#the plot is wrapped up extremely quickly like this should have been a whole trilogy

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads // twitter thread    

In-Between

an autistic aroace woman struggling with being told she’s not capable of parenting her son has to go on the run from his violent and dangerous fae father when he starts exhibiting magic

[irarelypostanything]

“RWBY is Disappointing, and Here’s Why”

There’s a video on YouTube right now by hbomberguy with more than a half million views, and it’s called “RWBY is Disappointing, and Here’s Why.”  It’s two and a half hours long, and my attention span is barely long enough to write these posts, but I liked his statement about “good faith criticism.”  His thesis, basically, is that RWBY had the potential to be good but then squandered it.  But then instead of just making fun of it, like JelloApocalypse or a particular subreddit, he went on to explain the whole production process, the complex history of the show, and possible ways it could have improved on itself.  A few things he notes:

-The two writers would make a script, then simply add *Monty Scene Here* and allow Monty Oum to do whatever he wanted.  He explains some inconsistencies, like a big fight in volume one shortly after deciding to run, and an inexplicably functional train in the abandoned underground during volume two

-Monty unexpressed unhappiness with the first two volumes, but genuinely valued the learning process.  He died during routine surgery during early production of volume three

-It’s no secret that the writers were heavily inspired by Cowboy Bebop and The Last Airbender

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81fdKWOHrdE&t=7004s

*Spoilers*

I feel that this video mostly boils down to describing ways in which the two lead writers are terrible, and the animators (except in a few infamous scenes he highlights) are great.  I’m just...I’m not quite sure if it’s that simple.

Miles Luna wrote the entire Chorus trilogy in Red vs. Blue, which I thought was really well done - it managed to have a serious tone, serve as a kind of standalone series, and actually bring in its fight scenes rather seamlessly.  I took a little time to look into Gen:Lock, which I thought had better dialogue and better pacing than much of RWBY, but the lead writer is a different person.

Without actually going into the studio and seeing what the process is, it’s difficult to make judgement calls on who’s competent and who isn’t.  If the writing process is like the collaborative process in any corporate environment, probably quite a few people contribute ideas and maybe even people we’ve never heard of constantly provide much-needed feedback.

Anyway…

-Ruby mentions early on that she’s a weapons designer, which is dropped 

-The plot structure of volume one is strange - the series chooses to explore two characters outside of the main four, then has a final fight scene with yet another character

-The plot of stealing dust in volume one is dropped

-The delivery of exposition has problems - Pyrrha explains battle fundamentals to Jaune, who definitely should be aware of them already because of the family history he explains, volume three has people explaining how the tournament works during a battle….

-The introduction of Qrow, a character who criticized the other characters, was a clever one

-The last half of volume three was excellent

Let me just see how quickly I can respond to these things…

I think Ruby is actually one of the least interesting characters in the series because a) she seems to be more capable than even Pyrrha, but unlike Pyrrha her ability doesn’t alienate her and she doesn’t face the consequence of having to sacrifice herself BECAUSE of her capability and b) until maybe volume six she has no obvious flaw, other than that maybe she’s childish but quickly matures.

The video comes down pretty hard on Jaune, though, and the question of why Pyrrha would want anything to do with him.  But Pyrrha has so much ability that everyone puts her on a pedestal, and Jaune is the only want who talks to her like a normal person.  I think that was actually one of the best relationships in the series, and something completely believable - she wasn’t interested in him simply because she had to conveniently move along his character arc, she was interested in him because the two were able to balance each other out.

Uh...let’s see…

The video talks about generic villains a lot, which I think is more of an issue after they kill off the most interesting one.  Some key things, like semblances, are explained pretty late.  The animation stays great.  The music is a bit of a mixed bag, though the opening themes are usually pretty good.

Like the series itself, I don’t know if I’m sure how to best conclude this.  Every time I watch a new episode, I ask myself if I’m doing it because I’m expecting some brilliant and thought-provoking story, or if I just want to see cool people with anime superpowers fight it out.  This series has attempted to get into more complex and nuanced topics like isolationism, militarism, cybersecurity (?), racism, extremism...I keep wondering if it’s just been trying to do a little bit too much, if it would be better if it just found a way to tie things up and wrap up.  Instead we keep getting new characters, and new plots, and I kind of wonder how it all ties together when we’ve already been exposed to the main, ultimate plot...like how Game of Thrones felt after they revealed the true threat.

I still want to see where it all goes, but I think the points made in the video hold.

[mantra4ia]

The Rise of Skywalker: Expanded Reaction Episode II (spoilers ahead)

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I must preface my opinions with the one central point of view that has never wavered: you can be a Star Wars fan and a film critic simultaneously.

Dislikes (big and small)

So in this new trilogy, does everyone know all about the secretive Sith? No one knows where Exogol-Sith-home-world is without a wayfinder. Yet some random spice traders know who the Sith are and that they have a runic language, but nearly the entire Jedi culture disappeared until the tale of Luke Skywalker revived it. This dislike is not isolated to RoS, but it's so odd considering that in the prequels and OT, the Emperor did not put the knowledge of the Sith right out in the open.

Too much telling, not enough doing. I detest plot reveals via exposition, because a majority of the time explain-y dialogue is far inferior to natural conversation. But for two-thirds of the movie, I couldn't settle into the world because I felt like I was being told a Star Wars story instead of being in it. Case point 1: Poe's argument that Rey is training instead of being on the front line to try to verbally push the narrative that she's not just naturally too-gifted. Case point 2: Explaining Force heal to the audience (via droid) after its already been demonstrated as if we can't interpret how it works. AND YET we get no planet captions? Who's advice are you listening to? Disney could spell everything else out in dialogue when it was unnecessary and borderline condescending to audience, but when it mattered you couldn't give us planetary captions so I blinked and missed the fact that we opened with Kylo Ren kicking a** and taking names on freaking Mustafar! That was a great scene. Epic. Kylo’s on a mission, and there ain’t no questing here - it’s as fast and direct as the throat punch. He’s tired of being jerked around, he’s in a position of power to demand answers, and he’s going for the head of the Emperor, all while I was like...was that Mustafar, that was Mustafar, except now we just left Mustafar. DAMMIT.

We see the repair on Kylo's mask but not the repair of Luke's saber, or Rey building her own saber? TLJ broke the most iconic lightsaber and RoS just fixed it off screen (see point above)? I suppose this shouldn't be shocking since they introduced Palpatine IN THE CRAWL, but it was disappointing.

Did like the opening crawl, did not like how it was used as Palpatine’s business card. I think my exact words were: did they really, what kind of movie am I here for?

Leia's death. I don't buy for a second that establishing a Force visitation with Kylo across the galaxy was enough to kill her. TLJ (in my opinion) demonstrated enough to establish her as a powerful force user, which Rise of Skywalker doubled down on using the flashback training scene. So no, I don't think the exertion of it was enough to take her life unless it was inferred that she either wasn't recovered from the events of TLJ or that the Force sensitive impact of Luke's death was taking an extended toll on her, or that she was somehow already overdoing it trying to use other Force abilities behind the scene to protect the resistance/ reach out to Luke. I understand that with Carrie Fisher's (rest in peace) sudden death it would make certain practical sense for Leia to die if fitting, but put all that explanatory dialogue to some good use for once and build up tension so that Leia's death makes sense.

Luke's Force ghost being underutilized. From the beginning I didn't have a problem with Luke's conclusion in Last Jedi (minus a subtle eyeroll at the noble sacrifice trope being easily confused with honor) because it doesn't bother me whether a character is living or not as long as they are still growing. I thought, I hoped, I legitimately put money on the fact the Rise of Skywalker would use Luke in the training of Rey or the haunting of Ben and that he would play an active Force ghost role. He was used for damage control. That was infuriating.

Han Solo. I recognize the irony of this moment being in both my likes and gripes. While I liked seeing Han bestow Ben forgiveness, even if he was just a memory and not a ghost, it quickly became a hollow sort of nostalgia. FULL POST HERE.

Why in the world is there an arbitrary 16-hour frame before the Exogol fleet strike? The Last Jedi gave us a slow space chase and now what, the executive team thinks that the polar opposite is the answer? So you already have to wrap of an entire saga in a 2-3 hour real world runtime, and you've decided to amp up the pace and cram that into 16 hours of Star Wars time just for funsies while the Emperor broadcasts propaganda to kill morale? Rushed, forced, we just spent a chunk of the movie at Fyre Festival in a space desert, don't tell me there wasn't more time to allocate for imminent doom.

So essentially, we had a StarKiller base in TFA, mini-Death Star canon in TLJ, and a thousand Death Star planet killing cannons on Star Destroyers? LET that part of THE PAST DIE!

The execution of Leia training Rey. The idea was wonderful...in practice you can really tell the dialogue was built around her, and the scenes suffer for it. Execution, for the sake of preserving the character Carrie built, may have been accomplished by Tricia or Joely Fisher or her friend Meryl Streep as a way to still honor her.

A case for triple / quadruple convenience. Star Wars has always been a universe of happy coincidences, but Rise of Skywalker takes them to new extremes to the point it smacked me out of the movie. Every movie has it's own unique level of “good faith reserves” after which point plot conveniences elicit “you've got to be kidding” reactions. This happened to me during the setup of Force healing. FULL POST HERE.

Execution of Finn's character. Apart from his force-sensitivity and connection to the trooper defectors, I think Finn's plot regressed in this film each time he had to follow in Rey's wake every time she went solo, (going after Rey in the sciff, yelling Rey in the Death Star battle, Rey I have something to tell you). I thought that we had gotten past this in TLJ when Finn found purpose in the Resistance and something worth fighting for, but old habits die hard. 

Scavenger hunt questing and the damn Sith Dagger. If part of this was in the crawl, that might have been good with me. I get that Rey's a scavenger – it's good to see her in her element like TFA, climbing through the Death Star at the culmination – but it's far too time consuming to do the double header of dagger/wayfinder and coincidental. She could have been standing anywhere on Kef Bir, the oceanic moon of Endor, but she happened to be standing exactly where she needed to be with no reference to force power, and the tides hadn't moved any part of the wreck and the topography hadn't changed at all for the protractor on the dagger to work?! I’m a nerd about mathematical, logical tools, but they don't work well in a Sith alchemy plot! Even when we try for logic, the convenience appears, which could have been passable if I still had good faith. In the words of John Mulaney, “you spent it already?!”

Nostalgia aside, where are the stakes? They're trapped in a sand cave / wait, no they're not. They're being hunted through Fyre Festival and they don't have a get away ship / oh yeah they do, and its fully fueled, parked in the open, not stripped for parts. There are about five different “fake” deaths where the tension releases so fast, and two real deaths of spies that should have been given beats but were skimmed over: Chewie's dead / but no it was the wrong transport, 3PO's peril / never mind we've got backups, Zori wants to turn Rey in for bounty / then they have the quickest fight in Star Wars and are on good terms. Instead of taking big risks and getting reward, this film banked on unraveling the plot by the flip of a two-headed coin and settling for surprise “Oh, they did wot now?” instead of awe.

“Retconning” The Last Jedi / plucking it out of the timeline. Rise of Skywalker, in many ways, feels like a direct sequel to The Force Awakens. Direct slaps to TLJ include but not limited to: Holdo maneuver “one-in-a-million,” and Luke plucking Rey's saber from the fire. “A Jedi’s weapon deserves more respect (except when its Kylo’s),” and Luke lamenting about going into exile as a mistake. Concepts that could have been accepted, some even verbatim foregone conclusions from TLJ, were it not for terrible execution clearly framed at goodwill appeasement.

So, the Knights of Ren were window dressing? They just follow Kylo around like bouncers and when he turned to the light, they turned on him? A) Like the praetorian guard for Snoke, they are supposed to be loyal to Kylo and if they’re not we should get to see that, B) they just made Ben look boss as he took them out. Epic saber fight, lackluster idea, especially when the Knights were so speculated on and could have had mythos. Take them out of the film and put Luke's ghost in. Problem solved.

Rey as a Palatine / OP (Overpowered) Rey. All the one-ups that ensued between Rey and her grandfather. No thank you. I don't mind that she has power and is very naturally and diversely talented, don't let lineage play a factor. It was vastly more meaningful when she was ‘ordinary.’ I could go into a whole dedicated post on this.

Hux as a spy? No, I can't imagine that's what TFA set him up for. Interesting concept - I don’t want you to win, I want Kylo to lose - terrible setup. The Last Jedi did it better, Benicio del Toro is one of the only things I'll give Canto Byte credit for.

What even is the point of Zori apart from a character used to deliver a plot point of security clearance? She is very much used to prop up Poe's story. I like the idea of the character, I don't dig her role, and even more so I don’t like how the destruction of her planet first was used to fish for emotion. Invest more in Poe's struggles ascending to acting general.

Palpatine overall, from his intro in the crawl to his motives – He's such a cool, larger then life character, it shamefully never feels like we JJ knows what he wants out of the Emperor as his villain. Palpatine's motivation for decades was the dark, unnatural Sith ability to live forever sought by his master Plagueis before him, yet in RoS he's so utterly content to say “kill me so that you can ascend to Empress and I can flow through you (possess you)” – and then the discovery that draining the “Dyad in the Force” can regenerate him changes the plan immediately. Principally its an interesting idea using him as a puppet master to tie *all* the trilogies together, but for me it didn't work as nothing else about his character felt cohesive. And then when his own Force lightning is blasted at him, hasn't he learned to stop using it (throwback: Mace Windu) and pick up a saber and fight. Fool my once, shame on you, fool me twice and I'll cut you down. Wouldn't it be so great if, despite his wizened state, he still had latent combat skills? We were sooo robbed of that opportunity.

“Undermining” Anakin’s arc as the chosen one. I don't think bringing in Palpatine undoes Darth Vader's sacrifice – because Anakin still brought peace and balance to the Force when he sent Papatine back to the shadows. Balance restored by nature is not a permanent state, so it makes sense that the balance Anakin brought would eventually be challenged - but it does take away from the satisfaction of his story, especially considering that we do not see him return in physical form.

I get the "Be with me" use of Force ghost voices from all the Star Wars mediums. It was teed up right in the very beginning of the training montage. But you’re STAR WARS, you are making history. Go big, take a risk, PUT THE FORCE GHOSTS ON SCREEN (or at least a few from the central saga)! Give me Obi-Wan, Anakin, Yoda, maybe Mace, Luke, and Leia bestowing their energy on Rey, or go home! I mean my goodness, the Emperor had Snoke clones, but they were just sitting around as props in tank. If you wanted to go really big you could get all the clones of his main Sith disciples on screen (Snoke, Maul, Dooku), and have him force drain them to illustrate Sidious matching the power of the Force ghosts. But instead Disney played it safe.

Rey’s return to Tatooine and taking on the name Skywalker. FULL POST HERE with better options than appropriating the name Skywalker, especially considering that the plot does plenty to fulfill the film’s marquee during the Final Order Battle on Exogol when Rey embodies the Force of the Jedi and they will her to RISE. Taking on the name by contrast seems to trivialize via overkill what was delivered on (imperfectly, but powerfully).

The death of Ben Solo / “the redemption”: This depends on largely on what how you define and merit redemption. I can see why some loved it and others hated it – if you define redemption as “Kylo turned good after all that universe wrecking carnage and now he has access to light side force ability?!” then I can see where you didn't like or want his redemption arc, and might be satisfied with his death as a conclusion. If, like me, you didn't see Kylo's redemption not as the act of turning good but rather turning to face his own reflection / the thing he most feared – himself – exactly like Rey – and that's what allowed him access to the light side abilities to heal, that's fascinating as h***.  My gripe is I don't think Ben needed to die for the redemption to work or as a way to finish his arc. (FULL POST HERE) Again, why another Luke-themed noble demise? It could have worked for Luke’s character because Rise of Skywalker follows TLJ and gives you room to breath and play. But there’s nothing after this episode for Kylo in the same way.

So peace was created by defeating Palpatine and his fleet? Nah. First of all, Rey killed Darth Sidious exactly like he “wanted” her to and yet he didn't possess her as promised, while an order of Sith stand around watching– okay, was the Emperor really that attune in his Force Cognizance that he expressed with full confidence to his followers “whatever happens, the ritual will be complete. Don't move, sit back, enjoy the show”? And there's still the fragmented First Order (see the previous point above). Not every First Order officer and ship were loyal to or trusting of the Emperor and his comrade General Pryde, so it would stand to reason they didn't all heed the call to the final order and join the fray. What happens to them now that their Supreme Leader (Kylo) abdicated and then died? Yes, they are far fewer in number and they no longer have the firepower of Exogol behind them so they retreat into that shadows and regroup like opposition always does. I don't believe for a second that they all gave up or were defeated by the groundswell of Resistance. And now we are right back to where Return of the Jedi left us almost beat for beat.

Initial Reaction *** Episode I *** Episode III