Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Ownership by Disney? Lucasfilm was acquired in 2012. Marvel was acquired in 2009. I tend to like the theory that Iger then tried to use Disney to springboard into a political career by hiring politically active people. If the sole owner wants to do something with a property it's pretty hard for outside pressure to resist it.
When Lucas sold off SW to Disney, he famously compared it to selling off a daughter to white slavers. He obviously had to walk back that comment publicly but I expect he was simply speaking his honest view at the time. On the other hand he has voiced considerable support for Bob Iger.
If your point here is that Iger is looking for political clout points I am not sure I agree, but then I also don't see this kind of businessman as an ideologue. Lucas says "no one knows Disney better" than Iger, whatever that is supposed to mean (I bet I know at least three Japanese young women who know Disney better than Lucas or Iger, but probably not in the way Lucas meant).
I can't speak to @Botond173 's query on the wokeification of Marvel properties but I think one of the tides that has risen all media boats has been the regulatory decision to promote DEI in filmmaking. Disney was recently outed by Musk but Warner, Paramount, Netflix, Sony Universal, etc. have all to the best of my knowledge (which is admittedly far from firsthand) implemented similar policies. I am surprised to discover it was only five years ago that the actress Frances McDormand chastened Hollywood with the cryptic term inclusion rider.
What happens then is what I'll call a Procrustean approach to storytelling, where whatever one starts with has to be hacked up to fit a particular standard. This is not always bad, mind you, and talented artists can often do their best work under restrictions. Robert Frost, according to my poetry teacher long ago, likened free verse to playing tennis without a net. Unfortunately when no one has any historical perspective nor gives a rat's ass about anything but current progressive epiphanies, bizarrely tone deaf films like The Eternals get made. If there is any test of Time I don't expect that film to pass it. Of course I've been wrong before.
On a side note, the cancellation of The Acolyte SE2 and the licking of collective chops at this kind of ironically makes me want to go back and watch it now. My very red tribe buddy back home, who watched it and found it benignly viewable, asked me to watch it and explain what the anger is all about.
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If you just watch it, absent any knowledge of the context or milieu it's bad - just mostly bad in the way that most popular entertainment is bad. Inoffensively and boringly so.
Someone who is truly red tribe is unlikely to hit the common fail states. Someone from that background is probably used to just passively consuming TV (and is therefore unlikely to not notice or care about bad/inconsistent writing, poor cinematography and so on*). They also probably don't know that Star Wars has a rule about having no white male primary protagonists. They don't know about the interviews ranting about Star Wars fans, men, red tribers, etc.
It's entirely possible to watch a season of Star Trek Discovery and not notice that their were no straight white men with a speaking role who weren't fascists but once you start noticing its hard to go back.
Your friend probably hasn't gone through that process, and if he's a real red triber he's probably in a supportive environment. Grey tribe and questioning blue tribe people feel like they are in a hostile environment and are far more likely to notice and get upset about these kinds of things.
Lastly: given the way that Disney cancels projects, especially ones with political correlates like this one (typically they just.....keep saying they are working on it until everyone forgets) the fact that they actually cancelled it tells you how bad it must have been in a watch-metrics sense.
*Compare: some people watched The Last Jedi and walked out of the theater when Admiral Purple Hair turned her ship into a KKV because it fundamentally invalidates decades of writing and world building. Lots of people went "oooooh pretty." The latter isn't invalid but a lot of Star Wars fans were the former type of person.
Edit: let me give a plot example. Here's the season summary: the Jedi were evil AND incompetent, and lesbian space witches were the true power of the force. You can see why this may upset someone with investment in the rest of Star Wars.
Except the Jedi weren't shown as evil, rather misguided and arrogant. Pre-Disney canon says that the pre-Empire Jedi had become over-zealous in their role about collecting force sensitive children and this had driven many smaller force religions into extinction or hiding. Check.
The Jedi had become corrupted by their political role, arrogant and complacent. Yoda says this. Palpatine says this. And is part of the reason their connection to the living force had waned. And why Qui-Gon was seen as a rogue operator by the Jedi. Check.
But even so every Jedi in the Acolyte is trying to do what they think is right. Note the fight is partially caused by the more militant witch choosing to mind control a Jedi, when Sol is only there because he thinks the girls are in danger. The Jedi are not shown as evil, they are shown as good people convinced of their correctness. Which is exactly the arrogance Yoda speaks of.
Now was the show good? Not really, creaky dialog and odd story beats. But was it bad because it suddenly retconned pre-Empire Jedi to have been evil? No, because it showed them in the light, we keep being told they were. The fall of the Jedi was set as soon as they became part of the political sphere in the Republic.
That is the tragedy of the Jedi. And that no-one remembers that, is the tragedy of the Acolyte.
The writer had issues with dialog, and some of the acting was ropey, but they clearly paid a lot of attention to pre-prequel EU material. From cortosis to the Corporate Sector, to yes the Jedi Order basically deciding they should be the only force game in town. What was shown of the Jedi is exactly what we have ben told. Good people in a systemically corrupt institution, that over centuries began to blind even people with access to super-powers.
Yoda, too late realizes this when confronting Palpatine, that he couldn't win, that the Jedi were doomed to lose from long before his own birth. That they had been blinded not by the Dark Side, but by their own hubris. And this is the wisest of the Jedi, who already thought the Jedi were getting too arrogant (as he notes in Ep 2.) This is why he becomes a broken figure in the original trilogy. Why it takes Obi-Wan to convince him.
To address this let me look to The Last Jedi for a bit - what happens to Luke isn't unreasonable but nobody wants to see it. It's contra the vibes people want to see, and the constructions they've had in their head.
Some of the subtext in the prequel trilogy is that the Jedi were blind idiots, but most people just paper that over with uhhh Sith force powers? and then get on enjoying the black and white story, which is what Star Wars is "supposed" to be. It takes a lot of mature writing to make Andor work despite the deviation from that.
It (including the Acolyte) is fundamentally not what people want to see in Star Wars, and it's not done well enough to make up for that.
The other piece is the dripping wokeness. How many white males are in the show? How are they portrayed?
How good the show is exists in a conversation that's driven by decisions of the other Star Wars properties in the last ten years (including public commentary but the creators), not independent of them.
Once you start looking at this stuff with a critical eye it's hard to stop and the wheels are pretty much off.
Obi-wan is relatively inoffensive if you aren't already mad at Star Wars, and is incredibly bad if you are.
That's a large portion of my criticism.
As a specific example: being annoyed and judgmental at Star Wars turns "lets transport this suspected murderer in an unsecured way" from "eesh writers didnt really think about that huh" to "oh god not another attempt at portraying the Jedi as total fucking inbred morons."
But what this shows is that it's the exact opposite problem surely? People were complaining that Disney ruined the Jedi by making them evil and stupid. But the truth you are claiming is that the audience is just not able (or willing) to absorb the kind of nuance which says actually the Jedi (as acknowledged by themselves and other external sources) were kind of stupid, arrogant assholes at the systemic level. Even as much as most of them, were good people at heart. That is fundamentally part of the story Lucas wanted to tell. That is what Star Wars is "supposed" to be.
It's fine that people want to paper over that nuance, if they don't find it enjoyable. But that is a different complaint than, this is all new stuff made up by Disney. Especially when they heap scorn on the creators on not being "real" Star Wars fans, when as you say they themselves have just decided to Flanderize the Jedi in their heads and ignore all the set up. Complaining about wokeness or bad writing and acting is one thing (and to be clear the Acolyte has significant problems in places there, in my opinion. Child actors are tough, but the young version of the twin's were simply not capable of carrying the story beats they were weighed down with.) But it is just ironic that much of what they are complaining about is literally what the story of the fall of the Jedi order is about, while they are complaining that real Star Wars fans know the Jedi are omni-competent good guys while complaining that Rey was boring because she was an omni-competent good guy.
And that is what is slightly annoying me, because as a Star Wars fan, I would like to see more stories about that. Where the Jedi are not simply perfect do gooders. So now the chances of getting some more stories which explore the contradictions in the Jedi philosophy and the interesting bits of Star Wars lore is probably dead in the water.
C'est la vie I suppose. Maybe I'll start up my old Star Wars D6 campaign using the old West End Games rules and set it in the era prior to the Empire, and give the Jedi characters some complex moral topics to wrestle with.
Politics aside, genre fiction exists to scratch a certain sort of itch. Why Batman Can’t Kill People is a very, very good essay that I recommend, and I'll shamelessly steal bits:
In short, you can't keep asking questions like 'can the Light side of the force be immoral under some belief systems?' or, 'isn't an organised, militarised group of warrior monk cultists going to end up with some pretty dubious practices?' without ruining the thing that makes original Star Wars fans enjoy it. It can work occasionally in one-offs or side material, but if you do it too much in the main shows you're going to lose the fans even if your storytelling is impeccable, because you're not telling the stories people want to hear.
The above is a lesson I think about a lot because I had to wean myself out of the 'but it would be so interesting if you took X aspect of the genre seriously' writing mindset and realise that even if there were potential there, it would remove the aspect of the genre that made me want to write stories in the first place. It's especially a problem for the professional authors / scriptwriters / directors / critics, who spend far more time in their chosen medium than their average audience member, and therefore find their tastes diverging. The professionals demand originality, complexity and subversion because they're sick of the same old thing. And at some point somebody has to remind them that they're being self-indulgent and neglecting the interests of the people they're supposed to be working for (employers/audience).
Getting back to politics, KOTOR II did morally-nuanced discussions of the Force and nobody was particularly upset. Even the first game shows a variety of Jedi with some not-especially-admirable traits. Those games, and the prequels, were interesting precisely because up until then the Jedi has been pretty clear-cut good guys. People get upset now because:
But isn't that just the point? The original depiction and backstory of the Jedi Order was that they were flawed, arrogant and compromised their ideals in service to politics. That directly led to them neglecting the will of the Force, having their abilities clouded and weakened and led to their fall. It isn't a deconstruction to show that. KOTOR II is a great example. But in the vast majority of media the Jedi are depicted as always being unambiguously good and competent. That surely is then the deconstruction? Or perhaps Flanderization, that they serve the Light side of the force so therefore they must be all good, all competent.
I think 2 is more likely. That now people see it as enemy action (and perhaps it is!) and therefore instinctively side against it, even when arguably it is in fact being portrayed accurately.
To be fair, I do think this particular problem starts with the prequel trilogy. The order of Jedi Knights worked best as background mythology. Before the days of Jar Jar and Young Anakin, they were hazy and a bit nondescript. I think that worked perfectly for the kind of mythic tale the OT was trying to weave. Going back and filling in details did some irreversible damage to the universe's structural integrity, but it was at least offset by the spice of variety: new aliens, new planets, new factions, etc. The playground widened up enough where I think many fans could ignore the mess Lucas made with the core story and play with the toys of their own choosing.
Nu Star Wars instead often seems like its doubling down on the parts few people liked to begin with while offering little else in compensation.
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