ray245 wrote: 2019-12-21 06:05am
The Romulan Republic wrote: 2019-12-20 10:52pm
LadyTevar wrote: 2019-12-20 10:41pm
It is worth the money.
Hmm.
To be honest, I've been so worn out with the fandom infighting and seesaw direction of the franchise, and so afraid of another Game of Thrones season eight, that I've barely been following it lately, but even still I've seen a deluge of bad reviews.
On the plus side, this is probably the least-spoiled I've ever been for a new Star Wars film in my lifetime. I might give it a go post-Christmas.
I completely disagree. I think if you like TLJ and what RJ did, you will hate ROS.
Anyone who thinks those that love TLJ will like ROS do not understand why people liked TLJ.
Rose role has been reduced to a minor background character.
Note: I haven't seen the film yet, so I am going off the presumption that what ray just said is an honest and accurate reflection of the film. The following statement is made in response to the marginalization of Rose, and is not meant to be a comprehensive statement on all aspects of the film. That said, this seems a fair opportunity to address some larger trends in the Star Wars franchise, and media and culture overall, so here goes.
If it is true that Rose has been minimalized (and that was already the case in the promotional material for the film), then they are not only pandering to the OT purists, but pandering to the Alt. Reich, exactly as I feared they were when I saw how they cut Rose nearly entirely from the promotional material.
Those fucking
scum viciously harrassed Kelly Tran off Twitter with racist and misogynist trolling, and instead of standing by their actor, Disney and Abrams decided to
reward the trolls by heavily cutting her role. I feel so, so sorry for Kelly Tran (for whom a breakout role has now been turned into renewed marginalization and a likely lifetime of harrasment and denigration from the nastier elements of the fandom), for all of the actors, and for Rian Johnson, who is already being scapegoated for ROS's failings (the argument I've seen goes that the film was ruined because Abrams "had" to spend half of it "fixing" what Johnson did**). And I feel sorry for the entire Asian community who are already among the most marginalized and under-represented in Western media, despite representing, between the various different Asian nationalities and ethnicities, the majority of the human race.
This is not only morally repulsive, it is a huge betrayal on Disney's part of their actors and the company's obligation to their safety. Because the message the Reich will take from this is that its harassment
worked, and that means there will be more of it. They know they can ruin any actor or director's career by being scum on social media, because companies will cater to whichever portion of the fandom whines loudly.
You do not appease these people with weakness and concessions. That emboldens them, because fascists and bullies smell weakness like a shark smells blood in the water, and they respond in the same way. I haven't been this disgusted at a company's cravenness since Comedy Central censored South Park in response to threats from Islamic extremists (note: I am not defending South Park's content here, but you do not give into threats from terrorists, because that only encourages more threats). And it doesn't even really matter if that was the reason, if their motives were bigoted or political, or if they just thought Rose was a bad character or that she didn't have a role in the film Abrams envisioned or whatever. Marginalizing her like this, in this context, will send that message.
Between this,
Endgame,and "Game of Thrones", though, its increasingly and depressingly clear to me that the surge in female protagonists in genre films over the last few years was just a fad, that the Powers That Be (who are still overwhelmingly white men) have basically decided "Okay female majority of the human race, we gave you your moment in the spotlight, now we're gonna go back to making nice safe films with white male protagonists that don't make insecure conservative white men feel threatened." Or maybe: "Okay women, we'll let you have your strong female protagonist, as long as they turn evil, die, or get marginalized at the end."
Millennia of persecution ranging from marginalization to second-class citizenship to outright sexual slavery, a few years of female-lead movies, and now its time to go back to the status quo.
Fuckers.
Honestly, this makes me inclined to boycott the film on principle. The only reason I won't is because a boycott would be cutting into the female and minority actors' paycheques, and there's no reason why
they should be punished because Mickey and Abrams decided to knife them in the back to appease fucking Twitter trolls.
I've been criticized for claiming that anyone who criticizes the ST is a fascist, but that is not and has never been my argument. What I believe is that the Alt. Reich
coopted criticism of the films, coopted the Star Wars fandom, in the same way that they coopted free speech advocacy (to the point that many regard "being a free speech activist" as simply code for "being a neo-Nazi/white supremacist"), or the way they coopted Patriotism, or they way the coopted a part of the Bernie Sanders campaign (the Bernie-or-Busters) or the way they coopted the fucking Swastika (which was an Eastern religious symbol long before the Nazis got their filthy paws on it and made it synonymous with them to the point that its still illegal in multiple countries to display it). Because they're a God Damn cultural cancer, and
this is what they do. They take over any system they enter and make it part of them and their hate machine. And we fell for it again. We, the fandom, let them do it. We let them use our nostalgia and sense of ownership of the fandom, and our resultant anger and resentment, to dictate what Star Wars can be.
Even leaving the politics aside for a moment, pandering to the most exclusionary portions of the fandom will not be good for the franchise in the long-run. What director or actor will want to work on a franchise where creativity or originality is met with vicious hatred and abuse from the fandom, and the company will then throw you under the bus and expunge your work as much as possible in order to appease them? This does not honour Star Wars, and it does not honour the OT. What it does do is ensure creative sterility, ensuring that the franchise will never be permitted to become bigger or better than it was- only smaller. Contrast to, say, Doctor Who, which thrives on change, has embraced it from almost the beginning, and continues to adapt to transitions that would cripple or kill another franchise. And which, probably not coincidentally, has probably the nicest and most tolerant fandom I've ever encountered- the Right tried to flood Who internet pages with rage over Jodie Whittaker, and it mostly just fell on deaf ears.
The OT succeeded, in part, because it dared to have an original vision, to do something new. But Star Wars isn't allowed to be bigger or better now. In trying to preserve the spirit of the OT, the ugliest portions of the fandom have ensured that Star Wars will never grow beyond it. This is, of course, a fundamentally conservative sentiment- that the priority should be always and only preserving and honouring a glorified past, not building a better future. No wonder, then, that the Alt. Reich found such fertile ground for their resentments in the Star Wars fan community. Indeed, one can see the process here as a very microcosm of the one which put Donald Trump in the White House.
Again, this is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis of the film, its plot, or its characters. I don't yet have sufficient information to speak to that yet. What it is is a response to the specific issue of Rose's minimalization, the context in which it happened, and its implications to the larger political issues of our time, and it should be read in that light. When I've seen the film, I will perhaps offer a fuller analysis of it, though I frankly cannot image any other qualities that could redeem it in my eyes from this single, shameful action.
I'm not going to boycott, for the reasons stated above. But there
does need to be a fan backlash, one even louder and more persistent than the one the Reich unleashed. Because these One Percenter shits running Disney and HBO and so many other companies only really care about profit and PR, and the only way that they will keep making movies with female and minority leads who are treated with a modicum of respect is if they fucking
hurt when they don't. Their idea of building a franchise is to just pander to whoever whined loudest about the last film? Then we better be damn sure that we're the ones whining louder.
But I forgot, that's "woke cancel culture" and President Obama tells us we shouldn't do that- because trying to be nice and "bipartisan" to the people who hated him simply for existing worked out
so well for him and his agenda and legacy.
*Which means that the assurances from Abrams about how much he liked Rose were likely so much cynically-calculated bullshit, just like all the times they built Daenerys up as a hero while planning all along to turn her into a Mad Queen stereotype and have Jon put her down like a rabid dog.
**Read: daring to do something new.
