They just mean there’s 20 or 30 really annoying accounts with really big followings on Twitter who will initiate dogpiles of teenage edgelords on you if you try to argue with them.

In today’s media environment, “we need to be objective about this” pretty much always means “we have to provide cover for reactionaries.”

This. One side in the actual circumstances we live under is arming itself to the teeth and screaming about how any day now it is going to gleefully bathe in the blood of the other, while that other side is...not doing any of that. Failure to present one side as the aggressor is an outrageous abdication of any intent…

Thereby, no matter who is watching the movie or what they believe, they can very easily enjoy the story without bias.

The prequels and the sequel trilogy both VERY clearly critique the Jedi order

I am aware that the EU tried many times to capture moral ambiguity between the poles. Most people are not. Which doesn’t even mean people couldn’t be introduced the idea, but also all people’s primary point of entry to Star Wars is some combination of the first six movies. It just is. Maybe someday for Gen Alpha or…

I mean, this comes down to my idiosyncratic read of TLJ too, but what it becomes is an interesting story full of Star Wars-branded content which is engaging on its own terms, but at the same time it’s fundamentally incompatible with the other content in the IP (which is a pretty big problem if you happen to be making…

It just feels of a piece with a general cynicism that feels pervasive in the people working in science fiction these days, where the belief is that no society/organization/etc. can actually be good and they are in fact inherently corrupt.

Sure Palpatine is a would-be god emperor persisting decades beyond his natural span by sucking the lifeforce from hosts of unwilling souls, all so he can expand his totalitarian empire propped up by brainwashed child soldiers, but have you considered that Master Yoda is also quite old and that Coruscant’s bureaucracy…

I am perhaps less interested in a story that invites me to find potentially seductive or morally grey elements in an evil ideology that is closely related to and often allied with, but not strictly speaking identical to, soul-reaving Nazi space wizardry.

You didn’t understand what I wrote.

With where the discourse is right now, I suppose this might get people replying with TLJ quotes about killing the past or whatever, but I’m not really interested in seeing people try to cram moral and political complication into IP with such a cartoonishly reductive mythology as Star Wars.

There will be various small enclaves of civilization eking out existence in isolation, and in the outside the outbreak will have died down enough that wild people still exist in a state of barbarism, with the virus still circulating to some extent among the drastically reduced population of scavengers and bandits.…

I also have to wonder who the audience for these new books really is [...] I have to wonder if Martin is unsure himself, and that’s why he’s been unable to finish the novels.

I’ll check it out, thanks!

Weird question: does anyone know where there’s a spoiler-y synopsis of this I can read? I do that for movies that provoke my curiosity badly but I won’t be able to watch for a while for whatever reason, because it sort of scratches the itch. I read about this a few months ago and have been keeping tabs since, but it…

I’ve said it a million times before—you could write an entire book around how the online discourse around this movie embodies every dynamic of how social media gins up culture wars controversies out of thin air and then stokes them into unending infernos. Five years later, this movie is trending on Twitter with people…

Yuna is just brokeass Terra.

Huh. You know what irritates me? Professional video game critics complaining about how hard it is as a working parent to find time to play video games.

I was gonna say, I never saw this before, but I would have appreciated it right there, I think, and maybe one or two others of similar length scattered through. Would only add like 6 minutes to have a few, but would build the world so much. I guess they were worried about how to pace the exposition with those…