Whereas I and the people I know/have known for years uniformly like Rose. We level a lot of the same gripes at TLJ as at TFA, the Prequels... The older among us, RotJ... *shrug* The biggest beef voiced by any of them was Rose kissing Finn -- but that's because she's asexual and because she doesn't have those impulses and is kind of repelled by the idea, so when others demonstrate them it's kinda nails on a chalkboard for her.
Anyway... This was in response to my last post:
Hogwash. The absolute SWIQ standard was set with the theatrical cuts of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. All the filmmakers had to do going forward was to continue stories and create new ones, while adhering to that standard. But beginning with ROTJ, the filmmakers--from Lucas' LFL to Disney's LFL--had to get too cute, too clever by half, too convoluted, too political, too preachy, too fast in pace, too artsy, too terrestrial and modern in their films' look and feel, and too greedy in how quickly the films are being churned out.
I'll say it's more that starting with RotJ we saw more of the unfiltered pen of George. He
really needs intervening layers to turn his ideas into actual stories, as his notions of "good storytelling" are very simplistic, heavy-handed, and shallow.
On the flip side, I think one of the big issues with the current era is removing him too
much from the creative process. But given he was pretty much done with it when he worked up his ST treatments and sold LFL, I don't think there was anything that could have kept him more involved, as a story consultant, as a first draft pitcher, whatever. He didn't want any part of that.
And, unfortunately, as one of the other intervening posters said, one of my biggest issues with the EU over its time was how few authors who dipped into the Star Wars universe really
got it -- the same issue they're contending with now. There are a lot of people who
appreciate Star Wars, but comparatively few who can
create within the context. And some are very oddly specific. I don't really like Kevin Anderson's standalone Star Wars novels, for instance, but I love his collaborative work on the Jedi Apprentice series with Rebecca Moesta, and I love his work writing the Tales of the Jedi comics for Dark Horse. I don't know what was so different about the latter two that was lacking from the first...
The fans--none of them--are the problem. The problem lies squarely with the low-SWIQ rightsholders of the franchise, and the low-SWIQ filmmakers they hire to make their SWINO films. They are SWINO films, because they are Star Wars In Name Only.
That is an instigating factor, yes, but how people respond to it is what I was getting at. I was too young to clarify what left me wanting more from RotJ at the time, but I was quite able to express how I felt the Prequels let me down, ditto TFA, R1, Clone Wars, Rebels, TLJ, and Solo. But I try to understand where the filmmakers were coming from and work
with them -- even though they don't know I, personally, exist. No one (well, hardly anyone) releases a deliberately bad movie. No one sets out to waste millions of dollars on something they know people will hate. The fact that some or all of them don't Get It makes me want to sit down with them and help them understand. Vitriol and boycotting isn't a useful response. I don't get people who adore the Prequels, but I'm not going to belittle and dismiss them for liking them. I didn't call for George's removal from LFL and his head on a pike when he dropped the ball as hard as I feel he did on AotC.
That one party is the one who originally created the universe and one isn't is immaterial when neither of them Get It.
The fans are the heart of Star Wars and LFL is simply not giving them what they want, I've been a fan my entire life however the current course the franchise is taking does not in any way meet my expectations.
I've been a fan since I was 2 (there was no Star Wars before that), and I'm used to not getting what I want or expect. It's nothing new. Problem is, the fan base is so diverse, there's no
way to give everyone what they want or expect. I don't know if it's even possible to cover the majority. The Prequels were released into a different paradigm than the OT, and the new films are being released into yet another paradigm. Things aren't the same as they were twenty or forty years ago. The people who watch these movies are very, very different from those who lined up around the block in the summer of '77.
That said, I and the people I regularly go to movies with like TFA, like TLJ, like Rogue One, like Solo... We're not
blown away by any of them, but we like them. Heck, one of the things we like is that they're skewing away from the post-RotJ EU, which is a plus in our books.
Identity politics should have no place in Star Wars and i'm disgusted that Kathleen Kennedy and LFL have chosen to focus so heavily on the things that divide us and not on what brings us together as fans.
Identity politics where...?
I do think Geeks and Gamers spends to much time talking about Star Wars, however i do agree with most of his opinions and i have now abandoned the franchise i love so much.
A shame. I'm excited to see where things go next. You will always be welcome back, of course, should you see something come along down the road that gives you a change of heart. I'm sad you find no joy in it currently. It's definitely not universal, though.
And people at large seem to agree, Star Wars is in decline.
I just
said it's not universal.
Much depends who one asks and where one looks for information. The general consensus
I have seen is that we see this is a moment of transition. Hasbro is going to have to rethink how they do things -- not because of Star Wars declining, but because the landscape of how children play and what they play with is changing, the dilution of toylines is discouraging to collectors, and so on. Marvel's Star Wars comics are some of their better-selling titles, given how the head of the comic division is kinda laying waste to the Marvel Universe out of jealousy over how much attention the MCU is getting. And with the whole movies/TV/internet/home-video/streaming thing so up in the air and changing, the manner in which people receive Star Wars stories is likely to be very different in another twenty years than what we're used to now.
Star Wars as we knew it forty years ago? Where you could only see it when it was in theaters, had to re-create it with action figures and model kits, when there were only a handful of books and the Marvel comics to satisfy your appetite for more? Gone.
Star Wars as we knew it twenty years ago? The EU in full swing, Hasbro deluging store racks with more action figures than OT fans could have imagined, LucasArts overseeing a string of over a score of memorable games, half a dozen books a
year being released, and Dark Horse flooding us with roughly as many Star Wars titles at a time? Gone.
Star Wars as it is now? Where the ancillary material is now as canon as the films, and thus the live-action, animated, prose, and graphic material is far more interwoven and interdependent then ever, where LucasArts is no more and Star Wars video games have all but vanished, where Hasbro has gone
way overboard with no less than eight Star Wars toy and collectible lines/scales? Some of what's tried will work, some won't. In another decade or two, some of this will have been fine-tuned and streamlined, some will be gone, and something new will have come along to be tried. There are lessons to learn in every era, and the ordinary human beings who are in positions to have to learn them will do so imperfectly at best.
Luke Skywalker thinks about killing his own nephew in his sleep, the child of his sister and his best friend! This is the guy who thought his father, Darth Vader, could be redeemed after he cut off his hand, blew up a planet, and killed Obi-Wan. This man went on a suicidal mission to the 2nd Death Star, because he believed one of the most evil men in the universe could come back from the darkness, and he was proven right! What does Luke apparently do with this new found sense of confidence in family? He pulls a light saber on a sleeping kid and runs away to let him ruin the universe after.
Han Solo doesn't stay with Leia and is a terrible, distant father who would rather haul cgi tentacle rape beasts around for... profit? Even though he's a legendary hero of the rebellion... Okay... Imagine being such a bad father that the child you raised actually restarted the evil empire you fought to destroy.
Leia Organa, instead of the kick ass, take no nonsense ball buster from the originals, is now a matronly, slow talking, constantly sad looking leader who might be Merry Poppins. She can't even trust Poe Dameron, who blew up Star Killer Base about 4 hours before this happened!
What a train wreck of a film.
See, I agree with most of that, from a certain point of view. What my circle of friends all agree on is that there needed to be a
much better transition from the Happily Ever After ending of RotJ to where we found Our Heroes in TFA, and thus then where they went in TLJ. As it is, it's way,
way too jarring and discordant. Even reading all of the ancillary material doesn't fill in all the important gaps. But worst is the impression JJ gives in how he presented TFA. Per their timeline, everything only went to hell in about the last couple years, but it feels from the film to have been that way for a while.
As of five years before TFA? A quarter-century after RotJ?
• Han and Leia were still together-ish. He was often off doing things because politics bored and annoyed him, and she didn't blame him. They were in frequent contact. When her true parentage was revealed, he immediately come home to help.
• Ben was still training with Luke, and they were off in the Unknown Regions looking for something, as yet unrevealed.
• The Empire was either no more or so severely hamstrung as to be irrelevant. The First Order, which is not the Empire, had yet to go public.
• And Leia is just organizing the beginnings of the Resistance.
So somewhere about 3-4 years before TFA is where Ben finds out Vader was his granddad, Snoke's manipulation of him comes to fruition, Luke's academy is destroyed, Ben disappears, Han, Luke, and Leia discover he's become Kylo, Leia throws herself into the Resistance, Han kinda dissociates, and Luke goes Walkabout. And less than
a year before TFA, the First Order starts nibbling around the edges of known space.
All of
that, even in thumbnail form, is what we needed to see on screen. How they get from older, but still the people we knew, to in the middle of crisis. Not just starting us when they're at about their worst.