sneeze-scream + han/luke.

[louie_ludwig]

SNEEZE-SCREAM: there is a man at my office, somewhere down the hall, who SNEEZE-SCREAMS on a daily basis. whenever it happens, my work ceases for at least 10 or 15 minutes while i laugh uncontrollably.

han people vs. luke people: so there have been some conversations of late about gendered icons from childhood. my primary icon of masculinity was

Comments

Luke

[amillionandone]

Pretty much only b/c our hair color was almost the same (I was a dirty blond as a kid).

Re: OMG

[constintina]

I forgot!

from the phan down the hall

[anonymous]

i'm afraid it might be me! i have always had a ridiculous yell sneeze. i can't help it. i also have a foghorn for nose blowing.

as a young nerd, i preferred luke. but i also once thought ROTJ was the best of the movies (and i enjoyed episode 1).

nowadays i prefer han solo, the sort of character who helped make the original trilogy not as shitacular as the prequels. and now i'm more of an ESB/ANH kinda guy.

[constintina]

Everyone knows I'm on the Han side, but of the tripod I ID-ed Leia. Strongly. She was a primary icon of femininity for me.

I mean, I still can't even hate on the ep 4 hairdo.

[magnolienbaum]

i don't even remember paying attention to han or luke. but i totally wanted to be leia. in the same way that i wanted to be that weird princess-in-the-sky in the neverending story.

[flw]

I don't know if I have much to offer on the subject, but I want to talk about Luke/Han.

Luke is the right-hand path and Han is the left-hand path. Everyone wants to be the left-hand path. You can't really be on that path until you've exhausted the right-hand. So, let's say, Michael Phillips is Luke Skywalker. He won eight gold medals, now what? He doesn't know what to do. Because we don't have the right-hand path (Luke, school, monastery, society) or the left-hand (Han, the forest, the wild, anarchy, individualism) anymore. We don't need people anymore. We are unnecessary.

Now I happen to be the target audience for the Star Wars... I was five years old when it premiered. I saw it about forty times in the summer of 1977. My friends and I would ride our bikes about four miles, every day to see the movie. It cost us fifty cents at a matinee. I can tell you this. Han Solo wore a vest, and his gun had a cone on the end. The sight on the gun was off to one side. Obi Wan was good and Darth Vader was evil. I dreamed about blowing up the

[snarkophone]

as i've said before, i have no in-depth knowledge of this, in a way that is apparently horrifying to many people. but from what i minimally know about the movies: it seems that luke is the one in the process of becoming something - a man, a master, what have you. he's in the midst of forming identity, and like sausage, it's not so appealing to watch in the making. whereas han seems to be very clearly defined - strong, decisive, aggressive - and that looks a lot more like something to identify with.

then again, i pretty much remember luke to be a whiny bastard throughout, so maybe he's permanently frozen in the least appealing stage of development.