#maybe its all the power-scaling dudebros

[eatingahorse]

Why are there are more jjk fans being homo/transphobic this year compared to last like....what happened?

Haven't seen an itafushi video without a comment about how they're just friends. WE GET IT OMG🤦‍♀️

[kuwanxs]

Hellooo there was something abt your post that kinda got me thinking. The mha fandom has always been populated by mostly fem and general queer people, which is probably the reason why these toxic brodudes were SO pissed whenever anything queer looking would happen in the story, and why their reaction to 430 was so bitter and vindictive. They hate when they see the queers feeling like they have been catered to, and they hate having to be creative by themselves.

I watched a video by a yt named Shaun, abt a fake outrage that the same kind of brodudes instigated, but with the difference being that it was abt video games. He said something that seriously makes sense even in the context of mha and various other mangas.

"They don't want to be a part of diversity, they want to be superior to it. They don't want a game with the option to cater to them, they want to be the ones who the game solely caters to".

And to me, that is exactly what 431 is.

Now i'm gonna be honest, my opinion of Hori wasn't the greatest before, and after that it just became really sour. But i recognized his capabilities and his passion. So being as chariable as possible coming from me; i think he just got angry that he had to see people criticizing the previous ending in such a humiliating way. It wouldn't be surprising, since the the fuss they made wasn't just in one place, it was everywhere. Everyone was spreading misinformation to hell and back and even attacking him personally.

He tried his best to counter all of what they were saying, by making everything they wanted a possibility at the very last minute. But, as you know, the things they wanted were absolutely nothing but the bland, underdeveloped het ship becoming canon. And for that, everything had to be dumbed down, forgotten, or forced in a shoddy way. Now all the same ppl who were pissed are praising him for "fixing" his ending.

He'll probably try to do damage control if the backlash of now gets to him, by like, idk making family/romantic illustrations for Iz/och? Which to me personally will just mean that he really is that lazy or weak willed. But maybe he will just show cool illustrations and stay quiet.

I think you are sooooo right about dudebros wanting a piece of media to only be catered to them. Your quotation is also so on point.

The biggest problem with mha is that it’s debut, and the initial few years of its publication, it mainly garnered a very dudebro like fanbase. Even during the first half of 2020 when it blew up, it catered heavily to dudebros with fan service and power scaling. The issue is that eventually as the manga transcended to become something that was much more inclusive, it stopped catering to these guys.

I have always said this but a man’s biggest enemy is women and queer people. So when a fanbase garners a massive female and queer audience, it becomes a job for these guys to shame said consumers who actually heavily heavily contribute to the popularisation of said media. I’m not sure if you have seen the video of that woman on tiktok who went viral for crying over chapter 431 and how aggressive these “normal” guys were towards her. I believe infiltration of fandom spaces mainly happens when the author tries to cater to EVERY side of the audience, the dudebros, women, queer people. And it simply cannot work that way. This is something i have always critiqued on Hori’s part, that despite that sheer density and strength of his story, he becomes directionless when it comes to appealing to certain sides of the fandom. Which is why we get sm fan service, sm forced izcha crumbs, its Hori’s attempt at keeping both bkdks and izchs happy. And it simply does not work that way.

However, i truly truly thought his choice of ending 430 the way he did was groundbreakingly beautiful. It was the most amazing open ending we could’ve had. But his choice to publish 431, which, he too, seemed unwilling to, really undid 430 chapters of his hard work because not only did it fracture the narrative and corrupt the characters but it also dismantled everything he had built. In a way, it also very much ruined mha in multiple ways.

I hadn’t seen a relationship as beautiful as tgchk and bkdk in shounen before, it was so raw and jarring in so many ways. And as a bisexual woman, Toga’s conclusion felt very dear and personal to me. But sadly, the ending really left a hole in my heart. So when i see these dudebros violently trashing ships and calling them senseless I cannot help but feel super sad because in a way, after chapter 430 the number of these aggressive dudebros had significantly reduced maybe because they were forced to come in terms with the finale. But 431 really resurfaced them in the worst way possible.

[ariainstars]

TRoS Speculation: Maybe It Was Intentional…

All right, since the subject obviously doesn’t let me go, new speculation on my side. WARNING: this is a longer post.

 Ever since the 80es, Star Wars has become a universal phenomenon with millions of fans all over the world. And while fans often agree, they more often than not disagree about the characters, the themes, the different turn of events etc. Star Wars touches very many different kinds of people deep down due to the emotions it provokes. Many of us have grown up with the saga, some with one trilogy, others with another. Others have read the EU novels or watched the TV shows first. The saga’s themes are so many that they appeal to all kinds of people, and the approaches are varying. There are very many topics on which we will never make everybody agree. Being the foundation for many fan’s view of the world, the root to a lot of their ideals, the source of many a dream, the saga has become a hugely personal matter. No wonder viewers all over the world can quarrel about it so venomously and get downright aggressive if you only introduce a new line of thoughts. Many fans feel that the saga belongs to them and not to the man who created it and the creative studios who are now employing it to develop new stories.

We have made our mistakes in our fandom, too, in the years since The Force Awakens came out. We were so excited in what we believed was investing into a redemption arc, love story and happy ending, connecting all kinds of dots throughout the saga and analyzing it from almost every angle. Some of us simply thought that who didn’t think like us was stupid. But many other fans believe that this saga is only about Good against Evil and not about human feelings. They keep seeing it as some superhero story, a comforting world where to retire when reality got too much, a place where bad things happen but then the hero eventually comes to take care of it. They stick to their conviction that the good guy (or the one you root for even if he’s a villain) is the one who’s the coolest. Many of them love the OT above all and plainly refuse to see anything positive about the PT or ST because they always expected to see the New Adventures of Han, Luke and Leia. Some of them have waited for literally decades for the OT’s continuation. We, who also love the other trilogies (or at least the sequels) were at times disrespectful and arrogant looking down on them and believing that they simply don’t know what the saga actually is about. And all of us need heroes. We apply our own problems, needs and expectations to them and wait for them to fix the problem as an example for us. That’s also why we expect them to get their happy ending.

I have seen videos and read articles about how highly divisive The Last Jedi was. Some fans (a few of them even with tears in their eyes) openly declared that the saga was ruined for them. Similarly to us, who identify with Ben Solo and / or Rey, they had often found courage in the examples set by their heroes and it was offensive and hurtful to them to see Luke Skywalker reduced to a hermit who drinks green milk, rejects the ways of the Jedi and was personally responsible for his nephew’s fall into his abuser’s clutches. They were entitled to their feelings of disappointment and inner numbness as we are now. I know of people who actually survived many ugly periods in their lives finding solace in the saga. Some in one part of it, some in another. And we all got duped and let down, each by one chapter of the sequel trilogy, like some naughty, sadistic kid was kicking apart our favorite doll house a few days before Christmas.

I assume now that The Last Jedi was an experiment to gauge the audience’s reaction. It touched many a sensitive issue. My personal approach is that in order to like it, you don’t only have to be a fan of the sequel trilogy and its characters in general, or a hopeless romantic who wanted to see Rey and Ben Solo’s love story. You have to accept in the first place what the prequel trilogy painstakingly tried to explain to us (though it wasn’t actually said but more shown): that the Jedi were no heroes but got destroyed by their own hubris, and that Anakin Skywalker was largely a victim and not someone who became a villain because he enjoyed being evil, like the typical Batman or Superman villains. The prequels are not a fairy tale like the original trilogy but a cautionary tale following the lines of “society creates its own monsters.” It was only logical to deduce that if the Jedi were so perfect and the Old Republic so idyllic as Obi-Wan described them to Luke when they first met on Tatooine, Vader’s rise and the creation of the Empire couldn’t have happened in the first place. This was never said as clearly and concisely as by Luke to Rey during their second lesson on Ahch-To:

“Now that they’re extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But strip away the myth and look at their deeds: the legacy of the Jedi is failure, hypocrisy, hubris. At the height of their power they allowed Darth Sidious to rise, create the Empire and wipe them out. It was a Jedi who was responsible for the training and creation of Darth Vader.”

This is the message of the prequels in a few sentences, and a pivotal change to the “superhero approach” to the Jedi which might qualified if you only watch the OT and never question its themes on a larger scale. If you accept the Jedi’s failure for a fact, all of the rest falls into place - Vader being but a broken, sad old guy, Luke’s disillusion, his decision to give up the ways of the Jedi, his first lesson teaching Rey that the Force is not some kind of superpower, his forgiveness towards his nephew, the glimpses of goodness we saw foreshadowing Ben Solo’s redemption. The prequels also make much more sense this way than watching them expecting to see the Jedi being super-cool heroes and Anakin becoming Vader because he thought it might be fun.

But many fans chose not to see or accept what The Last Jedi actually was trying to say: that things couldn’t continue the way they did, because the Old Republic and the Jedi (though they didn’t actually have bad intentions) were deeply flawed. Leia tried to build another republic without any major changes that we are aware of, and Luke wanted to rebuild the Jedi Order without effectuating the considerable changes their Code would have needed. Both failed. It was e.g. never explained why Luke spirited his students away to a lonely planet for their training, but the fact that they were taken from their families when they were too small to make a choice and stick to it - Ben e.g. wanted to be a pilot like his father and not a Jedi - already shows the same pattern. Luke had not learned from the faults of his teachers until his exile. Logically, Episode IX ought to have continued these themes and showed the ST protagonist finding a new and better approach to the Force. Instead, what we got was another (in my opinion: redundant) Ultimate Battle of Good Against Evil, in other words some kind of superhero film which largely ignores the themes of its predecessor.

Any fan is entitled to his opinion. If someone hates the PT because it shows a stagnant society and the Jedi as highly flawed, because they didn’t get to see Darth Vader becoming over-the-top cool but were confronted, in Anakin, with a deeply compassionate person crushed by expectations he never could meet in the first place, if they judged him a whiny brat instead of an intelligent guy who clearly saw through the flaws of the society he was forced to live in and simply didn’t find the right words to express it: they’re entitled to it. Same goes for not feeling the tension between Rey and Kylo in the ST, for judging Kylo quickly (again) as a whiny brat instead of a complex, tormented character, for not appreciating new characters like Rose on account of not being Star-Wars-y enough. These feelings mostly stem from the fans’ long-standing wish to see an actual continuation of the original trilogy, not a new instalment where a new generation takes over and the old heroes are relegated to the background and, additionally, their characters and past decisions are openly criticized.

We may claim that fanbros are simply too stupid to understand what the saga is actually about. Well, maybe they are, or they are just too lazy to look at the bigger picture. But they have a right to that.  Of course, it doesn’t entitle them to harass the studios, directors, creative team or actors the way they were, mind you: what e.g. Kelly Marie Tran, Ahmed Best and Jake Lloyd had to endure was a disgrace. There are very many fans who disagree with the PT and ST without getting bitter or even vicious.

This doesn’t mean I have changed my mind. I still believe that the Jedi were everything but heroes, that Darth Vader is a tragic figure, that the main themes of the saga are family, hope and new beginnings and not “the coolest ones win, ka-boom, the end”; that what it means to say is that human feelings are in the end more important than power, even an enormous power like the one the Force can provide.

We who are angry and disappointed with TRoS now like to blame how it went that way due to the influence of angry white dudebros, misogyny, Calvinism, racism, the overall political situation, the Mouse only wanting to make money etc.

But we ought to consider that The Last Jedi, which was so deeply controversial, hit theatres only two years ago. Have mentalities, politics and social structures and Disney’s overall approached changed so considerably, in so short a time, to produce two so radically different approaches to the saga within the scope of two years?

Sorry, I can’t believe it. it doesn’t really make sense.

The Mandalorian is met with universal acclaim, no doubt partly due to the fact that it’s a standalone story without the huge dynastic weight the saga has on its shoulders. Being a TV show, it had more time to introduce characters and situations and develop them. And it worked out fine. It had all the Star Wars themes - a lot of action scenes, sure, but it was also about belonging, family, redemption, protectiveness, friendship. Meaning that the studios didn’t lose track or are too dumb to think up a good story.

The Rise of Skywalker seems to bring the saga to a closure, but it could also be a wholly new beginning; the beginning of what I was foreseeing and still believe was in the cards - a new galaxy with a new and better political order kept together by a common belief in the Force as a whole; a new Jedi order where Force-sensitive children are not torn away from their families but can choose whether they want to become Jedi or not; and where Jedi are not taught emotional detachment. This would mean balance at last, a balance from which everyone would benefit. I have no idea how Ben Solo could be revived but I still am certain that he would be an excellent father figure, the perfect foil to his grandfather; and that the best thing for Rey would be to take care of children who are lost and abandoned the way she once was. And with Rey being a Palpatine, there is an interesting ground from which to explore her character’s tendency to the Dark, mirroring Ben’s. The basic approaches for this kind of development were all there in The Last Jedi. But a project like that would be something completely different from the original saga, and it would take a lot of time. Maybe that’s why the studios dropped it in favor of appeasing the angry fanbros who didn’t receive The Last Jedi well at all.

Anyone has the right to think that the original trilogy is the one and only and that the rest is rubbish. But the heroes of that story had their friendship, their family, their adventures, their successes, their happy ending. Even the heroes of the prequel trilogy had their moments, including Anakin Skywalker. Our heroes didn’t. That’s why this ending is so bitter for us and so hard to stomach. Essentially, we were right - we knew that Ben and Rey belong together, that Ben would redeem himself and make peace with his family, that balance would come. What we didn’t get was our happy ending.

The Force Awakens was still more or less accepted, because despite the many new themes and choices it wasn’t subversive and controversial in its approach. The actual wasps’ nest was stirred with The Last Jedi. No argumentation could convince antis that it is actually a well-made film and that their personal approach on the saga is too narrow-minded to appreciate it. They wanted the same villains, the same settings and costumes, the same heroes (or at least rehashes). And they had a right to want that, exactly as we had the right to expect a better development and ending for our new heroes. The hardcore OT fans wanted and expected The New Adventures of Han, Luke and Leia kicking ass. Well, it seems The Rise of Skywalker took care of that, finally giving them what they wanted and ignoring or “correcting” the course of events from The Last Jedi.

So, that’s it now. The OT fanbros got “their” Star Wars. I hope they’re finally appeased. They can ignore anything that happens next. That the saga is finished does not mean that the Star Wars universe came to a standstill.

If fans of the original trilogy felt entitled to ask for The Last Jedi to be removed from canon, or at least to be “fixed” in some way, so can we. In case you didn’t see it yet, the petition is already there: https://www.change.org/p/lucasfilm-continue-ben-solo-s-story

Let’s tell the studios to keep TRoS the way they prefer, but that we wish to have our Star Wars now. Let us not steep down to the level of who made the lives of actors who played characters they disapproved of a living hell (see above) or say over and over “Star Wars is dead” when we don’t know what’s in store for the future. With the Star Wars universe, you always have to be patient. In the meantime, we can write and read fanfiction and other stories and purse our own lives, telling our own happy endings.

Happy New Year everyone. Feel free to reblog. 😊

  P.P.S. On a side note: Rey’s last scene shows her where Luke used to be, on Tatooine watching the suns set. The twin suns. In A New Hope, this was shortly before he met the other half of his soul who had been separated from him right after birth - his twin sister. Considering that it was explicitly said that Rey and Ben Solo share the same soul, it might be a hint about the future. I’m not trying to make false promises or to fuel wrong expectations here. Just sayin’. 😉

[ancient-day]

Str8 dudes prefer Ad*chi bc they think his misogyny is funny ("bitches and whores", and a Goroboy drew Akc saying that), a man taking out his shit on women is a power fantasy. I've seen them say its cool to like Akc now, but only bc he can be seen as pure evil. I saw one say to someone's Akc tweet that sympathetic antags are boring, evil villains are better. So even if Akc is not that way, ppl want him to be and its the "cooler option" cont.

It's like, you're allowed to like villains only if they're evil, and you can like happy endings only for characters who don't have any "real" flaws. There would be nothing wrong with Akc being happy, but for characters like him it's easier to want them to be evil and edgy and I'm just so tired of fandoms being this way. People just can't comprehend a character like him healing at all, or that a character can get better without becoming too soft.

You’re absolutely right. I get it, not every villain needs to be sympathetic, but not all attempts at writing a sympathetic antagonist or villain are bad! Especially when said characters are young and were taken advantage of by people more powerful than them. Characters like Ad*chi and the adult Palace rulers chose to be that way; a character like Goro was taken advantage of and lived a lonely, miserable life for eighteen years. Like damn y’all don’t have to like him, but have a heart. I really don’t get how you can play the game and despise him and then still say you think the game is brilliant because Goro’s character represents so many of its themes that loathing him entirely seems like it would take away from the overall enjoyment of the game imo, but I guess I just can’t relate, and maybe that’s all it is.

But yeah, that actually reminds me of another thing I noticed when I see his former haters talk about him now. Dudebros only think Goro’s cool now because of 3rd semester, and they see him as a “badass” and “insane,” and that’s what makes him “cool,” and it frustrates me because it’s once again so transparent that they only like him when he’s shutting off his emotions because we can’t have emotional or vulnerable male characters, nope! And it’s completely ignoring the signs that he is still dealing with those emotions, but he has to put up walls because he knows he’s going to die and also he doesn’t feel worthy of anyone’s actual friendship. He’s not evil and edgy now; he’s just finally allowed to drop his customer service smile and drop his cartoonishly evil facade (which I feel like we need to constantly remind people that the way he spoke with Shido was also an act, but that’s another conversation), so really he just sounds like an exhausted dude who survived death and is now given a whole new thing to stress about and just wants to be over and done with it all already.

Not to just simplify it, but honestly. He’s justice. He’s the scales. He’s a gemini. He’s the duality of man. He’s allowed to be complex, and he’s allowed to heal in a way that makes sense for him without leaning so heavily on too soft or too harsh.