Ok, what bones _do_ you have to pick with TLJ?

In no particular order…

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There’s the general-purpose all-consuming gripe about the new trilogy (which does cover Last Jedi but is entirely inherited from Force Awakens): this entire setup with the First Order and the Resistance is terrible, it makes no in-world sense and it completely devalues everything that happened in the original trilogy, just because the authors wanted a fan-pandering rehash of “gritty scrappy Resistance versus shiny all-powerful Nazi-coded Empire.” 

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A number of memorable dramatic moments, moments that someone was clearly very proud of having come up with, don’t have any real payoff; they’re just kinda stuck there.  The big offender here is the Cave of Infinite Time-Delayed Mirror Images, which gets an awful lot of buildup and an awful lot of cool design for something that ends with “and no one learns anything and it’s a total bust.”  The thing with the Ancient Jedi Texts would be a lot more convincing if we had any knowledge of what was in them or any reason to care.  Both of the super-thieves – White-Jacketed Space Raffles and the one they actually end up using – seem like potentially-interesting characters who don’t get explored enough to be actually interesting.  Etc. 

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…sigh.

Too many things feel too strongly like they’re directly and didactically connected to contemporary culture-war morals.

Especial shout-outs to –

1) Vice Admiral Wild-Berry Skittles Hair and her sub-plot about the dangers of cocky over-assertive men who think they know more than competent women.

2) Space Monte Carlo, which is Evil, because shiny rich people stuff is built on corruption don’tcha know.

Argh.  I feel terrible about having this reaction, honestly.  One of the things that’s made me saddest, over the past five years or so, is the extent to which culture war bullshit has started infecting my own perceptions of media.  These narratives and messages are in the ether, and I know to look for them, so I can’t help seeing them, but maybe that says more about me and my discourse bubble than it does about the art.  Whatever the case, I hate it. 

…I am very curious how Ep. 9 is going to resolve things with Kylo Ren, since he is such a clear exemplar of the Edgelordy Self-Obsessed White Boy figure that serves as a totemic devil in these culture-war stories. 

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Everything that people have been saying about the pacing problems, and the ridiculous plot contrivances that seem designed mostly to give Everyone Something to Do, is accurate.  I don’t really have anything of my own to add.

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And then there’s the real underlying complaint, which is unfair, but so it goes.

I am bitter as all hell that the Expanded Universe was officially discarded to make room for this shit.  Star Wars is some reasonably heavy-duty childhood resonance stuff for me, and 90%+ of the stuff that resonated has been disavowed.  Force Awakens and Last Jedi, taken together, are not worth a dozen pages of a Timothy Zahn book.