TLJ was safe and derivative in thematic terms, and it flipped over the table (while derivatively recycling OT plot beats) in narrative terms. As SoftSac eloquently explains below.

By the end of The Last Jedi, Rey has not done anything Dark and Kylo has not done anything Light. Sith overthrowing their masters is textbook Sith, and Luke even says that Rey will rebuild the Jedi. The notion that the movie sets up some bold new path forward is unconnected from the text, and TFA was just as…

The point being, this is a discussion about legacy sequels, and Rise of Skywalker is a sequel to a movie that came out 2 years before it.

Flipping over a dinner table is not the same as cooking a meal. The Last Jedi cleared the decks, storytelling wise, but it didn’t set up s***.

Look, say what you like about The Rise of Skywalker, but there was very little wrong in that movie that wasn’t already wrong with The Force Awakens. Pissed they brought Palpatine back? The Force Awakens gave us a Palpatine in all but name. Pissed they made Rey’s lineage important? TFA pretty much explicitly demanded…

On the contrary, corporate support has done more for LGBTQ rights and inclusion generally than most other forces recently.

Until Facebook initiates such reforms, then, large corporations like Disney shouldn't be praised as "defending" their actors unless they also offer them free assistants screening their social accounts for trollery. Milquetoast, corporation-coddling pieces like this one are part of the problem.

So, is Facebook going to do something about this, already?

So, will Facebook ban users who message racist crap to strangers for life, or until they pass a community college sociology course?

Like Rogue One and Rebels, that’s still pre-OT, however close.

Is Lucasfilm really never, ever going to set any new movie or TV show during the freakin’ OT years themselves? Like, nothing? It’s just “PT era this” and “Mandalorian timeline that” and “don’t worry, someday we’ll catch up with Rey and friends” that, too, but never the Galactic Civil War??

And now is where we remember that Disney literally made Leia and Han’s only child a school shooter (slicer?). Except maybe it wasn’t his fault, because he was being hypnotized, or something.

Please clap!

Um, that person in the bacta tank is shirtless, so I highly doubt it’s a woman.

Unpopular opinion: the “Glee” school (false alarm, mostly) school shooting episode was fine, actually.

Where's Eva Mendes damnit!

Yes, yes, it does. I myself have a high tolerance for Diesel’s self-glorifying posturing, but he works best when paired with someone with a more laid-back energy.

I enjoyed Eastwood’s performance as the butt monkey of jokes in Fate, and never got the impression they were trying to force a replacement Paul Walker on the audience when the character himself was dumped on so much. So yeah, I'm pleased to see him return.

2018 called; it wants its edgy use of an ANH quote in a tiresome forever war over the objective suckitude of TLJ back.

“What if this abstract concept could walk and talk and quip” continues to get progressively fucking stupider.