#Anti TFA

[the-far-bright-center]

"Over a decade after its release, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005) still stands out as George Lucas’s summative and most masterful artistic statement. I use the word “summative” deliberately, because Sith incorporates a broad cinematic heritage, and also draws from Lucas’s own interests in narrative/illustrative art, architecture, world religion and mythology, anthropology, philosophy, pedagogy, and even race-car driving. In finding a tonally and visually radical common ground for these fixations, the film also addresses and subverts the director’s own oeuvre; and, as has always been the case with Star Wars, Sith contends with the poles of past and future, searching for (and sometimes grappling with) the space between. Of course, the Star Wars saga has always been anachronistic, employing science fiction iconography while also pulling famously from Joseph Campbell’s theory of monomythic commonalities in world narratives; the original film, released in 1977, also acted as a gateway to a commercial future, opening the floodgates (along with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws [1975]) for a new kind of American blockbuster cinema. However, while Lucas and Spielberg offered auteurist statements on genre that were also fortunate enough to generate mass appeal, the majority of big-budget fare has since become studio-incubated and sanctioned by market control groups, resulting in films that are often devoid of passion for cinematic language. Ironically and sadly enough, this can certainly be said of J. J. Abrams’s insipid The Force Awakens (2015), a reactionary attempt to conserve a falsely utopic view of the saga’s origins."

—Mike Thorn, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith: George Lucas' Greatest Artistic Statement?

[klaudia96art]

Autobot or decepticon ?😈

[peachi-blossom]

Non-Hazbin Hotel characters that are better than Alastor: The Sequel

NOTE: I made "Non-Hazbin Hotel characters that are better than Alastor: The Sequel" because I got more characters that I have on the list.

Hehehe, Alastor is gonna get solo'd by everyone!

[transingthoseformers]

About the Autobot Decepticon temporary truce:

TFA Lugnut going around making sure there’s absolute nobody so much as TALKING in a friendly manner with the other faction. No you can’t make small talk. No you can’t reminisce. No you can’t bury ANY hatchets or settle any bets or any of the sort because we need to KEEP hating each other, we’re simply tolerating each others existence right now. STOP TRYING TO BREAK THE TENSION AND GET COMFY.

And he’s too dense to realize he’s cockblocking a bunch of people too

Ohhhhh?????

Interesting how it's Lugnut, I'm sure that leads to some very funny situations

[the-far-bright-center]

I wrote about why TFA made no sense and why it was inherently destructive to the meaning of the saga all the way back in 2016, long before the rest of the fake-sequels were released.

It’s easy to blame TLJ, since it was terrible, but I do want to stake a claim to “TFA threw the OT trio under the bus and positioned OT heroes as failures in need of redemption”. I think that element was always poison and without a thorough explanation/justification as the core of the trilogy, excitement would always wear off and disappointment would always creep in.

[gritsandbrits]

I dont know who made the template for this meme, i found it on google.

I am probably the only person in this fandom (on DA at least) that doesn't ship these two. I guess its due to my own apathy towards cc x cc ships in general or my Oc ship with optimus. I know people ship them because they want optinus to save blackarachnia or she gets redemed amd changed back to elita but the show made it clear she doesnt WANT to be saved. Hell, she evengot WORSE when she decided to mutate Wasp who was an innocent bystander. That and she hates optimus - ironically more than sentinel when it was his idea to go to archa 7 - despite him risking his neck to still help her. She has no problem taking adavntage of his longering feelings for her.

Optimus isnt without flaws. He's pretty blinded by compassion and the past, almost as if hes loving a shadow. I wished there were more scenes where he stands up to her. I dont like how fans put pressure on him to redeem her when she's GROWN woman who CHOOSES to be evil.

Thats not a good relationship. Even if she was suddenly cured she'd probably still hate him because she cant help herself. Honestly i think the best route is for him to realize that they cant go back and move on with his life, and for blackarachnia to live on her own - and without him shielding her from the consequences of her actions. I want Optimus to find someone who's honest& accepts him. someone isnt a manipulative, self victimizing witch. Someone like me 🤭

Of course if you ship it that's totally fine! But this is MY opinion on the ship and why i personally dont like it.

[local-fire-dumpster]

I'll never get over how dirty they did Leia in the Sequels.This woman lost EVERYTHING when she was 19. She was tortured in the cruellest ways possible by having to watch as Tarkin blew up her entire home planet in front of her. Gone. Her people,her family,her friends,her culture.She managed to escape, spend 4 years fighting the empire and after it's fall she learns that the monster who tortured her and her friends and slaughtered them like pigs is actually her biological father.

And then decades later when she finally had the time to deal with all this trauma some dipshit reveals her family secret forcing her to retire as Chancellor, her son turns into a cringy edgelord that kills his father and everything she worked for is in shambles as said cringelord blows up the entire system with the senate on it terrorizing the galaxy with his discount empire.

She is still a general but all she really does is sit there with all the other characters the producers forgot until she dies and it somehow convinces kyle ren that he's good again.

[xaytheloser]

Hiii!!! I'm Xaiver!! here's a bit about me :33

pronouns: he/she/they +neos

Pansexual Demiromantic

I'm a multishipper, oc x canon, and selfshipper!!!

I'm autistic and also have ADHD!!

!!Minor!! please don't be nsfw, I dont mind interacting with adults but please don't be weird !!

Fandoms!! :

-Cookie run

-Transformers (mainly TFA)

-Murder Drones

-The Portal games

-Delicious in Dungeon

-Pokemon

-MLP + many others that would take forever to list lmao

DNI if:

Proship/comship, MAP/ProMAP, Racist, homophobic, transmedicalist, Truscum, Neo/Xeno pronoun exclusionists, TERFS, Zoophile, irl yanderes, self shipper exclusionists, Zionist, and other gross people!!

[the-far-bright-center]

Thanks for going through what makes this trend so awful in detail. It strikes me that it's a such a shame it was The Force Awakens of all things that Hollywood tried to mimic, instead of Mad Max: Fury Road, which came out earlier the same year, and which was a vastly superior film in almost every possible way.

The Force Awakens was, without a doubt, the worst cinema viewing experience of my life. Prior to seeing it, I remember thinking to myself 'if this is even half as good as the Mad Max movie was, then it might be alright'. Fury Road had been a rare example of a nostalgic sequel/reboot done right, and at the time I’d been hoping it would set the stage for things to come. I assumed the worst that could happen was that TFA would just be a cheesy, mindless action romp, but otherwise harmless. Oh sweet summer child, little did I know just how wrong I would be. The moment the opening text scrolled by, I knew something was terribly, unforgivably wrong. Immediately, I felt a sense of disorientation and panic setting in. The entire premise made no sense and was completely out-of-character, and that was even before the movie had started! It only got worse from there, until I stumbled broken-hearted out of the cinema, feeling as though someone had just reached back through time, found my happiest childhood memories and destroyed them before my very eyes. Return of the Jedi was my most-watched movie as a kid. If I had to pick a single film that embodied my childhood, that would be it. And TFA tried to gaslight me and tell me the events of that movie never happened, or if they did, they certainly didn't matter. Han and Leia were my childhood OTP, and TFA tried to gaslight me and tell me they never mattered. Luke Skywalker was my childhood hero, and TFA tried to gaslight me into believing that nothing he did ever mattered. Vader's redemption at the end of RotJ was, by pure chance, the very first Star Wars scene I ever saw as a child, and is forever ingrained in my heart and mind. And once again, TFA tried to tell me it never mattered or had any lasting positive effect whatsoever.

In the immediate aftermath, I felt like Star Wars was lost to me forever. For months I was in despair and afraid that I'd never be able to feel anything positive about it ever again. But I am nothing if not stubborn, and eventually I turned my focus back to Lucas-era Star Wars, and blacklisted and avoided everything about the rest of the fake-sequel movies. Nothing in any further sequel entry could ever 'fix' the damage TFA had done, so there was no point watching any further. It was obvious that Disney never cared one jot about the original story or characters—if they had, they would never have allowed something like TFA to ‘happen’ in the first place.

Since then, it’s become clear to me that we live in strangely cynical and iconoclastic times, in which nostalgic, long-beloved stories stories are mined for profit and then almost gleefully desecrated. One of the prevailing attitudes of this era is that 'subversion' automatically makes something ‘better’. Or, perhaps, more 'realistic', and thus more palatable to contemporary expectations. That all older stories are inherently outdated and ‘need’ to be overturned, even if the story in question was a positive or uplifting one. The fact that it didn't seem to occur to anyone that the original Star Wars saga was never in *need* of 'subversion' in the first place will never cease to astonish me. Disney treated a story that had been complete since 1983 (and in it’s fullest form, since 2005) as if it had been left open-ended (NOT because of any supposed 'flaws' with the original, but only because it’s more lucrative for a story to go on indefinitely) and tried to gaslight us all into believing it had never had a satisfactory or meaningful conclusion. In doing so, they forgot the key to the original films’ success and staying power: Star Wars is meant to function like a myth or a fairytale. It’s not meant to be 'realistic' in its outcome. And in a fairytale, OTPs don’t break up. Heroes don’t abandon their loved ones. And saving someone from the Dark Side is a galaxy-liberating blessing, not a generational curse.

Despite the continued onslaught, there are glimmers of hope. Hollywood may still be enamoured with its endless destructive spin-offs, reboots, and sequels, but at least the popularity of The Force Awakens itself seems to have waned. Of course, as someone who's been swimming against that particular tide from the start, I could just be biased. But I'm also an archivist and art historian by training, and I feel strongly that beautiful, old things can and should be preserved. And in the intervening years since TFA's release, I've focused on preserving the memory of the REAL Skywalker saga: the mythic, transcendent story that I've known and loved my whole life. A story that has already stood the test of time and will continue to do so, long after any unworthy 'additions' fade away into oblivion.

The unfortunate legacy of The Force Awakens and the Star Wars sequels

The fact that The Force Awakens made so much money in 2015 has been a lead weight around Hollywood’s neck for a full decade now. 

We’re *STILL* seeing decades-late sequels that imitate the Star Wars sequels’ WORST elements. 

Specifically:

Make sure your classic character(s) has/have been totally miserable and/or failures since they were last seen. Yes, even though it’s been at LEAST a decade, they should’ve been suffering the whole fucking time.

Erase at least one character’s growth (or sometimes even their base character traits) entirely, resetting them back where they started in their first film (or, alternatively, rendering them unrecognizable). 

Kill off some of those legacy characters ASAP to ensure they have no hope of ever achieving the happy ending you once promised/implied.

Work in obvious repeats of prior movies’ events and scenes so the audience can be like “Oooh, I remember when they said/did that in the other movies,” resulting in them feeling like they’re in on something and are therefore validated.

In fact�� maybe just copy/paste the entire plot from an earlier entry? No surprises means MAXIMUM NOSTALGIA.

These things were all present in The Force Awakens and even repeated for The Last Jedi. But they wound up just being pioneers of a shitty trend.

Some examples:

Terminator: Dark Fate

Ghostbusters Afterlife

The Matrix Resurrections

Scream (2022)

Clerks III

The degree of the severity of these things varies, at least. Maybe not every single legacy character has been completely miserable since we last saw them; it might be only some or even just one of them. I’ll also grant Ghostbusters Afterlife that killing off Egon was the only reasonable choice available to them. Situations like these can help soften the blow… and for those reasons, I don’t hate ALL of the movies I just listed. There’s even one or two I kinda like!

But make no mistake: All of the above lessons/tropes are still shitty ones. The legacy of the Star Wars sequels (TFA most specifically) is still a damning one. I honestly believe that ALL the movies I cited would all be better off if they hadn’t taken ANY cues from TFA’s template.

[angst-is-love-angst-is-life]

I’m never gonna ask “why do people ship them” because I know why— but really. Reylo is soooooo bad. He literally kidnapped and tortured her, and she was terrified of him

[the-far-bright-center]

SW rant of the day

You should NOT have to retcon an ENTIRE SAGA in order to make one idiotic little film ‘make sense.’  

If the story of the film in question does not flow logically as a continuation of the main saga as it is, and  if, in order to make it appear to do so you have to shoehorn it in via tie-in material, then that right there is probably a big sign that, you know...it’s not the story that needs to be, or even *should* be, told. 

[benadrylcandlewhack]

Made a thing

[theweeklydiscourse]

Could you imagine if someone said something like “ATLA would’ve been a better show if Zuko was tempted towards joining team Avatar and fighting to end the war but instead chose to pursue evil and staunchly rejected any chance of redemption . Wouldn’t it be so compelling if after the Crossroads of Destiny, Zuko just became more evil? Yeah, I mean fully embracing fire nation nationalism and becoming like his father. I would love it if the narrative presented us with the possibility of his redemption only for it to subvert those expectations and have him begin and end as an ontologically evil villain who remains static for all three seasons. What an amazing character arc that would be.”

This is what “Ben Solo should never have been redeemed” discourse sounds like to me. I know people have their interpretations, but I am genuinely so baffled by the idea that his character would’ve been improved if they had done what is essentially a retread of Anakin’s arc in the prequels. It’s complete and utter nonsense and I’m so annoyed by all of the people talking about that idea as if it’s SOOOOOO DEEP when in reality it’s probably the shallowest storyline you could come up with.

[caripr94]

Rogue One/Sequel Trilogy Salt

'A New Hope' is the story of a boy who grows up in a tranquil home and dreams of joining a war. What if we have the story of a girl who grows up in a war and dreams of returning to the tranquillity of home?

Gareth Edwards

This quote is evidence that Jyn Erso was written to be a foil to Luke Skywalker. Before Rogue One came out, I and a bunch of other fans were speculating Jyn to be Luke's wife and Rey's mom (due to the resemblance to Rey, the speculation about Rey being Luke's daughter, and the parallels between Jyn and Luke (and between Jyn and Mara Jade, Luke's Legends wife, to the point where it seemed like Jyn might become the Disney canon version of Mara)). Even after the film came out, I was still hoping for Jyn to pull a Phil Coulson for that, particularly with that kyber crystal necklace she had.

Years later, after Lucasfilm has mangled up Rey's origins along with the latter two sequels, I haven't completely given up on that idea, but it's been barely on my mind, and I've been torn between that and Jyn's relationship with Cassian Andor. But now, reading that quote has stirred up my feelings towards the former (and from what I've been recently reading about Cassian, he's kind of old for her anyway). It seems like a great opportunity that Lucasfilm has wasted.

@araitsume @aomoviegeek @reynaberrieorgana @fyeahreysky @finnrey-skywalker @roselani24 @jonesgirl88 @tragicfantasy-girl @vaderdala1541

[as8bakwthesage]

“Oh bUt TfA BuMbLeBeE iS iN tHe MilItArY” logic doesn’t apply when in the US, there have been countless cases of minors joining the military in history. Child soldiers exist outside of the USA and Autobot society isn’t exactly healthy about its militarisation. Autobots literally take young bots in order to put them into military training first and foremost.

You cannot tell me that child soldiers don’t exist, you fucking morons.

[peachi-blossom]

Non-Hazbin Hotel characters that are better than Alastor: The Finale

NOTE: I got more characters on the list for the finale!

Oh he's toast, he's very toast!

We're 10 days away before Christmas starts and I schedule a post on that day. Can't tell you what it is because it will spoil the surprise.

That is the end of the Non-Hazbin Hotel characters that are better than Alastor trilogy.