Actually to be clear here I was talking about the haircut thing. I haven’t had a decent cut in like 4 months and it drives me insane. It’s not so bad now cause the weathers getting colder so more hair isn’t as annoying to me.
Honestly, I kinda dig it long, haven’t had it that way since I was 10. Think I’ll wait until at least next June, then I’ll know how long it gets in a year.
I have 4c type hair so it actually becomes a puffy afro after a few months that makes it hard to wear hats and headphones. I can’t even imagine what it would look like after a whole year without a cut. I’m actually a little jealous of Walky here cause his hair seems way more manageable for a black dude. He probably doesn’t have to keep it hydrated at all.
I feel you, I cannot stand it when my hair gets long. The second it’s long enough to wear easily in a ponytail, it drives me nuts. I have a LOT of hair and it’s just..too much (my mom kept my hair below-waist-length for most of my childhood, that is probably why).
I was already almost due for a haircut when a pandemic started so I finally broke down and cut it myself 2 months in. Actually didn’t turn out too bad! (I did a choppy layered style, which helped) It was a looooot of work though. I am getting to that point again and it’s a battle of wills deciding if my frustration with my hair outweighs my exhaustion athe thought of all that effort again.
Yeah, my hair varies in texture from 2C-3A and it’s very fine and I have a lot of it. It’s frizzy as hell unless I use a lot of products and it grows sideways as much as down but also grows very fast (in under a yeara year it went from less than 1″ to almost mid back) and makes it hard to keep masks on over my ears. Some days I have the 80s frizz triangle hairdo. Other days I look like I am trying to single handedly bring back hair metal as a genre. Also hair dressers and barbers both here aren’t trained on anything more textured than about 2B hair so every time I go get it cut its rolling the dice whether it’ll look good or not. :/
Haven’t had a cut since February and it’s driving me a bit nuts but I am high risk for covid and a haircut isn’t worth the risk.
That said it’s becoming increasingly tempting for me to cut it myself because holy hell I hate it.
I haven’t gotten a cut since December (I would have in February, but I had surgery at the start of the month that kept me housebound – by the time that had ended, so the life as we knew it). Unfortunately, my hair no longer gets long in an attractive way (if it ever did) – on a good day(rare) I go for Brian May, but I generally end up Larry Fine…
I bought clippers years ago, and for years I’ve just buzzed it to half an inch once a month. If I cut it less frequently than that, it gets all poofy, unmanageable, and annoying. I hate that, washing it is like drying a kitchen sponge with a towel.
When I saw the protests in Michigan this summer about “But I need a haircut!” and whatnot from the covidiots, I decided to not cut my hair until the pandemic is over. No real reason, really, other than a “fuck you, you entitled muppets” to people whining about having to socially distance and stay inside.
I don’t regret my decision, but I honestly didn’t think the pandemic would still be going today, or that covidiots and anti-maskers would be so virulent.
My last local Walmart experience was the opposite. I didn’t realize there are also Walmart’s that *only* sell groceries, so I was very frustrated when I discovered I’d driven 30 minutes in search of store-exclusive Pokémon TCG stuff just to end up at a grocery store.
My only other Walmart experience was returning a microwave I’d ordered online that broke in 2 days, and seeing the giant wall of safety recalls on children’s and baby products while I waited in the return line.
I have decided Walmart is cursed and since done my best to avoid it.
Most big stores have those walls of recall listings, though. Only ones that don’t, to my limited knowledge, are Goodwills, and that’s because (per an acquaintance who did a brief stint at one) those are kept by the donations receiving area so they don’t accept something that they’ll have to throw out.
oh my gods, yes! Its a completely baffling scenario walking into a walmart neighborhood market for the first time. Ran into this when I went to Memphis to help train up my replacement at my last company. And the produce was in even worse shape than what I usually see at my local walmart.
I haven’t been to Walmart since March, when the toilet paper evaporated. It feels like Target’s clientele would be less likely to pretend the plague isn’t real.
Up here, our Walmarts usually have an optometrist, a salon, and either Subway or Dunkin’ Donuts. Target more often than not has a Starbucks and a Pizza Hut Express. If you go to Costco or BJ’s Wholesale Club, there’s a food court that sells generic quick foods plus a couple stalls for mall food vendors.
‘Member when Walmarts had mini McDonald’s in them? (Ours was complete with 12-foot-tall golden arches as the ‘door’.) They also used to have coin-op arcade games in between the entrance and exit, flanking the little door they used to bring the shopping carts back in.
Our local Big K-Mart had the “K Cafe”, which had the only Little Cesar’s in the area. That was the first thing you’d smell walking in the store, so by the time I visited a real standalone Little Cesar’s, my first thought was “why does this place smell like K-Mart?” They also had an auto shop and a portrait studio. (Does Walmart still have a portrait studio? Seems like that’s something that’s fallen by the wayside…)
I didn’t even realize he was talking about the latest films until reading your comment and looking up Snoke. To people who have seen them: am I missing much? Are they worth seeing?
TLJ had an awesome setup for where the First Order could go in the next film, and how it could fail, and so the next film… Completely ignores that so that they could [redacted stupidity] and waste the setup it was given on a throwaway spy.
You have a love story about how finding out the people you idolize have flaws as well, and how treating them as people can bring out the best in both of you? Nah, let’s just introduce a third love interest because… Because. And also have a last-minute aborted love confession that we’re going to pretend is actually a complete non-sequitor about how he might be force-sensitive, because screw the idea of anyone non force-sensitive mattering in Star Wars!
And… Eh, you know what, two is probably enough for now.
I’ll never understand how the sequel managed to mishandle things so thoroughly.
Oh, that’s easy. You put it in the hands of someone who doesn’t understand it and doesn’t care. Bonus points if they also enjoy shitting on things people care about. Done.
More specifically, you make a trilogy of films without any overall creative direction. No “showrunner” to establish overall character arcs and what each film needed to set up and resolve.
You could equally criticize TLJ for not setting up what was need for the last movie to work.
Some good work and some let downs in all of them, but together they’re an incoherent mess.
Any opinion on them is controversial, including the opinion that they were made and are Star Wars films.
That being said:
1st one: Entertaining, back-to-basics Star Wars. Has lots of moments that are derivative of the original trilogy (sometimes painfully so), but if that doesn’t both you, it’s a good time.
2nd one: Tried to break the mold by being very different and going in unexpected directions with characters and twists. Ask three people their opinions on whether it worked and you’ll get four different answers. For what it’s worth I liked it. Definitely the best looking SW if nothing else.
3rd one: Responded to the mixed reaction the 2nd one got by jerking the wheel back the other way and going off a bridge. Ignores the last one’s story as much as it can get away with, but didn’t have any ideas to replace it. Frustrating.
I liked the first two but haven’t seen the third because literally no one has said anything good about it. Not just “critics”, not just “people who’s opinion I trust”, just not “folks on the timeline”: any and everything I read or heard about the 3rd movie was negative.
I feel like the third one was trying too hard to course correct from the Last Jedi because some people didn’t like the themes Last Jedi was trying to setup. They should’ve just went with it and even if it wasn’t received well the trilogy would’ve been stronger as whole instead of trying to almost retcon Last Jedi. But hey, we all still have the Mandalorian!
I enjoyed the third one, but with everyone saying it’s bad so much I don’t feel confident enough to say it’s good and have just determined that I have really low standards for enjoying things I guess.
The people speak truly. The first two thirds of the film were choppy, and then the last third… Well, the parts that weren’t simply stupid or out of nowhere decided to spit in the eye of everything the first two films set up.
I thought TRoS was OK. I avoided it for many weeks because of all of the negative reviews, but finally saw it in its final week in movie theaters in my local area because I felt that one day I’d regret having seen all but 1 SW movie in the theaters. I expected it to be a complete trash fire, but it was mostly OK.
It had undeniably ridiculous twists, pointless new characters while cutting out interesting old characters, and reversed my favorite plot thread from TLJ, but I still feel like it was worth the watch. There were several moments that gave me a huge unabashed smile; probably more than in TLJ. It’s not great and it won’t live up to whatever your favorite SW movie is, but I guarantee it’s not as bad as you’re expecting and probably not as bad as many people remember it to be. I recommend giving it a shot, if only so you’ll be able to form your own judgment.
Force Awakens is a decent movie that’s rather formulaic in a way people forgave at the time but look back on less warmly now.
The Last Jedi was the first draft of a truly fantastic movie. It’s the only sequel movie with any original ideas or anything to say, but also has some REALLY weird parts (Mostly involving Poe Dameron, who is the worst character in all of Star Wars and should have been killed five minutes into TFA for Rey to be a surprise protagonist as was the original plan)
Rogue One might’ve been a pretty good movie if it wasn’t terrified of the audience forgetting it was a Star Wars movie.
I haven’t seen Rise of Skywalker (apparently a garbage fire literally no one likes) or Solo (apparent “enh”) and I think I’m done with Star Wars now.
I actually think Rogue One was the best Star Wars movie to come out since the franchise was purchased… Setting aside the fact that it doesn’t feel like a Star Wars film.
It was really nice to get the perspective of some “regular” Star Wars characters, instead of the larger-than-life heroes that usually dominate the films.
I loved that it didn’t “feel like a Star Wars film” personally. It showed that it was possible for Star Wars to be different things, to maybe grow as a franchise. That lesson seems to have been lost though.
I loved Rogue One. I liked Force Awakens, I was impressed by Last Jedi and surprised they were willing to put out a Star Wars film that makes you feel more like you survived it than enjoyed it (see also Battlestar Galactica, which I also loved) and then there’s… Rise of Skywalker. oof. 🙁
Much like Solo was a caper/heist flick, but with laser guns and robots.
Which is probably the best way to expand a franchise. Work with the basic premise and setting, but do movies with very different genre takes. Much like the Marvel movies did.
I didn’t want a Solo movie, I didn’t need a Solo movie, I am glad I got a Solo movie.
The actor they got for Young Han Solo was REALLY good in the role, making me forget that he looked basically nothing like Harrison Ford, and it was just overall a really *good* movie that no one wanted.
All this, and Donald Glover was AMAZING as Lando Calrissian. Note perfect to the point that now I kind of want a Lando Calrissian movie and I didn’t know I wanted that either. 😀
The Last Jedi was the only one of the three that even tried to do anything interesting, and that was undermined when the final film decided to ignore everything it set up. Also, the ending of the last film really ticked me off for a lot of different reasons.
The first film set up a lot of mysteries and questions, but in classic Abrams style, it never did anything with any of them, and those that were resolved, were resolved in a thoroughly unsatisfying manner. It’s not a bad film, but you’ll be disappointed if you expect a good payoff from anything it brings up.
The last film was honestly rather a trainwreck, with bad pacing, a bad setup, and an egregiously bad twist. Frankly, I wish it had never been made; leaving it in the hands of fanfic writers would have been better.
Now, that said… While the third trilogy leans too hard on action in general, the actors all give great performances. I’d happily watch another three films featuring the exact same cast. Rey, in particular, is great. Just… They really needed to have planned out the entire trilogy at once instead of handing it off to different people.
Rise of Skywalker retroactively makes the second film worse. TLJ, although it has faults, at its heart it was all about not getting bogged down in the weeds of what’s come before, and part of that was killing off the emperor-analogue of Snoke and apparently committing Kylo Ren to leadership of the First Order in a real, permanent way that precluded the redemption that was kind of predictable by the end of Episode 7.
An episode 9 that had been written to follow up on this, rather than one that tried to aggressively course correct with the safest pablum they could manage, could have been brilliant.
There are legitimate criticisms of TLJ, and not everyone who takes issue with it cries out about some sort of SJW agenda, but damned if it wasn’t a film that could have been brilliant with something written to follow it. But instead…well, we got The Rise of Skywalker. And that’s just sad.
Exactly. TLJ was all set to have Kylo Ren embrace his role as an adult, not as a child idolizing Vader, and have the seeds of his destruction set in the way that the leadership of the First Order neither liked nor respected him. This could have provided for a great arc for his character where he came to truly understand what he was committing to, and either turn away from it at the end (for the expected ending) or be destroyed by it (to take the arc home). Instead, we had him gallivanting about the galaxy on a fetch quest, had him play second fiddle to the “real” threat to rob any true agency or gravitas from his character, and had his genuine connection to Rey replaced by a stupid diad plot device – and in the process did legitimate harm to Rey’s character by reinforcing the idea that heritage is everything, and throwing out the idea that the Dark Side was legitimately enticing to her.
I don’t feel like The Last Jedi always succeeded at what it aimed for, but even when it didn’t, at least it tried, and the plot flags it set were ones that had clear directions for the sequel to follow up on. TRoS just wanted to be a stupid action film with no stakes, no themes, and lots of special effects – and in doing so, completely crashed what could have been a good end to the trilogy, as well as trashing all of the promises made in the first two films.
I agree with everything Jane said. Especially that last sentence.
I really hope the actors get to move on past the lodestone that the sequel trilogy has hung around their necks and become known for… pretty much anything else.
Force Awakens is almost (not quite, but close) a remake of New Hope. Watch it once for popcorn entertainment and to learn who everyone is before Last Jedi.
Last Jedi is, depending who you ask, either the best (MAYBE second or third after Empire and New Hope) or the worst (MAYBE second-worst after Clone Wars) Star Wars movie. The fanbase is very divided on that. I’d rank it in a difficult-to-call top-three, but your mileage may vary. Watch it at least twice, once to form an opinion and then a second time after you’ve heard everyone else’s analysis to see whether you want to modify yours. Then maybe add it to your normal rotation. Good or bad, it’s definitely a film worth looking at, thinking about, and discussing.
Rise of Skywalker is an incoherent, ill-paced mess that undermines most of the in-universe accomplishments of the rest of Star Wars as a whole while failing to bring the prequel trilogy to a satisfying conclusion, plus a few awesome scenes. I’d rank it as MAYBE better than Clone Wars and MAYBE on par with Phantom Menace. Watch it if you really need closure for the sequel trilogy, even if it’s bad closure. Otherwise, just YouTube the good scenes and forget the rest.
The interesting thing about Force Awakens being an almost remake of New Hope is that it both is and isn’t. It has a lot of the same tropes and hits a lot of the same basic plot beats, but everything is different about them. It’s like a completely different movie made off the same template sketch. And it leans into it in a way that makes the differences more striking. The characters are swapped around and have different motivations.
Kylo Ren is the clearest example. Armored masked, Dark Side wielder leading the evil troops – he’s obviously just a remake Darth Vader, right? Except he’s not – he’s a wannabe Darth Vader who’s torn by doubts, nothing at all like the Vader we saw in the original. Except on the most superficial level.
“Are they worth seeing?” Nope. Discount Darth Vader. Dollar Store Han Solo. Cheap knock-off Skywalker. Original trilogy actor who is dead kept alive. Original trilogy actor who is alive killed. Original trilogy main character actor totally wasted. Endings that make you mutter and throw your popcorn at the screen. Slow when they should be fast, fast when they should be slow. Useless side quests. Phony resolutions. Self-contradicting.
How much do you honestly like SW? Like, as a whole? Because if your answer is “it’s alright, I guess” (which i feel like it must be near, judging by you not having seen them yet), I would say you’re fine to just save yourself the time and not bother.
Yup, usually soundless. They like to play the big flashy movies to show off how good the new televisions are. Apparently The Fifth Element is great for this.
You’d think that they would want the sound playing too because. . .well speaker quality and all is just as important if not more so then the visual clarity.
Sound out of modern flat screen TVs doesn’t come close to matching their pictures – there’s no room to fit decent speakers. That’s why some sort of external sound is almost required for them to be at their best.
It doesn’t work nearly so well to have a whole wall of TVs playing sound from different movies or from one, but a bit out of sync. You can look at one screen easily enough, but a dozen soundtracks just blur into cacophony.
She is, for sure. She just needs to get past the underlying reasons for her goading Dorothy. I don’t mind waiting, I just want it to happen. I hope it happens.
Somebody let Dina know that if she wants to ditch the girl who survived two kidnappings and won an electoral campaign by hacking a US senator there’s some dudes in the comments box wokescolding her for being annoying on the first day of college who must be just awesome to be around.
Sorrynotsorry that I’m not so blinded by “gay character, everything they do is adorabLOL!” to recognize that announcing on your first day living with someone that you’re just waiting for them to be gone forever is called “being a brat”.
Except that whole arc wouldn’t have worked with Ackbar, because the whole audience would have been like “Shut up Poe, trust Ackbar, he’s got this.”
The point was to subvert our expectations by having the hero’s clever ploy fail when we were set up by action movie expectations for it to be the right thing.
I dunno the whole time I was red-faced and angry, syying “WTF Poe? Being tracked through hyperspace and not knowing how might mean a traitor in the fleet so why in the world do you expect an admiral to tell some pilot her plans especially when you just got a bunch of people killed? Shut up Poe and trust Holdo”
The Holdo Maneuver breaks Star Wars. Space combat devolves into hyperdrive equipped missile combat between missile carriers from beyond visual range of each other. Said carriers shrink in size as well.
No more giant capital ships, no more dogfights => no more metaphors for the size and power of the Empire, no more exciting action.
Whoever came up with the ‘Holdo Maneuver’ either doesn’t think their ideas through or hates Star Wars. Either way, they shouldn’t have been anywhere near the writers.
In all honesty, Star Wars-style space combat doesn’t make a lot of sense to begin with. Engagements probably should be at extreme distances considering the maneuverability space affords, and the vast destructive potential that nearly any space-capable military would possess.
Even X-Wings and Y-Wings make little sense in the context of a large fight – either the defenses of large ships are sufficient that they’d be useless outside of a kamikaze-style attack, or they’re weak to the point that another capital ship would do catastrophic damage if it could land a hit. I understand that there are explanations as to why this isn’t the case, but they still look like after-the-fact justifications for a cool idea to me.
The Holdo Maneuver could have used a bit more of a handwavey excuse as for why it’s not standard doctrine (like, say, “Oh, it’s only possible in the far reaches of the galaxy, or you risk jumping into an inhabited planet if you try”), but it’s a lot easier for me to accept than things like “So why don’t they just have ALL the ships flown by droids, and scrap that space-consuming cockpit?”.
Star Wars space combat makes literally no sense at all, except emotionally, where it kinda does. But that gets right to the flaw with the Holdo Maneuver in this context.
Don’t get me wrong. In isolation and in its context, it’s one of the most amazing scenes in Star Wars collectively. It’s visually and cinematicly just stunning. I was in awe.
But…
…compared to everything else mechanically in Star Wars space combat, it actually does make sense. And it’s utterly devastating. It’s about the most effective single-strike action we’ve seen (except the Death Star, yes). And if you automated it – and there’s no clear reason why you couldn’t – you wouldn’t even lose the single pilot. It all becomes robots against robots.
And that has the extremely unfortunate effect of making you go, “…then why are we bothering with all this other nonsense? What’s the point?” Not at that moment, because it’s spectacular. But when you think about it a little later.
And by doing so, by prompting you to think all this less unreal space combat vs. the more unreal regular Star Wars space combat, it robs that regular Star Wars combat of the sense it makes emotionally, because…
“Why do we do anything else? What’s the point?”
It moves that regular Star Wars space combat from heroic to wasteful and foolish. Which, I’ll say freely, does echo the bombing run at the beginning of the film! And it might have been the point. But if that is your point, there’s nothing new here to say “this changes the game, so all that other stuff wasn’t pointlessly wasteful,” and…
…that does kinda break Star Wars. Or at least that part of it. And given how much Shooty Shooty there is in Star Wars, that’s kind of a lot.
And that’s brave and maybe all that needs to be broken! But if you’re gonna do that, you’d better have the followup that builds something new out of the wreckage.
And thanks to Abrams, they most certainly didn’t. 🙁
I largely agree with you on this, except for two points; that at that moment in the film, the emotional tone of sacrifice it sets fits in with the emotional logic of Star Wars combat; in doing this, they’re sacrificing a good woman and one of the ships they were counting on to save the future. From a cold, logical standpoint, they’re sacrificing next to nothing in return for great gains – but the emotional logic of the scene is that they’re making a desperate sacrifice just to cling on in hopes of rescue. It’s nothing they’d even consider, except in dire circumstances.
And after the scene is over, questions are raised about why they couldn’t have just done that at the start, and saved themselves a lot of grief, but… That’s where I say it could have used a bit more of a handwave. A line with someone objecting only for Holdo to reply that they’re so far from meaningfully inhabited space that it’s safe could have sufficed, not that I can recall if there would have been a good space to wedge that in anywhere.
I mean, the viewer tends to understand that there’s a reason why they can do it here when they couldn’t do it elsewhere, because the logic of the setting demands it; they just need to be given a reasonably plausible fig leaf to accept it, unless they actively want to disbelieve that this scene can work.
the reason they can’t do it all the time is because they don’t have more than one giant expensive ship, because it was a giant, expensive ship
it only works as a last-ditch effort because it’s in no way cost effective
it’s like saying “well if launching your house at the enemy works, why don’t you launch your house all the time” WELL BECAUSE YOU ONLY GOT ONE HOUSE THAT’S WHY
I don’t think Jane really understands combat. Combat in Star Wars is very similar to combat in WWII (just in 3D), with Star Destroyers and Corellian Cruisers replacing Battleships and Aircraft Carriers. A flight of X-Wings & Y-Wings against a Star Destroyer is no different than F4F Wildcats and SBD Dauntless planes attacking the IJN Hiryu or IJN Kongo during the battle of Midway. Small, highly maneuverable ships are more easily able to evade a larger ship’s defensive fire, and make effective attacks, while the big ships themselves tend to stand off and fire salvos from a distance.
Space combat changes the variables & tactics somewhat, (and of course new technology comes into play) but many things will stay recognizable to 20th Century veterans.
The only major change I would make if i was writing about a Space Navy is that the fighters would become remote-controlled, semi-autonomous drones, capable of pulling far more G’s in evasive maneuvers than any human could. Plus, when the drone is destroyed, the pilot (onboard the carrier) survives, and a new drone can be “printed” from the carrier’s industrial fabricators.
But then you don’t have the visceral risk to the character pilots. The space combat scenes become less exciting. How much less thrilling would the Death Star run in New Hope have been if Luke was on his 3rd newly printed drone before he got the shot off?
Basically, even that’s a big move away from WWII fleet combat and changes things up. The Holdo Manuever on the other hand, completely breaks out of the WWII paradigm. Which is probably why it prompted such reactions, even though other nonsensical tactics didn’t.
Except that Space Combat is nothing like WW2 naval combat. WW3 naval combat won’t even be anything like WW2 naval combat.
It makes for a comforting reference that helps create a false feeling of realism, but the environmental conditions are completely different (for instance, large ships are no longer stuck operating on a 2D plane the way navies are, and fights can stop moving unlike planes), and technological progress necessitates that old paradigms simply don’t function anymore.
Shields, for instance. An absolute defense that doesn’t require any sort of interception, unlike WW2 guns that had to factor in enemy mobility. Smaller crafts had a better chance of avoiding fire them, but landing a hit isn’t the problem with Shields – the issue is overpowering them to get a meaningful hit. This is explained away in the EU by the idea that the shield has to be projected a bit outwards in order to function properly, but… In a more realistic science fiction, they’d have worked out other ways to avoid ship-sized gaps in their defenses. Because it would be a hard counter to things like Y-Wings ruining their day.
And even they couldn’t, you wouldn’t see strafing or bombing runs like this – they X-Wings would go in, break apart the smaller cannons in an area, and the Y-Wings would sit over the cleared site, dropping bomb after bomb until they’ve created a massive breach that either destroys the target or creates enough room for a boarding operation. Because in space, you don’t have to stop.
But ships wouldn’t actually look like this at all with robots as advanced as R2 – robots can clearly handle the vast majority of ship maintenance and operation in this setting, despite the ships obviously being designed with the expectation that humans are doing everything. This ships could be redesigned to be a fraction of the size that they currently are by replacing most of the human crew with smaller, more efficient droids without any loss of combat power – and while creating a much smaller target for their enemies. As well as replacing the iconic Star Destroyer design with something that creates a much smaller profile in general. If additional mass is still desired to keep it imposing or as a form of armor, they can simply replace it with otherwise unused layers of empty metal and keep ship operations towards the core.
And while X-Wings might still have a role as smaller patrol ships, they’d be pretty useless in large engagements the way I’ve outlined – but small ships could still play a decisive role in the form of unmanned, remote-guided missiles. This wasn’t possible in WW2 (though kamikaze attacks were, to good effect), but Star Wars level technology makes this a cost-free option even without Holdo – simply strap enough bombs to a ship, and send it on a safe course towards the enemy’s control center (which is made laughably easy to spot by putting it in such an unnecessarily conspicuous location). The sheer amount of explosive power on it shouldn’t have any issue in breaking through the shields, but you could even use a one-two followup to be sure – and since the only thing it needs are an engine and receiver (droid pilot optional), they could be made at a fraction of a cost of a Y-Wing, while being just as effective.
That’s what space combat should realistically look like with Star Wars technology – a handful of humans directing an army of drones trying to break into a massive floating sphere.
Not that I’d necessarily want to see that movie instead of Star Wars – it’d be interesting, but there’s a heck of a lot of stories that wouldn’t work with the setup. I don’t begrudge what Star Wars has chosen to do in the least, in this respect.
But it also means that the Holdo Manuever doesn’t even rank in the top 10 things I consider unrealistic about Space Combat in Star Wars, and I find it strange that some people consider this to be a grave sin against realism in the setting.
The problem with the Holdo Maneuver isn’t that it’s not realistic, but that it breaks the space combat paradigm the series has always used and thus makes people start thinking about it enough to realize none of it makes sense.
Ugh. This really reminded me that my local barbershop’s been closed due to covid for months. I wonder if they’ll ever reopen? Support local barbers. I also wonder what Walmart they have there cause non I’ve ever been to offers haircuts.
It’s such an annoying thing how whenever guys let their hair get slightly longer, other people feel entitled to tell them to cut it. You rarely see people voicing their opinions about women’s hairstyles so freely.
Mixed bag for me. My family seems to not care (they’re biased) and my sister actually prefers my hair longer, but it seems like every other female in my life likes to tell me that I look better with short hair.
I’ve got dreadlocks so I get a lot people telling me to let my hair grow out longer. But I don’t like it long cuz it gets heavy. Also cuz I wanna keep my cute boyish charm <3
I feel like that only happens when a guy’s hair is unkempt. Most guys I know with long hair generally look like they have a style they’re going for. There’s a lot of guys though like Walky where you can tell that their long hair isn’t a conscious choice, but rather a look born of pure laziness.
In fairness I have long hair primarily because if my hair was short I would need to spend a significant amount of time and effort styling it… Also because I would look like female Einstein I suspect as my hair likes growing out perpendicular from my head…
But if Walky was trying to grow out his hair (I don’t think this has been confirmed one way or the other), the initial unkempt look would be unavoidable. Short cuts take a long time to grow to a normal looking “bob” and a lot of that time is spent looking like a mullet.
Yeah, I remember her conservative Christian dad taking issue with it. In my experience, when I used to have haircuts like that people followed the “if you don’t have anything nice to say” rule.
Umm, I am a guy who at times has had hair down to my shoulders, and no one has ever told me to get it cut. Or to do anything else with it, except my food service boss who told me to wear a hair net.
(Probably because it is obvious I am such a total loser that it doesn’t matter what I do.)
Nononono. She’s not wearing it because it saves her time. She’s wearing it because this way she gets to spend the SAME amount of time proclaiming it twice as loudly.
Also, while Dorothy is not annoyed by it yet, I’m already annoyed by Becky on her behalf. Reminding Dorothy of a past relationship, she gave up specifically to focus on her studies, is a dick move no matter how you slice it.
So it costs $10 million to get a 20-year lease in a Walmart location. For a barber to be profitable there, he’s gotta pull in roughly ten grand a week or better.
Just thinkin’ aloud.
Thing I wanna know, as long as Dorothy is tangentially involved is…why *now*?
If she’s disciplined and driven enough to get into Yale after a semester at IU, she’s disciplined and driven enough to have done it out of high school.
So if she’s at IU to save a few bucks on undergraduate tuition, why try to leave after one semester? That’s not nothing in terms of savings, of course, but you have to figure she’d have done the math and determined that Yale would accept her coursework at IU in transfer. So why not do the general ed stuff at IU and aim for a junior year transfer? That’s what most kids who chase that path do.
Was there Some Kind of Drama that pushed her to IU instead of Yale? Did she miss an application deadline going to the Bone Zone with Danny?
Why is she trying to make that jump after just one semester? Why isn’t she there already if one semester of general eds can get her accepted?
If you’re coming into the middle, you should archive binge. I recommend it for the story.
But Dorothy wasn’t accepted directly out of high school, getting into Yale being highly competitive, and so her back up plan was to create a killer resume as a transfer student. Surprisingly it seems to have worked.
She wasn’t accepted out of high school. Yale is highly competitive so she relied on doing extra activities (she was part of the newspaper for a while) and performing well at IU to get the boost needed to transfer into Yale. Which seems to have worked.
Plus, before she was at IU, she had a clingy Danny who I imagine was slightly detrimental to her focus due to his own lack of ambition and desire to follow her pretty much everywhere weighing on her mind. And you know, also his desire for her to stay for him and pretty much give up her ambitions for him – while he only said this borderline outright once, I imagine it was something hinted at a few times before they broke up, which may have helped build to their breaking point.
I get that. But one semester at IU, even with activities, is not going to suddenly make Yale go “we dun goofed.” And the last we saw of her grades, they weren’t up to her expectations of herself and she was considering dropping some of those activities.
So, again – and I’ve been reading since day one – why *now*? She’s smart enough to pick her moment, and I can’t believe for a minute that she’d think one semester of general eds plus some newspaper plus…other stuff? Would do for her what four years of HS couldn’t. Did she get elected to student government and we didn’t see it? What did her resume have to offer to make that plausible enough that she applied basically right away after starting at Indiana?
She did a helluva application essay writing up the whole “my friend the secret vigilante superhero’s dad kidnapped me and a bunch of our other friends and I planned our escape. I wasn’t expecting our other friend’s dad turning on him to provide the distraction we needed. [detailed discussion on legality, ethics, morality, sociopolitical context, etc. that show her intelligence, knowledge, emotional intelligence etc, but basically using the experience to really help her stand out from the crowd. Possibly also the Ryan stuff]”? In which case the other/possibly primary reason she doesn’t want to tell Joyce et al is because she is basically using their trauma for her personal gain…
I actually can. Not her first draft — that would be for herself, to clear her mind, as you say — but then she’d go back to it and write one tailored for Yale, trying to minimize her use of her friends’ trauma and probably feeling a bit bad for doing so — but this is the girl who calmly refuses to apologize for positioning herself as Ruth’s replacement when it looked like one was needed. It may not just be desires she’d had to sublimate to get where she is today. She has her goals, and she’s focused.
The essay would be as much as possible about her experience rather than her friends’, but she’d have the Ethan Defense (it happened to me too, I’m allowed to have views on the subject) on her side.
I can’t really see why Yale would have accepted her now and not as a regular incoming freshman, but that’s apparently what’s happened. That it’s implausible doesn’t change her character arc, just accelerates it enough that we’ll see consequences this semester. She didn’t get in on her first application, so she went to IU instead with the intent of applying again and transferring. We knew that from the start and now it’s becoming a reality.
It’s unlikely, not implausible. Yale does accept transfer students and some of these are people they passed on the first go round. Just because it’s difficult doesn’t make it implausible. Just like winning the lottery is unlikely but completely plausible, as someone wins it on a fairly regular basis.
She might have been waitlisted somewhere near the top and enough people dropped out/transfered themselves to allow her to get in earlier than anticipated.
If they had made no nochitos scented Brylcreem, they would never have gone out of business.
Oh, wait. The Internet tells me that they never did go out of business, and I can yet some at Walmart. I guess it’s true, a little dab’ll do ya.
For those not alive in the 50″s, Brylcreem was this greasy concoction out of a tube that we rubbed into our hair to hold it down in the hopes that cute girls would be inspired to run their fingers through it. I would say it made sense at the time, but honestly, …
In a perfect world I could delete this and repost it up with the comment where I hit reply. I did leave the page several times and come back, but Whyyyyyy?
More like, Becky’s always been like this – it’s jsut that when she showed up much of the commentariat was all “wooo, a lesbian main character” and they excused everything. Now she’s up against fan-favourite Dorothy.
As opposed to the rest of the commentariat that was “omigod, she’s so irresponsible. that haircut” and “She’s probably just making it all up and her dad’s just worried about her”.
Oh man, I remember the haircut comments, but I totally missed the making up ones. On the other hand, it’s not like my faith in humanity needs any more blows, so it’s probably for the best.
My ‘favourite’ is the one that said Becky couldn’t know for sure she’s a lesbian unless she’s seen a picture of a dick. Or there was the one that guessed she ran away first and left a note telling Toedad about her being gay.
See, I should be mad at you for an unneccessary blow to my faith in humanity, but that first one is so absolutely out there that my brain got stuck in “What?” mode, and the blow never came.
There’s a weird thing with some people thinking orientation is strictly about genitals. Which makes no sense at all – overwhelmingly you only see the genitals after you’re attracted to someone.
It’s common in transphobic discussions, certainly TERFs, but also the old “tricked me into being gay” trans panic defense.
BBCC – that first comment you’re referencing sounds uncomfortably like the “if Faz doesn’t have bruises, he’s not really being abused” comments from last book. Kinda glad I didn’t dig too deep into the old comments sections when I was getting caught up.
The fact that Becky has a purposeful “make-fun-of-Dotty time”, instead of just making off the cuff remarks when the opportunity presents somehow manages to make it worse.
Yeah. It makes my wonder if there’s a time when Dorothy is present that isn’t ‘make fun of Dotty time’.
Or, frankly, if Becky is ever going to develop the basic respect for people that Joyce has and ‘call people what they want to be called’. Because her name is Dorothy, and she’s corrected Becky at least once on the front IIRC.
Yeah I hope this strip squashes the idea that Becky’s treatment of Dorothy is anything but pointed and intentional.
Like, the thing with characters being jerks to each other is that it has to make sense and it has to be interesting enough that you want to keep reading them doing their worst behaviour, and Becky succeeds at that. This has been built up for years and now the pieces are in place for Becky to just unload on Dorothy constantly until it reaches a breaking point, instead of going months between strips where Becky is just vaguely jerky in her direction and so much time passes you just kind of forget about it.
It’s good stuff. Even as it starts it’s one of the more interesting conflicts between cast members the series has had, and as far as I’m concerned there is no greater threat that these characters can undergo than the ones that they present to each other.
Without the establishing first panel–streetlights, paved walkway–the trees and (nicely turned) shadows might make me think these kids were in the first scene of a horror movie. Jes’ walkin’ into the woods, la-de-da…
Maybe Becky is onto something here. Dorothy does strike me as having a bit of a shallow attitude to relationships. She’s going on to bigger and better things so virtually every relationship (romantic and otherwise) she has at IU seem to be either for her comfort and recreation or simply to make her feel better about herself (“I am helping the little people!”).
Not really. That’s a very surface view of Dorothy. It matches more what she proclaims and what she thinks she needs to do than what she actually is like.
She wanted to avoid romance as a distraction, but fell for Walky anyway. She wanted to keep it “just for fun”, but fell in love anyway.
She wasn’t even upfront about it, like JBento suggests because she kept setting the boundaries and then breaking them. Which she acknowledged as unfair to him when they broke up.
She WAS upfront about it. It’s just that suddenly she decided she didn’t like what she’d been upfront about and so she told Walky she wanted to change it. That she kept doing it was terrible, but it wasn’t deceitful – the important part was that she TOLD Walky – he wasn’t working in that relationship blind.
(feel the need ot reiterate that the fact that she kept changing the rules whenver she felt like it is absolutely terrible)
Who she wasn’t upfront with was Danny, but when I pointed that out at the time half the commentariat jumped at me.
(and now you know two of the reasons I don’t like Dorothy, and the current Becky-is-constantly-an-asshole situation is all the more irritating for me now being in the irksome position of having to defend her)
Yeah, she told him, but she sprung it on him with a sudden “I love you” and got annoyed when he didn’t respond properly. She’d clearly been changing for awhile and not giving him warning to let him adjust along with her. It wasn’t “I want to change it”, it was “I have changed it”.
It was only after the fact, when they broke up, that she acknowledged it was a problem.
I don’t even dislike Dorothy for that. I just don’t like seeing it ignored here. I think it’s an interesting character flaw and am curious if more will be done with it.
As for Danny, that was in essentially the first 5 minutes of the comic and likely partly driven by the dramatic need to have the break up on stage, rather than just “Oh they used to date”. We also don’t have any of the buildup to it, so we don’t know how bad Danny was leading up to it.
Dorothy DOES have the problem common to people who make lists with checkboxes for everything: they get… upset is not quite the word I’m looking for, but it’s starting to get late here and my sleep has been shit of lately (and I’m working with a non-native language)… aggravated, perhaps? when people don’t respond to things within the range of reactions they expect.
Sort of like a light version of the Discworld Auditors, but without the malevolence.
This is for fun but also I’m in love with you and I want you to be in love with me but this relationship is just for fun and now you love me I’m breaking up with you.
Eh, it’s not like she wasn’t upfront about it with Walky. As long as everyone is on the same page on what the relationship is about, there’s nothing there to criticise.
It’s ok to date for fun if your partner(s) knows that’s what it is.
My recollection is that she was upfront with Walky, but when she found herself falling for him, was upset that he wanted to take her at her word.
I liked Dot in the first stages of the comic, but liked her less (or would have liked her less as a person were she not a comic strip character) as she was depicted as trying to simulate what she thought caring behavior looked like, lampshading it by carrying around her “friendly caring traits” punchlist.
Interesting since when Becky first heard about the break up, she said Dorothy doesn’t deserve Walky. Now she’s gonna bug and make fun of Dorothy for dating him.
Yeah, it seems like everyone thinks she’s showing disdain for Walmart hair cuts but I agree with you that she is irritated at Wally because her teasing failed.
I know this is a super late comment, but I had to come back to this page. I think the branches shading technique is some of my favorite art that has been produced since new semester start.
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This makes me very angry.
ah yes walky is breathing
Actually to be clear here I was talking about the haircut thing. I haven’t had a decent cut in like 4 months and it drives me insane. It’s not so bad now cause the weathers getting colder so more hair isn’t as annoying to me.
I got one in June.
Honestly, I kinda dig it long, haven’t had it that way since I was 10. Think I’ll wait until at least next June, then I’ll know how long it gets in a year.
I have 4c type hair so it actually becomes a puffy afro after a few months that makes it hard to wear hats and headphones. I can’t even imagine what it would look like after a whole year without a cut. I’m actually a little jealous of Walky here cause his hair seems way more manageable for a black dude. He probably doesn’t have to keep it hydrated at all.
Walky’s secret: he doesn’t actually wash his hair. It’s just that sleek and shiny from all the Nachitos grease.
Ew. Never mind. I’m not jealous anymore.
Knowing walky, he would buy a pomade if it were Nachitos scented.
My reply ended up way down the page.
My wife used to use a coconut-scented hand lotion that always made me crave coconut macaroons.
TIL there’s an alphanumeric encoding for types of hair.
I feel you, I cannot stand it when my hair gets long. The second it’s long enough to wear easily in a ponytail, it drives me nuts. I have a LOT of hair and it’s just..too much (my mom kept my hair below-waist-length for most of my childhood, that is probably why).
I was already almost due for a haircut when a pandemic started so I finally broke down and cut it myself 2 months in. Actually didn’t turn out too bad! (I did a choppy layered style, which helped) It was a looooot of work though. I am getting to that point again and it’s a battle of wills deciding if my frustration with my hair outweighs my exhaustion athe thought of all that effort again.
Yeah, my hair varies in texture from 2C-3A and it’s very fine and I have a lot of it. It’s frizzy as hell unless I use a lot of products and it grows sideways as much as down but also grows very fast (in under a yeara year it went from less than 1″ to almost mid back) and makes it hard to keep masks on over my ears. Some days I have the 80s frizz triangle hairdo. Other days I look like I am trying to single handedly bring back hair metal as a genre. Also hair dressers and barbers both here aren’t trained on anything more textured than about 2B hair so every time I go get it cut its rolling the dice whether it’ll look good or not. :/
Haven’t had a cut since February and it’s driving me a bit nuts but I am high risk for covid and a haircut isn’t worth the risk.
That said it’s becoming increasingly tempting for me to cut it myself because holy hell I hate it.
I haven’t gotten a cut since December (I would have in February, but I had surgery at the start of the month that kept me housebound – by the time that had ended, so the life as we knew it). Unfortunately, my hair no longer gets long in an attractive way (if it ever did) – on a good day(rare) I go for Brian May, but I generally end up Larry Fine…
I haven’t had a haircut in nearly 2 decades now.
Not much else to say, I just wanted to share that.
I bought clippers years ago, and for years I’ve just buzzed it to half an inch once a month. If I cut it less frequently than that, it gets all poofy, unmanageable, and annoying. I hate that, washing it is like drying a kitchen sponge with a towel.
When I saw the protests in Michigan this summer about “But I need a haircut!” and whatnot from the covidiots, I decided to not cut my hair until the pandemic is over. No real reason, really, other than a “fuck you, you entitled muppets” to people whining about having to socially distance and stay inside.
I don’t regret my decision, but I honestly didn’t think the pandemic would still be going today, or that covidiots and anti-maskers would be so virulent.
We get it, you don’t like Walky.
I know right? Everyone knows most good Barbershops _also_ have TVs
But they only show fishing programs.
My local barbershop only shows the Vietnamese cable channel. On the other hand, this means I get to supply my own dialog and it’s usually hilarious.
My shop always seems to be showing This Old House reruns. Geez, who has a shop like that? He could make Frank Lloyd Wright feel like an amateur.
So who you think has the thicker Boston accent, Norm or Tommy?
That’s why I go.
Agreed. Walky’s hair looks awesome. Faux!Billie as played by Becky is entirely in the wrong here.
Wait. You can get a haircut at Walmart?
friend, you can get just about anything at walmart.
Problem solved, Dorothy just needs to go to Yale and bam! President.
Also free of Becky.
Including even a tank, apparently, according to the Arrogant Worms.
If you’d like you can get a haircut and an eye exam while your tires are rotated.
just don’t get those mixed up.
But if you want your hearing tested, you gotta go to Sam’s Club.
It probably has to be a Super Walmart, but yes. If your area doesn’t have any of the big ones then that’s probably why you haven’t seen this.
My last local Walmart experience was the opposite. I didn’t realize there are also Walmart’s that *only* sell groceries, so I was very frustrated when I discovered I’d driven 30 minutes in search of store-exclusive Pokémon TCG stuff just to end up at a grocery store.
My only other Walmart experience was returning a microwave I’d ordered online that broke in 2 days, and seeing the giant wall of safety recalls on children’s and baby products while I waited in the return line.
I have decided Walmart is cursed and since done my best to avoid it.
Most big stores have those walls of recall listings, though. Only ones that don’t, to my limited knowledge, are Goodwills, and that’s because (per an acquaintance who did a brief stint at one) those are kept by the donations receiving area so they don’t accept something that they’ll have to throw out.
oh my gods, yes! Its a completely baffling scenario walking into a walmart neighborhood market for the first time. Ran into this when I went to Memphis to help train up my replacement at my last company. And the produce was in even worse shape than what I usually see at my local walmart.
The Onion agrees with you, but where else can you buy a vaccine cleaner?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=repxFQXVsHc
Also my mom is from Minnesota so I am genetically obligated to love Target instead. (Target is the best)
I haven’t been to Walmart since March, when the toilet paper evaporated. It feels like Target’s clientele would be less likely to pretend the plague isn’t real.
I would use a second-hand Flowbee before I’d go to WalMart to get a haircut.
My local Walmart has a hair salon, a bank, an optometrist and a Subway.
Depends on the Walmart, but some of the bigger ones can have a lot of smaller stores in them.
Up here, our Walmarts usually have an optometrist, a salon, and either Subway or Dunkin’ Donuts. Target more often than not has a Starbucks and a Pizza Hut Express. If you go to Costco or BJ’s Wholesale Club, there’s a food court that sells generic quick foods plus a couple stalls for mall food vendors.
‘Member when Walmarts had mini McDonald’s in them? (Ours was complete with 12-foot-tall golden arches as the ‘door’.) They also used to have coin-op arcade games in between the entrance and exit, flanking the little door they used to bring the shopping carts back in.
Our local Big K-Mart had the “K Cafe”, which had the only Little Cesar’s in the area. That was the first thing you’d smell walking in the store, so by the time I visited a real standalone Little Cesar’s, my first thought was “why does this place smell like K-Mart?” They also had an auto shop and a portrait studio. (Does Walmart still have a portrait studio? Seems like that’s something that’s fallen by the wayside…)
Our Walmart still has the mini McDees, and a portrait studio.
Well I didn’t know that happened in Star Wars, I still haven’t managed to find the time/money to see the latest films. Oh well.
There were spaceships, and laser swords, and silly droids.
Whoa slow down, you’re blowing my mind here, next you’ll be telling me people were moving stuff with an invisible force.
It has lightsabers, people always get chopped apart when they’re involved.
I didn’t even realize he was talking about the latest films until reading your comment and looking up Snoke. To people who have seen them: am I missing much? Are they worth seeing?
Force Awakens was the strongest, Last Jedi was pretty good, Rise of Skywalker was execrable.
the last jedi is the best star wars film
some day it’ll get a sequel
Some day. Maybe in a few years. In book form. So many ways that they could go with it and expand off of it.
Co-signed so damn hard.
110%. TLJ was great and handed sequel material out on a silver platter (that’s been sadly ignored).
At least 30 years from now we’ll get Broom Kid, the Disney+ series!
TLJ had an awesome setup for where the First Order could go in the next film, and how it could fail, and so the next film… Completely ignores that so that they could [redacted stupidity] and waste the setup it was given on a throwaway spy.
You have a love story about how finding out the people you idolize have flaws as well, and how treating them as people can bring out the best in both of you? Nah, let’s just introduce a third love interest because… Because. And also have a last-minute aborted love confession that we’re going to pretend is actually a complete non-sequitor about how he might be force-sensitive, because screw the idea of anyone non force-sensitive mattering in Star Wars!
And… Eh, you know what, two is probably enough for now.
I’ll never understand how the sequel managed to mishandle things so thoroughly.
Oh, that’s easy. You put it in the hands of someone who doesn’t understand it and doesn’t care. Bonus points if they also enjoy shitting on things people care about. Done.
More specifically, you make a trilogy of films without any overall creative direction. No “showrunner” to establish overall character arcs and what each film needed to set up and resolve.
You could equally criticize TLJ for not setting up what was need for the last movie to work.
Some good work and some let downs in all of them, but together they’re an incoherent mess.
abso-GD-lutely
Thank you, Willis!
They lost me when they tossed out 25 odd years of extended universe lore and had the empire still in control, and no Mara Jade and all the Jedi kids.
we lost luuke too, the fiends
Any opinion on them is controversial, including the opinion that they were made and are Star Wars films.
That being said:
1st one: Entertaining, back-to-basics Star Wars. Has lots of moments that are derivative of the original trilogy (sometimes painfully so), but if that doesn’t both you, it’s a good time.
2nd one: Tried to break the mold by being very different and going in unexpected directions with characters and twists. Ask three people their opinions on whether it worked and you’ll get four different answers. For what it’s worth I liked it. Definitely the best looking SW if nothing else.
3rd one: Responded to the mixed reaction the 2nd one got by jerking the wheel back the other way and going off a bridge. Ignores the last one’s story as much as it can get away with, but didn’t have any ideas to replace it. Frustrating.
I liked the first two but haven’t seen the third because literally no one has said anything good about it. Not just “critics”, not just “people who’s opinion I trust”, just not “folks on the timeline”: any and everything I read or heard about the 3rd movie was negative.
I feel like the third one was trying too hard to course correct from the Last Jedi because some people didn’t like the themes Last Jedi was trying to setup. They should’ve just went with it and even if it wasn’t received well the trilogy would’ve been stronger as whole instead of trying to almost retcon Last Jedi. But hey, we all still have the Mandalorian!
I enjoyed the third one, but with everyone saying it’s bad so much I don’t feel confident enough to say it’s good and have just determined that I have really low standards for enjoying things I guess.
The people speak truly. The first two thirds of the film were choppy, and then the last third… Well, the parts that weren’t simply stupid or out of nowhere decided to spit in the eye of everything the first two films set up.
I’d get into details, but, spoilers.
I enjoyed the the first and third better than the second, but I didn’t really think any of them were terrible.
I thought TRoS was OK. I avoided it for many weeks because of all of the negative reviews, but finally saw it in its final week in movie theaters in my local area because I felt that one day I’d regret having seen all but 1 SW movie in the theaters. I expected it to be a complete trash fire, but it was mostly OK.
It had undeniably ridiculous twists, pointless new characters while cutting out interesting old characters, and reversed my favorite plot thread from TLJ, but I still feel like it was worth the watch. There were several moments that gave me a huge unabashed smile; probably more than in TLJ. It’s not great and it won’t live up to whatever your favorite SW movie is, but I guarantee it’s not as bad as you’re expecting and probably not as bad as many people remember it to be. I recommend giving it a shot, if only so you’ll be able to form your own judgment.
Force Awakens is a decent movie that’s rather formulaic in a way people forgave at the time but look back on less warmly now.
The Last Jedi was the first draft of a truly fantastic movie. It’s the only sequel movie with any original ideas or anything to say, but also has some REALLY weird parts (Mostly involving Poe Dameron, who is the worst character in all of Star Wars and should have been killed five minutes into TFA for Rey to be a surprise protagonist as was the original plan)
Rogue One might’ve been a pretty good movie if it wasn’t terrified of the audience forgetting it was a Star Wars movie.
I haven’t seen Rise of Skywalker (apparently a garbage fire literally no one likes) or Solo (apparent “enh”) and I think I’m done with Star Wars now.
I actually think Rogue One was the best Star Wars movie to come out since the franchise was purchased… Setting aside the fact that it doesn’t feel like a Star Wars film.
It was really nice to get the perspective of some “regular” Star Wars characters, instead of the larger-than-life heroes that usually dominate the films.
I loved that it didn’t “feel like a Star Wars film” personally. It showed that it was possible for Star Wars to be different things, to maybe grow as a franchise. That lesson seems to have been lost though.
I loved Rogue One. I liked Force Awakens, I was impressed by Last Jedi and surprised they were willing to put out a Star Wars film that makes you feel more like you survived it than enjoyed it (see also Battlestar Galactica, which I also loved) and then there’s… Rise of Skywalker. oof. 🙁
Thankfully, we have The Mandalorian. ^_^
yeah it definitely felt like a nihilistic WWII French Resistance film but with laser guns and robots.
Much like Solo was a caper/heist flick, but with laser guns and robots.
Which is probably the best way to expand a franchise. Work with the basic premise and setting, but do movies with very different genre takes. Much like the Marvel movies did.
I must say that Solo was. . .
I didn’t want a Solo movie, I didn’t need a Solo movie, I am glad I got a Solo movie.
The actor they got for Young Han Solo was REALLY good in the role, making me forget that he looked basically nothing like Harrison Ford, and it was just overall a really *good* movie that no one wanted.
All this, and Donald Glover was AMAZING as Lando Calrissian. Note perfect to the point that now I kind of want a Lando Calrissian movie and I didn’t know I wanted that either. 😀
It tried a bit to hard to cram in references to all the Han Solo lore, but overall it was a good heist movie in space.
And had some interesting set up stuff for a sequel that will probably never get touched.
The Last Jedi was the only one of the three that even tried to do anything interesting, and that was undermined when the final film decided to ignore everything it set up. Also, the ending of the last film really ticked me off for a lot of different reasons.
The first film set up a lot of mysteries and questions, but in classic Abrams style, it never did anything with any of them, and those that were resolved, were resolved in a thoroughly unsatisfying manner. It’s not a bad film, but you’ll be disappointed if you expect a good payoff from anything it brings up.
The last film was honestly rather a trainwreck, with bad pacing, a bad setup, and an egregiously bad twist. Frankly, I wish it had never been made; leaving it in the hands of fanfic writers would have been better.
Now, that said… While the third trilogy leans too hard on action in general, the actors all give great performances. I’d happily watch another three films featuring the exact same cast. Rey, in particular, is great. Just… They really needed to have planned out the entire trilogy at once instead of handing it off to different people.
Rise of Skywalker retroactively makes the second film worse. TLJ, although it has faults, at its heart it was all about not getting bogged down in the weeds of what’s come before, and part of that was killing off the emperor-analogue of Snoke and apparently committing Kylo Ren to leadership of the First Order in a real, permanent way that precluded the redemption that was kind of predictable by the end of Episode 7.
An episode 9 that had been written to follow up on this, rather than one that tried to aggressively course correct with the safest pablum they could manage, could have been brilliant.
There are legitimate criticisms of TLJ, and not everyone who takes issue with it cries out about some sort of SJW agenda, but damned if it wasn’t a film that could have been brilliant with something written to follow it. But instead…well, we got The Rise of Skywalker. And that’s just sad.
Exactly. TLJ was all set to have Kylo Ren embrace his role as an adult, not as a child idolizing Vader, and have the seeds of his destruction set in the way that the leadership of the First Order neither liked nor respected him. This could have provided for a great arc for his character where he came to truly understand what he was committing to, and either turn away from it at the end (for the expected ending) or be destroyed by it (to take the arc home). Instead, we had him gallivanting about the galaxy on a fetch quest, had him play second fiddle to the “real” threat to rob any true agency or gravitas from his character, and had his genuine connection to Rey replaced by a stupid diad plot device – and in the process did legitimate harm to Rey’s character by reinforcing the idea that heritage is everything, and throwing out the idea that the Dark Side was legitimately enticing to her.
I don’t feel like The Last Jedi always succeeded at what it aimed for, but even when it didn’t, at least it tried, and the plot flags it set were ones that had clear directions for the sequel to follow up on. TRoS just wanted to be a stupid action film with no stakes, no themes, and lots of special effects – and in doing so, completely crashed what could have been a good end to the trilogy, as well as trashing all of the promises made in the first two films.
I agree with everything Jane said. Especially that last sentence.
I really hope the actors get to move on past the lodestone that the sequel trilogy has hung around their necks and become known for… pretty much anything else.
Force Awakens is almost (not quite, but close) a remake of New Hope. Watch it once for popcorn entertainment and to learn who everyone is before Last Jedi.
Last Jedi is, depending who you ask, either the best (MAYBE second or third after Empire and New Hope) or the worst (MAYBE second-worst after Clone Wars) Star Wars movie. The fanbase is very divided on that. I’d rank it in a difficult-to-call top-three, but your mileage may vary. Watch it at least twice, once to form an opinion and then a second time after you’ve heard everyone else’s analysis to see whether you want to modify yours. Then maybe add it to your normal rotation. Good or bad, it’s definitely a film worth looking at, thinking about, and discussing.
Rise of Skywalker is an incoherent, ill-paced mess that undermines most of the in-universe accomplishments of the rest of Star Wars as a whole while failing to bring the prequel trilogy to a satisfying conclusion, plus a few awesome scenes. I’d rank it as MAYBE better than Clone Wars and MAYBE on par with Phantom Menace. Watch it if you really need closure for the sequel trilogy, even if it’s bad closure. Otherwise, just YouTube the good scenes and forget the rest.
*failing to bring the SEQUEL trilogy to a satisfying conclusion
The interesting thing about Force Awakens being an almost remake of New Hope is that it both is and isn’t. It has a lot of the same tropes and hits a lot of the same basic plot beats, but everything is different about them. It’s like a completely different movie made off the same template sketch. And it leans into it in a way that makes the differences more striking. The characters are swapped around and have different motivations.
Kylo Ren is the clearest example. Armored masked, Dark Side wielder leading the evil troops – he’s obviously just a remake Darth Vader, right? Except he’s not – he’s a wannabe Darth Vader who’s torn by doubts, nothing at all like the Vader we saw in the original. Except on the most superficial level.
“Are they worth seeing?” Nope. Discount Darth Vader. Dollar Store Han Solo. Cheap knock-off Skywalker. Original trilogy actor who is dead kept alive. Original trilogy actor who is alive killed. Original trilogy main character actor totally wasted. Endings that make you mutter and throw your popcorn at the screen. Slow when they should be fast, fast when they should be slow. Useless side quests. Phony resolutions. Self-contradicting.
dont bother they were hot garbage (except for force awakens would recommend)
How much do you honestly like SW? Like, as a whole? Because if your answer is “it’s alright, I guess” (which i feel like it must be near, judging by you not having seen them yet), I would say you’re fine to just save yourself the time and not bother.
Honestly, you haven’t missed anything of importance. They are pretty bad. Soulless cash grab-wars.
Watching Snoke get chopped in half is always a great experience.
. . . Also do they actually play whole movies in the Entertainment section? I thought it was just endless trailers
Yup, usually soundless. They like to play the big flashy movies to show off how good the new televisions are. Apparently The Fifth Element is great for this.
You’d think that they would want the sound playing too because. . .well speaker quality and all is just as important if not more so then the visual clarity.
Probably can’t for legal reasons:
https://www.consumerreports.org/consumerist/copyright-law-why-your-favorite-bar-cant-show-the-game-on-a-60-tv/
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150421/05485230735/hbo-shuts-down-bars-game-thrones-viewing-party.shtml
Huh. Well that explains the setup of literally every Buffalo Wild Wings I ever stepped into.
Sound out of modern flat screen TVs doesn’t come close to matching their pictures – there’s no room to fit decent speakers. That’s why some sort of external sound is almost required for them to be at their best.
It doesn’t work nearly so well to have a whole wall of TVs playing sound from different movies or from one, but a bit out of sync. You can look at one screen easily enough, but a dozen soundtracks just blur into cacophony.
You’re no catch yourself Becky.
Yeah she is, let’s be real, Becky’s awesome.
She is, for sure. She just needs to get past the underlying reasons for her goading Dorothy. I don’t mind waiting, I just want it to happen. I hope it happens.
Not in these last few chapters, she hasn’t. My opinion is that she’s being obnoxious.
Somebody let Dina know that if she wants to ditch the girl who survived two kidnappings and won an electoral campaign by hacking a US senator there’s some dudes in the comments box wokescolding her for being annoying on the first day of college who must be just awesome to be around.
Imagine thinking failing upward because you were taken in by an incompetent senator and being kidnapped is a substitute for a personality.
It literally is.
Congratulations you’ve admitted Donald Trump is 50% your type.
Sorrynotsorry that I’m not so blinded by “gay character, everything they do is adorabLOL!” to recognize that announcing on your first day living with someone that you’re just waiting for them to be gone forever is called “being a brat”.
Admittedly, Becky is already ‘caught’. People behave better when they’re looking for a relationship than when they’re already in one.
Scoff! Scoff scoff! Scoff scoff, I say, scoff scoff!
I know! Walky, don’t read the stage directions!
The Holdo Maneuver is the single coolest thing to come from the ST but I hate that it’s attached to that character.
Shoulda been Ackbar’s last hurrah instead of killing him in the opening.
Ooh, yes!
But Ackbar already has a maneuver attached to his name. Or did th.. yeah, it got thrown out with the rest of the Expanded Universe, didn’t it? Ugh.
Except that whole arc wouldn’t have worked with Ackbar, because the whole audience would have been like “Shut up Poe, trust Ackbar, he’s got this.”
The point was to subvert our expectations by having the hero’s clever ploy fail when we were set up by action movie expectations for it to be the right thing.
but why would we want new characters that make the best sense within the narrative when we can have the meme do things
I dunno the whole time I was red-faced and angry, syying “WTF Poe? Being tracked through hyperspace and not knowing how might mean a traitor in the fleet so why in the world do you expect an admiral to tell some pilot her plans especially when you just got a bunch of people killed? Shut up Poe and trust Holdo”
The Holdo Maneuver breaks Star Wars. Space combat devolves into hyperdrive equipped missile combat between missile carriers from beyond visual range of each other. Said carriers shrink in size as well.
No more giant capital ships, no more dogfights => no more metaphors for the size and power of the Empire, no more exciting action.
Whoever came up with the ‘Holdo Maneuver’ either doesn’t think their ideas through or hates Star Wars. Either way, they shouldn’t have been anywhere near the writers.
I dunno how to tell you this, but the Empire was dead by the time the Holdo Maneuver was invented.
In all honesty, Star Wars-style space combat doesn’t make a lot of sense to begin with. Engagements probably should be at extreme distances considering the maneuverability space affords, and the vast destructive potential that nearly any space-capable military would possess.
Even X-Wings and Y-Wings make little sense in the context of a large fight – either the defenses of large ships are sufficient that they’d be useless outside of a kamikaze-style attack, or they’re weak to the point that another capital ship would do catastrophic damage if it could land a hit. I understand that there are explanations as to why this isn’t the case, but they still look like after-the-fact justifications for a cool idea to me.
The Holdo Maneuver could have used a bit more of a handwavey excuse as for why it’s not standard doctrine (like, say, “Oh, it’s only possible in the far reaches of the galaxy, or you risk jumping into an inhabited planet if you try”), but it’s a lot easier for me to accept than things like “So why don’t they just have ALL the ships flown by droids, and scrap that space-consuming cockpit?”.
Star Wars space combat makes literally no sense at all, except emotionally, where it kinda does. But that gets right to the flaw with the Holdo Maneuver in this context.
Don’t get me wrong. In isolation and in its context, it’s one of the most amazing scenes in Star Wars collectively. It’s visually and cinematicly just stunning. I was in awe.
But…
…compared to everything else mechanically in Star Wars space combat, it actually does make sense. And it’s utterly devastating. It’s about the most effective single-strike action we’ve seen (except the Death Star, yes). And if you automated it – and there’s no clear reason why you couldn’t – you wouldn’t even lose the single pilot. It all becomes robots against robots.
And that has the extremely unfortunate effect of making you go, “…then why are we bothering with all this other nonsense? What’s the point?” Not at that moment, because it’s spectacular. But when you think about it a little later.
And by doing so, by prompting you to think all this less unreal space combat vs. the more unreal regular Star Wars space combat, it robs that regular Star Wars combat of the sense it makes emotionally, because…
“Why do we do anything else? What’s the point?”
It moves that regular Star Wars space combat from heroic to wasteful and foolish. Which, I’ll say freely, does echo the bombing run at the beginning of the film! And it might have been the point. But if that is your point, there’s nothing new here to say “this changes the game, so all that other stuff wasn’t pointlessly wasteful,” and…
…that does kinda break Star Wars. Or at least that part of it. And given how much Shooty Shooty there is in Star Wars, that’s kind of a lot.
And that’s brave and maybe all that needs to be broken! But if you’re gonna do that, you’d better have the followup that builds something new out of the wreckage.
And thanks to Abrams, they most certainly didn’t. 🙁
I largely agree with you on this, except for two points; that at that moment in the film, the emotional tone of sacrifice it sets fits in with the emotional logic of Star Wars combat; in doing this, they’re sacrificing a good woman and one of the ships they were counting on to save the future. From a cold, logical standpoint, they’re sacrificing next to nothing in return for great gains – but the emotional logic of the scene is that they’re making a desperate sacrifice just to cling on in hopes of rescue. It’s nothing they’d even consider, except in dire circumstances.
And after the scene is over, questions are raised about why they couldn’t have just done that at the start, and saved themselves a lot of grief, but… That’s where I say it could have used a bit more of a handwave. A line with someone objecting only for Holdo to reply that they’re so far from meaningfully inhabited space that it’s safe could have sufficed, not that I can recall if there would have been a good space to wedge that in anywhere.
I mean, the viewer tends to understand that there’s a reason why they can do it here when they couldn’t do it elsewhere, because the logic of the setting demands it; they just need to be given a reasonably plausible fig leaf to accept it, unless they actively want to disbelieve that this scene can work.
the reason they can’t do it all the time is because they don’t have more than one giant expensive ship, because it was a giant, expensive ship
it only works as a last-ditch effort because it’s in no way cost effective
it’s like saying “well if launching your house at the enemy works, why don’t you launch your house all the time” WELL BECAUSE YOU ONLY GOT ONE HOUSE THAT’S WHY
Why bother with proton torpedoes? Let’s just strap hyperdrives onto solid blocks of metal.
I don’t think Jane really understands combat. Combat in Star Wars is very similar to combat in WWII (just in 3D), with Star Destroyers and Corellian Cruisers replacing Battleships and Aircraft Carriers. A flight of X-Wings & Y-Wings against a Star Destroyer is no different than F4F Wildcats and SBD Dauntless planes attacking the IJN Hiryu or IJN Kongo during the battle of Midway. Small, highly maneuverable ships are more easily able to evade a larger ship’s defensive fire, and make effective attacks, while the big ships themselves tend to stand off and fire salvos from a distance.
Space combat changes the variables & tactics somewhat, (and of course new technology comes into play) but many things will stay recognizable to 20th Century veterans.
The only major change I would make if i was writing about a Space Navy is that the fighters would become remote-controlled, semi-autonomous drones, capable of pulling far more G’s in evasive maneuvers than any human could. Plus, when the drone is destroyed, the pilot (onboard the carrier) survives, and a new drone can be “printed” from the carrier’s industrial fabricators.
But then you don’t have the visceral risk to the character pilots. The space combat scenes become less exciting. How much less thrilling would the Death Star run in New Hope have been if Luke was on his 3rd newly printed drone before he got the shot off?
Basically, even that’s a big move away from WWII fleet combat and changes things up. The Holdo Manuever on the other hand, completely breaks out of the WWII paradigm. Which is probably why it prompted such reactions, even though other nonsensical tactics didn’t.
Except that Space Combat is nothing like WW2 naval combat. WW3 naval combat won’t even be anything like WW2 naval combat.
It makes for a comforting reference that helps create a false feeling of realism, but the environmental conditions are completely different (for instance, large ships are no longer stuck operating on a 2D plane the way navies are, and fights can stop moving unlike planes), and technological progress necessitates that old paradigms simply don’t function anymore.
Shields, for instance. An absolute defense that doesn’t require any sort of interception, unlike WW2 guns that had to factor in enemy mobility. Smaller crafts had a better chance of avoiding fire them, but landing a hit isn’t the problem with Shields – the issue is overpowering them to get a meaningful hit. This is explained away in the EU by the idea that the shield has to be projected a bit outwards in order to function properly, but… In a more realistic science fiction, they’d have worked out other ways to avoid ship-sized gaps in their defenses. Because it would be a hard counter to things like Y-Wings ruining their day.
And even they couldn’t, you wouldn’t see strafing or bombing runs like this – they X-Wings would go in, break apart the smaller cannons in an area, and the Y-Wings would sit over the cleared site, dropping bomb after bomb until they’ve created a massive breach that either destroys the target or creates enough room for a boarding operation. Because in space, you don’t have to stop.
But ships wouldn’t actually look like this at all with robots as advanced as R2 – robots can clearly handle the vast majority of ship maintenance and operation in this setting, despite the ships obviously being designed with the expectation that humans are doing everything. This ships could be redesigned to be a fraction of the size that they currently are by replacing most of the human crew with smaller, more efficient droids without any loss of combat power – and while creating a much smaller target for their enemies. As well as replacing the iconic Star Destroyer design with something that creates a much smaller profile in general. If additional mass is still desired to keep it imposing or as a form of armor, they can simply replace it with otherwise unused layers of empty metal and keep ship operations towards the core.
And while X-Wings might still have a role as smaller patrol ships, they’d be pretty useless in large engagements the way I’ve outlined – but small ships could still play a decisive role in the form of unmanned, remote-guided missiles. This wasn’t possible in WW2 (though kamikaze attacks were, to good effect), but Star Wars level technology makes this a cost-free option even without Holdo – simply strap enough bombs to a ship, and send it on a safe course towards the enemy’s control center (which is made laughably easy to spot by putting it in such an unnecessarily conspicuous location). The sheer amount of explosive power on it shouldn’t have any issue in breaking through the shields, but you could even use a one-two followup to be sure – and since the only thing it needs are an engine and receiver (droid pilot optional), they could be made at a fraction of a cost of a Y-Wing, while being just as effective.
That’s what space combat should realistically look like with Star Wars technology – a handful of humans directing an army of drones trying to break into a massive floating sphere.
Not that I’d necessarily want to see that movie instead of Star Wars – it’d be interesting, but there’s a heck of a lot of stories that wouldn’t work with the setup. I don’t begrudge what Star Wars has chosen to do in the least, in this respect.
But it also means that the Holdo Manuever doesn’t even rank in the top 10 things I consider unrealistic about Space Combat in Star Wars, and I find it strange that some people consider this to be a grave sin against realism in the setting.
Of course it’s not realistic. It’s space fantasy.
The problem with the Holdo Maneuver isn’t that it’s not realistic, but that it breaks the space combat paradigm the series has always used and thus makes people start thinking about it enough to realize none of it makes sense.
See, I find it kinda messed up that they named it after her like it was a carefully planned maneuver. It’s like naming kamikaze attacks after someone.
Throwing that line in was a way for Abrams to acknowledge that a movie happened before his, right before ignoring or reversing everything it did.
“The Holdo Maneuver”?
Historically, I think its called “kamikaze”?
On that note. Why even sacrifice a person like that? I would have left a droid to execute it. Or just use the autopilot.
I think Walky won this argument, Becky.
Ugh. This really reminded me that my local barbershop’s been closed due to covid for months. I wonder if they’ll ever reopen? Support local barbers. I also wonder what Walmart they have there cause non I’ve ever been to offers haircuts.
We’ll all have long wavy hair like heavy metal GODS after this.
It’s such an annoying thing how whenever guys let their hair get slightly longer, other people feel entitled to tell them to cut it. You rarely see people voicing their opinions about women’s hairstyles so freely.
Unless they’re Black.
(I can’t speak to whether this happens to other WOC but it definitely happens to Black women.)
Doesn’t happen to me. Whenever I let my hair get a bit longer than usual women start making comments that imply it doesn’t look good normally.
Mixed bag for me. My family seems to not care (they’re biased) and my sister actually prefers my hair longer, but it seems like every other female in my life likes to tell me that I look better with short hair.
I’ve got dreadlocks so I get a lot people telling me to let my hair grow out longer. But I don’t like it long cuz it gets heavy. Also cuz I wanna keep my cute boyish charm <3
I feel like that only happens when a guy’s hair is unkempt. Most guys I know with long hair generally look like they have a style they’re going for. There’s a lot of guys though like Walky where you can tell that their long hair isn’t a conscious choice, but rather a look born of pure laziness.
In fairness I have long hair primarily because if my hair was short I would need to spend a significant amount of time and effort styling it… Also because I would look like female Einstein I suspect as my hair likes growing out perpendicular from my head…
But if Walky was trying to grow out his hair (I don’t think this has been confirmed one way or the other), the initial unkempt look would be unavoidable. Short cuts take a long time to grow to a normal looking “bob” and a lot of that time is spent looking like a mullet.
… Were you around when Becky first got her undercut?
Yeah, I remember her conservative Christian dad taking issue with it. In my experience, when I used to have haircuts like that people followed the “if you don’t have anything nice to say” rule.
I think they meant all the commenters here freaking out about it.
Until a point. When it gets LONG long, its the other way around and people FORBID it 😛
Ya got that right. Mine’s around my shoulders now, and I think my partner would actually cry a little if it got cut.
Guys don’t usually get told they’d be prettier if they smiled.
Lord knows I don’t.
Umm, I am a guy who at times has had hair down to my shoulders, and no one has ever told me to get it cut. Or to do anything else with it, except my food service boss who told me to wear a hair net.
(Probably because it is obvious I am such a total loser that it doesn’t matter what I do.)
Is Becky lesbian flag colors on purpose? 😀
Yes.
I want her coat so much.
It saves her time on constantly loudly proclaiming she’s a lesbian.
Nononono. She’s not wearing it because it saves her time. She’s wearing it because this way she gets to spend the SAME amount of time proclaiming it twice as loudly.
Also, while Dorothy is not annoyed by it yet, I’m already annoyed by Becky on her behalf. Reminding Dorothy of a past relationship, she gave up specifically to focus on her studies, is a dick move no matter how you slice it.
Besides, Dorothy has dated more than one person.
Unlike someone stockpiling burn material…
So it costs $10 million to get a 20-year lease in a Walmart location. For a barber to be profitable there, he’s gotta pull in roughly ten grand a week or better.
Just thinkin’ aloud.
That’s got to vary quite wildly.
“Next make-fun-of-dotty time”
For some reason, the way that’s phrased makes me assume that mocking Dorothy is actually how Becky gets through her period.
Distract yourself by being a bigger pain to someone else than your uterus is being to you!
#LifeHack
Wait. Lesbians have uteruses?
Well, except for the ones who sell theirs to George Soros for use in his Satanic rituals, of course.
#LifeHack
Hehe I haven’t had my hair cut in a barbershop in years. I just use my own scissors. Imagine paying money when scissors are $4.99
One Holdo maneuver was bad enough.
Thing I wanna know, as long as Dorothy is tangentially involved is…why *now*?
If she’s disciplined and driven enough to get into Yale after a semester at IU, she’s disciplined and driven enough to have done it out of high school.
So if she’s at IU to save a few bucks on undergraduate tuition, why try to leave after one semester? That’s not nothing in terms of savings, of course, but you have to figure she’d have done the math and determined that Yale would accept her coursework at IU in transfer. So why not do the general ed stuff at IU and aim for a junior year transfer? That’s what most kids who chase that path do.
Was there Some Kind of Drama that pushed her to IU instead of Yale? Did she miss an application deadline going to the Bone Zone with Danny?
Why is she trying to make that jump after just one semester? Why isn’t she there already if one semester of general eds can get her accepted?
If you’re coming into the middle, you should archive binge. I recommend it for the story.
But Dorothy wasn’t accepted directly out of high school, getting into Yale being highly competitive, and so her back up plan was to create a killer resume as a transfer student. Surprisingly it seems to have worked.
She wasn’t accepted out of high school. Yale is highly competitive so she relied on doing extra activities (she was part of the newspaper for a while) and performing well at IU to get the boost needed to transfer into Yale. Which seems to have worked.
Plus, before she was at IU, she had a clingy Danny who I imagine was slightly detrimental to her focus due to his own lack of ambition and desire to follow her pretty much everywhere weighing on her mind. And you know, also his desire for her to stay for him and pretty much give up her ambitions for him – while he only said this borderline outright once, I imagine it was something hinted at a few times before they broke up, which may have helped build to their breaking point.
I get that. But one semester at IU, even with activities, is not going to suddenly make Yale go “we dun goofed.” And the last we saw of her grades, they weren’t up to her expectations of herself and she was considering dropping some of those activities.
So, again – and I’ve been reading since day one – why *now*? She’s smart enough to pick her moment, and I can’t believe for a minute that she’d think one semester of general eds plus some newspaper plus…other stuff? Would do for her what four years of HS couldn’t. Did she get elected to student government and we didn’t see it? What did her resume have to offer to make that plausible enough that she applied basically right away after starting at Indiana?
She did a helluva application essay writing up the whole “my friend the secret vigilante superhero’s dad kidnapped me and a bunch of our other friends and I planned our escape. I wasn’t expecting our other friend’s dad turning on him to provide the distraction we needed. [detailed discussion on legality, ethics, morality, sociopolitical context, etc. that show her intelligence, knowledge, emotional intelligence etc, but basically using the experience to really help her stand out from the crowd. Possibly also the Ryan stuff]”? In which case the other/possibly primary reason she doesn’t want to tell Joyce et al is because she is basically using their trauma for her personal gain…
You know, why I can imagine Dorothy writing such an essay – just to clear her mind, you know? – I cannot see her doing it for a Yale application.
While, it why!
How does that typo even work?
Auto-correct. Is busy planning your future for you.
I actually can. Not her first draft — that would be for herself, to clear her mind, as you say — but then she’d go back to it and write one tailored for Yale, trying to minimize her use of her friends’ trauma and probably feeling a bit bad for doing so — but this is the girl who calmly refuses to apologize for positioning herself as Ruth’s replacement when it looked like one was needed. It may not just be desires she’d had to sublimate to get where she is today. She has her goals, and she’s focused.
The essay would be as much as possible about her experience rather than her friends’, but she’d have the Ethan Defense (it happened to me too, I’m allowed to have views on the subject) on her side.
She’s been accepted for NEXT semester, so she’s going to IU for an entire year then potentially transfering.
For reasons of plot and characterization.
I can’t really see why Yale would have accepted her now and not as a regular incoming freshman, but that’s apparently what’s happened. That it’s implausible doesn’t change her character arc, just accelerates it enough that we’ll see consequences this semester. She didn’t get in on her first application, so she went to IU instead with the intent of applying again and transferring. We knew that from the start and now it’s becoming a reality.
It’s unlikely, not implausible. Yale does accept transfer students and some of these are people they passed on the first go round. Just because it’s difficult doesn’t make it implausible. Just like winning the lottery is unlikely but completely plausible, as someone wins it on a fairly regular basis.
She might have been waitlisted somewhere near the top and enough people dropped out/transfered themselves to allow her to get in earlier than anticipated.
We don’t know why she didn’t get to go last semester. Could be anything from Yale being super competitive to money to an issue she had last semester.
And the acceptance is almost certainly for next semester, so it’s more like transferring after a year.
Becky, the volume only makes Walky and Sal’s hair even sexier.
Speaking from experience, yes.
To be fair, I’d never get tired of watching Snoke get chopped in half.
Somehow, I feel the alt text is speaking from personal experience.
If they had made no nochitos scented Brylcreem, they would never have gone out of business.
Oh, wait. The Internet tells me that they never did go out of business, and I can yet some at Walmart. I guess it’s true, a little dab’ll do ya.
For those not alive in the 50″s, Brylcreem was this greasy concoction out of a tube that we rubbed into our hair to hold it down in the hopes that cute girls would be inspired to run their fingers through it. I would say it made sense at the time, but honestly, …
https://youtu.be/o6F4GtyRfto
In a perfect world I could delete this and repost it up with the comment where I hit reply. I did leave the page several times and come back, but Whyyyyyy?
tried it once at a friend’s house: did NOT a feel ‘Debonair’, I felt greasy. One star – would not recommend.
Yeah I guess in the weird time vortex this comic takes place in, TLJ is recent enough to be on display TVs
Or maybe its because the good employees at Walmart recognize that The Last Jedi is the best Star Wars movie and just keep it playing.
Personal choices aside, can’t argue against watching Snoke get Quadra-sected!
Meh. Walky was your favorite person the first day you showed up, Becky, for exactly all the reasons you’re now making fun of him.
And that bugs me. Seems like Becky’s changed in some bad ways in the interim. =/
More like, Becky’s always been like this – it’s jsut that when she showed up much of the commentariat was all “wooo, a lesbian main character” and they excused everything. Now she’s up against fan-favourite Dorothy.
As opposed to the rest of the commentariat that was “omigod, she’s so irresponsible. that haircut” and “She’s probably just making it all up and her dad’s just worried about her”.
Oh man, I remember the haircut comments, but I totally missed the making up ones. On the other hand, it’s not like my faith in humanity needs any more blows, so it’s probably for the best.
My ‘favourite’ is the one that said Becky couldn’t know for sure she’s a lesbian unless she’s seen a picture of a dick. Or there was the one that guessed she ran away first and left a note telling Toedad about her being gay.
See, I should be mad at you for an unneccessary blow to my faith in humanity, but that first one is so absolutely out there that my brain got stuck in “What?” mode, and the blow never came.
There’s a weird thing with some people thinking orientation is strictly about genitals. Which makes no sense at all – overwhelmingly you only see the genitals after you’re attracted to someone.
It’s common in transphobic discussions, certainly TERFs, but also the old “tricked me into being gay” trans panic defense.
BBCC – that first comment you’re referencing sounds uncomfortably like the “if Faz doesn’t have bruises, he’s not really being abused” comments from last book. Kinda glad I didn’t dig too deep into the old comments sections when I was getting caught up.
Twittering for Republicans leads you to The Dark Side, even if you are reversing their positions.
She only enjoys those traits when they’re being used to make Joyce uncomfortable and upset.
Please don’t take Walky’s haircut away.
Anna, come back all is forgiven!
The fact that Becky has a purposeful “make-fun-of-Dotty time”, instead of just making off the cuff remarks when the opportunity presents somehow manages to make it worse.
Yeah. It makes my wonder if there’s a time when Dorothy is present that isn’t ‘make fun of Dotty time’.
Or, frankly, if Becky is ever going to develop the basic respect for people that Joyce has and ‘call people what they want to be called’. Because her name is Dorothy, and she’s corrected Becky at least once on the front IIRC.
Yeah I hope this strip squashes the idea that Becky’s treatment of Dorothy is anything but pointed and intentional.
Like, the thing with characters being jerks to each other is that it has to make sense and it has to be interesting enough that you want to keep reading them doing their worst behaviour, and Becky succeeds at that. This has been built up for years and now the pieces are in place for Becky to just unload on Dorothy constantly until it reaches a breaking point, instead of going months between strips where Becky is just vaguely jerky in her direction and so much time passes you just kind of forget about it.
It’s good stuff. Even as it starts it’s one of the more interesting conflicts between cast members the series has had, and as far as I’m concerned there is no greater threat that these characters can undergo than the ones that they present to each other.
Without the establishing first panel–streetlights, paved walkway–the trees and (nicely turned) shadows might make me think these kids were in the first scene of a horror movie. Jes’ walkin’ into the woods, la-de-da…
Lamppost just means they are in a Narnia horror movie. The Blair White Witch Project.
OMG, mail arrived for Dorothy today. Uh, postmarked… uh? Cambridge, Mass? Who’d be sending her mail from their? OMG, accepted to Ha’vaad?
Maybe Becky is onto something here. Dorothy does strike me as having a bit of a shallow attitude to relationships. She’s going on to bigger and better things so virtually every relationship (romantic and otherwise) she has at IU seem to be either for her comfort and recreation or simply to make her feel better about herself (“I am helping the little people!”).
Not really. That’s a very surface view of Dorothy. It matches more what she proclaims and what she thinks she needs to do than what she actually is like.
She wanted to avoid romance as a distraction, but fell for Walky anyway. She wanted to keep it “just for fun”, but fell in love anyway.
She wasn’t even upfront about it, like JBento suggests because she kept setting the boundaries and then breaking them. Which she acknowledged as unfair to him when they broke up.
She WAS upfront about it. It’s just that suddenly she decided she didn’t like what she’d been upfront about and so she told Walky she wanted to change it. That she kept doing it was terrible, but it wasn’t deceitful – the important part was that she TOLD Walky – he wasn’t working in that relationship blind.
(feel the need ot reiterate that the fact that she kept changing the rules whenver she felt like it is absolutely terrible)
Who she wasn’t upfront with was Danny, but when I pointed that out at the time half the commentariat jumped at me.
(and now you know two of the reasons I don’t like Dorothy, and the current Becky-is-constantly-an-asshole situation is all the more irritating for me now being in the irksome position of having to defend her)
“her” meaning Dorothy, not Becky.
I once again curse the alck of an edit function.
Alack! Oh for an edit function.
Yeah, she told him, but she sprung it on him with a sudden “I love you” and got annoyed when he didn’t respond properly. She’d clearly been changing for awhile and not giving him warning to let him adjust along with her. It wasn’t “I want to change it”, it was “I have changed it”.
It was only after the fact, when they broke up, that she acknowledged it was a problem.
I don’t even dislike Dorothy for that. I just don’t like seeing it ignored here. I think it’s an interesting character flaw and am curious if more will be done with it.
As for Danny, that was in essentially the first 5 minutes of the comic and likely partly driven by the dramatic need to have the break up on stage, rather than just “Oh they used to date”. We also don’t have any of the buildup to it, so we don’t know how bad Danny was leading up to it.
Dorothy DOES have the problem common to people who make lists with checkboxes for everything: they get… upset is not quite the word I’m looking for, but it’s starting to get late here and my sleep has been shit of lately (and I’m working with a non-native language)… aggravated, perhaps? when people don’t respond to things within the range of reactions they expect.
Sort of like a light version of the Discworld Auditors, but without the malevolence.
frustrated and anxious. like a chess player who tried to think too many moves ahead
He tried to pre-script his life, but couldn’t understand why other people never get their lines right. – Christopher Stasheff
This is for fun but also I’m in love with you and I want you to be in love with me but this relationship is just for fun and now you love me I’m breaking up with you.
Eh, it’s not like she wasn’t upfront about it with Walky. As long as everyone is on the same page on what the relationship is about, there’s nothing there to criticise.
It’s ok to date for fun if your partner(s) knows that’s what it is.
Sigh.
THis was supposed to be a reply to BenRG’s comment above. CURSE THE LACK OF AN EDIT FUNCTION! CURSE YOUUUUUUU!!!!!!
My recollection is that she was upfront with Walky, but when she found herself falling for him, was upset that he wanted to take her at her word.
I liked Dot in the first stages of the comic, but liked her less (or would have liked her less as a person were she not a comic strip character) as she was depicted as trying to simulate what she thought caring behavior looked like, lampshading it by carrying around her “friendly caring traits” punchlist.
Nice to know Walky is immune to Becky occasional snarkiness.
I think this is the first time Walky has out-obnoxious’d Becky.
I can’t wait to hear how Walky is somehow worse than Becky and her saying its shameful to date him in this strip.
Not shameful, just embarassing. But yeah, I don’t see anything Walky’s saying here that’s worse than Becky’s thing.
Becky is one to talk. As much as I like Dina she does have some childish qualities similar to Walky.
The last panel is funny.
Interesting since when Becky first heard about the break up, she said Dorothy doesn’t deserve Walky. Now she’s gonna bug and make fun of Dorothy for dating him.
Whatever makes Dorothy look worse, I guess.
Not like she dated him for his smarts
This bit of piercing Becky’s Armor of Obnixiousness and dismasting her, even momentarily, makes me like Walky just a little.
Yeah, it seems like everyone thinks she’s showing disdain for Walmart hair cuts but I agree with you that she is irritated at Wally because her teasing failed.
The shadows on their faces are super good.
i think what happened is when Mike died his spirit scattered over the IU campus and now everyone is a snarky ass pointing out people’s foibles
Waiting for a character from “It’s Walky” universe to pop out and kill Becky by telling her Joyce fell in love with “this” in their universe.
The star wars thing would be a pro if the sequels didn’t suck
It really seems like Walky is still impersonating Billy here, not saying this of his own accord. And we do know that Billie is a nerd.
I know this is a super late comment, but I had to come back to this page. I think the branches shading technique is some of my favorite art that has been produced since new semester start.
that’s a great observation, seregiel! it really adds to the impression of movement.