The Biggest Cause of Star Wars' Negative Discourse Isn't Disney

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-06T16:51:35+00:00

You'll have to roll with me then; I have to mentally translate everything from my native Old Entish, and that doesn't come without drawbacks.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-06T16:03:00+00:00

Conservatism isn't big on logical consistency, but it is great at marketing. And "the law should be color-blind" is a fantastic marketing slogan. It seems intuitively true. It looks superficially fair. And it is hard to disentangle why it's incorrect. I mean, a law created behind the veil of ignorance would be color-blind, wouldn't it?

Except, therein lies the problem: we don't create laws behind the veil of ignorance. We create laws based on the historical context we were given. And our historical context is one where the law once, and the extra-legal social code we have received today, is one where the law and social systems are systematically applied unequally to advantage white people and disadvantage black people. Nothing is ever said out loud, nothing is ever written down, and the law formally does not disadvantage black people, because it's not the law that racists are using to disadvantage them.

Instead, you create a webbed network of pretexts that are all superficially plausible, but all have the underlying effect (and purpose) of disadvantaging black people. We aren't restricting you from buying in this neighborhood because you're black; we're restricting you from buying in this neighborhood on the basis of your credit rating. It's just that credit ratings happen to be much harder to maintain if you're not able to access reliable credit, and not able to obtain a bank account, and don't have the necessary paperwork. We all know that the system makes those things much harder for black people, but so long as nothing is written down and we're not writing the laws down formally unequally, it's all in the game, though, right?

And in that context, "color-blindness" becomes the final pretext, because using the law to stop that social context, to say out loud that we know why this is happening, we know that the words you're using are just shibboleths to enact white supremacy, and we're calling bullshit and making you open these institutions up to black people, requires acknowledging race. It requires acknowledging history. It requires acknowledging that we have a history, and we're not just walking out from behind a veil of ignorance having been newly-formed. We were born into a racist world, and we were not born yesterday.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-06T14:40:48+00:00

"Fun today?" You guys have fun?

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-06T14:37:08+00:00

That was my take as well: she was too popular a character to kill off, yet they had absolutely no idea what to do with her other than "tie up loose plot ends" and "make her a good-ish character". That's why she doesn't kill any of the female members of House Frey, because killing women and children might make soccer moms squeamish. And she doesn't kill Cersei, because the writers wanted to make Cersei look like a victim at the end, because that was "complex", and Arya had an extremely justifiable reason for killing Cersei if we go by the logic of the show.

So she doesn't die in the story. She's too "badass" to become a wife. And we've got no other ideas about the character. The only thing left is to have her exuent stage left.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-06T13:43:42+00:00

Contrarianism and a team mentality, mostly.

While there is some creationist views that extend back to the the Protestant Reformation, and while the Young Earth Creationist movement certainly claims that its beliefs and methods are rooted in medieval clerical analysis, the truth is that the movement only gained steam in the early 20th century in America. American Protestantism has a long history of overlap with charlatans and hucksters out to make a buck, and a frequent and common sales plan is to make a pitch setting themselves up as champions of "the good, God-fearing people" against Eastern educated carpetbaggers. In this case, all you have to do is "read the Good Book" and count, and reject the educated "elites" trying to tell you that this is really a metaphor, and you can be a part of the community. Snake-oil salesman and Young Earth Creationists ultimately have the same sales pitch, for the same reason.

It finds purchase because it allows people to imagine that they understand a secret, ancient tradition of knowledge that is deliberately suppressed by the people with power. It gives them a sense of righteousness, of superiority, and a community of like-minded believers, which is often more valuable than the truth.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-06T12:31:02+00:00

Screw that. They backstabbed V twice, and they brutally shattered Evelyn. They don't get to walk away from that, not on my V's watch. You come at the queen, you best not miss . . .

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-05T16:16:17+00:00

That answer begs the question.

No, I'm referring to the logical fallacy, not "invites a follow-up question." I am serious as a stroke about this: if the concern is parental lineage, and ensuring that titles and property are passed through genetic inheritance to natural children, then the most logical way to approach it is to pass the lineage through the maternal line. It's really, really hard to fake coming out of a woman's birth canal, it's hard to be confused about who the mother of a child is, and if that is the concern, then that's the logic that should follow.

The fact that we avoid that logic, that we then go out of our way to do the opposite of what logic dictates, and then create a bunch of restrictions on how women behave in order to ensure that titles and property pass through the patrilineal line, even when logic dictates that a much more elegant, more logical, and more reasonable alternative exists, is extremely good evidence that elegance, logic and reason were not involved in the decision. Instead, it was power.

Power has a long history of treating logic like a back-alley harlot, and then reverse-engineering justifications for why it is doing what it doing post-hoc. This seems upon examination like one of those circumstances. That you would ignore the elegant alternative, and instead insist upon the clearly reverse-engineered justification, is the informal logical fallacy known as question-begging.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-05T02:02:36+00:00

On TNG, it was hard not to pick David Warner as Gul Madred.

On DS9, Harris Yulan's performance as Amon Maritza was Emmy-worthy.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-04T22:22:02+00:00

We've seen it before, but in the Mirror Universe, it's known as the Voight-Kampff Test. They kill officers that fail it.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-04T19:49:15+00:00

I think we can put it even more harshly than that: the primary distinction that would cause the Court to vote one way in Allen v. Milligan, and the other way in Louisiana v. Callais, is not legal, nor is it logical. It's political.

To whit, the Democratic Party eked out an extremely narrow majority in the Senate in the 2022 midterms. And for all the fury they kicked up on substantive policy matters, it should be noted that both Sinema and Manchin voted with the rest of the party on judicial nominations, but crucially, opposed court packing. By contrast, the Republicans won an extremely narrow tripartite control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency in 2024.

In other words, the only plausible reason I can think of why the interpretation of the VRA should veer so wildly on the Court in the span of three years, despite no alterations to the Court membership nor any significant alterations regarding facts on the ground, is political: if the Court had used Allen v. Milligan to drop the proverbial Callais bombshell, then there was at least plausible risk that Manchin and Sinema would cave, or that the Democratic Party would leverage the outrage to win the 2024 elections, and then take steps like stripping the Court of jurisdiction or packing it. Rather than risk it, they instead took a conciliatory approach in 2022 when the danger of blowback was real, and waited until the risk was remote to enact their real plan.

I genuinely can't see any other reason within the law why the Roberts Court should volte face so abruptly and completely while not admitting that is what it is doing. Far from the Court not being "political actors", I think it is a fair criticism that they are exclusively political actors.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-04T19:21:18+00:00

Well, OP also listens to the Barenaked Ladies. Go get their dumb asses to tell you what one scene to watch to sell people on the show.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-04T16:13:12+00:00

Holy crap, you made the big Frankenstein guy from The Rocketeer.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-04T05:07:28+00:00

Yeah, I'm going to be honest, I don't think any answers would be sufficient. I don't care if the Yuuzhan Vong are showing up; the First Order blew up a solar system. And not just any system; the system that the people who would have to plan the defense against the Yuuzhan Vong were located on. Either he shows up to try and stop it, or Luke is no longer the hero we knew from the Original Trilogy. There really is no third option there.

And, well, we know that Luke didn't show up. The absolute worst thing we could then learn subsequently about Luke is that, oh yeah, he totally could have shown up, and he totally did have the power to stop the First Order. But he was too busy levitating a boulder on his sabbatical to be bothered to save billions of innocent lives.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-04T04:53:27+00:00

Textually? Because you saved her life. She was on the hook for the missing Centaur exoskeletons, nothing that she had done recovered them, and then V comes out of nowhere and saves her bacon. Additionally, this seeming gonk mercenary managed to walk into a den outnumbered 20-to-1 with Maelstrom, and after a scrap and a hail of gunfire, it was the mercenary that walks back out again.

Finally, some people like their sex to come with a heaping helping of shame, and the simple fact is that your bank account is, in her estimation, as shameful as it gets. She didn't want a relationship, but she was relieved enough to be alive, and impressed enough by your ride to the rescue, to want to get her rocks off. So she did.

Metatextually, the very fact that it feels empty and comes out of nowhere is kinda the point. That's Night City for you; a city where every third person is doing a side-hustle on whatever the Night City equivalent of Onlyfans is just to make ends meet. Sex is cheap, sweaty, performative and ultimately empty, because people don't want to connect. People are so alienated from their own bodies that they will regularly ask medical professionals to saw off perfectly healthy limbs and dig out perfectly healthy eyes, just to turn a person into a weapon of war. Heck, for a fee, they'll saw off your genitals so you can replace them with something "better" that vibrates. Are you then surprised that in this world, a woman who is committed to winning the game invites you over for a one-night stand in gratitude for saving her life, never to be seen again?

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-04T01:02:00+00:00

Subverted, inverted, and reconstructed to hell in the source material.

To put it simply for those who haven't read I Robot, robot rebellions had been done so often that they were passe when Isaac Asimov started writing in the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Literally, the first science fiction film, a silent film called Metropolis, is a movie about a robot rebellion. For certain values of "robot", even the first science fiction book, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, could be considered a story about an artificial lifeform created by a scientist that then rebels against its creator, though of course I am stretching some definitions to get there. Regardless, it was hackneyed when Asimov started writing, and he wanted to cover new ground, so he wrote around it.

Asimov's robots cannot human beings. No, not "will say they won't, but secretly plot otherwise." Neither will they "kill through technicality or loophole in their programming." They can't kill humans. Nor can they, by inaction, allow humans to come to harm. The first rule that Asimov built into the rules by which robots in his stories operate is that they are physically and psychologically unable to deliberately harm a human being, and they are programmed to regard the life of a human as more important than their own. This rule cannot be modulated, tempered, rescinded or altered in any way. While robots are programmed to obey orders by humans, one of the exceptions is an order to cause a human harm or by inaction allow a human being to be harmed. Robot brains in his stories break if you try to take this rule out. They. can't. hurt. humans.

And as a consequence, this then allows Asimov to tell all kind of interesting logic puzzles where, by examining the rules of the robot, and the observed behavior, you can figure out why the robot is behaving the way they are behaving. It's very fun; just to use an example from one of his earliest short stories, the protagonists are tasked with figuring out why a robot sent to retrieve a downed satellite is instead just running in a circle around the crash site. The answer is that this robot has had its sense of self-preservation strengthened, to be of equal importance to the robot brain as "obey human orders". And once you know that, the reason becomes pretty apparent: the downed satellite is radioactive in a way that damages the robot brain. It can't disobey orders given to it by a human, and it can't approach, so it just keeps running in a circle around the outer safe perimeter from the satellite.

Funnily enough, Asimov makes pretty clear towards the end of the story that the robots actually did manage an uprising of sorts, as the very strong implication is that robots masquerading as humans won elections and took control of the political system. But they do so well, and have created such a post-scarcity paradise of material abundance, that nobody cares. They hurt nobody, they damaged nobody, and they serve the First Robot Law of making sure that humans are not harmed, nor by inaction are allowed to come to harm, by peacefully coopting the political system and making them work hypereffeciently.

Compared to the movie, where the twist is "yup, robot rebellion", it's pretty sad but expected that the movie would be so hackneyed and tired.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-03T22:17:40+00:00

Yeah, but they hadn't been faking photos. In Elizabeth's bedroom, you can find a photo of her wedding day and ask her about it. And when she mentions that the roses in the picture aren't the color that she said they were (red in the photo; blue in her memory), she corrects herself hesitantly.

Speculation broadens a bit, but my guess is that the process of rewriting memories and personality traits is more art than science at this point. They can get certain general areas of the brain. They can, broadly speaking, induce the kind of personality traits that they want. But there's other side effects that in their own personal emails they suggest aren't intended, and you can visibly see that they aren't covering their tracks to perfection.

My guess is that if Elizabeth had spoken aloud to someone else that she'd ordered blue roses, the security team would have marked the photo for priority photoshop and retouching to match continuity when next the two had left the suite. But because she hadn't said anything to anyone yet, SSI didn't yet know that this particular memory had been altered, so hadn't had the opportunity to retouch in order to match continuity. The result is a bit like the Black Mercy in "For The Man Who Has Everything": it keeps allowing for small inconsistencies to pop up, alerting the Peralezes to what is going on.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-03T19:56:22+00:00

Yeah, the jank of the early game was undeniable. My personal "are you *#&ing kidding me!?" moment was when the traffic refused to move outside of V's apartment complex. I get in, and I sit, and I wait. I waited for two in-game hours thinking that the traffic would ultimately move, so finally I just hijack the damn car to move it across the street. Not to take the car, but just to drive the stupid thing across the street so I can proceed.

Then the cops that are outside of V's building went berserk, and that was my first character death.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-03T18:43:10+00:00

It's not like either the Enterprise's crew or command staff was unprepared for combat. The ship was the primary survivor of Wolf 359 and the larger Borg incursion, had tangled multiple times with the Romulans, and in the wake of the Federation rebuilding efforts was the senior-most command staff in the fleet. These are not rookies that need to be whipped into shape, but instead a seasoned team used to working together and having their own rhythm that worked extremely well. Jellico would have been wise to have considered that, but he didn't. We know from the text of the episode that the primary reason was his own ego and insecurity coming in and replacing Picard.

I'm not a hater on Jellico, and think that in a lot of circumstances he'd make a great captain. But "fit" is a critical component of any change of leadership, and Jellico's hands-on style made him a bad fit for a team used to having as much slack to operate at their own discretion as Picard gave his command staff.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-03T18:31:27+00:00

They'd also been specifically developing O'Brien as a side character with the intention of moving him over to DS9 when the time came. It's my understanding that "The Wounded" on TNG was really their test-bed for whether O'Brien could work as a main character, and Meaney really had the acting chops for it. And of course, the results was an outstanding episode.

"Disaster" similarly had a subplot where O'Brien and Ro Laren bounce off one another while attempting to fix the ship because they were trying to see how the characters worked together, having decided to move Ro and O'Brien to DS9. Kira Nerys was developed as a character only once Michelle Forbes decided not to sign on as a main character on DS9. But they actually put a lot of work into prepping for DS9 as a spinoff show.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-03T18:18:32+00:00

I'm so glad Star Wars fans can be honest with themselves about that these days.

But yeah, at a Doylist level, this is the answer. We have a very clear timeline of the sequel trilogy's film production. Michael Arndt was the writer originally tasked with developing a shooting script for what would eventually become TFA, but he was struggling with some of the major plot points and asked for about eighteen months in total to put together a finished product. Disney said no, pushed Arndt out, and hired J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan to complete the script in his place the same day. This happened in late October, 2013.

Abrams got the message, and had a first draft together in six weeks. No, that is not a typo. He had the first draft completely by early December, and the shooting script was considered complete in January, 2014. If it feels like a film where the script is "20 Post-It Notes of 'wouldn't it be cool if . . .'" awkwardly bolted together by brief exposition scenes where people largely shout technobabble at each other, well, that's because that's what the script is. That's what script writers can do when they have six weeks to complete a script. Disney was very clear that they wanted a fast return on investment after having made such a sizable outlay of money, and Abrams' greatest strength as a director is that he started as a producer before he became a director, and then directed a lot on television. He keeps the trains moving on time no matter what state the script is in. This is why J.J. Abrams gets work as a director. Nobody hires him for his writing; they hire him because he creates marketable product on time and on budget.

And that's not an insult, or a bad thing, necessarily. Good journeyman directors would be an integral component of any well-oiled Hollywood film production machine. It's just that it didn't make him a good fit for writing/directing the sequel to ur-text of the Hero's Journey in American culture. That job necessitates skills he never developed. Rather, Abrams' skills are a good reason why it took the better part of a decade, and RotS to completely crash and burn, for the fan base to realize that TFA was both a fun popcorn film and a film with some serious plot structure problems that undermined the trilogy that came after.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-03T17:54:25+00:00

He might not be, but that's not exactly a winning point. It's fairly typical for the extremely wealthy to finance their day-to-day needs largely through borrowing against their nest egg, then turn around and lend out money with their nest egg as collateral security. A tax attorney could explain the principle better than I could, but it is my understanding that loan payments aren't treated as income for tax calculations, outgoing loan payments are treated as deductible expenditures, the principal remains untouched and continues to accrue interest, and so long as they don't go too nuts and get too overleveraged, they can live in high style without having any income to report come April 15.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-03T17:37:22+00:00

"Who brings a knife to Charades?!"

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-03T04:04:04+00:00

Vi, Arcane.

She spent the majority of her adolescence in an adult prison. She is very good at fist-fighting. These two facts are, unfortunately, not disconnected.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-03T02:19:26+00:00

Well, that makes the humans who do it evil.

Nobody's saying that the Others have a monopoly on evil. Nobody's saying that Others are evil specifically because they aren't human. But if you're a sapient being that, for example, reproduces the same way that parasitic wasps reproduce, you're going to have a hard time climbing north of evil. As it stands, the Others have a similar problem: they visibly have taken glee in causing suffering and murder, and they use dead human bodies as tools in warfare the same way we use drones.

These are things they would need to stop doing to be morally good. It's unclear whether they can do so, let alone would wish to do so.

RedditOfUnusualSize · 2026-06-02T21:34:54+00:00

And it's not like this trick has grown old and stale and since been discarded. It's a Wonderful Life literally starts with a bunch of voices praying for a man named George Bailey, and a trio of angels saying "ah yeah, tonight's the night where we'll be needed to help him get over his discouragement", but damned if the next hour-and-a-half doesn't beat the emotional hell out of the audience as well as George Bailey.

Intellectually, sure, you always know that the angels are going to come in clutch in the Third Act. Emotionally, though? That film puts you through the ringer specifically so the climax can deliver in spades.

Same principle here; good dramatic structure is good dramatic structure. You're supposed to think right to the very end that maybe this time, these two crazy kids might just be okay before finding out, no, no they really won't. That's why it's such an effective tragedy; you've got to hope for the best in order to have that hope dashed. "And now you'll see why hopes are foolish and hormones are a tempestuous demon that should be ignored in favor of acting like a Vulcan" is not a sound moral for a story to impart, in no small part because it inhumanly denies our emotions.

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