There is a story going about online about an artist drawing a poster poking fun at the fan powered TLJ remake. Now I have no problem with either the poster or the remake fundamentally, but something in the post made me uneasy.
In the poster, off to the side is a drawing of Rey cooking. The problem I have with that is that the artist clearly thinks that all criticisms about the movie are rooted in social belief. That is just not the case.
I personally was ok with the movie, definitely not good but certainly not bad. There were flaws; such as the movie being way to long, shoehorned scenes at the Cantina, and the dialogue was flat; but none of my personal disappointments with the movie were socially provoked. I believe in gender equality (I’ll be the first to admit my younger sister is physically stronger than me). I want prejudice against people of other skin colors to be gone (it's not racism because we’re all part of the one race, the human race). But I did not care for the movie, and despite what I believe the artist believes, most of the fans trying to make this remake feel the same way.
Now, as per usual, the TL;DR:
Most anger at TLJ aren't due to social issues but instead story issues.
I am more powerful than the Chancellor- Anikan Skywalker and Tman
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It's a loud minority in the complaining echo chamber that is the internet/social media.
In game guild: TNR Uprising
I beat the REAL T7 Yoda (not the nerfed one) and did so before mods were there to help
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I never said there wasn't. I just don't appreciate that people with sound arguments with the movie are considered to be against diversity and such.
That should have been my TL;DR. Well said.
I don't really care if it's real or not, I just felt uneasy about the poster and what the poster seemed to convey for me.
I will be honest, I dislike the diversity.... And the reason I dislike it is because I consider it to be racist and sexist....
When you go out of your way to put characters in a film just because they are of varying race, sex, sexual orientation etc, it isn't "doing justice" to these races, genders and orientations, it's exploiting them to broaden your audience....
The original star wars was free of all of this political and social nonsense.... It had an innocence to it that these new movies don't capture.....
100% agree. Some people will disagree with the original Star Wars being free from it all, seeing as Lucas fashioned the struggle between the Rebellion and the Empire based on the Vietnam War.
But even still, there’s a big difference between subtle social/political commentary such as that, and what we see in TLJ. There’s nothing subtle about it. Followed by the entire “this is the new Star Wars, like it or leave it” stance taken by the directors, actors, etc. it creates an issue that divides a lot of people for reasons that no other Star Wars films have done before. Sure, the prequels had people upset too, but it wasn’t about social justice issues — it was about acting, plot, and storytelling (hint, just like it still is today in TLJ).
Only a Sith speaks in absolutes. Obi-Wan
I’m glad studios are being proactive about diversity and putting effort into representation. Cause for too long, nobody has. Especially in a universe like star wars which is supposed to be a diverse, interesting universe.
For me, it only becomes a problem when it interferes with writing and character development. In the new sw films, nearly everyone who isn’t a white male is portrayed without any character flaws and therefore no potential for an arc. They have plenty of charisma, but they aren’t interesting in the long term because they have no potential for growth.
Lmao, Star Wars has nothing to do with Vietnam. If anything it’s WW2 because the morality is so unambiguous and cause you know... stormtroopers.
Except the part where George Lucas straight up said it was based on the Vietnam War.
The Battle of Endor is modeled after Vietnam. The Empire itself is clearly the ****'s (the name of the German's during WW2)
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-05-18/features/0505180309_1_star-wars-sith-palpatine
He talks about it here..
Cool.
The OT was a series of war movies made in the seventies that came down on the side of the terrorists, appropriating World War II imagery to frame the Viet Cong as the French Revolution and the United States as the Third Reich.
Episodes II and III were war movies made in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the war in the middle east in which a powerful overlord uses panic over an external threat that he secretly had a hand in to convince the public to willingly forfeit its rights so that he can amass personal power.
If framing the United States as **** Germany, or framing 9/11 as the Reichstag burning are mild and innocent political statements in your eyes, but casting a white woman and a black man as your leads in a movie are strong political statements, then I suggest some serious self-reflection.
The OT was wall-to-wall white men, and Legends was overwhelmingly white and male. Hell, it took us eleven movies to get one black woman with a name on the big screen. Acknowledging a problem exists and taking steps to address it is not pandering. It's actually putting in some effort to fix a problem instead of standing by and letting it continue, to turn the property into a more inclusive space.
What's more, by saying these actors are just being used, you're implying that white men would have done better. Which actor do you think would have been better replaced with a white man? Daisey Ridley? John Boyega? Oscar Isaac? Kelly Marie Tran? Laura Dern? Even if you don't like their characters, they all put in fantastic performances, and you wouldn't get better by replacing them with White Man.
And no. Giving someone a paycheck to play a space wizard, an absurdly overqualified janitor, a fly boy, an engineer, and grown up space Luna Lovegood is not exploitation. That's literally hiring actors to do their jobs.
The mindset that "white man" is a default, and deviation from "normal" is a political statement is, itself, deeply problematic.
The way you talk is like you dislike white men, and they cause for all the problems in society
I'm not going to get into some weird political argument over an innocent movie with an SJW..... You are reading way too much into the movie and putting words in my mouth....
I wasn't implying anything, some people (myself included), are capable of speaking their minds without some strange hidden agenda....
For the record, the original star wars was based off a samurai movie, The main "heroes" in the movies included two droids, Yoda, Chewie, Lando and Leia..... Only Luke, Kenobi and Han were white males....
For someone so offended by star wars, you sure are active on the forums....
Good lord. Why do you even Star Wars? At least you went a light year past proving OP's point.
@YaeVizsla I fully support your post (except for the whole Vietnam thing, but I digress)
But the discussion of the lack of diversity in a 40 year old Sci fi B-movie is totally cool.
Those who fail to learn from the past are destined to repeat it.
People like myself don’t dislike the OT for not being diverse. Of course they aren’t. But the topic gets raised to provide a higher standard for modern and future films.
He’s not implying anything, you’re inferring that white men would do a better job. However, I haven’t seen this massive backlash screaming that we need more white men in Star Wars. Your failure in logic is equating criticism of Rey, Finn, Poe, Rose, and Holdo to criticism of the actors themselves. I think they are good actors, but great acting can’t make poorly written characters suddenly good characters. I don’t see anyone saying that the actors are bad, yet you listed the actors by name rather than the characters because you feel that this is an attack on them, and then you put their gender and race on a pedestal to demagogue to the rest of us why the movie and the poorly written characters are actually good and we are the bad ones for being intolerant.
Replace every single actor you mentioned with a white male, and the characters are still lame, boring, characters. Anyone outside of this SJW agenda can see that that’s true. You could replace Daisy Ridley with a white male, and that doesn’t change the fact that Rey faces no adversity and has no meaningful struggle in the movie and just overcomes everything with ease. You could replace Rose with a white male, and it doesn’t change the fact that the character is pointless and only there to push an anti-war agenda on the audience. You can replace Holdo with a white male, and it doesn’t change the fact that the whole movie is spent in a mind numbingly boring chase where this character has a plan the entire time and doesn’t tell anyone.
You also seem to coincidentally skip over how one of the biggest criticisms of TLJ is Luke Skywalker’s character, but since Mark Hamill is a white male and that doesn’t neatly fit your perceived notion of cultural intolerance, you leave it completely out of your narrative.
But when you have all these bad characters that are overtly diverse, you aren’t being very subtle about the point you are trying to make. So all you get is a bad movie with lots of diversity, and we are supposed to like it because “look, diversity”.
Only IMOP the standard has been lowered.... To not be racist, or intolerant we should be looking past race, gender, orientation etc.... The act of casting a movie to ensure "diversity" doesn't do that..... And going out of your way to not have a single white male hero (aside from emo Luke), takes it too far....