“I’m Luke S-Skywalker. I am going to take care of you.”
Ughh I can’t express how much this fic "How the Blooms Yearn” by @thewriterowl is wrecking my heart in just the best way. Seriously couldn’t get this scene out of my head, I felt it for days after. So here is my humble attempt at showing it.
Work in progress shot. One of those “I’m artistically stuck, just gonna doodle that turns into a monster” type of drawings. I’m not fond of it right now, so hoping finishing it will help.
I think one of the things that always gets me in particular is how often “dark” writers say they’re just trying to “explore the topic / themes” whenever theyre criticized for writing absolutely vile things.
And I always want to know what the hell that’s supposed to mean in the context of these fics.
I DO think some dark topics can be explored in a reasonable manor, I obviously know someone who writes a murder mystery novel is not condoning murder. But the way you engage with a topic matters. Yes you can write a murder mystery, but if you exclusively write only graphic, detailed murder scenes and literally nothing else BUT the murder scenes themselves, I’m absolutely going to assume something is just deeply fucking wrong with you.
And I feel like that’s exactly how some of y'all approach this shit.
(tw for the rest of this post for discussing themes of sexual assault, racism, fetishization, abuse)
If you claim to be exploring sexual assault as a dark topic, to understand the themes of it and explore an understanding of it and the mental impact of it – but then exclusively only write violent, graphic sexual assault scenes and literally nothing else, I’m going to assume something is just deeply wrong with you.
You are not “exploring” a topic by writing a graphically disturbing oneshot. You just have a kink for writing noncon and abuse that you’re trying to pass off any responsibility for, and excusing it in the most pretentious way imagineable.
Ihave seen fics address the mental toll of sexual assault, and seen them do it respectfully, without showing graphic detail. Again I’m not against the exploration of these things. But when you’re writing 60k words of intense brutalization and that’s just… it. That’s the entire story. And then you write it again. And again. And again–
What exploration are you doing? What themes are you analyzing? What message are you attempting to send? If this truly is an exploration, you have an end goal to it, yes? What would be the point to it all if there wasn’t?
So besides you just… having a completely obvious kink for Din mentally, physically, and sexually abusing the shit out of Luke for no discernable reason other than you think its hot, go ahead and tell me what the purpose of your literary exploration was.
Go ahead and tell me what, in your analysis of the available canon media, led you to these character decisions. Go ahead and explain to me why you would assume these characters would perform these acts and why. Give me your whole reasoning. Give me examples. Cite your sources.
Oh it’s an AU? It doesn’t follow canon? So as someone with even more control over this universe now, explain to me what led you to these decisions as an author. Why you picked these specific characters for these specific scenarios. Do you even have a solid reason? If this truly is just a harmless fictional exploration of a fictional universe, why do you always seem to draw on and enforce such real-world prejudices?
(This is all rhetorical I don’t want to hear your shitty fucking explanations, but I’m encouraging you guys to ask this shit of yourselves. Be cognizant of your decisions and their implications.)
If the grand majority of your writing is based around Latino and Māori men brutalizing, assaulting, torturing, and abusing other characters, you are not fucking “exploring dark themes” in any way. You’re just fucking racist, and completely unaware of the way in which you fetishize characters. Stop making excuses for yourself.
Stop hiding under the guise of being some dark visionary for the Star Wars writing scene. You’re not ‘pushing boundaries.’ You’re just reinforcing harmful stereotypes for the sake of an irresponsibly handled kink.
I do not fucking trust people that grab at dark topics with both hands and claim it’s fine because they’re not condoning it, or they’re just exploring it. I don’t care what you think you’re doing. If your first thought upon consuming new media is about how much you’d like to write the characters grahically sexually assaulting each other and post it on the internet to share, you need to fucking seek help, not praise.
Anyways I’m so incredibly tired of my trauma being used as a casual kink for shitty racist people. 'Dark’ fic writers go choke challenge✌️
it is my strongly held belief that we could’ve slowed the hemorrhaging of people from the dinluke sandbox if we’d gotten louder and meaner at the grosser and more toxic corners much sooner. the “live and let live” philosophy (don’t like, don’t read; ymmv; ykinmk) doesn’t work if it allows racist tropes, harmful fetishism, gendered stereotypes, and other toxic trends to flourishand define the sandbox. the inability to exercise basic courtesy and tact especially in more public and easily accessible fandom spaces has done so much seemingly irreversible damage to a ship I love, and it really does make me question my continued association with it.
I hope the Mandalorian season 3 starts with a closeup of Luke meditating on a hillside when suddenly in the background you hear a :
“You wanna tell me why the fuck my baby showed up in the middle of an active war zone on tattooine unattended Skywalker?” It’s Grogu and Din. Both have their arms crossed.
If anyone can strike the fear of god into Luke Skywalker’s heart I think it’s papa bear Din Djarin.
There’s a lot going on and like… while I don’t particularly enjoy “feminised” Luke interpretations (which is to say they are exactly the opposite of what I like, they feel ooc), some of the language going around feels very, very nasty towards gender non-conforming men and amab people. There is nothing inherently wrong with gender non-conformity and we should all know this by now. Even if that interpretation displeases you, it’s not right to veer hard into the opposite direction. I imagine some men and amab individuals who choose to present in a more feminine manner might be quite hurt by this discourse, especially if they choose to project this presentation onto their favourite character. We’re all guilty of blorboism, otherwise we wouldn’t be in fandom.
It seems to me that these tropes people dislike are genuine flanderisations of the character traits Luke and Din do present in canon. Luke has always been an anomaly in fiction as a male hero who does carry a lot of traits traditionally ascribed to female characters (kindness, redemption of the enemy through love), and this kindness probably contributes a lot to these exaggerations of parts of his character. Din, on the other hand, is absolutely a protective character in canon, and that can push people into presenting him as possessive (which he isn’t, the choice to let Grogu go is testament to that).
I also feel like a lot of people are forgetting Mandalorians, including Din, are warriors. They are a culture that is founded on warmongering and galactic imperialism. By the time of Din a lot less so, but he is still a man who has murdered multiple people on-screen and resorts to violence quite often. One of his weapons for half the series literally vaporised people. We’re forgetting just how much Grogu has changed him and made him softer, and nevertheless we still see him cut a man in two and carry his decapitated head in a bag for work.
Tl;dr: both Luke and Din are capable of great violence and great softness, and those are important parts of their characters.
Also I think more people need to watch/rewatch the Original Trilogy. Just for fun and also for Luke.
so i’m actually being a responsible artist and drawing my graphic novel but i really miss fandom. i want to talk about how the inside of din’s helmet smells. what’s luke’s meditation schedule like. which parent is most likely to give in to sneaking grogu treats
The sequels are corny! Finn should be a Jedi acolyte! Luke and Din should be married! Ben Solo should be a bounty hunting Mando! Leia and Han should die of old age! Rey should constantly clown Luke for almost making Grogu choose between Luke and HIS DAD. This should be fun!
