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  1. #46
    Ultimate Member Sacred Knight's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by thwhtGuardian View Post
    I call BS on that, it was telegraphed hard in Force Awakens. They literally hit you on the head with a 4x4 with that idea when they had him give that speech before he killed his father.
    That's very debatable. In fact most came away with a completely different impression, that what was telegraphed hard was Kylo's permanent fall. That what they hit you on the head with was the misdirect. That the speech at first glance seemed to invoke that he wanted to turn back and was having trouble going through with it. When what it actually meant is that he wanted to kill his father and complete his turn but was having trouble going through with it. Turning it back around in TROS was then major back-peddling.
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  2. #47
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    There absolutely were complaints about TFA after it came out. And Boyega wasn't the one who brought race into this. The people calling for a boycott of the film because of a black stormtrooper and harassing an Asian-American actress did that.
    Well said.

    There was a lot of racist abuse directed towards Boyega immediately the first Force Awakens teaser was released. It's never really stopped since then. Kelly Marie Tran got it so bad that she had to quit social media. I mean, people actually edited the Star Wars Wookiepedia to deliberately berate Rose Tico and the actor playing her.

    The white studio heads at Lucasfilm might not have felt the impact but the actors were on the front line and bore the brunt of the abuse.

  3. #48
    Extraordinary Member thwhtGuardian's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Sacred Knight View Post
    That's very debatable. In fact most came away with a completely different impression, that what was telegraphed hard was Kylo's permanent fall. That what they hit you on the head with was the misdirect. That the speech at first glance seemed to invoke that he wanted to turn back and was having trouble going through with it. When what it actually meant is that he wanted to kill his father and complete his turn but was having trouble going through with it. Turning it back around in TROS was then major back-peddling.
    That he had trouble doing it was the giant neon sign that he was going to be redeemed, there was no back peddling at all.

  4. #49
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    Quote Originally Posted by thwhtGuardian View Post
    That he had trouble doing it was the giant neon sign that he was going to be redeemed, there was no back peddling at all.
    That didn't mean he was going to be redeemed. At best, that scene was him struggling against the last bit of humanity he had left.
    Last edited by Agent Z; 09-05-2020 at 05:48 AM.

  5. #50
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    Quote Originally Posted by Agent Z View Post
    There absolutely were complaints about TFA after it came out. And Boyega wasn't the one who brought race into this. The people calling for a boycott of the film because of a black stormtrooper and harassing an Asian-American actress did that.


    How did you watch a scene where the guy kills his dad and then come away with the idea they were always going to redeem him?
    The weird dichotomy where plenty of people were willing to fight for Tran after TLJ (which is a good thing) but couldn’t acknowledge the demotion and sidelining of Finn or other problematic elements from TLJ (particularly between Rey and Kylo) show where you can have “nefarious” reasons for applying double standards, like intentional or accidental bigotry... but also where some people just like a movie so much they don’t want to address problems it has.

    Don’t get me wrong; I do think there’s systemic racism and cultural white male privilege working in TLJ to make people think that Finn’s place in the story is where he “should” be, to have such a condescending and limited view of him while having such a coddling and sympathetic view of a monster like Kylo, or to think that it makes more sense for Rey to be drawn to Kylo than to, say, decry and confront him over what he did to Finn...

    ...But I also think there are people that simply were innocently enamored with Luke’s TLJ story (which I heavily dislike and think was the wrong choice for the film, but can respect more in terms of quality of writing) or with the concept of Rey and Kylo as a pair of leads and possible love interests - and that neither of those particular TLJ supporters want to hear that those stories/ideals both lead to the devaluation and dismissing of a black character on dubious enough grounds to be de facto racism, or that Rey and Kylo’s story is festooned with bad sexist writing.

    Let me be clear on the Kylo and Rey thing - I both think there are some people who have a conscious or unconscious prejudice in favor of Kylo based off the race of his actor in their support of the paring and the sometimes coinciding disinterest and almost militant apathy towards Finn... but I tend to think there’s also a rather argue portion who aren’t really fans of the story between Rey and Kylo as presented in the films as much a they are with a “head-canon” supposition of what it is, could be, or could have been. I’ve seen plenty of Reylos who have shown their own imagination and “additions” in their interpretation of evens to know they don’t have racism or sexism behind their support of the pairing - in fact, I tend to think they would likely have at least come up with a better story for the relationship if they put even a seconds worth of thought intowhy that relationship would happen, as I don’t think Rian Johnson or LFL did...

    ...But I also have seen the quiet, unyielding venom and coded phrases used by a handful in some situations regarding Finn and John Boyega to think those particular fans have racism in their hearts, and I’ll be blunt and say that if a Reylo fan is a white dude, I don’t really respect his opinion at all, and tend to just immediately think there’s racial bias at work there that he hopefully isn’t aware of.

    As to Kylo’s redemption aspect...
    Quote Originally Posted by thwhtGuardian View Post
    That he had trouble doing it was the giant neon sign that he was going to be redeemed, there was no back peddling at all.
    I really don’t think it’s his hesitation to kill Han that argue sin favor of his redemption at all; if that level of supposition, based off classic Star Wars conventions and certain predictable elements, were the bedrock of future film decisions, than I think we most certainly would have seen Rey Skywalker and a probable Rey and Finn romance, with Luke being Rey’s Jedi Master as well. Kylo’s hesitation to kill Han is insufficient by itself to argue for his redemption because it is offset, if not just over-written, by the way the scene is inverting Vader’s redemption and clearly portrays Kylo as a deeply disturbed and self-centered fanatic.

    What is making his redemption seem probable after the film came out isn’t anything to do with the story or his personality in TFA... it’s his family lineage.

    That’s what it is.

    People could easily think of Ben Solo getting redeemed because his last name is Solo and his grandfather is Anakin Skywalker, and not having Ben get redeemed would be a bitter pill to swallow for the family story even in a more optimal situation with Rey as a Skywalker to ensure the whole family story isn’t screwed by Kylo. It’s treating the character with the conventional, predictable expectation that emerges from the family story and the likely “safe” creative decisions.

    The problem with that is when all the other characters are being denied that conventional, predictable, and “safe” creative philosophy, it makes Kylo’s story both incredibly shallow by the standards nominally proposed by LFL, *and* makes him a parasitic and hypocritical liability towards the other characters.

    You cannot try and argue that Luke rejecting the expected role for his story while instead wallowing in self-pity and contributing nothing to Rey’s story is a good thing, or that Rey can be great when she’s not a Skywalker because she’s not a Skywalker, or try and apply some lame-ass and condescending “reality ensues” approach to Fonn’s story while simultaneously giving Kylo the most blandly conventional favoritism he could expect because of his parentage, because that undermines all your previous points.

    TLJ was screaming “No!....” at all the other characters, their fan bases, and their expected conventional stories, and then going “...but yes!” towards Kylo at the same time. Kylo becoming the most popular character of the ST cast while everyone else’s fanbase shrunk was not because his fanbase actually grew; it was because they were basically sacrificing everyone else for Kylo, whether they meant to or not.

    That’s how a Trilogy that launched with a strong female heroine and a escaped slave soldier black male lead wound up ending as a wispy-washy female heroine hand-cuffed to a bland, non-descript White male hero whose past as a Neo-Nazi who mind-raped her was ignored.
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  6. #51
    Silver Sentinel BeastieRunner's Avatar
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    Regarding the Rey v. Kylo mind probing (BTW I thought we couldn't use the "r" word on CBR?) ...

    Vader probed his daughter and there is no backlash for that.

    He was redeemed.

    It's par for the course in Star Wars.
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  7. #52
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    Quote Originally Posted by BeastieRunner View Post
    Regarding the Rey v. Kylo mind probing (BTW I thought we couldn't use the "r" word on CBR?) ...

    Vader probed his daughter and there is no backlash for that.

    He was redeemed.

    It's par for the course in Star Wars.
    If that particular phraseology is forbidden, I apologize, and I’ll confess to trying to use it for some particular venom; the scene was definitely coded and played as an intimate violation as well as torture, in a way that Liea’s torture was not, and I find most attempts to obfuscate on it to be full of moral relativism, condescension and “soft” on Kylo.

    But the issue is not with the concept of Kylo getting redeemed after everything. The issue is how that played in his interactions with Rey, or rather how it didn’t get played, and how there’s an inequity that he benefits from while other characters, including Rey *and* Finn, and a perfect example of the double standard that other characters suffered from while Kylo became the main focus of LFL for the ST possibly because he was the “expected” white male protagonist.

    I mean, it wasn’t Leia who was in the storyline about redeeming Vader, and it’s not like Luke’s approach to his father was presented as a naive gamble unsupported by anything else, and in fact pretty much all of Star Wars material touching on Leia and Vader have maintained a frosty attitude from her towards him, and since at no point was Leia portrayed as falling for a mass murderer or coming to sympathize with them over everyone else, and since even Luke clearly prioritized others over his father and himself, and was even cajoled into attacking and nearly killing Vader when Leia was threatened...

    ...It’s not so much the concept of Ben Solo getting redeemed that matters, as much as the story forsaking any and all dramatic impediments and opposing viewpoints to his redemption, often at the expense of other characters and even the themes of Star Wars. If nothing Kylo did in his TFA story was worthy of changing his possible redemption, than why does one line from Finn (“I’m just here for Rey”) that’s contradicted by his actions (coming back to Han before Rey is captured when he sees the Hosnian System go up, prioritizing the mission on SKB over Rey’s safety) need to define his entire character arc in TLJ, and why is he punished for caring about Rey... and perhaps for being too good of a screen companion for her?

    Unlike Leia, Rey was made to treat Kylo as a sympathetic character in TLJ after nothing more than one quick scene where she shoots at him, and the film basically leapfrogs over him killing Han and doesn’t even consider his actions against her or Finn worthy of conflict between them. And LFL fully invested in that over everything else; hell, they never even made a serious case for why Rey would find Kylo attractive or sympathetic even if he weren’t the monster who assaulted her and murdered/maimed her friends.

    That’s the part that’s bullshit between Rey and Kylo.

    The part that’s bullshit with Finn and Kylo is the simple, unarguable fact (to me) that Finn was introduced, established, and fleshed out as a complex character with a unique backstory and potential as the male lead in TFA... and then got shoved aside for a Kylo Ren and Ben Solo who never progressed beyond the shallow and contemptible cardboard cutout he was in TFA.

    I mean, it feels all but explicit to me that Johnson and LFL outright rejected Boyega and his MVP-caliber work in TFA as the male lead in exchange for a character who simply didn’t have anything over him... except a last name, and “conventional” favoritism that most optimistically was all founded on that name and therefore undermined a Rey entirely, and more pessimistically involved some systemic racism.

    At no point did Ben Solo or Kylo Ren ever amount to half of what Finn was in TFA, even as LFL seemed to deliberately try to undercut and downgrade Finn not just in other movies but in expanded universe work as well.

    And as an addendum to that... if you want to know a big part of Rey’s problem, it’s that a capable, complimentary co-Star in Finn was supplanted by a parasitic character in Kylo. Everything about their writing post-TFA lowered her complexity and dramatic appeal, whereas her interactions with Finn in TFA had helped sell her magnificently.
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  8. #53
    Ultimate Member ChrisIII's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by BeastieRunner View Post
    Regarding the Rey v. Kylo mind probing (BTW I thought we couldn't use the "r" word on CBR?) ...

    Vader probed his daughter and there is no backlash for that.

    He was redeemed.

    It's par for the course in Star Wars.

    Although Vader does say "mind probe" we don't quite see him use the technique that Kylo uses on Poe and later Rey, but we do see a menacing droid with a syringe that perhaps some truth serum or the Star Wars equavilent. (In earlier versions of the script Leia's torture is a bit more graphic I think, with her being hung upside down and with glassy eyes).

    We do see him interrogate a Rebel officer who he quickly kills, and then later also use a painful torture on Han in ESB (Some sort of heat/shock device). Luke of course has his "thoughts betray him" about Leia with Vader's subtle intimidation with no harm.
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  9. #54
    Ultimate Member Sacred Knight's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by thwhtGuardian View Post
    That he had trouble doing it was the giant neon sign that he was going to be redeemed, there was no back peddling at all.
    I think far more the giant neon sign was when after he stabs Han he says "Thank you", revealing that he was not struggling to go good here, but struggling one last time to stay bad, and overcoming that. Patricide was his final test and he passed.
    Last edited by Sacred Knight; 09-05-2020 at 01:31 PM.
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  10. #55
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    Quote Originally Posted by godisawesome View Post
    If that particular phraseology is forbidden, I apologize, and I’ll confess to trying to use it for some particular venom; the scene was definitely coded and played as an intimate violation as well as torture, in a way that Liea’s torture was not, and I find most attempts to obfuscate on it to be full of moral relativism, condescension and “soft” on Kylo.

    But the issue is not with the concept of Kylo getting redeemed after everything. The issue is how that played in his interactions with Rey, or rather how it didn’t get played, and how there’s an inequity that he benefits from while other characters, including Rey *and* Finn, and a perfect example of the double standard that other characters suffered from while Kylo became the main focus of LFL for the ST possibly because he was the “expected” white male protagonist.

    I mean, it wasn’t Leia who was in the storyline about redeeming Vader, and it’s not like Luke’s approach to his father was presented as a naive gamble unsupported by anything else, and in fact pretty much all of Star Wars material touching on Leia and Vader have maintained a frosty attitude from her towards him, and since at no point was Leia portrayed as falling for a mass murderer or coming to sympathize with them over everyone else, and since even Luke clearly prioritized others over his father and himself, and was even cajoled into attacking and nearly killing Vader when Leia was threatened...

    ...It’s not so much the concept of Ben Solo getting redeemed that matters, as much as the story forsaking any and all dramatic impediments and opposing viewpoints to his redemption, often at the expense of other characters and even the themes of Star Wars. If nothing Kylo did in his TFA story was worthy of changing his possible redemption, than why does one line from Finn (“I’m just here for Rey”) that’s contradicted by his actions (coming back to Han before Rey is captured when he sees the Hosnian System go up, prioritizing the mission on SKB over Rey’s safety) need to define his entire character arc in TLJ, and why is he punished for caring about Rey... and perhaps for being too good of a screen companion for her?

    Unlike Leia, Rey was made to treat Kylo as a sympathetic character in TLJ after nothing more than one quick scene where she shoots at him, and the film basically leapfrogs over him killing Han and doesn’t even consider his actions against her or Finn worthy of conflict between them. And LFL fully invested in that over everything else; hell, they never even made a serious case for why Rey would find Kylo attractive or sympathetic even if he weren’t the monster who assaulted her and murdered/maimed her friends.

    That’s the part that’s bullshit between Rey and Kylo.

    The part that’s bullshit with Finn and Kylo is the simple, unarguable fact (to me) that Finn was introduced, established, and fleshed out as a complex character with a unique backstory and potential as the male lead in TFA... and then got shoved aside for a Kylo Ren and Ben Solo who never progressed beyond the shallow and contemptible cardboard cutout he was in TFA.

    I mean, it feels all but explicit to me that Johnson and LFL outright rejected Boyega and his MVP-caliber work in TFA as the male lead in exchange for a character who simply didn’t have anything over him... except a last name, and “conventional” favoritism that most optimistically was all founded on that name and therefore undermined a Rey entirely, and more pessimistically involved some systemic racism.

    At no point did Ben Solo or Kylo Ren ever amount to half of what Finn was in TFA, even as LFL seemed to deliberately try to undercut and downgrade Finn not just in other movies but in expanded universe work as well.

    And as an addendum to that... if you want to know a big part of Rey’s problem, it’s that a capable, complimentary co-Star in Finn was supplanted by a parasitic character in Kylo. Everything about their writing post-TFA lowered her complexity and dramatic appeal, whereas her interactions with Finn in TFA had helped sell her magnificently.
    1) I understand your intent, I find no issue with it, so please don't apologize. This is a good thread, even though I disagree with almost 90% the non-race items mentioned so far. I just would hate to see things get modded.

    2) My only real issue with this train of thought and over-analyzing is that it means Vader et all were not able to be redeemed either. You are also giving Luke and Vader a giant pass as well as Obi and Yoda for all the dumb stuff they did in order to prop Rey as a bad character. If it weren't for the EU, Luke is a pretty boring character (hence why I enjoyed crotchety ST Luke over Super Jesus Luke in the old-EU). And that gets a pass, too, in order to gaslight Rey. Perhaps secondary media will or has shown Kylo to be worse (or better) that he actually was. Yet the evidence in films was he tried to one up Vader and Luke every chance he got. He blew up more planets, he killed his father, he stopped his rival, he killed his master, he fell in love and went to the light, then killed the Emperor for good in order to clean his soul. All over the top and bigger than Luke and Vader.

    3) Finn's Force sensitivity and use is the bigger issue. It has nothing to do with Rey. Or Kylo. Or Rian. Etc.

    4) Finn's ability and use could easily have been put over Poe, Haldo, etc. Rey and Kylo had nothing to do with that. Plus, you have the producers and Disney hamstringing Rian, JJ on Finn's usage. Again, that's the actual problem. He could've easily done nearly everything Poe did in the trilogy. I like Poe but ... perhaps him dying in TFA would've been better for Finn's sake.

    And that's the typical Star Wars pattern. Finding the holes and wishing they could be better with some tweaks. And that is where the EU comes in.

    That's my 2 cents.
    Last edited by BeastieRunner; 09-05-2020 at 02:07 PM.
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  11. #56
    Extraordinary Member Zero Hunter's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by thwhtGuardian View Post
    That he had trouble doing it was the giant neon sign that he was going to be redeemed, there was no back peddling at all.
    I think your just looking back at in hindsight now. At the time that scene was Kylo fully embarcing the darkside and in no way teased a redemption.

  12. #57
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    Quote Originally Posted by Agent Z View Post
    There absolutely were complaints about TFA after it came out. And Boyega wasn't the one who brought race into this. The people calling for a boycott of the film because of a black stormtrooper and harassing an Asian-American actress did that.
    No, look, I'm fully aware of this. It is why I said that Star Wars fans could be truly horrible people. My point only is that whatever went wrong with the new trilogy was much more about Disney or the higher ups at Lucasfilm than either Johnson or Abrams. And though it is certainly possible that orders came from on high to downplay the POC roles in the second and third films but the fact that The Force Awakens was the biggest film of all time meant that these ludicrous, racist protests made zero difference to the profitability of Star Wars. TLJ specifically gave us a female, Asian American character, further emphasised Rey as the main character and showed pretty definitively that the anti-SJWs didn't dissuade anyone from using non-white characters and it made sweet bugger all difference in how much money these films made.

    And, again, corporations are only ever really as racist as it is profitable to be. After the success of TFA, there was no reason for them to demand smaller roles for Finn or Rose and, very simply, I don't think any such demands were made. So why the undeniably worse second and third appearances for Finn and Rose? It's not a question of race but a question of a lack of an actual plan for the trilogy. Two different directors were allowed to do their own thing with the trilogy and the result was Johnson not wanting to go in a similar direction as Abrams with characters like Snoke and Finn and, for Rise of Skywalker, Abrams had little interest - or space - for Rose, and because he spent so much of the film reversing Johnson's work in TLJ, he clearly just ran out of time to do justice to what were by then side characters.

    Was this a case of a studio screwing things up on a creative level, as they so often do without a go-between like Kevin Feige? Oh yeah. Big time. Were there cretinous, racist fanboys who decried the appearance of African and Asian Americans as well as women and gays? Sadly, yes. Were Boyega and Tran harassed horribly by these scumbags? Yes again. Was this a case of the creatives being racist? Obviously not - there's little in the way of suggestion that either Johnson or Abrams were in any way racist. Was Disney on a corporate level being racist? Don't be silly. The box office numbers meant that they absolutely didn't have to be and therefore weren't.

    Plus, the only Star Wars film to flop, relatively speaking, was Solo and you can hardly decry that film for racism. And, from what I understand, we're much closer to getting a young Lando spinoff than a Solo sequel.
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    Extraordinary Member thwhtGuardian's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Zero Hunter View Post
    I think your just looking back at in hindsight now. At the time that scene was Kylo fully embarcing the darkside and in no way teased a redemption.
    There's no hindsight needed, because the film was played so heavily on nostalgia for both the OT and to a lesser extent the prequels it fit the mold to a tee to the point that I actively rolled my eyes seeing in the theater as it was just another box to check.

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    Quote Originally Posted by BeastieRunner View Post
    1) I understand your intent, I find no issue with it, so please don't apologize. This is a good thread, even though I disagree with almost 90% the non-race items mentioned so far. I just would hate to see things get modded.

    2) My only real issue with this train of thought and over-analyzing is that it means Vader et all were not able to be redeemed either. You are also giving Luke and Vader a giant pass as well as Obi and Yoda for all the dumb stuff they did in order to prop Rey as a bad character. If it weren't for the EU, Luke is a pretty boring character (hence why I enjoyed crotchety ST Luke over Super Jesus Luke in the old-EU). And that gets a pass, too, in order to gaslight Rey. Perhaps secondary media will or has shown Kylo to be worse (or better) that he actually was. Yet the evidence in films was he tried to one up Vader and Luke every chance he got. He blew up more planets, he killed his father, he stopped his rival, he killed his master, he fell in love and went to the light, then killed the Emperor for good in order to clean his soul. All over the top and bigger than Luke and Vader.

    3) Finn's Force sensitivity and use is the bigger issue. It has nothing to do with Rey. Or Kylo. Or Rian. Etc.

    4) Finn's ability and use could easily have been put over Poe, Haldo, etc. Rey and Kylo had nothing to do with that. Plus, you have the producers and Disney hamstringing Rian, JJ on Finn's usage. Again, that's the actual problem. He could've easily done nearly everything Poe did in the trilogy. I like Poe but ... perhaps him dying in TFA would've been better for Finn's sake.

    And that's the typical Star Wars pattern. Finding the holes and wishing they could be better with some tweaks. And that is where the EU comes in.

    That's my 2 cents.
    I think you may be misunderstanding my point about thenexecution of Ben’s redemption story vs Vader’s, though more likely I screwed up - what I’m saying is that the way Vader is redemption story was made was an asset to Luke’s story, while the way Ben’s redemtpion, and even the teases of it in TLJ, wound up playing out became a liability Rey.

    Philosophically and morally, Ben and Anakin getting redeemed is equally good.

    But as stories, one accelerated the Saga into the first recognized “space opera”, while the other basically killed Rey’s depth as a fictional character. Vader’s redemption embraced the seeming impossibility of happening to create drama and catharsis, while Ben being treated as someone who should “obviously” seem likely to be redeemed deflated the drama between himself and Rey. Vader was revealed as Luke’s father, but remained a great antagonist and opponent for Luke to contrasted with, but Kylo was treated as a privileged character above Rey and his portrayal as both only a half-hearted antagonist for Rey and as her new male lead who subtracted inconvenient depth from Rey that would get in the way of the script fawning over him.

    Rey getting propped up as a bad character at other characters’ expense is a complaint I get... but Rey herself was sacrificed to prop up Kylo as a character, if not as a powerful Force user. He’s far more the problem than Rey is, in my opinion, because when he’s not treated as a loathsome villain, Rey is left adrift without either a physical challenge or good internal conflict over him.

    I mean, Vader getting rendered defenseless and wounded before Luke in ROTJ’s climax perfectly illustrates how Vader was an asset for Luke’s story - all of Luke’s internal struggles are made physically manifest in a situation where he is justified to be enraged at and murder us towards his father, but is also witnessing a clear illustration of the parallels between them and his fathers humanity, and has to decide whether he will value his soul and spare his father knowing he’ll die at Palpatine’s hands, or keep his life but succumb to the same damnation his father has.

    TLJ puts Rey in a similar situation with Kylo in the Supremacy when he has redeclared his intent to be an evil douchebag and mocked and dismissed her hope that he’ll turn back, and yet he is apparently unconscious and at her mercy... but TLJ doesn’t even think that scene and conundrum was worth scripting, let alone putting on film.

    That’s where I think you can see some possible and accidental sexism but also some clear and definite bias towards Kylo clearly and unequivocally screwing over Rey as a character - a scene that clearly allows her to be human and face a serious conundrum never even entered Johnson’s head, it seems.

    And I‘d say it’s clear that Luke got a lot more screwed over for Ben Solo than he did for Rey, since the film tried to say he pushed Ben to darkness. Heck, Rey attacking Luke is on Ben fucking Solo’s behalf, not that of herself or her friends Ben Solo is currently trying to murder and previously has murdered. Thanks horseshit.

    And yeah, I’m going to blame Kylo’s rise to male lead as the main thing derailing Finn’s character. Poe getting more stuff to do wouldn’t be a problem if Finn were still Rey’s most important co-Star and male lead. Poe could have become the Han Solo knockoff he became, and it wouldn’t have overshadowed a Finn who was Rey’s co-lead. But making a Kylo Ren who was still just a two-dimensional waste of Driver’s skills act as Rey’s co-Star demoted Finn.
    Like action, adventure, rogues, and outlaws? Like anti-heroes, femme fatales, mysteries and thrillers?

    I wrote a book with them. Outlaw’s Shadow: A Sherwood Noir. Robin Hood’s evil counterpart, Guy of Gisbourne, is the main character. Feel free to give it a look: https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asi...E2PKBNJFH76GQP

  15. #60
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    Quote Originally Posted by godisawesome View Post
    The part thatÂ’s bullshit with Finn and Kylo is the simple, unarguable fact (to me) that Finn was introduced, established, and fleshed out as a complex character with a unique backstory and potential as the male lead in TFA... and then got shoved aside for a Kylo Ren and Ben Solo who never progressed beyond the shallow and contemptible cardboard cutout he was in TFA.

    I mean, it feels all but explicit to me that Johnson and LFL outright rejected Boyega and his MVP-caliber work in TFA as the male lead in exchange for a character who simply didn’t have anything over him... except a last name, and “conventional” favoritism that most optimistically was all founded on that name and therefore undermined a Rey entirely, and more pessimistically involved some systemic racism.

    At no point did Ben Solo or Kylo Ren ever amount to half of what Finn was in TFA, even as LFL seemed to deliberately try to undercut and downgrade Finn not just in other movies but in expanded universe work as well.

    And as an addendum to that... if you want to know a big part of ReyÂ’s problem, itÂ’s that a capable, complimentary co-Star in Finn was supplanted by a parasitic character in Kylo. Everything about their writing post-TFA lowered her complexity and dramatic appeal, whereas her interactions with Finn in TFA had helped sell her magnificently.
    I have to disagree, allready TFA dropped the ball when it came to Finn.

    This character made no sense. He was supposed to be raised trained like a Clone Trooper, but that was nowhere reflected in how he acted or in what he was capable of. He got apparently traumatized when they wiped out the village but had no problem when Stormtroopers (= guys who were like him abducted and brainwashed as kids, and that he grew up with) were killed.

    Lead characters in Star Wars are typically guys Jedis, Smugglers, X-Pilots, Bontyhunters or similarly extraordinary characters, Finn like he was done in TFA was simply not lead character material. For that he would have had imo to be way more capable, a clearer motivation for leaving the First Order and more agency then just running from the first order and after Rey.

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