Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

Serious question: why does it piss you off?

 

I started ETE because I smelled the reboot, and a huge new generation of fans, coming, and I wanted to show that the EU generation could be positive and reasonable about it. This does the opposite. New fans who don't have as granular an understanding of the different communities as we do are turned off of getting into the EU because it reminds them of stuff like this, and worse, it makes them warier of interacting with self-proclaimed EU fans. I see it all the time.

 

This question may be a little naive, as I am not too active on social media and thus I'm not very familiar with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. policies, but is it possible to ask for a ban on these Facebook groups and Tweeter users? They obviously encourage harasment and even participate in it themselves, so we may have a legitimate chance to ask for them getting shut down.

 

double post

 

I don't do social media at all and never have, so I too have wondered why they tolerate someone bragging about harassing others until they quit the site.

I mean, I troll the Jedi Council Forums all the time, but I'm not dumb enough to brag about it.

 

come on, don't insult my intelligence
you are literally keeping a diversity score where a movie gets a better score the less white males there are in it, it's not as subtle as you think it is

 

On FB and Twitter you can report specific posts for containing/promoting hate speech, violence, harassment, etc but whether to outright close down a community or individual's account is up to the site staff. In the case of FB, even if they did shut down this particular group (and a lot of people have been reporting them), the users could start another one fairly easily--indeed, that kind of thing has been happening all along, which is probably how you get from the really huge BBL groups a couple years back down to small, utterly insane ones like this.

 

And real-life, present-day Nazis....

Yes, you can report these types of posts/groups for inciting hate-speech or advocating violence. However, of late Twitter/FB/reddit don't seem to really care and leave these things up.

 

He doesn't have to insult your intelligence. You're proving quite capable of doing it all by yourself.

In case you need it spelled out for you, just because Coop's rough mathematical tool would register a "perfect score" in the purely hypothetical case of a work possessing no heterosexual white human males, no one, including Coop, claims (or thinks) that achieving a "perfect score" is desirable. And such a hypothetical work will remain hypothetical; I can't imagine there ever being a major Star Wars story with no white male humans in it. And even if there were one such work, that still wouldn't be "no white men ever," because the Star Wars franchise is bigger than any one work within it.

 

Responding to some of the above - social media, in general, does a terrible job of not only moderating this type of user behavior but providing adequate safeguards to communities to keep it out. Over the last 3.5 years of moderating the DR social media pages, I can't tell you how many times I've banned users for the type of toxic, abusive/harassing behavior, only to have them create new user profiles and simply return. In a few instances, I've banned the same people upwards of 4 or 5 times. And there is nothing else that can be done about it. (If you're wondering how I could know this, over time you get very familiar with certain individual speaking and writing patterns and in other cases, they flat out announce that they are returned from exile like some would be conquering hero.)

And as someone mentioned, overall social media sites are just flat out awful at moderation and do not take action nearly as frequently or even close to as frequently as you would hope they would for toxic accounts/entities.

 

Maybe of interest: Navajo Star Wars
from https://daledriven.deviantart.com/

Spoiler

¨

 

Just wanted to say as someone who's less enthusiastic than a lot of you about most of Legends, to those here who love it... friends, in NO WAY do I attribute that kind of nastiness to any of y'all. Different tastes in Star Wars is no big deal, and that... stuff... has NOTHING to do with anything that SW ever was, OT PT ST EU Legends New EU coloring books, Presto-Magix or Jar Jar Pez dispenser. If these folks are trying to equate their "philosophy" with Legends (which got more progressive and inclusionary earlier than the films had a chance to)... they're not fooling anyone.

That garbage has nothing to do with Star Wars at all -- those so called "fans" are tools of a larger and hideously toxic movement, and moreover, absolute morons. The notion that Disney or indeed any corporate entity at ALL will change its course of action *towards* being more racist and exclusionary, especially based on what amount to terror tactics, is flat-out insane.

Much love to all.

 

It's not the group. It's a troll that's constantly been against the group and doing stupid **** and then claiming their affiliation. Main rumors are a guy that got kicked out and went nuts or someone outside that's actively smearing the group.

 

It's...a diversity score. It measures diversity.

 

Fewer.

 

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/h...118898?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

TOXIC FANDOM IS KILLING STAR WARS

Fandom has always been an us versus them proposition. In the early days, it was because you loved something that the world at large found silly, be it comic books or Doctor Who. It was you and those who felt like you, against everyone else. Star Wars redefined fandom because it built a bigger tent than had ever existed before. Suddenly, the "everyone else" also loved Star Wars. Your mom knew what The Force was. Mark Hamill was on The Tonight Show. There was Yoda underwear. It was the first real “fan” thing that exploded into a phenomenon. But fandom always needs a “them.”

Star Wars is in an interesting place right now. The most recent film, Solo: A Star Wars Story, has been drastically underperforming at the box office. After two weeks in release, it had pulled in a mere $271 million worldwide. Analysts believe Disney will lose $50 million or more on the film, and Solo comes on the heels of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which — despite making $1.3 billion worldwide — proved itself an incredibly divisive film. While critics loved it (judging by the 91 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes), fans were split.

Some loved the bold liberties of writer-director Rian Johnson. They understood that there was room under that big tent for characters like Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) and Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran), women placed alongside Carrie Fisher’s Leia and Ridley’s Rey at the center of the Star Wars drama.

But others hated it. Hated everything it stood for. Hated what they saw as a social justice warrior remix of the Star Wars they grew up with. And they hated Tran’s Rose most of all because they decided that she was the avatar for all that was wrong with the franchise. Those fans — a minority but a loud one — found their “them” in the very thing they used to love.

Those who chose this particular vein of the Dark Side, emboldened by the faceless intoxication of the internet, went hard on Tran. Racist invective, misogyny, rape and death threats all hurled at her constantly, unrelentingly, transforming what had been a Cinderella story — The Last Jedi was Tran’s first major film — into a modern-day nightmare. On June 4, she all but quit social media, stripping everything from her Instagram save for a profile picture and a bio that says “Afraid, but still doing it anyway.”

(It shouldn’t go unnoticed that when this stripe of fan decides they don’t like a new take on an old favorite, they level their hate on the woman of color. Leslie Jones bore the brunt of the backlash to the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters and the racist, sexually violent tweets she got also caused her to withdraw from social media to find her balance.)

All of this raises the question: What exactly do Star Wars fans want? For so long, all they were asking for was more. It was 16 years between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, and then 10 years between Revenge of the Sith and The Force Awakens. Just getting Star Wars on the big screen was enough … at first. But then fans wheeled on the prequels: too much Jar Jar, too convoluted. (The vitriol was strong enough to chase Lucas away from directing and perhaps from Star Wars altogether.)

When J.J. Abrams signed on for The Force Awakens and built his narrative around a young woman with The Force and her black friend, it triggered the anti-SJW brigades. (Never mind it also gave them Han Solo, Chewbacca, Leia and a pair of familiar droids.) The #BoycottEpisodeVII hashtag spread, targeting Ridley and John Boyega, though it probably had more headlines than effect, as the film topped $2 billion worldwide.

But if The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi were too progressive for some fans, why didn’t they comfort themselves in the warm blanket of Solo, co-written by Star Wars standard-bearer Lawrence Kasdan and directed by Lucas’ Willow collaborator Ron Howard? It should’ve been everything they wanted in the prequels they didn’t get, without the “too many ladies and people of color” issues they claimed hurt the new films. But judging by the gross, they didn’t want Solo either.

What is Star Wars fandom against? Turns out, the answer: itself. Or, rather, the realization that Star Wars is and always has been for children, and they aren’t children any more. Star Wars fans — I count myself among them — look to the original trilogy as an anchor of youth. They want anything Star Wars to make them feel the way they did when they saw “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …” roll across the screen 40 years ago.

No diehard fan wants to imagine himself as old Luke Skywalker, hiding on an island from everything new, anything that might shake his steadfast belief in how the world is supposed to be. But if you saw the original Star Wars in the theater, that’s who you are, unless you find a way to open yourself to heroes designed to hook a new generation while still resonating with yours. Those who haven’t are lashing out at everything that reminds them that they’re no longer young Luke, staring off into the horizon of a future still dawning, like twin suns.

They are forgetting the very things that spoke to them about Star Wars in the first place — and the warnings of a little green puppet about the perils of anger.

Marc Bernardin is a former THR editor and a comic book and television writer whose credits include Hulu's upcoming Castle Rock. He also co-hosts the Fatman on Batman podcast with Kevin Smith.

 

It's a pretty good explanation of the current sourness in the fandom to the uninitiated, who might have seen enough of this stuff to wonder what the hell is up with this fandom.

We are all painfully aware that there's more to it, but that does a fair job of painting it in broad strokes for the "GA" -- sad as it is.

 

I have to say, I have to criticize the way that article seems to be taking as fact that the scumbag fans are actually in any way contributing to Solo underperforming at the box office. Literally everything I've heard on the topic of why it did so - and I don't limit myself to people I even necessarily respect, here - has boiled down to "general audiences don't feel a need to go to 2 SW films in six months (especially when one's not seen as 'essential' in the first place)". Let's not try and make these people seem more powerful or representative than they are.

 

I'm not the one defining diversity as the absence of white males

 

...

Neither is he?

We will never reach a place where big budget blockbuster movies completely remove white males. So, a formula that adds points for more minority or female characters works fine within that context.

You're pretty much the only one not grasping that concept.

 

But maybe they shouldn't though.

 

FWIW if I had to pick an "ideal" diversity score (while recognizing that different stories will have different expectations)--it'd probably be 85-90. From that you could extrapolate that white humans overall are around 25% of SW characters, which frankly feels like more than enough.