Sigh. Firstly, real life sucks, when you least expect it to
do so… or when you see it coming, (sort of), but it is equally bad in both
cases. And then the Americans have Hollywood.
Not so long ago, an IGN member made a brief speech on
YouTube, which conflated ‘Crazy Rich Asians’, ‘To All The Boys that I Have
Loved’, and – KMT, also known as Rose Tico on SW, the current trilogy. So what
is the problem?
In fact, the IGN member has conflated – as the rest of U.S.
may have done – a number of social groups. There are Asians who live in Asia,
and whose relationship with Americans, as well as Asian-Americans is one thing.
There are Asian immigrants to the U.S. as well as their direct descendants, the
Asian-Americans: them and their social position in the greater American society
is another thing. The third is the power struggle between the Asian-American actors (and that includes celebrities) in
Hollywood and the rest of the American entertainment industry and the other
power groups, including Anglo-Americans and Afro-Americans. It is very possible
that there are other groups lumped with those three, but let us put them
outside the brackets for the moment.
Now, KMT. The fact that she was driven from Twitter, (or
Tumblr, or some other social media platform) by Internet trolls (or whoever) is
abominable, no human deserves this, but-
But KMT is not just some average Asian-American citizen,
(unlike the IGN member who spoke up in her defense on YouTube recently); she is
a celebrity, actually. She is famous, she is talented, and she is certainly not
an average person. As such, she is not
just ‘a face in the crowd’ and should expect unusual treatment, both good and
bad. This is the essence of free will: everyone judges everyone else freely and
expresses this judgement freely. No one can be liked by everyone else, not even
a deity: just read the New Testament as to what happened when the Savior played
with the free will of people – it really went horribly wrong, or horribly
right, but horrible either way. Judaism, and Islam, and in a different way – Buddhism
– do not go this way: it is either God’s way or the highway, and you do not
want to go there.
…Or maybe you do, for this is how free will works: once
Moses got the Jews out of Egypt and they started their travels through the
desert, the man had to have his Levites make several bloodbaths to ‘tame’ the newly
liberated 12 tribes and to stop them from rebelling and returning the fleshpots
of Egypt. Since the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, is full of tales
when the Israelis turned their back on God and went to worship other gods,
idols, Moses was not really successful, though he tried hard and implemented truly
draconian tactics – but we have digressed.
On a less epic note, what happened to KMT was wrong, but it was
not unexpected, because a famous person always draws attention both good and
bad. At that time, KMT got hit with more bad than good attention, apparently,
but it had nothing to do with her race, but with the fact that Disney/SW merger
went on in an unexpected direction and seems to have split its’ fan base, or at
least – diminished it to a point where ‘Solo’ made only tens of millions of
dollars, and not hundreds, as Disney expected it to. Now, it is not known where
SW movies will go, in what direction: there is vague information about the SW9
movie, an Obi-Wan Kenobi movie, but nothing concrete, no indication of how the
audiences will react to the future SW movies. The merged Disney/SW team might
have wanted something new, progressive and radical…well, so did the
Netflix-allied folks behind ‘Insatiable’, (though again, Debbie Ryan doesn’t appear
to be associating with Disney anymore), and we know how that went down instead.
To rephrase it. The IGN member, who is an Asian-American,
somehow conflated KMT, who is a single person, a real life individual and so
on, with ‘Crazy Rich Asians’, a good, solid, American romantic comedy that got
hyped so much that it strove to achieve a status of international importance –
and failed, and now all the hype is dying down quickly, leaving behind nothing
more than a romantic comedy of a movie; and with ‘To All The Boys that I Have
Loved’, which is also a romantic comedy movie, a young adult one, and one that
is less hyped. It also is different from ‘Asians’; and in the original novels,
the racial angle wasn’t too important; in the last novel, the father of the
family married a Ms. Rothschild, who was certainly not Korean or even Asian.
Listen: even as this article was wrote, ‘Scientific American’
has released an article online about female climatologists being sexually harassed
in a manner that looks similar to what KMT went through, a woman herself – but
it isn’t about race. Not primarily. Such trolls are angry at what KMT and other
progressive people are doing – and they are using free will to express their anger,
whether it is wrong or right.
The catch of course, that this is to be expected; if KMT expected
only accolades to have come her way post the SW8 movie…then it genuinely sucks
to be her, and maybe she should star in something less controversial: a
romantic comedy, maybe. (Note that for a variety of reasons she apparently was
not considered to be a ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ material). She is going to replay
Rose Tico in the upcoming SW9 movie, but again, until it is actually aired,
this can go in any direction.
Seriously, look at ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’. There
was supposed to be a scene that depicted Zia in coming out as a same-sex
person, but it got cut and there is no indication that it will be revealed, or
play a role in the next JW film. So where does it leave the actress and the JW
franchise? The latter was trying to be progressive itself…until it did not.
What will happen to SW now that ‘Solo’ has indicated that even a Disney/SW
juggernaut can start feeling the hits if they accumulate. Will they pull a
Riordan and leave all the progressive values behind to salvage the financial
situation? And either way, where will it leave KMT and the other actors?
…And keep in mind, that none of the above matters either to ‘Crazy
Rich Asians’ or to the adventures of LJ and friends, regardless of whether they
will have sequels or not. LJ and friends did not really try to be politically progressive,
more like mundanely romantic, and neither did ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ within their
movie-verse. Their real life cast and crew did, and now there’s some backlash
as well, and with the Donald still at the helm this is something ‘Asians’ and
the real life U.S. don’t need – but that is another story.
…Well, this is for now – see you all soon!
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