“Rock bottom for woke Star Wars”? That thumbnail does not sell me on wanting to even open the link to see if it’s crap or sarcasm.
I haven't watched it yet, but RLM tends to dunk on the over politicization by the fandom.
I watched it through. I think their message is more nuanced and varied. They don't tend to fall into culture wars, from either side. For example, they mention the joke that the director of Acolyte made about R2D2 being a lesbian, and ridicule the right-wing reactions to that.
I'd call them a voice of reason, but then again, I'm a long time fan.
I don't think the problem is the politization or "wokeness" of Star Wars, we've seen politics injected into Star Wars for awhile, it's just this constant badly written drivel that they keep shoveling out. The problem is that in lieu of having anything well-written (apart from Andor), they're rolling out the diversity card thinking they'll get kudos for being "progressive" OR they're adding this in knowing it'll cause a nontroversy and then using that to defend the poorly written crap because obviously it's just toxic fandom that doesn't appreciate their "vision". Adding diversity and being inclusive in our media is fine, we should be able to see other perspectives, but trash is still trash no matter how much diversity you add to it.
That's sort of how "wokeness" works though. The important part is the who, the what is totally irrelevant.
Hour and a half video... when do they start saying anything interesting?
54 minutes until they actually start reviewing the show.
Up until then, the video can be boiled down to:
- fans and pundits focusing on political alignments of sci-fi should STFU and focus on real shit, and
- sci-fi creators should stop leaning on progressive idealism in lieu of good storytelling when justifying their existence.
Even more concisely: things are good or bad regardless of their political ideology.
I have quibbles with many their arguments, including the Rotten Tomatoes demonstration of progressive-leaning media having high critic ratings and low public ratings vs conservative-leaning media being flipped the other way. You make that case by pointing out examples of modern Christian-financed movies and conservative documentaries that don’t completely suck, which they didn’t do.
That said, I’m not arguing that good Christian-financed movies and conservative documentaries don’t exist. They absolutely might, and I’d like to see them if they do. But I also absolutely do not trust the ideologues to fairly or accurately measure quality in that way.
And that’s precisely the problem they’re pointing out with modern Star Wars and Trek. The creators seem to be getting high on their own progressive ideology and forgetting to focus on making great media first, which is SUPER annoying for people who don’t share those views.
I’m a lefty type, and I get it. I’d feel the same way if the genre I loved was flooded with hella conservative content and the creators were parading around its conservatism as a reason it’s so great.
The Disney pr team has sensed a disturbance in the force. Somehow, bad reviews returned
Man it’s hard being a fan who genuinely dislikes a good amount of the Disney stuff for reasons other than “mouse worked my show, woke bad!”
The ST was an unplanned, nonsensical mess which there is no excuse for given the experienced directors, money thrown at it, and IP that landed in their laps.
Rebels was good, Resistance was a hot mess.
Rogue One was great, still watch it on a regular basis with the OT/PT
Solo was meh.
First 2 seasons of Mando were great.
Mando season 3 sucked.
BOBF sucked.
Kenobi sucked but seeing Alderaan was cool.
Andor was fucking amazeballs.
Ahsoka was ok.
Acolyte has just been really boring so far until Ep 5, which brought some good action and story. The writing and acting still need work though.
I don’t know what the answer is. A lot of the stories are good but they just aren’t executed very well. With Kenobi it was also the quality of the effects…like it wasn’t finished completely in post-production. I hope Ahsoka season 2 is better, and I hope they make things that you don’t have to have read 20 years of Legends to follow (even though they’re great and should be read).
I wanna hope that things will pick up, but it’s been 10 years and idk how long they can keep just being “ok” considering the IP, the tech, the money, and the experience behind the scenes that goes into all of it.
The trouble really started when they jumped into Ep 7 without anyone having a coherent vision for the whole trilogy. I still have no idea how that didn't occur to them.
Latest episode is what we had all been waiting for.
