Has this ever happened to you? You arrive home from a long day of burning your Nike trainers, smashing up your Keurig coffee makers, and stamping on Greggs’ vegan sausage rolls to sit down with the missus and watch a movie. You go for a classic – Dumbo. You check Disney+, then suddenly, you remember. The woke have won. Dumbo isn’t on Disney+ anymore. Well, it is, it’s just in a slightly different place because it has racist crows, including one literally called Jim Crow. You burst into tears. You froth at the mouth. You shit yourself. You just wanted to watch Dumbo – what is the world coming to? You’re in no mood for a film now – you do some Lego to calm down. Ahh, the new Star Wars one, Boba Fett’s Slave I… wait a minute. What does that say? Boba Fett’s Starship? They’ve only gone and changed the name! Will the woke stop at nothing? They’ve already ruined Star Wars with a Black man and a woman – not Lando or Leia, you saw them as a kid so they’re cool – and now they’re basically saying Boba Fett is a racist? You throw the Lego on the floor, watching it smash into a thousand little pieces, before remembering that Lego comes in a thousand little pieces anyway. Your way of life is over. The woke have destroyed it.
What’s that? It’s never happened to you? In fact, it’s never happened to anyone? Well then, why can’t everyone just shut up?
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‘They’re changing the name of Boba Fett’s ship’ is the latest example of cancel culture out in force, except of course, they aren’t. I’m not even sure who this nebulous ‘they’ is, but I know they aren’t changing the name of Boba Fett’s ship. The Slave I will still be known as the Slave I in however many shows, movies, and cartoons Disney wedges Boba Fett into as it continues to milk the Star Wars nostalgia cow for all its worth. All that’s changing is the name of one specific Lego set, and even then, ‘changing’ is not the correct word. This is a new Lego set – no change required. The toymaker merely decided to name it ‘Boba Fett’s Starship’ rather than ‘Slave I’.
I’m not being willfully ignorant here – I understand that it was changed because of the loaded racial history of the word ‘slave’, and a fear of being cancelled. But the reaction to cancel culture – real or perceived – is often far more extreme than cancel culture itself. J.K. Rowling, Scarlett Johansson, and R. Kelly are three names you’ll see when you Google ‘victims of cancel culture.’ J.K. Rowling’s views on trans people have seen her popularity take a hit, but her books still sell, she still has an agent and a publisher, and she still has a massive platform. Harry Potter as an entity is alive and well. Scarlett Johansson, meanwhile, was ‘cancelled’ for her views that she should be allowed to play Asian people or trans men – later that year she was nominated for two Oscars, winning one of them, and is currently starring in Black Widow, the biggest blockbuster of the summer. R. Kelly was accused of being a paedophile running an underage sex cult – these credible accusations are not the result of ‘cancel culture’ at work, they are completely tied to the criminal justice system. Michael Jackson, accused of similar crimes, will also appear in these search results.
This is the issue with cancel culture – it can be applied to an actress touting some less-than-PC opinions being criticised while still getting A-list work and adulation, and can be applied to accused paedophiles. It can also be applied to a toy company being perhaps a mite overly sensitive and changing the name of a Lego set that only the more committed collectors would have picked up anyway, yet it has become a huge news story.
We cover Lego news intermittently here, especially when it relates to pop culture – more specifically, games – but we deliberately didn't cover the Boba Fett story, not because we're woke or because we were trying to keep it a secret, but because it's a non-story. The story isn't that Lego is calling its set on Boba Fett's ship Boba Fett's Starship, it's that the word 'Slave' has been dropped, and that causes a different kind of outrage – a much louder outrage. To focus on the story – rather than just the reveal of the new Lego sets – is to deliberately dangle the opportunity for outrage in the faces of bad faith actors. Had it been released with the name Slave I, I doubt it would have had any reaction at all, because Boba Fett's ship is called that – it's not a new name, and it's not even a dated one. The name has no link to the American slave trade, although it likely was changed on the Lego set to avoid possibly being accused of maybe being slightly offensive. But do you really care? Is this really a thing that matters to you? Go and have a sausage roll and enjoy yourself. The woke won't force you to make it vegan, I promise.
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