❝I wouldn’t say that just visibility is important. I would say visibility as the stars of a show is important. That says that our stories matter. We’re not here to do the taxes of the white person, or to be the chipper best friend to the white person. It’s important to see Asians in those leading roles because it changes what I’m calling the anglo-heteronormative status of TV. [Imagine] that a producer says, “Guy and girl meet-cute at an ice skating rink. They fall in love, but then she has to move away.” If you say that to anyone, including an Asian person, you picture a white person because that’s what’s become normative to us. If it’s “Asian-American meet in a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown,” that’s the only time you picture it. We need to have a picture of Asian Americans. We have a unique experience that has myriad opportunities for storytelling, if other people are willing to tell those stories.❞
#‘its experiences’ did you mean: #poe dameron awake at 4AM singing BB-8 songs he makes up as he goes #poe dameron running back into a firefight to save a disabled BB-8 from certain destruction (sustaining a shoulder wound) #poe dameron speaking in binary even though BB-8 tells him he sounds absurdly stupid #poe dameron sewing a little hole into all his tents so that BB-8 can charge next to him while he sleeps even when they’re on recon missions #poe dameron referring to BB-8 as ‘my friend’ and making sure his programming equips him to fully understand what that means #poe dameron always asking BB-8 to do what he needs instead of ordering it #poe dameron rewriting the astromech default programming that would force BB-8 to call him master #poe dameron rebuilding BB-8 by hand himself whenever BB-8 gets damaged #and keeping his hard drive and his audio sensors live so he can reassure BB-8 as he goes that it’s all going fine #IS THAT WHAT YOU MEANT BY ‘EXPERIENCES’ #DID YOU MEAN ‘POE DAMERON’ #because that’s what BB-8 would mean #‘strong loyalty subprogram’ is one way to put it #‘loves poe dameron right back’ is another (via @gyzym )
HOW VERY DARE
It strikes me, thinking about this, that self-preservation protocols strong enough to make a droid “skittish and easily frightened” are not exactly the most sensible things to program if the droid is being used in large part to help fly a rebel fighter plane. Surely, when selecting a droid for this purpose, you’d want one a bit more unflappable, a bit more willing to face danger. Which leads me to believe that there are only two really reasonable conclusions. Either:
a) Poe loved and believed in this round little droid so much that he ignored all of the above, secure in his faith that BB-8 would rise to the occasion; or
b) he was the one who added those self-preservation protocols to a standard model, because he didn’t want BB-8 getting hurt if he wasn’t around.
This actually reads as if BB-8 has developed humanoid feelings. I.E., a human will avoid doing dangerous things as a matter of self-preservation, but if someone they love is in danger or needs assistance a human will try to help their loved one by any means necessary, in spite of the fear.
So basically BB-8 is hardwired to protect itself but will willingly put itself in danger for Poe because he loves him.
Update: It is not, in fact, the Richards, who don’t actually have the surname Richard, that’s just the name of the eldest boy that I hear screamed over the fence all the time. Richard is probably nine, maybe 10 and his younger borthers are twins of seven becuase I happened to run into them on thier birthday. They pointedly refused to tell me thier names, instead giggling ominously after I introduced myself and running away. This is the gang of boys that I’ve had to stop from torturing small animals on more than one occasion, and whose mother is the one that gets crying-drunk on the front porch late at night.
Lovely family.
Around this time last year thier grandmother came to visit and gave them honest-to-goodness home-made black-powder Cherry bombs direct from Texas, which the boys immediately took to the most flammable patch of chaparral in the neighborhood and set off six of them at once, resulting in a small wildfire, seven emergency response units and a helicopter, a Long Stern talk from the fire department and Karen getting in a screaming match with Child Protective Services and a sizeable crater in the middle of the field.
At least according to Olivia the ER nurse and neighborhood gossip. I was out of town at the time and believe about 80% of that becuase I saw the crater where there had not been a crater a week before, and becuase karen threw a shoe at me the one time I asked if she was alright when she was having her weekly drunk-cry on the porch.
But I Digress.
The Airhorn in fact belongs to one of the ladies at the Old Folks Home. Diane is very excited about the upcoming NBA playoffs and was having a bit of a pre-celebration in the park with her family and hadn’t realized the noise would carry. She’s rooting for Golden State becuase that’s where her grandson goes.
We gon need more stories on that crazy ass family
I don’t have more stories about the Richards specifically, but now that I’ve moved out of that Extremely Strange Neighborhood, I feel free to relate some more of the Wierd Shit that went on there. Some anwers to commonly asked questions:
1. It’s been pointed out to me that Golden State is an NBA franchise and not an institution of higher learning. To be fair, Diane is 84 and in an Alzheimer’s unit, and I know fuck all about sportsball. Perhaps her grandson lives in San Francisco. Regardless, we all had a good time and I was sent home with leftover bean dip.
2. I sometimes misspell things becuase I have multiple learning/reading disorders and Public Education in the US is terrible. I’m funny anyway.
3. Last I heard, Richard had gone to live with the other, less pyrotastic set of grandparents, so maybe there is hope for them yet.
(As always, all names have been changed to protect people’s privacy):
The neighborhood consists of a 206 pallette-swapped versions of the same three houses surrounding the largest hospital in the next six counties in any direction, surrounded immediately by three ranches on one side and roughly 100 miles of uninterrupted rocky mountain wildreness on the other. It’s seperated from the main city (If you can call a city with only the bars and Denny’s open after 9PM a city. Which you can’t) by a large mountain ridge and connected via a small canyon highway. Hence, the neighborhood consists primarily of:
Middle-Class Suburban White People ™
People who’d be too poor to afford this neighborhood normally, but are subsidized by the hospital. Olivia the ER nurse, for instance. They’re terrific.
People with Major Medical Conditions and Their familes, who live nearby, also subsidized by The Hospital.
Old Rural People who remember when Durango had only the train track and no paved roads and was mostly populated by cattle and will tell you they were present at the Alamo if you let them keep talking.
Wildlife that was here first and has no intention of moving.
This is a story about the first learning about the last.
Staci-With-An-I-From-Ventura-California introduced herself to me as that while I was walking the dog by the playground, as I tried to keep her preschooler twins (there are SO MANY goddamn twins in the neighborhood. I mean, we’re right next door to an IVF clinic BUT STILL) from jamming thier fingers up Charlie’s nose but fortunately he thinks children are hilarous and decided to lick what I sincerely hoped was jam off thier faces.
“Hi I’m [Gallus]. Hey, kids, be gentle with dogs-”
“Do you live here?” She asks in what I would find out later is her normal interrogative voice, but sounded to my untrained ear like a member of the spanish inquisition had reccived operatic training then took up chain smoking.
Rebellions are built on hope 