a joke about his character and another character - a character who repeatedly has an inherently far kinder dynamic with his - having sex, there is a group of this fandom who has decided that this was an attack on them, and they must respond in kind. 

Whether or not you agree with ANY of what I have said of the interactions of Kylo and Rey, PLEASE tell me that you agree that THAT behavior is unacceptable. And THAT is the group that people are referring to when they speak so derisively about R*ylows. 

Because that is the group that speaks loudest. They’re who come to mind when the topic turns to this ship. You may not be part of it, but guilt by association comes into effect, because this group is hostile to anyone who doesn’t implicitly agree with them. And when you get this hostility from what comes across - whether it’s fact or perception - as a massive wing of total strangers, strangers who decide that, because you disagree with them, you are The Enemy, and you must be destroyed… Yeah, your reflex becomes “That group is trash, do not listen to them, do not engage with them, and god, aren’t they pathetic for devoting themselves to this ridiculous thing of made up characters.”

You want to go after the issue here? Root out the bad behavior that is the cause. Not the symptom. The symptom might be hating on women. But the cause is still the racism that started all of this.

You want to talk about how fandom hates women? Fine. Go right ahead. But don’t use a topic that came about because of racism to do it.

The more I think about it the more I realise that no ancient civilization would be at all interested in taming dragons.

Dragons are carnivores, so they’re really inefficient and costly to feed. They’re solitary, so its really frigging hard to form any kind of relationship with them. They’re darn right dangerous, so why risk your life taming one when there’s loads of llamas in the world. And worst of all their life spans are insanely long; if you had an opportunity to breed one, you wouldn’t live long enough to see the fruit of your labour mature, so you wouldn’t even bother.

when people say kylo ren (as ben solo i guess) was representation for those who have been abused and manipulated as children, and that’s why he shouldn’t have died bc it showed that people who faced abuse can’t have happy endings, i feel sorry for them. like truly, i’m sorry that you feel like your only representation for someone who was abused as a child is the white fascist who spent years murdering innocent people while being unable to sympathize with finn, who was abused, manipulated, brainwashed and did have a happy ending.

tldr: kylo ren is not the abused child representation that you think he is, not when finn exists

A sudden, terrifying thought

When you see an animal with its eyes set to the front, like wolves, or humans, that’s usually a predator animal.

If you see an animal with its eyes set farther back, though—to the side—that animal is prey.

Now look at this dragon.

See those eyes?

They’re to the SIDE.

This raises an interesting—and terrifying—question.

What in the name of Lovecraft led evolution to consider DRAGONS…

As PREY?

Please make a post about the story of the RMS Carpathia, because it's something that's almost beyond belief and more people should know about it.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a respondibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.