A lot of the complaints about Kylo Ren as a villain is that he lacks Vader’s larger than life evil, he’s too common, too human to be evil. Traits that are used by his stans to argue why he will/must be redeemed.
I would like to point out that both camps, those who hate Kylo Ren for his humaness and those who use it for his defense, has missed the point JJ and Lawrence were trying to make.
When Christians think of Evil, not the smaller, everyday evil but the one that commits genocide and other atrocities they tend think of people like this:
Or if we stick to the Star Wars universe, this:
or this:
But from a Jewish standpoint neither Hitler, Vader or the Emperor is the true face of evil. Evil isn’t some epic, outside force, or some larger than life villain.
Complete ordinary looking people. People, men and women, born to good families and proper bloodlines (in the Aryan sense anyway), with good Christian raising, believing in good Christian values. Well mannered, well educated, usually erudite. And the direct committers of genocide.
To Jewish people there are no difference between Evil and evil, they are one and the same. A Jewish woman, Hannah Arendt, coined the phrase “the banality of evil” and I have yet to see a single goy use it properly, because this is what it means.
This is why JJ and Lawrence made the First Order an obvious, punch in the face parallel to the Nazis, in every single conceivable way that one can in a fantasy universe with no actual Germany. That is why they made Hux such on open and overt parallel to Hitler, and then went and made him a secondary, one note villain. Neither Hux nor Hitler symbolizes the true face of evil, or the banality of it.
Kylo Ren does.
Which is why Kylo looks like this:
He’s a young man, from a good family, with (from the First Order’s or at least Snoke’s pov) “proper” bloodline. And he’s evil. Not in the epic, over the top, Christian variety like Vader or the Emperor, but the kind of evil that oversaw Auschwitz and ordered and carried out the atrocities there.
No Kylo isn’t cool, or awesome, or epic in his evil, he’s human. But because people are either incapable or unwilling to follow the Jewish understanding of evil many take that humanity Kylo Ren as a sign of goodness and the guarantee of his redemption, instead of as the source of his evil.
So the people who say that Kylo Ren isn’t space Hitler as absolutely right, they just miss the point. He’s something much, much worse.
@captainamericagf Next time some fucker comes at you arguing that JJ writing Kylo as having good in him matters at all in how evil JJ views the character as, please feel free to throw this post at them. Hard.
Just remember, these are elected officials and our tax dollars are being used for this.
This is what its like serving people. People want straight answers to questions they fundamentally don’t understand. They don’t even understand the language you use. There is a very definite answer to what ‘wifi’ is, but a lot of oldies have their own understanding which is seperate from fact, but they believe to be fact. So when you try to explain it to them it gets to a point where they not only don’t understand it, but they don’t want to understand it.
These people here, its not that they don’t understand the tech at hand. Its that they simply don’t want to. And so they never will.
Part of attempts to ban all research that involves human fetal tissue, because the superstitious feelings of anti-choice fanatics over useless, garbage corpse flesh is apparently more important than any number of entire human lives.
listen, let’s not pretend like the people who think fetuses have souls are not the same people who feel like hiv/aids is a punishment sent down by god for people “choosing” to be gay, black, and/or foreign. OF COURSE they don’t care
So the Spoon Theory is a fundamental metaphor used often in the chronic pain/chronic illness communities to explain to non-spoonies why life is harder for them. It’s super useful and we use that all the time.
But it has a corollary.
You know the phrase, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done,” right?
Well, Fork Theory is that one has a Fork Limit, that is, you can probably cope okay with one fork stuck in you, maybe two or three, but at some point you will lose your shit if one more fork happens.
A fork could range from being hungry or having to pee to getting a new bill or a new diagnosis of illness. There are lots of different sizes of forks, and volume vs. quantity means that the fork limit is not absolute. I might be able to deal with 20 tiny little escargot fork annoyances, such as a hangnail or slightly suboptimal pants, but not even one “you poked my trigger on purpose because you think it’s fun to see me melt down” pitchfork.
This is super relevant for neurodivergent folk. Like, you might be able to deal with your feet being cold or a tag, but not both. Hubby describes the situation as “It may seem weird that I just get up and leave the conversation to go to the bathroom, but you just dumped a new financial burden on me and I already had to pee, and going to the bathroom is the fork I can get rid of the fastest.”
I like this and also I like the low key point that you may be able to cope with bigger forks by finding little ones you can remove quickly. A combination of time, focus, and reduction to small stressors that can allow you to focus on the larger stressor in a constructive way.
“The scene takes no more than five minutes of the movie, and the tension between colonial history and race only escalates from that point on. However, we as museum professionals need to talk about the inclusion of this scene, especially regarding its function in a film that was cut from nearly four hours long in its first iteration to a solid two, a film that so many young people will see and one that is poised to become a cultural touchstone. The museum is presented as an illegal mechanism of colonialism, and along with that, a space which does not even welcome those whose culture it displays.
And is there anything incorrect about that?
It is worth considering the aspects of the scene that are realities in the modern museum. African artifacts such as those shown in the film’s museum are likely taken from a home country under suspicious circumstances, such as notable artifacts in real-life Britain like the Benin bronzes which now reside at the British Museum. It is often the case that individuals will know their own culture as well as or better than a curator, but are not considered valuable contributors because they lack a degree. People of color are less represented in museum spaces, and often experience undue discrimination while entering gallery spaces. Finally, museums are experiencing an influx of white women filling staff roles, leading to homogenized viewpoints, and lack senior staff with diverse backgrounds. With these truths represented in such a short but poignant scene, the tension between audiences and institutions is played out to the extreme.”
About a year ago, I learned something sinister about museums that really fucked me up.
If you’ve ever spent time in a history/culture museum, you may have noticed that the rooms with Native or African artifacts tend to be very dimly lit compared to other parts of the museum. You probably thought (as I did) that it’s because the artifacts are old and light sensitive. Sometimes that’s the case. Lots of times, though, it’s not.
Museums often display *contemporary* African and Native artifacts in rooms with dim lighting because they’re trying to construct a mythology around these artifacts. The lighting subconciously suggests to us these are relics from the past, from “dead” cultures, even when they’re not.
Furniture and silverware from 1750s Europe? Bright lighting, placed on a lower museum floor that gets lots of foot traffic. Shields made by members of an African tribe in the *1930s*? Dim lighting, placed on a quiet upper level of the museum that feels like a mausoleum.
This is completely intentional. Museums play into our Western notions of whose culture is “alive” and whose is “dead.” They give us what they think we want to see. They’re also doing real political harm, because if they can convince us that African and Native cultures are relics of the past, that means we don’t have to think about what we’re doing to the (very much still alive) peoples that they represent.
I love museums, but shit like that’s gotta stop.
I’ve had two pretty eye-opening experiences in regard to museums: I read Chasing Aphrodite, which revealed the appalling amount of antiquities theft that’s still taking place, and I visited the National Museum of the American Indian, which provided the contrast that made me realize how I’d been trained to think of Native American cultures as dead.
I learned about Native cultures in school. I was fascinated and admiring, I read all kinds of books and went to museums; if you’d asked I’d say I loved and respected these beautiful people and their varied beliefs. But the way I was taught about Native Americans wasn’t the way I was taught about US history, or about Europeans. The curricula taught about Native cultures and beliefs the same way they taught about Sumerians and ancient Egyptians, and so I learned the implied lesson: Native cultures were past, they were gone, they were dead. None of the museums I went to challenged that, just as the writer above explains. (Moreover, nobody taught us kids about modern Native people, their sociopolitical issues, or their cultures- as far as we knew, Native people were quaint historical footnotes, and any of their descendants still alive had the same lives and concerns as us white suburbanites.)
When I first went to NMAI I was confused, because it felt different than I expected and I couldn’t figure out why. Eventually I realized it was because I went expecting a temple to sadly dead mythologies and ways of life, and what I saw instead was a cultural history lovingly curated and cared for by its inheritors, just as any other modern ethnicity or nationality remembers and teaches its history. I recognize it’s not exactly the same as say, remembering Italian-American history, because of the weight of the genocide committed against Native people, and the sometimes all-too-successful attempts to wipe out their cultures. But my point is that in NMAI, I learned that Native cultures are alive, and it made me realize just how badly wrong my thought process had been to that point.
I am certainly not an expert in museums or in anything related to NMAI, but I can’t help thinking that the difference is in large part because Native people are so deeply involved in creating the exhibits and maintaining the collections. The exhibits feature Native voices and commentary, and they talk about Native life and culture today, making it clear that these communities haven’t simply vanished into the past. Just another example of how critically important representation is- it may be that ALL museums that handle Native or African objects/art need to have staff of African or Native descent, or it may be that they simply need to consult and take advice from modern representatives of the culture in question. I’m sure this would lead to the usual cries of “political correctness run amok” that always arise from certain quarters; but really, it’s the idea that white people alone get to decide how best to select and display artifacts from other culture (cultures which still exist, and have plenty of living representatives) that’s exceptionally weird.
Anyway, if you’re within range of DC I’d suggest you check out NMAI to see what I mean, it’s a cool place. (Also their restaurant is completely rad, so there’s that.) (And if anyone else knows museums that provide good examples of curatorship of living cultures, I’d be interested to know about them.)
The National Museum of Natural History also has some contemporary exhibits, and discussion of repatriation attempts of some artifacts. The ocean hall has several smaller parts referencing how local tribes have helped in studying climate change and pollution’s effects on the oceans, and the Narwhal room is like 1/3 praising modern Inuit scientists (the other 2/3s being narwhals and climate change).
While not an exhibit, when I was in grad school for museum studies we had a really funny lesson involving repatriation attempts within a museum’s collection. The tribe wanted most of the stuff back, naturally, but the thing the museum had a big collection for that they didn’t want were baskets. Why? Outside of maybe studying a few for possibly-lost weaving techniques, to the tribe the baskets were disposable things you got rid of when they were past their lifetime. So it’s sort of like:
Curator: So you don’t want these baskets? We have hundreds.
Tribe Spokeswoman: No, they’re not really useful and will probably just fall apart within a month or so outside of storage.
Curator: Yes, that is a problem.
Tribe Spokeswoman: That’s why we don’t really try to preserve these long term. They’re just not made for it. But you’re a museum and have to?
Curator: It’s in our collection policy.
Tribe Spokeswoman: Well, good luck then.
Museums–we have to preserve our collections to the best of our ability for as long as absolutely possible, even when it’s ridiculous and ultimately futile to try. Seriously, some of those baskets are at “poke them and they’ll disintegrate” level. Some of the tribe’s weavers still stopped by storage sometimes to study them, but they wanted the stuff that wasn’t going to fall apart as they tried to take it home.
When my mother gets into facebook fights with her childhood friends who grew up to be racists, she passive-aggressively fucks with them by making a donation to a local refugee assistance organization in the name of their immigrant grandmothers, a donation large enough that they get a card from the organization saying so. She passive aggressively fucks with the same demographic of friends who #bluelivesmatter by commenting with details about the various petty crimes they committed together as teens, e.g. “Wow Joey, where was all the respect for blue lives when we hotboxed your uncle’s patrol car?”
And obviously both these approaches are specific to former juvenile delinquent turned UMC babyboomer but it feel still inspirational in that we can all find our own chaotic good pettiness niche.
My name is Tom Sketchit (you can also call me Tam or Tammy if you want,) and this is the mod blog for the blog Reapers of Equus (among a few others).
Warning: NSFW art may pop up.
(Genderfluid, male by default, good with any pronouns. Bisexual, female preference. 23 years old. Single, but not looking at the moment.)
