Downtown Khazan: Ice Cold Utopia

[Nik Hasta]

I've no interest in rehashing the discourse of a film franchise I could best be described as apathetic about but I respectfully disagree with the assessment of TLJ.

It is, for my money, easily the best of the franchise.

[Jcogginsa]

It still makes me wonder if the trilogy would've been better or worse if Abrams had been full-time director and writer for all three movies. What was his original direction/plan for the trilogy, anyway?

Abrams original plan was to set up a bunch of mysteries, and then let other people figure out how to answer them.

I'd... have to agree with you with you here. TLJ was interesting, mostly as a case study for what not to do.

Rian Johnson basically took to The Force Awakens with a hacksaw, to the point where the editor for TFA: (Mary Jo Markey, editor for Star Trek/Star Trek: Into Darkness), called him out for consciously and intentionally undoing the story that had been built up in the previous film. Whether or not he did is debatable, but considering his plan was to deconstruct Star Wars and go in a different direction he... certainly did something. Like turn previously competent characters into slapstick oafs (looking at you, Supreme Leader Snoke, and General Hux), or insert brand-new characters so incomprehensibly stupid their actions break the established, CANON lore so bad it'll never properly recover (Admiral Holdo, and the Hyperspace Craptastrophe). To say nothing of the overall massive flaws with the plot, character actions and motivations, the subversion of expectations to the point where the subversion itself just becomes a parody of itself...

I mean whether or not the film was enjoyable stops mattering when it's a really really good case study for how not to handle a franchise.

And let me be clear. I don't think JJ Abrams did any better than Rian on that front, I'd argue he did varying degrees of worse, especially when it comes to RoS... but TFA had at least glimmers of promise (dare I say, hope?) both in the direction it was heading, and the characters it was developing (except for Rey but that's its own issue); before Rian slammed his "Bludgeon of Subversion" into the franchise at lightspeed.



tl;dr TLJ is interestingly because it's such a bad movie from a writing standpoint. It's pretty to look at though, (looking at you, Admiral Holdo, and the Hyperspace Catastrophe).



*cough* only so much to be done when your protagonist is a Mary Sue, and you couldn't figure out a compelling enemy for her to fight so you just dredge up a guy who died in the early 80s and strap him to an electric chair.



You would have missed Palpatine saying "if you kill me I'll possess your body!" only for Rey to... kill him, and him not possess her body for... reasons?

Also you know, the ability to REVERSE DEATH.

No, he didn't. Everything TFA set up was followed up on in TLJ, it was simply followed up on in a manner that didn't match the common expectation. Instead of Rey having a special backstory, she was the child of no one important. Instead of Snoke being the big bad, he gets ganked so that someone else can take the spot.

Both of which were better ideas than the common expectation.

A lot of the things TLJ gets criticized for (Such as Luke's deal at the start, or Finn not getting Jedi training) were things that are just Rian following off from where TFA left him.

As for the Lightspeed Ram scene: It was amazing, visually stunning scene, and only toxic fanboys care that it "breaks established lore" or whatever. Darth Vader being Luke's father broke Established Lore to a much greater extent, and that wasn't a problem.

And Mary Sue is an entirely worthless term that exists primarily due to sexism, as it's predominantly applied to female characters who do the same things that male characters get away with without comment

[Yun Lao]

And Mary Sue is an entirely worthless term that exists primarily due to sexism, as it's predominantly applied to female characters who do the same things that male characters get away with without comment

I agree with you up until this point, because while Mary Sue has been used as sexist dismissal by some, the term still has merit (looking at you, Alice from the Resident Evil movies). That and Gary Stu is a fairly well-used term.

[Cthulhu_of_R'lyeh]

I also liked the fact that Obi-Wan's classic line was actually true, Jedi are technically more powerful as Force Ghosts since they can still fully interact with the physical world and their connection with the Force is unrestrained.

Then you get into the weird stuff like Darth Nihilus, essentially the personification of the Dark Side. A Sith that didn't give a damn about anything but feeding on Force Sensitives, to the point where he was arguably the strongest Force User in canon and kinda just turned himself into a haunted suit of armor for the lols. Just kinda... on a timer, because he was ultimately going to starve to death.

[Jcogginsa]

I agree with you up until this point, because while Mary Sue has been used as sexist dismissal by some, the term still has merit (looking at you, Alice from the Resident Evil movies). That and Gary Stu is a fairly well-used term.

The thing about Mary Sue as a term is that it doesn't have a definition. It's just a nebulous term that people have been trained to view as a bad thing.

People have tried to define it, but they've failed because any definition people came up with either excludes characters everyone agrees are Mary Sues, or includes characters no one is willing to call a Mary Sue.

[The Dog]

Not just a weird knife.

A weird knife given to an assassin that died because he fell through quicksand that also somehow managed to drop him into a cave (without the sand yanno, flowing into the BIG OL HOLE, ITSELF) 20 years or so before Rey and Co. found it that somehow had been designed specifically so that you had to stand on a very specific bit of wreckage of the Death Star to pinpoint the room they needed to find despite the wreckage being sat in a VERY turbulent sea that would've caused a massive amount of shift of 20 years and...

*sigh*

And then THAT entire fetch quest and all of its ridiculousness is rendered a moot when the villain shows up and immediately destroys the McGuffin they spent the entire runtime up to that point trying to find, meaning they wasted not only their time, but yours by watching it. So Rey just steals the villain's (along with his ship) and leaves to basically take up Luke's old lifestyle of a lonely hermit drinking green milk squeezed fresh from the gross alien udder. But fortunately for her, before she starts milking the alien monster, Luke comes back as a force ghost to try and salvage his character after Rian subverted expectations and made him a weird, angry hobo who spent his entire time with Rey yelling at her and gulping down green alien milk.

[Yun Lao]

The thing about Mary Sue as a term is that it doesn't have a definition. It's just a nebulous term that people have been trained to view as a bad thing.

People have tried to define it, but they've failed because any definition people came up with either excludes characters everyone agrees are Mary Sues, or includes characters no one is willing to call a Mary Sue.

It does have a (admittedly loose) definition, the main issue is that it's a term born from fanfiction that's much more difficult to apply to characters from original IPs which is why it often makes no sense when people use it as a shortened "I don't like this character".

[master of read]

It does have a (admittedly loose) definition, the main issue is that it's a term born from fanfiction that's much more difficult to apply to characters from original IPs which is why it often makes no sense when people use it as a shortened "I don't like this character".

i've written stus and sues before and i know what one looks like and i will call it out if i see it. (someone already mentioned alice from the RE movies). and if rey wasn't a sue, she had sue-ish tendencies.

honestly, it would've been better if they made thrawn the main bad guy for the ST, instead of a poor man's palpatine which was followed by a poor palpatine. the ST had some interesting ideas. shame there was no real vision or planning behind it.

[Postmania]

I actually liked the part near the end of RoTS with all the Jedi coming together for a bit.

But then I realized it was just basically cramming in elements from Avatar TLA and wasn't foreshadowed well at all in anything else.

[Iron_Twister]

Yeah, I'll definitely chalk it down to there are some things in the sequels I do like but it's being weighed down by a lot of rather dumb stuff, RoS being a considerable bulk cause it really could had tried.

...But the damn knife thing keeps getting into my head and I'm just going how in the hell does that work? And no Palpatine's usual "I foreseen this cause dark side" spiel because even that can't explain the freaking knife quest.

[Iron_Twister]

Looking at my draft notes of my prequel work, I'm surprisingly going a little too deep on something that's akin "and that's how I married your mother."

I'll make it work...

[master of read]

I actually liked the part near the end of RoTS with all the Jedi coming together for a bit.

But then I realized it was just basically cramming in elements from Avatar TLA and wasn't foreshadowed well at all in anything else.

what irked me is how they got ashoka's VA to be in that last scene but the CC called her just "female jedi". almost like they didn't wanna acknowledge another, better female jedi before rey. or maybe just not remind people they could be watching "clone wars" over the ST.

[Jcogginsa]

It does have a (admittedly loose) definition, the main issue is that it's a term born from fanfiction that's much more difficult to apply to characters from original IPs which is why it often makes no sense when people use it as a shortened "I don't like this character".

And what is that definition?

i've written stus and sues before and i know what one looks like and i will call it out if i see it. (someone already mentioned alice from the RE movies). and if rey wasn't a sue, she had sue-ish tendencies.

honestly, it would've been better if they made thrawn the main bad guy for the ST, instead of a poor man's palpatine which was followed by a poor palpatine. the ST had some interesting ideas. shame there was no real vision or planning behind it.

"I know it when I see it" is not enough to be used as serious criticism.

[Yun Lao]

And what is that definition?

The classic definition of a Mary Sue/Gary Stu is a character who is either an author avatar or an idealized version of the author/ideals/etc inserted into an already established piece of fiction who acts as a sort of wish-fulfillment, often at the cost of the original characters/setting.

Although I rather not go on another rant about her, Alice from the Resident Evil movie franchise is the best example I can think of off the top of my head. As admitted by the director, Alice is an idealized person for him of sorts (considering the actress is his wife) and thus is allowed to be badass at the cost of the effectiveness of the other, original game canon characters (while not true initially, by the second or third movie this become prominent once they begin using the game's lore as plot).

[Jcogginsa]

The classic definition of a Mary Sue/Gary Stu is a character who is either an author avatar or an idealized version of the author/ideals/etc inserted into an already established piece of fiction who acts as a sort of wish-fulfillment, often at the cost of the original characters/setting.

Although I rather not go on another rant about her, Alice from the Resident Evil movie franchise is the best example I can think of off the top of my head. As admitted by the director, Alice is an idealized person for him of sorts (considering the actress is his wife) and thus is allowed to be badass at the cost of the effectiveness of the other, original game canon characters (while not true initially, by the second or third movie this become prominent once they begin using the game's lore as plot).

The funny thing is that this Definition would exclude the character which the term was named after. As well as any character from a movie which is not part of a franchise