Why some Mandalorian fans are cancelling Gina Carano (Cara Dune)

Gina Carano (Cara Dune in The Mandalorian) has come under fire for offensive tweets. Will this cancellation blow over or is it going places?

MMA fighter-turned-actor Gina Carano made her debut on The Mandalorian in its first season, playing former Rebel shock trooper Cara Dune. She returned later in the season, bringing a grit and muscularity to a character we know will be showing up sooner or later in the second season, which is currently airing on Disney+.

And when that happens, prepare for some blowback on social media, because Carano has landed herself in a middle of a firestorm that may or may burn out as time goes on; it’s hard to tell with these things. Basically, some people are ticked off at her for things she’s said on Twitter. What things and why? Let’s get into it.

Carano actually first drew ire months ago, when people were asking her to put pronouns in her Twitter bio, a common practice among transgender and cisgender social media users to help avoid misgendering. In response, she added the words “boop/bop/beep,” mocking the practice, which is also fairly common.

From there, it played out pretty much like cancellation always does, with people calling Carano names and wishing for her death, while others calmly tried to explain the value of the practice and how belittling it makes others feel, but they weren’t heard because there was too much anger in the air. Carano, meanwhile, got defensive and refused to budge, although she did share that she’d talked with costar Pedro Pascal, who offered her some perspective. “Yes, Pedro & I spoke & he helped me understand why people were putting them in their bios,” she wrote. “I didn’t know before but I do now. I won’t be putting them in my bio but good for all you who choose to.”

All in all, it was a pretty standard cancellation that left no one happy at the end.

The next dust-up came more recently, when Carano tweeted support of some of the unfounded conspiracy theories being spread about the 2020 election:

If you’re following the news, you’ve probably heard that President Donald Trump and many of his colleagues in Congress have refused to follow centuries-old tradition and concede that Joe Biden won the election, instead claiming without evidence that the returns were the result of mass voting fraud even though the spread is pretty wide and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which Trump himself started, said that this election had been “the most secure in American history,” election professionals being on particularly high alert after tampering in 2016. It’s a conspiracy theory started to hold onto power at the expense of the country, which is suffering from record high coronavirus case growth at the moment and needs a peaceful, cooperative transfer of power more than ever.

So yeah, it’s not great to see Carano playing into this — it’s not great to see anyone playing into this, especially if they have a platform. (The Voter ID bit is also pretty creepy, since such laws have pretty much always been pretexts for discrimination.) Twitter, as expected, had something to say about it:

And so on.

So that, in a nutshell, is why there’s a dustup about Gina Carano. What happens now? I dunno. It’s rare that actors actually face lasting consequences for things they say on social media, although it does happen. As a supporting character on The Mandalorian, Carano is both protected by the fact that she’s not that big a player — why bother firing her if she’s not that important to the show? — and more expendable — why not fire her, since it won’t change much? And then there’s the question of whether her tweets are objectionable enough for it to be worth taking action in the first place.

Honestly, the solution for everyone may just be to stay off Twitter.

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