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Here's my opinion on how to defuse many aspects of culture war: reduce copyright length to at most 40-50 years.
Consider. Lots of people were upset when Rian Johnson deliberately made the Last Jedi to be about fighting "toxic masculinity" and "fan entitlement". But he is not the problem. I am not here to criticize RJ. His interpretation actually had some interesting ideas even if it was badly executed and inconsistent with my general concept of what SW movie "should" be.
The problem is that Disney anointed him to be the one to save Star Wars from smelly nerds. And there's nothing you could do unless you had a billion dollars to buy SW from Disney. Except in the end this didn't work out for "woke" cause either, because TLJ did poorly at the box office so Disney hired Abrams who overrode every RJs decision. Everyone loses.
I think part of the reason why "culture wars" are so bitter is that all sides are essentially reduced to pressuring (or begging) large, faceless corporations into reflecting their values. This creates mutual distrust because both sides know that corporations will drop your values the second they stop being profitable. It is fundamentally toxic.
But if noone owns IP then we can have both "based" and "woke" version of every franchise. Fans will rise to the occasion to make both. Hence, less bitter culture wars.
Of course, there's zero chance Disney ever allows erosion of copyright, but it is fun to speculate.
I would have greatly preferred Zahn's Thrawn trilogy to be made into films rather than what we actually got. The talent is there, the stories were made by people who actually know what they're doing...
I still don't understand how Johnson was cleared to make such a bad film. There was a huge, irrelevant anti-capitalist tangent with about as much subtlety and sophistication as a brick to the head. There was Rey being a Mary Sue, which is not really a Johnson innovation though he intensified it. There was Holdo, attacking Poe for his toxic masculinity of actually fighting and winning. I remember sitting through the film and thinking 'oh she's not telling them her plan because she knows there's a spy who was revealing their location' but it turned out that she had no clue what she was doing, not even an engineer's special subject-matter knowledge that FTL-ramming was practical. Apparently it was just a 1 in a million shot as of film 9. It compares very poorly to Zahn's Luke-Thrawn tractor beam vs torpedo duel.
Johnson is clearly talented as a filmmaker/director, so how can he be so clueless as a writer? A lot of thought went into the effects, into the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars. The film looked good and that takes effort. So why didn't people think about having a slightly better written anti-capitalist plot? Is it just Kathleen Kennedy's corrosive influence? She wasn't so bad in 7.
The real issue is that the "woke" version has billions to burn on marketing, big budgets and polish. You can find "based" indie games on steam or watch anime. Just about everything in Hollywood is ideologically locked down. The 'free marketplace' of ideas is a bit like the Italian 1935-6 invasion of Ethiopia. No matter how hard the Ethiopians fought, regardless of whether they're in the right or not, the Italians had the money and technology to overwhelm the opposition.
On the other hand, some fan productions are spectacularly good and direly impeded by copyright. Consider 40K's The Lord Inquisitor and Astartes. The Lord Inquisitor's soundtrack is an absolute banger, despite the faces being somewhat off. Five years of AI development could surely fix that. TLI got cancelled by Warhammer for copyright reasons, Astartes got bought out and is on Warhammer TV or some streaming service nobody watches or cares about, myself included. Thus the video I link isn't the creator's channel, the originals got taken down.
Hopefully AI will just crush the copyright problem. When you can feed it some MP4s and crowdfund some computing power with crypto (and there are many possible options), use some mid-level technical skill... Nobody can stop you doing what you like. Not unions, not laws, not copyright, nothing at all.
I mean, at that point it's a choice between Rey Sue or Mara Sue, the perfect jedi girl with a Dark Past who the hero falls in love with but all the other girls hate because she's just so perfect (also her eyes change colour, original character DO NOT STEAL).
(It's been a while since I read the series and other books she was in, maybe I'm just misremembering. I definitely remember not liking all the stuff EU authors did with tractor beams, which should have revolutionized warfare but didn't because nobody was smart enough to think of it until the hero of that particular book.)
How is Mara a Sue? She's supposed to be good at her job, being an ex-Imperial Assassin and force sensitive. She's not some random scavenger who knows the Millennium Falcon better than Han within the first hour she steps on board. If she is a Sue then it's much less blatant.
In this particular example, they hit Luke with the beam and he tries to shake it off, using various tactics before explosively reversing his trajectory in an unorthodox way. Luke damages his hyperdrive severely, falling out of hyperspace shortly and getting stranded in deep space. On the Imperial side, Thrawn finds that the crewman responsible was incompetent, that they were supposed to be trained for this but the guy was a conscript as opposed to a proper professional soldier and didn't give it his best effort (tried to deflect blame onto his officer), so he has him killed. It's part of the post-Endor decline of the Imperial fleet. The tactic is not absolutely broken like FTL-ramming a gigantic battleship, it doesn't obsolete the entirety of Star Wars space warfare.
The tractor beam stuff was all over the EU books IIRC. I think it was Stackpole(?) who had a corvette beating a star destroyer by tractor-beaming a moon or something. It just irritated me after a while.
Stackpole was really fond of unorthodox tactics enabling major underdog victories, so I’d write that off as ‘Stackpole uses Mary Sues’.
I haven't read Stackpole's Star Wars stuff, but I have read a number of his BattleTech books, and yeah, that's probably an accurate characterization (see the Phantom 'Mech thing for an example).
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