Links - 12th September 2019 (1) (The Last Jedi)

Is Rey From The Last Jedi A Mary Sue & Is It Sexist To Think She Is? [Storycraft]

"Mary Sues are typically purposefully lacking in character development in order to remain as undefined and generalized as possible. The reason for this is so that large numbers of a story’s audience are able to “fill in” the characterization gaps by inserting their own personal character traits into the Mary Sue, thus fulfilling the “self-insertion” purpose of the character. And it is for this reason why Mary Sues can be so incredibly popular among audiences — because audiences feel as though they themselves are the flawless star of the story they are experiencing. (This can also be why some people are so vehement in their defense of a Mary Sue character, because they essentially feel as though they are defending themselves from criticism that is actually aimed just at the character and not them as an individual.)

The negative connotation that stems from this “wish-fulfillment” implication is that a Mary Sue becomes so perfect that the character becomes too lacking in realism or development to actually be interesting. Due to a Mary Sue’s extreme competence and masterful talents, she not only has no room to improve, but any obstacle that she encounters offers no challenge for her to overcome. Her lack of struggle, lack of transformation, lack of self-doubt, and lack of conflict robs the audience of any feeling of tension or drama because they inherently know that the Mary Sue will always prevail whether she deserves to or not.

But the real issue when it comes to Mary Sue characters — particularly in post-feminist cinema — is that they are often conflated with the concept of “Strong Female Characters.” In this instance, writers who wish to espouse a message of female empowerment conflate writing realistic and sympathetic characters with idealized characters in an attempt extol the virtues of being a woman, thus playing against the traditional female stereotypes found in older narratives. However, in making a female character a “Mary Sue,” they sacrifice creating a “strong female character” in exchange for an unrealistic “perfect female character.”

And no matter how noble the intention of a storyteller may be in making that character a Mary Sue, it ultimately creates a division within audiences that can alienate those who are unwilling to sacrifice realistic character development for idealized wish fulfillment. Proper storycraft dictates that while all audiences can accept realistic character development, not all audiences can accept the concept of a “perfect character.”...

Which is more sexist? Hating a character because of that character’s gender — or loving that character based entirely on that character’s gender?...

Male characters can also fall into this trap, having their own term for it: Gary Stu.

Because the label of an idealized self-insert character can be applied to both male and female characters, the term Mary Sue itself cannot be sexist in nature, no more than any gender pronoun can be considered sexist. Instead, it’s a descriptive term associated with a type of gender orientation. To call “Mary Sue” a sexist term is tantamount to calling other female-descriptive terms, such as “heroine,” “mother,” “girlfriend,” “wife,” “Queen,” “Princess,” or “matron” sexist simply because they depict different female-centric representations. And because the term is not inherently sexist, its use is therefore not inherently sexist...

Role models that embody “perfection” are inherently unhealthy due to the fact that they represent a standard that is impossible to achieve by those who look up to them. Instead, it is far healthier to have a realistic and sympathetic character who is indeed flawed yet able to overcome those flaws to achieve greatness. Defending “Mary Sue” characters simply because one sees them as potential role models actually does a disservice to those seeking a strong female role model to embody.

The real issue defenders of the Mary Sue label have is conflating the criticism of a character’s flawless nature with that of a character’s gender. Any criticism of a female character can be seen as “sexist” if one only looks at the character’s sex as opposed to the character’s actual traits...

One of the biggest mistakes a storyteller can make is confusing the concept of a “strong character” with that of a “perfect character.” Strong characters must struggle to overcome challenges and be transformed for the better by doing so. Perfect characters easily overcome any challenges and never have to transform any more than they already have.

A strong character is dynamic. A perfect character is static...

Strong Character = Well Written
Weak Character = Poorly Written

Just because a character is deemed to be “weak” does not make that character “bad” necessarily. A character can be weak and poorly written, and still be likable. An example of a weak but likable character everyone can relate to is that of Boba Fett from The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The character of Boba Fett is never properly developed or given any real distinctive character arcs in the films. But despite that, there is something about the character that resonated with audiences and made him a beloved member of the Star Wars universe.

Similarly, the character of Rey can also be defined as “weak,” but that does not make her unlikable. In order to understand why a portion of the Star Wars audience likes Rey, despite her being a poorly written character, and why a certain portion dislikes Rey for the same reasons, we need to look at storycraft elements that determine both “strength” and “likability.”

When it comes to developing a character, there are five aspects that can help define how strong that character will resonate with audiences. These aspects are:

Character Arc
Motivation
Activity Level
Struggle
Likability...

When it comes to the character of Rey, we must ask: What transformation did she go through? How was she different at the end of The Last Jedi than she was at the beginning of The Force Awakens?

One could argue that the big transformation is that by the end of The Last Jedi, Rey had actually become a Jedi. However, the counter-argument to that is Rey was always that Jedi she developed into by the end of that film. She was always self-assured, competent, and independent. She was always a good fighter. She was always an expert pilot. She was always an amazing engineer. She was always attractive and feminine. She always had a heart of gold. The only real change that could be argued is that Rey had a greater mastery over The Force, but this change was something she did not have to work to attain. Her abilities simply were given to her as the plot demanded and she never actually had to learn how to use them...

Luke’s character motivation in Episodes 4–6 was fairly straight-forward. He wanted to become a Jedi like his father. Luke had an idealized version of who his father Anakin Skywalker was, and Luke wanted to embody that ideal his father had set for him. Every action Luke took and every decision Luke made was based on this motivation to become a great hero like his father, eventually culminating in Luke’s final confrontation with Emperor Palpatine where he states: “I’m a Jedi, like my father before me.”

Now ask the question: What is Rey’s motivation? Essentially, Rey has no real core motivation driving her decisions. Most of The Force Awakens is spent with Rey simply wanting to return to her life on Jakku but getting swept up in a greater adventure against her wishes. Her driving force in The Last Jedi is to get Luke Skywalker to help the Resistance, until about halfway through the film where that motivation is abandoned and it changes to saving Kylo Ren, and then changes once more to saving the Resistance.

The only real consistent source of motivation for the character of Rey was her desire to find her parents. However, this motivation was essentially destroyed in The Last Jedi by the revelation that Rey’s parents were “nobodies” and were not important. In fact, I would argue that Star Wars fans were so desperate to have anything they could latch onto in terms of Rey having an obstacle to struggle with, or a motivation for her character, that this revelation that her parentage was of no consequence erased the last lingering hope that Rey would have SOME type of conflict to deal with that could potentially break her out of the “Mary Sue” mold...

When we compare the activity level of these two main characters, it’s plain to see that Rey is far more “reactive” than Luke is, in the respect that things in the plot happen to her and she’s forced to react, as opposed to her decisions and actions being the thing that drive the plot forward. Though it is possible to make an entertaining movie with a reactive main character, it is proper storycraft to always ensure that the main thrust of a narrative’s plot stems from the actions of a main character as opposed to their reactions...

A very large aspect of a “strong character” is that character’s ability to overcome adversity. Audiences do not relate to characters for which everything comes easily. In order for characters to endear themselves to audiences, they must fight to earn their victories rather than have those victories simply handed to them...

Characters struggle with both internal and external obstacles. The external obstacles come in the forms of villains, thugs, nature, and a host of other physical threats. Internal obstacles come from negative character traits and philosophical/mental/emotional/moral conflicts. So let us ask ourselves: what conflicts must Rey actually struggle to overcome in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi?

External obstacles: It can be argued that the only real external obstacles Rey faces in both movies come in the form of Kylo Ren and First Order ships. No other antagonists really threaten her in either film. In both cases, each obstacle is easily overcome. Not only can Rey out-fly and shoot down any First Order TIE fighter that engages with her, but Kylo Ren seems unable to defeat her, as is evidenced by her rejecting his Force interrogation and besting him at lightsaber duels. And though Supreme Leader Snoak offers a formidable external obstacle, notice that Rey never actually overcomes him herself. Snoak is defeated by a different character without Rey’s assistance. Rey also faces an external obstacle when it comes to her fight with the Praetorian Guards, but again, she’s able to defeat multiple combatants with ease (and even save Kylo’s life while doing so).

Internal obstacles: The only real internal obstacle Rey seems to struggle with in the films is this notion of who her parents are. Rey desires to have a family to which she can belong. However, she never actually tries to resolve or overcome this internal obstacle. Instead, she’s content to “wait” on Jakku for her parents to return. Surrogate parents seem thrust upon her without her seeking them out and The Resistance becomes a type of surrogate family to her even though she’s spent almost zero time with them. And ultimately, she accepts that her parents don’t matter, as is made clear in The Last Jedi, thus having her only internal obstacle rendered moot and taken away from her by Kylo Ren rather than resolved via her own actions...

In his book “Writing Screenplays That Sell”, Hauge lays out four character elements that make audiences instantly like a character. These elements are:

Make a character good at what he/she does.
Make the character funny.
Make the character the recipient of an undeserved misfortune.
Give the character a strong moral code...

So out of all five categories that determine a “strong character,” Rey only succeeds in fulfilling one. However, the one category she does pass with flying colors also happens to be the most important one, and that is of likability. Even Star Wars fans who may be critical of Rey’s “perfect” image are willing to admit they actually find her somewhat likable.

But being likable doesn’t make her “strong.” By failing 4 out of the 5 criteria, it is in fact safe to say that Rey is actually quite a weak character by storycraft standards...

A common criticism of Mary Sues is that the characters never have any real “flaws” that their character has to overcome and are thus lacking in character development... [Rey's] are not considered defining character traits...

Simply possessing negative character traits (or flaws) is not enough to claim that a character actually HAS flaws. From a storycraft perspective, character development is about transformation. It’s about characters overcoming obstacles to their goals and growing as a person because of it. If a character possesses a flaw — or “negative character trait” — then that flaw is only a “defining trait” in so much as it becomes an obstacle to the character’s transformation or achievement of a goal. In essence, a trait that helps to solidly define a character in the audience’s eyes is a “defining character trait.”...

Did any of these flaws present an obstacle in any way to her achieving any of her goals throughout The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi?

The answer here is a resounding NO. At no point did any of these “flaws” require Rey to overcome them to further develop her character. The Rey we see at the beginning of The Force Awakens is the exact same Rey we see at the end of The Last Jedi. None of these “flaws” impacted any of her decisions or were overcome in any type of transformation. The closest we got, it could be argued, is that her overconfidence in her abilities led her to the confrontation with Supreme Leader Snoak, but even in that scenario, it was Kylo Ren who saved her from Snoak. Rey’s overconfidence was not overcome in that scene, and it continues to persist after it...

Going back to The Princess Bride example, let’s make another comparison between the characters of Rey and Westley. Why is Rey considered to be a Mary Sue, but Westly is not considered to be a Gary Stu? After all, throughout his entire appearance in The Princess Bride, Westley embodies the concept of an idealized perfection. He can outfight any swordsman. He can overcome giants. He can outwit criminal masterminds. He can brave any obstacle, and he can also attract the most beautiful woman in all the land! So why is his character so overwhelmingly accepted by audiences, and Rey’s character is not?

Setting aside the gender of the characters, let’s simply look at their development. Though Westly is extremely capable and able to perform “inconceivable” feats of strength, skill, and intelligence, he actually takes the time to explain that these skills were acquired over years of relentless training and hard work, where he molded himself into the man he felt he had to become to deserve Princess Buttercup’s hand in marriage...

Rey’s ability to fight, fix machinery, or pilot a spaceship were never set-up or explained. She just already knew how to do all that stuff without any explanation to the audience as to how she knew to do it (Heck, she even knows how to swim in The Last Jedi despite having spent her entire life on a desert planet with no water). And when it comes to using The Force, the audience never sees her receive any training at all before she’s able to use it like an expertly trained Jedi Knight would. This is made even more blatant by the audience having seen Luke Skywalker’s, Anakin Skywalker’s, and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s training in the Jedi ways in previous films, and how much they had to work to master these skills.

This is the difference between “competence” and “perfection.”... Competence in abilities must be seen to be earned by a character in order for audiences to accept them — particularly when a character’s competence is in more than one field. If a character is an expert in one area, but a mess in another, the flaw of being bad in one thing counter-balances the expertise in another, thus saving them from the “Mary Sue/Gary Stu” label. Having an action hero who is incredibly skilled at fighting but is hopeless when it comes to his love life is a primary example of this. When it comes to Rey, there is nothing she is bad at or lacking in to counterbalance her extreme competence in all other disciplines...

The final litmus test of a Mary Sue is her ability to upstage any and all other characters in the narrative... there are numerous instances of Rey upstaging other characters in the narratives of both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. In some instances, proving she is more powerful/attractive/interesting by defeating or humiliating iconic characters who have been established and developed over the course of 30 years."


Also:

Admiral Ackbar Actor Tim Rose Details Humiliation on the Set of Disney's Star Wars: The Last Jedi - "One Twitter user described how they viewed Rose’s reaction.
    He thought he would be treated with dignity and respect but his expectations were subverted..
Following Rose’s interview, he would be summarily mocked by a number of people who indicated that Ackbar’s character was just a “meme.”
Sequel Trilogy fans are now mocking Admiral Ackbar & Tim Rose saying he’s a cry baby & “Ackbar is just a meme”
Lucasfilm’s new fanbase does nothing but disrespect the original actors & characters now"

Benjamin Johnson's answer to I keep hearing that the new Star Wars movies are filled with SJW things. I honestly don't see it. What am I missing? - Quora - "it's not that the protagonist is a woman; Star Wars has had many women in leading roles, starting with Leia herself. The problem is that Rey is not anything like Leia; nor is she anything like Luke, or any of the other characters we could name. But here's the thing: we knew, from very early on, what Luke and Leia wanted: Leia wanted to deliver the Death Star plans, Luke wanted to leave Tattooine and join the Academy; we saw Luke get his wish at the cost of his whole family, and we saw Leia get tortured and then lose her whole planet but still have enough in her to take charge of her own rescue. Luke and Leia both have an obvious connection with Vader even if we don't immediately know the whole story. Luke had to go through trials and training, and failure, and losing his hand to become a powerful Jedi.But what does Rey want? Can anyone tell me? What does she lose? Nothing at all. What connection does Rey have with Kylo Ren? Absolutely none at all. What trials does Rey face? None at all, because she doesn't even need training. If I described a male character with those same characteristics, could you really give me any label other than “Gary Stu”? If not, then why do you object to Rey being labeled as a “Mary Sue”?
Second, there's Holdo, aka Admiral Evening Gown. And before you mention Mon Mothma or Leia, do remember that neither of them are military officers; they are politicians. And when Leia did go to a combat zone (as seen in both ESB and RotJ), she was wearing more appropriate clothes for the occasion; so did Padme in the PT. Not only that, but Holdo is a lousy leader on top of it all; yes, she wasn't obligated to tell anyone the plan, but she could have avoided the entire mutiny just by saying: “I have a plan, the details of which will be revealed when I deem appropriate.” Instead she ignored the question in favor of a condescending lecture about something that, as Poe pointed out, really wasn't that important anymore. Any half-competent officer should know that if you act like you don't have a plan, the lower decks are going to assume that you don't have a plan, with inevitable consequences for morale. Holdo's plan was also, I might add, an incredibly stupid one: if the enemy can track you through hyperspace, then the thing to do is to have your ships scatter in random directions and make several random hyperspace jumps to random sets of coordinates, and then regroup at a prearranged rendezvous point; you do not lead the enemy on a sublight chase towards another base of yours and you most definitely don't assume that the enemy is dumber than you are. Holdo made those mistakes and more, with the predictable result that the Resistance is now small enough to all fit in the Falcon. And yet we are expected to side with Holdo because….can you explain it to me without using SJW terminology or arguments?...
Third, there's Rose's absolutely asinine line about “saving what you love, not destroying what you hate,” which anyone who has ever been in a real war knows is total BS. To paraphrase General Patton: “No one ever won a war by dying for their country; he won by making the other guy die for his country.”"

Garrett Stock's answer to I keep hearing that the new Star Wars movies are filled with SJW things. I honestly don't see it. What am I missing? - Quora - "The movie is forcing the idea already from this point that masculinity and bold attacks are the antithesis to “how it really works.” Meanwhile Leia has this obnoxious “I told you so” moment, she assaults Poe with no backlash, and their ensuing argument is literally “lol men think with their dicks stop thinking with your dick.”... the movie pulls us out of the interesting plot, to give us a propaganda advertisement about the evils of horse racing, capitalism, and parking tickets. Good fucking god. Canto Bight. Canto Bight in general. Canto Bight in specific. I wonder what the writers of Finn and Rey for this movie were told to do, but generally turning the two minority characters into comedic relief mixed with an absolutely forced love-interest mixed with a bizarre moralizing adventure is a recipe for *terrible characters*.Finn faced a lot of the “tsk, tsk! You need to listen to wahmen more” moments that plague the rest of the movie. Rose tends to be what I think the writers intended to be the “neutralizer” of Finn’s blunders... the two characters get arrested for parking in a clearly illegal spot, they have time to talk about animal cruelty but not clear up with the parking official why they should park somewhere else, and Finn gets a clear lesson on why capitalism is bad and how the galaxy needs a glorious revolution, led by the CGI camels that were designed to sell Disney figurines... Then we have the Admiral. She goes by many names. Admiral Evening Gown, Admiral Gender Studies, Admiral Where the Hell Did She Hide that Blaster…But yes. She is a slightly better leader than Leia insofar as we haven’t seen her physically assault her subordinates. She does take time to, rather than telling her subordinates that *THEY DO ACTUALLY HAVE A PLAN, WE AREN’T GOING TO DIE*, instead calmly go on a random speech about hope.Now I don’t know who Hope is, but she shows up a lot in this movie. Never does jack all, but apparently she’s going to be important one day. Meanwhile, rather than telling a Captain that there is a plan, maybe even trusting him because he is one of the most highly respected officers on the ship (and people have actually met him before), she does the logical thing:She tells him to fuck off, it doesn’t matter whether they have a plan, the only plan he needs to worry about is watching the ship drift, run out of fuel, and getting annihilated.
But let’s talk about this plan real quick. This glorious plan that only Holdo and Leia knew about. This foolproof plan.So once the Rebels run out of fuel, the plan is to evacuate the ship, and let it drift into the First Order’s effective firing range. Seeing the ship, the First Order will blow it up without hesitation, call it a day, and leave.They won’t board the ship and take political prisoners, in order to publicly execute or interrogate them about other possible resistance cells (Of which Leia built NONE for some reason), and then quickly realize the ship is empty save for an utterly impractically dressed military officer.Kylo Ren won’t sense his mother is still alive, conveniently on the icey-salt planet this ship had just passed... The First Order won’t notice that the ship should still have fuel for another hour or two and for some reason has ran out already. The First Order won’t be suspicious that the Resistance is deceiving them, that this victory was too easy.And then the Resistance, with no weapons, bomber fleets, or fighters, or fuel, will be stuck on an ice planet, with a base that can be fairly easily detected from orbit, and will be sitting ducks for about a week while the First Order goes about their daily routine of conquering their remaining allies.This is the best case scenario...
Now we are at the climax. Rose’s quotes. Every single memorable quote from Rose is asinine leftist bullshit."

Thomas Cannon's answer to I keep hearing that the new Star Wars movies are filled with SJW things. I honestly don't see it. What am I missing? - Quora - "can I just point out how ironic it is that Star Wars - a franchise where the heroes are rebels against corrupt tyranny - is pushing the message that you should shut up and blindly follow authority?
Rose? She’s presented as the heroic knight of justice who saves the day… by almost getting all of our heroes killed to save her crush. I mean, if Luke hadn’t showed up everyone would be dead… because Rose can’t keep it in her pants. The girl almost gets everyone killed and hands the villains victory on a silver platter because she’s in luurve… wow, Rian. Wow. Rey? She not only cheats her way to power (she literally steals the training from Kylo Ren’s mind - she doesn’t work for any of her power) but is presented as the epitome of the Strong Female Character… by spending the past two films running around and begging every man she comes across, from Han to Luke to Kylo himself, to save the day for her. She has no agency and no skin in the game, doesn’t work for anything she has (her ship, her droid, her lightsaber, her Force powers - they were all handed to her or stolen from those who actually worked for it) and is overreliant on everyone around her. How did I get to the point where I want the man who murdered Han Solo to win?"

John Miles's answer to I keep hearing that the new Star Wars movies are filled with SJW things. I honestly don't see it. What am I missing? - Quora - "Let's compare Rogue One to The Last Jedi.Strong female lead? Check and checkDiverse cast? Check and check.If you look at rogue one you have all the things that people supposedly complained about in TLJ. But there is one huge difference between the two.Rogue one was a very good movie, it was well written and had great dialog, the story made sense and was not about some weird chase and casino adventure."

Star Wars SHOCK: Mark Hamill SLAMS Last Jedi for cut Han scene - ""it shows Luke was putting on a facade in front of Rey and even Chewie, that he was embittered and sort of a broken man". Hamill continued: “And I think the fact that he could let his emotions out when he was by himself would have made an impact on the audience because it allowed them to grieve the loss of Han Solo just the way Luke felt it... “They had time for me to milk that big alien but to show any human emotion? Nah, we don’t have time for that. But again it’s not my call.” Last December a YouTube video called Mark Hamill Hates Star Wars The Last Jedi went viral.The video compilation showed the actor’s press interviews for The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi claiming the footage proves he hates the new movies.One of the most interesting clips to allude to this shows the star in a leather chair, saying: “Remember kids. It’s not important if it’s of high quality, only if it makes money.“So because The Force Awakens made a lot of money, it’s not ‘ergo it’s good’. And oh my god I’ve just realised this is all on film.”"

Chekhov's Gun: 13 Setups That Didn't Have A Payoff in The Last Jedi : StarWars - "TFA Setups
1. TFA sets up there's significance to Luke's light saber - it's literally thrown away showing that it meant nothing the whole time
2. TFA sets up Rey having a significant and cryptic vision - it's not decrypted
3. TFA sets up Kylo Ren having a gang called "Knights of Ren" - possibly referenced, but we still don't know much about them
4. TFA sets up Finn getting injured and going into a coma-like state - it's not used for anything except for a gag in TLJ. Contrast this with Han at the end of ESB and beginning of ROTJ.
5. TFA sets up Kylo going to "complete his training" with Snoke - it's never referred to or shown, making it meaningless
6. TFA sets up victory for the good guys when they blow up the bad guy's base - it doesn't seem to have an affect on the bad guys or good guys which made the victory feel meaningless. Nothing has really changed.
7. TFA sets up the importance of Rey's parentage - they're not important making that question in TFA meaningless
8. TFA sets up two new bad guys, Kylo Ren and Snoke - The former is given an explanation and meaning. Subsequently he is generally accepted as the best part of TLJ because they built off the setup. The latter is given no explanation. Which is really the shared fault of both TFA and TLJ.
TLJ Setups
9. TLJ sets up Luke to teach Rey three lessons - they finish two and the third must be unimportant because it's forgotten about for the rest of the movie.
10. TLJ sets up that there is more to the force or hints that it's going to be redefined in some way when Luke says "the force isn't just about lifting rocks" - Rey literally lifts rocks and our/her understanding of the force doesn't change. --I guess one could say Luke's astro projection shows us how it's changed but that's not really portrayed on screen very clearly as a payoff to that setup.
11. TLJ sets up DJ selling weapons to the good guys and bad guys - which ends up being meaningless information.
12. TLJ sets up Rey not being strong enough to resist the dark side because when she went into the pit w/ mirrors she doesn't resist it. Luke tells her this. - When Kylo tempts her with the dark side she easily resists. Making the supposed struggle undermined. Contrast this from Yoda telling Luke he needs to finish his training before confronting Vader. Luke looses and subsequently returns for training.
13. TLJ sets up Snoke being the only one powerful enough to connect Rey and Kylo via visions - after Snoke dies Rey and Kylo have another vision which makes that setup inconsistent."

How The Last Jedi Alienated Its Audience [Storycraft] - "something happened that changed the way I experienced the story, and then served to amplify every last flaw the movie had to the point where I walked out of the theater actually upset over what I’d seen.That change occurred approximately 31 minutes into the film. And I’m sure everyone knows the scene that I’m talking about.Yes, that’s right. The “Space Leia” scene. I can remember sitting in the theater watching this moment and hearing people around me either express confusion over what happened or laugh at the scene claiming how “stupid” or “ridiculous” it was. My own personal reaction was actually a combination of the two. I found it humorous that such a scene happened the way it happened, but I was also incredibly confused as to why writer/director Rian Johnson presented that scene in the way he did — a way which pulled the audience out of the movie.And from that point on, it felt as though half the audience in the theater stopped enjoying the film. I saw people make more jokes at the screen. More people pull out their phones to play on them instead of paying attention to the film. More people whispering to one another. Speaking for myself, I was so taken out of the experience of the film, that every single last flaw of the movie became so much more pronounced that I couldn’t ignore them and thus, my enjoyment of the movie was completely ruined. Now, this is not to say that everyone felt the way I did about this scene. However, from a storytelling point of view, doing something that effectively alienates half your audience 1/5th of the way through your tale is NOT proper storycraft. And many people who like The Last Jedi and defend it against its detractors will tell you they did not like this scene, even though they’re willing to forgive its existence... The term “Suspension of Disbelief” has been defined as a willingness to suspend one’s critical faculties and believe something surreal.In other words: Audiences are willing to sacrifice realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment... once an audience begins to refuse to suspend their disbelief, they actually start to actively reject the story they are being told. When this happens, audiences begin to scrutinize and criticize the narrative far more than they would if they were suspending their disbelief. They begin to obsess over every flaw and inaccuracy. They begin to nitpick the movie to death. They effectively “check out” from the story and stop enjoying themselves... This can best be described in the context of what is called “The Salesman’s Creed.” This is a concept in business which states the following:
“People love to buy, but they hate being sold to.”...
if you set up story elements that have no pay off, you essentially bog down the narrative with excess baggage, to the point where audiences begin to wonder why they should care about any of the elements within the story they are experiencing. A good example of this is any movie or TV show that JJ Abrams makes that utilizes his “mystery box” concept, the biggest offender of which is the TV show LOST. In that show, the writers set-up numerous mysteries concerning the mystical island the plane crash survivors of the series find themselves on. The only problem is that a great number of the island’s biggest mysteries are never given proper solutions, which served to make audiences turn on the show in its final season. LOST is a great example of a narrative with lots of set-up and no pay off.On the reverse side of that are the narratives that pay off story elements that were never properly set up. This is what is called a “Deus Ex Machina”... It creates logic flaws that audiences can’t ignore and negatively effects the story...
Headcanon Is No Substitute For Proper Storytelling... Violate these principles, and audiences will never forgive you for it, as Rian Johnson is unfortunately discovering."

No, half of The Last Jedi haters were not Russian trolls - "when you break down the numbers and look deeper, the reality is stunningly different: Star Wars does not have a Russian troll problem and the fan backlash is far more complex than the reports might have you believe... Bay's paper stated that "50.9% of those tweeting negatively" about The Last Jedi were likely to be politically motivated or not even human. This was the major takeaway for a panoply of media outlets that then stated most of the negative sentiment directed at The Last Jedi came from Russian trolls. But that is not the truth -- or at least, it distorts the truth... Of the 967 tweets analyzed, 206 expressed "a negative sentiment" toward the film and its director.Of the 206 negative comments, 61 were real people reported to have a political agenda, 11 were bots and only 33 appeared to be trolls. Of those 33, just 16 appeared to possess characteristics consistent with Russian troll accounts. In reality, less than one in 10 tweets were from Russian trolls -- nowhere near the 50 percent being widely reported. There are a few issues here. The first is that Bay's collection method relies only on tweets directed at Rian Johnson. Other accounts related to the film, such as that of Luke Skywalker -- @HamillHimself -- who has almost triple the amount of followers and assumedly a far greater reach than Johnson, were not analyzed. This significantly limits the power of the analysis.Notably, the research did in fact catch the eye of The Last Jedi director himself, causing him to remark "what the top-line describes is consistent with my experience online." Of course, it would be consistent with his experience online, because the research paper directly used Johnson's tweets as the source of their data. It quite literally analyzed his experience online... "The suspected Russian trolls are so few that it is basically the normal amount of Russian trolls you would expect to be present in a high-profile online debate."... The truth is simple: The majority of people who read about Bay's research will never go and read the study from top-to-bottom.The information will be presented to them and ingested through second-hand osmosis. Via a tweet, via outlets trying to capture a snapshot of the research that most appeals to their audience. There's no hard analysis of the methods, no interrogation of the dataset. And that approach only serves to inflame the discourse even more.Ultimately, it is ironic that in an era when fake news and misinformation are so rife, Bay's study found widespread appeal via a media-driven narrative that was far, far away from the truth."

[Rebuttal] Is Luke Skywalker A Christ Figure? Debunking The Cult Of The Last Jedi - "[Young] made the argument defending the changes writer/director Rian Johnson made to the character of Luke Skywalker by comparing The Last Jedi to the film The Last Temptation of Christ... my problems with The Last Jedi stem from my background as a writer who has studied narrative theory for years and who writes professionally. This isn’t to say I am a better writer than Mr. Johnson, just that I have enough training to spot bad writing when I see it. In my experience, “Bad Writing” encompasses many facets of a story’s narrative. It can range from flaws in the plot all the way down to poor dialogue. But in that spectrum is the concept of character development, or the process by which an audience experiences a character’s growth... To compare Johnson to Scorsese is like comparing Scott Adams to Leonardo Da Vinci. They are both artists, but nowhere near the same caliber in terms of skill and ability... To equate Rian Johnson as a writer AND philosopher on the level of Kazantzakis is yet another terrible categorization of Johnson’s talents. Firstly, Mr. Johnson is not a skilled writer — at least not on the level of winning a Nobel Prize for his efforts (or even an Oscar for that matter). Secondly, his philosophy is surface-level progressivism at best, nowhere near the deep and studied philosophies that Kazantzakis explored... The Last Jedi took Star Wars and got rid of everything fans loved about Star Wars to make something new which resembled Star Wars but lacked the core elements which made fans fall in love with it in the first place.You could also say that this is exactly what Kazantzakis did with the Christian faith, oddly enough. But the difference here is that Kazantzakis’s goal was to deepen the human understanding of God by looking at Christ as a man, whereas Johnson’s goal was to dismiss all the stories which came before The Last Jedi and move Star Wars in an entirely different direction. Rian Johnson’s message was “kill the past,” whereas Kazantzakis’s message was “embrace humanity and all its flaws in order to do good.”... Rian Johnson, for whatever reason, never allows Luke to “pass the torch” to Rey, so the audience is left without sufficient closure on Luke and without sufficient investment in Rey as the new main hero. Rian Johnson’s failure to “pass the hero torch” means that there will always be a disconnect between Rey as the saga’s main hero and a large portion of the fans who are still connected to Luke. And this is why so many fans are so focused on his lack of a satisfying character arc in The Last Jedi — because to them, Luke is still the main character, all due to this failure in writing on Johnson’s part... when it comes to Kylo Ren, Luke is merely a distraction rather than a path to redemption and love. The Luke of The Last Jedi essentially abandons his nephew to evil. He makes no attempt to redeem him, to forgive him, or to show him a better way. Luke makes no attempt to heal Kylo Ren’s pain and show him the love and mercy he gave to Darth Vader. Instead, he tells Kylo flat-out that he is beyond saving and leaves with a flippant “See you around, kid.” No advice to help him. No words of regret or apology. No indication of hope.That is a fundamental assassination of Luke Skywalker’s character. It goes against everything Luke was meant to represent in the original films. It goes against the hero mythos.And it certainly goes against the “Christ Figure” trope."

How The Last Jedi Destroyed The Continuity Of Star Wars [Storycraft] - "the “Holdo Maneuver” of accelerating a starship to lightspeed to be used as a weapon violates the internal consistency of all the Star Wars movies, creating such a massive self-contradiction that it retroactively creates errors in plot-logic in every previously made film in the franchise... Once the Resistance escaped to the salt planet of Crait, why didn’t Kylo Ren order one of the damaged Star Destroyers to be accelerated to lightspeed directly at the Resistance base, creating a massive crater that would have destroyed the base and everyone in it?... Headcanon tells us that it’s possible this tactic of weaponized light speed might not have been known throughout all the previous Star Wars movies, but there is a canonical mention of how hyperspace operates in A New Hope... The whole notion of a “retcon” is a technique designed to fix a mistake in the narrative that came before it. The very need for such a thing illustrates that very little forethought or planning went into the crafting of The Last Jedi’s story. And should this story element NOT be addressed, all future and past Star Wars films, TV shows, books, and comic books will suffer as a result."
I've seen people justifying the Holdo maneuver with headcanon, or reference to the novelisation. But if it's not explained within the movies, that clearly is a flaw