ljwrites: John and Daisy standing back to back (love)
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
-Anatole France


I have written before about how Finn’s decency was an act of subversion against the militaristic totalitarianism he grew up under. There’s another character in TFA who is also kind and selfless in an unjust system, and that’s Rey. The difference is the kind of oppression these two characters lived under, which are diametrically opposed but just as corrosive in their different ways.

Finn was a slave soldier of a totalitarian dictatorship, while Rey was an exploited worker under a capitalist who could rob and swindle people in the absence of law and order. To put it in a simplified way, Finn lived in a system with no freedoms while Rey lived in a system of unchecked freedoms. And while freedom without any restriction might sound like a wonderful thing, in practice it tends to mean that people with power and capital get to restrict the freedoms of people without such advantages.

A comparison and contrast of Finn's and Rey's backgrounds )

(This essay was originally posted to Tumblr on January 26, 2017.)
ljwrites: john boyega laughing (john_laugh)
Choosing to be kind is not choosing to be passive. It’s choosing to end the cycle of abuse . . . It’s a courageous act in itself.

-Melissa Grey on Cinderella


It’s amazing to me how some parts of the Star Wars fandom have no sense of nuance when it comes to Finn’s character, seeing him as either a naive child who can hardly function in the real world or a ruthless killer who showed no regrets or conflicts whatsoever about killing his former comrades.

Both extremes are fairly dehumanizing and distorted portrayals of the actual character, because the core of Finn’s character is that he is innocent when he has no business being so. He’s a character whose innocence and purity are not oblivious naïvete but qualities he had to fight to keep and attain. His morality is not based on an ignorance of life’s harsh realities, but rather on an intimate knowledge of brutality and the will to break free of it.

I love this character a lot, okay? )

(This essay was originally posted to Tumblr on January 2, 2017.)

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ljwrites: A typewriter with multicolored butterflies on it. (Default)
L.J. Lee

August 2019

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