Everyone knows how rabidly reactionary and shitheaded the SW fandom became after the Disney acquisition but I'm finally at my breaking point with this latest wave of chud whining. The Acolyte got review bombed before it even aired because the showrunner is a lesbian and the leading actress is a gay enby. Also a clip of Stenberg from like 6 years ago made the rounds where she says the goal of a completely different project she was working on was to make white men cry and chuds who get all their news from youtubers thought she was talking about the Acolyte.
Fast forward to the show's release, the chuds continue to whine about woke Star Wars despite the show's first several episodes being pretty bland and mid in every regard. To disguise their actual reasons for hating the show (diverse cast and queer showrunner) they pull out the absolute most ridiculous reasons to bash it, including but not limited to:
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"The writing is awful and the story sucks!" (the dialogue is genuinely quite bad at times but no worse than 95% of star wars projects. The general story is a mystery-thriller that's compelling enough. Also these same people turn around and say the prequels are incredible so )
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"The show contracts and ruins the prequels!" alright time to put on my nerd cap because the media literacy of these fucking shitbags is nonexistent. "Dark side user" =/= Sith, Red-lightsaber-user =/= Sith, there are tons of darkside users in the galaxy but the Sith area very specific order that the jedi warred with for thousands of years before they were almost completely wiped out. Also half the point of the prequels was to show the Jedi are blinded by their hubris and waning connection to the force, the Sith were right under their nose the entire time and they were just too arrogant to see it, silly Darth Teeth man doesn't ruin shit in your dog ass shit fuck childrens movies.
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"The show RETCONS CANON in an UNACCEPTABLE WAY" this is because a prequel side character's DOB was retconned and he's a lot older now and appears in the show. These worthless fucks are sending death threats to Wookiepedia editors who change the character's DOB and screaming that it's vile yes that's right it's VILE to change a fictional background character's birthday. Just take a look at the replies on that post, yes I know it's the bird hellsite filled with ragebait but the responses like "oh well I thought that GATEKEEPING was a BAD THING " are just so bleak. Art and media mean nothing to these people, their hobby is not watching Star Wars, its watching ragebait youtubers and getting violently angry about mundane things in shows they've never watched and aren't interested in Also these screaming manbabies keep referencing non-canon books and shit as "proof" of the show retconning things
The discourse around TLJ was bad but I think I'm finally done engaging with the SW fandom in any way shape or form. My brain has finally been broken by the chuds. I don't think I'll even tell people I like SW anymore because these shitbrains have just ruined it. And yes I know I need to but if you don't spend a decent amount of time in these SW fandom circles I promise you don't know how bad it actually is
/rant
Not to argue more, but to argue more, TLJ wasn't bad because of 'unrealistic physics' or whatever. It was bad because it couldn't hold a conflict or dramatic tension for longer than 3 seconds, which meant even when bad things were happening I felt no level of stakes for the main characters. I mean, even the prequels, for how bad and cheesy they were, still managed to hold dramatic tension. Even VII held dramatic tension. VIII felt more like... idk what the right analogy is, the closest I can think of is a bad season of Buffy. Like the writers know that conflict has to happen because stories need conflict, but that doesn't mean the conflict should actually affect the characters and their choices in any meaningful way.
Like the big things were clear, they wanted to hit the same beats as V, so they needed a Hoth, Cloud City and everything needed to look desperate but hopeful at the end, so they just decided to mix it up alittle. The issue was they don't seem to understand why those story beats work, and why they work in the order they were originally presented. Like, Vader and Luke's fight leads to his isolation, but after he is rescued, he knows the allies he does have he can count on. But it still ends with just him, Leia, C3PO and R2, with Chewbacca and Lando leaving them behind for Luke to recover. Having nearly every named character with Rey at the end, especially in the final shots undercuts the mood we are supposed to be feeling (the utter loss of an entire rebel base and the death of Luke Skywalker) and is a fundamental misunderstanding of the language of cinematography. The last scenes with the broom kid itself weren't bad cinematography, but there is no actual payoff to it, so it is mostly meaningless.
A pretty easy change to make it meaningful would be Rey being nearly alone now or completely isolated from the crew, distraught and hopeless, then Leia comes to her, talks to her of the despair she felt seeing Alderraan be blown up, but tells her that as long as there are people, they will fight for freedom, Rey looks off into a space window or something and then we cut down to the broom-kid scene. All those people can still survive, but the focus is on the main character, what the main character is feeling, how the world appears within that feeling and the previous actions of the main character that inspired hope in a much cleaner way cinematically. But these kinds of problems are all through the movie, just very strange choices with pretty easy fixes, like it was rushed out of the writers room.
TLJ was good, actually