This Week in Gossip (29th March)

This week in gossip: Star Wars fans suck, Barry Keoghan won't go outside, and Zendaya is very good at being famous.

Kelly Marie Tran Reflects on Years of Harassment From Dumb Star Wars Fans

The Last Jedi is great. Fact. But even now, saying this on the hellsite that I will always call Twitter can result in some of the most ridiculous levels of harassment this side of Hot Takes Central. Star Wars fans have never been known for their hinged nature, but the worst fringes of that fandom lost their damn minds with Rian Johnson’s movie, so much so that Disney panicked,

and we were left with The Rise of Skywalker. Yikes. Few people suffered more during this barrage of hate than Kelly Marie Tran, the newcomer who played Rose Tico and who had the audacity to be… uh, an Asian woman playing an optimistic character in a kids franchise. The abuse she received was staggering.

Speaking to CBR's Grae Drake, Tran was asked about her career choices and whether she feels a sense of freedom in the roles she picks after dealing with the madness of a major franchise. Tran said:

"Thank you for acknowledging this journey that I've had, and I would venture to say that I don't think I'm the only one who has experience that. We've seen over and over time again women of color in these, sort of established franchises having this similar experience. I will say, when I think about that time, which was ten years ago now, the thing that I think I didn't understand was that it wasn't my fault. My first reaction was to internalize everything that I was receiving. And use it as evidence that I wasn't supposed to be there... If it happened to me now as someone who has been through ten years of therapy and joined support groups and done all this work on myself, I think that I would have had a very different experience."

The racism and sexism directed at Tran (and the racism faced by her co-star John Boyega) was unconscionable. It was also clear that Disney had no interest in supporting its actors. It threw Tran to the wolves in The Last Skywalker, reducing her to a cameo to appease the worst and loudest people. Pandering to bullies never works. It just makes worse art and sends the message that the most marginalized people in your community are disposable. And, as history has shown us, nobody hates Star Wars more than Star Wars fans.

Tran’s also right in noting how this crap happens over and over again with women of colour who dare to take a job in a big IP. The “anti-woke” culture war bullsh*t was always a Trojan horse for straight-up white supremacy, and Hollywood giddily bent the knee for it as soon as it was politically convenient for them to do so. where was the support for Tran from Lucasfilm or Disney? It’s terrifying how an entire political movement managed to engulf the planet based on appeasing incels who think their space opera about trade wars and goose-stepping clones is apolitical.

Stop Being Weird About Barry Keoghan’s Appearance

Too many people on this cursed internet are extremely comfortable with insulting others’ appearances. There’s this notion that it’s not gross or weird to mock how a man looks because it “gives them a taste” of what women go through every day. I hate that idea. Yeah, it’s super progressive to treat people the way we’ve rallied against for generations. Your lack of desire for a celebrity is not activism. I think a lot of people just like being bullies and pretend it’s acceptable if they’re aiming it at cishet dudes with money.

That brings us to Barry Keoghan, the Irish actor who can currently be seen in the Peaky Blinders movie and is playing Ringo Star in all four of those Beatles movies that still sounds like a terrible idea. Keoghan has talked before about his insecurities regarding how people talk about his appearance. In an interview with SiriusXM, he opened up even further.