On a new episode of Hard NOC Life, our intrepid Star Wars correspondent Constance Gibbs reports back on her snowy adventure in Chicago for Star Wars Celebration.
Continue reading “Hard NOC Life: The Rise of Star Wars Celebration”
Are you freaking out? Because we’re freaking out.
Continue reading “Get Ready for ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’”
Hard NOC Life with Shawn Keith return from a brief hiatus to share what’s Nerd Poppin’ this week.
Continue reading “Hard NOC Life: A New Era of Representation”
This weekend during Comic-Con International in San Diego, nearly 40 people gathered in cosplay and Rose Tico t-shirts outside the Hilton Bayfront for the first ever “Rally For Rose,” including folks such as author C.B. Lee and Marvel’s New Warriors actress Kate Comer. Our Rally even got the attention of several media outlets like CNET, Rolling Stone, Nerdist, Business Insider, and the Los Angeles Times, to name a few. Oh, and the Rally got tweeted by Rian Johnson and Mark Hamill.
Welcome to a new era of Hard NOC Life! Starting with this episode, Shawn Taylor joins as the permanent co-host alongside Keith Chow as they break down the week that was in nerd pop culture.
Episode 115: “Bathing in Fanboy Tears”
Continue reading “Hard NOC Life: Shawn Joins Keith to Break Down the Week in Pop Culture”
It goes without saying that we are huge fans of Rose Tico and Kelly Marie Tran here at The Nerds of Color. Unfortunately, there’s a significant portion of Star Wars fandom that doesn’t agree. Even worse, they’ve taken their disdain for a fictional character and used it to harass the actress so much that she had to delete her Instagram.
Continue reading “Rally for Rose Tico at San Diego Comic-Con”
Ever since Kelly Marie Tran was bullied off of social media by Star Wars fanboys, an age-old debate in nerd circles has reemerged: Why is fandom so broken?
Continue reading “What Broke ‘Star Wars’ Fandom and Why #SWRepMatters”
The month of May holds a special place in the hearts of Asian American and Pacific Islander Star Wars fans. For starters, May has been AAPI Heritage Month since 1990, though it originally began as “Asian Pacific Heritage Week” when it was proposed in Congress by Representatives Frank Horton and Norman Y. Mineta in 1977. That’s right, 1977. You know what else debuted in May 1977?
Continue reading “Go Asians: A History of AAPI Representation in ‘Star Wars’”
All week, rabid Star Wars fans have been debating the merits of the most recent entry into the Skywalker saga, Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Directed by Rian Johnson and starring Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Issac, Kelly Marie Tran, Carrie Fisher, and Luke Skywalker, The Last Jedi has proven to be the most polarizing entry in the Lucasfilm canon. To break down what they thought of the movie, Keith invited his DC TV Classics co-host Britney Monae.
To properly analyze Star Wars: The Last Jedi, you have to go beyond the trappings of fandom and look at the movie as a part of a larger product of Disney/Lucasfilm storytelling. Approaching this as anything other than a corporate juggernaut mainly concerned with moving merchandise and building the next generation of consumers will result in total anger, confusion, and regret. This might sound cynical and cold, but it’s only the acknowledgment that Hollywood cinema is big business and sometimes actual art will slip through the image factory despite their best efforts to curtail imagination and wonder.
I’m not saying The Last Jedi lacks imagination or wonder, but there’s definitely a middling corporate influence throughout the movie that simultaneously keeps the movie in an inoffensive zone of bland character moments while setting up Rian Jonhson’s long-term vision for the Star Wars franchise.
What makes The Last Jedi interesting, though, is that it deliberately erases the nostalgic underpinnings of the Star Wars saga being about the Skywalker clan. Now this is where you see a lot of online outrage regarding The Last Jedi (even when you remove the knee-jerk right-wing racist backlash to the movie being “too diverse“) with the main complaint is that it “feels different” than previous Star Wars films.
WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW
Continue reading “‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ and Moving Beyond Nostalgic Ownership”
As is customary whenever a new Star Wars film is about to come out, Vanity Fair runs a special edition with gorgeous photographs by the renowned Annie Liebovitz. The Last Jedi is no exception since the magazine just released four special variant covers to this year’s Star Wars issue. They’re all great, but one photo definitely stands out the most for us nerds of color:
This morning was the long anticipated Last Jedi panel at the annual Star Wars Celebration convention in Orlando, and it didn’t disappoint. In addition to seeing Force Awakens breakouts John Boyega and Daisy Ridley reunite on stage, the world was officialy introduced to Kelly Marie Tran. Even better? We finally got a sense of who her mysterious character is and how she fits in the saga.
Continue reading “An Asian American Woman is the Hero of Star Wars: The Last Jedi“
Last week was a pretty discouraging one for the APA community — and for all POC folks — with Scarlett Johansson as Motoko Kusanagi, Tilda Swinton as a bald Tibetan monk, and Nat Wolff as Light Yagami. There has been massive outrage on many fronts and thankfully, the concern has been taken seriously by major publications such as the Hollywood Reporter. Over here at NOC, it’s been covered numerous times, so it’s safe to say that the anger and frustration is still very much present for many of us.
Let’s, for the time being, look at a happier place; to a story where a relatively unknown Asian American actress by the name of Kelly Marie Tran has been cast to play the new female lead for Star Wars Episode VIII. Not much is known about the role but being an actor in Los Angeles, it helped knowing a few folks who went in when auditions took place last September. The role was open to ALL ETHNICITIES and was surely for the new female lead in the upcoming Star Wars chapter. Whoever would get the role had to have a chemistry test with John Boyega (whether it’s a love interest for Finn or someone who is best friends with him is unknown) and once they nailed that, the rest would be history.
Continue reading “The Significance of Kelly Marie Tran in Star Wars Episode VIII“
