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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31024 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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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.

TLJ did poorly at the box office

According to Box Office Mojo, The Last Jedi earned. $1.3 billion worldwide -- and was the #1 film domestically in 2017

I will say that it did have a rippling effect which destroyed the franchise. Prior to TLJ, fans were mostly rallied behind the new Star wars movies, even begrudgingly since Rey was a Mary Sue. TLJ shattered the fan based and caused fans to actively hate the new Star wars, and fans started boycotting subsequent movies like Solo.

I think TLJ also made it rather clear that there was no cohesive vision for the new trilogy, or at least if JJ had one in mind RJ deliberately tossed it out.

Fair to make the point that there wasn't a fully cohesive vision for the OT when A New Hope released, but there was no point where it became utterly clear that there was no plan for the overall plot. Although the retcon turning Luke and Leia into siblings is obvious once you know about it.

I very clearly recall some remarks I made to a friend after watching TFA, basically praised that it fully recaptured the epic feel of Star Wars and had the possibility of some interesting arcs, particularly with Kylo Ren. I noted how Mary Sue-ish Rey was but of course if they had balls they could have her fall to the dark side or do something interesting with her parentage, so I was willing to wait it out.

Instead, she became a one-person tension-ruiner. Any moment she was onscreen you could be utterly certain no harm would befall her nor would she fail at her current task. The fact that she never even sustains a wound, much less lose an extremity or a limb like so many other characters, well, it became clear what the 'rules' surrounding her were.

This was also back when the "Darth Jar Jar" theory was hitting the public eye and thus people were hyping themselves up to expect some mindblowing twists in the story and likely the conversion of 'good' characters to the dark side and other actual developments/arcs.

And the new movies didn't just fail to live up to the hype the fans created for themselves, they utterly failed to even take advantage of the expectations set by TFA.

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