Darth Maul, Feminist Icon

Hey, Team.

The theme of this episode is Whiplash! Whiplash! Whiplash!

Here’s what’s on the docket:

Here are some of my proposed retcons for popular media:

I think it’s stupid he works in forensics. It doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a job that requires patience and a methodical mindset. Maybe I’m Justice League (cartoon) poisoned but that’s just not the type of guy The Flash is. Also I don’t think it’s right for him to work for the police. No cape should be a cop. If he were a firefighter, it’d be the perfect gig. He’d get everyone out of a building so fast, and in the flames and chaos, who’d notice the blur? The difficulty of wanting to save everyone while protecting his secret identity would have extreme stakes. Slow down to avoid detection at the risk of civilian safety? Or risk exposure as the Central City speedster as a worthy price for getting everyone out of harm's way? Imagine the internal crisis that would be triggered by missing one person in the flames. The person doesn’t even have to really come to harm, just someone he missed and a colleague found. The weight of imagining the alternate scenario where it didn’t turn out so well would bust his zippy little brain. Also his whirly arm trick could put out some flames when no one is looking. MAKE ABSOLUTE FLASH A FIREFIGHTER.

Just make them married the whole time. As a kid I thought they were married the whole time. Imagine my shock to find that not only were they not married the whole time, they end up divorced anyway.

Team, I need you to lock in.

When I was in elementary school and the prequels were first coming out, for whatever reason myself and many other little kids in my school got it in our heads Maul was a woman. There were no real context clues of this other than the fact pronouns aren't ever really used for Maul. Also, Maul, like, never spoke upon debut. Is a vaguely subservient character with no lines being automatically interpreted as “female” by a large group of children alarming? Yes. Is that relevant to this proposed retcon? No. Let's continue.

Years later I find out Maul is a male character in the films, shows and novelizations-- the quote unquote legends-- but out of my own bullheadedness I continued to refer to Maul as a female character. Because I don’t know what to tell you, Team, that's an incredible design for a female character. Like Asajj Ventress but 30% more Bush-era Hot Topic.

Then time goes on and I learn a little bit about Maul's home planet, Dathomir.

So as you know, Dathomir is home to the Nightsisters and Nightbrothers. As I understand it, the genders are split and separated along a very severe binary-- the Nightsisters are witches and the Nightbrothers are warriors. If I remember the fan-powered wiki page correctly, Maul is in fact the child of a high-ranking Nightsister. This binary culture would mean that, based on everything available to fans to glean from the expanded canon, Maul was indeed raised as male, as a Nightbrother. However, this detail has only served to bolster my headcanon by shifting it ever so slightly to this:

Maul was raised and socialized as male based on her body and therefore: is a transwoman. Leaving her home planet and leaving the rigidly gendered society of the Nightsisters and Nightbrothers was also leaving behind the mask of presenting male. A lot of the outfits worn by the Sith are, in my opinion, gender neutral. To be frank, within scifi there's no way to establish gendered clothing, so the way Maul adorns herself as a Sith apprentice is, to me, her presenting as a woman. My thoughts on robot spiderlegs Maul? So glad you asked. She’s running around tits out, as she should, and I hope she continues her nips to the wind rampage across the galaxy.

There's pretty much nothing to support this in the canon. Maul is known as a male character, he/him pronouns are used consistently in all iterations of the character. As an agender person I tend to queer a lot of characters like this on instinct, but Maul is the one that I hold so close to my heart. Maybe it's because as soon as I laid eyes on Maul something in my little kid brain flashed "Lady Woman" and it never stopped flashing. But, every time I learn a new scrap of info about Maul my confirmation bias warps it to fit my idea of her as a woman. And frankly? Transwoman Maul is the most interesting thing the prequels ever gave us.

Everything stays the same except he doesn’t work for the LAPD, thank you!

Everything stays the same except he doesn’t work for the LAPD, thank you!

Strategically, knowing history and recognizing when it repeats itself is beneficial. Through the power of hindsight, a modern not-fucking-evil person can learn from past mistakes to combat or better yet curtail fascistic and genocidal motions in the political sphere. There’s no arguing that. But I’m grappling with it being used for not that, but rather used like an argument on a pro/con list for why someone should care. I’m fumbling around in the dark with the idea that a person shouldn’t be alarmed by what’s happening now because they achieved fact collection. A person should be alarmed by what’s happening now because what’s happening now is alarming. I don’t think a person has to know to draw parallels to the ghettos of Warsaw, the post Mexican-American War lynchings, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the internment camps, and on and on in order to realize what’s happening to non-white civilians is Alarming, Dangerous, and Evil. A person should just know going to elementary school isn’t supposed to be a detainment risk, a courthouse for the final step of citizenship shouldn’t be a hunting ground, people shouldn’t be snatched away and sent to a prison based on checks notes vibes only a racist would pick up.

Hitler’s first attempt at power was considered a failure but in fact allowed a weakening of quote unquote checks and balances. When he fully attained power, no one seemed to register the old rules no longer applied and so the only thing that stood in his way was performative handwringing. Hindsight instructs: performative handwringing achieves nothing. Do not expect politeness to enshrine law, do not expect law to enshrine morality. A functioning human heart instructs: stop saying “they can’t do that!” when you mean “they oughtn’t do that!” we know they oughtn’t do that. They know they oughtn’t do that. They don’t care. You can’t hope a relevant legal precedent will haunt them on Christmas Eve and transform them into civil servants. Know that they know what they’re doing. Get angry about it. Stop them.

Jim Crow laws inspired the Nazi party’s methodical extermination of disabled, queer, Jewish, Romani, Slavic, non-white, broadly non-Aryan people. These practices are American. The betrayal and on-going genocidal acts against Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the treatment of immigrants, the violence against Mexicans, the massacres carried out on and continued terrorization of Black communities, the internment camps… These are not exotic inventions of faraway European lands poisoning the altruistic heart of Uncle Sam. They are his children. They’re the weights he lifted and the shackles he forged, all on his own. But I would hope that even if you didn’t know that, you would understand what’s happening right now is wrong.

I have no focused conclusion to give you goosebumps. I’m just angry. What else is new? I’m reading headlines, watching videos of violence carelessly doled out, absorbing the passive “well what can ya do?” responses of leadership, there’s blood everywhere. And maybe knowing the history would halt the fundamental misunderstanding of what this country is has turned into a roaring chorus of HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN HERE? HOW COULD ANYONE LET THIS HAPPEN? But can I honestly say, at this point, it’s worth explaining well, actually there are parallels and even precedents to this, that, and the other in recent history? We’re not in the middle of a history exam, we’re in the middle of multiple genocides¹. I no longer care what event or movie or show this is “just like.” I care about stopping it. And I know you care about stopping it. The time for reflecting on the past is gone, we can only be in the present and fighting for a future. I have to leave the analysis of historical parallels to the future scholar who will call the years we screamed our way through “the cool zone.” My goal now is to ensure that that future scholar will exist at all.

I’ve started reading Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. During a lunchbreak, I was working through several paragraphs explaining how the IMF would loan money to dictators knowing full well the cash was going straight into a Swiss bank with zero chance of ever being seen by the population. This was of no concern to the IMF, the debt would be paid back anyway, in perpetuity, even. Once the dictators are deposed, it falls upon the survivors to pay it back. And they will never pay it back because of compounded interest’s firm palm holding the population’s head just an inch below the surface of the water. The housing market crash followed a similar set of no rules– lending, borrowing, selling and shuffling debt around, creating loans designed to funnel borrowers into defaulting and losing everything. Those that loaned the money, those that shuffled it around, they ended up paid out on the backs of those they took from and swindled. A bleak start! Made bleaker still by overhearing, while reading this chapter, a pair of men who work at a nearby bank discussing a business loan. I’m assuming (hoping) this was a hypothetical conversation. The premise is the bank loans a client two million dollars for their business. There’s literally nothing to worry about whether the client can pay them back. I zoned out a little because I couldn't believe I was hearing this, but essentially, the bank would get the money back, somehow, and probably with interest even if the client can’t pay it. When one asked the other what would become of the business the loan was for, the answer was a bored “Oh, pfft. It goes under.” Makes sense, they both agreed. Makes sense? Makes sense? Find God before I send you to him.

This piece by Casey Lewis! The phrase “aestheticized authenticity” goes hand-in-hand with this piece from Eugene Healey for The Guardian: Gen Z and Gen Alpha Brought a Raw, Messy Aesthetic to Social Media. Why Does It Feel As Inauthentic As Ever?

My favorite part was the mention of “vulnerability as aesthetic.” I have actually written a little about this already

Also, Marty Scorsese looks so good here, omg:

Jail Support LA (I donated to them and then went to a protest, it was like a personal investment, lol)

National Lawyer’s Guild of LA

Community Power Collective (specifically would like to direct your eyeballs to donate to support street vendors affected by ICE raids)

…and I’m literally always saying that!!

Okay, that’s all for now, Team. Talk soon (threat)!

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Just this morning, SCOTUS ruled in U.S. v Skrmetti to move forward with Tennesse’s ban of hormonal therapy and puberty blockers in the treatment of trans youth. This is murder. Additionally, the Trevor Project received a stop-work order on its contract with the 988 suicide hotline. This is murder.