But I'm not sure that following up a stale retread of ANH with a stale retread of ESB is that much of a betrayal
ESB built on ANH. It maintained the same foes and made Vader even more interesting. TLJ jettisons the main bad guy and leaves us with a guy who lost to an untrained rando and a comic relief General Hux. It wasn't ESB at all. Superficially, I grant.
Maybe if Rian had actually turned Rey evil as some are suggesting. But it didn't. Which is why I say it's a "fuck you" movie. It doesn't even give you a watered down ESB. If you're too constrained to be truly subversive, don't LARP.
The EU was a big pool where different authors sank or swam, and because Lucasfilm back in the day were quite generous with the license, a lot of people tried different ideas. And now in hindsight, well, ask any EU fan and they will give you a curated list of the good bits, and those are the parts that live on.
There was an important difference: core stuff had a heavier lift to change. Even when Lucas couldn't even pretend to give a fuck you were not allowed to kill off an Original Trilogy major without permission. This is why Chewbacca's death in Vector Prime required approval and was supposed to be a big deal. Yes, fuck around with who Jaina Solo is going to end up with, fight it out with the comics. But the idea that you can character assassinate and then actually assassinate Han and Luke and do nothing with Leia...there'd be some complaints.
Also, the medium is different. It's easier to experiment with very cheap books compared to your one shot at one of the most anticipated sequels in blockbuster history. (One could suggest that they should have considered the EU as a giant laboratory and learned from the mistakes and distilled the successes like the early MCU instead of throwing it out and remaking the same mistakes all over again)
The problem is the whole premise of the Sequel Trilogy, and it seems to me that blaming everything on TLJ is scapegoating Johnson too much for Abrams' failures.
Yes, which is why I said elsewhere that Kathleen Kennedy is ultimately at fault for letting Johnson do this shit. Abrams shouldn't have been allowed to make ANH 2.0. But, once that's done, Johnson shouldn't have been allowed to fuck it up even more. You already lost anyone who wanted to see something truly different in the reintroduction. After that, you lost anyone who was even theoretically interested in Snoke or the rest of that shit or was holding on to it as a consolation.
This sort of thing is not unknown. The EU writers used to have shitfights and problems too. For Legacy of the Force Karen Traviss was essentially writing her own fanfictions with very strong opinions (Jedi are evil, virile Mandos are gods, basically). She went too far, other writers then took time to deconstruct her bullshit (specifically Troy Denning just having the Mandos absolutely wiped out lol). But, at the very least, the general story continuity was maintained. They only got to editorialize within that. Major decisions were cleared above.
I don't know what went wrong here: Lucas specifically picked Kennedy because she had a lot of experience producing and he figured she'd defend the integrity of Star Wars. She's defended it as her fiefdom but she seems to have no real sense or preference for where the trilogy should go (beyond the usual "diversification") if she just allowed each of these directors to do whatever they wanted. I think it may be that she worked well with Lucas and Spielberg because they had strong creative visions and simply couldn't provide her own and deferred to the creatives out of habit.
Would he have done better if not for Johnson? I just cannot see any reason to think that. He screwed up and effectively killed a big budget science fiction film franchise in exactly the same way before people gave him Star Wars.
Abrams was never supposed to return. It was supposed to be three different directors. Someone else could have taken the plots that existed from TFA and not gone "psych!". Like, Johnson didn't just not give fulfilling answers to Abrams' mystery boxes, he called you stupid for caring and then fucked off leaving you nothing else to care about. Seriously, what did he build? Rose Tico?
Let's grant Abrams is a hack. As matter of numbers imo TFA simply didn't kill the franchise (well...I think he killed Star Wars' best shot at becoming an MCU-like phenomenon in China) or TLJ would have opened much worse. TLJ however did have bad legs and TROS didn't open well either (though obviously Abrams owns the legs here)
This isn't only my judgment: the higher-ups clearly think TLJ was a failure which is why they pulled the alarm and brought Abrams back.
That seems particularly evident to me if we look at the directors' other work? I didn't think much of Knives Out or Glass Onion, but I found them more-or-less watchable and entertaining, in a dumb sort of way.
I remember watching Brick as a kid and being blown away. He's actively regressed and that might explain why he did so badly with Star Wars. Sad.
Tanista
2d ago
This is still true today in poorer countries. The word for a married woman and a married woman with status are different in our language. What status? Almost always that they have servants.
Tanista
2d ago
Obviously the West saw what was happening during the Ukraine War and the result was to a) pass over it in silence or b) complain that transwomen were not allowed to defect from their sex and leave
Tanista
2d ago
Their society experienced complete collapse a generation later.
You can also mention the massive purge of the military before the war and the subsequent mess they were in when it started.
Aren't even low IQ women better at reading faces and emotions than high IQ men?
I guess that feels nebulous compared to Science^(tm) and hand-eye coordination but it matters a fuckton in the real world.
There are also obviously other things (e.g. leveraging sexuality) but this doesn't play well with old or new moral codes and it has a shelf life
Tanista
2d ago
I think we're so many decades down from moral education that people believe at least some of it. Which seems to function as being forced to profess belief in all of it because you cannot deny bits and pieces of the blank slateism without being at risk of destruction.
People don't want female firefighters or Marines, but the inability to be honest without threatening the apple cart makes it impossible to check people who exploit the legal system to push us just one step further (unless something truly absurd happens like a Lia Thomas situation that cannot be ignored - but even in that case people are likely benefitting from Title IX being explicitly about sex so these attempted redefinitions can run into a hostile court).
Groups are actively leveraging this. It's very common with the trans stuff. There's constant claims that black women will suffer from going back to sexed bathrooms (yes, the new left wing take is that black women are so manly banning men will keep them out). Similarly, a common line of attack is that you're an essentialist and being essentialist is bad because what next? Race essentialism? If sex is real, why wouldn't someone argue race is real?
If they never believed in any of this none of this would have force. That poor professor who got fired for being frustrated at how badly her black students are doing wouldn't have been frustrated or have any cognitive dissonance at all.. You think Amy Wax is losing sleep over it?
That's why it's so difficult to dislodge this gender ideology stuff. Everyone is trapped in the same lie. No one can stand outside of it in the simplest, most expedient manner ("men are men and women are women and, frankly, the government shouldn't be involved") robs them of their own tools and stories.
Tanista
2d ago
The "deconstructing Skywalker supremacy " stuff is also only in hindsight. JJ had no idea who Rey's parents were in TFA (Rian could have done anything he wanted there - simply have her be a particularly force sensitive child) and the EU is also full of non-Skywalkers having their moment. Which makes sense, because the core movies are about one set of characters.
We've discussed how other parts of it, namely Holdo's costuming, are both derivative and miss the point of what they're drawing from.
Tanista
2d ago
I just think that TLJ is the least bad of the sequels.
It's a relay race. It doesn't matter if, in isolation, TLJ was the least bad. It was so bad that it hobbled TROS (it's pretty damning that the studio that hired you basically wiped your contribution so it isn't really even a fan thing) so there's really no point talking about it being better than it.
TROS was fucked anyway for a variety of reasons (Fisher dying,the hiring and firing of Trevorrow) but TLJ gave it no good lead in.
Abrams made a hack's movie but you're just never convince me that it isn't malpractice to throw out everything that even looked like set up in the second part of a trilogy when you had no say in how the third part would go.
This is a mistake that happened all over the EU. And in Doctor Who, where people grew up so enamored with their vision of what DW is that they squeezed it in instead of accepting that the canon and fandom was where it was. Sorry, you're in a relay race, you don't get to have it your way.
Johnson has to eat most of the blame. Or rather, Kennedy has to get it for allowing Johnson to do this.
Tanista
2d ago
If they're doing end-runs I don't see why you'd be surprised that the whole "equal protection" bit has clear caveats on who gets discriminated against. The logic is there to hunt down racists who got slightly smarter after the end of segregation after all.
In other countries (Canada) they just make this clear but people have to be smarter in America.
The Democrats don't percieve their lawfare as unprovoked, at least not the rank-and-file and the voters.
Letitia James actually is the one example where you can actually get prominent Democrats to admit that it may have been a bit much. I think because of the business element (not every Democrat is some rich-hating socialist, many actually have skin in the game) and the fact no one wants this to be the precedent set (that and going around talking about "getting" Trump)
I think this is partly hindsight. Anything from NY either didn't harm Trump or actively backfired and they can always tell themselves that the other cases were just, just slow or badly handled.
Fani Willis is corrupt and incompetent but, in comparison,I don't think most of the base thinks that Trump is innocent of trying to influence the election.
Yup. Failing to understand the basic point that discretion in charges leads to misleading criminal records is how Biden (or "Biden") ended up pardoning a witness killer. Though in that case the lower charge was not about leniency but the opposite.
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