#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]

A list of male characters who are slender, lean, slim, thin, or skinny with better character design than Vivienne Medrano's Onceler OCs

Today, I'm created a list of male characters (characters that I previously used and new ones) who are slender, lean, slim, thin, or skinny with better character design than Vivienne Medrano's Onceler OCs (except for Sir Pentious because I will forever see him as DollCreep) because we're all sick of her repetitive skinny twig design.

I have to put Jax on the list because Gooseworx knows how to do a good character design.

Derrick J. Wyatt never fails to design these cool Transformers characters. Of course, not everyone liked his designs in the past. But right now, they like his designs.

This is the third time I used Sun.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[xaytheloser]

something I doodled for a new mutual...... hiiiii... I hope we can yap about our silly robot boyfriends a lot.....

Skipper (right) belongs to @ozzyscarnivalofships

Xaiver (left) belongs to meeeeee :333

[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 Husk

Again, I'm so confused by Husk's character because he literally victim blamed Angel Dust for being SA'd in episode 4.

Lastly, I'm finding characters that are better than Cherri Bomb, which should be a lot easier.

[the-far-bright-center]

Thanks for humouring me and my rambles. 😅

I realise that this is mostly conjecture, but I’ve spent the better part of the past half-decade trying to make sense of many truly baffling storytelling decisions. Some things can of course be blamed on individual directors, but there’s also the question of why did they think audiences would want such things in the first place? Hence why I feel like it’s also worth considering the influence of various cultural attitudes and trends.

(Replying via my sideblog so I can keep all my SW rants in one place, lol.)

@dasfeministmermaid - apologies, I realise you asked this absolutely ages ago (last year now, even!), but re: my tags on this post, I was mostly just referring to the fact that at the time Disney took over SW, the popularity of GoT was largely responsible for the trend towards dark and 'gritty realism' in fantasy media in general. I don't claim there was necessarily direct influence on the SW sequels, but if we are talking cultural zeitgeists, then aside from perhaps Marvel, GoT was certainly one of the most prominent at the time. And I can't help but see something of that in TFA’s whole 'we’re going to portray the Original Trio as colossal failures and morally grey at best, instead of the unquestionably heroic figures created by George Lucas'. Not to mention the bizarro depiction of the Skywalker family as some kind of 'cursed' dynasty that was doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, despite the fact that such a cynical interpretation flew in the face of every story element, theme, and character arc established in the original saga. The only Skywalker who was under a so-called 'curse' was Anakin (and by that I simply mean his enslavement by Sidious), and he freed himself (and his family, and the whole galaxy) from that once and for all when he destroyed the Sith and saved his son at the end of Return of the Jedi. In this light, the course of events that was supposed to have taken place off-screen in-between RotJ and TFA made no sense within the actual context established by the Lucas saga. The milieu of the characters in the PT and OT is purposefully constructed to be different from one another, hence why the Skywalker twins are raised without any direct Jedi influence, in loving families, are allowed to have childhoods, allowed to love, etc., unlike their parents who were trapped within an increasingly corrupt system that actively prevented them from living together as a couple or family. The very context in which Luke and Leia’s story takes place is a big part of what allows them to definitively break the cycle.

Of course, it can be argued that simply by continuing the story beyond RotJ at all, the Disney-sequels were always going to destroy the meaning of the Lucas saga. But the character assassination of the Original Trio in TFA was a conscious and completely unnecessary decision—after all, a sequel could have potentially been made without destroying Han, Luke, and Leia’s entire characterisations and relationships. The fact that Disney also (lazily and pointlessly) decided to construct a new 'Dark Times' as the setting is even more telling, since there was absolutely no need to do so, and all it did was add to the impression that these characters were nihilistically doomed to constantly repeat the same past mistakes and tragedies, when nothing could be further from the truth that Lucas' story established. I have gone into great detail about this many times over the years since TFA was released, so I won't dwell on it here, but the Original Trio absolutely DOES 'break the cycle', and suggesting otherwise destroys not only the meaning of the OT, but also that of the Prequels (basically erasing Anakin's entire story). The unequivocally happy ending of RotJ is likewise what 'redeems' the tragedy of the Prequels, and without that, the meaning of the entire Lucas saga is totally undermined and destroyed. I refuse to accept that, hence why I've always rejected the Disney-sequels and will never accept them as legitimate canon.

In brief, Star Wars was never meant to be 'gritty', nor is the outcome of its storyline supposed to be 'realistic'. Lucas' saga begins with a tragedy (the Prequels) that is subsequently redeemed by a fairytale (Original Trilogy), and which, when taken together, forms a created-myth, the outcome of which is meant to be idealistic, positive, uplifting, redemptive, and restorative. It is the eucatastrophe that Tolkien talks about, the defiance in the face of 'universal final defeat'. But the Disney-sequels ignored and/or actively overturned everything positive and meaningful about the original saga (that most lifelong SW fans like myself had valued and cherished since childhood) and all in the service of a decidedly lesser wannabe ‘addition’ that was devoid of the inspiring Romanticism and mythopoesis of Lucas’ saga. TFA came at a time when studios had certain assumptions about audience expectations and pandered to those accordingly. So I’m not saying there was direct influence from GoT, just that there was a cultural trend that a lot of media got swept up in at that time. Imo, it's also just the inevitable pitfall of attempting to make something that vaguely resembles ‘Star Wars' appeal to contemporary sensibilities. It was never going to work, because Star Wars (the real Star Wars) is mythic, Romantic, and transcendent—a type of story that, sadly, contemporary studios and audiences alike seem unable to appreciate.

**Note: most of the meta I've linked on this subject is from my Star Wars sideblog which is vehemently anti-Sequels, so fair warning to anyone who happens to like those. ;p