this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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I also hate that it hurts the argument for inclusion. When they write a half-assed script, shoe horn some minority character into it, and crap out something everyone hates. The people who don't like that minority, are going to blame the minority for ruining what they love. All the while disney gets to pat themselves on the back because they helped out that community, it's just the world needs to catch up to their progressiveness.
Yeah, no-one is calling Alien woke for having a badass woman as the only survivor, and as the protagonist of the 2nd film. Because they're good movies.
Rose could have been fine if they didn't write her character as basically a cop during the introduction, a Mary Sue that figures out the weakness of tech where the start of the conversation was "that tech is impossible" (plus the weakness itself is completely out of left field), spend half of their field trip whining instead of doing their kinda urgent mission, and then the biggest thing she does is prevents a sacrifice that might have actually redeemed the movie somewhat, in a way that would have been physically impossible, given the scene leading up to it (ordered to retreat, she obeys, Finn ignores it and speeds at top speed towards the thing they were retreating from, then she somehow intercepts him from the side and both walk away).
The people that harassed the actor that played her are massive pieces of shit and this by no means justifies their response, but Rose seems like a character designed to draw hate.
It was bad writing pretty much across the board. Poe, Rey, Finn, and Leia got a pass from me mostly based on not being introduced as a barrier to the other characters and having got shit done previously. I felt as negatively about Luke as I did about Rose or Holdo in that movie, worse even because he could have been and done so much more, despite his past (or maybe because of it, ep 8 Luke was just a disappointment compared to his previous versions, like they took his only negative trait from the earlier films, his whining, and made that his main trait, despite him being mostly over it in ep 6).
And I agree that Rose wasn't a Mary Sue, but figuring out the weakness of hyperspeed tracking based on nothing at all was a Mary Sue moment (and Finn looked just as stupid for enthusiastically guessing where her mind was headed).
And some differences between Poe's and Holdo's plans were a) the audience was informed of Poe's plan (which sounded a lot like a typical Star Wars plan similar to their infiltration of the death star in ep 4) and for all we knew, Holdo had no plan but slowly let her ships get picked off as they ran out of fuel, and b) Poe's plan made the chase that made up most of the movie more interesting while Holdo's was a stall and run, which might have been a better plan but was so underwhelming after so much of the movie focused on that stupid chase.
And yeah, misogyny certainly played a role in the vehemence of the reaction and the bullying of the actors. Incels and other flavours of hate have a higher representation than average in a lot of nerdy niches. I just think that the producers chased that controversy rather than it falling upon them and resent that they did that to those actors even knowing how "fans" had reacted to kid Anakin and Jar Jar.