“whatever she got when she and Chris Pratt split up”:

That doesn’t sound nearly as cool as you think it does.

I’d never seen a single episode of Mom until the pandemic began. I often had the TV on as background noise and would have Bar Rescue on the Paramount network.. Once each day’s seven or eight episodes ended, Mom would come on. I appreciated the irony of a show about fixing poorly functional bars would be followed by a…

I don’t know if this helps, but two out of three of you have aged well.

Right, but that was also his arc in The Force Awakens, wasn’t it? He goes from a guy who wants to get as far away from the First Order as possible to someone willing to put his life in danger to fight tyranny.

Of course the top two posts here are just defending The Last Jedi rather than talking about the actual important racial stuff...

Or saying “bUT wHaT aBoUt lAdY In kNiVeS oUt??!!”

Yes, their shared experience of... saving a space horse and wearing stormtrooper outfits in a base and getting almost all of their friends and allies killed when they trusted a guy who literally sounds like a snake. You got me. That’s some classic romance stuff!

Yeah, I wonder if Ana de Armas would agree that Johnson doesn’t know what the hell to do with actors of color.

I mean failure is great but it has to have an impact on the story. In what way did Finn’s storyline impact the climax of the movie? How would it have gone down differently if he hadn’t been there? And honestly Poe’s whole thing was kind of weak and depended on him being a bullheaded idiot that got a lot of people…

I felt that Rey and Finn were definitely the stars of TFA, with Ren as the main villain. (Poe was barely in the movie.). I’d say that Boyega was justified in thinking Finn was the main heroic male character of the sequel trilogy after filming it.

Agreed. I think TLJ is really good as far as Star Wars movies go, but just as the worst shithead Gamergate fuckboy fans hated it for terrible kneejerk reasons, so too have I ignored some of TLJ’s problems because I’m reacting more to their reaction than the film itself. That sidestory with Finn is not spectacular. It…

As someone who does like the movie, I can understand why one would just not like TLJ in good faith. And yes the movie does have problems. And frankly, it’s ok to have different views on the movie.

I’ve grown a little uncomfortable with the conversation around The Last Jedi, which is a movie I genuinely like and defend, but which has sort of become a shibboleth used to determine if someone is a decent, mature, well-balanced person. I know that’s mostly the fault of the worst people in the world working…

For everyone coming to Johnson’s defense, I’d say that just giving an arc or role to a POC isn’t enough if it’s not a good one. Mere presence is not enough.

But you’ll notice the three characters you describe as being shunted off to the side were all played by actors of color.

At the end of the day the whole trilogy was just badly written. All of the characters were treated badly except for Ray. Hell, Poe was completely screwed over in TLJ to build up Holdo’s lame ‘tell not show’ reputation.

There is literally nothing in canon (old or new) that indicated that stormtroopers were all white, or that the Empire was all white. They were primarily Human and saw all species as lesser, but they had no issue with race. Think of it like Italians and Irish. They only became ‘white’ once whites had someone else to be…

You’re not, I find this thinking absurd.

At times, it feels as if it’s set 15 years in the past, or at least the pre-COVID-19 past: People gather in crowds to watch their kids play soccer. Schools and churches are open. Friends hug and serve each other drinks at parties. That all seems very far away now.