this has probably been said elsewhere and better but i miss the days in star wars when the oppressive empire was made up of white men with british accents. that wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t a trivial decision, like they are the face and voice of power and oppression both in the past and today. giving these roles to women and people of color feels like… idk obfuscating or something? like don’t get me wrong i very much want more diversity in star wars, but the empire being a monolithic sea of white men with imperial accents, and the good guys being a diverse crowd of allies from all demographics, it implicitly communicated something important.
instead of killing characters off at random for shock value, may i propose a hip new trend: keeping characters alive at random for shock value. by all logic, this character should be dead. there’s no possible explanation for how they continue to shuffle ‘round this mortal coil. maybe we literally saw them die onscreen back in the passe era of shock value deaths. and yet, there they are. alive before our eyeballs.
the innate familiarity of these shots… the way they feel so homely, so lived-in… the way your heart just yearns for a story you weren’t part of, yet, on a deeper level, that has become such an important part of you that it is your story, too…..
watching sg-1 “message in a bottle” when they seal off the mountain, like they do, and i’m wondering for the first time about the people working in NORAD who have no clearance to know about the stargate and just… have these things interrupting their work life with 0 explanation. i mean irl sealing off the cheyenne complex is partly why it’s there i guess, but to keep things from getting IN not OUT. is it just like “it’s a drill!” but all week? also this time we’re going to inject you with something, you know, for preventive reasons. sometimes air force one is inbound??? just ignore the alien symbols on your computer and those alarms counting down until the mountain explodes. free bagels in the cafeteria.
this was absolutely my favourite part of thinking about sg-1 back in the day. like, SURE, DEEP SPACE RADAR TELEMETRY, WHATEVER
cant stop thinking abt ursula k. le guin’s essay abt the carrier bag theory….. she’s like, maybe the first human tool was not a weapon, but rather something that holds, a bag, a pouch, a vessel, something for gathering and storing and sharing. let’s shift the narrative of humanity from that of violence to that of safekeeping. and i’m like
and THEN she’s like, a novel is also a carrier bag. there’s the Hero’s story, sure, but there’s room enough in fiction for every experience, for every little thing, and it’s that other story, the life story, that she seeks……. o|-<
