Way back on the seventies, even before the first Star Wars movie came out, Laura Mulvey, feminist film theorist published her work “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. In it, she explained, according to Freudian theory, the two pleasures from cinema come from 1) identifying yourself in the story to forget about life for a while, and 2) enjoy looking at visually appealing images and people. Because the industry was entirely controlled by straight white men, though, they inherently filled the first niche with people like them and the second one with objectified and sexualized women, especially there solely for the enjoyment of the male gaze.
Left without lead characters to identify with, minorities —what an ugly and deceiving word when they amount for the majority of people in the world— had to desperately search for themselves in background characters. A big part of the fandom consists of women, people of color, queer or with disabilities, latching on to the few characters they could find representation in. They get attached to this characters, love them like part of their own family and friends, because they provide something that is so rare to them in mass media: a voice.
One can only imagine what it is like to be a straight white male. To go to the movies, enjoy the story fully, and then leave without the necessity to form any kind of emotional attachment to the characters. Why would they? They will find themselves perfectly represented all over again in the next movie they decide to watch, whichever it might be, and the next one, and the next one. Representation to them is not a luxury, it’s a given right.
Seeing this, it’s no wonder how confused and scared straight white males are, now that they can’t find themselves leading the charge of the new Star Wars franchise. Two movies in a row they’ve had to sit on that theater and face the minority’s reality, facing a situation that is so unlike anything their psyche is used to they react like wounded animals, with a primal fear of being erased from a narrative they are sure to own.
The best part is, for the first time, they are so desperate to find themselves that, like lost children in the dark, they have latched themselves to the one character that has given them a chance at representation: Kylo Ren. They have projected on him their airs of grandeur, blind expectative of an easy redemption and even the misguided self-assurance that, in the end, he will be the ‘true hero’ —instead of the women and people of color who are actually fighting evil in the story. Inadvertently, though, they have willingly chosen to self identify with the most annoying, manipulative, mediocre, unbelievably self-righteous and unbearably whinny fuck-boy this franchise has ever created.
Though, looking at their reactions and comments online, they might not be too far off on that one.
i just realised that arkh project happened around what might be referred to as classic tumblr and the whole…drama goes back far beyond that which i wasn’t personally around for so for the people who have seen others mocking that game dev blog and don’t quite understand why here is a bit of a primer
back when kickstarter was just taking off as a thing in 2012, an indiegogo was created for something called the arkh project. the concept was simple: a JRPG style game featuring queer people and people of colour as the central characters. this was back when The Discourse wasn’t so nuanced on this website so a lot of people saw this and was like “alright i would like to see an RPG with queer people and people of colour”, and as you can see it broke its goal and a little bit more (which, if you’ve seen the goals for actual video games, is a little modest as budgets go; we’ll get to that)
they deleted their tumblr blog a while back so the post is mostly lost (i imagine reblogs are still around, including on my own blog but fuck going that far back to find it) but it was actual indy video game dev arden ripley who i believe first brought up that pretty much everything about the arkh project stank to high heaven of scamming: there was no explanation of what the game was going to be like, no real proof of concept or demo to show anything about it aside from about 4 pieces of concept art showing some characters just standing there, no-one involved in the project had any experience creating a video game and were wanting to create an AAA level experience on this small amount of money; the list goes on. the entire thing was running on “A VIDEO GAME WITH QUEER AND POC PEOPLE IN IT!!! SUPPORT US!!!!!!!”
the kicker was that the whole thing was set up by riley, a person who had become sort of notorious even in the SJ community for being very much a racist and ableist herself despite presenting herself as a sort of model progressive citizen (i should clarify that she is black and that this isn’t a “racist against white people” thing, like she was incredibly racist towards asian and jewish people amongst others).
i think there’s probably a good reason to believe that she’s an inspiration for the “social justice warrior” stereotype, outdated as it is, because riley’s response to the criticism was to claim that this was purely the act of Cis Straight White People trying to take everything away from her (arden is trans nd gay and so were a lot of the people reblogging the post and agreeing with her, so, uh, no real go)
the furore died down as things do and it pretty quickly came apparent that the whole thing was a scam when they set up another crowdfunding effort for the same game (i think they did it three times in total, including the inital indiegogo). the only things that ever came out of the entire thing were some Very Diverse Character Designs, sketches for some random weapons, and a video of the main character’s run cycle that was ONE WHOLE SECOND LONG!!!!!!!! this was back before tumblr videos looped too so you couldn’t even see it properly
eventually the tumblr just sort of winded down and became dedicated to boosting other kickstarters, and the project disappeared into the aether
but now riley is back! with a game that is VERY OBVIOUSLY banking on riding the coattails of undertale, and she’s asking for double the amount of money that toby fox got to make undertale; not double the goal for undertale, double the amount ($50,000) that he actually got
as it is with making these posts i probably missed something/goofed up somewhere - it was 4 years ago and i had to use encyclopedia dramatica to refresh my memory on a couple of things, much as i am loathe to - so please feel free to correct me on anything
but the moral of the story is that reSyNCh is a scam and you shouldn’t donate to it cause the creator has a history of scamming people and being an overall shitty person. and there we have it
![thehighbloodprince:
“ “ I owe you a YOOGE thanks.
You really did a number on that old loser.
Without you, I never could have gotten the nomination.
[…]
Aww, you’re feeling left out, aren’t you?
Well, that’s just perfect.
After all, I’ve only got 269...](https://66.media.tumblr.com/52d2341ba4a1c448eca6c53ba264bd15/tumblr_o3090vDxcs1rfvl6no1_500.gif)
