Category: Uncategorized

spiderjewel:

Ok Disney Parks Blog announced Kylo Ren is coming to Disneyland, and that for the time being he’ll be replacing Darth Vader’s meet and greet

And in the comments section a lot of people are really angry because they want to meet Darth Vader instead

Which on a meta level is the funniest thing ever to me

knitmeapony:

Ugh god I just need to talk about how important Finn Dameron shut up is right now, okay? 

He starts out a young black man with his entire humanity denied to the point where he doesn’t even get a name, okay, he’s literally nameless, faceless canon fodder, one of thousands.  And he’s assumed to be violent, it’s assumed that he will get bloody on command, that he’s obedient and savage at the same time.

And instead he’s soft.  Not weak, but kind.  Not cowardly – he’s not afraid of the violence.  He refuses violence.  He sees innocents hurt, he sees his friends fall, and then he rejects literally years of training and brainwashing.  His mind and soul are both powerful things, forces for the light side, immutably so.

He rebels successfully – cleverly, with a plan that’s simple but effective.  He doesn’t just go AWOL, he rescues someone in the process.  He is a moral compass from the start, pointing us towards true good.  He is the worlds worst liar, dear god, and when he claims to be part of the rebellion it’s not just because it’ll get him to where he needs, to be, but because he desperately wants to be seen as a good person.  No – he wants to be a good person.  No wait – he is a good person, and now he has the opportunity to show it.

And they try to kill him for it.  Over and over and over.

He will engage in violence, sure. but when he does it’s in defense of his life and his friends and his new family.  When he’s on the run, beyond hungry and thirsty and should be hiding, he creates a stir and tries to rescue a girl when everyone else was ignoring the attacks.

More than anyone else in this movie, Finn’s instincts are to do the right thing, every time.  He is shown as so inherently good it’s indisputable. He is the purest of the heroes.

And then on top of all that, he’s the one who gets hurt.  He’s not an unstoppable warrior, he’s just human, well practiced but fallible, who falls and is the one who has to be rescued.  And he gets rescued, by the people he showed his heart to, by the ones who are there for him as much as he was there for them.  He doesn’t fall by the wayside – he survives, and his new family is there to hold his hand while he sleeps.  He is loved.  He is lovable.  In every sense of the word – he is inherently worthy.

UGH FINN IS SO IMPORTANT MORE FINN META

allacharade:

frog-and-toad-are-friends:

I’m reading Don Quixote for my world literature class and apparently when it was first published in 1605 it was world-changingly popular, one of the first “popular novels” as we know it today, and there were all sorts of people who were writing and publishing their own unofficial fan-sequels to Don Quixote which was basically the first fan-fiction, and then in 1615 the original author wrote an official sequel in which Don Quixote reads a piece of fanfic about him and sets out on a quest to beat up the author who mischaracterized him

This is all true. What happened more specifically is that one fan fiction got really really popular and since people weren’t all that familiar with how novels worked (because there weren’t really any other novels in Europe yet), a lot of people just took this as a valid sequel. Cervantes (the original author) had pretty much stopped working on any kind of sequel to the original at point, but he got really pissed that people were reading this fan fic and assuming it was as legit as his canon. So he got off his butt and wrote this sequel, which academics call big words like “meta-textual” when really it was Cervantes trying to make sure people understood his canon correctly and didn’t get carried away with their silly fan theories based on this one fic writer’s interpretation. 

Now-a-days, the “true sequel” is normally just lumped in and stuck onto the end as a “part II,” in case you are wondering why you’ve never heard of a Don Quixote the Sequel. By all accounts, the fan fic was pretty bad, which makes it’s a perfect beginning to the grand tradition of fanfiction.

Calling this the first instance of fanfiction, though, comes from the fact that this was the first time, as far as we know, that the author of the original stepped in to officially denounce fan work as not canon. For most of history (at least western history) there wasn’t really an idea that stories had ownership. Most famous greek plays and poems are based on other works. Virgil’s Aeneid can easily be called Homer fan fiction (we have no real way of knowing how much of the story existed in folk tradition and how much he made up). Most of the versions of greek myths you know come from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which is largely his short fics about other myths. Moving out of the classical world, bible fic constitutes a lot of what literature is for a while. Dante’s  Inferno, specifically, (which is, lets be clear, a self insert fic where the author meets his fave author – so it’s also RPF – and they take a tour through a crossover fic between the Bible, historical fic, and greek myth) was so popular that it’s kind of crossed over into fanon (quick – biblically how many cicles does Hell have? Answer: none, they all come from Dante and in turn Virgil, and eventually Homer…) On the run up to Don Quixote, we have Shakespeare, who adapted most of his plays directly from other works by other people, from which he asked no permission (nor was he expected to.)

The real move that makes this false sequel the first official fan fiction is that the author of the canon material asserted his ownership of the intellectual property that was the characters and the story. Not in the legal sense – there was nothing illegal about this sequel – but in the sense that you could call this sequel “unauthorized.” It’s the beginning of thinking of characters and stories as belonging to a specific person, rather than simply being created by said person.