Man, I really don’t like Thor Skywalker. All of his stuff is very clickbaity. He speaks with this same tone in all of his videos, as if each sentence is some deep point he is making. It’s really manipulative, and makes people feel like they agree with what he’s saying without even thinking about it. But I guess that describes most clickbaity Star Wars YouTubers.
EDIT: And personally it seems a lot of female fans like Rey, and it gets kind of tiring hearing the perspective of male fans (or the one or two female YouTubers who have a large male audience). That’s personally why I like the Reylo community a lot. At least they actually have fun watching these movies, and their conversations are generally positive.
I generally appreciate the points Thor makes, though not the affected gravitas. However, I think there are far worse offenders in that category (Nerdwriter, I’m looking at you).
However, your point about the Reylo community got me thinking…most of the male critics of Rey like to point out how egalitarian they are by offering up Strong Female Leads, and they’re invariably Ripley/Sarah Connor/Furiosa/etc, in other words action heroines. They then compare Rey to these examples to show how easy her victories seem in comparison to these legendary badasses.
But maybe they have made the mistake of assuming that the Star Wars ST falls under the action genre, when the reality is that the ST could simply be a different genre altogether.
In a drama, especially a romantic drama, the female lead is rarely beset by physical obstacles, but rather mental/emotional ones. The most defining flaw of Rey’s character is a desire for belonging against the growing feeling that her every relationship is doomed. Rey would not be out of place as the lead in a drama, but since Star Wars has such a strong aspect of action there is also the expectation for Rey to be an action heroine and conform to the rules and limitations implied in its previous installments.
That’s where the disconnect seems to be - the Reylo crowd reads the ST as a (romantic) drama, while the ‘""""“True”""""""’ Star Wars fans read the ST as an action movie and a strict continuation of everything in the first six Star Wars installments.
I think the reason fans keep offering up Ripley and Sarah Connor as examples of their own egalitarianism is to counter the constant claim that criticism of Rey is tantamount to fostering misogyny. Then, of course, they’re accused of being misogynists for that very reason - the fact that they doubled down with Ripley and co. is supposedly proof of the fragility of their position. They simply can’t win.
We don’t get this with Jar Jar Binks. Plenty of fans hate Jar Jar and say he’s a childish and badly written character. Plenty of defenders counter with notions of mythical and psychological tropes to justify Jar Jar’s place in the saga. But no-one gets accused of being ‘anti-comedy’. If they did, I’m sure they would double down on Youtube and cite Charlie Chaplin and Monty Python as good examples of comedy in order to dispel the ‘anti-comedy’ position. Similarly no-one gets accused of being ‘anti-wildlife’ or somehow ‘speciest’ for hating on the Ewoks.
The problem with dismissing any comparison of Rey to action heroines is that Rey is portrayed as an action heroine, irrespective of whatever supposed emotional undercurrent is intended. The bare fact is that Rey goes around kicking everyone’s ass without breaking a sweat. Therefore it has to make sense both in the narrative and the canon as established. For many fans it simply doesn’t.
I haven’t seen any of Thor’s content beyond the above example, but I thought his position was entirely reasonable in this instance. And I certainly didn’t come away from it thinking that he has issues with women or is putting out cheap clickbait.