Star Wars Star Wars Discussion Thread - LET THE PAST D-! Oh, wait, nevermind

Urabrask Revealed said:

Let's not forget that the father of said "character" later married a Hillary Clinton expy, and he defended that development by claiming that the USA needed a mother figure right now. Said "character" also created a HK-47 expy, using the chassis of a B1 battle-droid as the basis.

In case you haven't cottoned on, that "character" is nothing more than the self-insert of Cuckdig.

Click to expand...

There's an endless amount of evidence that Wendig just writes out his own little pet obsessions. And does it at a level that's roughly 'trashy formula-based mass-produced romance lit dreck'. See:



That's the kind of description you might expect in a '90s harlequin romance. Or, you know, an off-brand imitator...


Of course, Chuck Wendig is not content merely dousing the world in his diarrhea. No, he is also bent on taking away access to good writing. The Internet Archive had an online library project, to make it easier for people to read during the corona crisis. A bunch of publishers got it taken down with legal threats, because "all books = our property", even though the projects was functionally an online library service to substitute, you know, the physical libraries people couldn't visit.

Take one guess who the publishers' primary online shill was, shrieking endlessly about how this service was evil and terrible and ought to be banned. Yup. Wendig. Another "woke" activist who, at the end of the day, is a willing lapdog for big money. A guy who actively campaigns to take away opportunities for poor people to read books. A scumbag who gleefully helps tear down non-profit efforts in service to his corporate masters, and then circlejerks on twitter about how "progressive" he is.

(A bit off-topic, I admit, but it can't be under-stated how much of a craven bastard this guy is.)

Didn't he get outed as an abuser as well?

Captain X said:

Didn't he get outed as an abuser as well?

Click to expand...

Pffft. Rape accusations these days are as believable as claims that water is actually purple with a pinch of pink.

Skallagrim said:

The writing, however, is the true issue when it comes to these ghastly abortions that are falsely advertised as "books". Wendig simply cannot write. Even if he'd been brilliant at characterisation, and gifted with the talent to pen positively enchanting plots... his terrible writing would still render it all utterly unreadable. His books are steaming piles of sentence fragments. Even the basics of grammar consistently elude him. He clearly has an aversion to using verbs in a straight-forward manner, which causes such an over-reliance on passive verbs that it would cause brain damage in most editors. (This is presumably why the books appear to be devoid of any decent editing at all.) Also: squinting modifiers, good grief. Enough to kill a herd of fully-grown Nerfs!

Even beyond such errors, his ability to write engaging prose is... non-existent. He has no talent for vivid description, nor for setting a scene, nor even for the competent use of words in any context. All of it literally reads like the sort of shoddy Twilight fanfic where the tween author drafts some horrifyingly stilted dialogue, comes to the realisation that this causes talking heads syndrome, and attempts to solve this by enthousiastically adding some rather incompetent would-be descriptive sentences around the dialogue fragments. Beginning fanfic authors regularly try to make this kind of filler text sound more "interesting" by looking up adjectives that "sound good" and then using (or mis-using) them in the hope that the result comes across as sophisticated. It generally doesn't work out for them, and whatever the method behind Wendig's madness may be... it doesn't work out for him, either. (And he doesn't have the excuse that he's a thirteen-year-old girl writing her first story.)

Finally, there's the weird pet obsessions. For instance: Wendig seems to have added an otherwise redundant character with a beard-- apparently for the sole reason that it allows him to spend a lot of superfluous words on the topic of beards. Which he does, repeatedly, for no discernible reason that could possibly make sense.

Click to expand...

Could you provide actual examples of these points of criticism, perhaps, as opposed to just *that one cherry-picked sentence*?

Hastur of Carcosa said:

many during the sith golden age would consider Bane and his disciples as heretics. so I'm not sure if they'd be too afraid of Anakin, heck some would probably even follow him.

Click to expand...

The KOTOR-era description of the MMO's reconstituted Sith Empire as the 'true' Sith just took on real meaning. Since they actually are the legal evolution of the Old Sith Empire, as their founder (no matter that he later turned his back on them) Darth Vitiate was probably the only ranking survivor of the ruling caste of the Sith Empire at the end of the Great Hyperspace War. Many Sith Lords in the reconstituted empire also had bloodlines dating back to the noble houses of the old empire. Of course, Exar Kun could contest that, as Marka Ragnos personally anointed him as a Dark Lord of the Sith, but few* if any of the post-Old Sith Empire Sith could claim they had similar sanction/mandate from the civilization they claimed to inherit.

*Darth Krayt was anointed by Xoxaan, one of the first Sith Lords, and a peer of Ajunta Pall, founder of the Old Sith Empire. The One Sith and their New Sith Empire could thus be considered the true successor of the Old Sith Empire, not Darth Ruin's Sith Order from the New Sith Wars, which eventually evolved into the Order of the Sith Lords.

EDIT: And come to think of it, the Line of Bane actually was disowned by the True Sith, when Darth Plagueis visited Korriban only to be denounced by the specter of Marka Ragnos.

ShadowArxxy said:

Could you provide actual examples of these points of criticism, perhaps, as opposed to just *that one cherry-picked sentence*?

Click to expand...

I've already linked to another bit showing issues with his writing. While I'm happy to delve into my ebook of Dark Force Rising to get some quotes relevant to a discussion, I don't own an ebook (or any kind of book) written by Wendig. I'm not going to download and then search through his drivel just to prove to you that his writing sucks. Reading it once was more than enough.

I can assure you that simply borrowing his books --maybe from an online library, since he hates those -- and reading them for yourself will adequately illustrate my point.

Jaenera Targaryen said:

snip

Click to expand...

See, this kind of politics in Star Wars is actually interesting to me.

Urabrask Revealed said:

See, this kind of politics in Star Wars is actually interesting to me.

Click to expand...

Indeed!

I know this may sound naive but when I first heard about the idea behind the First Order and the Knights of Ren I was really excited. I thought that a new Empire that learned from the mistakes of the old was an interesting concept. I was also hoping to see them put in the underdog position, using the same tactics that the Rebellion used to employ against the New Republic.

It would have been fun to see the heroes have to deal with First Order backed insurgencies and how to occupy worlds that genuinely believed in the Empire. I've always enjoyed some moral ambiguity in stories.

The Knights of Ren interested me because I thought they could take fresh take on conflicts between the light and dark. As much as we all enjoy the classic Sith versus Jedi plot it has gotten kind of overused. Maybe it was time to give some differing perspectives on the force some limelight.

I even had distant hopes that the writers might even make the Knights of Ren and their philosophy somewhat sympathetic.

But as we all know, none of this amounted to anything. Instead of of creating something new and exciting, Disney just took the old material and rewrote it in a worse way.

At least Rouge one was decent.

TyrantTriumphant said:

I know this may sound naive but when I first heard about the idea behind the First Order and the Knights of Ren I was really excited. I thought that a new Empire that learned from the mistakes of the old was an interesting concept. I was also hoping to see them put in the underdog position, using the same tactics that the Rebellion used to employ against the New Republic.

It would have been fun to see the heroes have to deal with First Order backed insurgencies and how to occupy worlds that genuinely believed in the Empire. I've always enjoyed some moral ambiguity in stories.

The Knights of Ren interested me because I thought they could take fresh take on conflicts between the light and dark. As much as we all enjoy the classic Sith versus Jedi plot it has gotten kind of overused. Maybe it was time to give some differing perspectives on the force some limelight.

I even had distant hopes that the writers might even make the Knights of Ren and their philosophy somewhat sympathetic.

But as we all know, none of this amounted to anything. Instead of of creating something new and exciting, Disney just took the old material and rewrote it in a worse way.

At least Rouge one was decent.

Click to expand...

I don't see anything naive there, that was pretty much my expectation as well.

Honestly there was no reason to expect Star Wars to go down so poorly and disorganized. Disney's been churning out high quality family entertainment like a well-oiled machine for decades and it was right after the Marvel Cinematic Universe proved they were doing great at action epics, they got the original actors on board, they had literally everything going for them for a new Star Wars trilogy to produce so much money the Box Office Sales record just said "Stack Overflow Error."

I don't think anybody saw what was coming. The worst predictions I saw were basically "Well be warned, it'll be awesome of course, but it can't quite live up to all the hype it's generating."

Bear Ribs said:

I don't think anybody saw what was coming. The worst predictions I saw were basically "Well be warned, it'll be awesome of course, but it can't quite live up to all the hype it's generating."

Click to expand...

I expected standard Disney fare; which is to say a tinny and plastic knockoff of the original at premium prices. Something that looks good initially but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as the being the actual thing it is imitating.

What we got was so much worse, it was rather shocking.

TyrantTriumphant said:

I know this may sound naive but when I first heard about the idea behind the First Order and the Knights of Ren I was really excited. I thought that a new Empire that learned from the mistakes of the old was an interesting concept. I was also hoping to see them put in the underdog position, using the same tactics that the Rebellion used to employ against the New Republic.

Click to expand...

I'd kinda expect to see "fight smarter" tactics coming from the Imperial Remnant (i.e. the Imperial moderates who were smart enough to sign a peace treaty), not the First Order (i.e. the Imperial hardliners who went into exile). That's why my headcanon/theory for The Force Awakens was that Phasma was a deep-cover Remnant agent; there's no other reason for someone who was supposed to be a fanatically loyal high-ranking officer to turn off the shield as opposed to activating a silent alarm on the computer.

ShadowArxxy said:

I'd kinda expect to see "fight smarter" tactics coming from the Imperial Remnant (i.e. the Imperial moderates who were smart enough to sign a peace treaty), not the First Order (i.e. the Imperial hardliners who went into exile). That's why my headcanon/theory for The Force Awakens was that Phasma was a deep-cover Remnant agent; there's no other reason for someone who was supposed to be a fanatically loyal high-ranking officer to turn off the shield as opposed to activating a silent alarm on the computer.

Click to expand...

Eh, as of the first movie of the sequel trilogy the First Order pretty much was your Imperial Remnant, and there was no indication that a separate Imperial Remnant existed. IIRC the lore after the first movie was that the First Order had been nominally at peace with the New Republic, what they were fighting was a Republic-backed quasi-military organization "The Resistance" that operated in First Order and unaligned space. When the First Order destroyed the Republic's core worlds that was a first strike on the Republic.

Then in movie 2 of course the First Order inexplicably controls the galaxy and has infinite ships for no clear reason, while the Republic no longer exists having been destroyed offscreen or in the opening crawl.

LindyAF said:

Eh, as of the first movie of the sequel trilogy the First Order pretty much was your Imperial Remnant, and there was no indication that a separate Imperial Remnant existed.

Click to expand...

The Imperial Remnant was not mentioned in the actual movie, true, but they *were* mentioned in backstory material including the official website, from the beginning of the sequel trilogy.

IIRC the lore after the first movie was that the First Order had been nominally at peace with the New Republic, what they were fighting was a Republic-backed quasi-military organization "The Resistance" that operated in First Order and unaligned space. When the First Order destroyed the Republic's core worlds that was a first strike on the Republic.

Click to expand...

I can totally see how you got that impression, because they *really* did not mention the actual Imperial Remnant except in backstory material. However, the if you looked it up it *was* officially canon that up until the events of the movie, the First Order's entire existence was a closely held secret. The entire reason Leia created the Resistance was that very few people in the New Republic were willing to believe the First Order *existed at all*, and therefore they refused to even consider rolling back the New Republic's disarmament.

Not strictly canon but logical: the Resistance basically consists of an uncomfortable alliance between Leia's "old friends" who do believe her, and the opposite numbers of the First Order -- the hyper-aggressive Rebel/NR fanatics who opposed the peace treaty and want to go back to war and purge the Empire completely.

Then in movie 2 of course the First Order inexplicably controls the galaxy and has infinite ships for no clear reason, while the Republic no longer exists having been destroyed offscreen or in the opening crawl.

Click to expand...

What really ruined Rise of Skywalker is that the plot hooks and concepts set up in Force Awakens were intentionally ruined in The Last Jedi, so even when they went back to the original director, it was impossible to save the planned plotline. That's why on a standalone basis, Last Jedi isn't as bad as Rise of Skywalker, but Last Jedi really is the movie that ruined the sequel trilogy.

This was basically a huge demonstration of why you should never hire Rian Johnson for sequels to someone else's work -- while he's a very skilled director, he's like a fanfiction writer in terms of taking over the story by reimagining it and taking it in a completely different direction.

Honestly the fact that the MCU had turned out so well up to that point made me think Star Wars might finally be done some justice now that Lucas was no longer at the wheel. I was so ready to like the new movies, and while I was disappointed by TFA, what really drove home how horrible things were was going to see TLJ. And now when I look at TFA, I see all the stupid stuff and missed potential.

DocSolarisReich said:

I expected standard Disney fare; which is to say a tinny and plastic knockoff of the original at premium prices. Something that looks good initially but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as the being the actual thing it is imitating.

What we got was so much worse, it was rather shocking.

Click to expand...

What's even more shocking is that there are people who actually enjoyed The Last Jedi (because it "subverted your expectations"), and who believe that not continuing along that trajectory is what ruined The Rise of Skywalker:


People like this guy blames us, as he believes we want endless sequels that just repeat the same story over and over again (because there's no other reason he can think of for why we didn't like how "unique" and "transgressive" The Last Jedi was); when in reality it's Hollywood that, for the most part, insists on force-feeding them down audiences' throats.

The Last Jedi was an unmitigated catastrophe for the entire franchise, and is indeed the reason Rise of Skywalker turned out like it did. I think, in many respects, it is actually "turn your brain off and enjoy it" territory as those who love Last Jedi embrace its subversion whilst mentally blocking what it means for the wider trilogy and franchise.

DocSolarisReich said:

I expected standard Disney fare; which is to say a tinny and plastic knockoff of the original at premium prices. Something that looks good initially but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as the being the actual thing it is imitating.

Click to expand...

That describes TFA precisely. Although TFA has the added draw-back of typical "Abrams-isms". Stupid empty mystery boxes, even more "style over substance" than is the standard for this kind of Disney production, and a highly annoying tendency to put his pet obsessions front-and-centre. (In this case, needless MacGuffins and a Big Scene that breaks all laws of physics and logic. Namely the insanely visible-from-all-planets death beam, which is just as stupid as the black holes in his NuTrek film.)

Basically, once I heard Abrams was going to direct, I knew it would have irritating things. But when he also took over writing, I knew it was going to have serious problems. I hoped for the best -- that maybe Kasdan could keep things decent -- but clearly, that wasn't the case. (I've since read much more about the production of the OT, and discovered that I hugely over-estimated Kasdan. Mainly because he shamelessly took credit for ideas that actually came from Lucas.)

Captain X said:

Honestly the fact that the MCU had turned out so well up to that point made me think Star Wars might finally be done some justice now that Lucas was no longer at the wheel. I was so ready to like the new movies, and while I was disappointed by TFA, what really drove home how horrible things were was going to see TLJ. And now when I look at TFA, I see all the stupid stuff and missed potential.

Click to expand...

With the prequels as the most recent SW films, loads of people still bought into the RedLetterMedia narrative that Lucas was the problem all along. I never did hate the prequels all that much. When the sequels were first announced, the concept sounded ideal. Ideas from Lucas (who appeared to still be involved), which would be turned into a screenplay by Michael Arndt (an accomplished screen-writer). So we'd get Lucas's great strength (big ideas & vision), while cancelling out his big weakness (he gets hammy when it comes to the details, e.g. dialogue and spacific visual choices).

Then Abrams was announced as the director. Like I said, that was bad news to me. Still, his initial NuTrek film wasn't that crappy. And his style seemed more suited to SW. So him as director wasn't all that bad, if the writer was just good. Then it came out they had actually ditched Lucas's ideas, and Arndt was also shown the door. Abrams would be lead writer, too.

Oh, and the next film would be written and directed by Rian Johnson. This was announced in 2014 already. Now, he made a film called The Brothers Bloom. I have a strong dislike of that film. A sort of terrible smugness drips off the screen. There's no doubt that the director thought himself an auteur genius. So seeing the name "Rian Johnson" was enough to make me fear for SW. Abrams writes rip-off imitation films, and shit sequels because he has no actual ideas. Rian Johnson, however, is the most irritating writer-director in existence. So he's the worst possible man to choose for a follow-up film.

The sequels were doomed from the moment Disney stabbed Lucas in the bak out of greed and impatience. And the fans cheered, because they all though Lucas was the Great Satan who made the "terrible" prequels. They didn't know how good they had it. They didn't get how much worse it could be.

I think the entire debacle can be summed up by this quote from Mark Hamill, about his experience with the sequel trilogy:

"What I wish is that they had been more accepting of George's advice and guidance. Because he had an outline for VII, VIII and IX. And it is vastly different to what they have done."

I'm going to have to disagree with you on that. I didn't like the prequels, and I largely agree with RLM on them, though I'm not nearly as nitpicky as they are. But I do put a lot of it down to Lucas, simply because no one was around to challenge him on anything the way that there had been during the OT. And having seen his ideas for the ST, I don't think that would have represented an improvement. I started a whole other thread over this, actually.

Honestly, all the sequels have done is beat a great love and nostalgia for the prequels into me.

They weren’t that bad. Yes, Jar Jar is annoying and the dialog in some scenes wasn’t ideal. But at least they flowed together naturally, the action was great, and character motivations and arcs made sense.

I’d even go so far as to call Revenge of the Sith the fourth best Star Wars film. Attack of Clones was somewhat annoying at times, but compared to the Last Jedi, it’s Citizen fucking Kane.

We’re sorry for being mad at you George! Please come back to save us from Rat Wars!