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anghraineAn anon on Tumblr asked:
What are your thoughts on the situation where shippers are accused of being racist for not shipping Rey and Finn? Personally I'd ship Finn with both Poe and Rey and I'd be happy if either was canon. But how can it be racist to ship a mixed race same same couple? That doesn't even make any sense. Either couple would be groundbreaking and both are clearly healthy ships between friends. What's to hate about either of them? Is this just another symptom of a crazy ship war? Or something more?
My response:
Just another symptom, though of something bigger than any one fandom.
On the face of it, TFA fandom is almost unutterably bizarre. It’s not just wanky, it’s wanky to the point of outright denying reality. But if you operate on the assumption that fandom SJ arguments are largely self-serving justifications for personal preference, everything begins to make sense. It’s the natural, if tragic, culmination of the purer-than-thou shipping/stanning that’s come to dominate fandom discourse.
I’ve seen people arguing that Rey/Finn = cishets getting their cooties on everything. I’ve seen people arguing that Poe isn’t really a man of colour because he’s light-skinned (with completely irrelevant asides about SOME LATINOS ARE WHITE, OK), and somehow Finn/a ~white passing~ Latino man is less progressive than Finn/a white Anglo woman. I’ve seen people arguing that the popularity of Poe/Finn is clear evidence of fandom misogyny, and people arguing that Rey/Finn is driven primarily by Finn’s feelings whereas Rey’s are platonic, so actually it’s evidence of fandom misogyny.
Etc.
The thing is, over the last few years, a lot of perfectly typical fandom wars over characters and ships have constantly gotten reframed in SJ terms. It’s not that there were not serious, serious problems in fandom wrt SJ issues (there were, and are). Nevertheless most fandom firestorms are driven by different people liking and disliking different things. People always need to justify the thing they like as Most Canon or Most Intelligent or Most Righteous–the specifics vary, but it comes down to “why can’t other people see that mine is the true path?”
And of course fandoms are rarely balanced, with everything liked and disliked in equal measure. Some characters and some ships end up much more popular than others. Sometimes their fans get defensive, and justify their popularity with some SJ thing. Sometimes fans of other things are sure that the popularity of a thing they don’t like must have some dark significance, which only escalates the already-existing antagonism.
(Read “sometimes” as “constantly.”)
So at this point, fans are used to justifying the righteousness of their own positions and the heresy of all others by reaching into a SJ grab bag. In many cases, they don’t even have to reach–they just plug in the justifications they’ve used in the same essential arguments before.
People treating Poe/Finn with the same righteous contempt that they have treated every other bromance slash juggernaut and making absurd leaps to count it as any-two-white-guys, then, isn’t incomprehensible. For the vast majority, it was never about combating racism. It was about not liking bromance slash and appropriating the language of anti-racism to justify their resentment of its popularity. The Poe/Finn fans going on screeds about Finn/Rey being the same generic straight couple that’s everywhere and so much less progressive than their ship, while blithely ignoring how groundbreaking it would be in a SW film? Same thing–they’re trotting out the usual arguments they’d use to justify themselves against het shippers, an appropriation of the language of anti-homophobia, rather than responding to any particulars. It’s part and parcel of the same thing as the unending Reylo wank. There were eight fics in the Reylo tag when the twelve-word anti-Reylo trollfic (now the most kudos-ed fic in the fandom) was posted. It wasn’t in response to Reylo’s popularity, it was a slam at the existence of unrighteous ships.
A lot of people have insisted that fandom wouldn’t go for the tropes they do if they weren’t written for white men, or straight couples, or whatever. But a lot of others have pointed out that fans are consistently drawn to those tropes even in the rare cases when they aren’t confined to the usual defaults. In that view, juggernaut ships are almost always generated by a small number of very popular tropes, and their fans will generally go after those tropes in any widely-liked source, regardless of the particulars.
TFA was nothing if not trope-y. And fandom with perfect predictability glommed onto the tropes that fandom always gloms onto: the bromance between two attractive young men, the mysterious tension between the shining hero and angsty villain, mutual hatred between rivals that seems suspiciously excessive, the sweet, natural friendship with strong hints of romance.
But also with perfect predictability, fans justified themselves with the same “the slash juggernaut is more popular than my het ship because racism” and “het shippers are whining bc they’re not the center of everything for once” and “HOW COULD PEOPLE CARE ABOUT THE SUFFERING OF A VILLAIN? THINK OF THE CHILDREN.” With plenty of “if character were [hand-picked marginalization], fans wouldn’t like the thing that fans persistently like.” And since TFA is just progressive enough that most of the arguments don’t even apply, and the rest ignore blatantly obvious confounding factors, it’s become very clear how self-serving the rhetoric really is.
What are your thoughts on the situation where shippers are accused of being racist for not shipping Rey and Finn? Personally I'd ship Finn with both Poe and Rey and I'd be happy if either was canon. But how can it be racist to ship a mixed race same same couple? That doesn't even make any sense. Either couple would be groundbreaking and both are clearly healthy ships between friends. What's to hate about either of them? Is this just another symptom of a crazy ship war? Or something more?
My response:
Just another symptom, though of something bigger than any one fandom.
On the face of it, TFA fandom is almost unutterably bizarre. It’s not just wanky, it’s wanky to the point of outright denying reality. But if you operate on the assumption that fandom SJ arguments are largely self-serving justifications for personal preference, everything begins to make sense. It’s the natural, if tragic, culmination of the purer-than-thou shipping/stanning that’s come to dominate fandom discourse.
I’ve seen people arguing that Rey/Finn = cishets getting their cooties on everything. I’ve seen people arguing that Poe isn’t really a man of colour because he’s light-skinned (with completely irrelevant asides about SOME LATINOS ARE WHITE, OK), and somehow Finn/a ~white passing~ Latino man is less progressive than Finn/a white Anglo woman. I’ve seen people arguing that the popularity of Poe/Finn is clear evidence of fandom misogyny, and people arguing that Rey/Finn is driven primarily by Finn’s feelings whereas Rey’s are platonic, so actually it’s evidence of fandom misogyny.
Etc.
The thing is, over the last few years, a lot of perfectly typical fandom wars over characters and ships have constantly gotten reframed in SJ terms. It’s not that there were not serious, serious problems in fandom wrt SJ issues (there were, and are). Nevertheless most fandom firestorms are driven by different people liking and disliking different things. People always need to justify the thing they like as Most Canon or Most Intelligent or Most Righteous–the specifics vary, but it comes down to “why can’t other people see that mine is the true path?”
And of course fandoms are rarely balanced, with everything liked and disliked in equal measure. Some characters and some ships end up much more popular than others. Sometimes their fans get defensive, and justify their popularity with some SJ thing. Sometimes fans of other things are sure that the popularity of a thing they don’t like must have some dark significance, which only escalates the already-existing antagonism.
(Read “sometimes” as “constantly.”)
So at this point, fans are used to justifying the righteousness of their own positions and the heresy of all others by reaching into a SJ grab bag. In many cases, they don’t even have to reach–they just plug in the justifications they’ve used in the same essential arguments before.
People treating Poe/Finn with the same righteous contempt that they have treated every other bromance slash juggernaut and making absurd leaps to count it as any-two-white-guys, then, isn’t incomprehensible. For the vast majority, it was never about combating racism. It was about not liking bromance slash and appropriating the language of anti-racism to justify their resentment of its popularity. The Poe/Finn fans going on screeds about Finn/Rey being the same generic straight couple that’s everywhere and so much less progressive than their ship, while blithely ignoring how groundbreaking it would be in a SW film? Same thing–they’re trotting out the usual arguments they’d use to justify themselves against het shippers, an appropriation of the language of anti-homophobia, rather than responding to any particulars. It’s part and parcel of the same thing as the unending Reylo wank. There were eight fics in the Reylo tag when the twelve-word anti-Reylo trollfic (now the most kudos-ed fic in the fandom) was posted. It wasn’t in response to Reylo’s popularity, it was a slam at the existence of unrighteous ships.
A lot of people have insisted that fandom wouldn’t go for the tropes they do if they weren’t written for white men, or straight couples, or whatever. But a lot of others have pointed out that fans are consistently drawn to those tropes even in the rare cases when they aren’t confined to the usual defaults. In that view, juggernaut ships are almost always generated by a small number of very popular tropes, and their fans will generally go after those tropes in any widely-liked source, regardless of the particulars.
TFA was nothing if not trope-y. And fandom with perfect predictability glommed onto the tropes that fandom always gloms onto: the bromance between two attractive young men, the mysterious tension between the shining hero and angsty villain, mutual hatred between rivals that seems suspiciously excessive, the sweet, natural friendship with strong hints of romance.
But also with perfect predictability, fans justified themselves with the same “the slash juggernaut is more popular than my het ship because racism” and “het shippers are whining bc they’re not the center of everything for once” and “HOW COULD PEOPLE CARE ABOUT THE SUFFERING OF A VILLAIN? THINK OF THE CHILDREN.” With plenty of “if character were [hand-picked marginalization], fans wouldn’t like the thing that fans persistently like.” And since TFA is just progressive enough that most of the arguments don’t even apply, and the rest ignore blatantly obvious confounding factors, it’s become very clear how self-serving the rhetoric really is.
