No its not. Its got more deep cut references than any casual star wars fan would ever be privy too. In fact its quite obvious by watching it how much of a star wars nerd he is. References to obscure books published in the past and more.
"Rian Johnson cares about star wars" is such an absurd position that I feel sorry for you trying to insist on it. JJ's stuff is bad because of his whole "string people along with mystery boxes" writing philosophy, but at least I could believe he likes star wars because of how he made his star trek movie feel more like star wars and how angry he was when Johnson pissed all over the plot threads set up in The Force Awakens. (Which, by the way, is not something you do when you really care about the project.) But RJ has just the kind of hatred of the past, hatred of the giants whose shoulders he's standing on attitude that is the topic of this witcher thread and that is so common with these corpos nowadays. You know the books aren't as obscure as you think, they were popular. That expanded universe the books exist in, that Disney lovingly and respectfully killed off had a following. Han was a good dad in them, and Luke was a heroic Jedi. But now Luke is a murder attempting loser and the Jedi suck, because RJ just loves star wars that much.
Then you don't know much about feminism. That same character uses her own chains to kill her captor.
A character being sexy or wearing skimpy attire is not anti feminist lol.
And neither do feminists I guess. I suppose Mai Shiranui and Tifa Lockhart are feminist icons now, since they're sexy babes who beat up the bad guys that capture them. You can be the one to tell the feminists, not me. Relax, they're not known to get mad about sexy girl characters in games, and they're very kind and reasonable, it'll go well.
No? Because what people like about the thing doesn't make a thing good in and of itself either. It being good does that. Hugo weaving has hated a lot of projects he was in but he still did good. Mark Hamill wasn't feeling lukes treatment on TLJ but he still put in the work and delivered a great performance. It happens all the time.
Look no further than the prequel trilogy to see this. That was George Lucas own brainchild and most of it is nigh unwatchable at this point. Sure it has stuff we like about star wars in it but ultimately those movies fall flat because those things are just surface level additions with little depth facilitated by the story.
YES. I don't know how people are being so willfully obstinate about this point. But at least you gave some examples to show how much you aren't understanding the premise of the thread.
Yeah, Hugo weaving did hate projects he was in, usually because of exhausting make up or prosthetics he had to put on, and of course Hamill hated TLJ with RJ's "loving" treatment of the star wars universe lol. But these people are ACTORS. They're not in charge of adaptation or the messaging of the story. We're talking about writers, directors, showrunners,
not people who aren't deciding how to approach the source material. Otherwise it's sophism.
I agree with you that the prequel trilogy is bad. I'd say it exposes how much Lucas was dependent on other talented people around him for the original trilogy, but was surrounded by Yes-men who couldn't give critical feedback when he was a powerful famous old out of touch man many years later. But I'm not saying people who care about the source material are always going to make something good, it's still hard to make something good even in those advantageous circumstances. I'm saying people who hate the source material and seek to use it for their own ends, in the manner of modern politically minded hollywood types, will never be able to reproduce what makes that source material great in the first place.
Here's a very simplified example to illustrate the issue. There's 2 writers making a superman movie. Let's say they're both very talented and they both don't care about superman. The first guy is humble about it, researches it, tries to get who superman is and put that in a movie, even though superman isn't his cup of tea. His Superman has black hair and a red cape, he flies around and says and does superman like things. Since the guy is such a good writer and things come together well it ends up being a good superman movie. The 2nd guy hates superman, hates people that like superman, hates things associated with superman like America or superheroes... he's a current year type of privileged writer like the witcher show staff, rings of power creators, that type of mentality. He gives superman blond hair, a green cape and since what he's really into is antique cars, superman never flies. The writer just changes the show to be about his personal obsessions and superman drives everywhere in antique cars. People who hate superman and what he stands for, or who care more about antique cars might say it's a good superman movie. But everyone else would say it's a failure because it scarcely has anything to do with superman.
Thats ridiculous.
For starters, calling 1 or 2 token black guys in a sea of other characters is not "diversity" lol. For two, if you're criticizing newer surface simply because they use minoritiy character and attaching the quality to that, then that IS pretty toxic considering I doubt most would like the project better if they had just cast mor white people.
Come on. You can't seriously be saying that 2 black actors in a good old star wars movie 40 years ago are meaningless tokens but when a modern day film like the last Jedi has 2 black actors it's like "omg so diverse thank you disney!" lol. The thing about characters like Lando and Darth Vader is they got to be cool characters that people liked. If you want to see what it's like when a diversity hire is pushed to the side and their story goes nowhere and they have nothing meaningful to do because the creators don't care then look no further than Finn. Set up as the most intriguing and interesting character - a storm trooper who turns good - as things progress he's a space janitor whose role is increasingly diminished to being around to fall over in slapstick moments of b-plots everyone hated.
And you say companies use it as a shield but that doesn't really happen. There is no "shield" but there is dismissal of criticism that tries to implicate the diversity of rhe cast with the drop in quality. Anyone should be able to see through that nonsense.
In a world where Rian Johnson cares a lot about star wars it doesn't really happen, but here on earth Amazon just made a Lord of the Rings show with dialogue like "do you know why a boat floats but a rock sinks?" It also has "Elves" that are not just race swapped but are unlike the source material in every possible way. They don't have a mysterious aura or almost angelic characteristics like in the source material or the older films that revere the source material. They're just exactly like humans with $2 halloween costume pointy vulcan ears attached...in a massively high budget tv show. And would you believe tolkien enthusiasts are critical of this trash from some reason? Then when they do criticize it the all too predictable modern day response in corporate media is the same as it is with everything else. It's not the corpos that are evil, like Amazon with unethical worker treatment and agenda driven programming, but the showrunners said in the hollywood reporter that their "patently evil" critics were racist and sexist.
Fans that liked minority and female characters in star wars before but weren't too happy with "content" like Kenobi, which carries on the modern trend of hatefully sidelining traditional male heroes in a similar manner to the witcher tv series were of course portrayed as toxic racists by disney through social and access media. They ran many posts and articles deflecting fan criticism by falsely equating it with some mean tweets mocking actress Moses Ingram's "girl vader but better" character or calling her out for saying dumb stuff like implying she was the first black person in star wars. It couldn't possibly be that fans of kenobi want kenobi to be like kenobi in the show called "kenobi." It's gotta be racism that selectively rears its head only when disney make their awful star wars output.
As stated, diverse and female characters have existed before the current era of hatred toward the source material and the fanbases of said material were not "toxic and racist" about it. What's changed is the hatefulness of elite types towards ordinary people and popular stories that don't express the radical political ideas of the hollywood hivemind. It's not that the "diversity shield" happens, it's that it's become typical. The whole reason I posted in this thread was I wanted reasonable people who somehow hadn't noticed to be aware. Disney just put out an amusingly bad man-hating Black Panther sequel. In the coming weeks when fans roast it and it under-performs compared to the previous black panther movie, do you really think hollywood types and corpo media won't try to gaslight people in to thinking that fans who liked that previous black panther movie are now sexist and racist for disliking the new one?
That ess overblown. Look up the poster for the second movie and he features prominently on there even in China. Sure, they may have capitulated to Chinese censors originally bu they didn't stick with that. I'll take omprofnenr over perfection.
I would say this evidence illustrates very strongly the opposite point. The first movie poster shows the real disney and what they do when they think they can get away with it without being noticed, and the second movie poster shows what disney is forced to do when the "toxic fans" hold them accountable for their evil and hypocrisy by exposing, mocking and memeing on them. Could it be any more obvious that the virtue signalling corpos that no longer make entertainment that stimulates thought, but instead produce content that tells people what to think, are the evil galactic empire, and the fans they smear as toxic are the plucky rebel alliance? This wasn't even a unique example, disney also covered up black panther's face with a mask only for the chinese version of the black panther poster, years after that star wars poster.
What has happened is that audience has changed. Not only has it changed to involve a much more diverse swath of people(which also increases capitalist potential) but a portion of it has also changed to be vocally and virulent opposed to even the normal levels of diversity we've gotten before. Those people need to be pushed away regardless. They don't belong anymore.
Opinions on the indivudal shoes and whatever is all well and good but trying to reduce all media down to some simple ideological warfare is juvenile. Thrrrd for more nuance to the discussion than that.
"All of what seems like extreme political messaging from elites is really just capitalism expanding the audience bro" is something you just can't gaslight people with at this late date. Yes, the audience has changed - by shrinking more and more as activists double down on their hatred of regular people and popular stories that don't express the elite's radical ideas. Disney had their biggest single day stock loss in 2 decades recently, and Amazon is trying all sorts of trickery to desperately fudge Rings of Power viewership numbers as they dropped massively after the first episode and kept going down the longer the show went on. Meanwhile The House of the Dragon, which also had race swapped characters but was generally respectful towards its source material, had its ratings go up as its audience kept growing every week. The notion you put forward here that nothing malicious is going on with all these shows but their fans changed to become racist is just...silly. And I'm embarrassed for you that you would say that. And wow at rhetoric like "those people don't belong" lol. You sound like you're a writer in charge of adapting a beloved tale of heroism for netflix or disney and you're "updating it for modern audiences" or something.
Sorry about the late response/thread bump. I wanted to reply when I read this a few weeks ago but I got really busy and that ain't changing anytime soon.