(no subject)

koalathebear has written a very interesting and thought-provoking post about Rey/Kylo Ren shippers (who skew young), and how teenaged girls are conditioned by popular culture (especially romance novels) to interpret abusive behaviour as romantic behaviour. And she manages to talk about it without patronizing the teenaged girls in question, mainly because she talks a lot about how she too interpreted this stuff in a romantic way when she was a younger and less emotionally experienced koala. And actually, the way I’m phrasing it makes it sound like she’s being incredibly patronizing, but she’s not, IMHO. I’m just phrasing it poorly.

I’m slightly handicapped in evaluating her post by not actually having read the Twilight series or 50 Shades of Grey, both of which she references as normalizing and romanticizing emotionally abusive behaviour. But it’s such an interesting post that I’m going to assume she’s interpreting these books correctly, because I don’t have time to read books which, if Koala’s right about them, will probably make me want to throw my device at the wall. Spoilers for Star Wars: the Force Awakens in her post, obviously.( Read more... )

Edited to add: Adding a cut tag, because that was more uncut text than I intended to inflict upon readers. Also, minim_calibre has rather different thoughts, here. Short version: her experience of the ship is rather different than Koala's. Which just makes everything even more interesting.