Is Hollywood Using Diversity To Justify Potentially Doomed Franchises?

[godisawesome]

Yeah, I feel like Johnson could've given much more of a personality to Rey. I didn't like what happened to Luke either, but aside from getting some rushed power-ups, Rey didn't get much either

Exactly. Rey’s “too quick and too far” power-ups in TLJ are simply side-effects of Johnson’s crappy writing for her as a tool for Kylo and Luke’s story - he doesn’t want to “waste” time on her, so he skips past her story and just starts using her for theirs.

He felt the history between Kylo and Luke was so much more important it deserved three Rashomon-style flashbacks, Rey attacking Luke over one of them, ignoring how little that would impact Rey’ own personal experiences with Kylo that it wouldn’t matter, or that Kylo is in full agreement he slaughtered his other classmates and therefore might be accidentally endorsing Luke’s violent reaction to him in the hut scene.

TLJ ska. Film that revolves around who ever ranks as the saddest white guy, like a parody of an Oscar bait film.

[Castle]

If they’d torn down Luke for Rey’s sake, she wouldn’t have been kicked out of the finale so that Luke and Kylo could do it as well.

Face it: The Last Jedi tore down Luke so that it could pretend Kylo Ren, another pasty white guy, was sympathetic enough to have a girl put herself through torture and violation *again* for his sake. Johnson didn’t give a damn about Rey.

The fact she had no good storytelling attached to her in TLJ is because Johnson was hyper focused on Luke and Kylo. The fact his Luke story sucked is because he wanted to tell a pretentious man pain story with Luke, when pretentious man pain stories are already kind fo dubious on the best of days, and don’t fit Luke at all.

the finale of last jedi? Luke is just terrible there. but the issue is not even that, the issue is ...was rey was stronger, better and did not need Luke at all to become more powerful. it was not the case with Yoda and Luke in Empire Strikes Back, oh and does Yoda count as diverse? he is a green dude, who is not human and little in height.

Face it: The Last Jedi tore down Luke so that it could pretend Kylo Ren, another pasty white guy, was sympathetic enough to have a girl put herself through torture and violation *again* for his sake. Johnson didn’t give a damn about Rey.

The fault of tearing down Luke is more of Rey's fault than Kylo Ren because you need to remember, Rey had already defeated Kylo in Force Awakens even if he was more skilled and trained than her.

[Panic]

The Sequel Trilogy “going woke” had nothing to do with its problems - if anything, it was the snap back to “sleep” that caused the problem. The $700 million difference between TFA and TLJ didn’t come from girls and black people pushing out white males from the audience - it came more from Rina Johnson making a pretentious story of white male pain that overrode everything else.

The problem ultimately with purely performative and surface level diversity is that its ultimately not diversity - and in the case of TLJ, it wound up being much more about white male privilege than anything else. It mattered more to Rian Johnson that Kylo Ren’s feelings were hurt and that Luke was having an existential crisis is then that he had an ex-slave soldier or a toughened survivor girl as his previous leads... so he demoted those two characters in favor of Luke and Kylo.

And yes, we need more diversity behind the camera - Finn’s ass ain’t getting demoted, and Rey’s not getting pimped out to Kylo, if there’s more diversity behind the ST.

You keep pushing this stuff, and I really think you're wrong.

The people who didn't like TLJ usually complain about: Luke being screwed over, Finn's plotline being dull, Finn getting no development, Finn and Rose having no chemistry, Poe's story being irritating, the dismissal of Snoke and his backstory, and Rey's family reveal being nothing.

You keep trying to reframe TLJ as a film that failed because of misogynistic decisions, but your main issue of the Kylo Ren/Rey disfunctional romantic tends to be very much a guy's point of view. The dangerous broken bad-boy romantic interest is always hated by the majority of the male audience, but incredibly popular with female readers/viewers. You can rail about it all you want, but trying to tell women who they should be attracted to and what romantic fantasies they are allowed to have is patriarchal behaviour. You want to have this discussion, get some women in here, otherwise it's just a bunch of guys moaning about popular romantic tropes they're uncomfortable with.

[godisawesome]

You keep pushing this stuff, and I really think you're wrong.

The people who didn't like TLJ usually complain about: Luke being screwed over, Finn's plotline being dull, Finn getting no development, Finn and Rose having no chemistry, Poe's story being irritating, the dismissal of Snoke and his backstory, and Rey's family reveal being nothing.

You keep trying to reframe TLJ as a film that failed because of misogynistic decisions, but your main issue of the Kylo Ren/Rey disfunctional romantic tends to be very much a guy's point of view. The dangerous broken bad-boy romantic interest is always hated by the majority of the male audience, but incredibly popular with female readers/viewers. You can rail about it all you want, but trying to tell women who they should be attracted to and what romantic fantasies they are allowed to have is patriarchal behaviour. You want to have this discussion, get some women in here, otherwise it's just a bunch of guys moaning about popular romantic tropes they're uncomfortable with.

Except the “dangerous broken bad boy” POV in TLJ is also a male’s point of view, from Rian Johnson, and didn’t gain the film or the franchise any more female fans - female fans actually dropped percentage-wise after TLJ.

Now, that’s not saying female fans can’t love toxic relationships - in fact, I’d argue the more pertinent fact is that men can and *do* enjoy them as well, even though we presume that is a female fan’s “literary weakness”.

And to be honest, it’s not even really that a toxic romance is automatically bad writing, or sexist, or going to drive away audience members.

It’s that The Last Jedi’s version of it was bad writing, sexist, and driving away audience members. Plenty of female fans rolled with it, because it either appealed to them personally, or because they plugged in their own “head-canon”... but not enough to actually encourage larger female investment afterwards. Johnson, a dude, wrote a story that checked out to himself... and has on more than one occasion shown perplexity whenever someone, male or female, objected to it.

(You’ll have to forgive me rudimentary citation abilities, but here’s the person who collected the data I’m arguing with - and he’s uses Deadline, and is trustworthy elsewhere: https://forums.superherohype.com/posts/37997684/

[CosmiComic]

You keep pushing this stuff, and I really think you're wrong.

The people who didn't like TLJ usually complain about: Luke being screwed over, Finn's plotline being dull, Finn getting no development, Finn and Rose having no chemistry, Poe's story being irritating, the dismissal of Snoke and his backstory, and Rey's family reveal being nothing.

You keep trying to reframe TLJ as a film that failed because of misogynistic decisions, but your main issue of the Kylo Ren/Rey disfunctional romantic tends to be very much a guy's point of view. The dangerous broken bad-boy romantic interest is always hated by the majority of the male audience, but incredibly popular with female readers/viewers. You can rail about it all you want, but trying to tell women who they should be attracted to and what romantic fantasies they are allowed to have is patriarchal behaviour. You want to have this discussion, get some women in here, otherwise it's just a bunch of guys moaning about popular romantic tropes they're uncomfortable with.

You know women can be taught by society to like problematic relationship ideals. It's been a thing throughout history.

But anyway, how is a toxic relationship in a movie is all the female fans' fault?

[Panic]

You know women can be taught by society to like problematic relationship ideals. It's been a thing throughout history.

But anyway, how is a toxic relationship in a movie is all the female fans' fault?

I don't know, how is a toxic relationship in a movie is all the female fans' fault, and why are you asking me that? It's not something I suggested. I was arguing against the idea that TLJ is somehow deliberately aimed at the sensibilities of a white male audience at the expense of a female audience. On the forum I mainly hung out at I remember the repeated suggestion that people who didn't think it was a great film were misogynists who were scared of powerful women.

It's a very divisive film. You can say why you don't like it, and you can say why you think certain creative decisions were made, but I think that's about it. The movie just plain irritated me from start to finish, with the occasional blip of entertainment cropping up occasionally. I really loved TFA, particularly the way the characters had a lot of chemistry with each other, and I felt Finn was the glue that held all that together. I did feel TFA over-focussed on pushing Rey as the hero to the extent that Finn got fewer cool moments than he should have as the film progressed, and I had hoped that TLJ would recalibrate that balance a bit, and bring the three leads together so we could see their chemistry as a group. TLJ didn't give me those things, and I left the theatre feeling apathetic in regards to the next film. I felt it was a film that didn't care about the things I cared about, and I felt the director was more more interested in showing off how maverick he could be in subverting expectations than he was in doing the characters justice. But I don't actually know why Johnson made the creative decisions he did, I just know I didn't like them.

[CosmiComic]

Idk what forums you heard that from, but I don't see how Last Jedi is a feminist movie or hiw anyone would think it is. The reason anyone is saying it's aimed at white male sensibilities is because the only one with a clear character journey is the White male villain

[godisawesome]

Idk what forums you heard that from, but I don't see how Last Jedi is a feminist movie or hiw anyone would think it is. The reason anyone is saying it's aimed at white male sensibilities is because the only one with a clear character journey is the White male villain

Plus, it *is* very much a white dude’s film. Rian Johnson is usually a great filmmaker; Knives Out and Brick are fantastic. But he’s also a dude who was clearly more at home with crime fiction and those tropes and cliches than he was with the space opera of Star Wars.

And I think he did - sometimes - mean to try and put progressive messages in the film.

But he mostly just showed his own preferences and prejudices regarding the story, and while defenders of TLJ were quick to label its critics racists and misogynists... plenty of those were other white dudes, and it’s not a coincidence that the longer lasting but still substantial complaints are against the film’s white male privelege. And on the Jedi Council Forums... well, let’s just say the number of ticked off Rey fans who dislike TLJ has grown to outnumber/outlast the female fans of TLJ.

TLJ is the perfect example of how diversity in front of the camera may not mean **** if the person behind the camera doesn’t use their brain, or doesn’t have that diverse POV themselves.

Don’t get me wrong; I still understand why Luke fans are pissed - as I am as well. But to be blunt, it wasn’t Johnson’s woke ESB’s that hurt Luke. It was just his simple pretentiousness with the character, and yes, his willingness to burn the character down to insist that Kylo was sympathetic and deep.

[CosmiComic]

Tbh I remember more people calling the movie sexist because of Reylo. But that mighr just be my experience.

The defense of this movie on progressive grounds IMO was more against anti-woke types blaming the movie's problems on diversity, when that's not the case at all

[rpmaluki]

The Sequel Trilogy “going woke” had nothing to do with its problems - if anything, it was the snap back to “sleep” that caused the problem. The $700 million difference between TFA and TLJ didn’t come from girls and black people pushing out white males from the audience - it came more from Rina Johnson making a pretentious story of white male pain that overrode everything else.

The problem ultimately with purely performative and surface level diversity is that its ultimately not diversity - and in the case of TLJ, it wound up being much more about white male privilege than anything else. It mattered more to Rian Johnson that Kylo Ren’s feelings were hurt and that Luke was having an existential crisis is then that he had an ex-slave soldier or a toughened survivor girl as his previous leads... so he demoted those two characters in favor of Luke and Kylo.

And yes, we need more diversity behind the camera - Finn’s ass ain’t getting demoted, and Rey’s not getting pimped out to Kylo, if there’s more diversity behind the ST.

This explains precisely why I haven't watched the last two movies after TFA and I'm female.

[Vakanai]

This thread still arguing over the SW sequels?

[Castle]

This thread still arguing over the SW sequels?

the SW sequels discussion is deserved, the series prior to each release prided itself with being all about diversity only to fail so miserably at it. Here is John Boyega exposing Disney

[Username taken]

This thread still arguing over the SW sequels?

The sequels became ground zero of the "diversity in movies being bad" conversation.

Which is honestly just bunk because those movies weren't really pushing any "diversity" message.

If anything, I would argue it really failed two actors of color - John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran. Worse still, when these guys were railed on social media, Lucasfilm/Disney kept totally shut. Same with Daisy Ridley, she had to completely quit social media. I have my criticism of how Rey was handled but there’s an armybvof incels and losers that have problems with seeing strong women.

[Vakanai]

Yep, still Star Wars sequels I see. I didn't watch them, looked at the reviews and decided I'd rather wait a bit...and then the arguments started and I since wrote them off - it seemed like whichever side of the argument you were one, people just weren't enjoying those movies. I'm still a bit interested in seeing the debate this thread poses, but I'm lost now as all the talk has narrowed down to one specific set of films I've no intention of seeing. Not complaining, just that there's nothing left to engage with in this discussion if you haven't seen the sequel trilogy.

[CosmiComic]

Yep, still Star Wars sequels I see. I didn't watch them, looked at the reviews and decided I'd rather wait a bit...and then the arguments started and I since wrote them off - it seemed like whichever side of the argument you were one, people just weren't enjoying those movies. I'm still a bit interested in seeing the debate this thread poses, but I'm lost now as all the talk has narrowed down to one specific set of films I've no intention of seeing. Not complaining, just that there's nothing left to engage with in this discussion if you haven't seen the sequel trilogy.

I wouldn't say any are bad movies. I enjoys parts of them, but not other parts. Now, looking at the ST as objectively as I can, they're not the best follow ups, and have lots of problems. Still, you might enjoy them