-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to yujiri.xyz:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini; lang=en
It's hard to find a person who dislikes Star Wars, even harder than to find one who dislikes Lord of the Rings. And it's for good reasons. Star Wars has profound strengths:
The Force as a truly *magical* magic system, driven nebulously by emotions and destiny. This is one of my favorite things. I can't think of another well-known story with a magic system that scratches this itch so well.
An appealing theme: temptation. But not in a stupid, power-is-evil way like Lord of the Rings. It's also about redemption, a natural complement to the theme of temptation.
Sword fights are an excellent choice of combat form for storytelling. it's intimate, relatable and visceral because it uses weapons and movements that we can actually play with.
The scale of the universe allows all sorts of stories to be told in Star Wars and for them all to interact and enhance each other rather than conflict.
Some wonderful franchise-wide motifs, like The Force theme.
So, unlike LOTR and Harry Potter, its popularity isn't completely unearned. There's a lot of good ideas here. But there are also systemic flaws with Star Wars, and these are the main reason I'm writing about it, because the flaws get so little attention. No, Star Wars is not a masterpiece. We need better than this.
The temptation/redemption theme is crippled by the perversity of Star Wars morality. Most Star Wars villains are strawman evil and the designated heroes are always the horribly flawed Jedi or those affiliated with them. Worse, the Jedi/Sith dichotomy is nearly built in to the fabric of the universe; these are *the* two sides to the Force, *the* two sides to every conflict. There isn't even any grey. Some EU works do a little better, but I don't think I've ever seen one that portrays the Jedi Way, not just individual Jedi, as wrong. The Jedi ideology is so ingrained into the universe that if there was ever a movie that showed benevolent Force users that aren't Jedi, it would hardly feel like Star Wars anymore.
Why do I rag on the Jedi so much, you ask? There are a few major things:
They forbid "revenge", by which of course they mean any use of force outside of *immediate* danger; they usually disapprove of killing a dangerous murderer or tyrant as long as they aren't *in the act* of attacking. For example, there's .
Jedi spirituality revolves around the suppression of emotion, and this is just extremely wrong and harmful. Emotions are not a force of evil; they can be a source of exhortation just as much as temptation. Anger, shame, sympathy, and any other emotion can inspire a person to stick their neck out to fight evil, seek self-improvement, or make sacrifices for the less fortunate.
They have a chain of command; there's no basis for such a thing in a group based on a static creed.
They forbid romance. This stems from their suspicion of emotion, so my same argument applies.
Most Star Wars source material is statist, but that's to be expected.
There's almost no worldbuilding. It's not just fake sci-fi; for all the Star Wars source material we have, we see almost nothing about what the world is like outside of the spaceships and warfare and politics. What is daily life like in this universe? Is there an internet? What kind of jobs do people have? Pretty much the only legitimate economic occupation we see is "moisture farming". This severely limits what we can do with the Star Wars universe in our imagination.
The droid rights problem. The droids in Star Wars are pretty clearly supposed to be sentient, but aren't treated like it by the "goodguys"; none of the heroes - or even the droids themselves - ever object to them being sold as property or the practice of wiping their memories.
The same thing applies to clones: no rights, they're bred and forced to be soldiers. What's that? They explore this in the Clone Wars show? Yeah, but they don't address the implication that um, the Republic is a slave empire and the heroes shouldn't be fighting for it.
Each trilogy is dominated by a single gender. The original and prequel trilogies have one female character each, neither are Jedi, and Padme exists only to support Anakin's arc. As for Leia, honestly I feel like you could just take her out of the original trilogy and the story would be much the same. I can't think of a scene where she does something that couldn't have been done by another character. In the sequels on the other hand, male characters are constantly sidelined or deglorified while every female character is a Mary Sue; Rey is the most overpowered hero Star Wars has ever seen and Kylo is a total wuss.
Even aside from these systemic flaws, each individual Star Wars movie has several of its own failures in plot, characters, presentation, and harmful messaging. I don't have the stamina to fill this article with a detailed criticism of each one, but feel free to ask me about them.
-- Response ended
-- Page fetched on Mon Jun 3 01:23:43 2024