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Forward, to the Past! – Episode III: Rebel Yell

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Or ‘American History X-Wing’

 

Yes, it’s the third and concluding episode in my trilogy of posts about Star Wars. I’m going to be making all sorts of generalisations about ‘America’ in this post. Please bear in mind, I don’t mean them to apply to all American people. Far from it. I’m talking about mainstream historical narratives, and the culture industries, and ideology, and so on. Also, in keeping with tradition, I’ve included an unnecessary and irritating (but also rather cute, if you’re honest) teddy bear. Oh, and in twenty years time I’ll come back and reissue these posts with crappy extra passages edited in for no good reason.

 

Three political categories dominate the Star Wars galaxy: Republic, Empire, and Rebellion. This is the arrangement in The Force Awakens just as much as in the original trilogy. Indeed, it is the apparent impossibility of telling a Star Wars story in which the galaxy is arranged any other way which determines the inevitability that The Force Awakens will be, and has to be, a ‘structre’ (as covered in previous episodes).

Galactic politics is in a constant state of fluctuation, but the fluctuation is between these three poles. Republic breeds Empire, Empire attacks Republic, Rebellion destroys Empire and restores Republic. And then the whole thing begins all over again. It unfolds with the inevitability of a Hegelian triad (but that joke isn’t funny anymore, so we’ll leave that there).

The three modes correspond to the way in which America conceives of its history and its future. America sees itself as always in a state of being one or the other, becoming one or the other, splitting away from one or the other, redeeming one or the other, fighting one or the other, falling from being one or the other into being one or the other. Left and Right agree on this, though they inflect it differently (natch).

Tied to this is the perennial idea of America ‘losing its innocence’ whereas, as James Ellroy put it: “We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can’t ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can’t lose what you lacked at conception.” Interestingly, he still seems to think that a ‘fall from grace’ did happen.

Hollywood has been playing with these three categories for some time actually. What are the great Hollywood Biblical epics but negotiations of the political and moral valences of republics that become empires, and rebellions against empires. In Ben Hur, Spartacus, Quo Vadis, The Robe, Cleopatra, etc, there is Rome as the great republic-turned-empire, dominating the world; and there are the Christians and/or slaves bravely defying her. The Ten Commandments does something similar with Egypt and the Hebrews. Star Wars reiterates these old Hollywood testaments in many ways, most especially the prequels with the slaves of Tatooine (slavery exists in pockets alongside the benevolent Republic… notice and store for later use), and in the religiose choral moments in the score of Return of the Jedi.…

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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: A Trekkie’s Tale

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Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky! It’s Lieutenant Mary Sue!

Oh boy, here we go. Yes, my friends, the time has finally come.

“A Trekkie’s Tale” needs no introduction. A notoriously vicious bit of satire attacking a particular trend within Star Trek fanfiction, the story is infamous for introducing the world to the hated Mary Sue. It took no more than five brief paragraphs to completely tear Star Trek fandom asunder and, as a result, “A Trekkie’s Tale” has transcended fan circles to become ubiquitous in the larger pop consciousness such that it’s had a truly transformative, profound, and arguably profoundly negative, effect on the way we look at genre fiction even to this day. A case could be (and has been) made that the introduction of the Mary Sue archetype is one of the largest and most sweeping acts of reactionary silencing tactics in the history of genre fandom.

And yet “A Trekkie’s Tale” itself is misread and misunderstood by pretty much everyone.

First, some background for those perhaps less familiar with what this is than others. “A Trekkie’s Tale” is a piece of satirical fanfiction published in 1973 and featuring a character named Lieutenant Mary Sue who is the youngest, most beautiful and most talented officer in the entirety of Starfleet. On her first day on the Enterprise, Lieutenant Mary Sue outperforms everyone else on the ship, causes Kirk to instantly fall in love with her at first sight, outwits Spock with logic (that is never fully explained) and singlehandedly saves the ship, the crew and the Federation at least twice before tragically dying randomly at the end of the story to be mourned by everyone and essentially turned into a modern-day saint. Lieutenant Mary Sue, and “A Trekkie’s Tale” more generally, is fairly transparently an attack on a certain kind of Star Trek fanfiction, and is most often read as a parody of (usually female) writers who create author avatar characters as wish fulfillment, thus sidelining the original cast and narrative in the process. In the years since the initial publication of “A Trekkie’s Tale”, the term “Mary Sue” has become a stock character archetype and nowadays gets tossed around rather carelessly, most typically as a knee-jerk reaction from insecure male fans to the concept of “strong female character I don’t like and who makes me uncomfortable with my masculinity.”

What’s the most interesting thing about the Mary Sue archetype to me, however, is how uniquely Star Trek a concept it really is. Star Trek fandom has, in my opinion, a very peculiar fascination with an *extremely* specific sort of fantasy: It’s an almost omnipresent dream amongst Star Trek fans of all ages, generations and genders to be captain of their own starship, command their own crew and, essentially, to be the star of their own Star Trek spinoff. This goes totally contrary to the stereotypical conception of the obsessive fan, which would be someone fantasizing about the characters or the actors, either in a romantic or sexual way or just a desire to meet them in person.…

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