02670: Toxic Fandom


So there's been a lot of hate in the Star Wars fandom ever since the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi last year. The movie made some "controversial" plot twists that I personally felt had worked out in an interesting manner but not everyone was happy with how it turned out. Those feelings continued to simmer so by the time Solo: A Star Wars Story came out there was a lot of online chatter about expecting the movie to "fail'. And while the movie made a good amount of money, this still felt short of what one would expect from a Star Wars movie.

Since then a ridiculous petition has been started to somehow remake the movie and make it "better", but what this exactly means is hard to define. They have a pledge fund that only really seems to exist as promises to pledge and not actual money turned over and it's all very silly. Now there are new rumors that Disney is eager to get rid of Kathleen Kennedy, current head of Lucasfilm under Disney. Cue the usual conspiracy theories about her terrible "SJW agenda".

It's a sad time to count ranting fans with unrealistic demands as part of the Star Wars community.

The Franchise Needs to Grow Beyond the Skywalkers - One of the quirks of the Legends books is how almost everything could be traced back to Luke Skywalker and his immediate family. It was a safe way to create stories that stood a better chance of being relatable to more fans of the movies since it was hard to image the Star Wars stories outside that context. But if this movie franchise is going to continue growing, we can't rely on the Skywalkers being the family fated to drive the narrative for every historic event in the Star Wars universe. That's a ridiculous limitation to impose on other writers to come and we need new stories.

Spin-offs Need to Make Sense - It has been hard to reach to the news of various Star Wars spin-offs as they've largely been tagged to characters. The Han Solo movie. The Boba Fett movie. The Obi-Wan movie. These are really just characters with no immediate stories attached to them. It's lazy and while there are probably good stories to be told, you can't start with a character and work your way from there. The core trilogy is on the right track by charting a new path forward but I totally get while the spin-offs are doing as strongly. We need more than just a marketing catchphrase to start a story that one can craft a good movie for.

The Movies Are Not Beholden to the Old Expanded Universe - What we now know as the Legends continuity of books and comics was a stopgap measure to keep Star Wars fans entertained in the absence of new movies continuing the story after Return of the Jedi. And fans need to accept that not everyone read those books and so the writers and producers planning out the new movies have no reason to create stories that link to so many different books a limited portion of the movie audience have read. That doesn't make business sense of fans need to let go and trust in the team and see where the stories take us now.

Your Fanfic Isn't Real - And realistically no story will possibly live up to our wildest imaginations and a lot of fans have had decades to think of possible stories for how things resolve. But again unrealistic expectations don't justify this much backlash for things not going precisely as hoped.

We can do better - no in terms of the moves but how fans are approaching the franchise. And Disney could also afford to ease off their eagerness to make more money and not have more than one Star Wars movie per year. December is a good release schedule for these things as both the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter franchises have trained us to expect good stuff at the end of the year.

Comments