Why Star Wars Fans Think They Can Bully the Franchise’s Actors

SPOILERS for pretty much ALL of Star Wars, including and especially Obi-Wan Kenobi through the fifth episode.

NOTE: Bullying Moses Ingram and any other Star Wars actor (or anyone else at all) is wrong. I do not condone that kind of behavior, especially since I’m a survivor of years of bullying and verbal abuse from my peers growing up. However, the responses from Lucasfilm and Ewan McGregor and other actors out there seem to treat this as a problem and an experience unique to Moses. It’s not. That’s why I’m writing this post.

The Star Wars fandom has a problem. Or at least, a certain segment of it does. Whenever a piece of Star Wars content drops and that segment of the fandom doesn’t like it, they flip out and attack anyone they can. They often attack the actors who play the characters they don’t like. The latest actor to deal with this behavior is Moses Ingram, who plays Reva/Third Sister on Obi-Wan Kenobi. She recently posted to her Instagram story about how racist Star Wars fans/trolls have been sending her direct messages (DMs) full of racist slurs and hurtful comments.

However, she’s not the first Star Wars actor to endure such horribly charged ire. Both Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyega faced racist attacks when they appeared in the Sequel Trilogy. But this type of actor bullying goes further back than the sequel trilogy. Ahmed Best (the Black man who played Jar-Jar Binks), Jake Lloyd (the white kid who played nine-year-old Anakin Skywalker), and Hayden Christensen (the white man who played Anakin as a young man and now plays Darth Vader in Obi-Wan Kenobi).

Continue reading →

Moon Knight, Ep. 5: Character Study, Ahoy!

MAJOR SPOILERS for Moon Knight Episode 5, “Asylum.”

CONTENT WARNING: This post discusses the trauma and abuse featured in this episode.

Wow, okay. This episode. THIS EPISODE. See, the reason that I love Moon Knight is that it’s a superhero show that isn’t really about being a superhero. It’s about a person with mental illness struggling to get through life and figure out what’s happening to them. The superhero genre is just a backdrop for all that. The story is really intriguing, but not in the usual, plot-ish way. This is a story about a person, a character. No, not all the things with the Ammit cult and the Ennead are going to make sense, but they’re not here to make logical sense. They’re here to facilitate Marc and Steven’s personal journey together.

Here are my reactions for this very intense episode:

Steven and Marc are just out here, staring into your souls.

Continue reading →

Moon Knight, Ep. 3: Let’s Have a Random Solar Eclipse

SPOILERS for Moon Knight Episode 3, “The Friendly Type.”

Alright, the story’s moving forward. And as always, I have thoughts and feeling about it. If you haven’t read my other two reactions to Moon Knight, please expect personal reactions and not any predictions for future episodes. I prefer to let the story unfold rather than predicting that something has to happen. Anyway, here’s how I feel about the third episode of Moon Knight:

We’re gonna party like it’s…the Middle Kingdom, I think?

Continue reading →

Superheroes Are a Phase, but They Came When We Needed Them

Today I read Alison Herman “As Disney+ Looms, ‘The Boys’ Is Sweet Relief”, and I have a few issues with the points she tries to make. Her article falls into some of the common critical pitfalls that I have covered in other posts: mainly the idea that you’re somehow superior (and even kind of oppressed) if you don’t like the big, inescapable mainstream thing that’s really popular for whatever reason. She also tries to narrow the satire of Amazon’s The Boys into being just a critique of Disney’s acquisition of massive franchises in recent years, and she also makes brief generalizations about Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman without taking into account what their adaptations mean for female representation in blockbuster film.

Oh my, there’s so much to cover here.