Soooooo, about "The Rise of Skywalker"....

Taking a day away from people being angry and disappointed about TROS and I feel like I can finally put my own thoughts about it down. It's been really stressful thinking about this movie, because I went into it sort of... dreading, as a lot of people whose opinions I respect had found it miserably disappointing, and there seemed to not even be any statements to the effect of "well it was Good For A Star Wars Movie".

( Spoilers for absolutely everything )

I still don't get where the fandom is coming from with their vicious disappointment, though. I understand the people who found the ending thematically unsatisfying, or were disappointed by what happened to their favourite characters, but there's just this... overriding narrative of a broken narrative promise that I just for the life of me do not get. Literally the only retcon I found it in me to be kinda frustrated about made sense and led into material that I found entirely thematically satisfying, and I find the way Rose's role was cut down an outrage against Kelly Marie Tran and her treatment, but it wasn't a debilitating plot issue, either.

IDK, man. To me, it just feels like a bunch of good ideas that people had, coming out of TLJ got Jossed, and all I can say to that is "well, yeah -- y'all didn't expect that?" We know the fandom is way more clever than the creators, we all know our theories will always speak to us more strongly and the ability for a creator to beat out their fandom in theory-crafting happens so rarely as to not be statistically significant.

I can't bring myself to hate TROS for not being the version of it that was in my head (this is the biggest reason I don't really write for series' that aren't finished, I have no interest in competing with the source material on who is more cleverer) because the version I got... was fine. I liked it.

And it kind of bothers me that I feel so defensive saying that, because me not not liking a movie is such an insignificant issue. But when even the spaces where I'd go to share in my enjoyment of a thing instead want to commisserate about how it burned their crops down... That's pretty alienating. I don't feel safe in spaces united in their hatred of a thing, anymore, and there seems to be nothing but those kinds of spaces for SW, right now.

So I'm at least glad that it's over, because now with all the unresolved potential is out of the air, we can build communities of concord over the space magic movies, and maybe start getting along, again.

(My first instinct is to go "something something hype-culture")

If there's one thing to be said for TROS is that I've never seen a fandom so divided so unified in hatred of a single thing before, tbh.

Or, like, I'm peripherally aware of this having happened, but I'm not familiar enough with the other examples to really say how similar the situation actually is? IDK. There definitely does seem to be A Trend(tm) of people getting incredibly excited for things and then that thing not delivering and everyone being absolutely disgusted with the end result.