Mjollydragon - Insert Witty Comment Here

This is by no means an original take, and I probably did not spend as much time as I should have editing the writing into being a coherent take, but:

In an awful lot of movies, Steve Rogers would have been right.

(Or, well, treated-as-right by the narrative, at least; in some of those movies many, many people would have died for his idealism, but this wouldn’t have been treated as wrong.)

When faced with this sort of explicit trolley problem, there are two main messages in pop culture: either you should never pull the level (you might kill a named character) or you should find a way to save everyone. For instance, take The Last Jedi: the narrative treats it as correct that Rose stopped Finn from sacrificing his life, not because his plan wouldn’t have worked, but more-or-less because we don’t trade lives. (Other examples: every fucking YA novel ever. ‘You can choose between your significant other... or saving the world.’ ‘Bye, world.’)

(She is absolutely trading lives, just not in the direction that, you know, saves people.)

(This is not to say that characters never trade off lives! The really obvious example here is that most movies are totally fine with killing the villain to protect innocents, although I’m pretty sure the message is generally closer to “the lives of villains don’t matter” than “pull the lever.” Characters will also sometimes do things like choose which of multiple locations to go to, which is generally understood in their narratives to be trading off lives at least a little. But when there’s this sort of explicit setup, the correct answer as portrayed in the narrative is almost never “pull the lever.”)

Now, I actually can think of counterexamples -- Wrath of Khan is very clear that you should pull the lever, for instance, and since I brought up The Last Jedi earlier I might as well mention Holdo’s choice at the end. But in said counterexamples, the person making the choice is almost always choosing to kill themself, not another person, and they usually would have died anyway.

But when characters are faced with the explicit choice of killing someone, maybe multiple someones, or letting far more people die, the treated-as-correct choice is almost never to kill them. 

And I’m glad that we have a movie where that’s not the case.

The moral of Rudolph the Red nose reindeer is that no one likes you unless you’re useful.

(Though I will note that Title IX mostly applies in educational settings.)

ron: god, professor dumbledore's speeches are so boring. more like dumblesnore amirite?

dumbledore: I HEARD THAT, WEASLEY

dumbledore: TEN POINTS FROM SLYTHERIN

malfoy: hey now what the shit?

dumbledore: FUCK YOU MALFOY

reblog if i can message you and awkwardly make conversation with you so we can become best friends

His eyes were as blue as blue eyes.

And it’s always the same 2 blue eyes comparisons. The ocean or the sky. Like come on at least be creative.

Honestly people who use “grammar” as a cover for their transphobia and desire to invalidate nonbinary people had better not have any speech habits that don’t conform 100% to that narrow subset of academic English they claim to worship. Drop the slang, no run-on sentences, and I know I did not hear you use a sentence fragment on the phone earlier!

And if they’re opposed to neologisms they’d better be consistent with that, too. What’s the cutoff date for a new word to be old enough to be considered “real”? The word “e-mail", coined in the 80s, is newer than the pronouns “sie” and “hir”, transphobes. Don’t use “selfie” if you’re aginst nounself pronouns, which have been around longer. Xe/xem/xer pronouns are older than the word “podcast”. Oh, and the singular “they” has been in use for hundreds of years, so better avoid saying things like “antibiotics” and “lightbulb”!

tl;dr - your cries of “But grammar!” and “But made-up words!” are woefully transparent. You’re doing a truly terrible job of hiding the fact that you’re a transphobic asshole who prefers making marginalized people horribly uncomfortable and possibly dysphoric to, you know, just respectfully changing one word you use to refer to someone.

Holy crap “Lost Stars” just acknowledged the existence of transgender people in the Star Wars universe. And not only that, but that transition technology and procedures exist and are relatively common knowledge.

I know some people could interpret this as an anti-trans women joke, but it honestly doesn’t read that way to me. This author, Claudia Gray, could have had Dak say something very different, either overly derisive of trans people (we all know how those jokes tend to go) or responding with agreement about how cold it is and not mentioning transition at all. Instead Gray has Dak say “There are easier ways to switch genders you know.” Aka if for some reason Thane wasn’t talking about the cold, it opened up that line of conversation (Perhaps Dak’s reason for saying it within the diegesis of the story). Aka letting any trans readers know that people like them exist in the Star Wars universe in canon, even if no named trans characters have appeared yet (I don’t think they have?).

Idk, this line blew me away and made me really happy. Gray has made people like me a canon part of the Star Wars universe with this line, and not in a way that marginalizes us or treats us as freaks (at least the way I read this line) and that makes me ludicrously pleased.