Ok, what bones _do_ you have to pick with TLJ?
The last bit is hard, as I am sure you were well aware. I intuitively sympathize with the tradeoff you were forced to make there and why it’s so noxious. TFA and TLJ really don’t seem worth Zahn, and a hundred other books besides.
But.
Rogue One was pretty good. Better than either of these really. Besides that…
Even granting that Zahn was great stuff, that misses the problem. Yes there was Admiral Thrawn… there was also a great, great deal of junk. “The Emperor’s clone is back! And Luke has embraced the Dark Side in order to infiltrate him by being his apprentice!” And we’re gonna keep making new Solo children, and killing them off, etc.
The EU epitomized the problem of “never being satisfied with enough.” They would keep churning out stuff, so long as there was a dollar to be made, and it led to a lot of crap. A lot worse than these two movies.
And well, there’s a logical end conclusion to ever-creative processes that never stop. The desire for more and more profit would inevitably spawn a movie that overwrites everything. (Much like a chaotic political system will eventually elect a dictator who overthrows the constitution behind it.)
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On a less important and sentimental matter: I think your culture-war pattern matching brain is overfitting. You saw it yourself, if they’re pandering to progressive ideological caricatures… why is the angry, entitled white boy getting such nuanced treatment? Occam’s Razor is because that’s not what the writers are actually doing, and they are happy to use compelling characters in any form.
The casino planet is a rich vs poor morality tale? Then what do you make of the thief who cynically points out how the merchants of death profit off both Rebellion and First Order? And what do you make of that character’s eventual moral arc and how that reflects on his lessons?
Same for Admiral Holdo. If she’s supposed to be a righteous woman straight out of central casting, then why is she dressed very similarly to the casino players (check out that neckwrap.) Star Wars has always paid extremely close attention to how the upperclass and the proletariat dress, and Poe is identified as looking more like and convincing his fellow grunts more successfully.
It’s not that there aren’t some modern-political cliches in these characters, but either they are much more nuanced than you would expect for a political cartoon, or the authors had absolutely no idea what they were implying with these caricatures.
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.
It’s not that there aren’t some modern-political cliches in these characters, but either they are much more nuanced than you would expect for a political cartoon, or the authors had absolutely no idea what they were implying with these caricatures.
You can call it nuance, or for that matter cluelessness, if you like. It strikes me more as careful pander-management than either; Disney is masterful at pandering without crossing the (generally-perceived) line. The Holdo dynamic, for example, managed to be All About Mansplaining without committing “character assassination” on fan-favorite Poe. But whatever. My culture-war-aware brain is overfitting, as a general matter, so I’m not inclined to push points of this kind too hard.
Regarding the other thing –
– yeah, as far as it goes, that is a fair characterization of the EU.
Look. I am a nerd, an old-school nerd by the reckoning of the present day. I am very, very familiar with media franchises that run on the model of “just keep cranking out material so long as there’s a dedicated captive audience that will keep on buying it.” That’s pre-2014 Star Wars, yes, and also Doctor Who, and traditional comics-centric Marvel / DC, and Dragonlance, and Fate. Hell, it’s the Cthulhu Mythos, for that matter. There are a lot of Expanded Universes out there.
And, yes, Expanded Universes tend to generate an awful lot of crap.
Nonetheless I like them, as a phenomenon. I like that there are enthusiastic fan communities whose members actually care about canon, who want to know what the Jedi of 1500 years ago were doing and are willing to pay for the privilege. I like that a few well-conceived concept touchstones can be used to unite the work of lots of different artists, some of whom will actually turn out to be good, and make that work accessible and compelling to lots of potential fans. I like being able to attach myself to a given fictional universe by diving into its trackless depths and looking around for something that matches well with me personally.
It’s not a great setup for High Art. High Art kinda has to be complete in itself, and can’t bear the weight of countless on-brand mediocrities. But, well, Star Wars was never going to be High Art. And I much prefer the EU model to the “corporately-massaged perfectly-anodyne core canon perfectly engineered for mainstream success” model.
…which is what we have now, for the highest tier of geek media, at least in the West. Geek stuff is too popular to be allowed to ghettoize itself with a labyrinth of weird, cool, often-stupid shit. I honestly find it a great relief that anime franchises seem to be continuing mostly on the older model, at least for now.