#yeah like my feelings about star wars being heavily influenced by eastern and south asian culture gets me riled up

[katierosefun]

ahhh love your points about poc being seen as interchangeable!! might be shouting into the void w this one but my lil indian self has gotta talk about ahsoka real quick- growing up and having next to zero representation in the media i was consuming was so hard for me for ages. and i always thought of ahsoka as indian - besides her name literally being inspired by indian mythology, her skin tone and features were just SO south asian to me and i always thought of her that way. (1/2)

I was so happy to see her in live action played by a poc but a huge part of me was sad that that idea in my head was in a way decanonised and i was back to having not a single south asian piece of star wars representation (except like depa billaba who has 0 lines). idk but just her animation as a kid and adult were both SO south asian looking to me and i love rosario but its never not going to sting just a little bit that i cant see myself in ahsoka so much anymore :(( (2/2)

your feelings are 10000/10 valid! i totally relate to that feeling of disappointment when a character that you thought was someone who shared your identity is suddenly casted as someone who...is not. 

i guess with ahsoka there was some leeway in choosing who got to represent ahsoka because i think ashley eckstein was the one who was like “the beauty of ahsoka is that she is literally identifiable to anyone”, and i think that’s because in clone wars, where like,,,there wasn’t that same wall marking ahsoka as a certain race, it! was! really cool for lots of young girls--and young girls of color especially--to maybe see themselves in a character who they might headcanon as someone sharing their own ethnicity. 

that said, i also agree that i kinda thought? ahsoka was more south asian in my head too because of her name. (and oh boy, the topic of names and star wars is something that actually gets my blood boiling too, because some of the names that george lucas gives the characters/cities are literal places from south/east asian culture...the jedi outfits are heavily influenced by south/east asian culture...and like, yeah, the fact that we rarely see any south asian characters be an actual speaking character is kind of sad?) 

so  basically--your feelings are absolutely valid about the situation, and yeah, i agree that it sucks that you might not be able to see yourself the same way in ahsoka as you used to. (if it helps any, i feel like there’s a lot of people in fandom who are of the similar sentiment in rosario being the one to play ahsoka.) 

and, just in general, you’re right: there needs to be more south asian representation in star wars. i think it’s incredibly ridiculous that a lot of star wars depends so much or drew so much from south or east asian culture, and the fact that we don’t have any characters at all represent those cultures is a whole other level of cultural appropriation. (like, dude. if you’re gonna use different cultures to “world build”, then you might as well make them the main characters/significantly important secondary characters in your universe, you know?)