diversehighfantasy:
cyanwrites:
diversehighfantasy:
waluigitheanti:
cyanwrites:
pridekachu:
You know…
There’s a reason why the Star Wars fandom is suddenly shipping the female leads with the villains.
It’s because none of the men that are near them are white (with the exception of Luke in Rey’s case (and Han but he’s dead anyways)).
They insist on finding a white man to ship with them.
So they go to the villains.
Having a diverse cast means the overly racist fandom will be gross. This is not a coincidence. Star Wars never had a diverse cast before, so that issue never existed.
You can see this being a major thing in other fandoms too when the canon love interest is a poc, like with Jessigrave (even though the show REPEATEDLY calls that rape).
There’s a reason why the Star Wars fandom is suddenly shipping the female leads with the villains.
Suddenly? What is this “suddenly”? Nae, mate, you just don’t know your Star Wars history.
Boba Fett? Not white, very popular with the original trilogy fandom.
Jango Fett? Also not white, obviously.
Darth Maul? Portrayed by a white actor in TPM, but canonically Dathomirian Zabraks are heavily coded as PoC (Savage, Maul’s brother, literally grew up in a mud-hut village, was abducted from his home by a white person, had his bodily autonomy violated by white people, was enslaved by and made to fight for a succession of white people, and got called a ‘brute’ and an ‘animal’ by other white people. Maul himself canonically had his traditional tattoos fetishised by white women).
I haven’t seen any fics or fanart for Padmé/Palpatine or Padmé/Dooku, even though both of these male villains are white. The predominant het hero/villain ships from the PT are Padmé/Jango and Padmé/Maul. The predominant het hero/villain ship from the OT is Leia/Boba. The EU novels had several white hero female/PoC villain male pairings, including reformed!Asajj and Sith!Quinlan.
Literally none of these ships include a white villain.
Kylo/Rey is only the latest pairing in a long line of Star Wars hero/villain ships, not the first of a new trend caused by a lack of white heroes but part of a narrative tradition dating back not only to the original trilogy but to the earliest of recorded fiction several thousand years BCE. Heroes and villains have always been shipped together because gosh, it makes for interesting storytelling.
It just so happens that Kylo is the first white, generally appealing, shippable villain in Star Wars (all other white villains in Star Wars being 65+ years old or Darth Vader), and therefore, wow, he got hero/villain shipped. No surprise.
You can see this being a major thing in other fandoms too when the canon love interest is a poc.
Mate, the only almost-canon pairing in TFA was Poe/Finn. Finn was never Rey’s canon love interest. When he got cut down by Kylo, Rey left to find Luke; Poe stayed with Finn. Rey’s last words to Finn were literally, “thank you, my friend.”
Listen. Saying you don’t like the Reylo ship or hero/villain ships in general is fair; we all have our nOTPs and squicks. But saying the fandom is racist for enjoying a hero/villain ship is bollocks, especially after 40 years of the fandom consistent shipping ladies with PoC coded/cast villains.
(I’m the OP, this is my anti blog.)
You owe me $50 for commenting this on my post.
And it’ll be another $50 if you want me to reply back because wow so not worth it.
I’ll answer it for nothing, because I’m getting so tired of this kind of revisionism.
@cyanwrites, Boba Fett’s popularity going back to the ‘80s dropped off significantly when he was revealed to be not white in AotC. It’s a fact that can’t be credibly disputed (and trust me, I’ve heard every “it wasn’t racial” line of reasoning for the drop in popularity out there). He’s not especially popular with the fanfic-centered Prequel fandom, and the stats on FF.net (which was active during the prequels) and AO3 (which was not but is home to nearly 6,000 prequel fics) bear this out. 178 out of 30K+ prequel fics going back to 2002 have Boba listed as a character; there are 50 fics with Boba listed as a character on AO3.
Jango is even less popular in fanfic, with just 62 fics listing him (again, out of thirty thousand prequel fics), and 27 on AO3.
And since this discussion is about shipping, let’s have a look at AO3′s top pairings for the prequels:
Top ship, two white guy heroes. Second most popular, white het protags. Number of hero/villain ships in the top 10? 0.
Let’s weed out all but the ships listing Boba Fett as a character to see his shipping track record with the Prequel fandom:
Not much, even in his own tag.
And just for the hell of it, Let’s look at the OT ships:
Luke & Vader is gen, but hey there’s Boba/Vader with 54 fics, less than 1/10th of the top ships. Top ship, white het protags, followed by two white guy heroes.
The only pattern TFA has followed from The OT and PT are that the popular ships are all white.
FF.net doesn’t offer breakdowns like this, but the numbers make it clear that Boba is not and was not heavily shipped anywhere near the level of Kylo and Hux. Plus, I mean, I was there – people lost interest in Boba when his backstory was revealed.
“POC-coded” or not, Darth Maul was not wildly popular with shipping fandom either. He is listed in only 165 fics out of 34.9K fics in the whole SW universe on FF. There certainly is fetishy Maul fanfic out there, but Maul never had the huge fandom Kylo does. Didn’t happen.
Padme/Maul and Boba/Leia are ships, sure, but dominants one likes Reylo? Not even a little bit close, not in this universe.
Palpatine and Dooku weren’t shipped often, either, but both have well more fics than the Fetts or Maul.
Funny, though, since Rogue One, the previously unshippable Tarkin is getting action on AO3. I won’t even get into how Director Krennic, the only white guy in the early trailers, was the most shipped character of RO ahead of the movie.
Don’t have the time to write out a long reply right now, but I want to point out that AO3 and FF.net stats are useless for assessing the popularity of original or prequel trilogy characters, as well you should know if you’re as knowledgeable about the fandom as you claim to be.
AO3 opened for uploading in 2009, more than ten years after TPM; we can assume a significant percentage of fans had left the fandom in the meantime and never transferred their works. FF.net might be a better source since it’s older, but their purge of X-rated fics skews the numbers. Furthermore, it was only recently that FF.net changed their system for tagging characters; you say you found only 165 fics featuring Maul, but a quick search I just did showed more than 400 fics, and there are probably even more if you adjust your search parameters correctly.
The fact is that the vast majority of OT and PT fics were posted to various Geocities accounts and personal archives now lost to us, or printed in fanzines to which I also don’t have access. We can’t rely on AO3 and FF.net statistics as “proof” because the data is incomplete.
Also, jsyk, Boba Fett isn’t found in shippy fics from the PT fandom because he was 12 years old. I mean, seriously.
Furthermore, if we’re discussing Rogue One, it’s disingenuous to ignore the fact that Chirrut/Baze is by far the most popular ship to come out of that movie. Like, by a ridiculously huge margin. Even if Tarkin or Krennic are getting fics too, the fandom fell in love with Chirrut/Baze. There are also a lot of flower crowns on Bodhi Rook here on tumblr. And most people whose posts I see are ‘meh’ at best about Jyn’s character and Jyn-centric ships, especially canon Jyn/Cassian.
Talk about revisionism? Compile an unbiased dataset, then we’ll talk.
Like I said, I was there. That’s not considered evidence, I’ve found, but I can say that the ship stats – which are of course flawed as the be all and end all – align with what was popular on forums and fic archives at the time. APAs and fanzines are less useful unless there’s a wide cross section of them. I’m sure there are Leia/Boba APAs out there, but this is about what is most popular, not what exists.
10k Maul slash fics didn’t get deleted from FF.net. There is no way to come up with a result where Maul was as popular as Kylo even by a quarter.
You’re the one who said the Prequel fandom loves Boba Fett (because then he could be called a POC), when he’s hardly acknowledged by them and never was unless it was to complain about how the prequels ruined him. I’m not including even unreliable stats of fics written about OT Boba Fett, who has always been perceived as white by fandom, even after the prequels.
Chirrut/Baze is popular, but before handing out cookies, remember that Stormpilot was the most popular TFA ship until late January 2016 before fans lost interest and Reylo and Kylux took over. The top RO ship within a month or two will be a white ship. It’s the kind of thing you can set your watch to.