There’s something infinitely wrong when society watches a movie about mysterious forces and light swords set in outer space and they take away that a girl displaying technical/mechanical knowledge is “too much” and “unrealistic.”
I’ve been seeing a disturbing amount of articles, posts, and comments saying that Rey is “unrealistic” for knowing tech/mechanics. One review, which I’m still really hoping was a joke, implied that Disney probably had a female STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) agenda or group sponser them because there really wasn’t another reason why Rey would have STEM-like skills. What’s even more upsetting is the fact that, while I’ve seen people rush to defend her force ability and fighting skills, I’ve seen no one defend her STEM-skills.
If Rey spent years scavenging material and sewing clothes, you’d expect her to be proficient in that. You probably wouldn’t even doubt anything she did with those skills. So why doubt her STEM knowledge? The comments saying that Rey’s technology and mechanic skills “come out of nowhere” aren’t exactly true. Rey has been on Jakku for about fourteen years, where she likely spent most of that time finding tech and working with machines, learning what each device did and what parts were valuable, finding and fixing things up for payment. Are you telling me that in her years and years of work experience, you really think she retained absolutely nothing? Why is it that the thought of a girl who knows tech and mechanics is able to make some so uncomfortable? In The Phantom Menace, Anakin was about half Rey’s age and a skilled pilot who was building C-3PO and, curiously enough, I’ve never seen a comment doubting his skills. So why are Rey’s skills so wrong? I agree that the writing/exposition didn’t overly explore or explain all of Rey’s skills, and I understand that the audience wasn’t shown much detail, but in a universe where there’s planet-blasting bases and music-making aliens, saying that
Rey being able to have tech and mechanic skills is “unrealistic" is downright insulting.
All of this. To add –
Not that we should need ‘proof’ to defend Rey’s proficiency in tech and language skills, but the cute little book “Rey’s Survival Guide” is perfect for it. In it she details how she spends her time studying everything about the ships she scavenges in. She keeps detailed notes and schematics. She pulls things apart, puts them back together, she learns how every part works, and what it’s purpose and value is – she has to, otherwise she won’t know what parts are best to trade for rations. She built that speeder from scratch and booby-trapped it so that no one can steal it (and calls it her baby!). She works hard at learning everything she can – her knowledge certainly didn’t “come out of nowhere”.
She lives INSIDE AN AT-AT
That is just such a great bit of characterization, she is so into technology she lives INSIDE a huge derelict machine and goes home and jams a republic pilot’s helmet on her head!
I’ve been thinking that it’s really interesting that, at least in the Sherlock fandom, there are two aesthetics of how we, broadly speaking, relate to Benedict Cumberbatch vs Martin Freeman.
Now, I know not all of us think of things this way, but the concept is out there; the idea of these actors as, ‘daddy’, and, ‘son’. The thing I find fascinating is that each fandom (if we were to pretend they’re discrete groups) has an aesthetic that seems to follow from the relationship it implies between the actors and the fans.
You know reading fanfic (and being kind of a porn aficionado myself) it’s interesting how different fandoms have certain porn trends. Like yeah the usual gamut of kink always exists to varying degrees, some more obvious than others – teen wolf used to be heavy on the knotting for obvious reasons while anything in dragon age involving the iron bull is gonna be an ode to size kink. But there are also subtler trends, like fandoms where no one ever forgets the condom, or every fic has some element of bdsm, or every fic has a warning for rimming. You can actually tell a lot about the fandom discourse™ just from reading its porn.
And now I feel the need to write meta comparing the porn trends within and across my fandoms dammit. This is such an interesting observation. I have a mental picture of a huge, elaborate set of Venn diagrams, charting the various fandoms and their crossover points by kink, ship etc. Someone who understands statistics needs to get on that right away 😛
I’ve often felt like an anthropologist/sociologist when I fall into an older, mostly defunct fandom. I can trace a lot of the discourse through the types of fic (and porn) I run into. I sometimes line the timeline up with where I was in fandom at the time and it often sheds even more light. Lots of things change depending on national public discourse, major fandom platform, and for a long time, the biggest fandom_wank post of the month.
It’s always kinda fun for me b/c I feel like I’m totally knowledgable about something for once and like, I can pretend to be that weird specialist that’s brought in once a season on some procedural show that slowly gets a cult following.
