Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2)

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I read the SyFy article and it's pretty gross.

Yeah, that sums it up pretty well. The article is indeed gross.

I don't know if people who write articles like this are wilfully misrepresenting the truth, or if they're just plain stupid. The most ironic and laughable section (amongst many) is when she writes:

"It would be unfair and too general to say that Star Wars has a fandom problem. What it has is a white male fandom problem."

Oh good, glad she wants to avoid being "too general" and "unfair." Maybe she should've taken some time to go through YouTube videos of people voicing their displeasure over changes to Star Wars. Or maybe actually speak with disgruntled fans. She'd find that quite a few of them wouldn't fit her profile of "entitled white males" being the only ones voicing the same exact types of objections she enumerates in her garbage article. But, that would require actual work and intellectual integrity. It's so much easier to be lazy and make broad-sweeping conclusions based on assumptions, especially when it fits perfectly with your pre-existing worldview.

Maybe "writers" like this should take the time to analyze what Star Wars is about, and find parallels here in the real world to understand why you might expect it to look and feel a certain way. The first clue is right in the damn title: Star WARS. If the saga was called "Earth Wars" it would be preposterous to represent the demographics of the various military branches as anything other than overwhelmingly male. Wars = combat; combat = military; military = mostly males. That may not be the case someday, but it's still the reality today. If you film any real-life battlefield in our current world, then present it on screen, you'd see virtually nothing but males. So, if you have "space wars," a reasonable expectation would be for the battlefield demographics to reflect the reality of "earth wars." Nothing nefarious involved.

Star Wars presented visuals and atmospherics that resembled the conditions of wars as we've known them. And it's no secret that Lucas even took inspiration (and not just aerial combat footage) from our real-life wars when making his SW films. She complains in her laughable article that only 37% of the speaking roles in new Star Wars films belong to women. But, in any other movie(s) about war, you'd have a really hard time accurately depicting the actual events of the war if you tried to maintain anything even close to a 37% female speaking roles. It's not an objection to women if they're in these types of films; it's an objection to artificially changing an established reality.

We hardly ever got to see on-screen Star Wars (the Lucas ones) scenes that weren't directly connected to the military/war aspect (Rebels vs. Empire & Jedi vs. Sith). In the rare times we did (Lars/Beru homestead, Mos Eisley, Cloud City, galactic Senate/governance, etc.), we did see women (Beru, Padme, Mon Mothma) without any objection from fans (even the evil white male ones). But, Star Wars is more about presenting the "Wars" part. Lucas wasn't being sexist when he cast the original Rebellion and Empire; he was trying to be realistic.

Making a WWII film that would portray the United States military as anything other than predominantly white male would be an odd choice because it would stretch believability beyond reasonable levels. It might take some of the audience out of the film because we know that the WWII American military was mostly white dudes. In much the same way, Star Wars military (especially the Empire - you know, the bad guys), had been established as predominantly white male. Sure, Star Wars is merely fantasy, so it doesn't have a historical level of accuracy that needs to be adhered to like WWII. But, Star Wars is a fantasy with a 40-year history of defining what the various militaries/groups/cultures look like. The same way you'd expect people to object to a WWII movie changing the demographics of the "war fighters" simply to fit today's social justice perspective, you could expect objections to a changing of the demographics of "Star Wars fighters" from pre-established canon just to fit that same social justice paradigm.

I don't even care about the casting of the ST or Rogue One. Rey is my favorite new character in the ST, and Jyn was my favorite in RO. I like take-charge/capable characters of either gender. But I don't dismiss other fans' objections over their perceived sense of shoe-horning for the sake of checking off boxes in a broader social agenda. I don't just presume these fans are being bigoted. I listen to what they're saying, and reflect on why they might be saying it.

Star Wars was never about race or gender, and SW fans never struck me as sexist/racist trolls. Throwing labels, and slandering a huge section of this large fan base for having objections to on-screen changes - simply because a small minority of fans make bigoted and stupid remarks - is grossly unproductive. White males don't own a monopoly on stupid, slanderous, and dismissive people. The writer of the SyFy article . . . well, she proves that.
 
For me the bottom line was the story and character development for TLJ was just horrible. It doesn't matter if the characters are male or female or have green skin, if the writing is bad it's just bad. But it did feel like the writers went out of their way to make the male characters seem really stupid and that the female characters had to take charge to keep them from hurting themselves... It was pretty obvious what the writers were doing and I think that's why a lot of male fans were rather pissed about it... I have no issues with strong female characters but I don't think you need to make the male characters look like morons in order to make the female characters look strong.... Especially in a movie franchise that's always had a HUGE male fan base...

Anyways the $%#* has hit the fan at Lucasarts so they need someone to blame and the "White Male Fan" is who their targeting... Like yeah, that's a good idea lets blame the people who spend the most money on this franchise...

As for the character Rose Tico, it wouldn't of matter if they had a hot blonde female or even a white male play the part, the character was horribly written... I think it's wrong some fans have targeted the actress as it's not her fault that the writers did a bad job on her character...

I feel bad for Ron Howard as he made a pretty good film with Solo but he's paying the price for Rian Johnson and Kennedy comments about the fans....

The sad thing about all this, I've really lost all interest in Star Wars as a franchise.... And I grew up on this stuff...
 
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For me the bottom line was the story and character development for TLJ was just horrible. It doesn't matter if the characters are male or female or have green skin, if the writing is bad it's just bad. But it did feel like the writers went out of their way to make the male characters seem really stupid and that the female characters had to take charge to keep them from hurting themselves... It was pretty obvious what the writers were doing and I think that's why a lot of male fans were rather pissed about it... I have no issues with strong female characters but I don't think you need to make the male characters look like morons in order to make the female characters look strong.... Especially in a movie franchise that's always had a HUGE male fan base...

Anyways the $%#* has hit the fan at Lucasarts so they need someone to blame and the "White Male Fan" is who their targeting... Like yeah, that's a good idea lets blame the people who spend the most money on this franchise...

As for the character Rose Tico, it wouldn't of matter if they had a hot blonde female or even a white male play the part, the character was horribly written... I think it's wrong some fans have targeted the actress as it's not her fault that the writers did a bad job on her character...

I feel bad for Ron Howard as he made a pretty good film with Solo but he's paying the price for Rian Johnson and Kennedy comments about the fans....

The sad thing about all this, I've really lost all interest in Star Wars as a franchise.... And I grew up on this stuff...

I said that from say one

The last jedi is a horrible crappy story on paper.

People are just still amazed by the effects and ship battles and aliens and lightsabers...
The story itself is embarrasing
 
The whole point of my post was to debunk these 2 articles.

A white male fan problem...... uhhhh..... Black people, Latino, Asian , gays, straights hated this movie. I’m not white but blaming the movie sucking on white people is stupid. It’s a ****** movie. Sure some people need to freaking relax about it but it’s still no doubt a horrible movie that will probably be retconned
 
Yeah, this film is full of contradictions. My biggest contradiction is when they say let go of the past yet they still save the ancient Jedi text. So let go of the past, but we should keep them around just in case.

I think the texts will show how wrong the Jedi Order was....

So maybe it should have been let go of the “more recent” past...

;)


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
For me the bottom line was the story and character development for TLJ was just horrible. It doesn't matter if the characters are male or female or have green skin, if the writing is bad it's just bad. But it did feel like the writers went out of their way to make the male characters seem really stupid and that the female characters had to take charge to keep them from hurting themselves... It was pretty obvious what the writers were doing and I think that's why a lot of male fans were rather pissed about it... I have no issues with strong female characters but I don't think you need to make the male characters look like morons in order to make the female characters look strong.... Especially in a movie franchise that's always had a HUGE male fan base...

Anyways the $%#* has hit the fan at Lucasarts so they need someone to blame and the "White Male Fan" is who their targeting... Like yeah, that's a good idea lets blame the people who spend the most money on this franchise...

As for the character Rose Tico, it wouldn't of matter if they had a hot blonde female or even a white male play the part, the character was horribly written... I think it's wrong some fans have targeted the actress as it's not her fault that the writers did a bad job on her character...

I feel bad for Ron Howard as he made a pretty good film with Solo but he's paying the price for Rian Johnson and Kennedy comments about the fans....

The sad thing about all this, I've really lost all interest in Star Wars as a franchise.... And I grew up on this stuff...

This is sad. I know the feeling. I loved naruto but the ending made me hate the new series Boruto . Still have love for naruto but I will not support any future projects going forward . It’s amazing how some bad decisions can ruin a franchise
 

^
Led by the traitorous Mark Hamill and Colin Tevorrow.

Yeah, but come on - look at that "journalist"'s recent article titles:


Star Wars has a white male fandom problem

An ode to L3-37, the feminist droid hero of Solo

Star Wars films broken down by women's speaking roles is revealing and depressing

Victoria Mahoney is great news for Star Wars, but female directors deserve more


:dunno


As a sidenote, the Victoria Mahoney story is a somewhat strange one. They make a major announcement about a SECOND UNIT DIRECTOR being hired for Ep IX - and formally announced by JJ Abrams. Such a somewhat insignificant crew hiring was apparently called out because she is female and black (in middle in pic below) - a pretty damning assessment of where female behind-camera partipciation in Hollywood is.

Gabourey_Sidibe%2C_Victoria_Mahoney_and_Yolonda_Ross_%28Berlin_Film_Festival_2011%29.jpg
 
What a ridiculous generalization. Yes a certain percentage of SW fandom is incredibly toxic but since the vast majority of SW fans are white males of course the toxic fans will be as well. You could just as easily write an article stating "white males are the saving grace of SW fandom" since that exact same demographic would also be responsible for the largest percentage of positive and respectful comments.
 
What a ridiculous generalization. Yes a certain percentage of SW fandom is incredibly toxic but since the vast majority of SW fans are white males of course the toxic fans will be as well. You could just as easily write an article stating "white males are the saving grace of SW fandom" since that exact same demographic would also be responsible for the largest percentage of positive and respectful comments.

the difference is that if you wrote that you would be considered racist, alt right supremacist and you would get fired and shamed out of existence. the article will be erased, your twitter would be blocked. etc.
But articles like that one are allowed because its 2018. not only is nothing gonna happen to that writer but that article will be praised and shared and applauded. the article will be shared by celebrities and praised for it.

thats the difference.
 
This kind of reminds me of SOE and Star Wars Galaxies, when Smedley (President of SOE) tried to blame the veteran players for the poor reception of NGE. Saying that the veteran players are a bunch of whinners and cry babies... he said this in a TV interview.... You can't blame the fans for your own bad decisions but that's what he did and the game suffered a lot because of it..

Now we got Rian Johnson and Kathleen Kennedy blaming the fans for their own bad decisions.... I really do hope Star Wars IX bombs big time at the box office, I know I won't be seeing it at the theaters and this will be the first time I've missed a Star Wars movie but it really pisses me off when people try to blame the fans instead of taking responsibility for their own actions... Especially when they try to pull the whole race and sexist card when neither of them apply... well it might apply to a very small percentage of fans but Lucasarts has singled out ALL White Males as the problem... that's a pretty big net they just casted..


That's one thing I like about the Marvel movies, IMO they have never gotten really political in their movies... But It seems Kathleen Kennedy wanted to make a big political statement with the Star Wars movies... and I think it's backfired.... or at least I hope it has... we don't need politics in our movies.. we get enough of that in real life...
 
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