#gl critical

[predator-padawan]

Oh cool, can we ask you our Jedi questions that are actually just theology questions? Cause I have one, and I truly don’t know the answer but I feel like the Catholic answer in this particular case is probably the same for the Jedi creed.

So like, pride is a sin, right? But then what about like being proud of your children/Padawans, is that allowed? Or is that forbidden. Thanks!

Of course you can! Fair warning though, my chosen interpretation of Jedi things is likely very far away from the intended reading. If there's a spectrum of beliefs, GL and I are on wildly different ends of it.

I am a Folk Catholic brujeria practitioner/Animist who dabbles in Irish paganism. For reference, Folk Catholicism is very disconnected from Vatican sanctioned Catholicism, and has little to do with the Arch Diocese/church itself at all. It acknowledges mysticism in Catholicism and is largely spirit work, ritual, and an open acknowledgement of Catholicism's syncretism with the indigenous pantheons and practices it amalgamated during colonization. As a result it is closely laminated onto Paganism and pre-colonial Mexican and South American practices.

Conversely, GL built the Jedi Order in conversation with eastern religions like Buddhism and Taoism, but as a westerner inevitably drew from Christianity, whether he or the fandom likes to admit it or not. The American Cultural Christianity he was likely influenced by has roots in Vatican-sanctioned Catholicism, but is MOSTLY protestant/Evangelical in nature. I see this all over the Jedi, and it definitely factors into my interpretation of them.

The Jedi's beliefs are dealt with inconsistently enough in Canon I can easily bend/play with the text to make it work alongside my beliefs, but often find it more fun to read the Jedi through a critical lens, and examine the flaws in their creed. (I mean, as someone who writes about Anakin this just seems like a necessary lens). So again, I don't know how helpful my answers will be given my background and my feelings about GL's worldbuilding! But I will try my best haha.

Ok, to answer your actual question:

Even in Christianity, Pride is not a sin across the board. For example, excessive pride at one's own accomplishments is considered far more sinful than the joy of watching a child grow, having implemented things you taught the child. Pride surrounding someone else's accomplishments is not the same as refusing humility. Furthermore, at least in Catholicism, sin is not really "forbidden." As I interpret it, Sin is anything that takes you away from the divine. It doesn't need to be avoided at all costs, it can be learned from, it can be a compass to help us guide us closer to God/the collective good. So overall, thinking of sins being allowed vs forbidden isn't really helpful in any context.

In the Jedi Order, I imagine pride would be an issue because it creates a disconnect between the individual and the Force: if you feel pride, there is an element of taking credit for something, and therefore seeing oneself as an individual, rather than One with the Force. So again, not a forbidden evil, but something that takes a Jedi away from the divine (if you want to view the Force as the divine). So, pride in one's Padawan is an entirely separate matter: A Master could be thanking the Force for all their Padawan has learned, and feeling joy their Padawan is so connected to the Force--THAT pride would NOT be creating a disconnect.

I hope that all makes sense haha!! Again I am not even sure GL viewed the Order as like, connected to sin at all, but I am positive he at least subconsciously factored Christian morality into his world building, which, in a culturally Christian context, DOES get broken down into allowed vs forbidden. So if he was answering this ask I bet he'd have a much different take. But you asked me so you got this mess of an answer lMAO

[predator-padawan]

whenever i see TCW content, all i can think is how the people who hated the prequels on reddit threads got everything they wanted with this; that being said i do think it’s a serviceable piece of children’s media and an adequate intro to space opera fiction. i just think they might as well have changed anakin and obi-wan’s names entirely and marketed it as some kind of alternate universe for all the similarity they have with the prequel depictions. all the femininity, vulnerability, sensitivity, monstrosity (anakin is very monstrous femme villain coded) just gets stripped out of him with commercial paint thinner and replaced with this cookie cutter gi joe bloke that seems like a direct result of the mcu-ification of mainstream media. every character has to have a witty quip followed by a billion unnecessary and ugly action scenes, the dialogue is stilted and doesn’t serve any underlying subtextual purpose; they merely say what they say without any sense of the underlying currents and motivations of character or the story beyond the absolute present, and all sentimentality and sincerity is handwaved away in favour of delusional masculine posturing that all the toils of interminable war simply slide off the characters’ backs as they spend episode upon episode fighting yet another battle with some hamfisted message at the end. anakin was fascinating to me because of his perversions and foibles - the all consuming desire, the rashness and impulsiveness, the internal drives for control that supercede the larger picture. the tcw presents this anakin that is duty bound and so blatantly, obscenely heroic in a way that seems like some response to criticism of all the flaws mentioned above as depicted in the prequel films. don’t even want to think about what they did to mr self immolation kenobi himself. he is reason personified, a prudent man that comes out of obi-wan’s dreams rather than his true self - the appearance of control has finally become reality. ever since disney got their little claws into star wars, and to be fair any projects they come out with these days (live actions i’m looking at you) a large proportion of their oeuvre just seem to be these tepid and lacklustre productions aimed at addressing the bad faith criticisms of previous iterations. the buzzfeed era solely subsisted on irritating one dimensional critique about how disney princesses aren’t feminist which gave birth to the horror of capitalist white feminism we saw in live action adaptations - no one actually gave a fuck that cinderella met the prince for the first time at the ball. the audience now can no longer be trusted to suspend disbelief, to engage with fictional rules of society, to learn about people in any context except one that tries to mimic what is the norm in reality. in the same way, tcw seems to exist to address the so-called problems of the prequels but to me it just seems to undermine what made them compelling as well as still leaving the more pressing problems that could be explored in a tv series format unaddressed. we get the opportunity for long form interaction between characters and it’s so rarely ever taken advantage of in visually interesting ways. the bad faith critiques to me are the triumph of the loud, dissenting, primarily male audience outcrying at the idea their big bad leather daddy actually once had dreams and desires and the soft underbelly that any mortal existence necessitates before he was choking people out and destroying planets. i’d love to see more tcw try to address why these traits are so repulsive not only within the universe of the jedi and the senate, but also metatextually in regards to their initial target audience.

This ask sparked a very heated, complex discussion in my house while I did the dishes, lol. I have a lot of thoughts about this subject, and while I agree with your overall thesis which is that TCW and Feloni's storytelling and characterization are weak because they seek to pander to male fans male fantasies....I would also ague that Lucas's depiction of Anakin is also sexist, and does the same thing, through a different lens. Anakin being Yin Coded (I think yin and yang as an actual duality Lucas was likely playing with is a more helpful framework to discuss these characters in than masc/femme or masculine/feminine because those words have lost meaning and aren't actually a binary) isn't a progressive thing in Lucas's depiction, and he also doesn't successfully achieve it, either, imo. In many ways both versions of Anakin embody male and patriarchal violence, even if that was never what Lucas intended to do, and is not how the fandom chooses to see him.

I don't have the energy to get into it (and I suspect it would get me in trouble, actually,) so I won't, but I think there's a lot to dig into here. My final thought I'll share is that both the prequels and TCW fail to examine the patriarchy, while performing it perfectly.

[predator-padawan]

Hi Phoenix! Do you have any opinions on like.. how Ewan decided to portray Obi-Wan, just would really love to hear your opinions on what the actors were doing (Hayden too, honestly i think the critics were so harsh on him when like - he had to play like darth v and i think he did that). And I mean - Ewan, knowing him, was prob really deliberate about playing Obi-Wan as gay/bi. Anyway, would love to hear your thoughts and also if you have any interesting facts to share, or some opinions about the actors to get off your chest, would love to hear'em! (Like, in my opinion part of success of Obikin actually lays in the fact that both Hayden and Ewan really clicked and were so soft and caring with each other and it seeped into the movies and their characters and the dynamic theyve built)

Oh gosh I have many thoughts about this.

So first off, Old Ben was the first incarnation of Obi-Wan I was ever exposed to and remains the most enduring image in my head. Like to this day if you ask me to picture Obi-Wan Kenobi I picture Old Ben. It comes from years and years of obsessively watching the OG trilogy before the prequels even came out. Anyway this feels relevant because I think Ewan's performance, in many ways, is an homage and careful replication of/expansion on Alec Guinness's version of the character. It's so clear (and dear) to me that he really studied Alec Guinness and how he chose to portray Obi-Wan, and that many of his choices are tied to that.

Alec Guinness was an English drama actor who began his career onstage, doing plays, before his film career. He was also not straight, and had many forays with men that were not revealed until after his death, though like many actors I suspect it was a known industry secret. His history/background factor into my understanding of Obi-Wan, who even when he's a mysterious old desert hermit who's past we know little about, has a foppish, refined, theatrical element to him. I love that Ewan latched onto that and elaborated on it by leaning into Obi-Wan's elegance. Not all the Jedi have that thick a Coruscanti accent despite growing up in the temple--that's something Alec Guinness had, and Ewan imitated to honor that former performance, but it also tells us something about Obi-Wan, and how he portrayed him/linked him to Alec: that even among Jedi he was particularly cultured, particularly concerned with how he came across, etc.

I don't know what Ewan's personal life looks like and I won't speculate about his sexuality, but he has played a ton of gay roles. Like way more than the average straight actor, imo, many of which are also androgynous roles, sexual roles, risky roles. In fact when he was cast for SW he had just finished wrapping Velvet Goldmine, (my favorite movie ever) where he plays a gay rockstar modeled loosely after Iggy Pop, a role that has full frontal nudity and multiple graphic gay sex scenes and full on hole. So it honestly seems very plausible that Ewan brought some element of queer sensibility to the role of Obi-Wan--not just because of Alec's performance but because of his own career! There are so many different casting choices, so many of his contemporaries which would have given Obi-Wan a totally different (more heterosexual or masculine or aggressive) flavor, even if they were also emulating Alec's accent/mannerisms.

So in conclusion: I think Obi-Wan was already mildly queer coded, and Ewan solidified and celebrated that with his performance.

As for Hayden...Hayden. Man. For a long time I felt really bad for him because all the criticism he got for his (admittedly very weird) performance of Anakin was not deserved. It's one hundred percent George Lucas's fault. The reasons why the OG trilogy is so good and and dialog feels so natural (despite being insane on a script level) is twofold:

1. the actors did a lot of work to override his directing and writing choices and he wasn't famous enough to exert his power and stop them. There are so many good interviews with Mark Hamill about this, where he drags the bonkers sentences he was expected to say as Luke Skywalker. And so many equally good BTS clips where Harrison Ford is literally directing everyone on a sensical way to deliver their nonsensical dialog. The actors busted their asses to make that dialog human, and it shows!

2. Marcia Lucas, bless her soul, (George Lucas's ex wife) hacked up and rewrote that script and was heavily involved in the actual editing process of the film itself an SAVED IT'S ASS. I am convinced SW wouldn't even exist as the big franchise it is now if it weren't for her. It would have bombed in the 70s. I can't even begin to explain in an ask all the ways she worked to save this film, but here's an article which discusses some, and there's also a great documentary out there.

Anyway. My point is, the OG trilogy has some of the GL pitfalls, but there was a collaborative effort to save it, and it was saved. However, by the time the prequels were being made, Lucas was King. He did everything and did not allow much concession or collaboration at all, as he was writer, director, and executive producer. He also went back and did fucked up horrible shit to the OG trilogy. This man has good big picture ideas but when it comes down to the nitty gritty? HE CANNOT EXECUTE IT, HE'S A TERRIBLE WRITER AND DIRECTOR AND NEEDS SOMEONE TO REIGN HIM IN ALAS, HE DID NOT ALLOW THAT! The prequel dialog, as much as I love it for its weirdness (which becomes charming if you view it with enough alcohol and love and forgiveness) makes no fucking sense. The storytelling makes no sense. And worst of all---the actors were very clearly over directed and not allowed to make as many decisions regarding how they delivered their lines as the OG trilogy actors. You can especially tell with actors like Natalie Portman, who had extensive major film repertoires before SW, so you can see what her acting actually looks like outside of GL's ironfisted control.

Hayden didn't really have this luxury. He was an accomplished actor but in mostly indie films, and this was his first big blockbuster. With Ewan and Natalie or Liam, any awkward dialog or delivery came alongside the caveat of "well, we know they're good actors, it must be the writing/directing." But Hayden had a huge (THE CENTRAL) role, meaning he was likely subject to the most micromanagement/control and wasn't particularly well known. So anything weird about his performance largely for attributed to him, hence the numerous Razzie awards and endless ridicule.

I think Hayden Christensen is a good actor and I absolutely love this performance of Anakin, but I do wish we had gotten to see it in a universe/time when GL was not in complete creative control. There's so many things I wish had been different about the Prequel Trilogy, like imagine!!! If the actors has been aloud to act! If Marcia was there helping them along!! GOD!! a dream!

Anyway it's been so nice to see Hayden in OWK, both acting and in the press. He loves SW and loves Anakin and finally that love was able to show, and we were able to see him truly act with some freedom, and he did a fantastic job. I really do love his performance in the prequels but I think it could have been even better if GL has loosened his barbaric clutches just a tiny bit :)

[predator-padawan]

NGL Anakin’s treatment of Padmé makes me more afraid of George Lucas & co than Anakin. Like dude is not supposed to read the way he does. We are suppose to see Anakin/Padmé as romantic and so all the stuff we end up seeing that is disturbing for some of us is totally unintentional. Which to me far scarier then if he was intended to be that way if that makes sense? It’s the unintentional-ness of it all that is practically bothersome.

Oh absolutely make sense, I have many asks where I go into this (my GL critical tag would be a good place to look to find them). This is the purpose of fiction and art, though: to reveal things about our real world through the act of storytelling. And sometimes it's intentional (good storytelling) and sometimes it's not, which is, often, worse.

I find Anakin frightening because I am watching him onscreen, feeling sympathetic terror for Padme in the scenes where he is violating her clearly stated boundaries. It doesn't matter that he's fictional because 1. real men exist like that everywhere and I have had countless real life interactions with them. 2. BECAUSE HE WAS WRITTEN BY A REAL MAN WHO THINKS THAT BEHAVIOR IS ROMANTIC, and 3. plenty of OTHER REAL MEN greenlit that depiction indicting they think it's normal, too!

The character Anakin is a vehicle for GL and company's uninterrogated misogyny. The character Anakin is a vehicle for the patriarchy's staked claim in the entertainment industry. Watching him is watching GL, it's a window into the writers room and a world where this sort of behavior is not alarming, but desired.

And yeah, that's fucking terrifying!

But as a writer I often do Watsonian analysis where I have to imagine the characters as if they were real people, rather than reflections of their creators and the cultural climate of Hollywood when they were created. That's how I write/how I make my characters feel real. So while the primary terrifying element of Anakin's character is the intent with which he was written, I also find him terrifying on his own, if that makes sense.

[predator-padawan]

I’m getting into the Star Wars Legends books (Rogue Planet my love💗)/material and it’s truly staggering how much material (some of it really good) Disney just dumped in the trash. It’s absolutely boggling that they could look at that much material, stories, characterizations, and world building and just decide it was worthless. I don’t know if anything else like that has ever happened in media before but it’s just 🤯. It’s also really confusing as to what actually “happened” in universe (apparently the Jedi Quest book series isn’t one of them 😑).

I saw somebody on here who said “canon is a suggestion that I choose to ignore” and I absolutely loved that. I thought it was great. I definitely live more in a fan made (especially your stories) SW universe than the “real” one. What so many of you write is far more compelling and better written then most of what we get now (glaring at you Disney). I think it amazing how you writers in the fandom are just taking this story that’s been around for 45 years and are still finding new ways to explore it. You really takes us to highest and depths that I think we can only ever dream of seeing on screen. I hope you know your work is beyond appreciated.

Aw this is so sweet!! I don't ever set out in Fandoms to be appreciated (I just come to write my lil stories and brace for the potential of hate because so much of what I write is disgusting but also really good and that makes people mad), so it's always just a nice bonus when people enjoy my fic <3

Anyway, in regards to the perspective “canon is a suggestion that I choose to ignore”, I am fully on board. I wrote this in an ask response awhile ago about how the SW "canon" in particular is so messy and retconned and has so many authors, it's literally just a sandbox we can enjoy as fans and there's no point in trying to find the "right" or "intended" interpretation of many things because, very frankly, there isn't one. Star Wars is a MASSIVE franchise and Disney, GL, and Abrams are ALL profit driven, so they don't really care about making cohesive stories or themes, they care about appealing to the widest possible audience and making money. Conversely, fan artists and fanfiction writers for the most part are writing for themselves, their friends, and out of sheer love of the thing. We are never profit driven, we write about SW because there are things we love about SW. And so, its natural fan made content, even wildly different and diverse interpretation in fanmade content, feel more authentic and rich on a storytelling front.

I also think a lot of the sci-fri writers who created the extended and Legends universe are also less profit driven and more loving about their approach, which is why so many of the non canon books are 1. better 2. MAKE MORE SENSE!!

In conclusion, real art doesn't exist within the framework of capitalism and so, SW the franchise is a very different beast that SW the universe. It's best to have fun in the universe with your friends than it is to try and make sense of the Franchise as an entity, imo.

[predator-padawan]

Regarding your answer about the style of animation in tcw and how they all wind up with the same sort of designs—specifically the women—I think one of the moments that I first noticed that in particular was when I realized they tended to give padme the fattest ass possible and i was like WHO designed this for a kids show?? And then I also realized they were kinda giving her the pixar mom treatment which was questionable (idk if you’ve ever seen the discussion about that and how it kind of originated, but essentially it stemmed from the fact that when that silhouette was established, butts weren’t as sexualized as boobs like they are these days, so it was a good way to establish them as having a mature and “womanly/feminine” shape without making them as sexual, which I guess makes sense in terms of having Padme be beautiful and attractive but also ‘good’ in a puritanical way, even in her often revealing outfits, as opposed to those fem fatale bounty hunters/other female bad guys who always had ridiculously large tits like you said) but still never made sense to me considering that’s just not at all what Natalie Portman looks like irl? Though I guess that’s in line with what you and your anons said about the designs not particularly suiting obikin either but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Omg i have always noticed and abhorred the Pixar mom silhouette, but never knew the lore, so thank you for this background information??!! Very telling. But yes, not at all what Natalie Portman--or any real human woman--looks like imo. They are such weird, dishonest, male-gaze charicatures of the female body to me, fuck you GL for making what is otherwise a very good show, very difficult to watch,

[predator-padawan]

May I also give an insight from a fellow ‘oldie’ (lol) fan who’ve been in many fandoms? (re: less intense anakin characterization anon)

I personally think the genre, rating and the intended audience of the movie itself also factor in this preference. Since they are all basically directed towards general audience, the majority of the fans who create fan content would also lend more towards—please excuse me here, for the lack of better word—common fans, or fans who enjoy soft, fluff and at most angst with happy ending still. 

Compared to, for example from my experience, mangas like Attack on Titan and Tokyo Ghoul, whose intended audience are thriller and dark fantasy enjoyers & 17+ age above, thus of course they easily attract a lot of ‘dead dove do no eat’ fans and majority of their fics also deal with themes that are under that ‘umbrella’.

I think to some extent this is true, or at least that it used to be, but the landscape of fandom is changing so much due to rampant puritanical ideologies, I'm seeing more and more exceptions! For example, NBC's Hannibal had a very Dead Dove fandom when the show first aired (because it's a dark show with a Dead Dove canon). But bizarrely, when it was put on Netflix in 2020 and had a resurgence and amassed a new, younger fanbase, the fic and art content developed a very strange subgroup of anti type fans who only wanted wholesome ship content and policed fic that was like--canon compliant? So bizarre.

I DO think Star Wars is a massive franchise and has always been intended to be accessible to as many fans across as many subgroups as possible. GL and later Abrhams are interested pretty much exclusively in casting a very very wide net and appealing to as many people as possible (also Disney's MO, so of course this continued when SW got incorporated to Disney). As a result, less dark interpretations of characters are not only more popular, the creators are often retconning darker or less appealing stuff from the earlier series to avoid isolating potential audiences (and revenue). So yes, rating and intended audience totally matter!

[predator-padawan]

Considering you have been in fandoms for so long (thus the experiences) and you are very understanding & kind, I might just give this question a shot. Or, maybe any of your follower can answer this? Anyway, I noticed Obikin shippers have very different preferred dynamic on this site & twitter. I also noticed the different audiences when I look through the notes/retweets (english speakers, mainly americans/europeans vs non-english speakers, mainly asian). Do you might have any slightest idea why?

Hi friend!! Yes, happy to answer, I've actually done convention panels about fandom dynamics and studied statistics about this stuff for years and do have some insight! It's mostly speculative because this stuff is hard to get data on if you're not like a legit anthropologist but here's what I think:

So, it's actually not common for there to be a significant difference between the fandom climate and cultural norms seen on Twitter vs Tumblr. They used to be more homogenized before 2017, because 1. tumblr was more popular than it is now 2. it allowed nsfw content. After the nsfw ban, however, lots of people who had accounts on both sites migrated to twitter only, and got embroiled in twitter culture. Then, the people who stayed here often refused to go to twitter on principle, and there became strong preferences for both site interfaces and totally separate fan cultures and in jokes within the same fandom but on the different sites. This basically just means fandoms that were formerly unified developed two distinct subsets. These subsets then became shaped by the sort of content each site encouraged: on tumblr you can make long meta posts and receive anonymous asks for example so fan content tends to be verbose and wordy, where twitter allows nsfw art and short form thirst tweeting, so content tends to be more sexual. There are also separate languages and and meme styles on each site, which shape head-canons, which shape how people perceive characters and pairing dynamics. So ultimately, what often happens is that two slightly different versions of popular ships arise on each site. I've seen it happen in pretty much every fandom I've been in, where certain phenomenons exist on one site or the other but don't really breach containment much aside from the people who have accounts on both sites and cross post (ie, in this fandom I really only see the bunnywan thing on twitter, and if I do see it here it didn't occur independently, it was posted from someone who is also on twitter).

This is related to the difference between western fandom and Asian/Russian fandom-- different cultures shaping how fans see characters. This has always been a really interesting phenomenon for me as an American to observe, because I almost always prefer the non-english speaking/Asian side of fandom's characterization but struggle to find all the content I want because I can't search stuff easily because of the language barrier. I've even been into pairings no one in western fandom even ships and had to go on Chinese/Japanese forums using shitty google translate to chat with fans so I can find art or crumbs of translated fic. As for the difference itself, my theory is that western culture hinges on very specific ideas about masculinity and heterosexuality, and that western media is subconsciously shaped by a strong evangelical/Christian influence. Western fans tend to see characters through a different, more rigid lens as a result, and often want to impose certain fixed roles about gender/sexuality/christian morality onto every dynamic, homogenizing pairings they like into a series of preexisting "types". I feel like I observe non-western fans actually looking to the canon text and developing ideas about dynamics based on how the characters behave in relation to one another, instead of trying to shoehorn them into preset roles or types based on how well they adhere to concepts of western masculinity/morality. ALSO non-western fandom is significantly less puritanical about things like age gaps, abuse, etc., so ships that are seen as taboo or controversial in western fandom and don't get as popular have much more fan-content for in non-western fandoms.

Also, I'm sure there are cultural concepts of masculinity/sexuality within non-western cultures that are getting imposed onto pairings as well, but because I am not privy to the finer details of those roles/concepts as an American, it seems less obvious to me. However, I have seen western fans of Asian media (Chinese dramas mostly) BLATANTLY imposing western sexuality/masculinity onto the main pairings and it's always so jarring and weird. If the reverse is happening, I'm here for it. Like I am all for Asian fans reclaiming whatever they want from Star Wars considering the canon is made by a Western creator appropriating Asian spirituality, fashion, and history to make a racist sandbox for his white characters to play in.