[rant]

QuickTidal, on 26 June 2018 - 01:36 PM, said:

And Worry, "toxic fandom" is a strain of the same PR game. Highlighting the bad eggs and blowing them out of proportion to encompass more of fandom than they actually do. This is a proven studio tactic in fact. When the trailer for Ghostbusters 2016 came out, it was massively down voted and the various complaints about it ranged from the "toxic" subset to much more level dislike to complex takedowns...and Sony (who ONLY allowed their YouTube page to host the trailer, clever that) who knew they might have a bad film on their hands and a bad response by their potential audience...DELETED any and all negative comments that were in any ways reasonable, and only left up the positive comments and (and here is the insidious part) the sexist and racist ones. So that they could point at that and go "See! It's just racist sexist's who don't want this movie to exist!"....and they ran with that narrative directly to the mainstream media. who bought it hook, line, and sinker...and it wasn't till a few days later that it YouTubers showed up with the receipts of what really occurred. Screenshots of the YT Sony trailer page filled with much more reasoned negative comments that had been deleted over the course of two days...because they didn't play to the narrative Sony's PR department was running.

Do I think that a subset of SW fans are of the toxic variety? ABSOLUTELY. Every fandom has them. Do I think that the majority of Star wars fans who discuss SW online and elsewhere are of that variety? No, I don't. Even a little bit. Do I think that such a "toxic" portion of the fanbase is being taken into account by Hollywood heavy hitters who have been offered the job os Star Wars? No. I think that Star Wars was ALREADY a daunting franchise to "command" BEFORE the Disney buyout....and after 4 movies of behind the scenes strife and a riven fanbase...it's got to be even more daunting for anyone to take on.

Sorry QT, but unless you're actively retconning the negative (re: racist as sin) reactions to Finn being a black stormtrooper BEFORE TFA came out I'm not buying this argument. Sure, it is 100% a PR move to attribute all the hate for the new films to a "toxic fandom" but that in no way means the toxic fandom doesn't exist. Several actresses have been driven off of their social media due to said "vocal minority". It wouldn't be hard for people to generate some screen caps of this "vocal minority" bullying everyone and everything in their path who thinks Star Wars doesn't need to have " I have a bad feeling about this" uttered somewhere within the 3 hour runtime of the movie (not to mention the green milk, Rey daring to be good at things, Kelly Marie Tran daring to be in TLJ, etc. etc. etc.).

I mean sure, Disney has the power and resources to astroturf that fake hatred I guess...but lol. What is the more likely scenario? The gamergate/ r/trump / anti-SJWs/ red-pillers crowd got roused up once again by those damn SJW bastards at Disney for...something?.....or Disney is running a protracted and in-depth astroturfing campaign to suggest that the difference between public and critic scores on rotten tomatoes for a movie that made them 1.3 BN (BILLION....just in Box office) is the result of a toxic fanbase that "doesn't actually exist"? Disney has probably already made back the ~4BN they spent on SW. They could just stop making SW altogether (re: the anthologies) and it would have been a solid business decision. Sure, they are definitely waging a PR war (as well as trying to right the ship creatively as has been mentioned several times here) to protect future profits...but I strongly doubt they are performing the negative astroturfing that would have to exist to support your claim that it is only a "vocal minority" (Maybe I'm wrong! Who knows).

The more I think about the TFA vs TLJ, the more it galls me the amount of accolades Abrams got for repackaging an already existing movie (ironically the only substantive change imo being a female protaganist who is good at things being the only thing the fanbase strongly criticized) in slightly newer packaging, while Johnson got pilloried by the same fanbase for actually trying (and admittedly failing in some cases!) new things. Or that RO gets so much praise for devoting 2 hours a single throw-away line from ANH. Next 2+ hour movie: Many bothans dying to get the DS2 plans! Movie after that: Ackbar realizing more things are traps! After that: showing how Han did the kessel run in 12 parsecs (OH WAIT).

And that is what I think it comes down to. Originality is punished in the SW fandom.
I agree with you: a lot of the fans aren't toxic in the racist/sexist hate-mongering way. But they have a single vision of what Star Wars is (re: OT), and any deviation from that is blasphemy (i.e: I'm sure some complaints regarding Finn the black stormtrooper were that the original clone troopers were all clones of a maori actor and therefore 'white?'.....completely disregarding the fact that TFA is what...~60 years from the destruction of the cloning facilities? Even taking those complaints at face & cannon value, non-SW people are going to just see the obvious connotation of those complaints: racism). The problem is there are enough of the real racist/ sexist complaints that any complaint derived from cannonicity issues or whatever is going to be drowned out by the more alarming message.

(On a side note, remember when all the complaints arose that Rue was cast as a black girl in the hunger games film despite being explicitly described as a black girl in the books? Maybe it isn't that there is a toxic racist fandom........but rather a toxic racist public that takes on these causes whenever they feel threatened..........by little black girls........who whistle, hide in a trees, and get killed by white dudes..............in a work of fiction......of course.......).

Regarding your championing of Filioni..........I support that (I think we agree KK handled this all poorly. Especially [imo] giving mystery box macgee JJ abrams TFA)............so long as you can promise me that he wasn't the creative force behind " the ones" as their creation & development as personifications of The Force is truthfully the dumbest thing to come out of this intellectual property (imo of course) ever. And I've read every EU book up to Apocalypse ( I was admittedly pretty upset with Disney dumping the EU. More so now that they aren't just cribbing the good stories...but that's another conversation lol)....so I've seen some pretty dumb stuff lol!

For me, I just want to see ORIGINAL stories in the SW universe. Not prequels, not extrapolations of those throw-away lines. New stories. KOTOR did it, and we got Revan. Zahn did it and we got Thrawn, Mara, etc. etc.

[Coco with marshmallows]

rant, on 28 June 2018 - 06:55 PM, said:

for a movie that made them 1.3 BN (BILLION....just in Box office) is the result of a toxic fanbase that "doesn't actually exist"? Disney has probably already made back the ~4BN they spent on SW. They could just stop making SW altogether (re: the anthologies) and it would have been a solid business decision.

-SNIPPED- i largely agree with what you are writing, but just want to point out that merely making your money back is a TERRIBLE business decision, conflating turnover with profit doubles it.

Realistically Disney would be wanting profits (PROFIT, not turnover) directly attributable to Star Wars of AT LEAST 5%p.a., circa $200m, and probably nearer 10% ($400m) for their outlay to be considered a worthwhile investment.

This goes even more so for movies where it's largely agreed that to hit a profit it's required to make back double initial cost minimum before it's considered beginning to be profitable.

Just a little interjection, please feel free to continue your discussion.

[worry]

I have an interjection too, sorry, I'll make it quick, but also it's more of a question I've been wondering about than a comment, thought maybe you guys might know the answer:

What exactly is Star Wars?

[rant]

Coco with marshmallows, on 28 June 2018 - 08:34 PM, said:

rant, on 28 June 2018 - 06:55 PM, said:

for a movie that made them 1.3 BN (BILLION....just in Box office) is the result of a toxic fanbase that "doesn't actually exist"? Disney has probably already made back the ~4BN they spent on SW. They could just stop making SW altogether (re: the anthologies) and it would have been a solid business decision.

-SNIPPED- i largely agree with what you are writing, but just want to point out that merely making your money back is a TERRIBLE business decision, conflating turnover with profit doubles it.

Realistically Disney would be wanting profits (PROFIT, not turnover) directly attributable to Star Wars of AT LEAST 5%p.a., circa $200m, and probably nearer 10% ($400m) for their outlay to be considered a worthwhile investment.

This goes even more so for movies where it's largely agreed that to hit a profit it's required to make back double initial cost minimum before it's considered beginning to be profitable.

Just a little interjection, please feel free to continue your discussion.

Lol yea youre right of course! I wasn't entirely clear--basically I was just thinking that if Disney was so concerned about the rotten tomato differential that they were choosing to the ignore the fact that the movie with that awful audience score still generated 1.5 bn in revenue (just from the box office of a single movie), and that they were willing to essentially inflate world wide racial and social tension (via a negative astroturfing)..another valid course of action (at least imo) would be to reject the sunk cost fallacy, stop throwing money at the problem (as they have clearly decided to do with the anthology films) and just let the property sit dormant for 25 years or something and then take another swing at it when half of us die hard nerds have died off.

Important caveat: I'm a science-human not a business-human, so I'm 90% talking out my ass at this point haha.

[rant]

Luv2B_Sassy, on 28 June 2018 - 08:50 PM, said:

I have an interjection too, sorry, I'll make it quick, but also it's more of a question I've been wondering about than a comment, thought maybe you guys might know the answer:

What exactly is Star Wars?

#myStarWars? See below list:

1) Blaster sounds1.5) Confusing laser in space sounds
2) Lightsaber sounds
3) " I've got a bad feeling about this"
4) Gigantic space stations/ weapons of mass destruction being blown up, but only after they've successfully committed some mass murder
5) The millenium falcon, xwings, tie fighters/ zero to little technological progression in about 15k years
6) Absolutely zero moral/ethical ambiguity7) Opening crawl with some blatant exposition8) C3P0 telling people the odds like a frigging idiot9) Everyone being everyone elses relation, and still kissing.

In actuality that is a super hard question to answer. It actually is at least part the aesthetics for me. Beyond that, I'd have to give it a serious think

[worry]

Man I love this stuff.
https://twitter.com/...725736161763328

This post has been edited by Luv2B_Sassy: 02 July 2018 - 11:10 PM

[Slow Ben]

Stunt choreorgrapher: "Does anyone have Kylo's choreorgrophy for the Luke fight? ....Anyone? .....Anyone?..."

Random guy: Just use the same one from Rey's practicing, no one will ever notice".

Stunt choreorgrapher: ".......genius...."

This post has been edited by Slow Ben: 02 July 2018 - 11:31 PM

[worry]

(But really it's a beautiful and lovingly crafted movie from start to finish, warts and all).

[QuickTidal]

rant, on 28 June 2018 - 06:55 PM, said:

Sorry QT, but unless you're actively retconning the negative (re: racist as sin) reactions to Finn being a black stormtrooper BEFORE TFA came out I'm not buying this argument.

As small a vocal set of fandom as any other major complaint that got into the news. I think MOST normal people were fine with Finn. Unless you have some metric that quantifies the Finn backlash as anything more than vocal minority? I don't think any one example, be it the backlash against Finn casting, KMT's casting/character backlash, are indicative of the majority of film goers, and so don't figure into a wider perspective beyond "selling clicks" for big headlines about such trollery.

rant, on 28 June 2018 - 06:55 PM, said:

Sure, it is 100% a PR move to attribute all the hate for the new films to a "toxic fandom" but that in no way means the toxic fandom doesn't exist.

I never said it didn't. I said it's not nearly as big as the press gives it credence, and fuelling it into a PR move by studios that KNOW papers want to sell clicks, is a dick move. Don't we all know to ignore trolls at this point? Nope. Troll sell clicks. Apparently.

rant, on 28 June 2018 - 06:55 PM, said:

Several actresses have been driven off of their social media due to said "vocal minority". It wouldn't be hard for people to generate some screen caps of this "vocal minority" bullying everyone and everything in their path who thinks Star Wars doesn't need to have " I have a bad feeling about this" uttered somewhere within the 3 hour runtime of the movie (not to mention the green milk, Rey daring to be good at things, Kelly Marie Tran daring to be in TLJ, etc. etc. etc.).

Yep, this has happened. But generous estimates would put the audience of the SW movies somewhere in the 65 million range globally. All it would take is for a few hundred trolls to come at an actor/actress to overwhelm someone off social media. But they are nowhere NEAR any kind of majority example. Nowhere near.

rant, on 28 June 2018 - 06:55 PM, said:

I mean sure, Disney has the power and resources to astroturf that fake hatred I guess...but lol. What is the more likely scenario? The gamergate/ r/trump / anti-SJWs/ red-pillers crowd got roused up once again by those damn SJW bastards at Disney for...something?.....or Disney is running a protracted and in-depth astroturfing campaign to suggest that the difference between public and critic scores on rotten tomatoes for a movie that made them 1.3 BN (BILLION....just in Box office) is the result of a toxic fanbase that "doesn't actually exist"? Disney has probably already made back the ~4BN they spent on SW. They could just stop making SW altogether (re: the anthologies) and it would have been a solid business decision. Sure, they are definitely waging a PR war (as well as trying to right the ship creatively as has been mentioned several times here) to protect future profits...but I strongly doubt they are performing the negative astroturfing that would have to exist to support your claim that it is only a "vocal minority" (Maybe I'm wrong! Who knows).

I referenced someone who used to work in PR and worked directly with Disney and has stated flat out that this is a PR dream if they can sell it, and she felt that they were amping it up. The problem is that the media SPECIFICALLY asks about the "toxicity" and Rian, JJ, and others have commented on it directly. RJ himself has spent the last 6 months only REALLY responding to trolls...all of this signal boosts that minority and works in Disney's favour. Is this some insidious campaign by Disney to shift the blame to a smaller subset? No. Are they ALLOWING it and fuelling the fire to shift it with the signal boosting the media is doing? Yup. How could they do anything but? It's only "good" for them to do it...but the problem is that SW fanbase is WAY too big and it's not quite flying anymore, and the tide is shifting. They've tried any number of "reasons" why Solo failed and it took only a few weeks for them to finally ACCEPT that a backlash to TLJ exists. 6 months that took.

rant, on 28 June 2018 - 06:55 PM, said:

The more I think about the TFA vs TLJ, the more it galls me the amount of accolades Abrams got for repackaging an already existing movie (ironically the only substantive change imo being a female protaganist who is good at things being the only thing the fanbase strongly criticized) in slightly newer packaging, while Johnson got pilloried by the same fanbase for actually trying (and admittedly failing in some cases!) new things.

Here is my problem with that statement. I totally agree about JJ. But then I also get why he did that, he was winning back a wayward subset of the fanbase after the prequels. And it worked. But yes, it was all pretty derivative. The problem with the second part of your statement is RJ doing "new things". Nothing he did was new. The film mingles elements of TESB and ROTJ and retells them as one movie....it was SO bad in fact that the script/studio required a MAJOR re-write in Jan 2016. Why? The Crait sequence...you know the one at the end of the film that REALLY resembles Hoth? Was originally at the beginning of the film, just like Hoth. The powers that be were like, um....you can't do that man, it's too close. The throne room scene steals ACTUAL lines of dialogue from ROTJ. A good portion of TESB is the Falcon and the good guys on the run from pursuing Imperial feet, same true of TLJ. TESB includes a portion on a new planet that includes betrayal by the person they were going to for help....so does TLJ. There is a training sequence between an old Jedi master and a young inexperienced one in TESB where the young one goes off AGAINST the advice of the old master. Same in TLJ. There are more. But RJ basically mashed TESB and ROTJ plot lines up and retold them. None of that was new. He may have added some subversion to those re-told aspects, and some of the reasoning behind character decisions might be mildly off...but it's as much of a rehash as JJ's film, if not worse. And for me at least JJ's film was WRITTEN competently. RJ's script is continuously at odds with itself from scene to scene.

rant, on 28 June 2018 - 06:55 PM, said:

Or that RO gets so much praise for devoting 2 hours a single throw-away line from ANH.

Actually, the plot of RO is not from any "line" in ANH. It's based off the opening crawl. They essentially live-actioned the crawl story, and I see nothing wrong with that myself. And that movie features the best space battle in the entire saga to this point. It had believable characters, with real motivations. You're thinking about the "many Bothan's" line from ROTJ Death Star 2. It's totally okay that RO didn't do anything for you, but in a world where a lot of the material has been kind of cribbing off itself, a Guns of the Navarone type of "all or nothing" story hadn't been done before, and I thought it was pulled off admirably, and made for an interesting and unique SW film.

rant, on 28 June 2018 - 06:55 PM, said:

And that is what I think it comes down to. Originality is punished in the SW fandom.

Is it? I don't think that's the case at all. I think if that was the case, then TCW and Rebels TV shows would have been ostracized instead of widely praised and lauded by that fanbase. Those two shows did all kinds of original things that fans loved. No, it's about planning and execution in my eyes. Rebels especially featured a whole new cast of unknowns who are now quite beloved. And TCW introduced one of the most popular characters in the Saga (Ahsoka Tano). Originality is fine, but it needs to be done right.

rant, on 28 June 2018 - 06:55 PM, said:

I agree with you: a lot of the fans aren't toxic in the racist/sexist hate-mongering way. But they have a single vision of what Star Wars is (re: OT), and any deviation from that is blasphemy (i.e: I'm sure some complaints regarding Finn the black stormtrooper were that the original clone troopers were all clones of a maori actor and therefore 'white?'.....completely disregarding the fact that TFA is what...~60 years from the destruction of the cloning facilities?

I don't see why anyone would assume that First Order Stormtroopers would be clones. That's nonsense, when it's clearly established that even Imperial Stormtroopers were enlisted men, and not Clones anymore. So anyone who even complains about that doesn't know what they are talking about to begin with.

rant, on 28 June 2018 - 06:55 PM, said:

(On a side note, remember when all the complaints arose that Rue was cast as a black girl in the hunger games film despite being explicitly described as a black girl in the books? Maybe it isn't that there is a toxic racist fandom........but rather a toxic racist public that takes on these causes whenever they feel threatened..........by little black girls........who whistle, hide in a trees, and get killed by white dudes..............in a work of fiction......of course.......).

I think anyone who thought that wasn't reading very hard when they consumed the book, it was pretty obviously described that she was black....but then it was a YA book, so the majority of those complaints would have come from a small set of YA readers who were not very discerning. Most people were fine with Rue. Again, the backlash was focused on, but it was not a majority AFAIK. Sidebar: The actress who played Rue actually weathered that social media onslaught of trolls and became a pretty powerful voice for diversity.

rant, on 28 June 2018 - 06:55 PM, said:

Regarding your championing of Filioni..........I support that (I think we agree KK handled this all poorly. Especially [imo] giving mystery box macgee JJ abrams TFA)............so long as you can promise me that he wasn't the creative force behind " the ones" as their creation & development as personifications of The Force is truthfully the dumbest thing to come out of this intellectual property (imo of course) ever. And I've read every EU book up to Apocalypse ( I was admittedly pretty upset with Disney dumping the EU. More so now that they aren't just cribbing the good stories...but that's another conversation lol)....so I've seen some pretty dumb stuff lol!

For me, I just want to see ORIGINAL stories in the SW universe. Not prequels, not extrapolations of those throw-away lines. New stories. KOTOR did it, and we got Revan. Zahn did it and we got Thrawn, Mara, etc. etc.

We agree!

Yeah, I can see most of what you are saying, but I always feel like we are giving the trolls way more credit than they deserve by even paying attention to them. RJ should not "clap back" at trolls the way he has been for six months. He should be ignoring them.

And studios should not allow the narrative to take precedence when the critiques are more widely varied. It took six months for the narrative to finally admit that a lot of people were either "meh" on TLJ or hated it (for legit reasons). They spent that time prior to that allowing the fanning of the flames, including creators like JJ and RJ and Wendig and some others directly confronting trolls and then claiming that they are the ONLY ones who don't like the ST so far...Wendig is particularly bad at this in fact. He famously tweeted that "the only people who don't like TLJ, are six white boys in their mother's basements"....

[QuickTidal]

Luv2B_Sassy, on 02 July 2018 - 11:47 PM, said:

(But really it's a beautiful and lovingly crafted movie from start to finish, warts and all).

Puts on Film Nerd glasses:

The problem with the above thing...it's not foreshadowing at all. The Kylo VS Luke fight was added LATE in the game when RJ was told that he needed an "ending" to the Crait Sequence in its new position in the film at the end. Originally the Crait sequence was at the beginning, exactly like Hoth (which was why the studio demanded RJ move it), and did NOT include a Kylo VS Luke fight (originally Luke and Kylo never fought at all). The Rey saber sequence was one of the first to be shot (they only had a few weeks to film on the island in Ireland). When the pickup needed to occur for the Kylo VS Luke fight, it was Sword master C.C. Smiff who choreographed the Rey sequence who choreographed it as well, and it was HE that chose to mimic the styles between the two fights. Said sword master is literal Hollywood royalty in the genre with a filmography to back it up (literally any sword choreography in the last 20 years of film is him). RJ didn't WANT Luke and Kylo to fight at all. It was never his intent to do that. But the Crait sequence needed a distraction/ending and Rey was busy with the Falcon. It was the studio and Smiff who organized the thing.

So sure, let's call it a beautiful symmetry. But let's attribute that to anyone but Rian Johnson please.

And a lovingly crafted movie would not contradict itself at every given opportunity, and would not crib things from the other two OT movies and willy nilly mash them together and call it "new".

[Cause]

How do you people know these things

[QuickTidal]

Cause, on 03 July 2018 - 03:21 PM, said:

How do you people know these things

It comes from a place of deep love needing to know everything about productions.

[Tiste Simeon]

QuickTidal, on 03 July 2018 - 03:34 PM, said:

Cause, on 03 July 2018 - 03:21 PM, said:

How do you people know these things

It comes from a place of deep love needing to know everything about productions. be right no matter what cos winning arguments on the internet is so important, gosh dang it!

[QuickTidal]

Tiste Simeon, on 03 July 2018 - 04:01 PM, said:

QuickTidal, on 03 July 2018 - 03:34 PM, said:

Cause, on 03 July 2018 - 03:21 PM, said:

How do you people know these things

It comes from a place of deep love needing to know everything about productions. be right no matter what cos winning arguments on the internet is so important, gosh dang it!

I appreciate that perspective on me. LOL!

It's not my intent mind you, I'm just overall passionate about SW in general so it comes out in these overly verbose diatribes.

I'll dial it back. Sorry all.

[worry]

Didn't have time to read any of the above yet, I was busy attributing every good thing about TLJ, the strongest entry in the Star Wars canon in decades, to its director Rian Johnson. I will try to make time to read those posts within the next week though. I should have some time after the community college class I'm teaching (Brick: A Study in Style and Substance) lets out for the summer.

[rant]

Public disclaimer: I'm breaking up QT's post thematically to better address issues. Any inferences derived from this and not QTs original post are therefore more likey to be biased by my slicing and dicing.

QuickTidal, on 03 July 2018 - 02:02 PM, said:

As small a vocal set of fandom as any other major complaint that got into the news. I think MOST normal people were fine with Finn. Unless you have some metric that quantifies the Finn backlash as anything more than vocal minority? I don't think any one example, be it the backlash against Finn casting, KMT's casting/character backlash, are indicative of the majority of film goers, and so don't figure into a wider perspective beyond "selling clicks" for big headlines about such trollery.

QuickTidal, on 03 July 2018 - 02:02 PM, said:

I think anyone who thought that wasn't reading very hard when they consumed the book, it was pretty obviously described that she was black....but then it was a YA book, so the majority of those complaints would have come from a small set of YA readers who were not very discerning. Most people were fine with Rue. Again, the backlash was focused on, but it was not a majority AFAIK. Sidebar: The actress who played Rue actually weathered that social media onslaught of trolls and became a pretty powerful voice for diversity.

QuickTidal, on 03 July 2018 - 02:02 PM, said:

I never said it didn't. I said it's not nearly as big as the press gives it credence, and fuelling it into a PR move by studios that KNOW papers want to sell clicks, is a dick move. Don't we all know to ignore trolls at this point? Nope. Troll sell clicks. Apparently.

QuickTidal, on 03 July 2018 - 02:02 PM, said:

Yep, this has happened. But generous estimates would put the audience of the SW movies somewhere in the 65 million range globally. All it would take is for a few hundred trolls to come at an actor/actress to overwhelm someone off social media. But they are nowhere NEAR any kind of majority example. Nowhere near.

Okay, so I'm going to try and parse this--it may not succeed, it is still tenuous in my brain, so bear with me.
These are all variations on a "small but vocal minority" argument. Which was the main thing I took issue with previously.

I'm happy to concede to you that you are vindicated; public opinion now officially dictates TLJ was a 'bad' film (my opinion still hasn't changed: i liked it), you did it!! (remember when you were complaining about being persecuted for being among the minority who didn't like the film lol? Despite the Rotten tomatoes score already being in your favor? I sure do!) Anyways, me being a snarky bitch aside, I say that because I suspect there are two underlying arguments being conflated here. 1) If TLJ was 'good' or 'bad' ( FYI I don't really care about good or bad, just enjoyed or not enjoyed), and 2) the existence of a fanbase (toxic or negative other words).....that can be pretty seriously shitty.

Onwards!

Im willing to concede that there are 65 million SW fans in the world (I think there should be at least 3.5BN!). I am not willing to concede that those 65 million people constitute a SW fandom (toxic or otherwise). So you're use of 65 million as the denominator (sorry, population health researcher here lol) for our rate of toxic fans (toxic posters etc/ entire fandom) is disingenuous at best, manipulative at worst. I'll do some research in literature (as I am sure someone has looked at this), but I am willing to bet that active fans (which I am operationally defining as people who go online to talk about SW ...or any fandom ) are a SMALL minority. R/ StarWars is ~900k. Lets use THAT as the fandom denominator. MUCH smaller (like 1.5% of your 65 million, and I am willing to bet there are ordinal degrees of participation within r/starwars that we could narrow it down further to be more accurate...but I'll be generous and leave it at 900k). So, 300 toxic fans (you say 'a few hundred trolls'...I'll be generous to myself and inflate that to 300 LOL)/ the 900k people that make up the fandom). So that's 30 toxic fans/100k fans (other epi folks, I know, I'm cheating a bit, just go with it for rhetoric sake).

30/100k. There are cancers with smaller prevalence.
Just because ovarian cancer *only* affects 30/100k people (" A vocal minority") doesn't mean it isn't a societal issue that should be acknowledged, addressed, and not hand waved away with some #NotAllStarWarsFans BS (BTW I am using a cancer metaphor seriously and deliberately). There is a problem in the fandom. It may not (and most certainly isn't) the entire fandom. But it is a problem. Your trying to handwave it away is akin to....I dunno....an ostrich sticking its head in the sand I guess.

Here's a compromise I implied in my previous post, but will make explicit here. I think there is a racist/sexist/jerkist public that exists in the world; it is certainly within the realm of possibility that these jerks co-opt Star Wars to prove their points.....and they are mistaken for the SW fandom. Regardless......there are people who watch star wars, then treat people associated with star wars like trash...and so IMO that makes the fandom (partially) toxic.

As a final aside to address what I suspect will be a future rejoinder: the existence of other toxic fanbases in no way invalidates the fact that SW has a toxic fanbase. Just because other fandoms have toxic minorities doesn't mean we shouldn't address ours.

QuickTidal, on 03 July 2018 - 02:02 PM, said:

I don't see why anyone would assume that First Order Stormtroopers would be clones. That's nonsense, when it's clearly established that even Imperial Stormtroopers were enlisted men, and not Clones anymore. So anyone who even complains about that doesn't know what they are talking about to begin with.

That happened lol. It literally happened, I read multiple posts about it. Because racists didn't like that SW would have another black person, and so that was the weak argument they grabbed for to not look racist.

QuickTidal, on 03 July 2018 - 02:02 PM, said:

Here is my problem with that statement. I totally agree about JJ. But then I also get why he did that, he was winning back a wayward subset of the fanbase after the prequels. And it worked. But yes, it was all pretty derivative. The problem with the second part of your statement is RJ doing "new things". Nothing he did was new. The film mingles elements of TESB and ROTJ and retells them as one movie....it was SO bad in fact that the script/studio required a MAJOR re-write in Jan 2016. Why? The Crait sequence...you know the one at the end of the film that REALLY resembles Hoth? Was originally at the beginning of the film, just like Hoth. The powers that be were like, um....you can't do that man, it's too close. The throne room scene steals ACTUAL lines of dialogue from ROTJ. A good portion of TESB is the Falcon and the good guys on the run from pursuing Imperial feet, same true of TLJ. TESB includes a portion on a new planet that includes betrayal by the person they were going to for help....so does TLJ. There is a training sequence between an old Jedi master and a young inexperienced one in TESB where the young one goes off AGAINST the advice of the old master. Same in TLJ. There are more. But RJ basically mashed TESB and ROTJ plot lines up and retold them. None of that was new. He may have added some subversion to those re-told aspects, and some of the reasoning behind character decisions might be mildly off...but it's as much of a rehash as JJ's film, if not worse. And for me at least JJ's film was WRITTEN competently. RJ's script is continuously at odds with itself from scene to scene.

I understand why he did it. And I enjoyed the film! I just don't think TFA should be lauded as this exceptional film, particularly in comparison to TLJ (neither are exceptional). Sure TFA was a great film......so is ANH lol.
But you're right. The criticism I was citing RE: TLJ was in response to alot of my fan friends complaining essentially #notmyLuke . Because they wanted to see the Luke they knew from ROTJ/EU: superpowered Goku version Luke, failure not acceptable. Or they complained that noone said " I've got a bad feeling about this". I'll be honest: the decision to take Luke in that direction is my favorite thing about TLJ (plus the entire duel on Crait).

Now a question for you: If those changes you cite hadn't been made, or were less obvious....would you have preferred that film? I'm willing to bet yes. The closer it was to a beat for beat ESB, the better.
Maybe they should just recast the OT every 5 years and do the original trilogy over again, akin to how theatre treats Shakespeare (I said this sarcastically....but truthfully I'd be happy with this haha).

QuickTidal, on 03 July 2018 - 02:02 PM, said:

I referenced someone who used to work in PR and worked directly with Disney and has stated flat out that this is a PR dream if they can sell it, and she felt that they were amping it up. The problem is that the media SPECIFICALLY asks about the "toxicity" and Rian, JJ, and others have commented on it directly. RJ himself has spent the last 6 months only REALLY responding to trolls...all of this signal boosts that minority and works in Disney's favour. Is this some insidious campaign by Disney to shift the blame to a smaller subset? No. Are they ALLOWING it and fuelling the fire to shift it with the signal boosting the media is doing? Yup. How could they do anything but? It's only "good" for them to do it...but the problem is that SW fanbase is WAY too big and it's not quite flying anymore, and the tide is shifting. They've tried any number of "reasons" why Solo failed and it took only a few weeks for them to finally ACCEPT that a backlash to TLJ exists. 6 months that took.

Okay so to be clear. Is Disney astroturfing fake twitter/ social media racists, or are they "allowing" these racists to publicly occupy their IP (lets not get into the idea of any person or org "allowing" or not allowing anonymous online speech)? I see those as VERY distinct things. Especially when your argument rests on the fact that there is a " vocal minority" and strongly implied that Disney was actually CREATING that vocal minority via the astroturfing I inferred from your previous post.

I actually agree with you. Disney is taking advantage of this. But I think you are using that fact to downplay the fact that there are a lot of shitty people in the fandom (again, yes, there are a lot of shitty people everywhere....that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to address our fandoms shortcomings. Saying its all disneys fault doesnt let us do that.)

Also, this may be straw-manning a bit, but your argument partially reads as: because journalists ask about a toxic fandom, and all the creatives answer those questions....ipso facto Disney conspiracy to make SW fans look racist. As before, I don't deny this is within the realm of possibility.... but if the other option is: people can be racist.....I know which way I'm leaning. Occams razor ya ken.

Should the media ask about RJ's haircut? Or the shoes Daisey Ridley was wearing that day.......OR should they write about this really interesting and topical phenomenon where-in people are actively battling for the future of the zeitgeist (at least in SW fandom)?

QuickTidal, on 03 July 2018 - 02:02 PM, said:

Actually, the plot of RO is not from any "line" in ANH. It's based off the opening crawl. They essentially live-actioned the crawl story, and I see nothing wrong with that myself. And that movie features the best space battle in the entire saga to this point. It had believable characters, with real motivations. You're thinking about the "many Bothan's" line from ROTJ Death Star 2. It's totally okay that RO didn't do anything for you, but in a world where a lot of the material has been kind of cribbing off itself, a Guns of the Navarone type of "all or nothing" story hadn't been done before, and I thought it was pulled off admirably, and made for an interesting and unique SW film.

LOL come on. That is a degree of hair splitting I don't think I've ever really encountered before. Especially since I very clearly mention the bothan line like two sentences later. I actually enjoyed RO alot, but I can separate my enjoyment of the film from the fact that I think it is much easier to create an explanation for a 'line' from the OT than it is to actually create a new story.

P.S On a side note, I've been rethinking TFA since the last time we were talking about this after TLJ came out. TFA could have been made so much cooler if Starkiller base was replaced with the Starforge. Seriously just think how cool that would have been! Almost all the beats we saw in TFA could have been kept....the starforge could have just been used as an explanation for how a splinter cell of the Empire was managing to wage symmetric war with a galactic new republic (I know I know, this is basically stealing large parts of KOTOR and not supporting my originality argument haha).

P.P.S I've never written the word toxic so much, but I'm going to start using it in my scrabble games!

This post has been edited by rant: 04 July 2018 - 12:52 AM

[rant]

Luv2B_Sassy, on 03 July 2018 - 07:14 PM, said:

Didn't have time to read any of the above yet, I was busy attributing every good thing about TLJ, the strongest entry in the Star Wars canon in decades, to its director Rian Johnson. I will try to make time to read those posts within the next week though. I should have some time after the community college class I'm teaching (Brick: A Study in Style and Substance) lets out for the summer.

You add a great deal of joy to my life

This post has been edited by rant: 04 July 2018 - 12:28 AM

[Cause]

Luv2B_Sassy, on 03 July 2018 - 07:14 PM, said:

Didn't have time to read any of the above yet, I was busy attributing every good thing about TLJ, the strongest entry in the Star Wars canon in decades, to its director Rian Johnson. I will try to make time to read those posts within the next week though. I should have some time after the community college class I'm teaching (Brick: A Study in Style and Substance) lets out for the summer.

You may have a seat on the council but we do not award you the rank of master

[rant]

rant, on 04 July 2018 - 12:25 AM, said:

QuickTidal, on 03 July 2018 - 02:02 PM, said:

I don't see why anyone would assume that First Order Stormtroopers would be clones. That's nonsense, when it's clearly established that even Imperial Stormtroopers were enlisted men, and not Clones anymore. So anyone who even complains about that doesn't know what they are talking about to begin with.

That happened lol. It literally happened, I read multiple posts about it. Because racists didn't like that SW would have another black person, and so that was the weak argument they grabbed for to not look racist.

Maybe it didn't happen as I remember! I've been going through the literature to see if there are any academic projects attempting to define fandom quantitatively. I've yet to find any articles as such, though they may be hiding in different MESH terms, but I've gotta work I guess lol. But it turns out there is actually a pretty new field of fan/fandom research, with a seminal book from 92 forming its core, and that author describes several criteria ( I didn't read into them) that need to make someone apart of the fandom and not just a fan. So that distinction between fan/superfan? does exist.

Anyways, I found this article:
http://www.participa...ssue%201/10.pdf

Which was an analysis of the #blackstormtrooper hashtag. The author concludes that there isn't really racist undertones to the actual argument, but rather fans just being confused that Finn wasn't Jango Fett again lol. Basically, those fans were confused by a black stormtrooper (without racism), and were talking about it, and more serious fans (like us I'm guessing) were basically telling them they were dumb and explaining canon. Non-fans and journalists missed that nuance, saw the major spike in that hashtag, saw some of the actual racist tweets, mistakenly assumed the non-racist tweets above were just more racist tweets...and that narrative was born.

I'm not a media/cultural studies scholar, so I'm not going to comment on the validity of the research methods. But taking it at face value, I think this pretty strongly undermines my Finn argument.

Other interesting finds:

This article talks about an individual aca-fan's (actual academic term--god I love academia) response to the Star Wars acquisition and announcement of new movies, is kind of interesting:
http://www.participa...tor%2010.1.pdf|

And just because I'm amazed by it, there is actually a Journal of Fandom:
https://www.ingentac...000002/00000002

In general, I was hoping to find more analyses like the one FiveThirtyEight did on r/TheDonald, which was quite interesting.
https://fivethirtyei...line-following/

Regardless, this has shifted my opinion a deal regarding the scenario you champion.

[LinearPhilosopher]

rant, on 28 June 2018 - 09:20 PM, said:

Coco with marshmallows, on 28 June 2018 - 08:34 PM, said:

rant, on 28 June 2018 - 06:55 PM, said:

for a movie that made them 1.3 BN (BILLION....just in Box office) is the result of a toxic fanbase that "doesn't actually exist"? Disney has probably already made back the ~4BN they spent on SW. They could just stop making SW altogether (re: the anthologies) and it would have been a solid business decision.

-SNIPPED- i largely agree with what you are writing, but just want to point out that merely making your money back is a TERRIBLE business decision, conflating turnover with profit doubles it.

Realistically Disney would be wanting profits (PROFIT, not turnover) directly attributable to Star Wars of AT LEAST 5%p.a., circa $200m, and probably nearer 10% ($400m) for their outlay to be considered a worthwhile investment.

This goes even more so for movies where it's largely agreed that to hit a profit it's required to make back double initial cost minimum before it's considered beginning to be profitable.

Just a little interjection, please feel free to continue your discussion.

Lol yea youre right of course! I wasn't entirely clear--basically I was just thinking that if Disney was so concerned about the rotten tomato differential that they were choosing to the ignore the fact that the movie with that awful audience score still generated 1.5 bn in revenue (just from the box office of a single movie), and that they were willing to essentially inflate world wide racial and social tension (via a negative astroturfing)..another valid course of action (at least imo) would be to reject the sunk cost fallacy, stop throwing money at the problem (as they have clearly decided to do with the anthology films) and just let the property sit dormant for 25 years or something and then take another swing at it when half of us die hard nerds have died off.

Important caveat: I'm a science-human not a business-human, so I'm 90% talking out my ass at this point haha.

A thing to factor in is that you want to be making more off the investment than the cost of the investment. This is because of opportunity cost, if you have the choice between say investing that money in goverment bonds at 1% ROI and investing that money to merely get it all back, you are actually behind if you only broke even.