'Anti-Disney' group claims responsibility for Harassing Star Wars actress Kelly Marie Tran
An ‘anti-Disney’ group has claimed credit for harassing Kelly Marie Tran to the point that she quit social media.
It’s said that it was behind similar online harassment of Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy, Lucasfilm creative executive Pablo Hidalgo and British Star Wars star Daisy Ridley.
Via a Facebook group that appears to be motivated largely by racism and sexism, the catchily-named ‘Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys’ referred to Kennedy’s ‘feminazi agenda’ and the ‘perversion’ of the Star Wars canon in recent years.
It also called for the reversal of ‘forced diversity’ and to ‘bring back the Straight White Male Hero that isn’t manufactured by a corrupt corporation like Disney’.
The group was previously thrown off Facebook for creating an event called ‘Give Black Panther a Rotten Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes’, which was set up to derail the Marvel movie’s score on the reviews aggregator website.
In the statement on Facebook, which now appears to have been deleted (but was grabbed by Screenrant), it also linked to the hashtag #GiveUsLegends, another online group which campaigns for ‘the original expanded universe’ of Star Wars, in opposition to the current, more inclusive direction of the franchise.
GiveUsLegends has sought to distance itself from the group, however, tweeting:
As a founder of @GiveUsLegends and president of the non-profit charity @twinsunsf that #GiveUsLegends became, I can confirm that the page in the story doesn't and has never had anything to do with GUL or the Alliance group which I help to admin. Please correct your story. Thanks!
— Brian Borg (@Azcatryo) June 9, 2018
The likes of director Rian Johnson and Mark Hamill have lent their support to Tran, who played Rose Tico in The Last Jedi, after she deleted all her posts from Instagram last week, publicly slamming those who have harassed her for months online.
What's not to love?#GetALifeNerds pic.twitter.com/k1sa0X1qpg
— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) June 6, 2018
However, since quitting the site, she’s gained more than 50,000 more followers.
Meanwhile, a fan art movement has spring up too, under the hashtag #FanArtForRose.
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