#and a coherent theme taking after a line in tfa!

[lucky-clover-gazette]

just spent three hours verbally outlining a revised star wars sequel trilogy with several nerd friends and i love our version of ben solo that doesn’t exist

[hauntedfalcon]

Happy Christmas, Star Wars Is Over

that was a thing I saw with my own two eyes 

“we have to End the Saga! ... but also leave ourselves opportunities to make more money” you really clearly cannot have it both ways 

there was... so much about that movie that I would have been able to tolerate... if the trio had been together the whole time 

but the instant Rey left the group, it became a terrible movie where stupid things happened for no reason, and there was nothing good going on to balance that out 

the trio interactions were, give or take one uppity Poe, everything I wanted 

they were so good together 

literally I yearned for two whole movies and I finally got what I wanted for a little while 

anyway as for the rest of the movie, you know the trolley problem? 

they had a couple options for tracks to follow after TFA and TLJ 

and instead they just... steered the trolley off a cliff 

what hit me hardest was the moments where Rey had the helmet on in Luke’s X-wing, and the moment where she sleds down into the Lars homestead 

cute moments! recognizable moments! music cues that helped us recognize them 

but the actual takeaway was that she had received absolutely no development since the first time we saw her put on an X-wing pilot’s helmet or sled down a sand hill 

none of them did 

when people kept asking her in TFA who she was, I never took that to mean “tell us your family name” or “which extremely powerful being gave you your powers” but what is your identity and how do you find it for yourself 

which is a theme that could have been explored if they weren’t busy driving the fucking trolley off the cliff 

what did any of it really mean? what’s the plan for the future? in thirty years does it all start over again when another Sith lord turns out to still be debatably alive? 

also everybody saying “we have to do this or the General died for nothing” like by that point? she had already? died? for nothing??? 

she projected herself through space to distract her shitty son long enough for Rey to stab him! that was the point!!! 

that was the death of her son that she foresaw at the end of her Jedi path! coming to terms with that and making it happen herself for the good of the galaxy could have been a thing!!!

all of these plot points are stupid, but there was a coherent way to connect them, and the movie just kept trying to contradict itself instead

disrespectful honestly 

keeping her corpse under a sheet until Kyle faded away was extremely disrespectful 

also not a fan of how they tried to build scenes around the scraps of extra Carrie Fisher footage they had to work with 

I maintain Leia should have been the one to do the jump at the end of TLJ, and then we wouldn’t have had to deal with this bullshit 

Rey should have been a Kenobi

Rey Should Have Been A Kenobi 

but moreover, Rey Should Have Been Able to Forge Her Own Identity Independently of a Lineage

which would have done wonders for the trilogy and put her on equal footing with Finn’s character concept 

if, let’s say, Palpatine was not a thing in this movie, and let’s say she ended up in Transport Tug of War with Kyle anyway, and she still accidentally Force-lightninged the ship and had to deal with that afterward? 

that would have been interesting! grappling with your own capacity for doing evil is interesting! “you have a capacity for doing evil because of your wrinkly granddad” is NOT 

imagine the conversation in the ship after the lightning where Finn says he gets it and Rey says he doesn’t, and Finn says yes, yes he does, because everyone has the capacity to cause harm regardless of the scale of it, but it’s the choosing that counts 

imagine if these characters got to say things to each other that actually mattered to the plot 

what a waste of Jodie Comer

why hire Jodie Comer and only put her onscreen for five seconds 

that’s like hiring Thandie Newton and killing her off after twenty minutes, or hiring Ming-Na Wen and killing her off after one epis--oh wait 

I was listening hard during the Every Jedi Talks At Once bit and it did my heart good to hear Qui-Gon again 

no Chirrut Îmwe though. see? disrespectful 

my beloved Finn 

my beloved Finn 

my beloved Finn is finally confirmed Force sensitive, and there is no time to build on that afterward 

my beloved Finn meets more people who broke First Order conditioning and refused to fire on civilians, who escaped and lived free, and we get a thirty-second conversation about it and it’s never mentioned again 

that should have been the A-plot 

my beloved Finn held. Poe’s. hand. and it was clearly a thing they do regularly 

my beloved Finn was so competent 

my beloved Finn was a GENERAL 

and that’s it. that’s all I’ll ever get of my beloved Finn 

Lucasfilm is not going to mention him ever again 

I am getting emotional now, back to things that made me angry  

what the fuck are they trying to pull with Poe 

a spice runner? a spice runner??? 

no nope no you’re not making him the Han of the sequel trilogy Abrams 

and then the whiplash of him being given command and wishing he had Leia’s guidance again and getting guidance from Lando instead and immediately acting on it? there’s actual Poe! right there! 

I don’t understand who it is they keep trying to convince us he is, but the real Poe always comes through in the end, thank you Oscar Isaac 

the hug 

the hug and the focus on Finn holding both of them and crying with relief 

I sure did miss Rose 

introducing just enough new characters for everyone to have a ~safe~ potential love interest was so transparent

there’ll be a comic book or a novel set decades down the line where some background character will be mentioned in passing as Finn and Jannah’s kid, and that will be that 

that being said now that we have Jannah you can pry her from my cold dead hands 

the fact that they didn’t even talk about why Lando left the fight??? 

the leaks I read were from an earlier cut of the movie where Lando told them he had a young child who was kidnapped by the First Order

he didn’t get to say anything about it this time??? it was implied to have been Jannah but they didn’t even get that much? they want us to believe he’s been hanging out on One Party Every Forty-Two Years Planet just because?????

hyperspace gets more and more watered down with every consecutive movie

it’s to the point where even the purrgils don’t seem that special anymore

the disposability of all the ships was almost as irritating as all the planet-hopping 

ships, just like lightsabers, are entirely renewable resources, there is one around every corner  

my “the Force is really just the ghosts of dead Jedi intervening for the living” theory is still going strong, especially now that Luke could lift his X-wing 

Yoda had to do it in ESB because Yoda had more dead Jedi friends  than Luke :) 

I legit squealed “WEDGE” when he appeared for 1.9 seconds

afterwards my best friend was like “what’s a Wedge? was it that Mike Pence guy” and I lost it 

Leia’s lightsaber was so pretty but I’m sad the blade wasn’t red in this canon 

Disney hopes you enjoyed 1.5 seconds of lesbian representation in a Star Wars movie, now never ask for anything again 

Dominic Monaghan was also there for some reason 

I’m running out of things to say, everything else in this movie was too fucking stupid to even talk about 

especially That 

we’re not talking about That 

at least we’ll always have The Mandalorian (pending any fuckery in the finale) 

[mithrilwren]

So, hmmm... I saw The Rise of Skywalker last night and... I have notes.

Nothing I say here is going to be super original, probably, but hey, I’m going to talk it out anyway. 

I walked out of that movie saying, again and again, that that script needed about 6 more rounds of polish. It is frankly baffling to me that a Hollywood movie, with so much money and so much time and so much investment thrown into it, could make it to filming on a script that disjointed. So many times, an avenue was proposed as the ‘only’ solution to the current problem, only for that to be unceremoniously dropped and for another avenue forward to miraculously appear. We never got any explanation for what Finn was going to tell Rey before they fell into the sand pit, despite it being built up multiple times as something significant. I’ve seen speculation that it was that he meant to tell her that he was Force-sensitive, but that particular plot thread was treated with so little fanfare by the rest of the script that I barely realized its implication until after the movie was done. Because of COURSE the fact that Finn is Force-sensitive is important - it means Rey isn’t the last Jedi! That’s huge! But the film makes no effort to re-contextualize the audience on that fact, because Finn and Rey never discuss it. They don’t even speak after the final battle. (I would love to see Folding Ideas do an editing breakdown of this movie, akin to the one he did for Suicide Squad, because it deserves a comprehensive, hour-long run-down of everything that went wrong on both a scene-by-scene and structural level.)

I saw a number of reviews that likened the script to fanfiction, which is... one of my least favourite forms of cheap criticism, because it nearly always betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what fanfiction is, and what its specific flaws tend to be. Instead, the term is used as a synonym for ‘bad writing’, which is frustrating to say the least. Fanfiction, on the whole, tends to be highly character and relationship-centric. That can come with its own pitfalls, but it’s baffling to apply that label to this movie, which spends so much time jumping between action sequences and macguffins that we almost never have time to linger with any characters in a meaningful way, or to develop the relationships between them beyond single, unsupported lines about how much they mean to each other. The exception to that is, possibly, the relationship between Rey and Kylo - and I don’t mean relationship in terms of the highly-controversial ship (that’s another whole conversation that I have no interest in diving into) but just in terms of two characters having multiple interactions with each other that change them as people in some way. Even that relationship felt rushed, but it was more than most of the other characters got.

My main gripe about the ‘Rey Palpatine’ twist is not so much that I think it’s bad, inherently. There are interesting things they could have done with that idea, even it’s not the direction I personally would have chosen! My main issue - and again, this is not a hot take, this is just common sense - is that this was so clearly not something they were building up to in the other two films, and so it comes completely out of left field. I have to wonder what someone who’s only seen this new trilogy thought of this plot thread, because the movie doesn’t exactly take a lot of time to explain who Palpatine actually is? There’s a large degree of assumed knowledge from the audience, because in lieu build-up in the previous two movies, you need the lore of the previous movies to even begin to contextualize what’s happening. What does the moment where Rey uses lightning to destroy the shuttle mean to someone who never saw Luke being blasted to the teeth with the same? Where is the creeping horror that the original trilogy managed to build around this shadowy figure, pulling the strings in the background? Who is this dude, anyway?

I’m probably in the minority who (on paper, if not in actual viewing pleasure) liked The Last Jedi quite a bit. I think that its writing was the strongest of the three. It had the most interesting things to say, and while I might have enjoyed watching The Force Awakens more, I was more interested in thinking about The Last Jedi. The biggest problem with the Palpatine twist is, of course, that it throws out every salient point TLJ was trying to make, which just feels... petty? TLJ exists, it is part of the anthology, and to pretend that most of it never happened and blatantly contradict both its reveals and themes, even if you (yes, you, JJ Abrams) didn’t like them, deprives the story of any chance of a coherent or satisfying arc. And that frustrates me, not just as a viewer, but as a writer. Because if there’s one thing that the writers involved in this movie should have learned from fanfiction, is that it is possible can spin gold from what you’re given, even if its imperfect, and elevate what existed before through your own creativity. But there was no effort made to reframe the unpolished elements of TFA and TLJ into a coherent three-part story. Instead, they went the route of ignoring what they didn’t like, and cherry-picking in what they did. Totally fine if this was a standalone episode, but it’s not. It’s part of a trilogy, and by throwing out the second act, you’ve gutted the entire heart of the story. *shakes my head*

There were definitely parts of this movie that I enjoyed. Every time the main trio was on screen together, it was a joy. All three of them were giving their all, and it showed. I liked both of the new characters introduced! The other former Stormtrooper, whose name I can’t recall, was vivacious and bright and I lit up whenever she was on screen, and I desperately wished the movie had taken the time for Finn and her to discuss their shared pasts more, because there some much interesting there. As much as I’m aware that it was likely a cynical tactic on the part of Disney to no-homo Poe, I didn’t hate his interactions with his old flame(?) at all, mostly because the relationship was ambiguous enough between them that it was just playful and fun, rather than wholly contrived. I actually found the shared visions between Rey and Kylo some of the most engaging scenes in the film - just visually and as a concept, the whole idea of trading physical objects between the two spaces? Pretty cool! 

But overall, I came out of this movie feeling like the best thing I got were a lot of details that I’m excited to see people incorporate into trio fic, and not much else. This is a movie that begs you not to think too deeply, lest it all fall apart at the seams, and just enjoy the spectacle of it all. And for me, who tends to get distracted during flashy action sequences and choppy edits, that didn’t leave me with much to chew on, or reasons to see it again. 

(PS. Rose, they did you so dirty, and I’m so, so sorry.)

[gffa]

So... I've seen a /lot/ of your thoughts about the prequel-era of Star Wars, and the original trilogy of Star Wars is pretty much loved by everyone... but that latest meta got me thinking. What exactly are your thoughts about the new trilogy so far? What do you love about it, what do you hate about it, and where does it fall in the end?

My feelings are pretty boring, to be honest!  I like the sequels’ characters pretty well, but I’m middle of the road on the plot and the worldbuilding.  There are things I like about it very much, there are things I dislike about it, there are things I’ve dug out of the whole thing that I like, there are things I’m never really going to get over, and mostly it just doesn’t really sing to me like the prequels and originals do.Things I like about the sequels:- The characters are all pretty darling and I very much want to know more about them and their stories!  Rey and Finn and Poe are precious, I really love Maz a lot, I’m interested in Ben Solo, I appreciate TLJ bringing us the Leia/Amilyn potential, I WILL FIGHT A MAN FOR ROSE TICO, etc.- TLJ actually made me really think about Luke Skywalker a lot, how I see him and how fallible he was in the originals, versus the Pure Cinnamon Roll that was all I saw for a long time.  And it really, really helped me understand his character a lot better.- The supplementary material has been really good to me.  Whether it’s the absolute batshit of Phasma (SHE MADE HER ARMOR OUT OF SHEEV’S YACHT, THAT IS THE SINGLE GREATEST THING HER CHARACTER COULD EVER DO, LOL) or the sheer adorable feelings��that Cobalt Squadron gave me about Rose Tico or how Battlefront II’s storyline connected the dots between the OT and the ST really well for me, how much I legit enjoyed some of the lines from Jason Fry’s TLJ novelization, or the Poe Dameron comic being amazing, or a whole bunch of other things!  The ST has given us the chance to have these things that I really love and I cannot (nor do I want to) full divorce those things from the movies in my mind, which means I have affection for the movies because I love the whole big picture that Star Wars is building with these characters and the galaxy!Things I don’t like about the sequels:- TLJ is something I don’t mind in and of itself at this point (mostly because I’m just so tired of the arguments) but it’s never going to be what my heart wanted, it’s never going to be satisfying for me in that sense.  Yes, I get where they’re coming from, I think it’s a fascinating look at showing that yes the dark side/dark emotions is a LIFELONG STRUGGLE to overcome, that Luke fell back into them because it’s not a one-and-done thing, but that means that’s the ONLY story we got for Luke from the sequels, as played by Mark Hamill.  If we’d had more stories of Luke with Mark, I think it would be easier to take, but this is the only thing we’ve gotten so far with Mark Hamill on the big screen, so it has all the weight of our expectations on it, and because it’s undoing so much of what ROTJ worked so hard for, it’s never going to be satisfying.  I think it’s justified in what it did, but it’s never going to sing to me.  (I would like to hope that TROS will stick the landing and make me change my mind, I’m absolutely willing to be won over, but I’m skeptical.)- Rey’s being wrapped up in the Skywalker themes, they’re going to have to step really carefully to stick that landing for me as well, and so far I haven’t been satisfied by the story.  I don’t necessarily need her to be a bio-Skywalker (though, that would be my preference), but I need her connection to them to be thematically coherent, and so far it’s not enough for me.  It’s not the worst ever, but so far it’s not singing to me, either.- The worldbuilding in the movies has been very lackluster.  The planets all look like Earth locations for the most part, the aliens aren’t very creative, there’s a weird eschewing of established aliens, like they don’t actually want this to be Star Wars in setting, and there’s no sense of this being a bigger galaxy in the movies.  The supplementary material does a lot of this lifting and I live in that space, so I’m not as cranky about it as I might have been (ie, god bless Battlefront for its gorgeous planets omg), but it’s pretty noticeable in TFA and TLJ.- The squandering of the OT cast.  I’m actually okay with Han’s death in the movies, but I’m frustrated by totally taking out any impact it has on Luke and Leia, that they weren’t even there.  Leia briefly feels Han’s loss and staggers over it, there’s mention of it in the TLJ novelization, but that’s about it.  She feels Luke’s death, she gets a moment to talk with him in TLJ, but it’s so brief.  Ben only briefly feels her and doesn’t pull the trigger on her, until one of his squadmates does.  And, hey, I get it, this isn’t the OT’s movie, they had their movies, this is the ST’s movies.  But I feel like there was a way to give them more meaning, to have their presences actually felt in the characters’ lives.  TLJ at least started us on Luke and Ben’s relationship, but for all the weight it’s supposed to have, it’s barely a blip compared to how much time he and Rey spend together.  There’s barely any interaction between Leia and Ben at all in the movies.  Han and Ben get one scene.  It’s harder for me to connect to Ben when he’s so disconnected from the people who he grew up with and so I’m told he’s part of this legacy, but I don’t feel it in the way I wish I did.Contrast this against the prequels, where Obi-Wan and Anakin’s dynamic is expanded on, that those interactions give such weight to their battle on the Death Star, to the way Vader won’t shut up about Obi-Wan, the way Palpatine’s influence on Anakin’s life has more weight now that we’ve seen what went down with them, and why it was such a huge thing for Anakin to break away from him, why seeing Obi-Wan and Anakin and Yoda standing together as spirits has so much more meaning, now that those connections were established.  You can add in new characters (like Padme and Ahsoka) while still building up what was already there, but I feel like the ST really hasn’t connected the dots that well.  There’s still this HUGE gap between ROTJ and TFA/TLJ and maybe one day I’ll come around on that, I certainly have enjoyed what we’ve been given so far, but there’s a disconnect between the ST and the OT/PT so far that’s hard for me to overcome.Where it all falls in the end:I’m hoping that I will come around and fall in love with the ST, but I’m skeptical because the ST is what brought me back to Star Wars, it’s where I started out after I watched TFA, that was where my investment was, until I started spreading my wings a bit, and the PT/OT really just bit into me hard in a way I never expected.  I started out as largely a blank slate (I was a fan as a wee thing, but my feelings back then are pretty much the opposite of what they are now, other than that I Liked Obi-Wan Kenobi, apparently that’s my one true constant!) and one part sang to me and one part didn’t.  I’m not sure TROS (especially not in the hands of JJ, who made Alias, which, look, I loved that show, but its ending was not strong, and don’t get me started on his Star Trek, SIGH) can change that for me.  I hope to be proven wrong!  There are a lot of things I will focus on and yell happily about–I love the characters, I actually genuinely enjoy looking at Luke’s character, I’m enjoying the worldbuilding of the books, comics, and games SO MUCH, but idk I just don’t have the same passion for the ST despite that I love the individual pieces a ton.(AS A NOTE:  If someone really loves the ST and has fun with it, I would like to request that you continue to do so, because people loving things always wins me over, like, the most fun I have is when someone goes, “I love that thing!  And I also love this thing!” and it makes me want to love that second thing, too!  That kind of positivity always wins me over more than anything else.)

[remainingso]

TLJ SPOILERS

On Rogue One being sandwiched between TFA and TLJ 

OKAY everyone and their mothers has a TLJ take so I mostly wasn’t gonna say much other than incoherent screaming BUT 

one thing I loved loved loved about the movie that really surprised me was the whole resistance thread with Poe/Leia/Holdo ESP considering I Did Not Care about Poe after TFA other than yeah Oscar Isaac is really pretty but yet somehow I believe very strongly that he had one of the most coherent character arcs in all of TLJ

ANYWAYS I’m super here about how the Poe v Holdo thing got turned on its head but I’m also super duper impressed at how TLJ managed to take a bunch of the themes Rogue One had and build on them—and that created this very sort of coherent narrative of constant resistance through the whole galaxy far far away that I LOVE 

Like they had the whole “character repeats inspirational motivation line from a character they once thought was bullshit but now respects” thing--like the “we are the spark” line and how it comes back in that pivotal moment on Crait was a lot like how Rogue One handled the “rebellions are built on hope” line and I think that sort of...structural mirroring helped tie the two movies together for me at first, and then I kept thinking about it and 

like the entirety of the resistance plot in TLJ was something like a zoomed out version of the Vader hallway scene in Rogue One--the rebels, desperately fleeing and getting away for a moment, but then the First Order catching up again, firing again, relentlessly pursuing, meanwhile all we can do is survive. In Rogue One, we have the benefit of context, we know AHN is right beyond that ship’s door, we know that, eventually, we’ll win. There isn’t any such reassurance in TLJ, but we eventually learn that it doesn’t matter, that we just have to survive and keep the spark alive, but I think building on that survival theme from Rogue One contextualized it really well for me. This is Star Wars. There will always be a new hope somewhere on the horizon. And honestly anyone who says the ending to TLJ isn’t filled with hope and light and renewal is dead wrong. 

[zenosanalytic]

Star Wars: The Last Jedi: Execution Strikes Back

Ok so I’ve been trying to write down my reaction to The Last Jedi for the last two days, but I have a lot of Thoughts and I’m beginning to think it’d be better if I wrote down Many Reactions to The Last Jedi, each focused on a particular aspect of my reaction, and so I’m going to do that.

OK SO: This Post will be my general reaction to the plot, story, etc. There won’t be much internal coherence to this as it’s just me jumping around, writing my general reactions to the aspects of the film that stood out to me enough to comment on without deserving their own post.

The tl;dr: It had problems, but they didn’t detract from it for me and it was really fun and I liked it, but the underlying rhetorical merchandising of “Rebel” and Related Things bugged me along similar lines to Rogue One.

TLJ follows in TFA’s footprints of having a really thin, basically tacked-on plot that’s really nothing more than the most basic background required to make the film’s true strengths -its character interactions, performances, worldbuilding, and structure- comprehensible, and to let them shine. I thought the action fun, focused, and not too busy(though occasionally Stupid); that the relationships between the characters and the larger ideas they were meant to convey were well done, clear, and engaging; and that, while the plot was Incredible Stupid(or maybe just stripped down?) and Barely Relevant, the structure of the story was quite Robust and well-built. The larger themes and rhetoric of the film were clearly conveyed, even if sometimes those themes and that rhetoric was, itself, in conflict, or just flat-out philosophically infuriating(hint: my Rogue One complaint about Disney’s commodification of “Rebellion” is amped up 1000% for TLJ, but I won’t get into that in this post). My one big problem was, as with TFA but even more so, the sheer volume of callbacks and parallels, which I found a bit distracting at points. I get that they WANT the films to feel cyclical and repetitive, but I feel like they just went too far in a few places here, and tried too hard to be “A Star Wars Movie” rather than doing their own thing, which gave it a very franchisey feel. There were moments, however, where they used those references and parallels to do some interesting stuff.

The idea of the bombing run at the beginning, the movie’s first set-piece battle, was, I thought, Very Stupid, but I get what they were going for with it and their execution of that was done well enough that I didn’t necessarily mind it. The basic idea: The FO is chasing the Resistance out of its hiding places and catches Leia’s crew in the midst of them evacuating their base from TFA; Poe and the fighters scramble to buy the evacuation time and stop a new FO siege-ship called a Dreadnought, from destroying the base before the evacuation can be completed. From practically the first lines they start introducing their themes; the opening(or maybe near-opening) shot is at the base, with one of the officers over-seeing it telling another to forget about the ammunition and intelligence and save the People instead. This idea, that it’s The People and Life that matter most and not resources, tools, and abstractions, gets repeated over and over in the film. It’s particularly important for Poe, who the lead evac officer(a woman; this becomes A Thing in his story in this film) mildly contrasts in this sequence. While she is putting the People first, Poe gets caught up in the opportunities for Victory afforded by the Dread’s vulnerability. After having won time for the evacuation Poe is ordered back but refuses, countermanding Leia’s orders to the fighter wings and ordering them to begin their bombing runs. They follow him over Leia(again: will become A Thing), and the sequence continues to needless tragedy.

So the Stupid: The bombers are big, unwieldy(I’m tempted to call them antimanuveurable), incredibly vulnerable, and just entirely impractical in their design. Their design is clearly inspired by the B-Wings but whereas those had heavy shielding, torpedo bays, and ion cannons, these are just sitting ducks with belly turrets, which are about as useful as you’d expect in a space-battle. Nothing about these is functional(they have to be over their target for pete’s sake, and they have frigging bomber scopes!), everything about these is meant to evoke WWII bombers, and all but one of them is immediately blown up to set up the death of Rose’s sister on the last bomber, heroically taking out the Dread right before her own ship kicks it. So Stupid But, like I said, it’s clear what they’re trying to do with this -establish that it is an unequal fight, emphasize that the Resistance are People and Individuals not faceless cogs in an institution, evoke WWII imagery to really drive home the anti-fascist nature of the Resistance and the Fascist nature of the First Order and further the film’s arguments, shine a spot-light on Poe’s flaws and their terrible costs even when he’s in his element, and make an engaging action scene while doing it- and they do it so well and so successfully that I didn’t mind the Stupidity of it. Unfortunately the movie then goes on to basically make this ALL about Poe, which undermines the PEOPLE!! message a bit as I’ll get into later, by having the only reaction to their entire bombing wing getting killed and plenty of fighter-pilots being Leia slapping and demoting him for his profligacy with his pilots’ lives and lecturing him about the leadership position she is STILL, after he got their entire bombing wing killed, grooming him for. Ugh. Like I said: Later.

The Last Jedi fits Very Well with This Theory by Diamanda Hagan on Youtube about Star Wars being a Cardassian “Repetitive Epic”. There are references out the Wazoo to the Original Trilogy, it’s an unabashed riff on The Empire Strikes Back(with hints of Return), characters openly reference the events of Return, Rey explicitly places herself in the role of Luke to Ren’s Vader in Return, explicitly conceives of herself and others within an ongoing historical teleology, it structures all of this about Family(while subtly subverting Family and Lineage as a theme in favor of loyalty to ideals/The State via Rey’s status as a orphan sold into slavery), and as such it cyclically fulfills the same function within the larger serial/cyclical narrative as Empire(I won’t get into the prequels that shall not be named).

Hamill plays Luke Wonderfully as a Filthy Hermit-Wizard Island-Hag XD His milking of that Totally Chill and Totally Cognizant Plesiosaulrus and subsequent raw-drinking of said milk was Inspired as Fuck :| :| 125% Malcontented Gremlin. I’ve tried to avoid review and discussion cause Spoilers, but I’ve seen some suggestion that people don’t like his characterization here and I disagree vehemently. Yes, he’s not the Luke of the OT, but the Luke of the OT didn’t blame himself and his “weakness” for the moral corruption and crimes of his nephew, nor for the deaths of half a dozen young students who trusted him. OT Luke hadn’t spent decades beating himself up for the “arrogance” and “pride” of his “Legend”, and the “weakness” that allowed this to led him to overestimate his abilities as a teacher and underestimate one particular student(I don’t think it did, but it’s clear that’s what he’s been telling himself). OT Luke isn’t punishing himself and projecting his own self-hatred and self-punishment onto “The Jedi”; This Luke is. Seeing his failure of Ben Solo as the result of Hubris, personal Weakness, and a loss of faith in Redemption at a critical moment, he projects that onto the Jedi Order who become, for him, Hubristic, Weak, and Hypocritical. He sees himself as irredeemable and deserving of death; so too he sees the Jedi. He’s been living with this negativity for years. He’s “cut himself off from the Force” -literally cut himself off from the universe itself and the Flow of all Being- out of disgust in himself(and via projection Jedi, the Force, etc) and as punishment. This is OT Luke after years of believing himself a Legend, after -as he sees it- his mortal flaws killing that Legend through a failure complete and deeply personal, and after even more years of swallowing the poison that resulted from that. I found it entirely believable, and wonderfully brought to life by Hamill.

I like Rey’s story much better than the other two, Finn&Rose’s story second most, and Poe’s story the least.

In fact I found Poe’s story to be kind of infuriating.

Here’s Poe’s narrative in this film: He’s a Heroic and Dashing Fighter-Pilot and he needs to Learn to Be the Leader He was Born to Be, no matter how many far more sensible and courageous women will have to repeatedly die, sacrifices to or for his grandstanding, for him to do so(it takes at least two, possibly three, pseudo-four, women given appreciable face-time on screen. There’s an unnamed A-wing pilot that may have died or may have made it through the movie I couldn’t really tell, and then there’s Leia’s near-death). He sees the Bomber attack as heroic and those who died as Heroic Martyrs to the cause, but Leia reminds him: they’re still dead. Those were people who didn’t have to go on that mission, who didn’t have to die, and that leadership means remembering what, exactly, you’re fighting for(Hint: it’s People! What Your Fighting For is PEEEOOOPLEEEEEE!!!!!!!! Of Course I did this :|). He sees Holdo’s cautious husbanding of their people and resources as betrayal, and so he instigates a mutiny in service of a hairbrained longshot plan that doesn’t work, putting everyone’s lives at risk in the process; AND his love for such Romantic longshots compromises that very mission, which in turn compromises Holdo’s plan, which puts Holdo in the position of having to choose between kamikaze and letting the Resistance be destroyed. Her death, I felt I was being asked to believe, showed him a True Leader’s approach to sacrifice; all I saw was an awesome figure of feminine leadership and strength, a perfect replacement for if not Leia(since Holdo wasn’t one of the Big Three) at least Akbar or Mon Mothma, well-crafted by writing and performance only to be dashed to bits at the last moment in service of Poe’s character development. And in a way that undermined the film’s larger message about leadership, risk, and sacrifice, no less. So I am Upset about this |:(

And during all this Leia’s fleet is in a slow-motion chase with the First Order through the actual middle of nowhere(so there’s no real sense of motion, either, aside from the occasional abandoned ship drifting back to be shot apart) while the Resistance manages to stay just barely one step ahead of them on low fuel reserves. IDK if TLJ introduces this(I kinda feel like it does) but this chase is necessitated by the conceit that hyperspace travel can’t normally be tracked but the FO has somehow figured out how to do it. Realizing they’ve done this is what sends Finn and Rose to Canto Bight in the first place(looking for a coder to help them break into the FO ship to disable their tracking), and Poe’s Doofery plays out with that backdrop. 

I’ve seen some folks complain about Canto Bight but I thought it was fine and pivotal to the political message of the film, and consequently to Rose’s role and Finn’s arc. Its decadence is presented as the other side of the First Order’s coin, and the poverty it inflicts on the jockeys, the slavery it inflicts on the Fathiers, the ultimate goal of the FO, the source of CB’s decadence, and the evil the Resistance is fighting to end. Finn’s political and moral awakening is even mirrored in his opinion of the place: when Rose and he arrive he loves it, but as his awareness of the exploitation and corruption it’s built on grows, so too does his conviction in the correctness of making sacrifices for the Resistance and its cause. It’d have been nice if they could have had this be a more natural process and rest less on Rose dropping exposition on him, but obvsl time is a factor and Rose needed to be pivotal to this process to fulfill her role in the film and his story. Finn’s arc is realizing it’s not just about him and Rey and their safety, and you can’t do that without another, new person for him to care about and be cared for by, and having her be, essentially, his moral mentor(Rose pretty nearly parallels Ben Kenobi’s role in Star Wars/New Hope for him here) made that even stronger and more satisfying for me. I also liked that they included del Toro’s character as her foil; having Finn’s choice be an actual choice, embodied by two different people relating to him for two different reasons, made that choice much stronger, even if you never really got a sense that Finn was tempted by DJ.

Rose was Delightful overall, and I love how they defied expectations by setting her up as a “Tech” only to have her basically be the emotional and moral heart of Finn’s story, and arguably the film in general. I don’t really have a lot to say here because it’s just very simple: she reminds Finn of the things he cares about, of WHY he runs risks, that other people are just as invested in their struggles as he is and that ultimately it is the People who matter. The Fight is for the People; Victory is the Freedom, Survival, and Rule of the People; his desire for peace and dignity is no different than anyone else’s and the Resistance is fighting for that against the Fascism, Aristocratic Hierarchy, and social corruption which the First Order represents. I feel like this point could have been made more strongly by tying the First Order more directly to the Star Wars upper classes in the Canto Bight section, and I also feel like -given Palpatine’s human-supremacist notions and racism- there should have been far more humans among the upper crust and far fewer aliens, but I recognize that, on the first point, TFA had kind of written them into a corner on this topic in how it chose to present the FO/Resistance conflict, and on the second, that the impulse to show their creature-making chops(and include a Cantina Scene in the film) would be quite strong. Also I’m sure that, while Johnson may be given the writer credit on this film, Disney had significant input on the film and its overall message, and tying wealth/the wealthy explicitly to conservative politics and its perennial abuses(slavery, corruption, war, extracting wealth for the non-wealthy through political manipulation[in this case, weapons-trading and the war-mongering that makes it most profitable]) is far too liberal/leftist a message for a company like Disney to tolerate in their films.

Rey’s story is just excellent in so many ways but a lot of my appreciation of it is tied up with TLJ’s choice to go with a more OT(original trilogy) and Zen approach to the Force which I’ll talk about separately so I don’t know how much I’ll say on this here. It was a very intimate and internal story, structured almost like Buddhist monk tales(so sort of fairytale)[1]. Like: She comes to Luke, Luke doesn’t want to teach her, then in response to her persistence he says “I’ll give you three lessons over three days”(which I remember as taking place at Dawn, Midday, and either Dusk or Evening on three consecutive days, but my brain might be making that particular referential bit up; I’d need to see it again), except these lessons are meant to teach her why she should give up on The Force. Of course(in eternal trophic tradition), her purity of purpose, will, and dedication ends up instead teaching Him that his choice to turn his back on The Force and the Universe was wrong, and bringing him back into engagement with the World.

Her interactions with Ren follow a similar trophic logic(which, again, I’ll talk about in another post) except along a more “two students” than “master and student” narrative. They are both pursuing the same thing(self knowledge and control; mastery and understanding of The Force) but for very different reasons and from very different backgrounds, and these reasons and backgrounds directly influence where they end up: Rey’s “success” at accepting and internalizing them with equanimity while also setting her desires aside, leading her to Balance; Ren’s “failure” to do so by seeking the “strength” to dominate and “kill” them, and thus continual consumption by and obsession with his past and his desires. Their interactions are deeply personal, concerning their emotions and confusion and fears, and also somewhat unsettling(which I think they should be) but I don’t think that they are, at all, romantic; though there is a simultaneously humorous and disturbing scene where Ren is topless, Rey asks him to get dressed, and he refuses. Humorous for the obvious reasons; disturbing as there’s a sense to all of Ren’s behaviors in these moments of trying to manipulate her. Rey is eternally reaching for understanding, even as she feels rage, sorrow, and disgust for the monster he has chosen to become, and he is eternally trying to use her reaching as a means to power, as he uses everything. Again, the “two student” dynamic: the “good” one who seeks enlightenment honestly, and the “bad” who enters the monastery for the political and social power a monk’s life can afford; even their relative social condition -her a nameless orphan, him an aristocrat from a bloodline filled with important monastic figures- plays into the dynamics and traditions of these stories.

Ok that’s about it for right now. The next one will probably deal more in-depth with Rey’s story and how The Force is presented.

[1]Though maybe I’m wrong about these particular parallels I’m drawing here. My exposure to these tales is very limited, and mostly I know Japanese ones(though some of those are transformations of earlier Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese ones), so perhaps these aren’t the prevalent Buddhist narratives I took them as.

[ryttu3k]

The Last Jedi, thoughts and comments!

Spoiler space

Space

Space

Space

Space

Space

Just in case people are reading this on mobile, you know?

Space

Space

Space

Space

Space

Space

Space

Space

Space

Space

Space

Space

Space

Space

The short version: better than I was expecting given the spoilers, not as good as the OT, TFA, or Rogue One, better than the prequel trilogy (in my opinion). If the OT is a 10/10, TFA is 9.5/10, and Rogue One is 9/10, and my favourite of the PT (Revenge of the Sith) is 6/10, I’d put this at a solid 7.5/10.

Good Bits

Luke and Leia have a reunion. There’s no hug, but Luke does kiss her on the forehead. I cried like a baby.

Leia Leia Leia I still love her so much. She’s a much harder character but I understand where she was coming from when she was giving Poe his dressing-down. I love how even after that, she and Poe still had that wonderful rapport: “You can’t just jump in an X-Wing and blow something up!” / “Permission to jump in an X-Wing and blow something up?” “Permission granted!” The scene of her in space had me hyperventilating (and crying, yes), and even if the way she saved herself was visually a bit naff, the imagery of her fingers starting to move gave me literal chills.

Luke’s death is poignant, peaceful, and feels appropriate (given that it’s generally expected that the previous trilogy’s trio doesn’t make it to the end). Also, the visual of the binary sunset.

Related: Force ghosts Luke and Han gonna fuck Kylo uuuuup! (IMPLIED GHOST REUNION. CUE GENTLE SKYSOLO WEEPING. Look I’ve shipped it since I was twelve let me have this.)

Speaking of deaths, while I didn’t like Holdo much, her death was amazing. Like, just the silence.

Luke and Yoda’s conversation!!

And Luke and Artoo’s! The ‘watch your language’ line! THE HOLOGRAM OF LEIA! Thank you for your emotional blackmail, Artoo <3

BB-8 CONTINUES TO BE THE BEST CHARACTER. BB-8 HEADBUTTING TO VICTORY. BB-8 IN AN AT-ST. MY BELOVED ROUND CHILD I LOVE YOU.

Poe was an amazing rebel who made mistakes but was also a goddamn hero. I also loved his allies, especially Connix (Billie Lourd’s character). Go you beautiful rebels!

Rose is a delightful character and I love her dynamic with Finn and she badly needs a hug. The escape scene on Canto Bight (the casino city, the planet itself is apparently called Cantonica) was wonderful and I loved Rose’s response to it. Also the Fathiers were beautiful and I loved, loved Rose freeing them. I feel her crush on Finn may be one-sided and I don’t really want to see her hurt, but tbh I’d be happy for my OT3 to become an OT4, haha.

Related: the Finn/Rey hug made me feel Emotions. They better kiss in the next film, okay. I also love how their immediate concerns were each other - Rey’s name being the first thing Finn says after getting out of the coma, his first question being, “Where’s Rey?”, wanting to leave to ensure Rey’s safety, and also Rey telling Chewie that if he sees Finn first, then to say. Something. They just worry about each other so much my BABIES.

Speaking of shipping. Leia/Holdo. I’m just saying.

Speaking of not shipping, look let’s face it Re//ylo is not going to work :D They do have a Force Bond, yes. It’s an artificial one completely created by Snoke intended to play both of them and is not seen as healthy or natural. Rey might genuinely hope to redeem Kylo but he is not going to have it and wants to turn her instead and at the end she shuts him the fuck down and frankly that bit was very satisfying. For more, see the episode 9 section.

The action was just. Fucking cool. The Falcon to the rescue on Krait (I think it was Finn’s line, “Oh, they hate that ship!”?), Finn versus Phasma (I may have nearly bounced out of my chair in sheer glee when he rose up on the platform!! “Rebel scum.” Yes!!), the Canto Bight escape, just so many rad action scenes!

Kylo’s overkill reaction to seeing Luke. Luke just brushes off his shoulder. Badass. Kind of out of character (see below) but badass. Related: the ‘every part of that statement was wrong’ callback. Rey, you’re our only hope!

Hux gets beaten up a lot and it’s very satisfying. Also his call with Poe I was fucking dying.

Maz Kanata.

The score was beautiful. Not just the new parts, but the callbacks! Favourite callbacks include Luke and Leia’s theme during their reunion, and was that the Trench Run? It was either the Trench Run or the Death Star run from Return of the Jedi, I can’t remember off the top of my head. John Williams can do no wrong, honestly.

Porgs, Fathiers, Vulptices. They are all completely beautiful and adorable and I want to hug all of them.

Okay! Fine! I admit it! Rey and Kylo taking out Snoke and his guards together was badass!

Bad Bits

The cinema didn’t include the dedication to Carrie :-\ Unless it was at the end of the credits? Still, not cool.

Snoke remains (remained?) totally one-note and Generic Bad Guy. We know nothing about him other than He’s Bad. Like, oh good he’s dead but why was he around in the first place?

DJ as a character is completely repellent and needs a punch in the face.

Poe flirting with Rey was awkward as hell. Like excuse me FINN is the middle of the OT3, not Rey or Poe!

The heck was that scene with Rey and the mirror-images? I mean it’s visually cool, but what?

Basically the entire Resistance is dead? The entire Resistance fits in the Falcon alone? Not a single response to the distress call? Goddamn that is depressing. How do you recover from that?

No BB-8 vs BB-9E showdown! We got robbed!

JFC Kylo put some clothes on no one wants to see that. ...Okay a depressing amount of people do, but I sure as shit do not!

Okay, so probably my biggest grievance, now. Luke’s characterisation. Like, I can kind of understand, I can, but it just - feels uncharacteristic. (Also tbh the milk and fish scene was just gross. Ew, Luke, ew.) The fact that he did ultimately regain his connection to the Force and confront Kylo was wonderful, but the fact that he needed to do that in the first place was... very much questionable. I also just cannot see Luke thinking, even for a moment, that killing his sleeping nephew was in any way acceptable. Like yes he admits that it was a moment of weakness, but god, even after that, his response was to continue being harsh and pushing everyone away? Abandoning Leia? Just fucking off to some island to die? Like, that’s not my Luke. That’s not... “No. You failed, your highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” He came good in the end but it shouldn’t have been like that in the first place.

I stand corrected. Biggest grievance: CHEWIE COOKED A PORG D:

Bits That Will Need Episode 9 To Make It Into A Coherent Narrative

So, the whole dynamic between Rey and Kylo. This is going under ‘needs episode 9′ and not ‘bad bits’ just because I think it can be handled well with a proper conclusion? So Snoke intentionally forces (haha) the Force Bond between them because he knows Kylo is weak and Rey is untrained and can’t block it. Rey comes to empathise with Kylo because she’s having such a miserable time, which honestly, uh, doesn’t speak well of Luke either, frankly. She comes to honestly feel he’s redeemable, and that bit I do feel is unrealistic considering how much she loathed him only a few days earlier, whereas he just wants to rule over the galaxy with her. Rey continues to believe he’s redeemable in the Snoke scene and Kylo promptly proves that, nope, he always has been a raging dickcanoe. And finally, when they next connect, she shuts him the fuck down. I’m interested in seeing if this will end up as Rey’s Magical Healing Boobs or whatever, or if there’s a more familial relationship (see below), or if she just gives tf up on him. Which. I wouldn’t blame her for, really! So this gets a question mark and a, “Don’t fuck this up, JJ!”

Related: Rey’s identity. Frankly, I feel the bit about her parents is misdirection and manipulation. Kylo is openly saying she is nothing and has no one and can only rely on him, that is a goddamn textbook emotional abuse tactic! And there is just too many hints that she’s a Skywalker. This is the story of Rey, Kylo, Luke, and Leia, and both Lucas and Hamill have stated explicitly that Star Wars - and specifically The Last Jedi, too!! - is the saga of the Skywalker family. Rey is just too entrenched in it to not be, and if she really is just some random, it’s frankly bad storywriting. (Also, if Rey truly is a random, how would Kylo even know?) I just don’t feel it’s over as easily as that.

Frankly the bit with the kids at the end was cheesy as hell but I’m willing to wait for two years to see where it goes.

So, tl;dr - many grievances and some parts I’m cautious over, but definitely a lot to love.

[lovecastsoutfear]

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Aaauuugggghhhhhhh!!!!! Y’all I loved it!!!!!!! I’m not gonna be able to form a lot of coherent thought ms but here we go!

There be spoilers from here on out!!

This is just gonna be a bunch of random thoughts about the movie so it’s gonna be kinda scattered.

I LOVED Poe’s arc in this movie!! I described it to my brother as “learning to play chess” he had to learn to think three steps ahead. Learning to take into account the cost of the decisions he makes not to always be a hero and at times to retreat and regroup to save lives. The way that he takes on Leia’s tile from the first battle in the last; callin people off of a suicide mission.

And Finn!!! His arc is amazing!! It is a wonderful continuation of his arc in TFA!! In the beginning when the chips are down for the rebellion he backslides a bit and almost runs away again. Rose literally stubs him out of that. And then on the casino planet he sees a bit of the scope of what the first order has done, through his seeing and interacting with the slave children. And then in the end just as Poe has taken Leia’s original place he takes Poe’s he ignores orders and tries to sacrifice himself. In that scene I resolved myself to him dying in a blaze of glory and I was sad but at peace with it. But then Rise knocked him out of the way. I’m glad he didn’t actually die but the willingness to die was a highly important moment in his character development.

And ROSE!!! I loved her so much!!!! She was an awesome character!! I’m glad she didn’t die also!! I love her backstory as being a former slave (I think)! Aaahhhhh! I love the line about saving what we love not destroying what we hate. I can’t really put anything else about her into words.

Leia kept surprising me! Like when the bridge is destroyed I thought they had killed her! Then they didn’t! Then I was like okay so she’s going to be out of commission for most of the next two movies so that they don’t have to kill her or explain her absence. Then she woke up!! And I thought she would back Poe up but she didn’t! Uuggghhh! I love Leia soooo much!!! That dedication! It hurt my heart in the best way possible!!

Laura Dern’s character (can’t remember her name and not looking it up right now)!!!! I love what they did with her!!! Like her first speech was amazing! But then her conversations with Poe and I wasn’t sure exactly what I thought of her!! Then I got carried away with Poe and mutiny! But then we are all in Poe’s shoes realizing that he is not always the best pint of view character. He has blinders on and is young and impetuous and at that point doesn’t have the vision or all of the information to know what to do. I love her relationship with Leia. I love that you can see from a few short lines that she and Leia have a long relationship and that they love and respect each other. And her sacrificial death is amazing!!

And now we come to Luke!! I loved him in this. A broken man consumed by self-doubt and guilt! If you had told me beforehand that it would come out that Luke had screwed up big time and pushed Kyle further to the dark side I would have been pissed off but I love the way they did it. He almost repeated his mistake with Rey. I’m so glad that she was able to call him out and through her connection with Kylo to figure out what exactly happened the night the temple was destroyed. My brother and I talked about how what he tells Kylo mirrors what Obi Wan told Anakin. “I’m sorry” and “I failed you.” Interestingly though they kinda failed their apprentices in opposite ways. If Kenobi had a major failure it was that he never believed Anakin could turn to the dark side, in some ways perhaps he needed to be harsher on Anakin and curve his path when he was on his way to the dark side; he should have seen it earlier. Luke on the other hand failed in that he was too ready to believe that Kylo went to the dark side. He saw the pathway pretty early but believed that Kylo was further down it than he actually was, and pushed him further that direction. It is a great example of meeting your destiny on the path you take to avoid it. I love his confrontation with Kylo and the fake out. The sweeping off his shoulder is such a Skywalker move! I loved that his story ended with him looking at twin suns again and that theme. Not that I think he’s actually gone, his force ghost will probs be in the next one.

Kylo!! I wasn’t completely sold on him as an interesting character after the last movie. But I loved him in this one. I loved to see him interacting with Snoke. Seeing that Snoke treats him like shit. His relationship with Rey is extremely intriguing. I love that she sees the conflict and the bits of good that are in him. He is clearly at the end of the movie clearly a man a bit unhinged who has been given enormous power. After TFA I thought maybe they wouldn’t redeem him at all in order to show that you can’t make someone come back to the light if they don’t make the call. And while my brother disagrees with me I think in The end they will turn him back. There is something metaphorically resonant in him using the different lightsabers he uses the blue one in doing good light side type things and the red when he’s leaning towards the dark. And I think the fact that he fights with it foreshadows that he is not really back to the light. Right now that blue light side saber is broken but I think Rey will use the crystal to make a new one and I predict that when Kylo is turned back he will pick up the new saber to do some good. There were definitely some shades of Vader and Padme’s final argument in him asking Rey to rule the galaxy with him.

I’ve covered most of my thoughts on Rey’s character arc in talking about Luke and Kylo. I’m just say that while I never really thought she would go to the dark side I’m glad that she didn’t. In interested in seeing where she goes from here.

Aaagghhhhh!!! YODA!!!! YODA!!!! I loved it and my happy my heart is!

Porgs were adorable! And I loved Chewy as a reluctant pet owner!

Baby force sensitive!!!!!!! I can’t wait to see more of him!

So many women just all over the place in the rebellion!

Yeah Finn get Phasma!!

Not really sure who I ship now. After TFAi love Finn/Rey; but they seem to be setting up Finn/Rose which I also really like!! I just hope there isn’t some kinda love triangle because Rey looks at them kinda longingly. Idk

Also loved Luke’s line about not being the Last Jedi.

Sorry not sorry this post is so long.

[nirikeehan]

Power, Politics and Star Wars: Armitage Hux Edition

I read this article that tried to explain what Hux did in TROS and justify it and I was just not feeling it so I wrote a whole thing about it. So I thought, why not post it.

https://dorksideoftheforce.com/2019/12/22/star-wars-tros-general-hux/

I just wanna start by saying yes, I understand the logic of what happened in the film as explained by this article. I'm just here to challenge exactly what happened, why, and the article writer's attempts to justify it, because I don't find them to be an accurate summation of Hux's character. 

"It’s not hard to miss that the way The Last Jedi framed his character was very different from what we saw in The Force Awakens. At first, it almost felt as though he was a completely different character, having gone from Nazi-like general to an officer everyone refused to take seriously."

Right, and I think it's worth trying to examine why that shift in portrayal happened – behind the scenes. The writing changed hands from TFA with Lawrence Kasdan & JJ Abrams to Rian Johnson. So, clearly Johnson decided to go in a different direction with Hux. But why? Was it a continuing ploy to "subvert expectations" like he did so much in TLJ? Hence, if Hux was big and scary in the first film (obvious Nazi parallels in imagery and speech, commits literal genocide while hordes of stormtroopers look on), he had to be... silly, ineffectual and easily mocked in the second? Why?

Maybe it fits into a larger theme with Rian Johnson's writing, like... it seems like authority figures can (and should, maybe?) not be taken seriously? Think of all the authority figures in the Last Jedi. With the notable exception of Leia (who has such an iconic history) and Holdo I guess (random insert without much substance in my opinion), every single character who is, could be or once was in a position of power is cut down to size in some way. 

Luke Skywalker - crotchety old man. 

Poe - too hotheaded, needs to learn his place. 

Kylo - emo boy in a mask. 

Hux - butt of yo mama jokes. 

Snoke - literally cut in half. 

While I like this technique in some ways (I think I'm in the minority as someone who actually liked Luke being a disillusioned asshole lol, I thought it made him more interesting; and pointing out the obvious that Kylo is a conflicted try hard made him way more human and relatable to me), doing it to this extent was excessive. Especially in a film series that is supposed to have clearly defined villains. While I like the murder of Snoke because it was unexpected and it let Kylo actually have some agency to try to take over the galaxy on his own, you can't do it with every villain, or the audience isn't going to think anything is at stake anymore. So it always played really weird to me that Hux was taken from General Genocide to the target of slapstick humor. Which brings me to the next point...

"Looking back, it’s possible to interpret this as the result of how other characters viewed and treated him from that point forward, rather than an actual drastic change to the way he was portrayed. It’s possible that after Starkiller Base, the masses lost great respect for him — on both sides. He is no longer a man to fear. He’s General Hugs. He doesn’t scare anyone."

I just don't see how this is possible, to be honest. Like yeah, Starkiller base was lost, but surely not before it destroyed the entire Hosnian system, which, from what I understand, contained the entire seat of New Republic government. So I assume that means the president, vice president, whoever else was in the executive branch, all of the Senate, etc etc. Like imagine some terrorist leader called down a laser from space and obliterated all of Washington, D.C. while the President and all staff were in the White House, Congress was in session and the Supreme Court was hearing cases. We'd be like, oh my god, everyone's gone, we have no federal government, what the fuck. Even if the American army managed to destroy the weapon that did it, there'd still be basically irreparable damage to the very structure of the government and its ability to function. (Sounds like the plot of a future Michael Bay movie, but I digress.) 

The point is, whoever was responsible for the attack would probably still be pretty fearsome to the masses. And in Hux's case, considering his goal in TFA seems to be to usurp the New Republic and replace it with the First Order, at the end of the first film, he seems to be in a perfect position to do exactly that... which is why I was super confused as to why he spent TLJ chasing down like 30 rebels, who were already basically defeated?? Like, now would have been the time to take over! Don't just leave that power vacuum sitting there, buddy! Someone else is gonna fill it if you don't! (More proof I don't think Rian Johnson has cracked many history books, but the lack of coherent political framework is a major failing of the sequels in general, so it's not all entirely on his shoulders. He did seem like he was trying to engage with some of these ideas i.e. Canto Bight illustrating the evils of the military industrial complex, but they fell so flat because he just wasn't that informed about the socio-political commentary he was trying to make.) 

"This is further evidenced by the way Kylo Ren treats him the moment he becomes Supreme Leader of the First Order. Kylo quite literally begins pushing him around, constantly putting him in his place, belittling him, and making him look incompetent and expendable."

LOL this is such a fundamental misinterpretation of Kylo and Hux's relationship at the end of TLJ. Kylo didn't start pushing Hux around because everyone had lost respect for his authority. Kylo starts pushing Hux around because Kylo killed Snoke and took the Supreme Leader role himself, giving himself a BIG promotion over Hux. He went from like, army commander to freaking king. He's on a power trip, trying to assert his authority not just over Hux, but literally everyone in the First Order. The dialogue (handily linked by the article above) between them after Snoke's death very clearly states this:

Hux: Who do you think you're talking to? You presume to command my army? Our Supreme Leader is dead! We have no ruler!

Kylo: *starts choking him* The Supreme Leader is dead.

Hux: *choking* Long live the Supreme Leader. 

Kylo is subduing Hux by violence and coercion and filling the power vacuum himself (see, that's what happens to power vacuums, usually the most brutal asshole around arrives to fill it!). That's not something Hux brought upon himself in any way; it's something Kylo took by force. Hux isn't the only one following Kylo's orders by the Battle of Crait, the rest of the First Order army is also because they're all too terrified of Kylo to question him. Somehow making this only about Hux and Kylo as individuals is a really narrow-minded, boring interpretation of pretty much my favorite part of TLJ. 

"And here lies the deep change within Hux that leads us into The Rise of Skywalker. General Hux knew he would never regain anyone’s respect. He knew that Kylo Ren would continue to publicly humiliate him. He knew his chances of ever being able to regain power in the traditional sense were lost."

I still don't see how this is possible, especially since as far as I know there's no supplementary canon material to back this idea up. The article writer is grasping at straws trying to make sense of TROS's nonsensical character choices for Hux. There's all sorts of ways Hux could still regain power. I don't even know what "in the traditional sense" means? Hoping for a promotion, maybe? Sure, he could suck up to Kylo and make himself invaluable to Kylo's continued status as Supreme Leader (this is the route I took in my fanfic, since it seemed pretty plausible; Hux is set up to be the brain to Kylo's brawn). He could have Kylo assassinated and take over himself. He could recruit a whole faction of people to mutiny against Kylo. He could even sell out Kylo to the Resistance, sure, which I guess is what he was doing in TROS, but all of that is still in service of regaining power for himself.

"Hux is so angry with Kylo Ren, and filled with so much rage toward all he is and all he stands for, that he decides it does not matter which side of the war wins as long as the Supreme Leader isn’t on the winning team."

Again, I don't think this has shown to be true at all before TROS. By all appearances, Hux's goal has always been obtaining power, and the supplementary canon with his backstory seems to support this. There's so much with his father being an old Imperial and Hux growing up with the old imperial ideology and the belief that returning to some semblance of the Empire would be the most ideal outcome of the First Order's war on the New Republic. And by this logic, shouldn't Hux be thrilled by the (totally outlandish) possibility that Emperor Palpatine himself would come back to rule? Imagine all the Nazi holdovers after World War II finding out Hitler had RISEN FROM THE DEAD. They'd probably be pretty excited, no? 

But this is why reducing Hux's character to some petty asshole who has no personal values or larger ideology and just "wants to see Kylo Ren lose" is so dumb and boring to me. It means he literally no longer cares about his own personal ambitions or that of his larger ideological ones. Everything he worked for his whole life, countless hours of blood, sweat and tears, deciding to commit genocide of billions of innocent people to get the galaxy to fall in line with his vision........ amounts to literally nothing. As long as Kylo loses their little schoolyard tiff. 

Nah, I don't buy it. 

But this just speaks to generally larger problems in the sequel trilogy with the writers not having a strong grasp on the mechanisms of political power in the universe they're working with. In the films, who's fighting who and why has always been painfully vague and often confusing (why wasn't the Resistance just the New Republic army in TFA? etc), but while at least Rian Johnson used TLJ to try to engage with some of these questions of politics and power – albeit at times with cringeworthy naïveté  – TROS abandons it completely. It never once clarifies who's actually in charge here. Ostensibly it should be Kylo since he’s still got the title “Supreme Leader” in the opening scrawl, but he's running around chasing zombie Palpy! And the First Order is still very obviously still just a military operation focusing on the Resistance, so are all of the galaxy's sectors just... self-governing right now? If so, why? 

TROS's complete abandonment of the notion that anyone in this universe could even want power was completely baffling to me. It's always about power. The original trilogy was about power. Even the prequels were about power (to a micromanage-y, super boring degree. Embargoes! Trade disputes! Senate meetings with votes of no confidence!) To bring Palpatine back from the dead to make him some weirdo with a death cult who just wants the whole galaxy to die (I guess?)... none of that's compelling to me. And it seems to completely misunderstand (or willingly sidestep) any kind of interesting real world parallels, of which the original trilogy had plenty (and the 90s era EU/Legends novels in particular were really good at engaging with, probably why they're my favorite entries in the whole franchise). Which does play into my cynical suspicion that TROS was deliberately sterilized of any potential political commentary by Disney to appease the increasingly authoritarian governments in their international market. Can't have those pesky human rights cutting into their profits. :/

[gffa]

THIS IS GOING TO BE A JOURNEY and it may not be what you were looking for, but I hope that it can explain how I came around on TLJ and why I’m sitting where I am, why I’ve made peace with it and even come to like aspects of it.  It’s going to seem pretty negative at first and it’s not going to work for everyone (spoiler alert: I think the supplementary canon is pretty invaluable for turning someone around), but I’ll lay out how I got to a pretty good place with TLJ! Because, looking back on it, I think what I really needed to do wasn’t to sweep aside my negative feelings, but instead to work through them.  This isn’t a post for people who loved TLJ and want a celebratory post about it!  It’s also not a post for people who hated it and want to read criticisms of it (though, both those things are in here!).  It’s a post for those who are struggling with how to figure out how to feel about it and want to like it a little more.  (Or anyone who just wants to rubberneck at this rather long navel-gazing post!  XD) LET ME START WITH THIS:  I fully recognize that my method and my views and my way of coming around on TLJ aren’t going to be for everyone and that’s okay. We all have our different views of the movie and we all have our preferences/lines in the sand drawn at our own personal points.  If you read what I have to say and don’t come out any more convinced than you were before, that’s okay, too! LET ME FOLLOW IT UP WITH THIS:  My feelings for TLJ are complicated, in that there are aspects of it that I really enjoy, but I came around to them in a very roundabout way and that may not work for everyone.  While there are things I really love about the movie now, there are also things that I think are never going to work for me.  In a nutshell:  The Luke & Rey storyline is largely the only one that really works for me.  The Kylo stuff actually hangs together reasonably coherently for me, I’m just not sure what to do with it until IX comes out.

The Finn & Rose stuff has a lot of potential that I like, but it fails to follow through on that potential.  As @thewillowbends has noted many times (and she’s very right about this, imo) HOW do you have a storyline about what war does to people by the rich and powerful to the oppressed, HOW do you have a storyline that contains child slaves in it, AND NOT CONNECT IT TO FINN’S STORY AS A CHILD SOLDIER IN THE FIRST ORDER? The Poe & Holdo stuff has potential and hangs together well on a thematic level, as the three stories are about cementing characters into their roles and making sure they are committed to being on these paths, as well as the movie has the theme running through it of defying expectations (yet this still locks them into giving those expectations just as much importance, because that’s the framework you’re still working it) and that it’s about men being called out by women, that this is how the Poe and Holdo thing defies what we expect.  Yes, I can agree with all of that!  I can agree that Holdo doesn’t owe him an explanation, women don’t owe men shit, in that sense!  It works on a thematic level, but then I look at it from a character level and it just absolutely falls apart for me.  W H Y did Holdo not sense the mutiny brewing under her nose, W H Y not just tell us a good reason for not saying anything about their plan?  There’s no in universe answer that has satisfied me on that yet. AND THEN THE ONE THING THE MOVIE MAY NEVER BE ABLE TO FIX:  Rian Johnson makes no bones about how this was a movie about defying expectations, that Rey’s story in the cave was about the hardest thing for her to hear, it was a movie about Luke Skywalker not being what we thought we wanted from the story.  And I can eventually come around on the Luke part of that story, because rewatching the OT has actually helped me a lot to see where much of his characterization has been stemming from!  But we’ll get to that later.  Right now, what this movie can probably never fix is that, yeah, okay, you’re defying expectations, that’s the story you wanted to tell and maybe there’s something to that whole thing.  But it also means that I’m never going to get Mark Hamill as a badass Jedi Master in all his glory, not for more than about two minutes. Instead, I’m going to be left with the feeling of how bitterness ate at him for at least those six years, how he died for this, and it’s never going to reach the epic heights of what the old Legends EU set up for him.  Whether it’s a better story or not, that depends on what each of us gets out of it, but my heart wanted Luke Skywalker being badass the whole way through a movie and getting to see him in a lightsaber fight that actually put his incredible skills to use, to see that strength in the Force on display in movies that could do the special effects justice.  I’m never going to get that with Mark Hamill and I’m never going to be satisfied on some level for it.  All the good (if you think they’re good) reasons in the world are never going to be able to fill that in for me. AND THE BIGGER PROBLEM WITH THE OVERALL SEQUELS:  I had to come home and Google what the fuck the First Order even was after TFA.  I have no idea what the state of the galaxy is like during TLJ and boy did the movie work to make sure it didn’t feel connected to anything that came before on a worldbuilding level.  Sure, you have Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa and the Millennium Falcon and lightsabers!  But that’s about it.  There were no recognizable alien races.  There are almost no recognizable planets.  There is a very, very obvious lack of knowing the backstory and I don’t know if IX can stick the landing of what is very obviously a WIP.  George Lucas managed it, that the prequels evolved as he wrote them/worked on them, but I think one of his strengths is that he’s really good at building a bigger world like that.  Can a George Lucas-less film trilogy stick the landing without him?  I’m willing to work with them, but I’m not sure JJ Abrams (a guy known for the Alias ending and that LOST was his baby as well, even if he wasn’t as involved as later, and the Star Trek movies) is the guy who can achieve that. WHERE THIS ENDS US UP AT:  Okay, so those are my big criticisms with the movie.  For me, it helps to understand where my dissatisfaction is coming from, that pinning it down and laying it out in clearly expressed words so that I completely and totally grok my problems with the movie, that lets me move on to, well, okay, what do I like, what potential good stuff is here. This is a pretty high up view of my problems with TLJ, of course, I’m skimming over a lot of the more detail-oriented problems (like how Holdo’s kamikaze hyperspace attack basically breaks Star Wars, because WHY HAS NO ONE DONE THAT BEFORE?, THERE IS NO REASON THAT ANYONE HAS COME UP WITH THAT SATISFIES THAT QUESTION FOR ME, but that’s not really a TLJ problem, that’s a “this was always there, just that no one really thought about it and assumed it wasn’t possible” problem), as I want to keep this post under 3k words, but that lays out the framework.  Okay, so where did I go from here? SOME WAYS I STARTED TO COME AROUND A BIT: → I started getting into the supplementary material.  I watched the Battlefront II game like a movie and, oh, hey, they’re doing the work of connecting the Empire to the First Order!  And, whoa, that was the single best Luke Skywalker story post-ROTJ that we’ve gotten yet!  I read Legends of Luke Skywalker and that gave me a lot of Luke feelings, which eased up my feeling stung about how the majority of the screentime he got was him mired in depression and blaming the Jedi for the problems. → I started reading interviews with Rian Johnson.  Now, this is a mixed bag at times, but there are some things that he explicitly explains that really worked for me, such as:  “[Luke]’s taken the weight of the world on his shoulders, taken himself out of the equation, so that the Jedi can die out, so that light can rise from a worthier source. So, in his own way, similar to Kylo, he’s trying to disconnect, he’s trying to throw away the past, he’s saying 'Let’s kill religion.  It’s the thing that’s messing us up, thing thing right here, let’s kill it.’ And the truth is, it’s a personal failure.  It’s not religion[’s fault], it’s his own human nature that’s betrayed him.” This puts A LOT into context       → It highlights that Luke was in a really bad place mentally and I’m here for characters who are speaking out of being in bad mental/emotional places!       → It highlights that Luke’s words about how it was time for the Jedi to end, how they were responsible for the creation of Vader and the rise of the Empire, how they were fucked up, how they weren’t needed in the galaxy, were all explicitly set up to be knocked down!  He literally goes out to face down the entire First Order with his laser sword!  Rian Johnson explicitly states what happened was a personal failing, not the religion/Jedi’s failing!       → It took me a long time and a lot of going back over Luke’s scenes from the OT to really connect them to how they were being continued on with TLJ and focusing on him as coming from a bad mental health place made me ready to hear that. → I read the novelizations, which are largely pretty standard retellings, but they do contain a lot of the characters’ thoughts and confirmation of some details that bugged me.  Like, it’s confirmed that Rey’s abilities with the lightsaber are based on the Force bond that Snoke gave her to Kylo, that she’s using his memories as a way to fight. This also allowed me to take a better look at Rose Tico’s character and give better context to Finn.  There’s a scene in one of them (I can’t remember if it’s the adult or jr novelization?) where it’s pretty clear that Finn wasn’t a failure at being a Stormtrooper, but that he was mopping decks because they couldn’t squash the compassion and goodness out of him, to do the jobs they were tasking him with.  He had really high scores in the rankings, but he just couldn’t follow through on the bad shit, so he was being punished.  That kind of thought being given to Finn, even if only for a moment, really helped me! Rose also gets more exploration and her reactions as coming from a place of grief are much easier for me to see.  Her anger at Finn’s desertion attempt because Paige gave her life for it, her latching onto him because she has this empty place in her because of Paige’s death, her readiness to FIGHT EVERYTHING IN HER WAY, were all really charming to me! → During this, I’m also reading the supplementary material to get me more emotionally invested in the characters.  Both the Phasma and Cobalt Squadron books really charmed the hell out of me and they helped fill in the world for me! WHERE I STAND AT THAT POINT: Well, I still have issues with TLJ, but it’s starting to make more sense to me.  I still think some things are bullshit about it or just leave me feeling entirely cold, I think a lot of the backlash against the criticism for the movie ignores that there are a lot of people with really good points, instead of it being just assholes who are angry that women and people of color are getting all up in their Star Wars.  (Don’t get me wrong, that’s a very real problem with Star Wars fans, but it’s not all of the TLJ criticism.) But I guess I’m warming up to it. And I realized that I needed to drop a certain mindset from the movie:  It is not revolutionary or breaking new ground or a big, shocking thing. The movie does kind of pride itself on defying expectations, but that still means it’s just as married to using those expectations as a framework for the story.  For example:  Rian Johnson talked about how the cave scene was about telling Rey the hardest thing she could hear, rather than what would be the satisfying answer or whatever.  Okay, but that still uses the question of, “What would the audience find satisfying?” as the foundation of how that scene was written, rather than something that would feel organic to the character’s actual development and the world around her.  (In fairness, the whole “defies expectations” thing is more about reviewers and defenders on YouTube than it’s something directly from RJ himself, so I’m not putting this on him as much as I am on the fandom-in-general.) So I dropped the whole idea that TLJ was revolutionary or different or breaking new ground. “Let the past die.  Kill it if you have to.” KYLO REN IS NOT RIGHT ABOUT THIS.  And Rian Johnson explicitly says so.  He says that you shouldn’t be stuck in the past, but that you build on it and move forward.  And, when I looked at TLJ in that light, I suddenly liked it a lot more. FOR EXAMPLE:  That cave scene.  You know why it works for me?  I explain more fully here, but basically it really works (even RJ’s comment about what would be the hardest thing for her to hear works with this) as the time honored Jedi tradition of going into a cave full of the Force and facing your greatest fears that linger inside yourself. Luke did it on Dagobah.  The Jedi younglings all did it on Ilum.  Ezra did it in the Jedi Temple on Lothal.  And now Rey does it on Ahch-To. If that scene wasn’t about revealing some external truth, but instead some internal truth about what she was carrying around with her?  HELL YEAH I’M HERE FOR THAT, THAT’S WHAT A JEDI NEEDS TO DO TO BECOME A JEDI. And if I could turn around on that aspect, maybe there were other things I could turn around on, too? WHICH BRINGS US TO THE LUKE SKYWALKER QUESTION:  A big crux of a lot of people’s dislike of TLJ is OMG LUKE SKYWALKER WOULD NEVER.  And that was absolutely how I felt for a long time! But now I’m kind of wondering:  Am I sure about that? Because I’ve been doing some meta about Luke Skywalker and I’ve been finding it to fit with the things the character has always struggled with.  As much as we want Luke Skywalker to be a pure cinnamon roll who is nothing but sweetness and light, that’s not actually who he is.  (And let me be clear that this is not a criticism leveled at Luke or even a “oh, you can only like him if he’s ~flawed~, otherwise you’re not seeing the ~truth~”, but instead aimed at showing why Luke Skywalker is incredible as a person and as a character, as I see him!) It’s easy to remember that Luke threw away his lightsaber and refused to fight, that he said, “I am a Jedi.  Like my father before me.”  But you know what came right before that?  Sidious taunting him with how he feels the hate and anger flowing through Luke, as he threatens his friends down on Endor.  We see it, too:

He is SO ANGRY here, even at this late in the game.  He’s spent years working on himself and controlling those feelings and he STILL struggles with it, even knowing that there’s good in his father. Sidious’ taunt wouldn’t rile Luke up if there was nothing in him that was there to rile up. And it’s present all along the way, Luke’s struggle with fear and anger.  He’s angry after ANH when all the slaves on Cymoon 1 are killed, blaming himself for Vader killing them.  He has fear and doubt swirling around in him, because the cave on Dagobah isn’t showing us an external threat, but an internal one.  All that he faces there is what he brought with him.  He runs off from Dagobah before he’s ready to face Vader, who says he can feel the fear Luke is at least learning to control--but it’s clearly still there.  And when Luke cannot deny the connection to Vader, when he has to yield some part of himself to the truth that Darth Vader is is father, he wants to die.  Mark Hamill talks about how Luke let go from Cloud City, “like committing suicide”. Luke is an incredible, phenomenal person, but a big part of that is because of the struggles he faces to overcome his anger and fear, that he does it--not that he never felt them in the first place. And the Jedi very much make the point that this is a lifelong journey to keep facing all the dark side stuff inside you.  They make this point in the prequels, they make this point in Rebels, they make this point in TLJ even. So, the idea that he would ignite his saber in a moment of weakness (because, let’s be honest, Ben Solo is not innocent at that point--if someone is willing to MURDER ALL THE OTHER STUDENTS because his uncle realized the darkness in him--and that is how it’s phrased in the novelization--then THAT PERSON IS A DANGER and Luke’s reacting to something that’s there) and then regret it so deeply that he withdraws from everyone for the next six years?  That he would be borderline suicidal while on Ahch-To because the dark things inside him were eating him alive? Yeah, for me that’s a continuation of everything that’s been established about Luke in previous stories. We remember Luke’s insistence that Vader had still had good in him, that he didn’t want to fight him, that he didn’t want to leave him behind on the Death Star.  But it’s easy to forget that Luke also did have moments of anger and violence against Vader, after he taunts Luke and threatens Leia, reading Luke’s thoughts about her.  (God, there was a twitter thread that I’m sure I reblogged that talked about this issue specifically, Luke’s aggression towards Vader in ROTJ, but I cannot find it again.) He believed there was good in his father, but it was still a struggle to put down his weapon. That’s exactly what happened with Ben as well--he knew there was still good in him, but he felt that darkness roiling in Ben so strongly that it was still a struggle to put down his weapon. (Also, this was six years pre-TLJ, so Ben was in his early-to-mid-twenties or so, not a teenager!) And then Luke, who struggles not to take on responsibility for others’ actions, retreats because he goes to a bad mental place, as the dark things that have always been in him (that are in all of us) get the better of him. AFTER ALL OF THAT: All of this may just solidify that you (or anyone else reading this!) are never going to like TLJ and that’s okay!  It’s not going to work for everyone, it’s not going to jive with everyone, some people are going to read those scenes differently.  Also okay!  There’s no hard feelings on my part if someone reads all of this and goes, “That’s not how I saw it.” And I’ll give the caveat that this process took me months, honestly I’m still sorting through my feelings.  I don’t think this is going to suddenly make anyone go OH SHIT YOU’RE RIGHT.  But maybe it might help nudge a few people towards recontextualizing everything in their head--which is the process that I went through and the only way I could go from “WTF WAS THAT?” to “Yeah, okay, that makes sense to me.” Plus, you know, hey, not everyone is going to want to read a bunch of supplementary material to feel better about the movie and there’s a very valid point about how you shouldn’t have to.  I ENTIRELY AGREE ABOUT THIS, btw!  But, at the same time, those supplementary materials exist and I’ve been consuming them and they’ve started drawing connections in ways that really help me. The novelizations and the comics have given extra bits of insight that made it clear they are thinking about the worldbuilding in the wider franchise.  The books and comics set in Canto Bight’s casino have specifically made an effort to include established aliens.  The Star Wars: Battlefront II game’s story has gone to worlds that are familiar (LEIA ON NABOO, bestill my heart, the arcade mode in the Naboo palace where you can have Vader or Leia or Luke wander by the stained glass windows with Padme’s image on them!  MY HEARTTTTTT) and great characterization.  The Propaganda and Aftermath books are doing a lot to start bridging the gap of what happened between VI and VII, helping me see that, yes, they are building this world up and the First Order being the Empire 2.0 actually WORKS for me. I put more things into context of how, for example, it’s only been six years (give or take) since Luke retreated--he spend the other ~25 years doing WHO KNOWS WHAT.  At least some of that time was spent traveling the galaxy in Legends of Luke Skywalker.  Mark Hamill got to voice Luke in a Forces of Destiny short that made me feel better about his connection to the role!  Rewatching the OT and listening to Mark talk about Luke helped me see TLJ as an extension of what was already there. OKAY, HERE’S SOME STUFF I STRAIGHT UP JUST LOVED: A lot of fandom really hates that it wasn’t Anakin showing up to talk to Luke, but it made perfect sense to me that it was Yoda.  In universe, Yoda is the one that Luke spent the most time with, they spent months together on Dagobah and developed a very strong bond.  As much as we love Luke and Anakin’s story, Yoda was actually incredible important to Luke in-story.  AND BOY DID I HAVE FEELINGS about Yoda showing up and smacking Luke in the face literally and metaphorically, that he was like GET BACK IN THE GAME, TRASH FIRE, and “Ahhh, Skywalker, I have missed you.” LUKE SKYPEWALKER.  Oh, my god, Luke Force Skyped himself to death, that is an Extra As Fuck way to go out as ANYTHING, I hope the Force Ghost gang are all proud of him. That fight on Crait was pretty fucking gorgeous.  I wish we’d gotten a longer fight but oh MAN everything we did get was incredible.  Luke sliding under Kylo’s blade in slo-mo was F A N T A S T I C. Also crystal foxes!  I LOVE THEM.  The porgs were really cute but GIMME THOSE CRYSTAL FOXES.  Crait as a planet in general was beautiful. Leia, practically in a coma, so all her thoughts were shoved out of her head and she was acting on instinct, using the Force like that?  HELL YEAH I 100% BELIEVE ANAKIN SKYWALKER’S BIO-DAUGHTER WAS CAPABLE OF BEING THAT EXTRA. Luke blowing up the hut when he exploded in on Rey and Kylo’s Force Skype call, that is an underrated moment of FORCE USING BADASSERY. Luke on Ahch-To, staring out at the binary suns, so far away from where he started and yet all things circle back around in their own way.  His body disappearing, his robe fluttering to the stone floor.  HI THANKS I’M CRYING especially when the novelization hinted that there was a voice waiting to welcome him to the other side. I legit got misty-eyed at Luke and Leia’s reunion.  I wish I could have had an entire movie of them working together, I wanted to see more of Mark and Carrie’s chemistry, but I am going to cling to the hope that, just like Obi-Wan and Anakin, they’ll be together in the Force one day. IN THE END: This is how I came to like at least big parts of this movie.  But I needed to work through those feelings, rather than sweep them aside, so that’s what this post was aimed at, showing how I did that (if in a very generalized, bird’s eye view kind of way). So much of it ultimately revolves around my growing understanding of Luke Skywalker’s character, why I disagree that he’s a pure cinnamon roll too good for this world, but instead that his incredible strength of character and inherent goodness are about overcoming the dark side, not about never being tempted in the first place or making mistakes.  And I see that Luke in the man who found peace and purpose in the end of TLJ, who took a long, hard look at himself and dragged himself back up again, because that’s what good people do. I’ll always wish we could have gotten Mark Hamill to play Luke during the high points of his life, to see that in a Saga movie on the big screen.  But if this is Luke Skywalker’s end, then I understand how he got there and that the ultimate lesson of his life was: The dark side is a part of all of us, it’s in the fear inside of our hearts and minds that we must constantly face.  It can knock us down sometimes, it can make us doubt ourselves and retreat because we think the world will be better without us. But we get up again, we take a look at ourselves, and we re-choose the light all over again.  The world works better when you’re on the side of good and you have a choice about that.  And sometimes it’s going to be a struggle to choose it, but Luke Skywalker showed me that, even when I fall down into a dark hole in my own mind, I can still get up and find peace and purpose in my path going forward.