All opinions about art are subjective. I don’t see the point in appending a bunch of IMHOs in front of every discussion about the merit of art. Doubly so when it’s something that’s usually only applied to negative opinions. “This is good writing,” is every bit as much a subjective opinion dressed up as objective, but folks don’t complain about it nearly as often.
“There’s something wrong with you for liking this,” is just being a jerk, though.
I’m definitely someone who thought the writing in the sequels was atrocious, and I think I can defend that opinion fairly well without resorting to “Woman bad!,” but this isn’t the thread for that. I do think one of the problems with differentiating between people who have genuine criticisms of the film, and people who were reacting out of prejudice, is that the latter group is not going to be entirely made up of people who are consciously rejecting the film from those prejudices.
A common criticism of the prequels is Rey knowing how to pilot a starship, despite not having any sort of formal training. But Luke could also pilot a starship without formal training, and that’s usually just taken at face value. Some of that is people being overtly sexist, but a lot of it is just unexamined expectations and societal-level sexism. Audiences are more likely to accept a male hero who is skilled and competent at face value, while expecting a much higher level of justification for similarly skilled female heroes. But if they don’t have the basic tools to discuss and deconstruct how media works, they just know they had a negative emotional reaction to it, and aren’t really able to articulate why beyond, “The writing wasn’t good.”
In my experience it can get a lot more complicated than that and dependent on the specific story one is trying to tell - in my case, action romance. “Manipulative” is a big one. Women seem to be inherently viewed as manipulative if they want to have sex or are sexual in any way. Women committing acts of violence is another one. If she’s acting too much like a woman, she can’t be too violent, even in self-defense. If she’s acting like a man, she can be violent, as long as she’s as skilled as a man would be. If a man does something terrible to her and she doesn’t forgive him right away, she’s being unfair. I could go on. And point out that a lot of these perceptions are coming from women. I wrote a male character that was a worse, more violent, more unhinged person by several orders of magnitude and not a single reader ever had a problem with him. They loved him. They would forgive him anything.
It was writing female characters that really got me wondering if I’m autistic. Are the women I write just autistic women and therefore nobody understands them? I don’t know if I’m autistic.
I do know that trying to navigate these ridiculous double standards did make me a better writer. So that, at least.
There is at least some writing in Star Wars that Luke may not have training on a T-65B X-Wing but that he had some pilot experience in a T-16 skyhopper. Now, yes, most of that was later expanded outside the movie that Incom made both with similar controls and other lore, but at least there’s the idea planted that it’s not like he’s never flown something before. The problem with Rey is that we don’t really know anything about her or even indirectly what she might have experience with because JJ Abrams is a hack who couldn’t be bothered to care about such things.
It comes down to “it’s bad writing because of xyz” vs. “it’s bad writing”. Things like episode VII focusing on Rey and Finn as the two main protagonists (on the level of Luke, Leia, and Han), with Poe Dameron receiving treatment more on the level of Lando. Then episode VIII comes along and Finn is relegated to the background while Poe becomes a main character, with no explanation given as to why those changes were made. I could go on. Suffice to say there’s a bunch of major problems like that about which the sequel trilogy can be criticized.
There is at least the line about shooting womp rats in his T-16. Which doesn’t tell the audience much, but to at least some degree he has experience flying something with some degree of targeting. I don’t think TFA even gives that much of a throwaway bit of character background for any experience Rey might have.
And Biggs’ line, added back into the Yavin hangar scene in the 1997 Special Edition, about “Luke is the best bush pilot in the Outer Rim.” Which still is only a tiny bit of context, and Biggs may or may not be biased.
I really didn’t mean to hijack this thread into a debate about the minutiae of Star Wars films, but I kinda feel the conversation is proving my point? Everyone’s willing to go to bat for why farm boy Luke knows how to pilot cutting edge fighter craft, nobody wants to extend the same suspension of disbelief to tech scavenger Rey knowing how to pilot an archaic space truck.
And part of that, for sure, is that Rey is in an overall shittier movie, and people are more willing to do a bit of extra mental work to paper over the cracks in media they love. But to the extent that this is a flaw in the writing of one movie, it’s exactly the same flaw in the other. “Well, in the EU they explained that…” or “This cut scene that was added back in after twenty five years establishes…” doesn’t change that.
Could be! I’m no story genius. Story geniuses don’t have to read books about how to write stories. I know a guy who is a story genius. He can come to writers group and say, “I didn’t get a chance to read this” but by the end of the session he will have identified and fixed the problem. It’s uncanny.
Personally I think storytelling is the hardest part. Which is why so many people get it wrong, I think.
Like the brilliant scientician who said that a dark-skinned Little Mermaid doesn’t make sense because an underwater creature wouldn’t need the UV protection of melanin…
I was that guy in screenplay class, but only for other people’s stories. Couldn’t figure out the beats in my own story to save my life, but I was William fuckin’ Goldman for everyone else.
My point wasn’t really meant to be arguing Star Wars but more that there’s a trend that is often seen in bad writing. Star Wars manages to give you just enough information and names to give you a sense of the universe without actually having to do much world building. Or even with works with deep world building like Middle Earth, so much of it just comes across as this massive world that clearly means something even if the reader or viewer doesn’t know what. I remember with The Hobbit when the company investigates the troll hoard and find Orcrist and Glamdring and Sting. The line is something like “These are fine swords of Elvish make. They were made in Gondolin for the goblin wars”. Now, if you were my parents and had read Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion you knew far more of what that line meant. To me as a small child it was just this mysterious bit of world building to wonder about.
But what you often see is important information either cut out or deliberately withheld from the audience. Then, when the audience says they don’t understand the writing, point to a cut scene or even worse something like a YouTube short or a licensed book or a TV show or some other bit of multimedia crap to defend why the thing being discussed can’t stand on its own. Abrams is especially bad with his puzzle box crap but a lot of writing for streaming services have leaned heavily into things like non-linear writing to try to hide that there’s no “there” there.
We were also children when the first one came out. To really compare we should ask today’s children what they think about the more recent stuff. Our aged and cynical minds may just not be able to put the inner critic on mute to let ourselves enjoy things as much. I actually said the same thing when The Phantom Menace came out and got dragged by the fandom. The prequels have aged better. They still have their issues, but they are not at all hated like they were when they came out. Were the sequels perfect? No. But I still enjoyed them for what they were. I thought The Last Jedi was great to be honest, and it pisses me off that they adjusted so much for Rise of the Skywalker to try to appease the haters and they still hated it.
Little Mermaid is a perfect example. The creative team came out and said that Halle Bailey blew every other actress out of the water at the auditions. That it was no contest she was the best. And these are the same people that demand everything be based on merit. Make it make sense please.
Nostalgia is definitely a complicating factor in evaluating stuff from our childhood, but I don’t think its an explanation in and of itself. I hated the prequels too… but I loved the Clone Wars cartoon, which I didn’t watch until I was about a decade older and (presumably) a decade more cynical. And as a kid, my three favorite things in the world were Star Wars, Transformers, and GI Joe, and Star Wars is the only one that’s held onto my affection. I can still enjoy the original SW movies; I’m not watching reruns of the old Transformers cartoon on Youtube.
Are complaints about “dumb writing” or “dumb storytelling” the same as calling something “bad writing” or “bad storytelling”? I ask because whenever my father didn’t like a TV show, movie, play, book, or song he didn’t like, he called it “dumb.”
This reminds me of the recent Mad Max films. Fury Road is in my opinion damned near perfect. One of the best movies of all time. Leaned hard into what’s fun and intense about that world. The prequel, Furiosa, for some reason tried to explain the world, and tried to shorthorn that worldbuilding stuff into the plot. And oh my Jesus the closer you look the stupider it sounds. That world makes no sense.
Does it have to make sense? Not really. But maybe don’t draw attention to that part if you can help it.
I’ve never liked the Star Wars style of storytelling because I’m a shades of grey person. And that’s why I love Andor. Andor is the show about how the Star Wars sausage gets made, and what sacrifices, including ethical sacrifices, have to be made to overthrow an oppressive regime. It makes you question the people you’re rooting for. That’s my kind of storytelling. And that is, effectively, a matter of preference and opinion, but if you ask me which film/show has better writing…
We like what we like and if we like a thing there’s really no amount of material weaknesses we won’t hand-wave away.
Also, it’s still valid to complain about something being politicized (and especially, needlessly politicized) even if the acting is excellent, casting is great, special effects and CGI are great, etc.
