Star Wars, Episode 8: The Last Jedi

[Iambaytor]

1 hour ago, Drifter said:

As my wife put it before: "They've gone through too much shit for THAT to be their happily ever after." I've posted before on the problems of how the new films were crapping all over the old ones, betrayal might be too strong a word, but this modern nihilist cyclical bullshit in sci-fi is getting out of hand. Nobody's efforts pay off, not even the bad guys, it's fucking right there in a character's goddamn name, "DJ stands for 'Don't Join' you dumb shits," it's depressing when the director makes a point about the pointlessness of ethical struggles and the gray areas of morality in a fucking fantasy setting with the most obviously diametric representations of good and evil in the modern history of film.

 

Star Wars isn't a children's cartoon, a happy ending was never promised or implied.  Sure, everbody had a big party after they blew up Death Star II and the Emperor and Vader but they had a big party after they blew up the first Death Star and we saw how things went for the rebels after that.  Sure, Return of the Jedi was a bit more kid friendly but moral greyness and the cyclical nature of the battle between good and evil have always been part of the narrative, that's Darth Vader's entire character arc.  Just because yours or your wife's (or the writers of the godawful expanded universe novels') head canon said that Luke, Leia, and Han went on to be lauded as heroes of the universe and lived long and happy lives with minimal conflict doesn't mean that's what would or should happen.  In fact, that's a terrible way to set a story.  Star Wars isn't about winning or losing, it's about balance and that has blatantly been the point since the first one.  DJ is the cynical take on that, sure but this movie presents that ideology as flawed, the entire message of the movie is about how the struggle and the hope are the point.  If you're saying that the rebels should have brought peace to the galaxy and everything should have been happy with minimal conflict from that point on then you're saying that Star Wars is a story for small children.  And saying that it should have a neat happy ending because it's fantasy is nonsensical as well, even children's fantasy is plenty dark.  I mean the classic children's fantasy protagonist, Bilbo Baggins gets corrupted by his nifty magic ring and lives a torturous existence as an impossibly old and senile man, similarly his favorite nephew lives with physical and emotional wounds that will never heal and wanders off to basically die with his uncle in a far off land.  Your entire case is that, for nostalgic reasons, Star Wars should be far less nuanced and that's a pretty weak argument.

 

The only character I want an explanation for is Snoke. Who was this fucker and how did he come out of nowhere to rule over the imperial remnant as a dark-side godling? Seriously, he makes no sense what so ever, you can't even make a reasonable assumption there. Everybody else has, if not simple purpose, then a one worded explanation for their existence, soldier, pilot, pirate, slicer... Dark Side Demigod? Where the fuck was he hiding, the emperor's summer empire? Were they ruling parts of the galaxy in some kind of time-share?  He was the emperor of an evil empire... and was more powerful than Vader (because Vader was his bitch)... nothing more was needed because we knew nothing. It was also a logical assumption: there was an evil empire, so there had to be an evil emperor, and that was all that was needed. But because of what was established in the first three films the prequels HAD to show his rise, didn't have to focus as much on him as they did, probably shouldn't have, but eh, fuck it. But for a Demigod Snoke to show up AFTER all the crap that went into deposing the emperor. Where the fuck was his gnarly ass hiding all this time? 

 

Snoke never really proved himself to be any more powerful than Palpatine and your logic doesn't really work because who was Darth Sidious before he decided to become a Senator.  The Jedi Council were completely unaware that a master of the Sith was even still around, let alone right under their noses.  Star Wars takes place in a literal galaxy of its own so Snoke could've been off anywhere doing anything without drawing attention to himself, especially if he kept a low profile as Palpatine did prior to the Naboo Trade Disputes.  You want a one word answer for who Snoke is?  Warlord.  He's clearly the leader of some fringe paramilitary group with religious trappings, a sort of Osama Bin Laden of outer space who took advantage of the power vacuum left by Palpatine's death.  And maybe he didn't pop up before because he didn't want to send up his obscure Sith order against another Sith master who had a galaxy conquering army and a pet psychopath on the payroll.

 

As for screwing over the previous films, all the new films have really succeeded in doing is negating the struggle of the previous films. Not even because of what's transpired on screen even, but before the camera even rolled the galaxy had gone to shit, with the first order one dead system, one death ray or accidental supernova away from conquering the galaxy all over again, implying that nothing was made better by the heroes of the last series. Fucking grim-dark sci-fi bullshit.

 

Did you think the entirety of the Empire was on the second Death Star?  They were a military force capable of controlling the galaxy and the rebels were a fringe group making surgical strikes that were on the run.  Did you think the rebels arrested all the Imperial soldiers post-Return?  And the new movies have made it clear that the galaxy at large considers The First Order an annoyance at best, they haven't taken over the galaxy again they just destroyed the rebellion's best hope of summoning a government force to combat them.  And also, I can't overstate this too many times, THE STRUGGLE IS THE POINT.  The theme is balance and the point of balance is that it is easily offset, it's not grimdark in the slightest unless you're expecting Star Wars to be He-Man and the Masters of the fucking Universe.

 

 

 

 

[The NZA]

aside: i dug this post

 

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ROTJ would be ripped to shreds if it were released today. The structure of the film is a mess. It reuses the Death Star plot. Luke's plan to rescue Han makes no sense. Palpatine's plot to lure the Rebels into a trap makes no sense. Vader's redemption is unearned.

Yet I love it to death regardless because it's a fantasy movie and it does a good enough job suspending my disbelief that I don't notice or care about these things.

 

[Jumbie]

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okay, but give examples, cause i really didn't even see how 

 

I don't want to start throwing stuff out until I have my head organised. The more I start thinking about this stuff and what I want to say, the more it I see it at the nexus of a larger creative philosophy discussion about the hero''s journey and the way stories and archetypes are part of social and personal psychology plus the rise of commercial sequel culture and the rules of story-writing and capturing an audience.

I don't think I can really explain myself without a long form piece right now (But then again, what else is new, right?)

But I'm NOT saying that the deep and unique pain some particular viewers of TLJ was because Luke was humiliated or grumpy or lost hope of contemplated killing Kylo. I believe those things to be problems, but they don't make this film any worse than say AotC with its mischaracterisation of Yoda, its neutering of the Jedi, its laughable 'romance' and morality etc.

I'm saying there's a meta cause that hurts some SW fans directly in a mostly unconscious way and these faults are scapegoated for it.

Problem is, the meta concept is kinda nebulous in my mind and I'm trying to pin down the borders of it and the main arteries of its function. I can summarize it as 'lost legacy leading to lack of audience investment and refusal to suspend disbelief,' but I can't YET lay out the cause and effect in a way that I feel is complete. I'm actually at the point of feeling like I'm back in university writing papers again... I mean, I've written three novels and this feels like it's taking more effort to organise and plot out right now.

 

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a) literally no one cares about your fanfics or "pet theories",

 

Well, I see no true cause of discontent originating from the movie not matching fan theories. That's part of the scapegoating I was talking about where an alienated fan decides to act out the anger stage of their grief process by throwing the nearest rock at the object of distaste and for a lot of SW fans, the nearest rock is a fan theory.

 

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b) the visceral reaction to stronger female characters & minorities is forever embarrassing, in any fandom - but it's crazy prevalent here

 

Sadly for some people, the nearest rock is resentment of representation. But I don't see that resentment as a driver of the higher level of anger with TLJ.

 

However, as a separate issue, I don't think the anti-representation reaction is more severe than other properties, just that since the audience is so much bigger for SW that the sheer volume of disruption a small percentage can create seems overwhelming on the calm ocean of people who are fine with minority representation. A 1 meter rock dropped in a 100 meter pool is not gonna hurt anyone. But a 1km asteroid in a 100km lake is gonna destroy towns on the shore.

 

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c) i can't walk down the street without stepping on some fucking star wars merch, literally no other fanbase gets pandered to like this..

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This is a bad argument because it relies on confusing two different meanings/contexts of 'pandering'.

 

Star Wars fans are diverse in their wants.

 

Saying you pander to the collectors of merch is not the same as saying you pander to the story wishes of the fans. Even if that's often the same fan.

 

Disney can pander to the group that desires stuff on their shelves without pandering to the group that wants Rey to be a Kenobi. 

 

NOTE: I'm not saying Disney should cater to fan demands. Just that in an academic sense, your argument is very wrong and based on word trickery to conflate two different scenarios.

 

I will also point out that things like Boba Fett, porgs, ewoks and Phasma prove that SW has catered to merch fans without catering to story needs for a long time since SW is a merch selling machine at its core.

 

As for my own view on it, I think that Disney made a genuine mistake in trying to cater too much to the fans love of the original movie that ironically backfired. For instance, the decision to rehash the underdog rebels vs big empire dynamic led to them erasing the legacy of the Rebel Alliance and Luke, which is the magnifying factor in all complaints. On a lesser note, it's been documented that Disney skimped on worldbuilding politics in the new trilogy BECAUSE fans felt the prequels were too talky and political. I don't think that specifically played into the meta-alienation but I do think it shows that Disney was making a deliberate effort to ape the dynamics of the first trilogy and THAT certainly led to the meta-alienation.

 

 

 

 

 

3

 

Once again, I have no idea how to undo a quote. I was supposed to end the NZA quote and ended up starting a quote within a quote and now I can't change it.

No one else ever makes these mistakes and has to fix them?

Edited April 2, 2018 by Jumbie

[The NZA]

...i have no idea how you are so bad at quotes with this board's iteration 

 

for the last part though: i mean, weren't they kinda painted into that corner? you're gonna need the big bad empire vs the underdog rebels again or there's not much of a galactic threat.  you're damn sure gonna have to entice the older fans by tying up what happened with their favorites after the credits stopped rolling, because if you don't it's just a huge elephant in the room and everyone's even madder for leaving them hanging. 

 

anyway, your post was about what wasn't the big problems with the movie, despite so many people saying those were big parts of it for them.  i guess i'm going to wait for you to marinate on this apparently heavy and layered topic from your emotionless robot chamber before knowing what was so bad here, haha

 

[Jumbie]

 

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 you're gonna need the big bad empire vs the underdog rebels again

Absolutely not. The best source of war movies we have ever had is WW2 which is a giant battle of roughly equal sides with shifting alliances divergent goals, covert underdog missions, huge set piece battles, political intrigue, personal intrigue, spies, technology and arms races, superweapons...

 

Any competent writing team could take world war 2 as a template and pick out the elements of good story to make the heroes underdogs for the duration of the trilogy. The whole 2 years after Pearl Harbor comes to mind on the US side. Or you could make the main characters 'Egyptians' caught between the British (Republic) 'helping' on one side and the Italians and Nazis (First Order) invading on the other.

Disney mistakenly decided to ape rather than remake  and they ended up having to negate the first trilogy. And THAT is when they were painted into a corner because nothing they did with Han, Leia or Luke could undo that negation.

 

(Not to mention that so many great stories where the HEROES and their community are underdogs or are placed in great danger are based on Vietnam or the War on Terror. where the US protagonist comes from a side with huge military, economic and political advantages )

Note that the word I use is 'negate'. You can have Han, Leia and Luke all die painful, horrible deaths and it would be fine for most fans as long as the deaths 'meant something' in the long run because they left the galaxy a better place for having lived. None of our 3 OT main characters seem able to say that at the start of TFA and that is confirmed and solidified by the end of TLJ. 

I'm gonna do a post after this using Baytor, Axel and Drifter's conversation to illustrate what I mean and why each of them is wrong in their own way. Gotta go eat dinner first.

Edited April 2, 2018 by Jumbie

[The NZA]

19 minutes ago, Jumbie said:

Disney mistakenly decided to ape rather than remake  and they ended up having to negate the first trilogy. And THAT is when they were painted into a corner because nothing they did with Han, Leia or Luke could undo that negation.

 

but how was the first trilogy negated?  because the sith were able to retake power again later? i feel like i missed something

[Drifter]

They set out to change the galaxy and ultimately completely failed, but even worse then they couldn't even change anything in their own lives.

[The NZA]

they took out both vader and by proxy, sidious - sparing countless lives

 

luke didn't take to teaching, and a relationship didn't last forever, like most.  i don't get it - everything was supposed to be fixed forever after the first trilogy?  if that was the case, why would there be a story worth engaging for another 3 movies?

 

jumbie's using war metaphors, so i think it's weird to say that the current nazi resurgence would somehow mean WW II was kind of a wash 

[Iambaytor]

Exactly, resolution of conflict is not negated by an addition to conflict.  Fixing one thing doesn't fix all things, that's a child's concept and the people saying that this ruined their happy endings are ignoring the years of peace and comfort the characters had in-between trilogies.  Luke had enough time to establish a temple and a school before fucking up because he was never very good at the whole Jedi thing and that was canon before The Force Awakens was a gleam in Disney's eye and Han and Leia was clearly a romance forged by sharing a battlefield and without that, what did they really have in common?  The Rebels didn't fail at shit, they won their battles, celebrated and moved on to the next ones.  That's how war works.

[Iambaytor]

 

https://twitter.com/PhilSzostak/status/980685117361442816 https://twitter.com/PhilSzostak/status/980685117361442816 https://twitter.com/PhilSzostak/status/980685117361442816

[Iambaytor]

 

[Jumbie]

SPOILERS AHEAD. I'm not hiding it because the damned board goes weird when you open it because I posted a frikkin book.

6 hours ago, Drifter said:

As my wife put it before: "They've gone through too much shit for THAT to be their happily ever after." I've posted before on the problems of how the new films were crapping all over the old ones, betrayal might be too strong a word, but this modern nihilist cyclical bullshit in sci-fi is getting out of hand. Nobody's efforts pay off

 

 

Here we go, exhibit A, the alienated fan who feels like TLJ broke his love of Star Wars. He's vilified by many as focusing on minor details like the origin of Snoke when Snoke's lack of a backstory is hardly an egregious sin in the world of moviemaking and he is often dismissed as selfish for wanting how 'own' Star Wars and not allow other interpretations.

I think the truth is that this is a person suffering real pain which comes from a place he doesn't even understand and that he's going through the 5 stages of grief because his pain is so real and comes from such a psychologically deep place.

What could cause such pain?

 

Drifter touches on it with more self-awareness than most alienated fans. Or at least his wife does. 

The new trilogy negates much of the gains won by the heroes of the originals. She uses the phrase 'happily ever after' and for this reason people seem to think that the alienated fans are upset at the personal unhappiness or indignities of the OT main characters. Even Drifter's wife seems to think so.

But there is a difference between reward and legacy. The legacy is what they built and will leave behind when they die. I'm talking about in-movie legacy. Not the legacy of Hamil, Fisher & Ford.

 

To understand why this is the central source of all the heightened discontent, we need to touch on two sidebars first.
 

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Star Wars was built on the Hero's Journey or Cycle. One often-ignored element of the Hero's journey is that at the end of the quest, the hero returns with a blessing or gift for his community. 

 

That is why The Return of the King spends so much time at the end on a commonly overlooked section of the story, 'The Scouring of the Shire,' where the 4 now-heroic hobbits come back and kick out the bandits that have taken over their village using the skills and weapons and valor they learned on their adventure. For the benefit of the Shire.
 

What did the OT heroes give to their galactic village? It's mostly vague things like freedom from oppression and the right to live, ...and sick Ewok percussion music, but a few specific things are implied: 

 

-The return of the Jedi as peacekeepers and guardians, particularly Luke, who has proven his resiliency and commitment to the light.

 

-The Return of representative government, like a Republic, say - one with the goal of eventually bringing good, fair government to all the galaxy.

 

-A heroic and responsible Han Solo who now understands loyalty and selflessness and is a benefit to his community.

 

-Vigilance about the nature of evil and how it rises.

I should also note a few thing that are NOT implied: Han and Leia living together happily or even having children. Luke having any kind of personal happiness. (Dude is gonna be haunted by killing his father for the rest of his life.) Leia being president of the Republic. Long lives. Peaceful deaths. Prosperity.

 

 

 
 

 

How and Why we invest in characters. The Star Wars fandom is famous for how crazy in love we are with the world and the characters. The actors are beloved and we can't get enough media about them or the characters. 200 bucks for a Leia towel? Sure, I'll pay that.
 

In the SW movies, the fans invested emotions in these three characters like nothing else before. Their struggles were our struggles. When they cried, we understood why. When they got mad at the droids, so did we. When they stared at the suns, we wanted off that planet too. When they kissed their sister on the mouth, we-


Okay, I'm getting off track. For whatever reason, the OT hit the right buttons to sync our emotions with the fates of its characters, many of us with manic intensity. And when they got that victory, we were winners too. 

Going back through the thousands of years of storytelling, humans have looked to archetypes and epic tales to take their spirit out of their isolated valleys and sea villages out into the world for adventures. To live out dreams and, at the end of the story, feel a sense of accomplishment and worthiness as if we took that journey ourselves.

 

There's a lot of old psycho analytical stuff on this from Freud and Jung that is often considered outdated in the specifics, but no one doubts that stories and fictional characters are vessels for our senses of self.
 

 

And when you put a large fraction of your sense of self-worth into a modern franchise character, that character becomes a Harry Potter horcrux in the possession of a greedy corporation. NOT a good idea. What if that corporation decides to continue the story in a way that negates the accomplishments of your heroes?

 

LET'S TAKE A TIME OUT HERE. I want to make clear that the Last Jedi is divisive, not generally a misfire. It is a misfire for SOME fans. A large segment of them. Casual fans seem fine with it. Likely because they didn't go through the bonding with the OT. All the alienated fans seem to have stepped onto the Star Wars train at the OT stations. Not to say that all OT fans are alienated. But if all the alienated ones are OT fans, that's a clear and concrete indication of where the discontent is coming from.

 

So for those who are OT-bonded so to speak, whose sense of worth is tied up in the OT, what happens when you get to the new trilogy?

When you start reading the opening crawl of TFA, a few things start to become clear. Implied promise have been missed. For one thing, no one seems vigilant about the rise of evil. The Republic is not fighting the evil First Order, so Leia has gone rogue to do it. Good for Leia, but why aren't the good guys installed by the OT heroes being good? They learned about this stuff the first time around when Palpatine used corruption to gain power and then took over slowly with military power! (Note. This is not me bringing in the prequels. The OT talked about the wiping away of the senate and the gradual rise of Palpatine through deciet and corruption and the elimination of the Jedi. When your Jedi are taken out, surely you know shit's about to go down and you get yourself strapped for a fight? So the vigilance the OT heroes brought to their community is negated.)

 

Also, after 30 years the Republic is tiny and ineffective. That's not necessarily unrealistic, but with oppression overthrown and good people in charge and peace in space, plus the protection of the Jedi, we would have expected something more substantial. (This sense of the weak Republic is exacerbated by Abrams refusing to lay out the politics here. Just what are the borders and capabilities of the antagonists? We don't know so it's hard to get a sense of what the OT legacy is.) So that's another OT accomplishment negated. Partially.

 

Luke's not here helping to fight? But he always fights. He forged himself into a weapon of defense as one of the Jedi-

 

Oh wait, there are no Jedi! WTF!?

 

Something terrible must have happened. Oh, this is horrible. What could have done this? 

What the Hell is a Snoke?

 

PAUSE. This is not a simple mismatch of expectations. Three things we view as OUR accomplishments are just wiped away. But you're probably thinking, "Well, no one was throwing rocks during the title crawl of TFA, why do you think this matters?"

 

Because the process is unconscious. It takes a while to set in. And most importantly, we are loyal to SW so we give it the benefit of the doubt. We want to see the whole movie first and get a clear picture of what happened.

 

We hope the movie will show us that we didn't really lose anything. We're already wondering if Luke is off on some secret mission, because simple surrender would negate the promise of the OT that Luke and the Jedi will fight to protect the community.

 

Ok, movie, what's next?

 

Han Solo, space pirate.

Well fuck. He's not with the Rebellion (uh Resistance), he's not a benefactor to his community. He's right back where he was the first time we met him, doing illegal deals in dirty space ships. So the whole emotional journey we took with him, watching him grow, nearly losing him to Jabba etc so we could see General Solo man of the community was for nothing? Man, this is bad news.

 

So now, our not-yet-quite-alienated fan has had another earned gift negated, something that the psychological effect of storytelling has made him view as HIS accomplishment. If things have gotten this bad, there must be some amazing explanation. 

PAUSE: I understand that the story reason for Han to revert is quite sound. His son is a child murderer and the right-hand fist of the greatest threat to peace and freedom since Darth Plagueis. And when our fan finds out about this, they understand why Han is the way he is, but such a loss, it couldn't have just come from some random source. If the loyal fan is to lose this sense of accomplishment and worth tied up with Han Solo as a gift to the community, it better have some amazing, rewarding in-story explanation. 

NOTE: This fits in quite well with the grieving process idea. When our friend dies in some random accident, we get mad at the randomness of it. Humans, FOR WHATEVER REASON, want losses to have some special meaning. I don't advocate for that to be accommodated. I'm just saying that's how all of us work and you can't ignore its effects. Some of you might be tempted to say, 'A grown woman shouldn't have so much invested in fictional characters. It's the fangirls' own damned fault for being babies." But you're wrong. The phenomenon of SW is because it had a secret formula for prying open hearts. The fans can't help that they feel invested in their characters because that's what good storytelling is evolved to do over the centuries. It hacks our brains to create the links.

 

So now the fan is thinking, 'Man, I really wish I knew what this Snoke guy did to turn Ben and negate Han Solo and all the Jedi!'

Oh wait, the Republic just got 5 planets wiped out! Damn, this is bad. I bet the rest of the Republic stop pussy-footing around now and come help Leia. 

Thank God we have Rey. The way Luke left her there on Jakku, that's got to be part of the plan he had, some last minute play while he recovered. 

(Yes, I know Luke didn't leave Rey on Jakku, but that's what the movie presented, so it cannot be considered otherwise for what the audience would have been feeling at the time.)

 

PAUSE. I'm getting tired now, so I'm gonna do a quick bullet of some things.

 

-At the end of TLJ, the negations of so many OT gifts to the community would not be clear, just fearfully suspected. We would all turn to Episode 8 to show us that we didn't really lose all those legacies that feel like our accomplishments. Maybe Luke is off on a secret mission and Rey is part of it? Maybe Leia gets to lead the Republic now and get them mobilized properly? And at least we'll find out how Snoke F'd up the galaxy so bad. What did he do to Kylo? Where did he even come from?

 

-But then in the opening crawl of TLJ, we learn that the Republic has been destroyed. So now another legacy of the OT heroes is negated. Luke is not on a secret mission. In fact, he's no sort of guardian of the galaxy, willing to let his sister die. So that's negated too. And if Luke isn't on a secret mission, that means the Jedi are truly gone. He hasn't been secrety training a new generation on the island or anything.

So that''s 3 hard negations of major OT heroes' legacy items right there at the start. This mohas has cratered within 15 minutes for any fan with strong emotional investment in the OT. Any kid who ever felt like they accomplished something when Leia, Luke, Han, Ackbar, Wedge, Lando etc beat the Empire has had that sense of worth shattered.

Most of this alienation was created in TFA, but it will be TLJ that gets the blame, because that is here it was co is where it was made concrete.

 

-But none of the loss is felt consiously or immediately. We are still in the denial stage of grief. Because of the unconscious nature of our loss, we are even skipping over anger and getting to bargaining. We continue to hope that Rey is part of some secret backup plan. It's mostly inertia at this point, since that would not change all the negations, but it's one of the few hopes we have remaining from TFA when we first started to dread that this new trilogy was destroying our childhood. We want it without having a reason to want it anymore.

 

And that brings us to this:

 

3 hours ago, Drifter said:

The only character I want an explanation for is Snoke. Who was this fucker and how did he come out of nowhere to rule over the imperial remnant as a dark-side godling? Seriously, he makes no sense what so ever, you can't even make a reasonable assumption there.

 

 

All this man has left now is to find meaning in his loss. No ordinary evil man could have ruined his life's work. )I mean, the life's work of his heroes. Nothing less than a story of epic meaning and superlative consequnce can suffice to justify Disney eliminating the legacy of our beloved OT and all the work and effort we put into it. I mean, that the characters put into it.

 

2 hours ago, Axels said:

What did we know about the Emperor when he was introduced?

 

We're just running in circles with these discussions.

 

 

Indeed. We are going in circles. Because the ones laughing at the 'fanboys' can't see their grief and the 'fanboys' can't articulate what they feel because the source is so structural in the story. Most seem unaware of where their grief is coming from, but they keep saying overdramatic things like, "This killed my childhood" and "Star Wars is over for me." And they will soon get to the anger of grieving and start nitpicking the story to pieces and scapegoating all kinds of real and percieved faults for what went wrong. And the TLJ defenders will defend those nitpicks, pointing out that none of those flaws like purple-haired women, lightspeed mechanics, awkward lines etc are fatal enough to 'kill' a movie and this the fanboys are irrational. 

 

2 hours ago, The NZA said:

i guess it's cynical but i like that as "happily ever after" - han & leia were entirely different people with different roles/priorities etc, so them not working out in the long run made it more interesting.  luke was always impetuous, so him kinda bombing the jedi academy over a poor decision, again, didn't really feel out of line for me. 

5

NZA can never feel the fanboy grief. 

He is too objective. He wasn't soulbound to this OT. It was never his thing and he didn't sit in cardboard boxes by himself at age 13 hoping he wasn't too old to be daydreaming himself as an X-wing pilot flying the trench run.

He is a 1st class geek, but his sense of identity comes from Link and He-man and sometimes he still cries over the death of Optimus Prime late at night.

But he's not a Star Wars OT geek. 

While he can't feel the grief, I think he can understand the mechanics of it however. I know I have little proof for the main point of my argument which is that the fans' sense of worth and identity is tied up tot he in-movie legacy of the characters (and the main reason I'm taking so long to put my thoughts together is trying to find psych papers or literature crits to back me up properly), but I think anyone who is a fanboy can appreciate how they are tied up with not just their characters, but their character's gifts to the community.

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I have more to add, but baytor's quote is on the other page and this iteration of the page doesn't allow multiquite across pages. I'm going to come back and EDIT this SAME post once I type out the rest.

If you've reached this point and are reading this, reload to get the rest. 
 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 3, 2018 by Jumbie

[Iambaytor]

See but you're just restating the point in the more longwinded way, what it boils down to is "this didn't turn out the way I expected it to in my head, I am mad."  And your grief concept is interesting but really just amounts to little more than gatekeeping.  The fact of the matter is that if this wasn't Star Wars people wouldn't be so mad about it but since Star Wars has attained religious status those who worship at the alter of Lucas get really butthurt about things that wouldn't bother them in another property.

[Jumbie]

OK, either my computer is messed up or my nemesis the board software hates me, but I can't edit my previous post at anything less than 1 character per minute due to slowness. So I'll add my second part here. Also I didn't get to finish proofreading my original post before the board AI (which is surely skynet vintage) decided to freeze me out so I can't fix typos and badly worded statements in the last half. I may have phrased things badly and have to issue clarificatios later.

 

Spoiler

 

 

Continuing. A lot of this will be scattershot and disorganised, because I'm responding to things in baytor's post as I see them or think of them.

Uh, Iambaytor said, some time ago,

 

 

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 resolution of

conflict

is not negated by an addition to conflict.  Fixing one thing doesn't fix all things, that's a child's concept and the people saying that this ruined their happy endings are ignoring the years of peace and comfort the characters had in-between trilogies.

 

And apparently Rian Johnson said:

 

Quote

To address middle age & beyond in a really honest way, the myths deal with disillusionment, starting to lose your place in the world and loss.”

 

 

Baytor thinks the alienated fan is upset that the OT heroes didn't get a stirring or heroic sendoff or that they didn't get happy endings.

 

That is because the alienated fan TOLD him so.

 

But much like the way your constant complaining about your sibling rivalry with your brother ends once you realize you're really both really reacting unconsciously to your father's constant pressure to perform, Baytor and the fan are not addressing the issue of legacies and the emotional attachment fans have with characters and their in-movie legacies when it comes to modern franchise/sequel movies and stories in general.

 

The issue is not actually whether Han got a happy family life. Or Luke succeeded as a teacher.

We are quite prepared to see conflict rear its head again. We don't care about a bigger badder threat coming to town to take on Han Leia and Luke and ultimately kill them. We just want to see that the better world our heroes created is still functioning and if you want to put it in danger and have them die protecting it from that new danger, then that's fine. Our emotions are tied up in the gift to the community, not the character.

 

But when we skip from episode 6 to 7 to find no Jedi, a feeble Republic, no Luke etc, that feels like something has been seriously lost. No one expects the gains a hero brings to his people to last forever. But losing it all off screen after just 30 years of story time? Too harsh.

 

I'm not trying to enter the game of telling my own SW sequels, but I offer that if we had seen a clash of civilization type battle between a healthy Republic and a rising First Order, with a Jedi corps helping in the defense of people and Luke doing SOMETHING, Han helping people in some way the fan reaction would not have been this heightened and there would be no exaggeration of how horrible the nitpicked faults were or even the large and genuine faults.

 

You could have still replicated the basic story beats. Han could have been broken up by his son's actions, but there are more ways to show that than him being his old self. Make him a pacifist space ambulance driver. He would still be there to reluctantly mentor Rey. The Republic could stil have been caught off guard by a superweapon. Luke could still be disillusioned by Kylo turning and we could meet him when he's starting to lose his place. 

(BTW, I wish to note the dishonesty in Rian Johnson's quote. Luke isn't 'starting to lose his place' in TLJ,  He's literally all the way lost and spiritually 99% empty. "I came here to die." Remember, Rian? You wrote that line. Rian is trying to fudge things. Ironic that he's talking about doing things in an honest way. The radical personality changes are dishonest. People change with age. They don't shapeshift.)

 

But here's a novel contention: The OT characters don't need arcs in the new trilogy!

 

Let me say that again. Not every character needs a character arc.

 

Ben Kenobi, Tarkin, Yoda, Chewie, even Leia. None of them had any kind of arc.

In the New trilogy arc time should be for the new characters, Finn, Rey and Poe. Leia, Luke and Han are support cast and mentor characters, through experiences they had in the first trilogy. 

 

Granted no one's personality and values stay frozen for 30 years, but that's not an arc. That's just drift. And if you want to show people grow as they get more mature, why does no one get happier? (hear Lando was tentatively set to be the owner of Canto Bight...so that would have been nice)

 

I know I'm rehashing the point of honestly portraying aging, but look at Obiwan and Yoda again. (Yes I'm talking prequels now, but it's relevant.) We meet both Ben and Yoda hiding out. In the prequels they were actively going out of their way to fight evil. They were both sadder and more deliberate in old age. They both had doubts about the feasibility of their mission. But their core values never faltered even after having Anakin mess up the entire galaxy, their friendships, the woman Obiwan loved, the Jedi order etc. When the call to action came, they were still who they basically were before, but more wary and sadder and wiser.

 

The true childishness in approaching the Last Jedi is in Disney's decision to ape the power dynamics of the OT. They talk about the need to explore aging, but refuse to present an aged-up galaxy with more mature political power dynamics. They regress it back to babydom because it was too grown after then end of RotJ and they want to tell stories about simplistic underdogs-and-oppressors dynamics.

 

==============

 

Anyway I have more to say about how the anger manifests itself in fanboy nitpicks and blamecasting and also about the how the pattern applies to things like Hal Jordan's death, The 1986 Superman reboot, the fact that DC brought back that same 1986 Superman after they tried to revamp Superman as a different character, The treatment of Aang in Avatar Korra and the reboots of Xmen and Star Trek and the clusterfuck that arose out of the reboot/remake of Ghostbusters.

 

But I really need to think this through more.

My assertion about the emotional links to story characers and their community legacies is evidentially weak. I mean, I've been dealing with the issue in general since my lit degree and I have a sense of what it is, but I'd like to pin it down.

 

I also want to work through the other franchise examples some more.

 

And I don't have a strong counter factual case right now either. I'd like to say, as I just did above that TLJ could have been done without the negation of the community legacies and still been a similar movie, but maybe I'm wrong and only a very different movie could have come out of that? And maybe I shouldn't be trying to steer the argument into that direction anyway and say that choosing the story and then blasting away the foundations to make it fit was a bad idea and they should have looked at the foundations that the OT built and asked what kind of story was suitable for it?

 

I don't know. It's late and I'm tired. I'm gonna proof read this and post it and go sleep.

 

Oh wait, Baytor replied while I was typing this up:

 

Quote

See but you're just restating the point in the more longwinded way, what it boils down to is "this didn't turn out the way I expected it to in my head, I am mad."  And your grief concept is interesting but really just amounts to little more than gatekeeping.  The fact of the matter is that if this wasn't Star Wars people wouldn't be so mad about it but since Star Wars has attained religious status those who worship at the

alter

of Lucas get really butthurt about things that wouldn't bother them in another property.

 

I disagree, because it's not simply that the story was not the one they wanted. 

My suggestion is that the creators did things that worked against age-old dynamics of storytelling. There's something to be learned there I think. There is a wire that should not be ripped up on that track. People study movie script formulas and ratios of scene lengths to audience attention span etc. I think this is one of this kinds of things that a screen writer needs pay attention to for artistic and commercial success.

 

I also don't think that it's simply not liking the direction of the story, because as I've said in this post there are literally infinite stories that could have been laid on the foundation of RotJ that would have been in concordance with the audience's investment in the world as long as the foundation was left in place.

 

I admit that I'm not sure what I have to say is different enough to merit the time, but I think it's worth my time to investigate because it's a new phenomenon in storytelling that comes from modern sequel culture.
 

With regard to the TLJ debate I think it's important to get to the pysch issues like grief because I think we've been having far too much shouting about superficial things that damage the debate and I'm hoping to push those things aside.

 

And I'd really hoped to  avoid the gatekeeping accusation. I've tried hard to point out that I don't think TLJ deserves the vitriol it gets as a general movie. 

To me, the movie is the least remarkable thing about the last three months of conversation. The division and the way it's manifested is what I'm interested in. I certainly don't think Star Wars belongs to any set of fans for liking it longer. In fact, I was trying to explain why one set of fans is in what I think is real distress (comparatively speaking) and that their distress is not from the sources that they are mocked for like selfishness or lack of engagement with new ideas or blind worship as you stated. (BTW I'd love for you to unpack that sentence for me. I can't picture what specifically the worship concept encompasses in this context and therefore I can't see the link to not liking this one movie. To me worshippers at the altar of Lucas would be people who refuse to criticise at all or even defend all the movies against critics. I saw a lot of that thing couple years ago with what I consider DC worshippers who would not admit SvB at serious problems.)

 

Anyway, as I said, I'm not really interested in analysing the movie, but the debate industry that seems to have grown up around it. I'm also fascinated with the pushback from Johnson and Lucasfilm and with Mark Hamill running around unable to hold back his own grief and the way supporters of the movie seem to be offended that people don't like it and also how political agendas are being brought into the debate in ways I often think are unjustified. and I'm really, really fascinated at the idea that a popcorn movie could prompt such anger.

 

I think my framework helps cut through a lot of that stuff to identify the mechanic at work for the severity of the split and the outsize anger it provokes among the aggrieved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 3, 2018 by Jumbie

[The NZA]

man, you are giving way too much thought to all this - but as you said, you found these discussions more interesting than the movie proper, so i guess there's that 

 

41 minutes ago, Jumbie said:

(BTW, I wish to note the dishonesty in Rian Johnson's quote. Luke isn't 'starting to lose his place' in TLJ,  He's literally all the way lost and spiritually 99% empty. "I came here to die." Remember, Rian? You wrote that line. Rian is trying to fudge things. Ironic that he's talking about doing things in an honest way. The radical personality changes are dishonest. People change with age. They don't shapeshift.)

 

luke was a kid who wasn't a great jedi & essentially had to commit patricide to save the galaxy.  lacking direction after scoring the big touchdown, he found he wasn't great at other things either, and likely due to both kylo's descent & the resurgence of the sith, dove into isolation & from there, nihilism.  there's nothing there that strikes me as "shapeshifting".  

 

i also think you're downplaying the more common reasons people dump on this for your kinda hyper-nuanced take on things like wanting to see a more evolved republic, in the few places we've seen so far (another dustball, inside of ships, space-ireland with luke, etc - but that's forgetting the thriving casino scene that some folks didn't seem to dig either)

 

if the prequels taught me anything, it's that the jedi as a collective are impressively dumb & equally poor at staying united. and to borrow from your historical analogies here: a large problem in anti-fascist movements is that once fascist groups & governments are done away with, the momentum is gone & the majority of people involved go back to living their lives - a cycle that allows fascism to grow in power from the shadows all over again.  given how much easier it is to be a sith than a jedi, i figure this is pretty amplified in that universe.  

 

and i know you're likely to dismiss it, but there's truth to the fact that this is a 30+ year franchise & baytor's not wrong to highlight the way fans have taken it as practically religious (which lends itself to critiques reeking of heresy cries) and i think damn near anything would've crumbled under that weight, honestly.  i posit that the story many older fans would've wanted - "happily ever after", a more evolved republic with sith & jedi on equal footing, etc - sounds a lot more boring than what we saw.  i mean, metal gear solid 4 tried to tie up 30 years of loose ends & end happily, and that was shit. 

 

to evolve & continue to grow with younger fans, you acknowledged that it had to shed the older characters.  maybe it had to shed some of the more cantankerous & toxic elements of its fanbase too (particularly anyone unironically using the phrase "SJW" in their critique), you know? 

[Iambaytor]

You're just bending over backwards to come to some kind of objective reason why you yourself didn't care for the movie.  But once again it's boiling down to "this is not what I expected, I am mad." 

 

When I went back and researched all the movies prior to The Force Awakens it became apparent that all the romantoc notions I had about these characters and settings were based more on merchandise and those cash-in novels than anything actually in the movies.  The movies are darker and the characters more damaged than people remember.

 

Luke never won a lightsaber battle, and his biggest moment of triumph was destroying the first Death Star.  He didn't even bring Vader back to the light side, it was seeing The Emperor tear into him as he narrowly avoided going to the dark side that motivated Anakin's change.  Luke was told he was the chosen one but he only managed to stop the Empire through passive resistance, when he gave in to the darkness again for a brief second he lost everything so he went back to not meddling.  It was a lesson he learned in both The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.  

 

All this objectionable shit was in the original films but I swear people remember the coloring book version better than the actual thing.

 

 

[Keth]

2 hours ago, Iambaytor said:

Luke never won a lightsaber battle

Oh shit, I never realized this. Not even in TLJ technically. 

[Drifter]

I'd say when Luke got properly pissed off and went full bore at Vader in ROTJ he won, especially when he got Vader down and took his hand, turnabout being fair play and all. He won against Vader, defeated him in Lightsaber combat and fulfilled his final trial as laid out by Yoda, declared victory and proclaimed himself a Jedi to the Emperor's face and then stupidly flung away his laser sword as a final FU to Sidious. New fight starts with a sucker-punch from Sidious as he fries Luke. Vader, being moved by his son's act of mercy, integrity, courage and defiance, and then by his embarrassing begging, is the one who flings the Emperor over the railing, being fatally electrocuted in the process... Luke didn't kill his father, his father died saving him and the rest of the galaxy from Sidious.

 

I agree with Jumbie. As I've been saying, the new series renders the struggle of the previous characters essentially pointless. If the galaxy is that fucked up at the start of TFA, where so little has changed, that you could basically erase the first three films, where if the events of A New Hope thru Return of the Jedi had never happened and you'd still be at exactly the same setting as the beginning of The Force Awakens, then what was the fucking point of the character's actions? It's that fucking Nihilism in Sci-Fi shit all over again. Where anything that happens is a pointless meat grinder of never ending suffering and stagnation for 40000 years grim-dark bullshit. Star Wars is NOT suppose to resemble Warhammer 40k, thank you.

[Drifter]

On ‎12‎/‎20‎/‎2017 at 11:02 AM, Drifter said:

Yeah, turning the force into an STD was monumentally stupid and ultimately insulting to the audience, but it didn't contradict or change the overall effect of how the force was portrayed in any of the films or other media, it just made it laughably easy to identify a force user with a fucking blood test. At the end of the day it added nothing but also didn't really detracting from anything; it was just a childish insult that ultimately changed nothing. Exposition where none was needed. (The impetus for it was Lucas wanting to rationalize the force in 'reality', to him the force is everywhere in the universe, even right here and right now, but the fucking force bacteria only exist in that one galaxy far, far away, saturating the place like mist of mold spores; and it is through that medium that living creatures can interact with the force and do their magic mumbo jumbo... ooooh, big whoop, you too are descended from cylons. Don't you just feel an extra-special connection to the show now.)

 

I can just picture it now- I'm sorry but you've tested positive for jedi and there's not enough antibiotics in the galaxy to clear that up, you should have been using a prophylactic on your lighsaber; but at least you didn't catch sith, that one's just nasty with all that pasty skin and funky eyes, shudder to think about it. 

 

As for Vader... well, there is that trope of 'taking a level of badass' to fall back on... all it took to turn a whiney bitch into a black knight shit-kicker was an afternoon picnic next to a volcano, go figure. But again, because it was a prequel it didn't really change anything about the character or his motivations in any of the other films, it was just a ham-fisted clusterfuck to shovel more melodrama onto the audience but what did it change about the character once he put on the black suit? It may have diminished his dark persona for some of the audience (the difference between a tortured soul and a brooding hipster can be subtle) but it can be ignored or explained away with out detracting from any of the other franchise works.

 

But the new sequels are showing the direct aftermath and effects of all the history of the canon, and we're seeing that character arcs and personal growth have amounted to jack shit 30 years later. The message isn't that people can change and that perseverance in the face of adversity pays off, but that life is just one long crushing desperate struggle of the same shit generation after generation with no hope for improvement and that just one slip will destroy everything that you've fought to maintain and even that is ultimately pointless in the grand scheme of things for even the most powerful among us who want to do good... it's taking fun space fantasy and turning it into dark-grim nihilism... which says a lot about this day and age when even our escapist entertainment is depressing by design... what the fuck ever happened to having a fun adventure in a hopeful world of tomorrow; defending your utopia from the forces of evil; or standing up for your ideals in the face of adversity? How about taking the high road and winning? I'm sick of this shit of some depressing band of PTSD suffering fashion models with crippling emotional issues and untreated mental illness tearing down a corrupt dystopian system that has a stranglehold on the desolate remains of a failed society that in the end still leaves our heroes wallowing in a cesspool human filth and proudly looking forward to an uncertain future that only offers more desperate struggle in a desolate wasteland and little else?

I've been reduced to quoting myself

[The NZA]

i mean, KOTOR is some of my favorite SW stuff...i thought the cycle of sith rising/domination, then jedis winning, only to have the peace they established wane & the cycle begin anew...isn't that kinda the point?  

 

again, we're seeing a tiny part of the galaxy in these films.  how much of these remote corners are even affected if the sith aren't pointing lasers at their dustball planets?  it really does seem chlidlike to think that warrior aristocrats have this war that fixes everything everywhere forever.  

[Drifter]

A lasting impact doesn't have to be forever or absolutely everywhere, but it sure as hell shouldn't be equivalent to as if it had never happened at all, aka, absolutely fucking nothing. The problem is that this isn't the next part of the cycle, it's that these new films are continuing the last part of the cycle. This isn't Epilogus Interruptus, this is Defeat in Epilogue; this isn't Star Wars: The Next Generation, this is Star Wars: The Animated Series of Failure. 

 

And we're seeing a 'microcosm' of the galaxy in these films, not some isolated series of unrelated and contained incidents with no far reaching repercussions, no matter how remote the systems they take place in; they make it quite clear in these films that they are fighting over "the fate of the galaxy." And in that often used statement it's actually the word 'galaxy' that is the understatement because they're actually talking about at least 4 galaxies, the main one and 3 (that are canon, with up to another 4 non-canon) surrounding micro-galaxies. That last scene in Empire? They're in orbit of a protostar in another galaxy, VIEWING THE GALAXY. The scope of the conflict isn't childish fanboying, it's a re-statement of lines from the film series.

[Iambaytor]

8 hours ago, Drifter said:

I agree with Jumbie. As I've been saying, the new series renders the struggle of the previous characters essentially pointless. If the galaxy is that fucked up at the start of TFA, where so little has changed, that you could basically erase the first three films, where if the events of A New Hope thru Return of the Jedi had never happened and you'd still be at exactly the same setting as the beginning of The Force Awakens, then what was the fucking point of the character's actions? It's that fucking Nihilism in Sci-Fi shit all over again. Where anything that happens is a pointless meat grinder of never ending suffering and stagnation for 40000 years grim-dark bullshit. Star Wars is NOT suppose to resemble Warhammer 40k, thank you.

 

Where were the stormtroopers stationed on Jakku?  You didn't see them because The First Order is a fringe group, they're only fighting the resitence and that's because they're a shadow of themselves because the Rebels fought them back.  The galaxy is at piece except for these two splinter groups fighting, Leia even mentions that the senate doesn't see the First Order as enough of a threat to combat.  That's a big step down from Galactic Empire and the fact that most of the galaxy can live in relative ignorance of what's going on is a sign that what they established had real impact.  Your repeated accusation of grim-dark bullshit holds no water and is just more tantrum throwing over your hatred of depth.

 

We get it, you didn't like the movie, shit happens, but there's not some objective reason that the movie is bad.  Rian Johnson and J.J. Abrams did do their research, they do understand the characters and the overarching themes of the movies.  They didn't fuck up, they didn't betray you, and they don't owe you shit.  You didn't like the movies, great, let it go and move on.

[Drifter]

What are you talking about? The first scene of TFA are stormtroopers attacking Jakku. Its' made pretty clear that the first order moves and attacks with impunity and everybody knows about them, but they mostly stayed in their own systems flagrantly breaching the weapons treaty like hitler before ww2. The film stated that they were waiting to attack the 'rest of the galaxy' till after the crippled the republic... by blowing up just one system it would seem, at least there was an obvious fleet in it that presumably was the majority of the republic navy.

 

And the writers did do their research, they got the facts right, but completely missed the point of the franchise being a Fairy-tale Fantasy; and while they have the heroes' journey they went overboard and forgot it's not some Ancient Greek or Norse Myth of lumbering demigods and heroes fighting a loosing battle in a desperate struggle to stave off the end of times for just a little while longer.

 

They did a disservice to the previous films by fucking over the setting to make it more 'gritty' that seems to be all the rage in sci-fi nowadays and it's insulting to a shit load of people. So yeah, fuck them.

[Keth]

Goddamn I can't wait for the next movie to come out.

[Iambaytor]

Fairy tale?  It was based on Eastern folklore, Akira Kurosawa samurai films, spaghetti westerns, and the fucking Vietnam War.  You may also not know how fairy tales work, they're all darker and more upsetting than The Last Jedi.  Shit, the average Marvel movie is grittier than The Last Jedi.

 

You unironically compared Star Wars to Warhammer 40K, maybe one of the most exaggeratedly grimdark I.P.s becuase Han and Leia broke up, Luke fucked up restarting the Jedi order, and that a movie with the word "Wars" in the title decided to cast the heroes as the underdog.