Yeah, I hear that.
The first part, I mean. I watched the original Star Wars movies as a kid and they were… fine. I’ve rewatched them as an adult and they are still fine, although for different reasons.
Star Wars was written as a tribute to B Movies and does a very successful job of being a series of B Movies.
But I don’t much care for B Movies. So being the best B Movie is still pretty “meh.”
They’re certainly watchable – unlike the prequels.
I liked the first one because it looked like the space opera I used to read as a kid, even though the story was rubbish and the characters were flat. By the third one I was thinking, “What am I doing here?” I never saw another.
HECK YEAH! CINDEL! Disney totally messed up when they removed her movis from canon. Not like they impact anything >< Where are the Ewoks Disney? WHERE ARE THE EWOKS?!
I was thinking about this the other day and while there are scenes I *like* more I find Rogue One to be the most re-watchable. The mainline SW films feel like event movies that I need to devote my attention to. RO is good and beautiful but also something I can put on while surfing the web. I think that’s because I used to do the same with a TV channel that showed a lot of the war movies RO evokes.
I’m old enough that I remember a time when saying that my favorite Star Wars movie was Return of the Jedi would get me mocked. That was the “bad” Star Wars for 16 years.
Even though it has more awesome shit that any other film in the trilogy: Jabba’s palace, the Rancor, the sand barge, the speeder bikes, the bigger and more exciting Death Star battle, Yoda’s emotional death, Luke’s confrontation with the Emperor, Vader’s redemption, and Leia and Han getting together. But it had Ewoks so fuck me for liking it.
Then the prequels came out and Jedi was cool now, we hate the prequels instead. And then the sequels so now we forgive the prequels and hate on those.
This is why I can’t take any of the current Star Wars “controversy” seriously. Seriously, I’m old and I was there, SW fans have always been like this.
Right? Vicious little bastards, nearly eat the heroes. And they have empty Stormtrooper helmets at the end, so what do you think was being served at the victory party?
But they looked cute and toylike. If they’d been reptile or insect looking then no one would have had a problem with them being badasses. Even though in real life even small bears are bad news.
In terms of box office, yeah, but that was mostly due to backlash from Last Jedi, among other date issues.
Solo as a whole seems to be well received by fans and critics alike. Add that with the positive reception Rogue One got and it’s still kinda stupid why Kathleeen dropped the idear.
It’s not a great movie, but it isn’t terrible. It underperformed at the box office, but it had little to do with backlash to TLJ. Much more important to its perceived failure were a) the release date (too close to TLJ), b) the lack of a marketing push (it didn’t even get a trailer until 3 months before release), c) the very publicly troubled production and d) it being a Han Solo movie 30 years too late and without Harrison Ford.
By what “objective” measure specifically was Solo terrible? It was not as good as Rogue One but it was way better than episode 7 or especially episode 8. The Last Jedi was by a fair measure the worst Star Wars movie ever made and The Force Awakens was only marginally better.
the force awakens was a good movie. It held a lot of promise for the new triology, with interesting new characters, and a great jump on point.
The Last Jedi then wasted all that potential by focusing on the boring as hell Kylo Ren instead of on the far more interesting duo or Finn and Rey.
I dunno, the effects and writing on the prequel trilogy make them unwatchable to me.
Yeah, I know that I’m gonna get mocked for it. But seriously, bad special effects and/or dialogue can destroy a film for me way more than most other flaws
LITERALLY THOUGH. Every time something new comes out, it’s the worst thing ever and ruins Star Wars. Then the next thing comes out and old thing was fine, it’s the new thing that’s awful and on and on and on.
I don’t think there’s anything that could come out that would make me like the current movies, and I don’t think there’s as much a cycle of hate it, now love it! I think people got a little tripped up by ewoks, maybe. But then Jar Jar was goofier. I think people mostly liked 2 and 3 because they were mostly war again, minus a few cheeseball or wooden delivery lines.
I saw it with the fandom every time like clockwork. First it was the prequels, then Star Wars: The Clone Wars, then TFA, then TLJ and Rebels, etc. I look forward to whatever comes next.
I have no dog in this race, seeing as I’m not a Star Wars FAN (and also I stopped watching the movies after episode VII, because if Rey’s already beaten the bad guy in both the physical and psychological plances, why would I care about the rest of the trilogy?), but as an aside I’ve never heard anyone talking about Clone Wars that WASN’T praising it?
if you were going to define “milking a franchise”, is there a better example in any medium than the seventy-thirteen iterations of this schlock? it isn’t really a question of which was worst, it’s mostly about which insult is freshest in your mind.
Seriously. Watching Phantom Menace, my two takeaways before I noped out were:
– Sheesh, that is some awful dialogue, and
– The consistency with which EVERYONE is giving these awkward line reads that seem designed to cram too much info in a short time says to me this is very much a directorial/writing choice, not an acting one, which makes the harassment the actors got even worse. (Not that ANYONE deserves the harassment that fandom has inflicted on its creators. You can critique things without being a vitriolic shithead.)
I was okay with the prequels, they weren’t great, but at least they filled in the backstory, and it was fun seeing the younger versions of the various heroes and villains. When I watched the Last Jedi and very quickly realized that they had tossed out 30 years of very carefully curated extended universe it killed it for me. All I could think of was “WTF, the empire lost, what is going on here? and where is Mara Jade, and where are the other offspring, there were more kids than that whiny emo twit.” And when I realized I had already seen this movie when it was called A New Hope, that is when I lost any interest in watching any more of the sequel movies, and I grew up a huge Star Wars fan, watched the first one in the first theatre in my area to get surround sound, as a teenager in 1977.
Blowing up the EU was a necessary step, much like the equally controversial time-travel reset in the Star Trek universe, simply because the canon was so bloated and so mixed up that trying to keep it all would’ve been nigh-impossible. So instead, declare, “Here is the limited canon. Anything else we decide to keep from the EU will be piecemeal, if it fits the story we’re trying to tell.”
Not only was it bloated and mixed-up, but it was also completely unknown to 90+% of the movie audience they were hoping for.
Roborat may have been wondering where Mara Jade was, but the vast majority would have been wondering who she was. And you couldn’t really answer that without doing more movies about the original trio and thus needing to recast. Completely unworkable.
That die was cast the moment they decided to do sequels.
Also, that’s already happened. With the prequels. We never had a truly solid idea of what the clone wars were, but they weren’t what Lucas did. While Disney is surely making mistakes with the new, extended canon (And they’re not my circus, not my monkeys, because I’m totally not paying attention anymore) it’s at least actually trying to curate it, and Disney does know how to do that.
I would also say that the EU always suffered from the same problem of many other uncurated settings where you have huge, apocalyptic throwdowns every other year, at most. They somehow managed to squeeze like 3 of them into a two year period (With the resurrected emperor and then Kyp Author-SIrron stealing a superweapon). And this is notwithstanding that most of it is honestly just Bad. There are things I like, that I’ll use in like, star wars TTRPGs and that otherwise are just, if they never get ported over, ~whatever~. It’s a big galaxy, there’ll surely be new things, some of which are interesting and many of which are bad, to get concerned with.
I mean, as stated above, I’m not exactly a fan – BUT I will say that I watched the first prequel in the theater and hated it walking out of the theater. I didn’t even bother watching the next two in theaters (saw them on rental).
On the other hand, I like the new Star Wars films fine. I would almost rank Last Jedi as my favorite except for the stupid bombers at the start. And yes, that’s my criticism of that film – not ANY of the other stuff people complain about – just the bombers. Hate em.
This is Star Wars, so… no, not really, people don’t space.
I mean, I’m all about sci-fi that has at least a passing relationship with actual science, but Star Wars isn’t that and never has been. It’s a setting where a farmboy and a wizard meet a cowboy in a bar to rescue the princess from the dark knight and his Nazi army and then have a WW II Pacific dogfight. Only in vaguely space-ish drag.
Yes and no. Yeah, it’s definitely always been WWII Pacific dogfights. It doesn’t really space.
OTOH, the bombs dropping was more blatantly not-space than most of the other action and if it drags enough people out of their suspension of disbelief while watching it, that’s a failure.
Except they’re not? The Because Science! YouTube channel did a video on the space battle stuff, and the bombs falling is actually accurate even without the “magnetic acceleration” from the sourcebooks or the “clearly falling already in the ship’s artificial gravity” factor.
TL;DR: gravity doesn’t cease to exist in low orbit. The only reason the ISS doesn’t drop like a rock is because it has enough horizontal momentum to (mostly) overcome gravity. If you released an object with little to no horizontal momentum it would go straight down towards the planet–just like the bombs do.
…but who cares, because they’re literally B-17s in space.
Was the mega star destroyer in low orbit at the time? I honestly don’t recall?
So what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if there are potentially valid explanations, whether they’re implicit in the scene or added in later sourcebooks.
If it pulls too many people out of their suspension of disbelief and makes them think it shouldn’t be working rather than being immersed in the scene, it’s a failure as a movie scene.
If it just makes fans argue over how it would work after the fact, then that’s cool. That doesn’t really matter, as long as the scene works for the audiences watching it.
Yes, the dreadnaught was in low orbit* at the time. It had just used its ventral Giant F-U guns to flatten the Resistance’s land base. So the bombs falling in that scene are more realistic than the similar scene in ESB where TIE bombers bomb the big asteroid.
If it broke your immersion, then fine, I guess. I’m just pointing out that this is one of those times where common perception of things (in this case gravity in space) isn’t actually accurate.
*Fun fact: astronauts on the ISS still feel ~90% of the gravity as people on the Earth’s surface. They appear “weightless” because the ISS (and thereby the astronauts themselves) is moving so fast. Basically, the ISS is constantly falling–it’s just falling in such a way that it constantly misses the ground. You know how you sometimes lift out of your seat when a roller coaster hits the apex of a hill? The astronauts are like that in a constant state.
Honestly at this point modern audiences do seem far more ready to pick everything apart, so things that are legit will ‘break immersion’. If ‘everyone’ has their immersion broken by a thing that is legit… who fucking cares. That’s on y’all. You don’t get to hold it up as a failure of the movie, and overconcerning yourself with the validity of immersion is already overfocusing on a thing that isn’t particularly important in the first place.
Honestly, I had no issue with the bombers. I just assumed that there was technology going on there that actually was causing the bombs to ‘fall’ like that, and was happy.
I think the much-despised casino diversion was given too much screen time, even though it absolutely was trying to fill part of the film’s philosophical roots (no, not the pro-social justice stuff–the film is really very deliberately Kirkegaardian in its moral framework, which delights me to no end).
I feel like a couple things could’ve been executed better – building up the new cast’s relationships with each other rather than separating Finn and Rey for the entire movie being the biggest one to me – but on the whole? I like the biggest plot beats that get the most shit. (Still wish they’d made Finn a Jedi too, though.)
Okay, okay, I’ll say a thing: I thought Jedi was only okay – not bad, a perfectly good finish, just not amazing – until I watched prequels II and III with the original three in Machette order. (New Hope, Empire, Clones, Sith, Return) And while that order really did not help the prequels, it did make Return of the Jedimuch better, and not as some sort of snide “by comparison” thing. Knowing how shit went down back then actually improves Return of the Jedi for me, like, a lot.
(I did this before going to see The Force Awakens because I hadn’t ever seen Revenge of the Sith, and wrote it up on Dreamwdith. Seriously, II and III do so much for Jedi, and it’s too much to put in a comment here.)
I’ve never watched them in Machete order, but I’ve loved the logic of it since I read that post back in the day. And it makes me really happy to hear that it worked for someone!
Of the original trilogy, Empire Strikes Back is my favorite, but Return of the Jedi is second. I think all three of them are good though. I never hated any of the newer Star Wars movies, though I admit the prequels weren’t as good, and there’s some things I didn’t like in both the prequels and the sequels. I also really like Rogue One, and I think Solo was pretty good as well.
As nearly as I’ve ever been able to tell, people hate it because Alden Ehrenreich isn’t Harrison Ford. (I too liked Solo, but then there’s only one Star Wars movie I actively dislike and that’s Phantom Menace. So you may need to take my stated liking with a grain of salt.)
IMO, it was a perfectly good heist movie in space. It was even a decent Han Solo movie.
It tried a little too hard to hit every throwaway line about Han’s past in one movie. I’m not sure what could actually have been left out though – it wouldn’t have really been a Han Solo movie without Chewie and the Falcon (and thus we need Lando).
“Is there a dork in the room”
Danny, to self: “This is it! My moment to shine. Finally my particular skillset is needed.”
Eric: “Sure!” *fingerguns*
Danny: “…but I am the dork…”
I wonder if Mike is going to start tormenting Danny just to get Ethan’s attention again. If so it would serve to get Ethan’s attention on both Danny and Mike which is what they both want. Of course this is all assuming that Mike has some larger plan besides screw with people, and does Mike have a larger overall plan?
I do think that Mike is brilliant and good as schemes. I don’t think he’s playing 6th-dimensional chess, though. If Mike and Danny somehow escalate from bickering to making out, it’s going to be on the very human, very emotional motives of jealousy and validation. They’ve bot let go of someone they wanted “for the greater good”, which sounds fine and dandy until you get to watch that Someone flirt his way across the dorm with a speedrun in his mind.
And then the entire comment section will be debating whether it’s part of Mike’s years-ago-irl plan of getting to either of them to make the other one a whimpering mess, for a loooot of stripes.
1. Rogue One
2. Empire Strikes Back
3. The Last Jedi
4. A New Hope
5. Return of the Jedi
6. Revenge of the Sith
7. The Force Awakens
8. Solo: A Star Wars Story
9. The Phantom Menace
10. Attack of the Clones
1. Empire Strikes Back
2. The Force Awakens
3. Return of the Jedi
4. Rogue One
5. A New Hope
6. Revenge of the Sith
7. Solo
8. The Last Jedi
9. Attack of the Clones
10. The Phantom Menace
You’re extremely mistaken.
1. TPM
2. AOTC
3. ROTS
4. ANH
5. ESB
6. ROTJ
7. TFA
8. TLJ
How can you not know this? It literally says it in the opening sequences.
1. The Empire Strikes Back
2. Return of the Jedi
3. Rogue One
4. Star Wars (I prefer calling it the original title, sue me)
5. Revenge of the Sith
6. The Last Jedi
7. The Force Awakens
8. Solo
9. The Phantom Menace
10. Attack of the Clones
Oh gods, the Holiday Special is painful.
I can’t even enjoy it in a bad movie sense, unless you fast-forward through certain parts, like the 5 hours of wookies having a conversation with each other with no subtitles.
1. ESB (well-directed, great set pieces and pacing)
2. 1977 (Fun somewhat campy late 70s space fantasy romp)
3. Who cares, the comics and games are honestly better. Star Wars works so well as a world setting to explore that a movie just can’t do well
Though I gotta say that I loved the Clone Wars as a cartoon action serial, and god damn do I love the Mandalorian going back to Star Wars’s roots of basically being an homage/rip off of westerns and kurosawa films
Hey I got something to say now that we are ranking them:
1. L’ECA (well I only saw it dubbed, sorry)
2. UNE (same)
3. RO (I saw this one in english in a long distance flight, it was in the movie list, so this counts? – oh well this is also the dubbed title bc inbetween people got enough english savvy here so we don’t translate titles now but I watched it in english, without subtitles, I swear!)
4. LRDJ (dubbed, again. You know english is hard for the youngs)
5. TPM (looked like an good exposition, only not really a mmovie)
6. AOTC/4 (I fell asleep and never watched it again)
Danny, you didn’t threat Dorothy or Amber with force chocking, and you didn’t murder children in two different movies. Even the Mandalorian treats Tusken Raiders as people, and he comes from one of the most warmongering civilizations in the galaxy!
Mike on the other hand needs to relax. Maybe certain someone chan share weed with him?
Sadly every time I see that film – nieces are “fans” – I substitute Dark Jar-Jar for Count Doofus and it feels 1k times better when I add the following exchange at the end.
Yoda – Who ARE you?
JJ – [with a head tilt and a wink] That’s a secret.
Then it’s a running gag where nobody believes JJ is the Sith Lord.
Honestly the only Star Wars movies I’ve ever sat through in full were Return of the Jedi and the sequels, and I am muting most of the Star Wars topics because the endless fan wank has killed any genuine desire I might have had to watch the rest of the Original Trilogy. (Did watch Phantom Menace up to the pod race yesterday, just to see if it really was that bad. Very long, loud pod race.)
The animated shows are still fun, though. Wake me when we get a feature-length film about Ahsoka in some part of the post-Clone Wars era.
Listen. I may not be an überfan of Star Wars…But I consider myself an above average fan. I will say, of all 8 movies, there is exactly 1 great movie, 2 good movies, 2 mediocre movies, 1 bad, and 2 just GOD AWFUL movies.
The 2 movies that you haven’t seen in the original trilogy are one of the two good ones, and the great one. If you never consume another piece of Star Wars fiction in your life afterward, you owe it to yourself to watch episode 4 and 5. They’re by far the two best movies in the entire canon.
The thing is, ultimately? I could watch that. Or I could watch something that has more than one significant female character. There’s still three and a half seasons of Sailor Moon I haven’t finished, y’know? And those have canon lesbians. I’m not a huge action person in the first place, and over the years the Star Wars fandom has wrapped up in my head with the kind of nerddom gatekeepers who say being a True Fan is dependent on going through all these Genre Greats first (and ignore how said Genre Greats are all by straight white dudes, and often have few or badly-written female characters and characters of color.) And I’m just SO OVER that bullshit.
Am I ignoring a movie I might really like out of spite? Yeah, probably. But at the same time I’m not sure I can go into Empire at this point without thinking of all the assholes who’ve ruined every discussion of Star Wars since 2015. It’s just not worth it when I could be devoting that attention to something I WILL enjoy.
Or maybe I was, through ignoring the point, making my own point about how stupid that I personally find it that some people make their viewing decisions based on enforced (read: “token”) diversity or whether or not the writing staff fulfills the Planeteer Rule. Thanks for assuming I’m ignorant, though.
Oh, I see. You wanted to make a stupid point that was even more foolish than being thought a regular ignoramus. I was apparently doing you a solid, and you’re mad about it!
Here on earth, those of us who aren’t Honkey McStraighterson III often have a dearth of fiction about us. And if you actually knew anything about what you’d tried to deploy “ZOMG THE TOKENS” about, you’d know that said lesbians outnumber relevant men – and in fact, counting the generally easily read Chibi Usa and Hotaru, are a third of the god damn relevant cast. Token, it ain’t.
But also: Basically most things are about honkey mcstraighterson (Especially if you start to count things about non-white men who are the majority culture of their nation). Fiction not being about honkey mcstraighterson can genuinely be comforting purely on the grounds of alienating you less, especially since you’ll be made to feel like a token in real fucking life. But you know, thanks for your fucking concern and all. I’m glad you’re really concerned this philosophical abstract you use to complain about fiction having people besides honkey mcstraighterson III. Concerned enough to tell a woman she’s dumb for worrying about having characters that aren’t honkey mcstraighterson III. You sure are helpful and smart.
More power to you, honestly. And equally, it’s fucking 2019. There’s not actually such a thing as must-see (And if ‘must see’ is real, it’s so huge as to be completely meaningless). Like yeah, I think the newest star wars movies are pretty good, but if you don’t want to see them, ~whatever~. And in fairness, the thing TLJ did most correctly, doesn’t _mean anything_ if you aren’t approaching it with an eye on the history of the franchise, so that’s even more ~whatever~ for a lot of folks.
That said, if your thing is “I want to see some anime with a bunch of reasonably well written gals who are gay” I would suggest Revue Starlight.
Revue Starlight is super great, and extremely gay, though I always hesitate with the latter with americans. Like yeah, it is, but when even meriken who claim to know about the Takarazuka Revue insist that there were no detectable queer issues to the show, I kinda have to asterisk a recommend regardless. So the asterisk would be “Yeah it’s super gay, but it’s just not very explicit, because Japan doesn’t really do explicit emotions; to the point where the most famous way to say ‘I love you’ is ‘The moon is beautiful tonight’. If you want it to be Big and Loud about being gay, instead of just obviously true, you’ll be dissatisfied.
Otherwise, enjoy the scathing take on the Takarazuka Revue by a reasonably gay cast, with an entirely gay dramatis personae.”
I’ve watched the original trilogy and Revenge of the Sith through. OT because they’re ubiquitous and I’ve caught them on TV, and saw ROTS when it was in theaters. The Despecialized Editions of the OT are fantastic.
I tried watching TPM and AOTC, but just couldn’t get through them. They’re bad movies, Star Wars or not. The Phantom Edit helps a bit, but the important parts of TPM were best summed up in this five-and-a-half minute video. ROTS felt the most like a movie, even with its stilted dialogue and endless fight sequence.
I haven’t watched Rogue One, Solo, or any of the sequel trilogy yet, but I have read the plot synopses on Wikipedia. The pissybaby nerd whining around them is too fresh. From my point of view they don’t seem like terribly paced, fundamentally flawed movies (like TPM and AOTC), but they have impossible expectations to live up to just like any other long-awaited sequels.
Rogue One is a solid movie carried by Alan Tudyk for most of its runtime, but is capped off with a fantastic third act. X-Wings and space battles have always been my favorite part of Star Wars, and the ending of Rogue One delivers. Also, that ending bit with Vader is possibly the best action sequence in the franchise.
Solo is an OK, but forgettable film. It’s at its best when Lando is onscreen and when it’s just trying to be a space western or a heist movie. It’s at its worst when it’s trying to give background to things that don’t need background.
Basically my theory.
It might have worked better if it had been exactly the same movie but they hadn’t called it the “Kessel run” and maybe dropped a couple of other callbacks. They got annoying.
People are really mad about finger-guns, I guess. Was weird watching a boomer army-guy who never left the states yell at my brother, who is a Marine, for shooting me with a nerf gun. Because if you ever blah blah you would blah blah, it’s a foam dart, it’s annoying, it’s not a gun. There are no guns in my home.
Apparently if you shoot somebody in the eye with one of those you can do permanent damage including blinding them and they may need to have their eyeball removed.
dang, yeah, now that you mention it, I can totally imagine how pre-DOA Danny — poorly-adjusted stalker clingy guy with a thing for a (aspiring) young politician — would respond to Episode II.
I actually havn’t seen Attack of the Clones. I first watched Star Wars on tv, and since AOTC and ROTS wasn’t out yet, they showed them 1, 4, 5 and 6. I was very confused by TPM, cause all I had heard about Star Wars was that the bad guy with dark mask was someone’s dad, and that Star Wars was really good movies. TPM did not have the bad guy I had seen pics of, and it was kind of boring. But I watched the rest of them later, and then I understood. I befriended a girl that liked Star Wars later, so we saw ROTS in the cinema. Just kinda forgot to check out AOTC, and then people said it wasn’t very food, so I just didn’t.
The ones I really like and keep rewatching are the original triology and Rogue One.
Yeah I’m not gonna talk about which are my favorite and least favorite Star Wars movies because there’s always someone who’ll say that my opinion is wrong. Though I will admit the Yoda vs. Dooku fight was pretty cool.
I’m getting a feeling that on a level Mike noticed that he and Danny share this heartache for Ethan, and what he really wants iis to connect. But his asshole reflexes and defensiveness kick in way before he could show any vulnerability.
Unless you’re expecting it to fail in the near future, remember that this comic always takes place “now”, except for during flashbacks (in which case it’s “X years before now”).
FWIW, Attack of the Clones is my favourite of the prequels too but it’s such a shallow pool to choose from. It’s like saying The Force Awakens is the best of the Sequel Trilogy.
Yeah… We kind of need Danny to be with Amber in the next stage of her conflict with her father, don’t we?
I feel like Attack of the Clones is my favorite of the prequels, even though E1 is more coherent and E3 is technically the better movie. There’s just so much cool stuff going on even if it’s messily linked together.
The romance subplot doesn’t even register in my head. It’s not like it’s going to be a healthy relationship.
Honestly, fair enough, even given that Danny’s antagonistic to mike for good reason. Expecting emotional succor from someone you just called a gigantic asshole is a jackass move, and since you’re completely correct about it, also a stupid one.
The entire SW canon is more of a cultural phenomenon than a series of movies. As movies, none of them are very good. A few are OK b-level films. They are most successful on the level of GI Joe or My Pretty Pony, as marketing opportunities. Internally incoherent. Full of howlers that a high school science teacher could have prevented. Bad actors reading bad lines badly. Plot holes big enough to drive a star destroyer through. Transparent mcguffins that just don’t make sense. She-Ra has better writing. I understand having a reading /watching profile but for me they fail even as pulp.
In total fairness, it’s not quite that simple – science fiction in general is nominally supposed to be using advances in technology to talk about current day society in some fashion (And to this end, some hard science fiction isn’t really science fiction either, because ti’s mostly just meandering about tech).
Star Wars has moral lessons, sure (Albeit much, much safer ones until 7/8/possibly 9), but the fictional setting honestly has fuck and all to do with them, unless you get _Really_ charitable with Lil’ Orphan Annie. It’s not that it’s ‘soft’ or that it’s space opera per se, but that none of the commentary on society really comes from that space opera-ness.
To contrast briefly, Star Trek TOS is pretty pulpy sci fi, but nonetheless, the episode “The Immunity Syndrome” is a blatant (Albeit very simple) commentary on the foolishness of racism; the aliens are central to the point its telling. This is also true of say, Dune, where the metaphor for oil relies on being a different planet to show just how much effort people are going to, to get their colonizing on.
I would say that most of Star Wars is space opera without being science fiction; 7, 8, and maybe 9 are space opera that is science fiction, and star wars being star wars, the various side materials cover everything plausible under the sun, even sticking to officially endorsed stuff. For the record, I actually like Star Wars the best, and don’t really care for sci fi gatekeeping overall, but if one is going to use the ‘make commentary on society through fictional metaphor’ definition star wars legit does fail that (mostly).
Wait… based on the current timeline, none of the cast (except Robin)
would have been of moviegoing age when Episode II came out – I
presume all of them who had seen it saw it on DVD?
The only star wars movies I’ve seen are rogue one and last Jedi, and those were because my friends dragged me along. So basically the comments have gone straight over my head for two days
All you have to know is that all Star Wars movies are bad. Especially the one that the person reading this considers their favorite. That’s the worst one.
Rogue One is pretty good, even if the “little ship manages to push gigantic ship” moment near the end is one of the WTFiest moments in the whole franchise. I only watched the first of this latter trilogy (TFA), so I can’t comment on TLJ.
I feel bad for Mike. His poor attitude and behavior is either a shield or a coping mechanism. I don’t think he wants to alienate himself from everyone, he just feels like he doesn’t have other options. I hope he’s able to grow, get passed it and make amends with everyone.
Agreed. I feel like there’s a good chance he will make steps towards that in this comic, since we’re starting to see past his shell. I look forward to seeing a more vulnerable Mike.
Because if there is one thing that the last 4 or so years has taught us, nothing raises fandom passions and rage as much as a subjective opinion on a movie from a popular franchise!
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I… don’t think I actually HAVE a favourite Star Wars??
[by contrast, my very Star Wars-y relative is getting hitched this coming 5/4, why am I not surprised]
Yeah, I hear that.
The first part, I mean. I watched the original Star Wars movies as a kid and they were… fine. I’ve rewatched them as an adult and they are still fine, although for different reasons.
Star Wars was written as a tribute to B Movies and does a very successful job of being a series of B Movies.
But I don’t much care for B Movies. So being the best B Movie is still pretty “meh.”
They’re certainly watchable – unlike the prequels.
I liked the first one because it looked like the space opera I used to read as a kid, even though the story was rubbish and the characters were flat. By the third one I was thinking, “What am I doing here?” I never saw another.
Welp, I’m 37 and I’ve never watched Star Wars. ANY of them. (And i don’t intend to xD)
Now, Star Trek on the other hand… (or my #1 SF, Doctor Who!)
Y’know what? Battle For Endor. Cindel Towani is the best Star Wars protagonist.
Fight me.
HECK YEAH! CINDEL! Disney totally messed up when they removed her movis from canon. Not like they impact anything >< Where are the Ewoks Disney? WHERE ARE THE EWOKS?!
I was thinking about this the other day and while there are scenes I *like* more I find Rogue One to be the most re-watchable. The mainline SW films feel like event movies that I need to devote my attention to. RO is good and beautiful but also something I can put on while surfing the web. I think that’s because I used to do the same with a TV channel that showed a lot of the war movies RO evokes.
What’s special about the 5th April?
Fifth the April be with you
I’m old enough that I remember a time when saying that my favorite Star Wars movie was Return of the Jedi would get me mocked. That was the “bad” Star Wars for 16 years.
Even though it has more awesome shit that any other film in the trilogy: Jabba’s palace, the Rancor, the sand barge, the speeder bikes, the bigger and more exciting Death Star battle, Yoda’s emotional death, Luke’s confrontation with the Emperor, Vader’s redemption, and Leia and Han getting together. But it had Ewoks so fuck me for liking it.
Then the prequels came out and Jedi was cool now, we hate the prequels instead. And then the sequels so now we forgive the prequels and hate on those.
This is why I can’t take any of the current Star Wars “controversy” seriously. Seriously, I’m old and I was there, SW fans have always been like this.
Those people were jerks, the Ewoks are awesome.
Right? Vicious little bastards, nearly eat the heroes. And they have empty Stormtrooper helmets at the end, so what do you think was being served at the victory party?
But they looked cute and toylike. If they’d been reptile or insect looking then no one would have had a problem with them being badasses. Even though in real life even small bears are bad news.
I thought we forgave the Skywalker Saga as a whole on account of Solo
But Solo is better, in all measurable ways, than the prequel trilogy and A New Hope.
Solo was an objectively terrible movie, and I still liked it better than most of the others because it was fun. 🙂
Wasn’t Solo so bad it killed any future standalones?
In terms of box office, yeah, but that was mostly due to backlash from Last Jedi, among other date issues.
Solo as a whole seems to be well received by fans and critics alike. Add that with the positive reception Rogue One got and it’s still kinda stupid why Kathleeen dropped the idear.
It’s not a great movie, but it isn’t terrible. It underperformed at the box office, but it had little to do with backlash to TLJ. Much more important to its perceived failure were a) the release date (too close to TLJ), b) the lack of a marketing push (it didn’t even get a trailer until 3 months before release), c) the very publicly troubled production and d) it being a Han Solo movie 30 years too late and without Harrison Ford.
By what “objective” measure specifically was Solo terrible? It was not as good as Rogue One but it was way better than episode 7 or especially episode 8. The Last Jedi was by a fair measure the worst Star Wars movie ever made and The Force Awakens was only marginally better.
that’sbait.jpg
the force awakens was a good movie. It held a lot of promise for the new triology, with interesting new characters, and a great jump on point.
The Last Jedi then wasted all that potential by focusing on the boring as hell Kylo Ren instead of on the far more interesting duo or Finn and Rey.
I love how we’re handwaving “objective” for what’s essentially a matter of taste.
THIS.
Presenting personal preference as universal truth? That NEVER happens …
I still dont know anyone who likes the prequels honestly.
Episode III was actually very good, as was the final half an hour of Episode II for me.
I dunno, the effects and writing on the prequel trilogy make them unwatchable to me.
Yeah, I know that I’m gonna get mocked for it. But seriously, bad special effects and/or dialogue can destroy a film for me way more than most other flaws
I do. They’re not my favorites and there’s more obvious flaws than the original trilogy but I still like them.
Two and Three were decent, the only thing that I strongly disliked
about Phantom Menace was Jar-Jar Binks.
I don’t even dislike Jar Jar, he was just overused.
LITERALLY THOUGH. Every time something new comes out, it’s the worst thing ever and ruins Star Wars. Then the next thing comes out and old thing was fine, it’s the new thing that’s awful and on and on and on.
I don’t think there’s anything that could come out that would make me like the current movies, and I don’t think there’s as much a cycle of hate it, now love it! I think people got a little tripped up by ewoks, maybe. But then Jar Jar was goofier. I think people mostly liked 2 and 3 because they were mostly war again, minus a few cheeseball or wooden delivery lines.
I saw it with the fandom every time like clockwork. First it was the prequels, then Star Wars: The Clone Wars, then TFA, then TLJ and Rebels, etc. I look forward to whatever comes next.
I have no dog in this race, seeing as I’m not a Star Wars FAN (and also I stopped watching the movies after episode VII, because if Rey’s already beaten the bad guy in both the physical and psychological plances, why would I care about the rest of the trilogy?), but as an aside I’ve never heard anyone talking about Clone Wars that WASN’T praising it?
When it first came out, good god, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t think it ruined the franchise forever.
if you were going to define “milking a franchise”, is there a better example in any medium than the seventy-thirteen iterations of this schlock? it isn’t really a question of which was worst, it’s mostly about which insult is freshest in your mind.
Honestly, when people started claiming the sequels are worse than the prequels, I wa sjust like “Really no? Really?
Because while the sequels have some flaws, they definitively don’t have the wooden as fuck dialogues the prequels had.
I watched Revenge of the Sith again a few years ago and not even the German dub could save the dialogue.
And Revenge is probably my favourite of the prequels (probably beause Palpatine is a treat to watch and Anakin doesn’t get nearly as much to say).
Seriously. Watching Phantom Menace, my two takeaways before I noped out were:
– Sheesh, that is some awful dialogue, and
– The consistency with which EVERYONE is giving these awkward line reads that seem designed to cram too much info in a short time says to me this is very much a directorial/writing choice, not an acting one, which makes the harassment the actors got even worse. (Not that ANYONE deserves the harassment that fandom has inflicted on its creators. You can critique things without being a vitriolic shithead.)
(it) makes the harassment the actors got even worse…
The combined forces of Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy, Audrey Hepburn, and Carole Lombard could not have made the prequels better.
IMO, it is absolutely 100% Lucas. He was being called out for unreadable dialogue all the way back in ’77 (by Ford, of course).
I was okay with the prequels, they weren’t great, but at least they filled in the backstory, and it was fun seeing the younger versions of the various heroes and villains. When I watched the Last Jedi and very quickly realized that they had tossed out 30 years of very carefully curated extended universe it killed it for me. All I could think of was “WTF, the empire lost, what is going on here? and where is Mara Jade, and where are the other offspring, there were more kids than that whiny emo twit.” And when I realized I had already seen this movie when it was called A New Hope, that is when I lost any interest in watching any more of the sequel movies, and I grew up a huge Star Wars fan, watched the first one in the first theatre in my area to get surround sound, as a teenager in 1977.
In fairness, they announced they were tossing the EU into ‘separate timeline’ territory a long time before the movie came out.
Blowing up the EU was a necessary step, much like the equally controversial time-travel reset in the Star Trek universe, simply because the canon was so bloated and so mixed up that trying to keep it all would’ve been nigh-impossible. So instead, declare, “Here is the limited canon. Anything else we decide to keep from the EU will be piecemeal, if it fits the story we’re trying to tell.”
Not only was it bloated and mixed-up, but it was also completely unknown to 90+% of the movie audience they were hoping for.
Roborat may have been wondering where Mara Jade was, but the vast majority would have been wondering who she was. And you couldn’t really answer that without doing more movies about the original trio and thus needing to recast. Completely unworkable.
That die was cast the moment they decided to do sequels.
Also, that’s already happened. With the prequels. We never had a truly solid idea of what the clone wars were, but they weren’t what Lucas did. While Disney is surely making mistakes with the new, extended canon (And they’re not my circus, not my monkeys, because I’m totally not paying attention anymore) it’s at least actually trying to curate it, and Disney does know how to do that.
I would also say that the EU always suffered from the same problem of many other uncurated settings where you have huge, apocalyptic throwdowns every other year, at most. They somehow managed to squeeze like 3 of them into a two year period (With the resurrected emperor and then Kyp Author-SIrron stealing a superweapon). And this is notwithstanding that most of it is honestly just Bad. There are things I like, that I’ll use in like, star wars TTRPGs and that otherwise are just, if they never get ported over, ~whatever~. It’s a big galaxy, there’ll surely be new things, some of which are interesting and many of which are bad, to get concerned with.
I mean, as stated above, I’m not exactly a fan – BUT I will say that I watched the first prequel in the theater and hated it walking out of the theater. I didn’t even bother watching the next two in theaters (saw them on rental).
On the other hand, I like the new Star Wars films fine. I would almost rank Last Jedi as my favorite except for the stupid bombers at the start. And yes, that’s my criticism of that film – not ANY of the other stuff people complain about – just the bombers. Hate em.
Too right! Do these people even space?
Well, there’s also the fact that if the New Order had even mildly competent leadership the rebels would be a fine plasma cloud pretty quickly.
“Sir, there’s a rebel X-wing hailing us.”
*blank stare* “Shoot. It.”
This is Star Wars, so… no, not really, people don’t space.
I mean, I’m all about sci-fi that has at least a passing relationship with actual science, but Star Wars isn’t that and never has been. It’s a setting where a farmboy and a wizard meet a cowboy in a bar to rescue the princess from the dark knight and his Nazi army and then have a WW II Pacific dogfight. Only in vaguely space-ish drag.
Yes and no. Yeah, it’s definitely always been WWII Pacific dogfights. It doesn’t really space.
OTOH, the bombs dropping was more blatantly not-space than most of the other action and if it drags enough people out of their suspension of disbelief while watching it, that’s a failure.
Except they’re not? The Because Science! YouTube channel did a video on the space battle stuff, and the bombs falling is actually accurate even without the “magnetic acceleration” from the sourcebooks or the “clearly falling already in the ship’s artificial gravity” factor.
TL;DR: gravity doesn’t cease to exist in low orbit. The only reason the ISS doesn’t drop like a rock is because it has enough horizontal momentum to (mostly) overcome gravity. If you released an object with little to no horizontal momentum it would go straight down towards the planet–just like the bombs do.
…but who cares, because they’re literally B-17s in space.
Was the mega star destroyer in low orbit at the time? I honestly don’t recall?
So what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if there are potentially valid explanations, whether they’re implicit in the scene or added in later sourcebooks.
If it pulls too many people out of their suspension of disbelief and makes them think it shouldn’t be working rather than being immersed in the scene, it’s a failure as a movie scene.
If it just makes fans argue over how it would work after the fact, then that’s cool. That doesn’t really matter, as long as the scene works for the audiences watching it.
Yes, the dreadnaught was in low orbit* at the time. It had just used its ventral Giant F-U guns to flatten the Resistance’s land base. So the bombs falling in that scene are more realistic than the similar scene in ESB where TIE bombers bomb the big asteroid.
If it broke your immersion, then fine, I guess. I’m just pointing out that this is one of those times where common perception of things (in this case gravity in space) isn’t actually accurate.
*Fun fact: astronauts on the ISS still feel ~90% of the gravity as people on the Earth’s surface. They appear “weightless” because the ISS (and thereby the astronauts themselves) is moving so fast. Basically, the ISS is constantly falling–it’s just falling in such a way that it constantly misses the ground. You know how you sometimes lift out of your seat when a roller coaster hits the apex of a hill? The astronauts are like that in a constant state.
Honestly at this point modern audiences do seem far more ready to pick everything apart, so things that are legit will ‘break immersion’. If ‘everyone’ has their immersion broken by a thing that is legit… who fucking cares. That’s on y’all. You don’t get to hold it up as a failure of the movie, and overconcerning yourself with the validity of immersion is already overfocusing on a thing that isn’t particularly important in the first place.
Han puts on a breather mask to walk around in hard vacuum in Empire. Star Wars is glorious nonsense.
Honestly, I had no issue with the bombers. I just assumed that there was technology going on there that actually was causing the bombs to ‘fall’ like that, and was happy.
I think the much-despised casino diversion was given too much screen time, even though it absolutely was trying to fill part of the film’s philosophical roots (no, not the pro-social justice stuff–the film is really very deliberately Kirkegaardian in its moral framework, which delights me to no end).
I feel like a couple things could’ve been executed better – building up the new cast’s relationships with each other rather than separating Finn and Rey for the entire movie being the biggest one to me – but on the whole? I like the biggest plot beats that get the most shit. (Still wish they’d made Finn a Jedi too, though.)
I just figure that the bombers were an objectively bad experimental ship design that the Resistance was able to get real cheap.
Okay, okay, I’ll say a thing: I thought Jedi was only okay – not bad, a perfectly good finish, just not amazing – until I watched prequels II and III with the original three in Machette order. (New Hope, Empire, Clones, Sith, Return) And while that order really did not help the prequels, it did make Return of the Jedi much better, and not as some sort of snide “by comparison” thing. Knowing how shit went down back then actually improves Return of the Jedi for me, like, a lot.
(I did this before going to see The Force Awakens because I hadn’t ever seen Revenge of the Sith, and wrote it up on Dreamwdith. Seriously, II and III do so much for Jedi, and it’s too much to put in a comment here.)
I’ve never watched them in Machete order, but I’ve loved the logic of it since I read that post back in the day. And it makes me really happy to hear that it worked for someone!
Of the original trilogy, Empire Strikes Back is my favorite, but Return of the Jedi is second. I think all three of them are good though. I never hated any of the newer Star Wars movies, though I admit the prequels weren’t as good, and there’s some things I didn’t like in both the prequels and the sequels. I also really like Rogue One, and I think Solo was pretty good as well.
I don’t get the hate for Solo. It’s supposed to be a side-story, and it is one, and somehow people get mad about that? Why? I liked it.
Also, Donald Glover was note-perfect in every frame and I adored his performance so much.
As nearly as I’ve ever been able to tell, people hate it because Alden Ehrenreich isn’t Harrison Ford. (I too liked Solo, but then there’s only one Star Wars movie I actively dislike and that’s Phantom Menace. So you may need to take my stated liking with a grain of salt.)
IMO, it was a perfectly good heist movie in space. It was even a decent Han Solo movie.
It tried a little too hard to hit every throwaway line about Han’s past in one movie. I’m not sure what could actually have been left out though – it wouldn’t have really been a Han Solo movie without Chewie and the Falcon (and thus we need Lando).
You forgot Slave Leia. 😀
Mike you are not alone in this Dexter Jettster is just an absolute daddy.
I don’t know the names of minor characters, but that’s the diner guy, right?
Yes.
“Is there a dork in the room”
Danny, to self: “This is it! My moment to shine. Finally my particular skillset is needed.”
Eric: “Sure!” *fingerguns*
Danny: “…but I am the dork…”
It’s always painful to be beaten in your own game
I think Eric meant Ethan?
Which really only makes it worse for Danny, frankly.
True. Being outdorked by perfect Ethan and his harem of boyfriends is even worse. Not even being a dork is safe from someone better to snag from him.
Oh no. Mike is the only person that can notice Danny’s presence.
Mike: “I see Dan people.”
“Goodbye forever, Mike” is a good line. I think more characters should be saying it.
I just hope that Danny sticks with it.
Now it’s time to go home
And I Ain’t Even Done With The Ni~i~ight!
“Well, what’dya know?”
-Dexter Jettster, 22 BBY
My favourites are 3 and 5.
These are excellent choices, I approve.
I like all of them. Unironically. Yes, even that one.
I’m not ashamed. 🙂
I wonder if Mike is going to start tormenting Danny just to get Ethan’s attention again. If so it would serve to get Ethan’s attention on both Danny and Mike which is what they both want. Of course this is all assuming that Mike has some larger plan besides screw with people, and does Mike have a larger overall plan?
Oooor here’s a twist Danny Sadducees Mike out of desperation and that makes Ethan Jelouse.
I do think that Mike is brilliant and good as schemes. I don’t think he’s playing 6th-dimensional chess, though. If Mike and Danny somehow escalate from bickering to making out, it’s going to be on the very human, very emotional motives of jealousy and validation. They’ve bot let go of someone they wanted “for the greater good”, which sounds fine and dandy until you get to watch that Someone flirt his way across the dorm with a speedrun in his mind.
And then the entire comment section will be debating whether it’s part of Mike’s years-ago-irl plan of getting to either of them to make the other one a whimpering mess, for a loooot of stripes.If that happens I hope either Danny or someone else punches Mike out.
I’m pretty sure Mike’s only plan right now is “make the emotional ouchies go bye-bye”
Maybe his own.
Seducing Ethan to make Danny jealous seems to have worked pretty much as planned. I doubt he’s interested in making those ouchies go bye-bye.
I wouldn’t go for Jexter Dexter.
But the borderline fetish gear they put Padme in… Good heavens.
Mikes favorite part was probably when Anakin was crying over his dead mother, while he was busting a nut in someone else’s.
Oh, are we ranking Star Wars movies now?
1. ESB
2. ANH
3. TFW
4. ROTJ
4.5 Rogue One
5. ROTS
6. AOTC
7. TPM
7.5 Solo
8. TLJ
(Sorry, TFW should be TFA)
1. Rogue One
2. Empire Strikes Back
3. The Last Jedi
4. A New Hope
5. Return of the Jedi
6. Revenge of the Sith
7. The Force Awakens
8. Solo: A Star Wars Story
9. The Phantom Menace
10. Attack of the Clones
No, I’m sorry, you’re wrong.
don’t be that guy
no, no. I’m that other guy.
1. Empire Strikes Back
2. The Force Awakens
3. Return of the Jedi
4. Rogue One
5. A New Hope
6. Revenge of the Sith
7. Solo
8. The Last Jedi
9. Attack of the Clones
10. The Phantom Menace
You’re extremely mistaken.
1. TPM
2. AOTC
3. ROTS
4. ANH
5. ESB
6. ROTJ
7. TFA
8. TLJ
How can you not know this? It literally says it in the opening sequences.
I like you.
Damn. Ninja’d. Welp, I bow to the master.
1. The Empire Strikes Back
2. Return of the Jedi
3. Rogue One
4. Star Wars (I prefer calling it the original title, sue me)
5. Revenge of the Sith
6. The Last Jedi
7. The Force Awakens
8. Solo
9. The Phantom Menace
10. Attack of the Clones
>4. Star Wars
We can be friends.
1. Empire
2. Jedi
3. ANH
4. ROTS
Judgement reserved on the rest until I’ve seen them.
1139. TPM
1140. AOTC
Honorable mention: The Holiday Special. It’s so bad, it’s good.
Oh gods, the Holiday Special is painful.
I can’t even enjoy it in a bad movie sense, unless you fast-forward through certain parts, like the 5 hours of wookies having a conversation with each other with no subtitles.
1. ESB (well-directed, great set pieces and pacing)
2. 1977 (Fun somewhat campy late 70s space fantasy romp)
3. Who cares, the comics and games are honestly better. Star Wars works so well as a world setting to explore that a movie just can’t do well
Though I gotta say that I loved the Clone Wars as a cartoon action serial, and god damn do I love the Mandalorian going back to Star Wars’s roots of basically being an homage/rip off of westerns and kurosawa films
Hey I got something to say now that we are ranking them:
1. L’ECA (well I only saw it dubbed, sorry)
2. UNE (same)
3. RO (I saw this one in english in a long distance flight, it was in the movie list, so this counts? – oh well this is also the dubbed title bc inbetween people got enough english savvy here so we don’t translate titles now but I watched it in english, without subtitles, I swear!)
4. LRDJ (dubbed, again. You know english is hard for the youngs)
5. TPM (looked like an good exposition, only not really a mmovie)
6. AOTC/4 (I fell asleep and never watched it again)
I feel urged to add that I was the resident Star Wars nerd for most of my junior high, highscool, college and first university years.
…
Yeah, it wasn’t really an honor title.
Danny, you didn’t threat Dorothy or Amber with force chocking, and you didn’t murder children in two different movies. Even the Mandalorian treats Tusken Raiders as people, and he comes from one of the most warmongering civilizations in the galaxy!
Mike on the other hand needs to relax. Maybe certain someone chan share weed with him?
can*
I volunteer.
(Or Carla, I guess.)
Eric’s gone full Fonzie!
So THIS is how Mike flirts
To thunderous applause.
The most under-rated comment in this thread.
What is Dexter Jettster?
The four-armed diner owner who’s Obi-Wan’s underworld contact.
The Yoda and Dooku figher WERE awesome.
Watching the little wrinkly green muppet kick ass was pretty fun. “Oh, that’s why everyone is so polite to him.”
Sadly every time I see that film – nieces are “fans” – I substitute Dark Jar-Jar for Count Doofus and it feels 1k times better when I add the following exchange at the end.
Yoda – Who ARE you?
JJ – [with a head tilt and a wink] That’s a secret.
Then it’s a running gag where nobody believes JJ is the Sith Lord.
Dexter Jetster gives me a boner but it’s Jar Jar that makes me bust a nut.
Dexter Jettster is Zaddy
Honestly the only Star Wars movies I’ve ever sat through in full were Return of the Jedi and the sequels, and I am muting most of the Star Wars topics because the endless fan wank has killed any genuine desire I might have had to watch the rest of the Original Trilogy. (Did watch Phantom Menace up to the pod race yesterday, just to see if it really was that bad. Very long, loud pod race.)
The animated shows are still fun, though. Wake me when we get a feature-length film about Ahsoka in some part of the post-Clone Wars era.
Listen. I may not be an überfan of Star Wars…But I consider myself an above average fan. I will say, of all 8 movies, there is exactly 1 great movie, 2 good movies, 2 mediocre movies, 1 bad, and 2 just GOD AWFUL movies.
The 2 movies that you haven’t seen in the original trilogy are one of the two good ones, and the great one. If you never consume another piece of Star Wars fiction in your life afterward, you owe it to yourself to watch episode 4 and 5. They’re by far the two best movies in the entire canon.
That’s all I have to say about that.
The thing is, ultimately? I could watch that. Or I could watch something that has more than one significant female character. There’s still three and a half seasons of Sailor Moon I haven’t finished, y’know? And those have canon lesbians. I’m not a huge action person in the first place, and over the years the Star Wars fandom has wrapped up in my head with the kind of nerddom gatekeepers who say being a True Fan is dependent on going through all these Genre Greats first (and ignore how said Genre Greats are all by straight white dudes, and often have few or badly-written female characters and characters of color.) And I’m just SO OVER that bullshit.
Am I ignoring a movie I might really like out of spite? Yeah, probably. But at the same time I’m not sure I can go into Empire at this point without thinking of all the assholes who’ve ruined every discussion of Star Wars since 2015. It’s just not worth it when I could be devoting that attention to something I WILL enjoy.
It’s not about gender or race. EVERYONE is badly written in the prequel trilogy.
And just think how much worse they would have been if there wasn’t a team running herd on Lucas’s ego, like for example Episode one.
You have completely missed the damn point.
Or maybe I was, through ignoring the point, making my own point about how stupid that I personally find it that some people make their viewing decisions based on enforced (read: “token”) diversity or whether or not the writing staff fulfills the Planeteer Rule. Thanks for assuming I’m ignorant, though.
Oh, I see. You wanted to make a stupid point that was even more foolish than being thought a regular ignoramus. I was apparently doing you a solid, and you’re mad about it!
Here on earth, those of us who aren’t Honkey McStraighterson III often have a dearth of fiction about us. And if you actually knew anything about what you’d tried to deploy “ZOMG THE TOKENS” about, you’d know that said lesbians outnumber relevant men – and in fact, counting the generally easily read Chibi Usa and Hotaru, are a third of the god damn relevant cast. Token, it ain’t.
But also: Basically most things are about honkey mcstraighterson (Especially if you start to count things about non-white men who are the majority culture of their nation). Fiction not being about honkey mcstraighterson can genuinely be comforting purely on the grounds of alienating you less, especially since you’ll be made to feel like a token in real fucking life. But you know, thanks for your fucking concern and all. I’m glad you’re really concerned this philosophical abstract you use to complain about fiction having people besides honkey mcstraighterson III. Concerned enough to tell a woman she’s dumb for worrying about having characters that aren’t honkey mcstraighterson III. You sure are helpful and smart.
More power to you, honestly. And equally, it’s fucking 2019. There’s not actually such a thing as must-see (And if ‘must see’ is real, it’s so huge as to be completely meaningless). Like yeah, I think the newest star wars movies are pretty good, but if you don’t want to see them, ~whatever~. And in fairness, the thing TLJ did most correctly, doesn’t _mean anything_ if you aren’t approaching it with an eye on the history of the franchise, so that’s even more ~whatever~ for a lot of folks.
That said, if your thing is “I want to see some anime with a bunch of reasonably well written gals who are gay” I would suggest Revue Starlight.
I’ll be watching the last of the sequels because that’s become a family thing, but I don’t expect to have particularly strong opinions?
Revue Starlight has been on my To Watch list and I really need to fix that. Sweet sweet theater gays.
Revue Starlight is super great, and extremely gay, though I always hesitate with the latter with americans. Like yeah, it is, but when even meriken who claim to know about the Takarazuka Revue insist that there were no detectable queer issues to the show, I kinda have to asterisk a recommend regardless. So the asterisk would be “Yeah it’s super gay, but it’s just not very explicit, because Japan doesn’t really do explicit emotions; to the point where the most famous way to say ‘I love you’ is ‘The moon is beautiful tonight’. If you want it to be Big and Loud about being gay, instead of just obviously true, you’ll be dissatisfied.
Otherwise, enjoy the scathing take on the Takarazuka Revue by a reasonably gay cast, with an entirely gay dramatis personae.”
Totally understandable
I’ve watched the original trilogy and Revenge of the Sith through. OT because they’re ubiquitous and I’ve caught them on TV, and saw ROTS when it was in theaters. The Despecialized Editions of the OT are fantastic.
I tried watching TPM and AOTC, but just couldn’t get through them. They’re bad movies, Star Wars or not. The Phantom Edit helps a bit, but the important parts of TPM were best summed up in this five-and-a-half minute video. ROTS felt the most like a movie, even with its stilted dialogue and endless fight sequence.
I haven’t watched Rogue One, Solo, or any of the sequel trilogy yet, but I have read the plot synopses on Wikipedia. The pissybaby nerd whining around them is too fresh. From my point of view they don’t seem like terribly paced, fundamentally flawed movies (like TPM and AOTC), but they have impossible expectations to live up to just like any other long-awaited sequels.
Rogue One is a solid movie carried by Alan Tudyk for most of its runtime, but is capped off with a fantastic third act. X-Wings and space battles have always been my favorite part of Star Wars, and the ending of Rogue One delivers. Also, that ending bit with Vader is possibly the best action sequence in the franchise.
Solo is an OK, but forgettable film. It’s at its best when Lando is onscreen and when it’s just trying to be a space western or a heist movie. It’s at its worst when it’s trying to give background to things that don’t need background.
Basically my theory.
It might have worked better if it had been exactly the same movie but they hadn’t called it the “Kessel run” and maybe dropped a couple of other callbacks. They got annoying.
I love mike
I think Mike’s feeling better now. Fuck. It was nice while it lasted.
Danny: I didn’t just kill the men but the WOMEN and the CHILDREN.
Dot: Get away from me!
Danny: No, this is supposed to be romantic!
Amber: So hot.
People are really mad about finger-guns, I guess. Was weird watching a boomer army-guy who never left the states yell at my brother, who is a Marine, for shooting me with a nerf gun. Because if you ever blah blah you would blah blah, it’s a foam dart, it’s annoying, it’s not a gun. There are no guns in my home.
think it’s just ’cause they’re obnoxious :p
Come on. Everyone knows brothers are contractually obligated to shoot their siblings with at least one Nerf dart whenever granted the opportunity.
I think it’s in the Constitution.
Apparently if you shoot somebody in the eye with one of those you can do permanent damage including blinding them and they may need to have their eyeball removed.
So don’t do that please.
dang, yeah, now that you mention it, I can totally imagine how pre-DOA Danny — poorly-adjusted
stalkerclingy guy with a thing for a (aspiring) young politician — would respond to Episode II.Saying ‘No Fingerguns’ to Eric is like “No personality!” isn’t it?
I actually havn’t seen Attack of the Clones. I first watched Star Wars on tv, and since AOTC and ROTS wasn’t out yet, they showed them 1, 4, 5 and 6. I was very confused by TPM, cause all I had heard about Star Wars was that the bad guy with dark mask was someone’s dad, and that Star Wars was really good movies. TPM did not have the bad guy I had seen pics of, and it was kind of boring. But I watched the rest of them later, and then I understood. I befriended a girl that liked Star Wars later, so we saw ROTS in the cinema. Just kinda forgot to check out AOTC, and then people said it wasn’t very food, so I just didn’t.
The ones I really like and keep rewatching are the original triology and Rogue One.
*very good
I’m actually with Mike on Episode 2.
You also lost your virginity in the middle of that movie?
OnyxIdol is Danny’s mom?
Yeah I’m not gonna talk about which are my favorite and least favorite Star Wars movies because there’s always someone who’ll say that my opinion is wrong. Though I will admit the Yoda vs. Dooku fight was pretty cool.
I’m getting a feeling that on a level Mike noticed that he and Danny share this heartache for Ethan, and what he really wants iis to connect. But his asshole reflexes and defensiveness kick in way before he could show any vulnerability.
I’m getting a feeling Willis is setting up Mike/Ethan in the not too distant future.
Ah, I meant Danny/Mike, whoops
Mike is way too much of an asshole for Danny to ever like him.
But they would have the most epic of hatefucks.
I understood that reference
Danny & Mike about to rebound with each other?
How does Disney+ exist in this timeline?
Unless you’re expecting it to fail in the near future, remember that this comic always takes place “now”, except for during flashbacks (in which case it’s “X years before now”).
DofA will, at some point, inevitably flashback to Becky and Joyce watching Disney+ in their childhoods.
Nope, they weren’t allowed Disney cartoons. Promoted happiness without god’s love.
Ah yes, I forgot the sliding time scale where now is now even though only weeks have passed in comic time.
I’m kinda weirded out by how Ethan keeps manhandling Eric around.
I’m weirded out by how you think basic physical contact is manhandling.
FWIW, Attack of the Clones is my favourite of the prequels too but it’s such a shallow pool to choose from. It’s like saying The Force Awakens is the best of the Sequel Trilogy.
Yeah… We kind of need Danny to be with Amber in the next stage of her conflict with her father, don’t we?
Goodby, sad Mike
Hello, petty Mike, long time no see
OK, is no one going to talk about the uke having a shoulder strap? I mean, really. You put it in it’s little case, then put it in your pocket.
It’s like having a shoulder strap for your phone.
“Hello sexy!” – Obi-Wan ‘Larry’ Kenobi
I just need to test something. I don’t even have a comment about the comic. But has my gravatar changed?
Is is supposed to be Sailor Jupiter? That’s who I see at the time of posting.
It’s Neptune right now.
Well it’s Sailor Neptune now, so if it wasn’t that before, then yes
Super agree with the alt text, that fight is friggin’ sweet
Dooku and Yoda were the best part of the movie.
Also yeah fuck off forever Mike.
I feel like Attack of the Clones is my favorite of the prequels, even though E1 is more coherent and E3 is technically the better movie. There’s just so much cool stuff going on even if it’s messily linked together.
The romance subplot doesn’t even register in my head. It’s not like it’s going to be a healthy relationship.
Honestly, fair enough, even given that Danny’s antagonistic to mike for good reason. Expecting emotional succor from someone you just called a gigantic asshole is a jackass move, and since you’re completely correct about it, also a stupid one.
The entire SW canon is more of a cultural phenomenon than a series of movies. As movies, none of them are very good. A few are OK b-level films. They are most successful on the level of GI Joe or My Pretty Pony, as marketing opportunities. Internally incoherent. Full of howlers that a high school science teacher could have prevented. Bad actors reading bad lines badly. Plot holes big enough to drive a star destroyer through. Transparent mcguffins that just don’t make sense. She-Ra has better writing. I understand having a reading /watching profile but for me they fail even as pulp.
Why would you want to have a scientifically accurate Star Wars? I mean, that’s horrible.
There’s a common misconception that Star Wars is science fiction.
It is.
The subgenre of space opera or of science fantasy, depending on how you categorize things. It gets kind of fuzzy at times.
It’s certainly not hard science fiction, but that’s not the only subgenre.
In total fairness, it’s not quite that simple – science fiction in general is nominally supposed to be using advances in technology to talk about current day society in some fashion (And to this end, some hard science fiction isn’t really science fiction either, because ti’s mostly just meandering about tech).
Star Wars has moral lessons, sure (Albeit much, much safer ones until 7/8/possibly 9), but the fictional setting honestly has fuck and all to do with them, unless you get _Really_ charitable with Lil’ Orphan Annie. It’s not that it’s ‘soft’ or that it’s space opera per se, but that none of the commentary on society really comes from that space opera-ness.
To contrast briefly, Star Trek TOS is pretty pulpy sci fi, but nonetheless, the episode “The Immunity Syndrome” is a blatant (Albeit very simple) commentary on the foolishness of racism; the aliens are central to the point its telling. This is also true of say, Dune, where the metaphor for oil relies on being a different planet to show just how much effort people are going to, to get their colonizing on.
I would say that most of Star Wars is space opera without being science fiction; 7, 8, and maybe 9 are space opera that is science fiction, and star wars being star wars, the various side materials cover everything plausible under the sun, even sticking to officially endorsed stuff. For the record, I actually like Star Wars the best, and don’t really care for sci fi gatekeeping overall, but if one is going to use the ‘make commentary on society through fictional metaphor’ definition star wars legit does fail that (mostly).
The new She-Ra or the old She-Ra?
(Probably both.)
I wonder if Mike will follow Danny, then they will see Toedad & co. and so they will have to work together to save everyone.
Wait… based on the current timeline, none of the cast (except Robin)
would have been of moviegoing age when Episode II came out – I
presume all of them who had seen it saw it on DVD?
The only star wars movies I’ve seen are rogue one and last Jedi, and those were because my friends dragged me along. So basically the comments have gone straight over my head for two days
All you have to know is that all Star Wars movies are bad. Especially the one that the person reading this considers their favorite. That’s the worst one.
Rogue One is pretty good, even if the “little ship manages to push gigantic ship” moment near the end is one of the WTFiest moments in the whole franchise. I only watched the first of this latter trilogy (TFA), so I can’t comment on TLJ.
I feel bad for Mike. His poor attitude and behavior is either a shield or a coping mechanism. I don’t think he wants to alienate himself from everyone, he just feels like he doesn’t have other options. I hope he’s able to grow, get passed it and make amends with everyone.
Agreed. I feel like there’s a good chance he will make steps towards that in this comic, since we’re starting to see past his shell. I look forward to seeing a more vulnerable Mike.
But, wait… two was empirically better than 3, and arguably better than 1. Why would his opinion upset anyone?
Because if there is one thing that the last 4 or so years has taught us, nothing raises fandom passions and rage as much as a subjective opinion on a movie from a popular franchise!
I like 2 way better than 1, but apparently I am soundly outvoted, best I can tell.
Danny has the correct reaction to Mike.
this made me think of Doin Your Mom rap by ray william johnson and ray william johnson in general i would like to say fuck you