Month: April 2016

For years Star Wars has had a bunch of female fans. It has a huge female fanbase, as it does a male fanbase, obviously. And there is no reason that this world would not, and should not be populated by more women and by more people of color. And this movie is showing us that “No, no, no, they’ve always been there.”. Now, you can go back and say, you know, the original trilogies just happened to focus on these three white people that were kind of related, but like, they’ve always been there. And I think it’s fantastic.

There’s already been an outcry about how this movie has another female lead. It’s ridiculous because the critics of it, I think they’re dudes and they’re white dudes, in terms of the thing about people of color now being in the movie, that it’s essentially, somebody else is playing with your toys and you’re upset. You think that if there are other faces, then it’s not for you anymore. But it’s been for everybody this entire time. I always get the argument of like “Wait, can’t women and people of color relate to someone who doesn’t look like them?” and I go right back to you, “Can’t you?”. Of course you can. Of course you can relate to a good story, if it happens to be a woman, if it happens to be a person of color, if it happens to be Forest Whitaker, Diego Luna – great actors. You can’t use that argument. And I think that these characters look super intriguing, no matter what they happen to look like. They look badass and they look really cool. And you know, there’s no better revenge to those types of critics who want Star Wars to stay a certain way, than to just be like “No look, we’re gonna get movies that have all different kinds of people, and aliens and spaceships.”.

And if you have the attitude of like “Well, it’s pandering”, my question to you is, do you think the original Star Wars are pandering to white males, and only white males, and therefore you should be just as offended, because it’s not inclusive? If you’re trying to argue that this isn’t inclusive – the reason that these movies and new movies going forward are focusing on that, that Hollywood ‘has’ to do that, it’s because they’re trying to better represent the world. Here’s the thing. Here’s white dudes in every movie ever [holding one hand high up], and here’s everybody else [holding other hand much lower down], and what this movie did is just that [raising lowest hand a tiny fraction]. In five years from now it will be maybe here, twenty years from now we’ll be maybe here [raising hand gradually until it matches], and eventually everything will be even-stevens and everybody will be happy all the time. But that hasn’t happened yet, so unless you now go back and boycott the original trilogy because it just starred white people, and you are just as upset by that if you are upset by something like this, then you need to ask – I think people who are upset by those reasons need to ask themselves other questions.