janellemonaeTHE FORCE IS WITH #HiddenFigures🚀 Last night my hero and shero hosted a private screening of HiddenFigures🚀 . I can’t quite describe to you in words how it felt to hear the creator of Star Wars (a huge inspiration to me and my work) and Ms. Force herself genuinely gosh about this film and its’ importance. Thank you George Lucas, Mellody Hobson, and Jeffrey Katzenberg (who is nothing short of amazing for hosting as well) for being champions of this film and these brilliant hidden figures! I will forever cherish last night. 🔲🖤 #HiddenFigures🚀 is out everywhere Friday JAN 6th !! Let’s make it number 1 over Star Wars ;-)
imagine being a published author and not getting it so much
I’m putting my face in my goddamn hands Kylo Ren is a TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE of a character who will get a redemption arc why is this hard for people to understand
“Kylo did Bad Things and had a shitty attitude so he can’t be redeemed”
News flash: you have to do bad shit and be a bad person to warrant having a redemption arc????? It’s?????? Required??????
Didn’t you know guys you only deserve redemption for being just a little rude. I mean just look at darth vader :)
I just read an article that claims Kylo Ren having any humanity at all would be a shock?? Like the possibility that he might show some depth of character or – God forbid, the potential for *gasp* REDEMPTION?!? – is the most ridiculous idea they’ve ever heard???
The complete lack of basic story-telling structure is appalling…
It’s not even whether he deserves it or not (and the whole point of redemption is that you have to earn it and atone) – it’s that the author seems to think redemption is not interesting.
Come on, somebody who does terrible things realising they might be wrong and trying to do better. Fuck that shit, it’s just boring and completely undesirable, moreover it’s unrealistic because nobody ever realised they were on a horribly wrong path and needed to change.
Going out on a limb here but I’d not be surprised if people saying this were at least overlapping with people who demand to see only wholesome things in fandom. The black/white thinking of “villains are monsters and you’re a monster if you like them” is nicely complemented by “nope, redemption arcs are bad (bec. monsters can’t be redeemed and don’t deserve it and the acoompanying sympathy anyway)”. And the general ridiculous cognitive dissonance these people experience makes simultaneously held opposing views such as “I only want wholesome things to be portrayed” and “it’s wrong to portray somebody who does evil as realising they’re evil and trying to better themselves” extremely likely.
Not saying everyone who’s against a Kylo redemption arc is an anti, but surely there’s a not insignificant percentage; it fits the pattern too well.
Normally I agree with a lot of things N. K. Jemisin says, but absolutely not here. Particularly since this gets to the heart of a very unpleasant sort of attitude that’s starting to be visible in fandoms these days. I’ve talked about it in the context of TFA and of people who will bend themselves out of shape and stuff their fingers in their ears and pretend like they suddenly can’t read any longer, if you point out the in-canon evidence, stated by Leia herself, that her son was watched and groomed since infancy by Snoke.
I’ve seen that little bit of detail getting swept aside so consistently, both by fans and by some Lucasfilm people themselves (looking at you, Pablog Hidalgo and your misogynistic ‘of course Leia would say that, she’s his mother!’, as if being a mother precludes a woman from rational analysis!) because it gets in the way of… honestly, what ends up coming across as some very frothing, completely out-of-control hatred via projection. That’s how Kylo Ren as a character ended up reduced from a nuanced, complex, damaged individual to an ‘allegory’ for ‘fuckboys’ and ‘school shooters’. I’ve said it before, but a friend who works with former child-soldiers from various warzones, when it comes to social reintegration, went to watch TFA convinced by the fandom that she was going to see Kylo Ren as sort of ‘MRA stand-in.’ She came out completely fucking bewildered and told me ‘what on earth are these people smoking? If anything, he has more in common with former child-soldiers of the LRA and is a narrative foil for Finn, both of them being two sides of the same coin – people groomed for violence from an early age, in a totalitarian framework, who end up reacting very differently to their conditioning!’
So what you essentially end up is a fannish culture that blatantly ignores or denies in-canon shit like CHILD-GROOMING, if the character in question is one that people have projected all of their negativity on. That’s how you end up with the bewildering situation of:
CANON:Something went down when he was young, but Ben Organa was clearly targeted by Snoke from an early age, with nefarious purpose.
FANON: He was just a spoilt, whiny, angsty fuckboy who had everything and who threw it away for nothing!
And here’s the irony – redemption and atonement don’t preclude suffering. They don’t preclude punishment, if that’s what people are specifically looking for. They’re something a person earns, through making the choice to lift up their soul from moral decay and the act of good works. The road could well be long and hard and redemption doesn’t obligate anyone to forgive. The character could well go through a conga-line of pain and hardship on their atonement road. All that redemption and atonement preclude is the character dying/exiting canon with their soul still in a state of moral degeneracy. That’s it.
“I’d started thinking about it and I said to George, ‘Why? This guy—he’s like Hitler. He’s killed. He’s done all of these terrible things and now we’re saying he’s equal with Yoda and Obi-Wan, as if he’s gone to heaven or whatever.’
And George pointed at me, he was real close, and he says, ‘Isn’t that what your religion is all about?’ And, boy, that was like being slapped on the side of the face, because, yes, it is what my religion is all about.”
There’s a lot of discourse going round at the moment about Padme’s fate/the general lack of reproductive health in Star Wars, so! Time for a blog post about
Dorothy Bomberger
Lucas, George Lucas’s mother.
(Do you have any idea how hard it was to find a photo of her?! There she is on the left, standing next to her husband)
Dorothy belonged to an old and wealthy Californian family, the Bombergers, and she attended school with George Lucas Snr, the soon-to-be father of our Lucas. Apparently, George Snr saw Dorothy in his history class and fell completely and utterly in love. That same day he told his mother he was going to marry this girl, despite not actually knowing her name or, presumably, anything about her at all.
Yuh-huh.
Anyway, whatever George Snr did to win Dorothy over it must have worked, because the two of them got married in 1933. He was 20 and she was 18. By the next year, Dorothy had given birth to George’s oldest sister, Ann.
Then two years later she gave birth to another girl, Kate. This pretty much zapped Dorothy’s health, as we all know can happen in pregnancy, because her body simply couldn’t take the strain. Dorothy’s doctors told her to not have any more children, but for whatever reason she didn’t follow that advice. She had two miscarriages, but in 1944 on Mother’s Day she gave birth to the subject of this blog, whom George Lucas Snr immediately named after himself.
As patriarchal dudes (which Lucas Snr apparently very much was) did back then.
And finally, when George Jnr was eight months old (possibly. Some sources say he was actually three?), Dorothy gave birth to another girl. By this point her health was utterly and completely shot, to the extent she couldn’t even really raise the kids and go out with them and such. George and his sisters were mostly raised by their housekeeper, Till Shelley, whom the Lucases have spoken fondly of but whom we know pretty much nothing about.
Obviously that is all very much different from dying in childbirth, considering Dorothy actually lived to be 75, but there’s no way in heck it didn’t have some effect on her only son.
Anyway. Dorothy is described in various Lucas biographies as being strong-willed (especially considering, you know, the era she was in), rather fragile physically even before the pregnancies, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and a loving mother. Obviously, Star Wars fans know a couple of characters fitting that description:
So that’s a thing.
Lucas remained close to his mother even as his relationship with his father grew strained. “My father thought I was going to be an automobile mechanic, and that I wasn’t going to amount to anything. My parents – not my mother, mothers never write off their sons – but my father wrote me off.” And I guess “mothers never write off their sons” could also be the slogan of the entire Star Wars saga, especially after The Force Awakens. Nice.
This has been "Little-Known But Significant Star Wars Influences.” Or possibly “Why That Whole Childbirth Thing In Revenge of the Sith Happened: Some Facts Coupled With Wild Speculation”
For the past year there’s been more and more people talking about Marcia Lucas and how important she was to Star Wars and how it’s because of her the series is what it is but
It also makes me sad because we talk about her like she’s dead but she’s still alive
After the divorce George didn’t just take Star Wars from her he took EVERYTHING from her
She won an Oscar for Best Editing for Star Wars and she hasn’t worked since the divorce.
He blacklisted her.
People she thought were her friends stopped talking to her
She dropped off the face of the planet.
Literally I wrote a little essay on her a few months ago and the only recent news about her was that there was a house in Southern California up for sale under her name
And I just think about how fucking unfair it is that this woman who made Star Wars no longer gets to be involved and the redemption arc for the new trilogy that I REALLY want is Marcia Lucas coming back to edit again.
Granted, this blog you’re reading here will bit a little biased by default – but –
He really doesn’t seem to have blacklisted her. I don’t think that could’ve even been possible?
What was Marcia doing during all of this? Apparently, not much. Scorsese had been her number one employer over the previous half decade, but he was between films at the time, New York, New York having done bad business. But did she even want to work? Scorsese finally made Raging Bull in 1980, but he went with Thelma Shoonmaker to edit the picture, whom he hired as editor for virtually every single film he has made since then. Lucas was able to coax Marcia into sorting out the split-screen edits on More American Graffiti, released in 1979, but she did so begrudgingly; Eleanor Coppola asked her to edit her documentary Hearts of Darkness, but she told her she was “too busy putting her house in order.” [lxxvi] Offers apparently continued to role in for her to edit, and even to produce and direct. Marcia, however, seems to have been waiting for George to settle down so that they could get back to starting a family like he said he would do.
By 1981 (she was still married to Lucas then) she had become an interior designer. This might be her, in fact – it looks like her, name’s the same.
Marcia had offers to edit and direct even after the divorce –
However, since Marcia began family life, Pollock reports that the idea of directing or editing had lost it’s appeal to her. Her number one interest, it seems, was being a mom.
Which she did! That’s the Instagram of Amanda Lucas, who became a professional wrestler (neat!) and appears to still have a good relationship with both her parents.
It’s true that the Marcia-George divorce was incredibly messy – he neglected her in favour of his work; she had an emotional affair that he couldn’t forgive; inevitably their mutual friends ended up taking sides, it sounds awful and I judge neither of them really – but the myth that Marcia, one of an editing team comprising many, singlehandedly saved the entire Star Wars story from a feckless husband and then was cruelly turned away from the bright lights of Hollywood due to his vindictiveness has really gotta die. Cos it just isn’t true.
Things I did today: (possibly) tracked down Marcia Lucas! Man I hope that really is her.
Also @rhodanum – I swear you had something to say about this at one point? no worries if not though
For the past year there’s been more and more people talking about Marcia Lucas and how important she was to Star Wars and how it’s because of her the series is what it is but
It also makes me sad because we talk about her like she’s dead but she’s still alive
After the divorce George didn’t just take Star Wars from her he took EVERYTHING from her
She won an Oscar for Best Editing for Star Wars and she hasn’t worked since the divorce.
He blacklisted her.
People she thought were her friends stopped talking to her
She dropped off the face of the planet.
Literally I wrote a little essay on her a few months ago and the only recent news about her was that there was a house in Southern California up for sale under her name
And I just think about how fucking unfair it is that this woman who made Star Wars no longer gets to be involved and the redemption arc for the new trilogy that I REALLY want is Marcia Lucas coming back to edit again.
Granted, this blog you’re reading here will bit a little biased by default – but –
He really doesn’t seem to have blacklisted her. I don’t think that could’ve even been possible?
What was Marcia doing during all of this? Apparently, not much. Scorsese had been her number one employer over the previous half decade, but he was between films at the time, New York, New York having done bad business. But did she even want to work? Scorsese finally made Raging Bull in 1980, but he went with Thelma Shoonmaker to edit the picture, whom he hired as editor for virtually every single film he has made since then. Lucas was able to coax Marcia into sorting out the split-screen edits on More American Graffiti, released in 1979, but she did so begrudgingly; Eleanor Coppola asked her to edit her documentary Hearts of Darkness, but she told her she was “too busy putting her house in order.” [lxxvi] Offers apparently continued to role in for her to edit, and even to produce and direct. Marcia, however, seems to have been waiting for George to settle down so that they could get back to starting a family like he said he would do.
By 1981 (she was still married to Lucas then) she had become an interior designer. This might be her, in fact – it looks like her, name’s the same.
Marcia had offers to edit and direct even after the divorce –
However, since Marcia began family life, Pollock reports that the idea of directing or editing had lost it’s appeal to her. Her number one interest, it seems, was being a mom.
Which she did! That’s the Instagram of Amanda Lucas, who became a professional wrestler (neat!) and appears to still have a good relationship with both her parents.
It’s true that the Marcia-George divorce was incredibly messy – he neglected her in favour of his work; she had an emotional affair that he couldn’t forgive; inevitably their mutual friends ended up taking sides, it sounds awful and I judge neither of them really – but the myth that Marcia, one of an editing team comprising many, singlehandedly saved the entire Star Wars story from a feckless husband and then was cruelly turned away from the bright lights of Hollywood due to his vindictiveness has really gotta die. Cos it just isn’t true.
This got a whole bunch of new notes today, so I once again invite people to consider the alternate universe in which George Lucas was female, and Star Wars fandom was blotted out with article after article about how her stories related to her infertility and nothing else.
“Shaw returned on Tuesday, having been recalled for the pickup shot against black velvet, which Lucas supervised; the unmasked Vader would now appear as a “ghost” along with Yoda and Ben at the end.
Ironically, Kazanjian had changed his mind about this being such a good idea.
“I’d started thinking about it and I said to George, ‘Why? This guy—he’s like Hitler. He’s killed. He’s done all of these terrible things and now we’re saying he’s equal with Yoda and Obi-Wan, as if he’s gone to heaven or whatever.’
And George pointed at me, he was real close, and he says, ‘Isn’t that what your religion is all about?’ And, boy, that was like being slapped on the side of the face, because, yes, it is what my religion is all about.”
The Making of Return of the Jedi
this is a really interesting tidbit re: Anakin’s redemption.
(I’m assuming the religion in question is Christianity.)
