Tag: ask

It’s honestly distracting how inconsistent TLJ is

It really is! I remember this article where RJ said he was surprised at how much freedom he was given to shape events. For that matter, tie-in authors have talked about the amazing amount of freedom they had, too. In retrospect that was not a good thing, because while creators were given the freedom to make Star Wars thought-provoking, fun, diverse, and queer off the big screen, it also meant a bad writer like RJ could make a terrible and incoherent mess of the biggest and best-known vehicle of canon–a saga movie–and no one stopped him with even basic adherence to canon materials. LFL clearly did not have a plan, and if it did it failed to stick to it.

To clarify, I like Finn. I don’t think he’s Force-sensitive, because I don’t think that Lucasfilm is that subtle or creative, but he works well as a character. What I said before was just nitpickery.

You think he’s unrealistic but he also works well as a character. Okay. It’s fine whether you like him or not, it’s just interesting that fans give extremely inconsistent reasons for dismissing him in some way. Maybe that speaks to the complexity of the character, idk.

It’s almost like someone that has been abused their whole life might have sympathy with murder victims of their abusers. How is Finn unrealistic? Like you said, there is precedence for this in the real world. And if this is the one weak reason they have for not liking Finn, but they find remorseless privileged school-shooter Kylo Ren compelling, I have to think there’s something else driving the dissonance, even if it’s unintentional. (Moth)

Yeah it’s interesting how there’s always a reason to find Finn boring, unsympathetic, and unrealistic. He’s too perfectly good or too violently bloodthirsty, too childishly naïve or too aggressively sexual, too emotionally healthy to be realistic or too emotionally broken to be romantic (not with Rey, that is–because evidently Rose is perfectly safe with a creepy obsessive stalker). If there’s one thing I’ve learned in fandom it’s that a Black character will never be good enough for fandom, often for wildly contradictory reasons.

How would you rank the Droids (R2-D2, C-3PO, BB-8, K-2SO, Chopper, L3-37, R4, R5, the Battle Droids, the Gonk Droid, the MSE Droid, Rex from Star Tours…) on how they can help you in your everyday life? Like instead of Siri or Watson, you have this Droid assistant that rides in the car with you.

C-3PO is my top choice, all the way. Universal translator and protocol droid who also tells me the odds? Sign me the fuck up.

I will grant that I was basing that post more on what I’d read about cults (I also had no idea that that other post existed). But I was under the impression that the First Order went way deeper into thought control procedures than ordinary citizens of totalitarian regimes went through, like hypnotic conditioning.

The exact nature of Stormtrooper conditioning hasn’t been clarified in the movies, but there does seem to be some highly unethical shit going on using psychiatric technology/mindforming. Terex in the Poe Dameron comics was made outright robotic to keep him in line. The “reconditioning” that Finn was threatened with after Tuanul may have looked something like that.

These techniques don’t seem to be the first resort, however, and mostly the FO seems to rely on more mundane propaganda touting itself as the ultimate good. Finn was mostly a model cadet before his defection, which makes it likely that he would have escaped the more invasive procedures before his disobedience in his first battle.

I mean don’t get me wrong, the kind of story you referenced in your prior ask (link) could be a valid storyline for an escaped Stormtrooper. I just don’t think it’s fair to denigrate Finn’s story based on that one specific mold, since different people react in a range of different ways to survive the unbearable.