As a franchise. There just isn't really anything that I care about anymore that wasn't made several years ago... at least... if not several decades ago. The Dark Herald, an anonymous blogger with Arkhaven, spells it out. I'll be quoting lots of his post: The LucasFilm Civil War is Over.
And Star Wars lost.
The abrupt and extremely petulant firing of Gina Carano from LucasFilm has made [it] abundantly clear that the Return of Luke meant absolutely nothing.
Any good warm fuzzies that came from that were strictly the result of fan projection. There undoubtedly are people at LucasFilm that aren’t happy to see their life’s work thrown into a raging dumpster fire. But they are not going to be able to do anything about it.
These people are the holdovers from George Lucas’ day and Lucas was a Gamma Boss. There is no way in hell he kept around anyone who threatened his delusion bubble. Any "old hands" at LucasFilm who don’t like the way things are going are fundamentally the kind of people that feel that "the first nail that pops up, is the first that is hammered down." Because that is how George Lucas ran his business. If there was any kind of problem between the boss’ opinion and naked reality, then it was reality that always had it wrong because George couldn’t be. That was the kind of company he handed over to Kathleen Kennedy.
I strongly suspect that this is absolutely true. Obviously, I don't know George Lucas personally, but he's a public figure, and the public figure for a franchise that has been just about my favorite entertainment franchise for most of my nearly 50 year life. I think a lot of his personality has come through over the years for those who pay attention enough to deduce it. He's a super defensive control freak, riddled with insecurities and one who doubles down, triples down, and quadruples down (ad infinitum) on denial when something that he's trying to do isn't working.
He was also a genius, or at least he was. At one point. When he made the first Star Wars, he tapped into a starved market, and did it quite well. His marketing strategy and merchandising strategies were genuinely extremely clever. Under his loose direction, the Clone Wars did quite a few things right; many of them surprising so. But he also made the prequels, which are bad movies, crippled with bad execution, and not really featuring the best ideas to begin with. But either way, I suspect that this post gets it exactly right about the kind of people who were Lucas loyalists under KK's Star Wars. Not the kind to really fight. Even Dave Filoni comes across as a sycophantic beta most of the time, and Jon Favreau is an outsider altogether.
The firing of her most popular (human) character over tweets that SJWs disliked shows where the company’s priorities are and always will be. And it’s not like Gina Carano is some raging Far-Right firebrand. [...] Her posts were only vaguely Right-wing in nature. Although, that was enough to get her run out of Hollywood on a rail.
Her agent dumped her, her publicist quit and Amazon stopped selling Cara Dune action figures. Which made Hasbro stop production on Cara Dune action figures and if Hasbro isn’t completely Woke that must have had them pulling out their own teeth in impotent rage at Disney. Because apart from Baby Yoda, she is the only Star Wars figure that has had significant sales in years.
Now, I understand there is going to be a certain number of people who can’t understand it. Why are the goblins at Lucasfilm are so determined to cut their own throats? I mean, it has to be obvious at this point [doesn't] it? The Reylo trilogy was an utter disaster and by any reasonable standard, the high Republic is an abject failure. If they are going to keep their jobs, they need to assure that their company is healthy, and to do that they need to have products people will pay money for. Making Star Wars fans happy and engaged is in their own self-interest. LucasFilm needs to be profitable, right? Right?
Oh, that is so adorable.
That's been a hard lesson for people to unlearn, because it's a delusional wishful thinking lie. Corporations do not care about making money, or at least they don't care about making money through sales. The way that they make money... or rather, the way that the people who run them make money, is by raising financing, paying themselves big, fat paychecks, and then moving on before the whole thing collapses. CEOs and other corporate leaders seriously could care less about customers, unless a customer revolt somehow gets into the news, becomes a trending topic, and impacts the ability of the corporation to attract investment financing.
While not limited to entertainment or tech companies, it's especially notable in those sectors. Appeasing customers and getting your revenue through making them happy is an old fashioned idea. Probably a white supremacist one, because only white people care about customers. Especially if the customers are mostly white people and male—it's probably a feature, not a bug, that you're pissing them off. Way to go, LucasFilm and Disney!
At this point, LucasFilm has settled comfortably into the model of corporate parasitism. And the uber-Woke senior executives at Disney are delighted to be fed upon by the incompetent.
You have to remember an SJW infestation is a convergence of grasshopper-people.
They create nothing, preserve nothing and leave nothing behind.
When grasshoppers have finished devasting and devouring a once productive ant colony, do they sit around trying to rebuild it? After all, that would be in their self-interest wouldn’t it? To have a healthy ant colony that they could regularly harvest makes more sense than destroying it. But no, grasshoppers are grasshoppers, they destroy and move on to the next target. The Woke are no different. When LucasFilm collapses under its own weight due to their undermining they will move on to another property and begin the process all over again. Unconcerned by lessons of failure because they are fundamentally unable to face the lessons of their own mistakes.
The more visceral synonym of locust probably works better than grasshopper, but that's a minor nitpick. And isn't it ironic that A Bug's Life has become a metaphor for the corporate parasitism embodied very notably by Disney itself?
So what is the future of Star Wars? Well, it doesn’t have one. Kathleen Kennedy remains in charge because (and this is crucial), Woke Disney wants her in charge. Let’s be clear about something else, there is NO plan in place to walk back the Reylo trilogy. No retcon in the making. Hobo-Luke swilling testicle-boob-monster milk is still the official future. The grasshopper-people at LucasFilm are utterly committed to it. They couldn’t care in the least that it will lead to the franchise’s destruction.
They would much rather have Star Wars dead than lose an inch of ground in [the] culture war.
I have said before that the Last Jedi wasn’t the worst fight. It wasn’t the biggest fight. It was just the last fight. It was the break-up fight. The one where I am walking away from this relationship because I don’t care anymore.
If that was the breakup fight then the Return of Luke was the one-night-stand with the Ex. You got together to discuss some unfinished business and for a moment you thought the magic was there again. But the next morning your Ex was back to doing the same stuff that caused the break-up in the first place. Nothing had changed
And nothing will change with Star Wars.
I'm perfectly happy continuing to consume my older Star Wars products. And working on my alt-Star Wars products, even if it's just for my own amusement and never amounts to a novel or game or anything else. Star Wars, Marvel, Disney, the entire entertainment industry, and for that matter, America itself, are basically Bernie's body still being waved around by Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman, who are desperately trying to pretend he's still alive long enough that they can make their getaways before the Mob catches up to them. Those who are perceptive enough to notice that Bernie has already been dead all weekend get a totally different kind of entertainment watching the clowns traipse around wearing a corpse and trying to pretend that that's not exactly what they're doing, but those who earnestly want more decent Star Wars content are going to have to get used to disappointment.
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