#we’re getting discoursey up in this bitch.

[headspace-hotel]

since I guess I’m talking about Star Wars now, calling the Empire in the Star Wars sequel trilogy “fascist” has always bothered me in a way that’s it’s very difficult to express, but has something to do with how...fucking abysmal the portrayal of the empire is in terms of like...being anything more than a vague, hollow aesthetic.

I mean yeah, “fascist-coded” might apply to them, but that term feels useless for anything except winning internet arguments. What they are is “bad guy coded.” There’s no substance. We largely don’t see the qualities that would make the Empire fascist. We get close, a little bit, with Finn’s backstory, but then that gets thrown out the window. “Speeches with lots of yelling” and “flag color schemes” aren’t what fascism is.

Like, here’s the obvious thing: if you are content to rely on how a regime is ~portrayed~ to decide if it’s fascist or not, you sure as hell are not going to notice fascism in real life because you’ll be waiting for your country to adopt a more evil-looking color scheme. I mean, if we’re going to take it seriously, this is not a good way to evaluate evilness.

“Kylo Ren is a bad character because he’s a fascist” is a take, but consider: “Kylo Ren is a bad character because he isn’t a fascist.” There is no substantial ideology or intent behind his actions, he’s just angry and likes power. The Empire doesn’t appear to have a culture, let alone an idea of their culture being superior. The fight against the Empire has nothing anti-fascist about it. As handled in the sequel trilogy, it’s just irritatingly shallow. It absolutely could have been better. The seeds absolutely were there! But Rise of Skywalker was too occupied no-homoing Finn and Poe to remember to complete their character arcs.

Yes, destroying an entire solar system is ABSOLUTELY genocide, but the film spent like, 40 seconds on this, because the role of Starkiller Base is to be another round thing in the sky to blow up while starfighters go pew pew pew. The annihilation of billions of people and untold amounts of culture is an afterthought. It’s also boiled down to a single person pressing a button instead of a massive project overseen and operated by countless people, and its impact seems totally forgotten about once the heroes blow the thing up.

I mean sure, this is true of the original Death Star, but Starkiller Base is “the same plot point, but worse.” The original Death Star took almost two decades to complete, for one thing. There was at least some recognition of how meaningful it was to create something with the purpose of annihilating planets. It was still shallow but it was something. In The Force Awakens there’s nothing, there is no weight to it at all. It’s not handled at all in terms of the destruction of cultures, of entire people groups, just as a Bigger Bad. Everything is just there to mirror the plot of the OT enough to make the fans happy (which is impossible, but I digress). That entire part of the story is executed in a way that just sucks unbelievable amounts of ass.

I guess my take is that if we’re arguing about whether Kylo Ren should be redeemed because he’s a “fascist,”—that is, if we want to take this stuff seriously at all—we should talk about how terrible a job these films did with portraying fascism. You can’t even say that Disney was *attempting* to portray fascism because let’s be real, I doubt Disney has an interest in meaningful social commentary with its cash cow franchise.

The argument we’re essentially having about the sequels is “If you imagine what these movies would be like if the villains had any meaningful, socially applicable ideology or motivation, they would probably be fascist because the people that gave them a vaguely “Nazi-like” aesthetic would, in this universe, have done that for a reason other than to tell us that these are supposed to be the bad guys.” At some point the execution of an idea in a story has to be so fucking bad that it’s overly flattering to the story to discuss it so much.