The other day I was driving home and listening to sports radio and I guess they had been talking about a trade a team didn't make and the fans were angry. One of the hosts said that the angry fans reminded him of nerds who get angry and become toxic because their fan theories didn't come true. I couldn't have rolled my eyes any harder.
Just brought back memories of all the moronic critics when The Last Jedi came out. It wasn't enough to simply say they enjoyed the movie, they had to crap on everyone who didn't and Disney being Disney went along with it. I remember hearing the "you're just mad because your fan theories did come true" or "You just wanted to see a heroic Luke" I remember asking someone who said those exact things why it was a bad thing to want to see a heroic Luke. They didn't respond.
This also popped up in Game of Thrones with Arya killing the Night King and people getting called sexist for saying that it should've been Jon.
I guess in hindsight this exposed all the media shills for what they were. Anyone who was actually interested in the IP would know that fan theories have been around in nerdom since the beginning. Anyone who actually cared about the IPs would know this, but this is what happens when a site/channel that was made to cater to fans is bought out by a corporation and gets re-staffed with a bunch of hacks. Sci-Fi Channel and the Star Wars websites I would frequent in the 90s and early 00s come to mind.
There are so many things wrong with that movie, and the so-called “theme of failure” is a great example. People only grab onto it because one of the characters comes about as close to turning and saying it directly to the camera as he can. If you look at what happens, it doesn’t make any sense to call that the “theme.”
Poe makes nothing but correct choices and gets shit all over for it. Where’s the failure and the lesson for him?
Finn… fails to find the master coder and ends up learning that… there are evil people on both sides… and this lesson causes him to recommit himself to one side in particular? Except at the end where his very rational, necessary act of self-sacrifice is randomly (impossibly) sabotaged, resulting in what should be the death of the entire resistance except that the cave with no back door has a secret back door? Utterly incoherent and has nothing to do with failure.
Rey does not fail at anything she attempts, ever. She is given multiple unearned victories, in fact.
How does this “great theme” apply to any of our three primary characters? It doesn’t. The movie says it does, but the movie says a lot of things that make no sense upon examination, and this is just one more. Even if you say “actually, it’s not a theme, it ONLY applies to Luke,” then that isn’t something you can apply to the defense of other parts of the movie. Not to mention that the failure and the lesson only work if you have a character that isn’t Luke Skywalker in anything but name.
But rewriting ripely will call you a Nazi despite the fact that you dismantled that movie using facts. How that movie became a darling for critics I’ll never know
It had a “diverse” cast of main characters, and shat all over beloved white characters and the world those characters lived in.
Well I guess I understand now why it is but at the time I was confused about it. Also remember it had much more capable women
Well… Rey aside, the women are another case where what the movie tells us about them being right and competent is at odds with what actually happens.
Holdo’s lack of communication nearly gets everyone killed, and her plan hinges on the First Order forgetting that they can just push a button to reveal cloaked ships. The fact that they do is just dumb, not her genius.
Leia and Holdo both unfairly castigate Poe for destroying the dreadnought, despite the fact that the bombers could not have been recalled safely, the dreadnought would have destroyed the whole fleet, and the very scene prior, Leia was talking about how they needed a galvanizing victory like the one over the first Death Star. The destruction of the first Death Star saw a massively powerful weapon defeated by a group of underdogs at the cost of nearly every ship sent against it being destroyed. The destruction of the dreadnought should fulfill this criteria, but the movie ignores that. (This line is actually doubly retarded, since they destroyed Starkiller Base about 12 hours ago in-universe, but unfortunately, the line is in the movie).
Rose effectively dooms the resistance when she stops Finn from destroying the cannon. It’s dumb luck that this doesn’t result in everyone’s death, and physically confusing, given where she strands them, that she and Finn aren’t immediately killed by the First Order. Everything else she does is net neutral. (Except for her complete lack of comms discipline leading to DJ exposing the escape plan to the First Order, but in fairness, Finn is equally to blame here).
Arguably, even Rey gets handed a massive failure in the form of an idiot moment when the movie confirms that she woke up before Kylo after the explosion in the throne room and left in Snoke’s shuttle, but apparently didn’t do anything like attempt to capture, kill, or even inconvenience Kylo while she was standing over his unconscious body.