YouTuber Filmento observes that usually, people on the internet express enjoyment and trolls bash them. But with The Last Jedi it seems that the people who enjoyed it acted like trolls and preemptively insulted the portion of the fanbase that disliked it.

“To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand The Last Jedi…” *gulps down Szechuan sauce*

The only good thing TLJ did in my opinion was bring back one of my favorite species from Legends, the Cathar

There was a Cathar character?

Leia’s quote seems to creepy and I was uncomfortable when I saw it

Yeah it’s one of those over-the-top, tryhard lines I hate. And by trying to be clever and complex and shit it also ended up having really unfortunate implications, as generally happens.

I was wondering why I couldn’t get past the first season. I couldn’t put my finger on why it was inferior to ATLA, but I just didn’t like it as much. I thought it might have been the steampunk thing that was putting me off, but I actually thought the technological advancements were interesting, so I knew in the back of my head it was something else.

If you’re looking for more validation, see also this critical video by Lily Orchard (link). It’s a 1.5 hour vid but I linked a time stamp that has a minute-long rundown of the main points. If you have enough interest, time, and vitriol I recommend the full thing, I found it interesting and illuminating.

I’m curious on your opinion of LoK. What’s your issue with it?

Book 1 was so ineptly written that it was fully possible to dismiss non-bender oppression as a thing that never existed and was made up to wipe out benders–and that’s how large sections of the fandom took it, in fact.
And look, Fantastic Racism in general is very easy to get wrong (looking at you, X-Men, Zootopia, too many others to name…) but LoK is particularly egregious in implying that movements for equality are essentially largescale frauds, especially when the writing is inconsistent enough to imply in places that discrimination against non-benders is in fact a problem that exists.
Abrupt fix-it at the last moment in Book 1. We’re not even allowed to experience the full tragedy of lost bending (and like, bending isn’t real so why are we supposed to care again?), that consequence has to be taken away by divine intervention because Korra was sad.
Speaking of Korra, we don’t get to watch her struggle and work her ass off the way we saw Aang or even Roku do in the brief flashbacks we got. She comes pre-equipped with water, earth, and fire at the age of five, and never even has to grow into the spiritual values of Airbending. She had her other three elements taken away and Airbending abruptly came to her because she needed it in her desperate hour. She doesn’t grow through work or by trying, but by being put in danger and pain. Looking back, this substitution of female suffering for hard work and organic development foreshadowed her end of Book 3-Book 4 trauma storyline.
As a tangent, and because I need more people to piss off apparently, this replacement of suffering for work is strongly reminiscent of Rey in the new Star Wars. Both Korra and Rey are willing to work hard, but that’s not how they actually make the most dramatic gains. Either they’re born with their prodigious talents or the work they did put in happens off screen. Their most meaningful gains come from being violated in some way by male characters, by being kidnapped, having their powers stripped, being poisoned, tied up…
I mean this is just a thinly veiled version of rape as a heroine origin story, where the thing that makes a woman truly powerful is not the hard work she puts in but the fact that some man treated her like an object.
Why are creators afraid to let women struggle? Why do we have to be born prodigies who are violated into our destinies? Yes, trauma and the way we face up to it can make us stronger, and I don’t want to take away from anyone who felt empowered by Korra’s or Rey’s stories. But when I see three seasons dedicated lovingly to Aang working to master the four elements, then Korra just getting it within a season because she had her bending stripped after being physically held down, I’m going to be just a little salty at the different ways male and female protagonists are treated.
Raava and Batu were bullshit concepts that used the trappings of yin and yang to express a stark good-evil duality. If you don’t understand what yin and yang are then stop distorting the fuck out of the imagery. And for that matter it’s pretty iffy to impose a very Christian struggle between cosmic good and evil on a universe built on Asian cultures and mythologies.
This show doesn’t even know what it wants to be. Book 2 took a complex and interesting story of a civil war between literal brothers and a moral/political debate about military interventionism, and made it into a kaiju slugfest. While the slugfest was entertaining, what the hell happened to that earlier story? It’s like Book 1 all over again, they avoided actually dealing with the political storyline they set up early in the season by shunting it aside to magic punching.
Bolin’s abuse was played for laughs. I will never not be mad about this. Because male victims of abuse are not already ridiculed enough in real life, right? Fuck whoever thought this was a good or okay idea.
Speaking of abuse, the Water Tribe brothers from Book 1 (not to be confused with the Water Tribe brothers from Book 2) dying by murder-suicide was horrifying. Hey it’s not like victims of parental abuse already feel broken and unworthy to live, let’s totally validate that by endorsing the position that the only way they have to go is death.
The brothers’ fate is such a far cry from the empowering storylines Zuko and even more minor characters like Mai and Ty Lee got escaping and recovering from their own abuse, it’s insulting for them to even exist in the same franchise.
And yeah, lots of abuse victims are assholes! But Azula was 10,000x more memorable and better written than the asshole brothers ever were, and what’s more, hers was not the only abuse victim narrative in her show–she worked as another perspective of abuse victims precisely because Zuko and the others had very different stories. LoK doesn’t have any such nuance. Just blow them up because that’s all they’re good for and we shall never mention them again.
Asami, Bolin, and Mako could have been replaced by sock puppets for all the development they got in the show. They had potential but were so massively underused while the story spent all its energy changing tracks mid-season and lurching all over the place trying to be everything. Why not do something with the characters you already have.
This show has a really big fucking underlying problem with class. The supposedly good people, Korra, Tenzin, Lin, Su-yin, Iroh II and so on are essentially aristocrats, sons and daughters of heroes and world leaders who, in the case of Korra and Tenzin, have entire organizations dedicated to serving and helping them. Their servants and the orphans they graciously take in, on the other hand, are either invisible or become traitors and Big Bads.
I mean while I squeed at Korrasami, I get cynical about it at times and wonder if what really made Asami the endgame mate for Korra and not Mako was that Asami is the daughter of a rich industrialist who inherited everything from her dickish dad, while Mako is an orphan who grew up on the streets.
Even among the underdeveloped trio of Asami, Mako, and Bolin, it’s clearly Asami who did the best in terms of character development at least toward the end, reconciling with her asshole would-be murderer dad, while Mako and Bolin’s far more interesting mixed heritage family was swept under the rug.
Speaking of which, MAKO WAS TOTALLY IN THE RIGHT FOR SNITCHING KORRA’S AWFUL INTERVENTIONIST PLAN TO THE PRESIDENT AND YOU CAN FIGHT ME ON THIS. Both Korra and Iroh II can get fucked for acting like the New Republic was their fucking property and casually trying to plunge it into war. Fuck that noise and fuck those entitled brats.
Too bad the showrunners were too cowardly to follow up on this actually interesting political and interpersonal conflict, but inconsistency and lack of follow-through are pretty much LoK’s calling cards so what else is new.

Everyday we dig deeper and find new things terrible about the ST extended universe/TLJ. This morning i open imdb, they’re showcasing a “what we know so far” video and they illustrate it with a pic of Rey and Kylo. Is there anything worth salvaging for Finn fans in this shitshow? TLJ was the worst thing but TFA had started throwing him under the bus. I just wanna be free of this pain but i just keep going back to lurking and it just breaks my heart a little every time.

On the one hand, fandom will find ways to focus on the white characters no matter what, and it’s to be expected that fandom would fixate on Rey and Kylo when much of the information released so far about IX has involved Finn, Poe, and Lando. That’s the schema that audieces are given in a white supremacist media environment, that the young white characters must be the leads and that any Black and brown characters are peripheral to the story.

On the other hand, it’s also true that TLJ and the end of TFA gave some validation to these fans’ expectations. It was awful for Finn to be the bait in an abrupt switch after driving the story with a very clear protagonist’s arc, and clearly Johnson had no idea what to do with Finn’s character except to position him as an object of mockery and instruction.

I think it’s incredibly cruel what the franchise has done to Finn’s fans, especially Black fans who were so excited about representation in an iconic franchise. They gave Finn a good and promising start and then yanked the carpet from underfoot for–what? To show that fans were foolish to expect Finn could be the special figure the story set him up to be? That we shouldn’t expect Black characters to be protagonists, period, and we deserve to be mocked for our expectations? RJ gets a lot of justified flack for mocking fans, but it’s really something that started with JJ. RJ just gave the larger SW fandom a taste of what Finn fans got from JJ at the TFA climax, except Finn and his fans got extra fucked over in TLJ because of course.

Fandom has piled onto the franchise’s existing horribleness, outright lying about what was on screen, laughing at fans for thinking Finn’s place could be anything but peripheral, talking shit about Finn and his actor, calling Black fans toxic antis for pushing back against fandom racism. The franchise and fandom together have helped push Black fans out of the fandom, so like mission accomplished I guess.

And the truly cruel part is that a lot of fans find it hard to let go because Finn is still an amazing character with a lot of potential, and there are just enough signs of hope together with the fear that it could be dashed at any moment and turn to yet more mockery at having expected anything but crumbs.

I’m not sure I have an answer. I know personally I’ve turned more to my original work because I have been taught the hard way that I can’t trust my favorite franchises to give me the representation I want (Asian representation in my case), and I’ve talked to other fans who are similarly putting more focus on their own projects. I’ve tried to get less attached to SW, although it’s not always easy because it’s such a huge fandom and franchise that has its own gravitational pull.

My responses are not an answer for everyone, of course. I think the classic line about hoping for the best while expecting the worst is a good general guide, personally, as is not putting all your eggs in one basket.

Wait, they character assassinated Mon Mothma too? Damn it all.

Idk if she even had enough character in the OT to be assassinated, but she certainly became the symbol of everything wrong with the Republic: its lack of moral conviction when it counted the most, its worship of expedience above all else, and its eagerness to compromise at the expense of principle.

When Leia said she’d burn down the galaxy if she thought it right she did so in opposition to Mon Mothma’s policy of only helping planets who had something to offer the New Republic instead of the once who needed help most and Leia here kinda implied strongly that she’d do what it took to help those who needed to be helped, even if that meant burning down the galaxy or going straight against Mon. Context is really important.

And even with that context that’s such a terrible, hyperbolic way to phrase her moral conviction because Chuck Wendig is a shitty writer.

Do you ever find it amazing how so many in the SW fanbase reveal themselves as being complete trash as time goes on? I mean seriously, how much more of a fucking dumpster fire can a fandom possibly become?

Look, fandoms are made out of humans and I try never to fool myself about just how bad human beings can get. And somehow I still get disappointed.

To add on to what I was saying in that reply: Arkansas has a seat in the house and the Governor up for election this year. Both of the ones running for re election are Republicans. The Congressman has made commercial after commercial throwing tantrums about and slandering his opponent. The governor? Is literally suppressing his opponent. I’ve seen no ads, no flyers, nothing, I don’t even know the person’s name. I’m sure it can be found on google but you shouldn’t have to google this

This was probably a different state but I read about an opponent to a sitting Republican withdrawing her candidacy because of death threats and threats of budget cuts to her job. Large parts of the U.S. are no longer functioning democracies, if they ever were.