some man online: “arya’s a mary sue. rey’s a mary sue. i simply don’t believe a young girl could be that skilled.”
what they expect me to say: “well, no, actually, canon supports it, because if you look back as far as season three, she’s been training for–”
what i’m actually gonna say: “good. good. about fucking time. in the next movie i hope rey blows up a dreadnought with finger lightning that she learned earlier that day. i hope she rips palpatine’s spine out with her bare hands while everybody claps”
Neither of those are coherent reasons beyond whining “I want! I want! I want!”
Whoosh, their point really went over your head
the point of “I want it! I don’t care that it’s sloppily made! I want it, I want it, I want it!”?
white straight cis men: [getting to eat candy exclusively for like seventy years, just drowning in candy, candy, putting up billboards with pictures of candy]
anybody else: may i also please… have some candy
you, an intellectual: candy rots your teeth. what are you, some kind of fucking baby
how’s that in any way, shape or form related to wanting fiction to be well made, and not just a strawman made by you so that you can mock someone who dislikes sloppy writing and doesn’t mind bad ideas being criticized?
hey, if it’s asking questions time, here are some of mine:
what’s “sloppily made” or a “bad idea” about a trained girl assassin doing an assassination?
what’s “sloppily made” or a “bad idea” about a girl discovering she can use a quasi-magical force in a universe where quasi-magical forces exist?
what’s “sloppily made” or a “bad idea” about having a gay superhero in a story that takes place in a world where gay people exist?
what’s so hard to understand about my original post? is it not obvious that i’m making a joke? a joke about the way that gatekeepers expect us to be constantly proving the “quality” and “merits” of us getting any scraps of representation at all? when we should not have to fucking do that?
i’m tired of being forced to do fandom homework for gatekeepers. i shouldn’t have to write a dissertation on arya’s training with the faceless men to establish the validity of her actions to people who’ve been watching the fucking show all along but just have such misogyny-soaked brains that they can’t recognize the difference between “bad writing” and “my own shitty internal bias.” there is PLENTY of shitty writing on game of thrones: nearly all of it! but this was a logical plot development, and yet fandom still lost its collective shit, because skilled women are somehow the most fantastical element of a fucking ice zombie story.
that dude asking “well why should there be a gay avenger?” is a perfect example: he wants his homework done for him. he wants an essay in 12-point font with one-inch margins outlining Ten Solid Reasons for the inclusion of a gay avenger and their Relevance to the Plot, but i will tell you what he deserves, which is to be told to fuck off. there should be a fucking gay avenger because there are fucking gay people alive on earth and that is IT. we’re alive in the world, and so we deserve stories. stories about people like us. it’s that simple.
the point of my original post is that i am done politely providing footnoted essays on why there should be heroic lead characters that i identify with. “rey’s a mary sue” is not a statement that deserves to be refuted with evidence, it deserves to be fucking laughed at, and i was.
so i didn’t build a strawman for you: you carried one in here. feel free to escort it back out.
so i didn’t build a strawman for you: you carried one in here. feel free to escort it back out.
You're right. I wasn't thinking critically and had already made up my mind not to listen to you.
The more I thought about it the more I understood that holding minority representation to higher standards of subjective quality was unnecessary and childish in and of itself. If I wasn't personally impressed by the movie, I didn't have to watch it.
And I actually have no idea where I got the point that wanting something isn't enough reason to want it. It doesn't make any sense.
Furthermore, I see now that representation is uneven and it doesn't add up that this would be because white, straight, male representation just happens to always be better. It was my own internalized bias that led me to believe this without logical support.
And above all, my refusal to understand simple concepts doesn't place the onus on you to explain why you want something. It's on me to think about different perspectives. That's how we grow as people. Insisting on remaining stagnant stifles that intellectual growth.
I apologize for being dismissive of you. What I said was smug and had no basis in logical thought. Going forward I'll try to think more critically about the reasons for my opinions before I speak.
