Hatboy's Hatstand

(I added this as a podcast interlude, using the female (Remy) voice. It’s pretty fucking funny.)

Once upon a time, there was a martial artist turned actor named Gina Carano. She played an evil mutant in the first Deadpool movie.

She pioneered the Superhero Landing.

She also portrayed a tough, gritty Rebel shock trooper named Cara Dune in a Disney+ TV series called The Mandalorian. I may have mentioned it once or twice. Okay just once. Fine, twice. She was tough, a warrior, respected and admired by all. A veteran of the titular star war, and a survivor of the Alderaanian holocaust (that’s going to be important later, so remember that bit … also just keep in the back of your mind that I said titular), she was a pretty darn cool character.

There was a lot of crying about it. Like, a lot. Star Wars is truly a tragic franchise, when you think about it. I don’t think anyone involved is happy anymore.

Who was crying?

Well, first it was incel fanboy neckbeards crying about how overpowered and “Mary Sue” the character was. Adding her into the story was gratuitous and just pandering to *checks notes* females, who make up a tiny *checks notes again* 49.6% of the human population.

Then, when Carano’s social media opinions revealed themselves as … let’s say “dodgy,” the libtard SJW brigade started to cry. There was a hashtag. Many a Fitbit was dropped into a smashed avocado toast. I don’t know, I told you this was lukewarm. What, did you think that was a Star Wars joke?

A man walks into a cantina. The bartender asks, “what’ll it be?” The man replies, “can you make a Gungan Pullover?” The bartender says, “sure, it’s teaching the morons to drive that’s difficult.”

That’s a Star Wars joke.

Anyhoo, yeah. She had some shitty opinions about things. She was one of the tens of millions of people in the US who supported Donald Trump. She pushed a lot of anti-mask, anti-vaccine, Q-anon conspiracy theories. She was warned by Disney to stop saying dumbfuck things, in accordance with the right for humans to have opinions but the obligation for the human face of a corporation to have unfucked opinions.

There was some crying about her adoption of “bleep / boop / bop” as her personal pronouns. This is a particularly dumb one but here’s a quick recap:

Some people put the pronouns by which they prefer to identify (in my case, for example, it is “he / him / his”) into their social media profiles. This is handy in some rare cases where communication requires one to know whether one is addressing a male, a female, a non-binary person, and so on. Trans and non-binary folks use them in order to prevent misunderstandings and questions. Cis folks use them to show solidarity and to lessen the burden of explaining pronouns. I don’t know. It’s just a thing. Naturally, conservative vice signallers use the existence of pronouns in one’s bio to identify libcuck femboys or something. It makes things easier for trans and non-binary people, and it enrages certain conservatives so there’s no downside I can see.

Making a joke out of the pronoun game is a low-key transphobic signal, and so when Carano did that, more calls for her public flogging went around.

This is where it gets wild.

Carano had a chat with her costar, Pedro Pascal, whose twin had just come out as a trans woman. He explained the whole pronouns thing to Carano, who then walked back her joke. She wouldn’t do the pronoun thing herself, she said, but she would no longer make fun – and now she understood the practice, she was sorry for doing so. This is exactly what is meant to happen when someone is being intolerant. Someone educates them, and they become more tolerant and less antagonistic.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Carano was a fighter, and she’d been bullied and screeched at a fucking ton online. She’d had enough.

Okay, so she Instagrammed a picture of the Lviv Pogroms, and compared the atmosphere of hate and distrust that the Nazis encouraged to the current political climate. I told you the Alderaanian holocaust would come back into it. See, nobody knew she was a method actor.

But seriously, she wasn’t wrong. Of course, she was comparing the Jews to people with her political and social views, making herself out to be the victim. That’s questionable. But the ruling rich, be it corporate or political or social media or all three, is invested in polarising the populace. Minorities (actual, oppressed minorities, I mean) suffer the brunt of it, but both ends of the privileged spectrum can also claim to be the victim of hate crimes, because that shit happens.

It’s also just a feature of social media and ignorance and bias, of course.

So, Carano got fired. And I think that’s fine. She worked for Disney. They warned her. Then she put a fucking holocaust image on her public feed. Yeah, it’s fine. She deserved to get fired.

What she didn’t deserve, I think, was to be hounded and bullied all across the internet. Certainly not for transphobia. On that, she grew up. And yes, when you are a public face you have an obligation not to propagate dangerous falsehoods. And when you’re a fucking adult you should be expected to handle adversity without being a goddamn drama queen about it. But there’s a line between criticism and feeding frenzy. And when you cross that line with an MMA veteran who has been taking hits in a “man’s world” all her life, you can probably expect some push-back.

Don’t worry, though! Carano may not be appearing on Disney+ again anytime soon, but Ben Wapiro’s Daily Wire has allegedly agreed to hire her to star in a movie. I’m sure it will be great, as long as she sticks the landing.

This scene has been playing in my head a lot these past few weeks.

That would have been a nice line to close on, but there’s one more wrinkle so far. And that is the apparent attempted social media cancellation of Henry Cavill because he dated Carano … ten years ago!

That, I think I can safely file under “surreal shit that you’re gonna find six instances of on an internet containing billions and billions of scraps of information,” and give it no further credence. If anything, it smells like a false flag operation fabricated by the anti-PC, “cancel culture is bad” crowd. But I’m not that deep down the rabbit hole.

I am keeping a concerned eye on the whole “Cavill’s Superman” situation, though. Because he was a fine Superman and a fucking magnificent Geralt, and we need to look after him.