50 years into the future, time has not been kind to Jack. Aku has destroyed all of the time portals, thwarting the journey to travel back in time and stop him. Now, Jack is immortal (as a side effect of the time travel), but broken and lost. Aku, similarly, has everything he could ever want and is equally miserable. It’s a dark vision, not just in terms of the world, but in the personal despair.
more.
Right now, The Princess Diarist is the #1 book on Amazon.com. And it’s sold out.
Looking at Carrie Fisher’s other books that feature her in her Leia persona on the cover, namely Wishful Drinking and Shockaholic – I am struck by the fact that she always portrayed herself as Episode IV Leia. (Both are out of stock right now, too). Obviously, she wasn’t a fan of Slave Leia, but General Leia didn’t seem to be as iconic in her own mind.
In a recent Facebook convo about Leia’s image, a female friend of mine expressed that she thought General Leia in Ep VII finally redeemed Leia from the “degraded mess” the character had become in Return of the Jedi, presumably because of that bikini. Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post writes a pretty comprehensive defense of Leia on that score. I largely agree that focusing on what Leia was wearing misses the point – Leia was kidnapped by a space slug, forced to wear something obscene, and then killed him with her bare hands in revenge. The bikini was a literal symbol of how women are oppressed, and it’s her resistance and revenge over the victimization by Jabba, not the actual victimization itself, that define Leia. Fisher herself colored outside the feminist lines – she once joked about not remembering who she slept with to land the Leia role, but hoped it was Lucas himself! That’s not exactly a female-positive sense of humor. Likewise, what Leia wore in one scene of one movie shouldn’t really degrade the character or define it. Leia was complicated, reflecting how Fisher was complicated.
A (female) friend of mine loved Rogue One, but noted an imbalance in the Force:
Wept tears of joy. And not to nitpick the film’s clear feminist intentions, but couldn’t at least a handful of the nameless cannon-fodder strike force be women?
The ramblings that follow began as a long-winded reply, but grew so unwieldy and disorganized that I decided it fit better here 🙂 Spoilers may follow. (more…)
Spoilers, of course. (more…)
The first episode is up!
Let’s see how this Dirk compares to the Dirk from the BBC radio scripts.
As this essay at MoviePilot.com puts it, having a Muslim crew member aboard is fulfilling Gene Roddenberry’s mission:
There are many people facing discrimination in the current fraught social climate, and positive representation in the media can go a long way to helping ease these tensions. There’s no denying that Islamophobia has risen in recent years. Without delving into a political discussion of the specifics, suffice it to say that introducing a Muslim character to Star Trek might be the most revolutionary thing that Discovery could do — and this would be the best way to parallel Chekov’s role in The Original Series.
… including a Muslim character in Discovery would go a long way to fulfilling Roddenberry’s aim of easing social tensions between different human cultures and peoples. Admittedly, to do so the Discovery writers would have to flout another one of Roddenberry’s beliefs, but there’s already ample evidence for religion existing within the Federation.
Personally, I would love to see a woman sporting a hijab on the bridge of the Discovery — and not just because it would be neat to see how the scarf is incorporated into the uniform. If the Discovery writers do want to combat Islamophobia with representation, the character in question must be a practicing Muslim, as this isn’t just a racial prejudice, but one against the religion and culture.
I have two reasons for why I dislike this idea. First, I don’t like the analogy of Islam being the modern era’s Soviet Union. I don’t like talking politics here so I won’t belabor this, it’s a topic for City of Brass. Second, I think that social engineering on this sort works better with ethnicity than religion. Pavel Chekov was not a Soviet Russian. He was simply Russian, ethnically, in a way that was unambiguously obvious (ie, his accent). Worf was as Klingon as you could get – an explicit racial presence, also obvious. For Roddenberry’s strategy of de-Otherizing to work in the context of Islam, a similarly obvious approach needs to be taken.
I think including an explicit Muslim would be jarring since tehre is no other “real world” religion represented in Star Trek, at least for the Human society. It was Roddenberry’s world and he chose to eliminate religion from it. Adding a character who is explicitly Muslim complicates canon and introduces tension that undermines Star Trek’s appeal to all of humanity. Then you also need canon explanations for the status of Jews, Christians, Hindus, etc. This mess is exactly why religion was introduced to DS9 using the alien Bajoran society rather than picking one from our own.
The solution is to recognize that Islamophobia is not an intellectual reaction to a religion’s precepts, but rooted in racial and ethnic fears. Having a stand-in on the crew for a “Muslim-y” ethnic type would be great because that way when someone sees a Muslim on the street, they should be able to counter their knee-jerk stereotype by relating that person to this crewmember. Therefore, the ethnic choice of the actor is relevant to maximize that stereotype-defeating analogy. Which ethnicity works best for this purpose?
Arabs seem an obvious choice, because of the long ethnic association with Islam, but are not as visually distinguishable as Muslim due to high in-group diversity. A better choice would be bearded, brown-skinned, and male, ideally played by a Indian or Pakistani actor. But not Faran Tahir, who looks so badass in real-life that he isn’t connectable as a Muslim stereotype. I think Muslim American women are on the receiving end of more Islamophobia than men are, but for a different reason, and one that isn’t as addressable by casting in this way.
Overall, a bearded brown dude on the bridge would be a great nod to Roddenberry’s Bridge tradition, and avoid needless complication of the Trek universe’s canon or real-world appeal.
via File770, Star Wars: Celebration just dropped the trailer for Season 3 of Rebels. Big reveals: the Darksaber is back and more Mandalorian lore, Grand Admiral Thrawn returns to canon, and Ezra slips ever closer to the Dark Side. The trailer is amazing:
Everyone is going to flip out over Thrawn, which is cool (though extremely muddles the Empire’s command structure). But the bigger clue is Ezra. In many ways, Ezra is Luke (and the same age, notably) – being trained ad-hoc, growing in strength, and convinced he is immune to the Dark Side’s corruption. We saw Luke flirt with the Dark Side’s power throughout the original trilogy and in ROTJ Luke dresses more like a Sith than a Jedi. There’s an entire theory that Luke actually went full Dark Side.
TFA basically refuted that, but there’s no denying Luke was walking the line between Light and Dark the entire time. He is a Skywalker, his grandfather is the Force, so I guess he had some plot protection in that respect. However, Ezra does not have that lineage. And the path that Ezra is walking is very similar to Luke’s – seeking more power, embracing the Sith holocron, not for its own sake but to protect his friends and family, and justifying the dalliance with the Dark Side on that basis.
My prediction: Ezra fails to walk the line as Luke does, and ultimately becomes Snoke.
Ezra’s dark side master is clearly Maul, which is appropriate because Vader is Maul’s replacement as Palpatine’s apprentice. As a result, Kylo Ren is the heir to Palpatine’s teaching via both Maul and Vader.
Since Maul went off the reservation, that would explain how Snoke has taught Kylo Force abilities we haven’t seen yet, like mindrape and forcefreeze. We can even speculate that Ezra’s final act to turn fully towards the Dark may be killing Ahsoka.
Obviously I’m not the only one to have speculated along these lines before, but the trailer for Rebels S3 makes it much more plausible, especially the Luke/Ezra parallels. But Ezra is no Skywalker.
(warning – spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens)
A quick thought about Kylo Ren and the Knights of Ren, who we do see during Rey’s sabre-vision.
All we know of why Luke went AWOL was that one of his apprentices (Ren) “destroyed everything” that Luke had tried to build. It’s never stated explicitly that Ren went all Anakin on the younglings. In fact it seems given Ren’s angst about killing Han and the Light, that he’s never crossed the line so dramatically. This is underscored by Snoke who explicitly tells him, “you are the Master of the Knights of Ren, but even you have never faced such a challenge.” (paraphrasing)
What if instead of killing Luke’s jedi in training, Ren corrupted them? Using some of that charisma and leadership skill he inherited from mom and dad, it’s plausible that he took over the Knights of Ren and lured them to the dark side. Such a betrayal of Luke’s goals would be arguably worse than just killing them. In a real sense, that truly is “destroying everything Luke worked for”…
… from a certain point of view.
