this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
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Star wars a new hope started out with Luke as an everyman. But since then it's all become about the bloodline. Rise of Skywalker is especially bad, tearing down the anyone can be special and saying you can only be special because of your bloodline.
The issue with the Star Wars story is that it can't end. This means Luke cannot have been very effective, because the same issues have to repeat historically to promote an endless cycle of protagonists and antagonists and battles that relate to the previous fan-favourites (because nostalgia sells).
Therefore Luke must simultaneously be an awesome hero, and also just some loser that didn't really do anything that worked.
I think legends handled it okay, that the battle of yavin was the tipping point, but the empire still had remnants that needed to be countered by the New Republic. And the New Republic has its own problems, but faces an entirely different threat than the empire too.
Whereas with the new movies, they just hit the reset button back to episode four, rather than developing on the trajectory in interesting ways, which would have given Luke's actions and the original trilogy more weight.
The point of a successful Disney media franchise is not to provide nuance and provoke thought, but instead to sell merch for profit.
As if Lucas didn't create star wars for that sole purpose.
Homie was a film school nerd who took a gamble that paid off. People that ONLY want to make money don't take such huge risks or put so much pretentious thought into pulp. He made it to make a ton of money because it literally couldn't happen any other way. How else do you get rich people to invest that much money?
Lucas capitalized on his success.. anyone who grew up with 80s cartoons specifically designed to sell toys to kids can tell the difference between the two.
Well at least until Return of the Jedi..
... and did so without examining why the Republic fell in the first place, or how the Rebellion could fall to the same cyclical forces. Which is the sort of thing The Last Jedi kinda hinted at? That movie was an anarchist deconstruction fanfic that somehow got filmed as a major motion picture.
This gets to the fact that all stories are lies. No one lives happily ever after, for we all die. No one is strong and wins, because strength, weakness, winning and losing are just perceptions that are eventually erased from time.
When you start to intuit that human psychology is heavily based on such soporific narrative, you start to understand how people can be so stupid, both individually and collectively.
That seems a little glib to me. Not all stories are lies, not all stories have happy endings, some victors are known now thousands of years after their death. On a cosmic timescale I suppose that, trivially, nothing matters - but, conversely, the cosmic timescale is so vast that it doesn't matter to us...
Also I couldn't really parse what you were saying in your second paragraph so I'm gonna leave that there
I agree, stories only matter because we lack objectivity.
I'm not sure that anything can objectively be said to 'matter'. So, yeah, I guess? Things only matter to us because we.care about them, sure...
A new hope started with blood line. It was established out of the gate that Luke’s father was a Jedi knight and a good friend of Obi Wan.
Force Awakens and Last Jedi seemed to go in the direction that Rey and Snoke are unrelated to previous blood lines, but nope, it’s all Palpatine.
Somehow Pal... Ah fuck it, buy this robot plushie!
They tried to fix it in the last Jedi, but the fans had too much of a tantrum.
Yeah, because just pretending the previous movie didn't happen is also a shitty solution.
Which movie are you referencing? Last Jedi, or Rise of Skywalker? I get it for the latter and mostly don't get it for the former.
The Last Jedi didn't do that.
#9 did that.
That was like the only thing I really liked in Last Jedi. Her being completely a nobody made me look upon it more favorably when I watched it, because I assumed they'd make her related and was so impressed they didnt.