#tlj criticism

[swan2swan]

Another Star Wars science question:

For years now I’ve argued that TLJ doesn’t make any sense because large ships should be able to move faster than smaller ships, BUT:

If the Raddus (3.5 km) was powered by Ludicrisium fuel in its engines, while the Supremacy (50km) was powered by Standardium fuel, would the exponentially-greater energy output of the Ludacrisium-powered engines generate faster acceleration than the Standardium-powered titanic engines pursuing it? Maybe the tolerance limits of the Raddus’s smaller engines are greater than the Supremacy’s, even though it’s pushing a much smaller mass through a zero-G environment? 

[madeleineengland]

Don't let the sequel trilogy ruin the original and the prequel characters in your hearts. The Rise of Skywalker (and TLJ with Luke in my opinion) made the Skywalker family so dirty in a disrespectful way.

But the real Anakin Skywalker, the real Luke Skywalker, the real Leia Organa, all of them will always live in our hearts. Thanks to George Lucas.

[nickyrp]

❤️ for Rey, ♜ for Mirta, ✘ for both

❤ - what was the moment that first made you fall in love with REY?

You know, I still don’t have a proper answer for this one! Sorry. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

✘ - what do other people tend to get wrong about MIRTA GEV & REY?

For Mirta, let’s talk about Troy Denningfor a minute. Because while I think Denning is a good writer, I think he is terrible at writing in a shared universe. When he’s just doing his own thing, focusing on the characters he likes, he’s fine and dandy! As soon as he tries to play well with others…well, frankly, he doesn’t. And this became extremely apparent to me at the end of the Legacy of the Force series.

How does this relate to Mirta? Because Denning wrote a scene where Jacen Solo was interrogating Mirta, and he threatened to scar her pretty face. And she, at least as far as Jacen could tell, quavered at that idea. Because OBVIOUSLY any “pretty” girl would find that horrifying. Because OBVIOUSLY the fact that Mirta didn’t have scars all over her face, and was yet part of a warrior culture, meant that she would react to the idea of scars with horror. And not, oh I don’t know, perhaps laugh in Jacen’s face and tell him to shove it.

In Mandalorian culture, scars are considered badges of honor for a fight well fought and are not actually seen as ugly…but you know, whatever Denning, it’s not like you bothered to actually read anything that Traviss wrote about Mirta or the Mando’ade before you wrote your part of the story, is it? So how would you know or care about that?

Anyway…I’ve never seen anyone else playing Mirta in rp, and thus have no comments to make on what people may or may not get wrong about portraying her here…but the actual canon books on the other hand? Yeah. Nar’sheb, Denning.

I headcanon that Mirta was actually upset at the thought of the nanovirus, and just let Jacen think he’d scared her with the dumb scar threat, and by that point Jacen was so far lost in the Caeduspersona he couldn’t look past his own ego to notice.

For Rey…I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s so much “tend to get wrong” as just “isn’t the way I see the character,” which are not at all the same thing – but I do think some people play her a little too nice. Hapless. Bland. Kind. That tends to happen to just about every female character, though! I don’t think it’s anything specific about Rey.

Although if we want more ranting about bad canon writers...the whole “Rey Nobody” theory is dumb as hell, not because Rey needs to be “related to somebody we know” to be special or important -- but because A: the entire first movie set it up that she was an Organa-Solo did have a major family connection to discover so the “surprise twist” of negating that is just....bad writing, actually? and B: Rey already thought her parents were nobody important so it’s not “subverting” any of her expectations, actually, to make them “nobodies.” Rey didn’t want to find A Special Destiny As The Chosen One (did you not see how she reacted to the lightsaber, Rian? she literally ran away from the idea of having A Destiny) she wanted a family. A family that would come back for her, a family that cared. She wanted love...not “specialness.” And again: it’s not a “clever twist” to just break everything that the writer before you in a shared universe set-up and just leave a story in ruins without even crafting anything to replace it...it’s just bad writing.

The only thing I see people in rp do a lot with her that I just can’t wrap my head around is the reylo ship…because I can’t help but see her and Kylo Ren as analogous to Jaina and Jacen, no matter what it turns out Rey’s canonical lineage is or is not, because that was how they appeared to me immediately during the first few minutes of TFA. But that’s not something that other people do wrong, it’s just not something that fits my pov!

♜ - what is the strongest or most reliable thing about MIRTA GEV?

This is tricky because Mirta is such a strong character to begin with…but I think it’s her sense of loyalty. Her devotion. Once Mirta has embraced a cause or a culture, she’ll go to Hell and back for it – even if it ends up being a disappointing grandfather who turned out to be not as villainous (nor as paternal) as Mirta had wanted. She wasn’t raised fully Mandalorian, but once she decided that they were her people then they were her people. Full-stop. She embraced that part of her identity 110% and dragged ba’buir along with her whether he liked it or not. She’ll fight for her people, bleed for them, die for them if she has to. She’ll never give up, not on them and not on restoring their planet, and not on training the Mandalore to live up to what he’s supposed to be…again, whether Fett likes it or not. And she sure as osik won’t let him die before he’s fulfilled his duty.

[vaderey]

How is IX gonna reconcile the absolute shitshow of writing that was TLJ? Like I’ve been generally really positive about it, but the more you think about it, the more you realize that TLJ absolutely broke Star Wars. The way both Luke and Rey were written to facilitate some sort of dumbass sympathy for Kylo Ren is fucking ridiculous. Luke Skywalker trying to kill his sleeping nephew, no matter what he did doesn’t work. We can’t see that and think yeah he’s still a good guy. IT goes against everything that Luke is and was set up as in the OT. Luke “I am a Jedi like my father before me” “I’ve got to save you.” is a hero through and through, and making him some sort of hermit recluse who doesn’t have a good reason for not helping people anymore was the dumbest thing anyone could’ve done. As for Rey, having her team up with the guy who attacked the people she loved mere days ago make no fucking sense either. There is no way Rey would become sympathetic to Kylo so quickly after he tried to kill Finn, the only person she really has. WHO IS TO HER KNOWLEDGE STILL IN A COMA BECAUSE OF IT. RJ completely refused to acknowledge any real connections the Rey had made in TFA to give her some sort of weird nonsensical connection with the villain. That had absolutely no fucking payoff in the end. We end exactly as we started. Kylo is still evil, Rey still has to defeat him. And having Rey act like some naive girl who doesn’t understand how the world works makes no sense, seeing as we saw her being a gritty and jaded by the world in TFA. The only way I can see IX making it work is through ignoring TLJ the ways TLJ ignored TFA, and that will make for unsatisfying trilogy through and through

[atheistj]

I don’t usually wade into TLJ criticism because there’s already enough of it and there’s nothing I can really say that hasn’t already been said. But I feel like talking about my biggest problem with the movie for a second. You can disagree with me on this. That’s fine. I’m not trying to drag people who love this movie. I just want to mention what the glaring flaw was, for me.

I have my problems with TFA that I can go on about it, but despite all those problems, TFA set things up that we assumed were going to be paid off in the sequel. Who is Rey? Who is Snoke? What’s gonna happen when Luke and Rey meet? These were questions that the movie wanted us to ask. They wanted us to be obsessing over theories for two years. That was the POINT.

So we get to TLJ and the movie provides us with no payoff at all for these questions. They turn the Luke and Rey scene into a scene played for laughs rather than this big scene. They kill off Snoke without doing jack shit with him. And Rey is nobody. Not only that, but it feels like the movie and Lucasfilm is essentially giving us the middle finger and telling us “Hey, it’s YOUR fault you were asking those questions and theorizing for years!” when they give us some of the worst payoff of all time.

We, the fans, weren’t asking these questions just because we wanted to. We were asking them because that’s what TFA WANTED us to do. They set up all these mysteries only to tell us with the sequel “None of that mattered.” And they went for shock value instead, particularly with killing off Snoke when they set him up to be this major threat.

And here’s the thing, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Rey being nobody and Snoke dying. That all actually could have been cool and interesting. But they should not have set up TFA in such a way that we, the audience, were told that these two characters were going to have massive reveals in the future. Killing off Snoke and making Rey nobody isn’t a cool plot twist. It makes so much of TFA feel confusing or even pointless.

You don’t have to agree with me on this. I’m well aware that people love this movie, and that’s great. I’m not really looking for a debate about this either. This was just my main problem with a movie I had a lot of problems with.

[mereoleonawifecity]

All never get over rat Johnson scrapping the scene between Finn and Paige Tico that directly paralleled his introductory scene because rat Johnson couldn’t figure out how to finish writing the scene but had no problem writing one with Luke milking titties

[emperorren]

What if Kylo IS being set up as a raging villain for IX, though? You’re right that Rian probably needed to hand him off as a believable villain for the next movie, and any nuance we see in Kylo on Crait is because of the acting performance, not the writing. But I’M a Kylo stan and I thought he went too far on Crait, and I think the reason non-stans point to Crait as a scene that makes him more irredeemable than killing Han is because he was conflicted with Han but on Crait he’s super gung-ho.

Despite all my qualms with his portrayal and other stuff, I don’t think he actually crossed any particular line on Crait. For all his bitchin’ and frothing at the mouth he didn’t accomplish anything and didn’t inflict any permanent damage, aside from indirectly causing Luke’s death by creating the conditions that made his sacrifice-via-force-projection necessary. Sure, only external intervention prevented him from doing anything irreparable, which doesn’t negate that the intent of inflicting damage was absolutely there, but at the end of the day his regression to villainy is more about the way he acts, how his behavior is framed, than about what he *does*. 

And we know he never hated Han but he absolutely loathed (and feared) Luke, and not without reason on his part, hence the lack of hesitation at firing all his guns on Luke whereas he hesitated with his father. It’s not that he turned more evil, it’s that Luke specifically elicits the worst in him because he’s the one who is directly responsible of the most traumatic event in his life, the one that changed it all. 

His rampage isn’t funny to watch, from a stan’s perspective. Mostly because you can see he’s deliberately shutting all the goodness and the sweetness of the moments with Rey out. That’s particularly hard to stomach because we all thought that once they’d start getting close it would be all downhill towards redemption, and yet it was the opposite. But in the last moments, starting from when he realizes that Luke wasn’t actually there but was force-projecting himself and thus he was probably dying all alone light years away, to the cave scene when he finds the dice and has the last connection with Rey, you can’t say there’s no conflict in him. It may not be regret for Luke’s death per se, but for all that went wrong, for childhood memories forever lost to him, for his loneliness, for losing Rey. Perhaps there’s a beginning of self-awareness that he fucked up big time, if not genuine remorse, too. It’s more than we got at the end of TFA, where yes, he looked on the verge of an emotional meltdown, but aside from the face he made right after killing Han there was no individual scene dedicated exclusively to him and his misery.

I think if Rian was setting him up as an irredeemable villain he could have ended the film with Kylo crushing the phantom dice in his fist and commanding to burn the entire cave to ashes, and that would have been a glorious Lucifer Rising cliffhanger for IX. Instead his last actions included making puppy eyes at Rey and looking absolutely defeated as the dice disappear. So I think the real goal wasn’t setting him up as definitely irredeemable as much as restoring a post-TFA status quo in terms of ambiguity re: Kylo’s final fate, with the audience split between redemptionists and he’ll-die-a-villain-ists. Mission accomplished, I guess.

[rootbeergoddess]

Like one of the reasons I know R*ylo won’t be canon is because of TLJ. Again, even though people like the movie, it wasn’t a massive success. It lost Disney $200 million and they also had to remove it from China. The merchandise sales went down drastically and they haven’t recovered. TLJ pushed R*ylo and I really don’t think Disney would want to push something that is associated with a failure.