Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
If you just watch it, absent any knowledge of the context or milieu it's bad - just mostly bad in the way that most popular entertainment is bad. Inoffensively and boringly so.
Someone who is truly red tribe is unlikely to hit the common fail states. Someone from that background is probably used to just passively consuming TV (and is therefore unlikely to not notice or care about bad/inconsistent writing, poor cinematography and so on*). They also probably don't know that Star Wars has a rule about having no white male primary protagonists. They don't know about the interviews ranting about Star Wars fans, men, red tribers, etc.
It's entirely possible to watch a season of Star Trek Discovery and not notice that their were no straight white men with a speaking role who weren't fascists but once you start noticing its hard to go back.
Your friend probably hasn't gone through that process, and if he's a real red triber he's probably in a supportive environment. Grey tribe and questioning blue tribe people feel like they are in a hostile environment and are far more likely to notice and get upset about these kinds of things.
Lastly: given the way that Disney cancels projects, especially ones with political correlates like this one (typically they just.....keep saying they are working on it until everyone forgets) the fact that they actually cancelled it tells you how bad it must have been in a watch-metrics sense.
*Compare: some people watched The Last Jedi and walked out of the theater when Admiral Purple Hair turned her ship into a KKV because it fundamentally invalidates decades of writing and world building. Lots of people went "oooooh pretty." The latter isn't invalid but a lot of Star Wars fans were the former type of person.
Edit: let me give a plot example. Here's the season summary: the Jedi were evil AND incompetent, and lesbian space witches were the true power of the force. You can see why this may upset someone with investment in the rest of Star Wars.
Except the Jedi weren't shown as evil, rather misguided and arrogant. Pre-Disney canon says that the pre-Empire Jedi had become over-zealous in their role about collecting force sensitive children and this had driven many smaller force religions into extinction or hiding. Check.
The Jedi had become corrupted by their political role, arrogant and complacent. Yoda says this. Palpatine says this. And is part of the reason their connection to the living force had waned. And why Qui-Gon was seen as a rogue operator by the Jedi. Check.
But even so every Jedi in the Acolyte is trying to do what they think is right. Note the fight is partially caused by the more militant witch choosing to mind control a Jedi, when Sol is only there because he thinks the girls are in danger. The Jedi are not shown as evil, they are shown as good people convinced of their correctness. Which is exactly the arrogance Yoda speaks of.
Now was the show good? Not really, creaky dialog and odd story beats. But was it bad because it suddenly retconned pre-Empire Jedi to have been evil? No, because it showed them in the light, we keep being told they were. The fall of the Jedi was set as soon as they became part of the political sphere in the Republic.
That is the tragedy of the Jedi. And that no-one remembers that, is the tragedy of the Acolyte.
The writer had issues with dialog, and some of the acting was ropey, but they clearly paid a lot of attention to pre-prequel EU material. From cortosis to the Corporate Sector, to yes the Jedi Order basically deciding they should be the only force game in town. What was shown of the Jedi is exactly what we have ben told. Good people in a systemically corrupt institution, that over centuries began to blind even people with access to super-powers.
Yoda, too late realizes this when confronting Palpatine, that he couldn't win, that the Jedi were doomed to lose from long before his own birth. That they had been blinded not by the Dark Side, but by their own hubris. And this is the wisest of the Jedi, who already thought the Jedi were getting too arrogant (as he notes in Ep 2.) This is why he becomes a broken figure in the original trilogy. Why it takes Obi-Wan to convince him.
To address this let me look to The Last Jedi for a bit - what happens to Luke isn't unreasonable but nobody wants to see it. It's contra the vibes people want to see, and the constructions they've had in their head.
Some of the subtext in the prequel trilogy is that the Jedi were blind idiots, but most people just paper that over with uhhh Sith force powers? and then get on enjoying the black and white story, which is what Star Wars is "supposed" to be. It takes a lot of mature writing to make Andor work despite the deviation from that.
It (including the Acolyte) is fundamentally not what people want to see in Star Wars, and it's not done well enough to make up for that.
The other piece is the dripping wokeness. How many white males are in the show? How are they portrayed?
How good the show is exists in a conversation that's driven by decisions of the other Star Wars properties in the last ten years (including public commentary but the creators), not independent of them.
Once you start looking at this stuff with a critical eye it's hard to stop and the wheels are pretty much off.
Obi-wan is relatively inoffensive if you aren't already mad at Star Wars, and is incredibly bad if you are.
That's a large portion of my criticism.
As a specific example: being annoyed and judgmental at Star Wars turns "lets transport this suspected murderer in an unsecured way" from "eesh writers didnt really think about that huh" to "oh god not another attempt at portraying the Jedi as total fucking inbred morons."
But what this shows is that it's the exact opposite problem surely? People were complaining that Disney ruined the Jedi by making them evil and stupid. But the truth you are claiming is that the audience is just not able (or willing) to absorb the kind of nuance which says actually the Jedi (as acknowledged by themselves and other external sources) were kind of stupid, arrogant assholes at the systemic level. Even as much as most of them, were good people at heart. That is fundamentally part of the story Lucas wanted to tell. That is what Star Wars is "supposed" to be.
It's fine that people want to paper over that nuance, if they don't find it enjoyable. But that is a different complaint than, this is all new stuff made up by Disney. Especially when they heap scorn on the creators on not being "real" Star Wars fans, when as you say they themselves have just decided to Flanderize the Jedi in their heads and ignore all the set up. Complaining about wokeness or bad writing and acting is one thing (and to be clear the Acolyte has significant problems in places there, in my opinion. Child actors are tough, but the young version of the twin's were simply not capable of carrying the story beats they were weighed down with.) But it is just ironic that much of what they are complaining about is literally what the story of the fall of the Jedi order is about, while they are complaining that real Star Wars fans know the Jedi are omni-competent good guys while complaining that Rey was boring because she was an omni-competent good guy.
And that is what is slightly annoying me, because as a Star Wars fan, I would like to see more stories about that. Where the Jedi are not simply perfect do gooders. So now the chances of getting some more stories which explore the contradictions in the Jedi philosophy and the interesting bits of Star Wars lore is probably dead in the water.
C'est la vie I suppose. Maybe I'll start up my old Star Wars D6 campaign using the old West End Games rules and set it in the era prior to the Empire, and give the Jedi characters some complex moral topics to wrestle with.
Politics aside, genre fiction exists to scratch a certain sort of itch. Why Batman Can’t Kill People is a very, very good essay that I recommend, and I'll shamelessly steal bits:
In short, you can't keep asking questions like 'can the Light side of the force be immoral under some belief systems?' or, 'isn't an organised, militarised group of warrior monk cultists going to end up with some pretty dubious practices?' without ruining the thing that makes original Star Wars fans enjoy it. It can work occasionally in one-offs or side material, but if you do it too much in the main shows you're going to lose the fans even if your storytelling is impeccable, because you're not telling the stories people want to hear.
The above is a lesson I think about a lot because I had to wean myself out of the 'but it would be so interesting if you took X aspect of the genre seriously' writing mindset and realise that even if there were potential there, it would remove the aspect of the genre that made me want to write stories in the first place. It's especially a problem for the professional authors / scriptwriters / directors / critics, who spend far more time in their chosen medium than their average audience member, and therefore find their tastes diverging. The professionals demand originality, complexity and subversion because they're sick of the same old thing. And at some point somebody has to remind them that they're being self-indulgent and neglecting the interests of the people they're supposed to be working for (employers/audience).
Getting back to politics, KOTOR II did morally-nuanced discussions of the Force and nobody was particularly upset. Even the first game shows a variety of Jedi with some not-especially-admirable traits. Those games, and the prequels, were interesting precisely because up until then the Jedi has been pretty clear-cut good guys. People get upset now because:
But isn't that just the point? The original depiction and backstory of the Jedi Order was that they were flawed, arrogant and compromised their ideals in service to politics. That directly led to them neglecting the will of the Force, having their abilities clouded and weakened and led to their fall. It isn't a deconstruction to show that. KOTOR II is a great example. But in the vast majority of media the Jedi are depicted as always being unambiguously good and competent. That surely is then the deconstruction? Or perhaps Flanderization, that they serve the Light side of the force so therefore they must be all good, all competent.
I think 2 is more likely. That now people see it as enemy action (and perhaps it is!) and therefore instinctively side against it, even when arguably it is in fact being portrayed accurately.
To be fair, I do think this particular problem starts with the prequel trilogy. The order of Jedi Knights worked best as background mythology. Before the days of Jar Jar and Young Anakin, they were hazy and a bit nondescript. I think that worked perfectly for the kind of mythic tale the OT was trying to weave. Going back and filling in details did some irreversible damage to the universe's structural integrity, but it was at least offset by the spice of variety: new aliens, new planets, new factions, etc. The playground widened up enough where I think many fans could ignore the mess Lucas made with the core story and play with the toys of their own choosing.
Nu Star Wars instead often seems like its doubling down on the parts few people liked to begin with while offering little else in compensation.
tESB and RotJ, actually, started the "the old Jedi were good-hearted but were not all-wise" theme.
Yoda, ESB:
Yoda, RotJ:
Luke and Obi-Wan, RotJ:
Obi-Wan and Yoda are specifically portrayed as wrongly inflexible regarding the temptations of the Dark Side and the possibility of redemption from it. Luke does enter a Dark Side rage, but it does not forever dominate his destiny. Anakin does still have good in him, and Luke does not have to kill him to defeat the Emperor. Obi-Wan and Yoda are the stale thesis, which invited the comically-evil antithesis of the Emperor and Vader, and Luke represents the new, vibrant synthesis (his new lightsaber in RotJ is green, neither the cold blue of Obi-Wan and pre-fall Anakin nor the dangerous red of Darth Vader - the only three lightsabers that had been shown up to that point - but something new and alive).
Do note that this makes prequel and sequel aspersions cast on the Jedi different in implication. Showing the Jedi of the Old Republic being flawed supports the dialectic in the original trilogy; these are the mistakes that caused them to be supplanted by an antithesis. I haven't watched the sequels, but any aspersions they cast on Luke's Jedi in the New Republic undercut that dialectic; if the synthesis is bad, what was the point of the exercise? It is important that Luke's new Jedi are not the same as the old Jedi.
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There definitely is a disconnect, where we are told (and Lucas says!) the Jedi are good and moral and wise, and then shows them or implies them doing things which should render that judgement clearly flawed. Even back in the old RPG before the prequels the (Lucas approved) Jedi sections talk about how the Jedi would test and take force sensitive children, and that most parents saw this as an honor, but the ones that didn't had no choice. And how even alien species who had their own unique connection to the force were studied willingly or not by the Jedi, which is why there were so few extant Force cults because many of them went into hiding or died out.
The only option that seems to reconcile the two is that individual Jedi were good, but they were essentially operating within a system that had taken and raised them as children, taught them what was good and bad and was connected to a deeply corrupt Galactic Republic and so their viewpoint was very attached to this.
Yoda in the Revenge of the Sith novelization indicates he realizes this at the end, that the Jedi had become too entwined with the Republic, and too unbending rather than learning and evolving given they had become a galactic organization. And that Qui-Gon was probably right all along about listening to the living force.
It is perhaps to be expected that if you are writing a story about an order of wise enlightened space-knights who can see the future who at one point get wiped out, you are going to have to have these wise people holding the idiot ball at some stages of the story. They basically have to have been deeply flawed and blind for the plot to work. At the same time as being great role models for the last of them to want to take up the mantle again.
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I don't have anything to add here except I love it whenever somebody links to Shamus' blog. Really good stuff if you're a fan of vidya but also like reading walls of SSC or adjacent material.
I kinda stopped checking it once one of his kids took over after his passing. The content really wasn't as interesting and failed to meet Shamus' level of quality. And when I last did, his steadfast 'No Politics' rule had appeared to have been hollowed out entirely for the usual reasons. I was also really dismayed by what looked to me like his kid publicly throwing his corpse under the bus and painting him as some kind of raging anti-feminist behind the scenes.
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At this point the majority of the total high budget content-hours are about this, despite the fact that the majority of the years and cultural influence are not. It's all over the Disney content.
I think what you're saying is a misread of the Lucas era (although if you quotes from him in that time frame please pass along*). It's clearly not a part of the original trilogy. The prequel trilogy, some of the text has it with stuff like this:
"OBI-WAN: But he still has much to learn, Master. His abilities have made him... well, arrogant. YODA: Yes, yes. It's a flaw more and more common among Jedi. Too sure of themselves they are. Even the older, more experienced ones."
But that's not really a lot.
Per an /r/StarWars thread on the matter:
"Fans have projected an awful, awful lot onto Lucas's intentions for the Jedi. His intentions were to show them get outmaneouvered and trapped by Palpatine. You can reasonably argue that he presented them as complacent and too comfortable.
Yoda observes that many of the 'older, more experienced' Jedi are becoming arrogant, but not in a way that suggests this is massively damning or concerning. It's the kind of observation which a wise, elderly leader whose job is to be mindful would note. Their arrogance plays out in the films where they take gambles which don't pay off in ROTS - but this is very human and mild overconfidence and arrogance.
But Lucas absolutely, 100% neither wanted to make them, nor accidentally made them out to be, a cult of emotion-denying warmongers who kidnap children and whom the Force wants culled for the sake of its balance - which is what an awful lot of people on this board seem to believe."
This contrasts with what has been produced by Kathleen Kennedy - her writing team is clearly ULTRA woke and political. It's not shocking that they are interested in portraying a white male presenting hierarchal organization as ineffective or preferably evil. It's also BORING at this point given these people rule most of media and everything they've put out in the last 10 years has this ideology all over it.
Playing them straight (pun intended) would be novel and interesting at this point.
*I don't know what he is saying now, but that is going to be tightly wrapped up in the contradictory interviews he has put out in the Disney era.
Really? I think most of it still shows the Jedi as much less flawed than they should be. What Lucas said or intended and what he actually showed, wrote and licensed are very different things. Even prior to the Disney take-over. I stand by my argument that a lot of the people criticizing the shows for being woke transfer that energy onto other elements of the show that are arguably exactly as they should be way before Disney ever got involved.
If you think the lead characters being black and asian or the lesbian witches vs Jedi is a woke overreach and this impacted the quality of the show, I think that is understandable. But I think a lot of people then want to criticize everything about the show through the same lens. Especially people who weren't around during the heyday of the expanded universe before the prequels where for example Palpatine gets resurrected and corrupts Luke. And that wasn't anything to do with white men bad or whatever.
In the end I would rate the Acolyte as 6/10. Lovely choreographed saber fights, recanonization of cortosis, the Corporate Sector (Han Solo at Star's End was one of the first Star Wars books I read all the way back in 79.), an interesting look at how even good guys can do the wrong thing for the right reason. Some sub-par acting (especially the child actress), some creaky dialog and a little too much fan service without pay off (Darth Plagueis and Yoda). Though at least Plagueis feeds into the Legends idea that he directly or indirectly created Anakin using dark sorceries gathered in secret.
I absolutely agree and that's part of my argument, sorry if that wasn't clear.
One of the things that is happening here is that you absolutely get a pass when you providing fun escapist entertainment. Lots of trash (or perhaps less judgmentally pulp) suffers in one dimension or another or has inconsistencies. Star Wars is burdened by meaning something in a lot of people's minds (which makes what it is "supposed" to be somewhat sticky, occasional to its detriment) and it's also moved away from just being fun escapist fiction and some of that is the politics which have been injected into it with avowed intentionality, part of it is the "okay but lets subvert" and other adjacent attitudes.
They decided to play a different game and now they are being judged by different rules. A taut political thriller demands more internal inconsistency than a Roland Emmerich film.
Parallel to this - once you've pissed someone off they aren't going to cut you a lot of slack. There's an entire genre online criticism that is essentially calling out woke entertainment on stuff that would have been fine in a generic Hollywood action script in the 90s. I can see how some would want to paint this as unfair, but frankly stuff written by people who hate you is going to be judged by a higher standard and I'm not sure that's wrong, especially with the way a lot of this involves people who hate their fans reaching for a replacement audience that doesn't exist.
To sum, it's not that it is bad so much as what it represents makes it bad. Woke themes that could be forgivable are another ongoing attack on me. Meaning it gets exactly zero slack.
It is also a deliberate lack of course correction which means that even though it's probably in the same ball park as the other recent SW shows it's worse for it. If someone keeps slapping you in the face and you keep telling them not to it doesn't matter if it's all the same strength, at some point you go ENOUGH. For me this one was the first one I didn't watch (with the last two being relegated to being watched at 1.5-2 speed).
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What I love about your comment is that it truly is "right is the new left". You could swap some words around and 1:1 have complaints about minority representation circa ten years ago. The stuff about hostile environments heightening objectively-small slights could be from an explanation of microaggressions, etc. I think you could work this out into a general theory of social progress where some tribe of particularists (progressives in this case) develops theory based on concrete allied cases and later on universalists (liberals) generalize it to their enemies.
But it's also the case that the left wield power in a way that fits their critique, right? If you have a movement that complains a lot about minority representation, it's going to put a lot of work into choosing what kinds of people get what roles, ending up discriminating against majority representation. Likewise the stuff about hostile environments - having identified the existence of microaggressions that cause trauma to minorities, they instituted strict speech codes that makes things comfortable for their clients whilst making things uncomfortable for their enemies.
If the US had been unexpectedly invaded by time-travelling Stalin from 1949, we wouldn't be talking about this stuff and we'd be talking about the genocide of kulaks and how the Five Year Plans discriminate against our class and sector. The rhetoric from Faction A is going to be related on some level to the actions of Faction B.
It's also mentally easier for rebels to adopt (and be trapped within) the framings of the propagandistically-superior foes. That's why you had Satanists and Pagans in the 90s/2000s and now you have White advocacy influencers.
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I mean my understanding of the world is very strongly that the woke are the right from my formative years. Intensely racist and sexist, care about what you do in your bedrooms, want to ban books and thought and speech etc...
A lot of the women I know in my life who are woke act like the religious right soccer moms and some of them actually were before that became gauche.
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Have you actually seen it? Your post here offers a compelling view but I have read similar though probably intentionally vague critiques online, particularly the scathing Forbes reviews. I passed on reading all of them because it's too easy to let reviewers chisel pre-formed opinions before one watches.
You seem to be (though I could me misconstruing) making a lot of assumptions about what I would suggest are considerably varied backgrounds and environments of red tribe folks, but to clarify he's a 56-year-old welder, former cop, who grew up as I did on Star Wars and hasn't really enjoyed any of the shows since ESB, though like me he is a fan of both Rogue One and Andor. White guy. Republican voter. Probably more rightwing than he lets on to me--he would consider me relatively left of himself. No stranger to what you and others have termed "noticing," but, similar to myself, doesn't let himself get sidetracked if the story is good Usually only really annoyed when the plot points veer too far from the understandings we all had of the *lore when coming up. (C3P0 as Anakin's droid for example, does not sit welI.) I once asked him, as an ex-cop, if he got annoyed when women were presented as martially capable, physical badasses. He said it didn't bother him; he knew plenty of good female cops (and has always been a fan of Gina Carano.)
Anyway thanks for the response, throwaway number 5.
*I could discuss at length the Holdo Maneuver, as it was eventually called. I would suggest that that scene didn't undue any previously established canonical point. Many other parts of the sequels did really irk me but that wasn't one of them.
Cards on the table? I haven't seen it. I don't want to give them my watch dollars - however I've watched over twice the length of the show in review and complaint shows (because I throw them on at two times speed while I'm cooking, working out etc).
For a different sort of experience, say something by Lynch or something complicated or with a lot of texture like Better Call Saul or The Wire I'd say that means reduced validity of the complaint (even though again, I've seen a looooot of clips) but the thrust of my complaint is stuff like the content being offensive (in a culture war sense) or the plot is ridiculous. These things don't change having seen it or not and it's the kind of product that's going to be the high art that requires experiential engagement and also - the people who are historical Star Wars "fans" generally care about these things, including consistency of established canon and not rewriting the feelings or associated with the themes (like the Jedi now suddenly being deeply questionable at best).
With respect to my Red Tribe commentary what I'm angling for is that there seems to be a certain slice of person who is less offended by/struggles to notice some of the culture war trends. Red tribe people who are well settled in life, older big business democrats, they tend to be more likely to say things like "oh yeah I guess there are no men in this show. Weird. I guess maybe it's the women's turn?" A young guy who feels like he doesn't have a lot of media product to engage with and is being held back in society because of his sex (and likely politics). People who feel like society is working for them get much less upset and find it harder to Notice.
Doesn't apply to everyone though. My dad was one of those for years and is now watching the Critical fucking Drinker somehow.
It's certainly possible for someone to be a Red, like Andor, and to have no problem with this one (and be an noticer).......but I'm absolutely shocked to hear it and haven't really seen that demographic elsewhere. It's not one of the standard buckets for sure lol.
An additional dimension is the lagging tail of people being done with Kathleen Kennedy's bullshit. At this point she's legitimately racist/sexist if you want to use those terms.
With respect to the Holdo Maneuver - if hyperspace interacts with real space in a concrete enough way that you have access to relativistic kill vehicles then you need to explain why they aren't used elsewhere. It's the perfect answer to the plot of most of the movies (any of them involving the super weapons, including Rogue One). Load up an expendable ship and crash it. Death Star done. Go home.
If that's your only objection, I'd suggest piracy.
I mean why though? The only reason I'd watch it at this point is so that I can say I've seen it. I know I won't like it, it appears by some objective measures to be even worse than Ahsoka, Obi-wan, and The Book of Boba Fett all of which I pirated and were awful.
This way I don't even show up on piracy statistics if they have those (although I guess I am supporting hate watching YouTube commentary so not entirely disengaged).
Piracy statistics don't give watch dollars.
And yeah, I did say "if that's your only objection"; wanting to avoid watching shit is indeed a separate objection.
After the whole Velma thing I'm terrified of doing anything that remotely convinces "them" that a show has interest of any kind.
What happened with Velma? I know very little about Scooby-Doo; only seen the movie (the one with Scrappy operating a humanoid robot and running a theme park that possesses people with demons).
One running narrative (which is obviously of questionable accuracy) is that very few people authentically watched it but so many people hate watched it and/or gave it buzz that it was green-lit for a second season anyway.
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I'll bite. When I saw that scene in theatres, I grinned like an idiot at the visual for roughly ten seconds, and then immediately thought "this breaks every other Star Wars movie forever," and by the time I walked out of the theatre I'd already decided I was done with Star Wars as a franchise. There were a lot of things I didn't like about the plot and writing of TLJ, but that part in particular really stood head and shoulders above the rest as being completely, egregiously incompatible with the entire setting before and since.
Why didn't they use hyperspace ramming against the Death Star, or against the imperial fleet at Hoth? Why aren't hyperspace-ram missiles the standard anti-ship weapon for every faction in the setting? It can't possibly be a matter of expense or scarcity; hyperdrive-equipped fighters and light transports are ubiquitous throughout the setting. There doesn't appear to be a countermeasure, and she didn't appear to be unusually lucky in her execution. In every subsequent viewing of a space battle, as soon as the situation becomes tense, I'm going to be asking "why aren't they solving this problem with a hyperspace ram missile?" And why shouldn't I?
I had the same specific experience. I enjoyed various parts of EpVIII, and then by the time the credits rolled, I left the theater full of complaints. Didn’t even go see IX.
Having that suspension break during the movie was just…ugh.
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Yeah, me too, and I was genuinely baffled that other SW fans didn't see the problem.
"But... but... the Death Star?"
It was clearly a goshcoolwow moment that looked awesome on screen and gave Admiral Purple Hair an epic swan song and is the reason literary SF > cinematic SF, because an author writing a series would not fuck his own universe over like that (and if he did, his fans would absolutely drag him).
From my view, the annoying part is that a good writer -- and while I don't think you need to be Zahn-level good, coincidentally Zahn did offer his services free of charge -- could have pretty easily pulled it off in a way that made it much more impactful. Even if you don't care about the broader universe or milSF concepts, we never get an idea of why this was heroic and the other suicidal efforts weren't, why it happened now and not earlier or later, and some hints that it was even possible beforehand so people could want it.
Those breadcrumbs don't have to be as explicit in film contexts as in written works, but they still matter there. Instead :
Now, you've established that hyperspace kill vehicles only work when a) targeting someone without shields in the way, b) that you're incredibly close to c) with a big expensive ship with a ton of power, d) targeting a big ship so you can even try to hit it, e) while that big enemy hasn't blown up some vital part of the hyperdrive while disabling the rest of your weapons and engine systems, f) you got really lucky on top of all that to actually hit. What kind of tactical or strategic moron would even risk the slightest possibility of that risk?
Flashfoward to Hux going full 'retreat, at our moment of victory?' He's exactly the sort of moron that would leave a disabled ship in his grasp just to make its commander suffer while he swats down unarmed and unshielded transport vessels. ((That this means DJ's betrayal inadvertently gives Holdo a chance at the cost of countless lives helps.)) Hell, he might try to capture them alive, just to
torture them for the fun of itgive Snoke a Rebel leader's brain to sift through. Have Holdo spell out, while she's desperately trying to come up with some way to distract the Imperials, to save just one life, that every possible system is down -- weapons, engines, shields, scanners, escape pods, life support -- while the Imperial megaship is taking up more and more of the view from the viewscreens. Have the Imperials give a sensor readout: the Rebel flagship is completely dead in the water, with a scattering of life signs.Except the hyperdrive system. And then we hear the distinct heavy rumble of Holdo's ship being scooped in through the megaship's shields, and the viewscreens are no longer a sign of dread; they're a target. It's still a hopeless cause: Holdo doesn't have maneuvering thrusters to aim, or time to calculate a good hyperspace solution, no time to even guess that their damaged ship is big enough to damage the Imperial megacruiser, and they're leaking enough fuel that they might not even be able to enter hyperspace once.
Then the scene.
I recently watched so that’s why they cut all her scenes from the movie from CinemaStix about how different the movie Constantine was before being recut, as well as when the editor has to fix it in post about Ferris Buler's Day Off. Amazing how different those movies could have been without big changes by the editing room. As an outsider, all those changes seem like things a competent reader would have been able to tell from the script.
Your post reminds me of the old What if Star Wars Episode I Was Good, and II and III by Belated Media. These sorts of plot fixing recommendations just sound like common sense; what is wrong with the production process that produces this billion-dollar nonsense?
The pessimistic answer's that they don't care, either because modern audiences will buy it anyway, or because the costs of writing well exceed the return. But I'm not convinced.
((For example, take Deadpool 3:It has a brilliant character bit where the protagonists take down Cassandra Nova in her headquarters, if you'll excuse the pun, by exploiting her sadism and fascination with corrupting others to her view of a destructive freedom from past constraints, then offering her a sort of redemption even recognizing how little she'd want to take it, something only that Logan could do and that has had breadcrumbs dropped throughout the film.
.
And then it has her pop up again, and the second time she's beaten by Deadpool and Wolverine holding hands and trying to kill themselves. There's a mechanical cause why that works, but it's made up five minutes beforehand by a guy who has no idea what he's talking about, and ends up being partly wrong anyway.
The people who wrote the first confrontation weren't facing different pressures than the second -- it's not like Michael Bay helicoptered in, made a bad joke, and then dived out a window.
The less cynical possibility is more that the modern nature of digital editing and massively parallel work means that by the time even a mid-range movie comes out, it's hard for anyone to have a good view of the final product and only the final product. The people making decisions are living, breathing, and sleeping every part not just the scenes that are shot or napkins that are scrawled on, but even some that only existed in their heads. The people touching up individual scenes are looking under a microscope at details we might not even be able to see, without the big picture.
Sometimes that's for the better: a lot of what gets dropped is better implied, or better not done at all. But things slip through the cracks.
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Yup ruined all of it for me instantaneously, I laughed at the time and loudly proclaimed how stupid it was in the theater. That is my level of autism...for better or worse.
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"Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy. Without precise calculations we might fly right through a star, or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"
This is admittedly George Lucas dialogue, but from the first, 1977 film. It suggests at least the possibility of randomly hitting solid (plasma) objects. If this is true or possible, the Holdo ship ramming thing has to be possible.
Now, as to why this kamikaze or automated hyperspace trick isn't used regularly, no idea. I'm sure there are EU authors somewhere scrambling to find a rationale. I could probably think carefully and come up with a few myself if I had the motivation, which I do not (not out of any dismissal of your question).
There are a lot of random issues even in the original trilogy. Tie bombers going over the asteroid field. A space slug with, inexplicably, a mouth full of incisors. The boats on a wave phenomenon of spacecraft floating upright in the same angle. To say nothing of sound. I suspend disbelief, as the saying goes, willfully. Until I don't.
I can think of a lot of potential narrative fixes that could work, if they'd been integrated properly into the movie we all saw. Like, they're in a super-weird region of space with anomalous hyperspace physics; they didn't want to go in there in the first place as the localized threat of hyperspace collisions makes it near-suicidal, but they had no other options and the imperials are arrogant enough to follow them in. Or the super-cap imperial ship has some sort of experimental, super-powerful hyperspace jammer and hyperspace ramming is a unanticipated side effect, or when they infiltrate the supercap they tweak its hyperdrive to create a resonant frequency with the cruiser, allowing an otherwise impossibly-precise ram jump to be programmed, etc, etc... But the common thread of all these is that they establish an explanation for why this is going to be a one-time thing, because it really, absolutely has to be a one-time thing or else all space combat in the setting breaks forever.
The problem is that the movie that we actually got does none of these, nor does it really leave room for anything like them in the story as delivered. I like to think I'm something of a storyteller myself, and technobabble is a thing I've done before. I don't think the issues raised by the holdo manuever can actually be technobabbled.
Authors can make that suspension easier or harder, though, based on what they write and how they write it, and this is a big part of the difference people perceive between good and bad writing. There's a degree to which "I suspend my disbelief willfully, until I don't" is a fully general answer to any complaint about any element of any story, no matter how incongruous or poorly thought out.
Give me a scene where the whole focus is on the tragic death of one of the main characters, and then two scenes later they're suddenly alive again and the story carries on as though nothing happened, and this is never explained or addressed again. Maybe this is some super-subtle 3d-chess thing where the death is supposed to be read as metaphorical, or maybe the author is intending this as a demonstration that something else is going on behind the scenes; maybe the world is actually a simulation. Funny Games did something like this by injecting blatantly incongruous, nakedly-unjustified cartoon logic to abruptly reverse a pivotal character death, very clearly on-purpose and with an obvious narrative intention. The problem with the holdo manuever is that it's very nearly as disruptive to the story and setting as a character literally re-winding another character's death with a VCR remote, and the disruption is never addressed; there's no evidence the authors even understood why it would be disruptive. To the extent that "bad writing" is a meaningful category, this is about as central an example as I've ever seen of bad writing. It makes suspension of disbelief hard enough that there doesn't seem to be a point in trying; if I'm going to have to rewrite the whole story in my head anyway, I might as well do that from the start and just write my own from scratch.
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Not necessarily. Stars and supernovae (which contain neutron stars) both have strong gravity wells. There is an RL theory out there that the reason gravity's so weak is that it leaks into hyperspace (as in, literally, 4th+ spatial dimensions), and that dark matter is normal matter out in other membranes whose gravity is leaking into our membrane through hyperspace.
I don't have my copy of the original Star Wars novel to hand, but I seem to remember "black hole" being used in this line.
Not to geek out, but this is the passage from the book:
“Traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops, boy. Ever tried calculating a hyperspace jump?” Luke had to shake his head. “It’s no mean trick. Be nice if we rushed it and passed right through a star or some other friendly spatial phenom like a black hole. That would end our trip real quick."
So the book was ghost written by Alan Dean Foster from the story by Lucas. I assume the only reason "star" and "black hole" are used here are because they're things in space, and "there's a lot of space out in space" (thanks, writers of Wall-E.)
Anyway as I say this point can be discussed at length and I am sure on reddit and other places it has been, but my point is it always made sense to me based on my viewings of the films and having read the book.
I am also sure that it never crossed Lucas' mind to have ships doing hyperspace kamikaze jumps, and that this decision by Rian Johnson or whoever wasn't great. But it wasn't a dealbreaker for me.
Quotes like that exist pretty early on but it's easy to interpret them as "shit IDK they need to avoid a gravity well of large objects?" instead of "constant direct interaction with objects in real space is a thing."
But once you have use the technique you need to explain why you aren't using it all the time. Was Holdo the first one to think it up? Did they have to override some navigation settings? Are shields somehow just that powerful so it doesn't make sense most of the time? All of these explanations are bad and the fundamental problem of the original trilogy is under resourced group needs to blow up something big......which is easy to do this way.
They didn't even put it in a line with a bad explanation they just didn't think at all.
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