Same. And this is why I knew it would eventually collapse under the weight of its own continuity. I've seen it over and over again in cape comics. It's inevitable. Continuity is cancerous.
If you're interested in this discourse, I'm literally writing a novel about it, and I this publishing climate, I might as well give it away when the time comes.
But three or four generations of people idolized the jedi—hey, just like Rayencourt said!—and couldn't imagine what the movies clearly showed us: that they were so far past misguided that they were training children to kill other children who escaped their cult.
Dude. Dude. Dude.
This is what I come to social media for. I *just* had a rousing convo about how fucked up the Jedi are. It starts with dr flowers saying "acab includes the Jedi."
I am HERE for this discourse.
Anyway, it's possible that D&W could be the exact kind of goofy palette-cleanser we need, taking the pressure off and getting back to just hanging out with characters who are fun.
But yes, the MCU is now SNL: an institution more than actual entertainment, something we have fondness for.
What's important about the shared universe structure is that it should make us care *more* about the characters. We get to spend more time with them. The individual movies are better even if they are flawed. Age of Ultron was redeemed partly because we got to see Widow and Banner find each other.
We see how that turned out with Kang. When you oversell what's coming later on, you box yourself into a corner that you can't write yourself out of. The original MCU universe had a *loose* narrative structure. They changed stuff all the time to make it work for better for good movies.
What's happening in this new era of the MCU is that they are leaning way too heavily on the overarching story. All of the movies are just vehicles for tie-ins. They created the entire first season of Loki just to set up the new Big Bad villain. But that's too much. Now you have a lot to deliver on.
This is part of my thesis. What actually happened was that the investment in the overarching universe is what enabled the MCU to survive bad individual movies. The studio assumes they can just do that again. But they're missing what was important about it.
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I wonder to what extent this is also nostalgia playing with people's memories of phases 1-3. Yes, Endgame was A Big Deal but (some of us at least) sat through things like Thor: Dark World and Age of Ultron to get there.
I wish it was more okay for us to accept that some phenomenons are specific to that place and time. I don't think it's possible to recreate the feeling of the MCU run up to Endgame. It was an amazing time. But now everybody is chasing that feeling instead of looking for art.
This show really opens up that whole angle on the jedi, yes. What was implicit is not explicit.I'm genuinely surprised they allowed it to happen, and now I'm bracing myself for when Season 2 ham-handedly reverses what they've done by making the "vergence" and the witches a legitimate threat.
The things Luke gets right are: making friends is *good*, and the dark side is not a one-way trip. I give the movies credit for that bc it's ultimately about community and reconciliation.
"It's too late for me, my son" is a *powerful* line with a lot of implications, but that's another conversation
Yes. God. Well said. That's it exactly.
If an army of fanatic wizard-samurai is hellbent on killing you, murdering as many of them as possible starts to look damn reasonable. I mean, change the POV of the story, and he's the damn hero for standing up to them.
Action heroes are so so very often not even close to being the "good guys." They're just the point-of-view characters, inflicting exactly the same violence as the alleged bad guys, but doing in the name of the state or white supremacy or patriarchy or capitalism or whatever.
True! Good point. Luke really failed to learn his own damn lesson: that the jedi are way more often wrong than right. I guess that makes him a real jedi after all.
No, and those movies end before we see what that looks like. The closest we get is watching Luke in flashback FUCK IT UP AGAIN and make the only responsible choice and do his best to end the jedi once and for all. The force is a natural disaster, though, and kicked off the whole damn cycle again.
Thing is, it's not emphatic, but the end of Return is all about how badly the Order fucked up the whole situation. They thought no one could come back from the dark side. They were wrong. They thought emotional attachments lead to the dark side. They were wrong.
They thought no could start training past the age of about four. They were wrong. There's relatively little they were right about, and both Yoda and Luke in the sequels (of which they made only two, real shame) make that very clear: the old order had to die with the old republic. It was sick.
But three or four generations of people idolized the jedi—hey, just like Rayencourt said!—and couldn't imagine what the movies clearly showed us: that they were so far past misguided that they were training children to kill other children who escaped their cult.
"You think I shouldn't exist" is a *damning* line, and it's true. That doesn't make the Stranger right to commit many, many murders, but he's not wrong!
I am writing a novel on that very subject. It's definitely about policing and mental health.
I feel a *little* scooped by this show, but it's worth it. That ended STRONG.
It’s the first election after a coup attempt and the coup plotters are using democratic means to try to retake power. We probably don’t talk about that with enough clarity.
