The Future of Star Wars

Well, I've now seen Rise of Skywalker and the entire run of the Mandalorian, and my prognostication for the future of the franchise is... that, well, there's some life yet in it, but it's going to have a hard time flourishing under the foolish stewardship of Disney.

First the movie.  It's been out a week now, so I'll give a quick capsule overview.  As Overlord DVD said, and I agree, it's the best of the sequel trilogy, yet it's also the worst.  It's the best in that it's the most charming to watch, and the characters finally have some charisma and chemistry.  There's a handful of ideas that are actually kind of clever, even if they're hampered by being stuck in a stupid plot, and of course, it's a very pretty movie most of the time.  It also minimizes the wokeness, no doubt as an apology of sorts for the Last Jedi, as well as the numerous franchises that are falling to audience rebellion due to their execrable social and political posturing and their outright hatred for the core audience that loves them.

It's the worst of the Star Wars movies because the plot is stupider than any others.  It finally manages to undo literally everything that happened in the Original Trilogy (and even the whole point of the prequel trilogy, for that matter) just so Rey can do it right the way those stupid white males like Luke and Han and Annakin and Kenobi couldn't.  It doesn't even bother explaining how things happen.  Why is Palpatine alive after we see him die, and then to make it even more final, the Death Star he just died on is blown to atoms?  I dunno.  Shut up and consume.  Speaking of the Death Star being blown to atoms, why is the wreck of it sitting out there in the ocean on Endor?  I dunno.  Shut up and consume.  This kind of farcical nonsense happens over and over again.

Also, Rey is such a dire Mary Sue, that she gets new powers that would have dramatically changed the course of the prior movies if they were actually a thing.  The force teleport thing between her and Kylo, and the force healing are usually shown as the most egregious offenders here.  Although--I have to be fair and point out that the force teleport is a kind of unique thing because they are a force dyad (whatever that is), so it isn't meant to be something that's just a magical convenience.  (No, it's a rather deus ex machina plot device unique to these two characters.)  And the force healing is a thing that's been common in many Expanded Universe things for some time now, and technically, we saw it more recently in an episode of the Mandalorian a few weeks earlier.  Nobody seemed to complain about it then; in fact, in general, the people who love to hate on the movie love to love on the Mandalorian.  But the fact is that the Mandalorian is just as cavalier with established Star Wars plot points, even though they're usually more local and detailed in scope.  The force healing that Baby Yoda does to old Apollo Creed is just the biggest; the details about Mandalorian society are completely at odds with other canon sources of info on the Mandalorians such as the Clone Wars and even Star Wars Rebels.  Since when can Mandalorians not take off their helmets?  They do all the time in those two shows.  Since when are Mandalorians not a race but a creed? On Mandalore and Kalevala in the Clone Wars, they absolutely were the former not the latter, but the new show makes the opposite true. (Although I'm not naive; I know what's happening here.  George Lucas invalidated a bunch of older EU stuff about Mandalorians, and the Disney custodians have been just semi-quietly bringing it back since the acquisition as much as possible.)  On the other hand, they at least are telling entertaining stories (mostly) and the set up for new stuff, especially given the last couple of episodes, is intriguing for once.  If the Mandalorian is the template for New Star Wars, it won't be great, but at least it won't be terrible either.  It'll be somewhere between the quality of the Clone Wars and Rebels, most likely.  Hopefully more like the former than the latter, as r-selected writers and quiet woke moments, such as Sabine Mary Sue, the Mandalorian Asian girl, and bratty Ezra, who's supposed to be a cool, relatable teenager, but only if you were a really stupid, entitled, bratty teenager does that actually work, etc. kinda ruined Rebels a fair bit, and the moments of brilliance it had was much fewer and farther between than on the earlier show.

If I were somehow suddenly put in charge of Star Wars, I'd... well, first, I'd fire almost everyone working on it and tell them to take a hike.  Lower budget stuff with compelling characters, as in the Mandalorian, would be my first step to rehabilitate the brand, whether to theatres or a streaming service or however it was most convenient to be done, with the goal towards making blockbuster movies again.  But I'd have some other design principles in common first too:

• First, I'd have everyone on whatever creative team I put together go outside and engage in some coed team sports.  If that doesn't alleviate the nonsense about women acting like men and vice versa, then those who can't get with the program get fired too.
• Then, we'd do an exercise where we watch both the older 1981 Clash of the Titans and then the 2010 (or whatever year it was exactly) one back to back, with a particular emphasis on the characterization of Perseus and his love interest (which for some dumb reason isn't even Andromeda in the second movie) and why they work.  If I really need to spell out the fact that masculine men and feminine women are attractive to normal people of both sexes and r-selected palette swaps between men and women are off-putting to normal people of both sexes, then I clearly have the wrong creative team.  Adhering to biological sex roles works because... well, because it's biology.  Anything else marks the movies as a time capsule from a period of Clown World.
• By the same token, what is Star Wars?  A space opera?  Yes, heavily based on the Lensmen, Dune, Flash Gordon and John Carter.  It also has lots of elements of the Western in it, and Ruritanian romance.  What do all of these have in common?  They are unique stories created and told by white men for white men.  And while they have a kind of timelessness about them that makes them popular across the world, the core audience for Star Wars has always been white men.  We're not going to chase phantom diversity audiences, we're going to focus on our core demographic.  The majority of the protagonist, and even secondary and love interest characters should all be white.  Diversity casting (otherwise known as blackwashing and brownwashing of white, American culture) is cultural appropriation of the most egregious kind, and if it's good for the conservative goose, it can be good for the liberal gander.  You don't get to complain about cultural appropriation of non-white cultures while looting white cultures for whatever you want to take, and expect us to accept that.
• The sequel trilogy was a debacle, but for "normies" they probably don't want it soundly denounced.  A better way to go about it is what I've always suggested for STAR WARS REMIXED; go forward in time far enough that you wipe the slate clean.  Refer to some of the characters of the old movies as legendary figures about which no truth is remembered, and strongly imply that we don't even know anymore what of what is seen in the older movies was actually true and what wasn't.  And then largely ignore them anyway and focus on more immediate characters and events.  Nostalgic callbacks are for losers who don't have anything interesting to say in their new movie.  A few are kinda fun, but don't overdo it.  Feel free to depart from some of the tropes of Star Wars if necessary; this was done to good effect in many of the better Clone Wars episodes, for instance, and some of the better material in Old Republic.  The latter was seriously held back, on the other hand, by trying to imply too much stasis in many ways; four thousand years before Star Wars, everything was pretty much exactly what Star Wars had been?  C'mon.
• Knock it off with the Jedi and Sith.  Sure, you can have them, but the orders after thousands of years won't look like what they did in the prequels.  I actually like how the Remixed version had a kind of fragmentation of force using and lightsaber wielding traditions as well as a balkanization of the political structure of the galaxy anyway.
• As another aside, in the original trilogy, while the Jedi and Sith were both these kind of space wizards, their powers were subtle, understated, and not terribly drastic and amazing.  When the Emperor starting shooting lighting out of his hands at the end, that was a dramatic moment, because nobody suspected that that could even be done, and it's strongly suggested that he was some kind of force using prodigy anyway (same for Yoda.)  As the movies progressed, even under Lucas' supervision, the Jedi and Sith became outright superheroes, completely disconnected from anything that a "normal" adventuring character in the galaxy could ever expect to be able to match.  The Mary Sue aspects of Rey were previewed by the Mary Sue aspects of the Jedi overall long before Rey took it over the top.  Let's pull that back down.  Sure, they have some pretty cool acrobatic and combat abilities with their sabers, and they are capable of some minor misdirection and persuasion here and there.  Force abilities and lightsabers themselves have gotten too over the top.
• Now, that doesn't mean that wild Hong Kong style fight scenes should go.  Those are, of course, freakin' awesome.  No, what it means is that rather than an action tax on the Jedi, everyone should, if need be, be a credible threat, because cool, swashbuckling action isn't limited to people who use the force.  A Mandalorian, for example, should expect to be the equal of any Jedi.  Stormtroopers should be feared rather than mocked.  Experienced, James Bond-like agents, smugglers, criminals, soldiers, mercenaries, bounty hunters, and what-have-you should all be action heroes of comparable ability to any Jedi, Sith or member of any other knightly order.

In fact, it's really not that hard to make good Star Wars content, as a variety of fan films on Youtube and elsewhere show.  It's just that the people in charge of making actual, official Star Wars content are incompetent people who hate the audience for the franchise, and hate what the franchise actually stands for, so they are deliberately tearing it down.  Not that I think these highlight all of the dot points I do, but they are reasonably good Star Wars fan films, which proves the point: it's not really that hard to do.

Shill media

What happens when the shill media gets tired of shilling?

Remember that with the Last Jedi, the shill media had a score in the 95+ percentile.  The audience reaction was in the 30s until Rotten Tomatoes purged tons of reviews, because they themselves are shills, and they used the dishonest narratives of Russian bots, and alt-right trolls, and crap like that to purge tons of reviews.  (In spite of that, it's still in the mid-40s.  Dishonestly high, compared to reality, but not high.)

The early reviews for Rise of the Skywalker are low.  Mid-50s low.  More reviews are coming in, and the shills are helping that to rise, but it's still not good.  This screenshot says 56%, but the most recent one I saw was 62%.  That'll probably continue to climb over the next few days.

And although I don't trust that the audience score won't be manipulated by positive bots and Disney shills, it'll still be low too.

Either way, this is a confirmed dumpster fire.  It might even be worse than The Last Jedi, although that would be shocking, given the last minute desperate reshoots and cuts done to eliminate the worst aspects of their original cut.  I almost wish we could have just seen Jar Jar Abrams' and Kray Kray Kathy's original vision, just to see how badly they could ruin the franchise, and make sure that neither of them ever work in Hollywood ever again, but instead, we get watered down suck.  So not only is the movie not going to be good enough to please anyone, but it's not even going to suck enough to become a spectacle of badness either.  It's just... bleagh.

The Fall of Skywalker

I strongly suspect that this is completely true.  Sadly, as I said, because I don't talk about Star Wars much with my wife, she bought tickets for us to go see it in gigantic imax on Friday.  Granted; we used free ticket vouchers, so we didn't buy them per se, but for accounting purposes and from an opportunity cost perspective, we've contributed to the opening weekend of Star Wars.  Sigh.  Sometimes she's pretty cute when she's trying to help but gets it wrong.  So, although next weekend isn't likely to be a great opportunity for me to log in and review the movie, I'll eventually do it (probably too late to matter, because everyone who will see the review will already have seen the movie or decided that they won't under any circumstances anyway.)  As the video linked above says, we can already basically review the movie based on the spoilers that have been leaked; even through desperate reshoots, recuts, and re-edits, they still don't have a fan pleaser on their hands, and they know it.  I almost wish that they had gone with their disastrous first instinct, just to make sure that Kathleen Kennedy and Jar Jar Abrams never work in Hollywood again.

Meanwhile, the Mandalorian has played out pretty much as I predicted it would in my earlier post on the subject.  It continues to be... OK.  Not bad at all.  Which, compared to everything else going on in Star Wars the last several years means that relatively speaking it's fantastic, but the truth is that the show isn't great.  I actually really hoped for more from it.  Granted, even though it's a shorter show streaming on a streaming service, it's still a show at the end of the day, and I always give shows several episodes to find their legs before I judge them completely.  But we're almost done now; there's only eight episodes in the first season, and we've now seen six of them, and it really hasn't quite risen to the level of being more than a paint by numbers, emotionless Western set in space, with characters that have almost no charisma or chemistry with each other.  Nobody is really a memorable character; even the title character of the show himself.  The only break-out is Baby Yoda, and there's not even any good reason for it other than he looks like a much quieter and more passive version of Gizmo from the Gremlins movies who doesn't shed. This isn't meant to sound like a negative review, because I don't dislike the show at all; I just really hoped to actively like it better than I do.  Sigh.

For whatever reason, though, I'm getting re-enthused by The Old Republic again.  Now granted, I haven't played that in a long time, and I actually had some issue where it wouldn't launch on my computer with the hot graphics card anymore (probably because I still have Windows XP on that computer and hardly anything runs on that anymore unless it's an old version of the program.)  "Our" laptop has been effectively commandeered by my wife as her own (and it doesn't have a graphics card anyway, and although I attempted to install it on that, it didn't run very well), "my" laptop is provided by work, and I can't install games on it.  I am, however, expecting a new second desktop, which we'll put in the office at home instead of the bedroom, and one of my first things to do with it once it's up and running is reinstall Steam and Old Republic, and then enjoying games that I haven't played in a year or more, including Old Republic, which I' never really played as much as I'd have wanted to.

Playing Old Republic is both fantastically fun in some respects and shockingly frustrating in others, but I'm aware of the limitations of the medium and the studio, so I don't expect to be as frustrated by the unfortunate elements of it as if I didn't understand those quite well, at least.  It's curious that there's a fair bit of activity here.  A new expansion just came out a couple of months ago, and I was probably dragged in because of both my intense schadenfreude watching the sequel trilogy burn in a dumpster and anticipating both the Mandalorian show and the new episodes of the Clone Wars in February.  The Old Republic's most frustrating aspect, though, is the potential I can see through it and in the setting, which isn't realized because something like The Mandalorian or The Clone Wars wasn't the product of the setting.  Can you imagine a decently made ensemble cast ongoing series set in that setting?  How awesome would that be?  Granted, BioWare probably has some strange rights meaning that Lucasfilm would have to pay them royalties back in return to use their version of the setting, or some other such complication, but that's exactly why I've always thought that going forward in time from Return of the Jedi sufficiently that the setting can be made to resemble the Old Republic setting in some ways, and yet do its own interesting things at the same time. That was the whole point of my Star Wars Remixed tag, after all, and I still maintain that that would make better new Star Wars than what we're actually getting by a long shot.  In fact, that's almost always been the main problem with new Star Wars; both the sequel trilogy and much of the Expanded Universe material, for that matter.  It either tinkered with a story that was already told and didn't need any expansion or tinkering, or it sperged out on some minor detail and made it tedious.  What it always needed was new stories about new characters, yet set in the same setting.  Preferably characters that were a little more evergreen, in many respects.  The saga of Luke Skywalker was always a closed circuit; there isn't anything you can do with Luke after Return of the Jedi that's interesting or desirable, because his story was already done. This is the fatal flaw of both the prequel trilogy and the sequel trilogy; trying to milk the same story that was already concluded.  It's also where the potential of the Clone Wars and The Mandalorian, when they were really on their best game, came through.  If only the creators (including Lucas himself in the 90s and 00s) had had the sense to do something new like this, we'd have had a very different conversation about the Star Wars franchise than the one we've had the last couple of decades, where fans are labeled as "toxic" because they rightly recognize that the potential is being wasted.

Anyway, here's an interesting hybrid video put together that's The Mandalorian + The Old Republic.  If this doesn't at least jump start thoughts in your mind about the potential of Star Warsian space opera, there's no hope for you.

Quick update

Quick udpate; my access to blogger was actually somewhat restricted this last week, and even if it wasn't, I've been super busy.  Next week, I'll make some real updates.

But, in the meantime, it's been curious watching the Star Wars franchise literally collapse before our eyes in the wake of the new movie coming out.  I wanted to see the new movie eventually; kinda like how you want to watch a video of a trainwreck, or something, but I didn't want to see it opening weekend, or pay full price for it.

Sadly, my wife, who doesn't care about any of that kind of stuff, went out and bought tickets for us for opening night.  At a discount, I think, but still.  She's cute when she's trying to help, but misses the mark.

Oh, well.  I'll be fun, I suppose, to get the hot take nice and early.

Meanwhile, I'm kinda falling behind on the Mandalorian, which isn't as good as I'd hoped, although I'll get caught up once Christmas vacation is fully upon us.  I'm also watching a bunch of Old Republic playthroughs on YouTube; I'm getting a new computer, and I'll load that game on it again and play through the stories and stuff.  I've always been fascinated by that game, but haven't ever really done enough with it.  Oh, well.  Maybe I'll have some reports there, although naturally by now the game is hardly new anymore.

Bounty Hunter armors

While the graphics for Old Republic aren't really very good, I've long thought that there was a lot of potential in that game for a good Old Republic themed ensemble Clone Wars type show.  One where a major character of each of the eight classes is done and then followed throughout the show, highlighting how their interactions intersect with each other over the course of many narratives.  And while the graphics aren't good, there are some good principles of visual design in the show that, if applied to a different graphics engine, or better yet, turned into actual cosplay costumes or something, would look really cool.

There's a channel on Youtube where the creator basically does Old Republic fashion shows; it's kind of an odd idea, but y'know what?  Why not?  You want your character to look good, after all, if you're going to be looking at them for many, many hours of game play.  Plus, you can consider it concept art for a show of the type I mentioned above, not that there is one.

In honor of the Mandalorian, she did a newer video just a couple of days ago about the ten best bounty hunter armors you can craft, find or buy in the game.  So, for your enjoyment (or not, depending) here they are.