The Last Jedi and the Dark Side of the Fandom
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I first saw Star Wars at the age of four. I was at my grandparents’ house, and my uncle had a VHS copy. My sister, two years older, was super excited to see it for the third time, and she was at the age where messing with me wasn’t just a pastime, but part of the natural order of siblings. She turned up the volume loud enough to hear outside, and started it, wanting to recreate that movie theater bombast of sound to blast away the rest of the world and leave only the movie in its place.
When the Stormtroopers first blasted through the hatch onto Leia’s ship, I was hiding behind a chair, afraid of how loud the explosion was because, again, I was four. She still brings it up, even today, if I come close to rivaling her fandom to take me down a peg.
When Return of the Jedi debuted, my uncle saw it five times in one week, and took my sister every time. It was determined that I was too young to go, as it got out three hours past my bedtime. She left every time with a grin on her face, and kept “the big spoiler” secret until I finally saw it myself once it was acquired on VHS.
I loved Star Wars, even if I didn’t get to mainline it like a lot of people. The lone action figure I had was one of the nobodies, the also-rans, and being under the age of ten I wasn’t thinking to keep it mint in box and sell it later to pay for three years of college.
When The Phantom Menace premiered I attended a midnight showing with friends, and we showed up an hour early to get a parking spot. A pizza place stayed open, wisely calling it that early-birds would load up on slices to avoid buying $17 popcorns in cheap plastic collectible bins. I got to join in with the cheers when the Lucasfilm logo appeared, the eruption of applause, hoots, and hollers when that iconic main title started, some people jumping to their feet and waving their plastic lightsabers in the air.
It was a theater full of college kids and high-schoolers, people like me who were too young to have seen the original trilogy in the theaters, but it was okay. This was going to be our trilogy, after all. The prequels we’d share with our friends and eventually our own kids.
So yeah, I was disappointed, but not to the levels that some people were. Jar Jar was kinda lame, but I wasn’t about to grab a torch and pitchfork. Jake Lloyd was… a kid working with not-awesome writing, and made “Yippie!” one of Darth Vader’s immortal lines, but I still cringe at the shit that the “fans” put that poor kid through afterward. It’s also where I learned about toxic fandom.
Sidestepping into education for a moment, as a professor I make it a point to consult Beloit College’s infamous “Mindset List”, an annual release to familiarize educators with what incoming students will be familiar with, and what they won’t be familiar with. It’s often shared as a means to mock people older than us, until we reach the year where the list starts to make us feel old, to imply two words that aren’t just a revived series on Netflix: arrested development.
With that in mind, let’s go back to the Star Wars cinematic universe, a setting that has endured since 1977, over 40 years, a setting that has taught the basic morality of good and evil, Light Side and Dark Side, to Baby Busters, Generation X, Echo Boomers/Generation Y, Millennials, and iGen/Generation Z. It’s not a zeitgeist, it’s considered to be a cultural institution, a common ground for millions to start from. It gave us films, cartoons, TV specials, dozens of books, hundreds of comics, tabletop roleplaying games and countless computer and video games that gave an extra peek, another story, something else to color in the lines.
As a result, some people are protective, some a little too much, some entirely too much, when any change or addition is proposed or inserted or made canon, set in stone. When the new trilogy debuted, there was understandably pushback as it wasn’t being shepherded by George Lucas, meaning that Star Wars would have to survive without his lazy writing, unnecessary angst, and broad-painted stereotypes. (Remember, this is a guy who told Carrie Fisher she couldn’t wear underwear in space because it would strangle her.) But also, the leads changed.
The primary leads of the original trilogy? Luke, Han, Leia. Two white straight guys (one late teens, the other in his 30s), one white straight girl under the age of 21 in a generally supporting role. Prequels? Anakin, Obi-Wan, Padme. Two white straight guys (one late teens, one in his 30s), one white straight girl under the age of 21 in a generally supporting role. The new trilogy? Finn, Poe, Rey. Probably straight black man (early 20s), possibly bi/pansexual Latinx man (early 20s), possibly asexual white girl (early 20s). In the era of the alt-right, Gamergate, and toxic masculinity being called out, the screeching backlash to The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi is by no means justified, but it’s understandable why it’s there.
So let’s go back to two terms mentioned earlier that often go hand in hand: toxic fandom and arrested development. Science-fiction and fantasy were learned and gendered early on from the baby boomers all the way to Generation Y to be white, heterosexual, and male. However, as time passed and the diversity of readers and consumers in American markets increased, diversity of leads and characters emerged from niche markets to establish themselves as feasible choices for publishing, playwriting, and screenwriting. (It doesn’t mean that it’s a given, unfortunately. Writers and artists are often encouraged or given notes to Anglicize names and concepts “to increase marketability”, or they self-censor/edit for fear of rejection from mainstream houses.) The concept of arrested development is that while a person’s body may grow and mature, emotional growth and maturity is not a given, hence some feeling even on a good day to think like they’re still fifteen, even if in their forties. Popular culture has been assigned some of the blame, providing validation for arrested development by marketing subjects typical aimed at adolescents and those in their twenties to those who aren’t that age but still think like they are.
As a result, this section of the fandom often has more time invested by virtue of age, and therefore equates that time invested to degree of entitlement over the direction of a specific franchise, and discounting new targets of marketing. If the concept seems off-putting regarding Star Wars, it can easily be applied to the backlash to making Doctor Who a woman, even if it was established in the canon that the titular Doctor could regenerate as anything, he always returned as a pasty white Englishman. (Articles have been written to describe that the Doctor would always return as a white male to ensure privilege would allow and forgive his shenanigans, and only with the recent social progress would the Doctor return as a woman to ensure they’re be taken seriously in a crisis.)
However, the same arguments return with Star Wars when the Force Sensitive lead is written as a woman. “Mary Sue” is the most common insult thrown out regarding Rey, the term often meaning a self-based character with zero to very few flaws who is immediately an expert at everything they do, and serendipity follows them about like an attention-starved puppy, and the veracity of that charge is a whole ‘nother essay unto itself, but it does beg the question of why the same label was never applied to Luke. If the response is that Mary Sue is only applied to women, it must be asked why the term was freely applied to Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: TNG. Luke is not charged with being a Mary Sue by the more toxic wings of the fandom being 1) he’s a white, implied to be straight” male, and 2) he’s the hero that they grew up with, that they wanted to be like, and applying that trait to him would be in a sense applying it to themselves.
The Last Jedi received much of the “fan”-rage for shutting the door on Rey being connected to any of the major bloodlines in the SWU: the Skywalkers… and that’s pretty much it. By connecting her to the Skywalkers, she would share blood with Anakin, Luke, and Kylo (Leia, too, but we all saw how the toxic wing took Leia having the gall to use the Force to save her own life.), and therefore, her strength and power would be tied to, and owed to, powerful men, instead of coming from nothing.
The film also complicated the rather simple morality that had existed in Star Wars and most traditional fantasy. Rebellion good, Sith/Empire/First Order bad, and that was all there was to it. The scene on Canto Bight (the casino planet) was to establish that the only real winners were the arms dealers, selling to both sides, glutting themselves off a war that had been raging for years. While the First Order was still clearly evil, the Rebellion’s luster was tarnished slightly, introducing moral questions that typically aren’t expected in a Star Wars movie, but questions that 15-30 year-olds have to handle in 2018 that they didn’t have to handle in 1977. Until The Last Jedi the most vicious Star Wars morality debate was about whether or not Han shot first.
Returning to arrested development, part of the complexities of the new Star Wars trilogy lies both in a more established canon (which now includes two animated series, which brought a disavowed villain out of the cold of the former Expanded Universe, the most sinister art history major ever), and in its marketing, in that it’s no longer targeted at aging white men, but a wider, more diverse audience to reflect a wider and more diverse fandom. One only has to look at the box office to tell the tale. The key is that as the fandom expands, more diverse and younger voices will be the basis of that expansion, who not only want stories that feature them too, but also have the disposable income to support it.
If Disney is, as planned, going to keep releasing Star Wars movies until long after the fans of the original trilogy are dead, then the older factions of the fandom must accept that, as the new trilogy has shown, Star Wars isn’t just for them anymore, that POC and LGBTIQAP+ people are fans too, and would like to see people like them being the hero and saving the galaxy. They need to see that other people can have their stories in the Star Wars universe as well, to not fear it. Because, well, fear has led to anger. That anger has led to hatred. That hatred has led to suffering. And suffering… well… I think Star Wars fans know what that leads to.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://vaughndemont.com/2018/06/27/the-last-jedi-and-the-dark-side-of-the-fandom/
I think a lot of these points are right, but I think a lot of the fans aren't necessarily just upset about increasing inclusion, since a lot of the fans who have become disappointed in the Star Wars trilogy enjoy other works that are plenty inclusive (I consider myself to be in that category, to an extent: the Expanse is to me what Star Wars used to be, a sci-fi universe I can count on enjoying fresh content from).
I think that part of the thing that's having issues is that Star Wars is having something of an identity crisis. It's not sure if it wants to be a kid's movie or not, which wasn't a problem with the Original Trilogy (which generally didn't try to be a kid's movie), wasn't a problem with the Prequels (which generally did, though Episode III was more mature: Episode III aged with its target audience), and now the New Trilogy alternates back and forth.
One of the things that made the first Star Wars hold up so well (and it doesn't actually hold up as well as fans say: I teach it so I'm pretty familiar with it) is that the story is very much traditional in format. You have a hero who faces real loss and accomplishes a real triumph by the end.
The Force Awakens pulled that off better than The Last Jedi, which is why you didn't see quite as much of a backlash against it as you saw with TLJ.
The thing that TLJ got in trouble with is that it presented a problem but not a solution to that problem, and it's unclear who the hero is in a plethora of characters and action that really reflects an approach more similar to the MCU.
I think that there are a lot of people who do use the focus on diversity in casting as a point to attack the newer films because they fail to see that The Last Jedi is really nothing more than a blunder. It's no worse than the Prequels, but they don't see that because they're looking for a reason.
While the more logical reason is that the Star Wars universe isn't a magic formula that guarantees a good movie (anyone familiar with the EU should be aware of the fact that not all Star Wars content over the years has been good by a long shot), and TLJ's team was drawn off in different directions for marketing concerns and in an attempt to swell the cast. I don't think the motive for this is necessarily solely because of diversity; I think they wanted to hit on the same success the MCU has had with its broad array of characters and open paths for more content down the road.
There are also real missteps, things that should've been caught. They literally had a plot point in TLJ centered on a traffic violation. That's a crappy Monday, not a Hero's Journey. Solo got a lot of things right and kept stakes high, and it worked really well with the new formula.
I think that a lot of the fandom had absolute trust in Star Wars, a belief that it could do no (significant) wrong. When they were left disappointed, they sought a scapegoat without considering the real reason to avoid accepting the fact that there could just be a mistake in how the franchise has been handled that doesn't revolve around some larger worldview.
It's a good point bringing up the MCU, considering that both the MCU and the SWU are both under the Disney umbrella so both are going to be nudged into a "house style". Also, I think Forbes did an article about how Ep 9's issue won't be screeching fanboys, but competition. Star Wars usually didn't have to worry about sharing opening weekend with any other AAA blockbusters, but that's changed in recent years. All you have to do is look at what's opening in December 2019 to see what it'll be up against.
Solo was... a heist movie that just happened to be in the SWU, and I think it worked because it's a flavor of Marvel's "common movie genre, only with superheroes! :D" house style.
Yeah. My hope is that Star Wars can move on in a direction that learns from its mistakes, which are thinking that it has things it really doesn't have like it used to (for instance, they were able to have some of the Original Trilogy characters return, but not really enough to carry the plot forward).
If you had told me ten years ago that Star Wars was going to have to seriously compete, I wouldn't have believed you. Solo really showed us that it will have to, and people argue that that's because it was a side-plot, but I think it's really because Disney isn't approaching it with enough concern for the finished product.
Solo was amazing. It might be one of my top movies of 2018 (I would even say it's almost as good as Infinity Wars, which I thought dragged out a little much).
I think they could learn from Luke Cage and create a Star Wars that's got a little bit deeper villains. The First Order just isn't as compelling, and Kylo Ren manages to be aggressively shallow between moments of looking like he's developing.
The thing that surprised me in Luke Cage is that Shades, who I really wanted to go off and die during Season 1, actually wound up becoming one of my favorite villains, with actual moral conflict and development. The new Star Wars villains lack the mystique of the old ones, because they draw too much upon their past (ironic, given Kylo Ren's catchphrase from the most recent movie), and they aren't really shown to have a good reason why they fight.
We can buy the existence of an evil Empire, but the people who follow it need a reason to exist. If you had simply said "Oh wait, we didn't really finish them off!" that would make sense. However, nobody really seems to like the First Order in-universe. It's not successful enough for people to stick with it because of the potential benefits (I mean, at least from my observation: we've seen them lose a superweapon, barely hunt down a massively outgunned rebel fleet at the cost of their main flagship and their leader), and I just can't understand the organization's purpose.
I think they just need more talent involved. It feels like they're going for the opposite approach to Blade Runner. Instead of lingering and giving us time to fall asleep, they over-stimulate everyone and fail to deliver substance.
Shades really is an excellent character, especially in the new season, and Bushmaster... I agree with the AV Club that he commands the camera with every scene he's in, but they needed to figure out how much exposition he really needed. As always, the weak link in Luke Cage is, well, Luke Cage. Mike Colter is a fantastic Luke Cage, but there are so many scenes of "Luke's closing himself off again". I mean, if you can point out the likely emotional arc of the season in the first 90 seconds of the opener, and the protagonist doesn't figure it out until the penultimate episode... It's like how the DCTVU are working on moving off from that tired trope of "the hero's keeping secrets because he doesn't want anyone to get hurt", but they still stumble. Is it required that EVERY hero has to have that moment of hand-wringing?
Yeah, all of the Marvel Netflix stuff tends to feel like people miss the obvious solutions.
It's like whoever ordered the series said "And the incredibly obvious solution of the protagonist getting over X needs to wait until the end of the season."
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