Where is the line…
… when the joke stops being funny?
… between cosplay and copaganda?
… between parody and promotion?
… between representation and reinforcement?
… where the successive waves of Disneyization of the Star Wars universe have blurred the lines so much that we forgot what the original represents.
That those are indeed “the baddies”.
Because if we look at the subtext here, or perhaps even the literal text, it isn’t that subtle.
Then what we have here is objectively terrible:
A foot soldier of an authoritarian and fascist empire uses a war trophy taken as spoils following the extermination of a minority population and celebrates with the unboxing of a new weapon of war.
Did the above capture the essence of it?
Ah, it’s funny, it’s goofy, it’s relatable.
And through this cuddlefication of brutality*, the line continues to blur.
When we look back, can we tell when the line has been crossed? Or is that only something we can tell in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight?
(Do we know we’ve reached the Rubicon, or are we informed after the fact?)
Where we can say this, this is the point where we became accommodating, where we become comfortable with fascism, with the fun-loving stormtroopers and their goofy antics, where the clear delineations of the original films become blurred and muddied, cuddly and coddled.
So if this is the line, when do we step back? Can we back away? Are we already too late?
(*Perhaps I’m being dramatic? Maybe, but I don’t think so.)
The genesis for this was a cutesy stormtrooper “unboxing” video that circulated on social media, most notably the ‘Tube and the ‘Gram, with the cover that I embedded above. (There’s other similar videos up there as well.)
If you need to see the originals, you can find them on the following YouTube channel:
I had thought about directly embedding them, but decided not to based on the subject matter.
It’s possible to recognize that a lot of skill, talent, and resources went in to the production of the videos on that channel. We’re trying to address the broader impact of the spread of this content, and the underlying ideology that it supports.
This also was (one of) the reasons underlying the Not Feeling the Fourth post from a few weeks back. More on the other reason will be coming soon.