I hate the constant toxicity and “woke” arguments. It takes away from genuine criticism.
The problem with Disney Star Wars isn’t “wokeness”. It’s not diversity, it’s not politics, it’s simply awful writing and directing.
But because of all the dumbasses whining about “Star Wars went woke”, Disney gets to call all their critics racist/sexist/-phobic and avoid accountability for the actual issues at hand.
Andor is fire tho. Hope they don’t fuck up season two.
I also hate that it hurts the argument for inclusion. When they write a half-assed script, shoe horn some minority character into it, and crap out something everyone hates. The people who don't like that minority, are going to blame the minority for ruining what they love. All the while disney gets to pat themselves on the back because they helped out that community, it's just the world needs to catch up to their progressiveness.
Yeah, no-one is calling Alien woke for having a badass woman as the only survivor, and as the protagonist of the 2nd film. Because they're good movies.
Rose could have been fine if they didn't write her character as basically a cop during the introduction, a Mary Sue that figures out the weakness of tech where the start of the conversation was "that tech is impossible" (plus the weakness itself is completely out of left field), spend half of their field trip whining instead of doing their kinda urgent mission, and then the biggest thing she does is prevents a sacrifice that might have actually redeemed the movie somewhat, in a way that would have been physically impossible, given the scene leading up to it (ordered to retreat, she obeys, Finn ignores it and speeds at top speed towards the thing they were retreating from, then she somehow intercepts him from the side and both walk away).
The people that harassed the actor that played her are massive pieces of shit and this by no means justifies their response, but Rose seems like a character designed to draw hate.
Almost all the discourse around episodes 7 and 8 when they were new was "Ray is a woke Mary Sue character", and later "Rose and Finn were just diversity inclusions". Complete with death threats sent to the actors.
Rose and Finn's episode 8 scenes could have cut entirely and you'd immediately have a better movie. That wasn't because they were diversity inclusions, but because it was terrible writing.
Where do you see people citing wokeness for star wars?
Youtube mostly. My guesstimate is that roughly 66% of videos criticizing disney star wars will blame the wokeness for all the failures, instead of Bob Eiger and the really fucking stupid and shitty writing they're giving the green light all around
The thing is, Disney is every time the one that starts the flames, years in advance, probably as a vector for what they know will be a disastrous product...
Taking the Acolyte as an example:
They had the Cast make derogatory remarks about the fans and Star Wars in general ("Star Wars does not have strong women" conveniently forgot about Leia?) full years before any part of the Acolyte was finished. ... why??
They even had cast members who clearly did not know anything about Star Wars ("Anakin blew up the Death Star") proclaim their "wisdom" as stated fact. ("Star Wars has no good and evil")
Why are fans not allowed to be angry?
Fans don't care about diverse lesbian witch covens, they shrug it off, SW is filled with all kinds of aliens, it's Disney that keeps pointing it out, look! Look! Look upon our glorious lesbian witches, they are what Star Wars is now!
What we do care about is atrocious writing, writing so bad it looks like an 11 year old's fanfic, writing stuff that does not fit in the SW universe... but we need to swallow the stinking mess and smile because it is written by a lgbtq person who claims to know better than George Lucas...
$180M worth of wasted potential that may not be criticized or you'll be declared a toxic fan.
"The force is female", strange, no one declared it to be male, it never had a gender, why suddenly this gendered labeling? Quite weird that protesting against such sexist remarks is considered toxic....
Another small example, one of the high republic books from a few years ago had, in all seriousness, a chunk of inanimate rock as a "jedi navigator/pilot".
And fans are not allowed to be angry about that?
Concluding, it's not the fans who are toxic, the toxicity originated each time from within Disney's Lucasfilm.
Another small example, one of the high republic books from a few years ago had, in all seriousness, a chunk of inanimate rock as a "jedi navigator/pilot". And fans are not allowed to be angry about that?
Like the living planet from Green Lantern? Awesome.
i think the star wars fandom is a great case study of how right poppulism works.
star wars fans have always been hating on new stuff and in many cases the negative feelings are semi justified (looking at the prequels, clone wars, christmas special, ...)
but blaming capitalism is complicated, and while the quality of star wars media hasnt changed much, it now has a diverse cast and scapegoating disliked minorities is easy.
"get rid of the foreigners, get rid of jewish people, get rid of the queers, get rid of women and it will fix everything"
It's more that when anything is bad for any reason, right wingers blame the scapegoat instead of trying to understand things. You'd think that'd be relaxing, but it actually makes things scarier and more stressful.
Star Wars is supposed to be about how anyone can be a hero, and the key to power is wisdom that anyone can learn. But the Vader retcon destroyed this core theme by making Luke born special. The whole point of Luke and why he's a good character is that he wasn't born special. Lucas ruined Luke, and that ruined Star Wars. Now we've got midichlorians and force sensitivity and Jedi royalty and Rey Palpatine. Nobody would have cared who Rey's parents are if Lucas hadn't retconned Luke's parents into being special.
You could replace that with just about any other fandom based around a TV/movie franchise and I guarantee it'll probably be the exact same. I am thankful every day that I don't join specific communities based around individual show/movie franchises because of how toxic they can get.
Point out to certain fandoms either some major flaw or the fact you don't like the show and some groups will act like you just committed a 9/11 style terrorist attack on their show. Same thing even goes for creators of the show sometimes. We really need to end fandom culture.
I read somewhere that the most toxic substance known to man (or the lowest LD50, at least) is botulinum toxin (botox) and a teaspoon of pure botox it is enough to kill literally all of humanity.