It's time that I stood my ground and admitted something that has bothered me since 1999.
I have never hated Jar-Jar Binks. The Midichlorians I get, Jake Lloyd's performance was infamous, but I saw him in Jingle All The Way and I enjoyed parts of his performance like that scene where he's imagined by Arnie-Dad as an adult drinking booze proved he had some brilliance if given good material where he could mix cute with creepy and disturbing. But I never hated Jar-Jar Binks. For many years, my brother asked me in no uncertain terms, "Why?". And that's a very good question to ask of a person who defends one of the most hated comic relief characters in modern cinematic history. I hope to illuminate what occurred to me at nine years old to defend this infamous CGI Gungan as it ties into other, more recent examples of people decrying other supposedly annoying comic relief characters which for the record I disagree with in ways we'll get to later. Oh boy will we get to it later.
The reason why I defended Jar-Jar Binks to a crowd of Darth Maul fanboys who mocked me as a child was very simple now I think of it. It wasn't merely Jar-Jar Binks as a character, I mean I thought the floppy ears were cool in the promos but there was more to it when the backlash reached unholy levels of hatred to what was really a CGI creature put there to please children. Children, I remind you, who were my age at the time of The Phantom Menace's cinema release. I was Jar-Jar's target market, as were a lot of other kids who rejected him and preferred Darth Maul instead. No, it wasn't just Jar-Jar's character design or comic relief appeal that got to me. It was the way nerd society just spat on this poor critter and wanted to see him dragged through the streets and maimed, for the crime of... existing. As a child, I'd often been mocked and teased for being annoying, naive or getting in people's way a lot. I was diagnosed with high functioning autism from a very early age and I saw things in Jar-Jar Binks none of the other kids really saw because they didn't have empathy for somebody they saw as annoying. I related to Jar-Jar Binks because here was this alien creature, made an outsider by society even in universe (That's part of the plot if you recall) and despised by the divine wrath of Star Wars fandom, and he was reviled for being annoying rather than a real villain who did truly reprehensible things. Kids then fanboyed over Darth Maul because he looked cool, he had a double bladed lightsaber and had cool makeup, yet the fact my generation rooted for him over the outright harmless Jar-Jar Binks just sat wrong with me, and for years I couldn't put my finger on it until I saw this same thing play out again and again with other movies that came out which were unrelated but the hatred of these harmless comic relief characters was all too familiar. Where other people saw hilarity in jokes about Jar-Jar being frozen in carbonite and harmed in various ways, I saw the same bullying I was put through by my peers for nothing less than the crime of my high functioning autism that made me different and harder to deal with than the other kids who took their social skills for granted. It was also something I've noticed the internet latched onto, this unwarranted hatred of these outright harmless characters who hadn't hurt anyone really.
I didn't notice this cynicism creep in modern fandom reach intolerable levels for me until I saw criticism of Wreck-It Ralph because Sarah Silverman played Vanellope. Oh my word. The overreaction to this character purely on the basis on Silverman Stigma brings my piss to a boil. Don't you fucking dare bring Silverman's baggage into this. Don't. You. Fucking. Dare. I was in the cinema when Wreck-It Ralph was released. The moment I saw this character I knew I was going to like her. For reasons that will take some explaining. For starters, she's wide eyed and fun, annoying to some critics yes, but she's a breath of fresh air to what would be considered the mainstream acceptability of "annoying". Vanellope has fans. She has more fans than Jar-Jar making her a lot safer to defend. She's also got aspects to her character which I find far more eerily relatable to my personal childhood growing up than Jar-Jar had in universe, notably the fact that she has a glitch disability that makes her unable to be accepted by the other game characters and race in the Grand Prix. This character put me back in a place that was very familiar. A familiar place I associate with being hurt and shamed for who I was, by people who either didn't know any better or were just cruel for the hell of it. As soon as those bullies showed up on screen I had an inkling I wasn't gonna leave that theater before going through some flashbacks I'd rather forget. The part where Ralph smashes her car in order to spare her feelings only to make it worse... broke my fucking heart. Let's be real. I've seen Cannibal Holocaust a worrying amount of times. That movie is brutal. Yet due to a horrendous borderline clinical depression I'm still recovering from, among other things like these characters murdering animals on camera earlier, I felt nothing for these bad guys getting torn apart by cannibals. When Ralph tore that car to shreds though, the car that Vanellope worked so hard to create from spare parts, I was in actual tears. My eyes are watering right now just remembering it. There's a big difference between the catharsis of seeing a villain suffering from violence and seeing some poor comic relief character that's done nothing to hurt anyone get their dreams crushed. There's a very important difference. About three jugs of tears worth of difference. I cried the same tears children a quarter of my age cried that day. I thought my years of political activism was enough to kill my soul and I'd never feel emotional about anything ever again. I have never been so wrong. I learned that day that I did have a soul still. That I was capable of emotions I forgot I had. And that I felt the same way about this carnage that these kids who didn't know how rough the world was yet, despite being three times as jaded.
I could not deny that this character reawakened something human in me, when I'd lost all hope I'd ever feel something like that again. I once more believed in cinema. It's entirely likely that Vanellope's glitch disability would make me biased to defend her from the get go. As a high functioning autistic, disabled people in movies get me very protective. I do not fuck around with that stuff. But Vanellope's charms worked all on her own. She was more than just one gimmick to tug on your heart strings. She was a complete character with actual dreams and hopes beyond just being there for sentimentality. She refused to be a victim of her own condition. For these reasons, and a few others I've forgotten to mention by now, I just don't see that Silverman Stigma has any right to remove the dignity of this character. No. Just... no. Jar-Jar has his detractors, but I refuse to acknowledge that he in any way ruined the Star Wars franchise. And I refuse to my dying day to concede to the haters that Vanellope somehow makes Wreck-It Ralph a bad movie. Don't you fuckin' dare.
I should probably mention that Donny is my favourite character from The Big Lebowski, even moreso than The Dude because I know I'm a Little Lebowski Achiever who can't give himself permission to BE The Dude. Donny is the guy who gets on Walter's nerves a lot. I was irritating and hard to love by my friends and family also. He walks into conversations not knowing where the context started. He's out of his element. And I've been out of my element a lot of times. This doesn't make Donny a bad person. He's just a bit out of the loop but he brings a lot to the table. He's still the best bowler. And a guy like that deserves a better funeral than he got.
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