site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Here's my opinion on how to defuse many aspects of culture war: reduce copyright length to at most 40-50 years.

Consider. Lots of people were upset when Rian Johnson deliberately made the Last Jedi to be about fighting "toxic masculinity" and "fan entitlement". But he is not the problem. I am not here to criticize RJ. His interpretation actually had some interesting ideas even if it was badly executed and inconsistent with my general concept of what SW movie "should" be.

The problem is that Disney anointed him to be the one to save Star Wars from smelly nerds. And there's nothing you could do unless you had a billion dollars to buy SW from Disney. Except in the end this didn't work out for "woke" cause either, because TLJ did poorly at the box office so Disney hired Abrams who overrode every RJs decision. Everyone loses.

I think part of the reason why "culture wars" are so bitter is that all sides are essentially reduced to pressuring (or begging) large, faceless corporations into reflecting their values. This creates mutual distrust because both sides know that corporations will drop your values the second they stop being profitable. It is fundamentally toxic.

But if noone owns IP then we can have both "based" and "woke" version of every franchise. Fans will rise to the occasion to make both. Hence, less bitter culture wars.

Of course, there's zero chance Disney ever allows erosion of copyright, but it is fun to speculate.

I wish we could have a scheme where copyrights had to be renewed every 5 or so years, and the price rose per term dramatically something like:

first term is $10 

second term is $1000 

third term is $10,000 

fourth term is $1,000,000 

fifth term $100,000,000

sixth term is $10,000,000,000

seventh term is $1,000,000,000,000

And there is no eighth term. The idea would be most properties fall out between the third and fifth term (15 to 25 years) and the enforcers of copyright benefit from extended protection on the super valuable properties (something like Pokemon, Star Wars, or Harry Potter might be worth a 6th term but that's about it).

Huh, I actually find a lot to like in this scheme.

There may be a better way to set a price for each renewal term, but I like that the fourth term is within the means of a group of devoted fans to crowdfund the purchase of the rights if the original holder is no longer interested, and as you indicate, the sixth term is certainly only justifiable for massive properties.

If a given work isn't renewed after a given term, is that a situation where it automatically and permanently falls into public domain, or would it simply remain on the 'open market' where anyone can swoop in to buy up the rights at the stated price?

Also, if the seventh term is going to be such an absurdly high amount, perhaps that can be the price to purchase the rights 'in perpetuity' such that they never expire.

Yeah those were just round numbers I picked to illustrate the pattern. I'm certain there are better figures to use (I'd probably lower the 2nd and 3rd some so small authors can make money for at least a decade and might raise the 5th a bit).

Automatically goes to the open domain. Just like It's a Wonderful Life which didn't get renewed so it came out very early. I'd like a new scheme to allow for that (such that stuff people forget about becomes public). I'd make the terms extend to perpetuity but in the US, I think there's a constitutional prohibition.

Seems like the ideal pricing scheme would aim to be some % of the estimated value of the property, or maybe % of the revenue generated by it, but that calculation seems way too fraught.

But that would allow small authors/creators to maintain their rights at low cost unless some particular property got really popular.

Perhaps the only issue I see with allowing a property to slide directly to public domain if rights aren't renewed is that it actually disincentivizes anyone from making any works using such a property since they can't exclude others from doing so if the new works get popular.

Whereas if there's a property that's just sitting out there unused and the rights can be snapped up for $10k-$100k then creators might keep a very close eye on the stuff that isn't renewed so they can snag it and do some work with it.

Not that public domain stuff never gets used.

Huh, maybe there could also be some absurdly high amount which, if paid, would automatically transfer the rights of some property to the public domain and the payment split between the government and the rights-holder.

Sort-of-kind-of like an 'eminent domain' for IP.

Perhaps the only issue I see with allowing a property to slide directly to public domain if rights aren't renewed is that it actually disincentivizes anyone from making any works using such a property since they can't exclude others from doing so if the new works get popular.

I'm not the best at copyright law but I think when a new work uses a character from a work that's in the public domain they retain rights to their work but not the character. Like when something like Pride and Predjudice and Zombies gets written doesn't it become a new creative work? Or when Disney makes an Aladin animated film they own the rights to that film but anyone else can make their own Alladin fim or comic or whatever, too.

Eminent domain for IP seems pretty interesting, I'll have to think more about that.

Alternately, just don't build culture around proprietary intellectual property. Having your cultural identity as an American tied to the whims of corporate interests is a recipe for disaster. See: Disney's Black mermaid. Millions of white Americans grew up identifying with Ariel and Disney World as part of their core identity, and now when the globalist interests of Disney shareholders decide that white America is a liability and not an asset, white America's cultural heritage is in the crosshairs.

At least when white American identity was more closely tied to Christianity you didn't have this problem. It actually really bothers me as a white middle American to think about how much of my own childhood and shared culture is owned by corporations or even just by people who wrote and published books or created something of their own. I envy European and Asian cultures who in many cases have many thousands of years of folk tales and traditions to draw from when American culture is locked behind IP protection laws from decades ago.

Your proposed solution is to end copyright protection sooner, but to me the ideal solution is to avoid building identity on anything proprietary to begin with. Admittedly I find Marvel and mass market films kind of gauche to begin with and the idea of people rallying around these properties as cultural entities worth tying identity to makes me uneasy.

I envy European and Asian cultures who in many cases have many thousands of years of folk tales and traditions to draw from

Currently being displaced and destroyed by the American commercially-produced folk-culture substitute. It's really sad to me, but that's a culture war that has already been lost. The American mass-produced substitute not only is several billion-dollar industries, but it's also designed to reflect the current social and material conditions. Meanwhile, the conditions that sustained actual folk cultures around the world, such as peasant life in most of Southern Europe, have disappeared or are disappearing, leaving the original traditions void of most of their former meaning. We are left, for example, with American neo-traditions which are usually centered around spending money. But the local traditions have lost their original meaning, so even where they are still practiced, they only can be either a tourist attraction or a LARP (or both).

To give you an idea of how pervasive this is, even traditions that don't depend so much on their meaning, such as tales for children, have been displaced by mass culture substitutes. For example, where I live most of the traditional tales have been completely forgotten, displaced by the Grimm Brothers in the best case (at least still based on a tradition from somewhere) and Disney or books like "X has two daddies" in the worst and more common one.

Currently being displaced and destroyed by the American commercially-produced folk-culture substitute. It's really sad to me, but that's a culture war that has already been lost. The American mass-produced substitute not only is several billion-dollar industries, but it's also designed to reflect the current social and material conditions. Meanwhile, the conditions that sustained actual folk cultures around the world, such as peasant life in most of Southern Europe, have disappeared or are disappearing, leaving the original traditions void of most of their former meaning. We are left, for example, with American neo-traditions which are usually centered around spending money. But the local traditions have lost their original meaning, so even where they are still practiced, they only can be either a tourist attraction or a LARP (or both).

Absolutely. My grandfather knew most of Goethe and Schiller by heart. Dropping a line out of their works in an appropriate context both got a laugh out of everyone and it fostered a shared understanding of belonging to the same culture. Of belonging to the in-group.

That has first been replaced by sit-com catchphrases ("Bazinga", "true story") and now by memes. Which, to channel my inner old man yelling at clouds (itself a cringey Simpsons reference), is just really lame.

And you Yanks are the worst. You wouldn't recognise a Shakespeare quote if it bit you in your very Cs, your Us and your Ts.

That's really disturbing to me and I'm sorry to hear your culture is going through that. I've always loved traveling and the pervasiveness of globalization is super depressing to me when I visit other countries. As an American I feel terrible that exporting our power and values bulldozes everyone else's.

To be charitable I try to also look at what the American cultural exports offer to people though- in many cases people's lives are improved by adopting new technologies and opening their borders to international trade and so on. You have to accept people's agency and their own right to choose to have their culture molded to fit international standards even though I don't think a lot of people do, or even can, consider thoroughly the negative effects of this in the long run. I mean, that's what I have to tell myself to keep from going crazy, haha.

Yes, I'm not laying blame into the American mass-produced culture, or at least not exclusively. It fills the void left after traditions lose their meaning, and in a case-by-case basis it is indeed voluntarily accepted. But it does a terrible job at filling that void (to the extend that it fills anything at all) and there are few, if any, non LARPy alternatives to adopting it. When the roots die the whole tree dies as well, and it's only normal that fungi grow in the rotting mass. But it's still sad that the tree is no longer there.

Both of those plans are unactionable, but "convince society to not build culture around" is maybe a bit more unactionable than "convince congress to change copyright." :)

That's true, but the "convince congress to change copyright" solution doesn't do much for me as it allows people to continue to tie their personal identity to Spiderman, in a novel and more atomized personalized way and I don't really see much value in that.

My solution isn't entirely "unactionable" either, really, it's not like people can't have their opinions changed en masse in certain ways (that are outside of my scope of abilities but not everyone's)

That's true, but the "convince congress to change copyright" solution doesn't do much for me as it allows people to continue to tie their personal identity to Spiderman, in a novel and more atomized personalized way and I don't really see much value in that.

Provocative question that I don't really believe myself: Is that really that much different from an Athenian youth tying their identity to Achilles or Odysseus? The differences between mythology and super hero comics are smaller than we think. People only think of the former as high-brow because we consume it via completely outdated language and through a form with which we are unfamiliar. The content itself isn't that different from a comic book story (defeat monsters, take revenge!). Of course, Homer was a one-in-a-million observer of human nature. But so is Alan Moore. Probably.

Is that really that much different from an Athenian youth tying their identity to Achilles or Odysseus?

Do you mean an Athenian youth as in a young man from Athens, Greece today, or do you mean a hypothetical young man living in ancient Athens?

In case you mean the former, the main difference I would point to would be the test of time- that tales of Achilles and Odysseus have survived millennia to still be relevant and resonate with us today, whereas Spiderman (specifically) was just invented a few decades ago. Additionally there is more cultural legitimacy afforded by the proponents of ancient Greek myth, today and throughout history: philosophers, religious and government leaders back in the ancient times, professors and scholars of literature today and so on. People can argue that this shouldn't matter, but I don't think anyone would argue against the fact that in practice it does matter.

Additionally, I am personally very particular about aesthetic and the form that media takes. For example I have huge respect for anime and most Japanese art forms and find that American art forms are deeply unappealing in comparison. Modern Japanese tying their identity to (90s anime/manga*) Sailor Moon doesn't bother me nearly as much because I think the artwork that Naoko Takeuchi created and the 90s anime are both stylish and attractive and elegant, whereas the style of Western comic books I find garish and amateur and crassly commercial and lacking refinement. I know many Western media fans don't understand this but as a creative/artistic person, I can't stand when media looks bad, and Western media nearly always looks bad, in my opinion.

That was kind of a tangent but to tie it back in with your question: ancient Greek art generally looked good, or at least what's left looks good in the museums today. So if someone of Greek heritage wants to tie their identity to ancient Greek legends, I don't find that terribly embarrassing because it's rooted in something aesthetically pleasing. But when I leave America and have to be associated with the culture that brought the world Spiderman, I'm embarrassed by the lack of elegance and consideration for aesthetic that I see in Hollywood movies, Western comic books, American art and architecture and so on.

I may be destroying the basis of my original argument with this post, but I think the main point I'm trying to make is that if you tie your cultural heritage to someone else's ugly art, you're going to first be associated with ugly art and then you're going to be upset when the owners do something with it that will upset you. Neither of these things are good to me. So in my mind if you want to tie your identity to media, first seek out good media, and then have the foresight to understand that JK Rowling can be a TERF in 10 years or Star Wars can go woke in 50 years, and don't place too much stock in this identity to begin with.

*Sailor Moon Crystal looks bad.

Oh sorry, I meant ancient Athenian youth. I was referring to the popular hot take that super hero stories are the myths of today. Of course, the former are much more manichaeic and underdeveloped than the latter. But that might just have to do with the fact that they didn't undergo the long selection process you speak of. The "90% of everything is shit" rule propably comes into effect here.

I guess to me, this is how I would see the distinction. The Ancient Athenian boy is tying his identity to the religion of his family and community, and the modern American boy is tying his identity to a story that was created by someone entitled to royalty checks every time someone sells a shirt with the word Spiderman on it. The ancient boy's family, friends and everyone he's ever met believes the myths as fact and has never met anyone who doesn't believe them. No one in today's America believes Spiderman was real and it would be weird if you did. If today's boy wants to grow up to make all his money writing Spiderman comics, he's going to have to hash out property rights with whoever's managing the estate's IP from some guy who died 30 years ago or face a big lawsuit, while the Athenian boy could have grown up to create his own myths about Achilles and spread them to everyone he'd ever met and no corporation was going to be able to silence his stories.

How do you feel about Harry Potter? It has made a lot of money for companies, but ultimately it was created by a single person, not a corporation. Would you therefore not object to people considering Harry Potter part of their culture like you object to Spiderman? (Or would you only object for the movies, not for the books?) For that matter, would you object to Spiderman if it was the 1960s where essentially all creative decisions about Spiderman came from two individuals?

Is bubble tea a valid cultural element? The origin of bubble tea is unclear in such a way that it is literally unknown whether it was created by an individual on his own or by a corporation.

It should really be even shorter. IP law is an ongoing disaser that goes well beyond the culture wars.

I would have greatly preferred Zahn's Thrawn trilogy to be made into films rather than what we actually got. The talent is there, the stories were made by people who actually know what they're doing...

I still don't understand how Johnson was cleared to make such a bad film. There was a huge, irrelevant anti-capitalist tangent with about as much subtlety and sophistication as a brick to the head. There was Rey being a Mary Sue, which is not really a Johnson innovation though he intensified it. There was Holdo, attacking Poe for his toxic masculinity of actually fighting and winning. I remember sitting through the film and thinking 'oh she's not telling them her plan because she knows there's a spy who was revealing their location' but it turned out that she had no clue what she was doing, not even an engineer's special subject-matter knowledge that FTL-ramming was practical. Apparently it was just a 1 in a million shot as of film 9. It compares very poorly to Zahn's Luke-Thrawn tractor beam vs torpedo duel.

Johnson is clearly talented as a filmmaker/director, so how can he be so clueless as a writer? A lot of thought went into the effects, into the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars. The film looked good and that takes effort. So why didn't people think about having a slightly better written anti-capitalist plot? Is it just Kathleen Kennedy's corrosive influence? She wasn't so bad in 7.

The real issue is that the "woke" version has billions to burn on marketing, big budgets and polish. You can find "based" indie games on steam or watch anime. Just about everything in Hollywood is ideologically locked down. The 'free marketplace' of ideas is a bit like the Italian 1935-6 invasion of Ethiopia. No matter how hard the Ethiopians fought, regardless of whether they're in the right or not, the Italians had the money and technology to overwhelm the opposition.

On the other hand, some fan productions are spectacularly good and direly impeded by copyright. Consider 40K's The Lord Inquisitor and Astartes. The Lord Inquisitor's soundtrack is an absolute banger, despite the faces being somewhat off. Five years of AI development could surely fix that. TLI got cancelled by Warhammer for copyright reasons, Astartes got bought out and is on Warhammer TV or some streaming service nobody watches or cares about, myself included. Thus the video I link isn't the creator's channel, the originals got taken down.

Hopefully AI will just crush the copyright problem. When you can feed it some MP4s and crowdfund some computing power with crypto (and there are many possible options), use some mid-level technical skill... Nobody can stop you doing what you like. Not unions, not laws, not copyright, nothing at all.

Johnson is clearly talented as a filmmaker/director, so how can he be so clueless as a writer?

He's a "rule of cool" writer. He writes things that seem fun in the moment but he doesn't do verisimilitude or rich world building. His range is very limited.

Look at Looper. The parts where limbs are cut off in the past and disappear in the future don't make any sense under any consistent time travel rules. It's pure "this is cool, don't think about it".

He's a bad match for Star Wars. It's space opera in a rich exotic universe. Consistent rules and world building are very important for the genre.

His "Star Wars" spin off trilogy was going to have no spaceships, no lightsabers, and no force. Basically it was not Star Wars. He just couldn't get his own trilogy made.

To understand what went wrong, you have to understand who Kathleen Kennedy is.

Yes, she worked with Spielberg and Lucas for years. But she was never a creative. She's an enforcer.

Her job was to manipulate and bully the studio and the press into doing what the creatives needed.

She managed to rise up the chain to be in charge of LucasFilm. But she's still not a creative, and she doesn't even like Star Wars.

She wants to make feminist empowerment movies. She doesn't know what makes a good SW film, but she's sure as hell not going to let some dirty man babies tell her what to do. So she hired directors that had recently done some big sci fi movies (Star Trek and Looper), told them to include feminist empowerment messages, and assumed everything would work out.

It's pure "this is cool, don't think about it".

He's a bad match for Star Wars.

I agree he wasn't a good match, but "rule of cool" wasn't the reason. Star Wars is a space opera conceived as "WW2 fighter planes, Jidaigeki, and Wild West, ... IN SPACE." In other words, rule of cool. None of the rich details of the exotic universe make sense, they are there because they look cool. Lucas wanted to cast a Japanese period drama samurai star as Obi-Wan Kenobi because of "how cool that'd be". Consistency is maintained in OT and prequels because of inertia and involving a single auteur whose vision of "cool" didn't change too much.

Hiring a "rule of cool" director was a good idea. The mistake of was that Johnson's brand of cool was different. Hiring a director who worships "canon" isn't necessarily a bad idea, it can work for some time, but eventually it will result in milking the original vision empty, producing soulless merchandise.

I think both these things can be true; Star Wars probably is the exact kind of setting that can't run on Rule of Cool all of the time, and Lucas' ideas were reined in by those around him during the Original Trilogy (such as his wife)--the Prequel Trilogy allegedly is the way it is because Lucas got full control and little pushback.

Much of Star Wars universe "internal consistency" is the result of EU authors and fans just padding out, expanding and smoothing the inconsistencies of stuff that Lucas threw in due to Rule of Cool. As one of the most obvious examples, witness the attempts to make "Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs" make some sort of sense.

witness the attempts to make "Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs" make some sort of sense.

That's funny, because at least the early scripts seem to address this point:

Han Solo: Fast ship? You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?

Ben: Should I have?

Han: It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs.

Ben reacts to Solo's stupid attempt to impress them with obvious misinformation.

https://imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-A-New-Hope.html

It's actually a remarkable character moment, especially for George Lucas: Han Solo thinks that he is dealing with a dim old man (and a hillbilly youth) whom he can confuse with space babble. I like to think that the Kessel Run isn't even a real thing and Han made it up because it sounds impressive.

Of course, this subtle character moment was ruined in Solo by retconning the achievement to something about distance, because modern Star Wars writers are hacks who would never think of actually reading Lucas's scripts, despite being paid a lot of money to understand Star Wars.

I would argue that Kennedy, as the titular head of Lucasfilm, bears ultimate responsibility, but then she hired Tony Gilroy and we got Andor, which I would argue is one of the best viewing experiences in the Star Wars oeuvre since 1981 and ESB. Andor is more anti-empire than anti-capitalism (i.e. it's what Star Wars started out as), but one of the things I find interesting about it is that its theme of rebellion against a seemingly all-powerful but grossly abusive and incompetent system has been embraced by both (extreme) sides of the US political spectrum--perhaps because both of these extremes want the same thing: System collapse to be replaced with [something.] It could be called genius, from a marketing perspective, but I don't really think anyone knew this would happen.

That's all quite peripheral to my enjoyment of the series, however. The characterizations, world-building, acting, music, and cinematography were all just incredibly refreshing, and far superior than the awfulness that was Obi Wan Kenobi, which is almost a literally crying shame since Ewan McGregor came back for this role and it could have been done so much better in the hands of someone who was driven by a desire to build art and not ideology.

The thing is, Andor is actual art. It makes an honest portrayal of an aspect of the human condition. And in that is universal. Hell I think it's well written enough you can root for any of the characters.

The imps are not nazi caricatures like in the PT, they're bureaucrats and military officers of various levels of competence desperately trying to maintain order as the cogs of an incomprehensible immense machine that can have no nuance.

And the rebels are not plucky underdogs who do no wrong but the true face of those who would fight tyranny: bank robbers recruited by shady politicians with dodgy credentials as murderers, traitors, thieves and naive idealists.

I was able to relate to pretty much all characters as humans, from the tired garrison commander who wants to leave his shithole post to the egoist thief who knows from experience in the end everyone is in it for themselves.

If there is any justice, memory of this show will far outstrip that of stinkers like TLJ, and I'm inclined to think there is, for if every line of ROtS is etched into my mind, I have already forgotten all about the Kenobi show.

There was Rey being a Mary Sue

I mean, at that point it's a choice between Rey Sue or Mara Sue, the perfect jedi girl with a Dark Past who the hero falls in love with but all the other girls hate because she's just so perfect (also her eyes change colour, original character DO NOT STEAL).

(It's been a while since I read the series and other books she was in, maybe I'm just misremembering. I definitely remember not liking all the stuff EU authors did with tractor beams, which should have revolutionized warfare but didn't because nobody was smart enough to think of it until the hero of that particular book.)

How is Mara a Sue? She's supposed to be good at her job, being an ex-Imperial Assassin and force sensitive. She's not some random scavenger who knows the Millennium Falcon better than Han within the first hour she steps on board. If she is a Sue then it's much less blatant.

In this particular example, they hit Luke with the beam and he tries to shake it off, using various tactics before explosively reversing his trajectory in an unorthodox way. Luke damages his hyperdrive severely, falling out of hyperspace shortly and getting stranded in deep space. On the Imperial side, Thrawn finds that the crewman responsible was incompetent, that they were supposed to be trained for this but the guy was a conscript as opposed to a proper professional soldier and didn't give it his best effort (tried to deflect blame onto his officer), so he has him killed. It's part of the post-Endor decline of the Imperial fleet. The tactic is not absolutely broken like FTL-ramming a gigantic battleship, it doesn't obsolete the entirety of Star Wars space warfare.

The tractor beam stuff was all over the EU books IIRC. I think it was Stackpole(?) who had a corvette beating a star destroyer by tractor-beaming a moon or something. It just irritated me after a while.

Stackpole was really fond of unorthodox tactics enabling major underdog victories, so I’d write that off as ‘Stackpole uses Mary Sues’.

I haven't read Stackpole's Star Wars stuff, but I have read a number of his BattleTech books, and yeah, that's probably an accurate characterization (see the Phantom 'Mech thing for an example).

Johnson is clearly talented as a filmmaker/director, so how can he be so clueless as a writer?

He's not clueless. He knows exactly what he's doing: he is a giddy social justice warrior whose goal is to spread those messages through any vehicle at his disposal, and he won the lottery with Star Wars.

Almost mid-way through Glass Onion there's a monologue by Edward Norton's character about what it means to be a "disruptor," and that true disruption is bringing down the system. Although many speculated that this character was based on Elon Musk, it sounded to me at times that Johnson was using this character* as a vehicle for his own thoughts, especially with that monologue that was essentially Johnson's argument for what he did with Last Jedi.

For a bit, I wondered if Johnson was betraying an admiration for Musk, but as the ending twist plays out it reads instead as if Johnson assumes that Musk wishes he was Johnson, a true disruptor!

Johnson's work is fully intentional, and as Glass Onion's final scene reveals, he doesn't care what is damaged in the process; in fact, damage is the point.

TLJ did poorly at the box office

According to Box Office Mojo, The Last Jedi earned. $1.3 billion worldwide -- and was the #1 film domestically in 2017

It's not what that film did, it's that every film since that one has been a box office dissapointment.

Solo, the next film after Last Jedi did 1/3 of Rogue One's Domestic Box, Rise of Skywalker did less than either of the previous trilogy films (in nominal dollars), compare with Lord of the Rings where each film does 20% more than the prior one, or the original trilogy where Return of the Jedi does 6% more than Empire Strikes Back.

Disney paid $4 billion for LucasFilm and released a film a year from the studio, which stopped after Solo and the last film of the trilogy. Compare with Marvel which continues to release 3-4 films a year under Disney.

Marvel, both comics and films, has always been not just an ensemble of heroes, but an ensemble of tones. Disney gets that, in the same way their Princess films have each been very different:

Want earnest do-gooding and the struggle between normal life and superheroing? Watch a Spider-Man. Want a story about doing right anyway in the face of bigotry and oppressive political power mirroring the Civil Rights struggles? Watch an X-Men. Want a story of a great mind struggling with both great obstacles and personal weakness? Watch an Iron Man.

They tried to do the same with Solo as a heist film, Rogue One as a war film, and The Last Jedi as a Chosen Ones Against Great Evil/Passing The Torch film, and for me, they mostly worked. But that ensemble of tones was attempted within the final trilogy, and in TLJ, within the same film, all without the level of master planning of Kevin Fiege’s Marvel, and it didn’t work. It all felt like plot and tone overrode the joy of imagination, which is what Disney and Marvel are both known for.

They also announced they were going to ignore the big story beats from the vast story universe of the books: a healthy and fecund Solo/Organa marriage, a happily married Grand Master Luke Skywalker and his functional and growing New Jedi Order, a struggling but functionally governed New Republic in an unsteady peace and competition with a militaristic and dysfunctional Imperial Remnant ruled by people, and the complete political dethroning of the Sith and other Dark Side factions who continue to make big trouble in the galaxy.

Instead we got divorced rogue Han, a Leia out of power and leading a militia, a Dark Side faction which was more interested in slavery and destruction than gaining true, lasting power, a bad Solo son who took out the whole New Jedi Order offscreen, and a bitter and failed Luke living in isolation as a monk and looking to forget his glory days in a galaxy still run by the connected and corrupt elite. People asked “what even was the point of the win in The Return of the Jedi if it all fell apart before a generation had passed?”

Luke Skywalker and his functional and growing Jew Jedi Order,

Uhh, I don't remember THAT in the EU novels....

Oh, is that why people were blocking me? Shit. Fixed.

Oh man, please name names, because that's hilariously thin-skinned.

I hope no-one was blocking you over that, the N and J keys are right next to each other, so I would hope people realized it was a mistake given the rest of your post had nothing to do with that topic.

a struggling but functionally governed New Republic in an unsteady peace

I actually thought this would have been a great theme to explore in the post Great Recession period.

To be fair as a kid I felt the exact same way about the New Jedi Order series (R. A. Salvatore, really?), but it sounds like popular opinion swung in favor of those sometime after I checked out.

This isn't the first time someone's decided to destroy the happy endings of beloved characters and throw everything they built into a dystopian war with a few hundred trillion deaths that makes every earlier struggle meaningless. And at least Chewbacca didn't die in the new movies.(in an off-screen flashback? Or maybe that was from a "last time on star wars" scene from another book. It's been a while)

Ironically, the backstory of the final trilogy could have been the first film of it and garnered critical acclaim! Call it Fall Of Skywalker.

Show the New Jedi Order in morning calisthenics, doing sparring and obstacle courses with lit sabers. The order is doing great, but Ben doesn’t like Luke’s strictness. Also, Luke is married to Mara Jade, former Emperor’s Hand and second Master of the Order with Luke.

Leia being ousted from the New Republic leadership when it comes to light she’s Vader’s daughter, over her protests she’s an Organa in her politics and her heart.

The alien philosopher Snoke tempting Ben to become a “Grey Jedi” and giving him a test: watch his uncle’s eyes for hate.

Leia finds out the media scoop was provided by a shadowy source, and tracking it down leads to proof of mass abductions and missing hyperfuel shipments.

Ben and Han have a huge argument about Snoke and Ben uses the Force to shove his dad. Han tells Luke the kid’s a bad seed, then storms off to do some smuggling to clear his head.

Leia finds proof of slavery of armies of stormtroopers. She learns a new fascist power has emerged in the underindustrialized sectors of the galaxy, promising an end of poverty: The First Order. She returns to Hosnian Prime to discover they’re already there, making a non-aggression treaty with the New Republic.

Ben is startled awake from a nightmare by Luke standing over him, green saber lit. Ben fights him to a standstill, fear and anger boiling from him, while Luke looks stone cold deadly and determined, almost inhuman. Luke’s other students join in the fight reluctantly, and Luke slices through Ben’s blue lightsaber to disarm him, but red-sabered figures emerge from the shadows: the Knights of Ren (as seen in TLJ). They slaughter Luke’s students and wife, and rescue Ben, taking him aboard Snoke’s ship.

Epilogue: Leia forms her militia after the New Republic refuses to hear her evidence of stormtroopers and Star Destroyers. Luke disappears to the planet of the first Jedi temple. Han shows up at Chewie’s door on Kashykk and asks if he’d like to do one more run, for old time’s sake.

Do it this way, and the third film isn’t even needed.

I will say that it did have a rippling effect which destroyed the franchise. Prior to TLJ, fans were mostly rallied behind the new Star wars movies, even begrudgingly since Rey was a Mary Sue. TLJ shattered the fan based and caused fans to actively hate the new Star wars, and fans started boycotting subsequent movies like Solo.

I think TLJ also made it rather clear that there was no cohesive vision for the new trilogy, or at least if JJ had one in mind RJ deliberately tossed it out.

Fair to make the point that there wasn't a fully cohesive vision for the OT when A New Hope released, but there was no point where it became utterly clear that there was no plan for the overall plot. Although the retcon turning Luke and Leia into siblings is obvious once you know about it.

I very clearly recall some remarks I made to a friend after watching TFA, basically praised that it fully recaptured the epic feel of Star Wars and had the possibility of some interesting arcs, particularly with Kylo Ren. I noted how Mary Sue-ish Rey was but of course if they had balls they could have her fall to the dark side or do something interesting with her parentage, so I was willing to wait it out.

Instead, she became a one-person tension-ruiner. Any moment she was onscreen you could be utterly certain no harm would befall her nor would she fail at her current task. The fact that she never even sustains a wound, much less lose an extremity or a limb like so many other characters, well, it became clear what the 'rules' surrounding her were.

This was also back when the "Darth Jar Jar" theory was hitting the public eye and thus people were hyping themselves up to expect some mindblowing twists in the story and likely the conversion of 'good' characters to the dark side and other actual developments/arcs.

And the new movies didn't just fail to live up to the hype the fans created for themselves, they utterly failed to even take advantage of the expectations set by TFA.

It's star wars... you can make the last part of the trilogy a dwarf gay porn and it will still top 1B

My understanding is that it was still considered disappointment given the expectations and investment. Movie industry is weird like that.

A lot of it gets into mind reading since the targets are not public information but that seems like a consensus opinion but on the other hand you have a Q1 2018 earnings report claiming it and Thor:Ragnarok were a success relative to Rogue One and Dr Strange the year previous. On the gripping hand you get into things like legs/multipliers and series entries effects on later releases like Solo which is a rabbit hole of cardiologists and robbers.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats