cf Theresa May over here.
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I would go to those services!
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I totally expect that when I die, that’s how the creator will look to me in the afterlife.
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Fucking hell. It seems all my safety tools are failing, here and elsewhere. Is this a new type of pain, or is Waterfox unable to block the old types?
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Marja, I’m sorry. Can you elaborate? Which tools are failing?
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Some of my animation-blockers. I’ve kept QuickJava up, but gifs are getting through here and on other sites. Some kind of rotating pain/animation hit me yesterday on one of Wanderfound’s links. I’d assumed it was a new format which could breech existing protections. Strobing hit me on another site.
I have a nasty migraine and want to relax without getting hit with more migraines.
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Putting this here, but it touches on topics suitable to many of our threads.
A long read, but a good one.
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Spoilers ahead
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Roughly twenty years ago, a friend and I were sitting on his yacht (I know, I know…but I am not one of the 1%.) looking across the water to the Statue of Liberty*. Then suddenly he turned to me and said “Do you know, we may be the first generation in the history of the world where it really makes no difference if you have sons or daughters?”
I think Jack was being massively overoptimistic, but he had a point. His daughters and mine are all in professions which until very recently were 100% male. The history of the 20th century is full of the tinkling of glass ceilings. But, like the death of God, the news hasn’t reached very far yet.
*Which was what had sparked the train of thought.
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The thing about Rey is she talks with a distinctly fancy-pants aristocratic accent.
It’s pretty strange. They must have told the actor to do that for a reason, but it really doesn’t fit with the character’s background at all.
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Setting aside the wingnuts for a moment, I could see that easily overlooked like water to fish. Besides the classical Star Wars-Lord of the Rings-type epics I’m not sure how many movies build enough of a separate world to portray this, but cartoons regularly do, so let me consider a few of those.
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Right now Pixar has Coco, which without spoiling more than a few minutes, is about a boy from a shoe-making family but instead yearns to be a musician, something he gets from his great-great-grandfather.
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The rest of Disney, where of course princess is its own thing, has Moana about a chief’s daughter who struggles to be who she should – she yearns to be an explorer, as we discover her ancestors were.
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I don’t know about the most recent Dreamworks, but their two main franchises have been Kung Fu Panda and How to Train your Dragon, about a noodle-making panda who yearns to do kung fu and a dragon-killing Viking who realizes they can coexist instead. In the sequels it turns out both have absent parents who are all about those.
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Sony made Emoji Movie, where I guess the main character has trouble being accepted as a malfunction, but then it turns out his father was too and it ends up ok? I have not talked to anyone who has seen this or heard they should.
In context these are innocuous to even beautiful findings. But when you see something again and again it usually matters, and while I might be accidentally cherrypicking, this seems like that to me. Not necessarily aristocracy, but whenever someone is different or special, it’s not just them but their ancestry.
Steeped in that, an idea like someone being daughter-of-nobody-important seems radical, even though it really shouldn’t be unusual at all.
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Interesting analysis. Gives a lot to think about.
What I’ve noticed, after a lifetime of being part of and an avid consumer of many different forms of artistic expression, is that creative people on average seem to have difficult childhood/family experiences that they are working through via the creative process. Many even acknowledge that they are creating something to help others work through similar difficulties in their own lives. Losing one or both parents early in life is a major instigator. Who am I, when I don’t even know who I’m from? And so these themes keep replaying in every genre.
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What stands out here is even if Rey’s parents are nobodies, there’s a general lack of telling stories of family relationships forged despite discordant desires or experiences. Either one’s family is entirely discarded or else shared characteristics end up being discovered.
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This idea (of significant heredity) is so engrained in our culture that it’s not going anywhere soon. Look at the Bible, where a lot of the plot is about explaining the lineage of X. Jesus has to be traced back to King David (the incongruousness of tracing him back to a vicious, womanising near-psychopath being skated over). Aristocracies are entirely based on the idea that you have status through ancestry. In the Gilgamesh epic, Enkidu is created without ancestry to humble the pride of Gilgamesh - but still has to be created by a goddess, which is a kind of trump card.
Of course, the British aristocracy survives by getting outsiders in to ensure the gene pool doesn’t go completely Rees-Mogg, but they are usually attractive women.
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A million times, this.
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That was one reason some people thought she might be a Kenobi. In the older movies, a British accent usually means a character is associated with the Empire, or in Obi-wan’s case at least, the Old Republic. Even Leia affected a crisp, clipped mid-Atlantic accent when addressing Tarkin. Strange that they had John Boyega Americanize his accent but not Daisy Ridley.
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Ah, the patriarchy up to its old tricks (not the OP, what she describes in the thread):
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