Is she the defacto lead of ANH? What is her role in the climax of ANH?
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JJ Abrams to direct Star Wars Episode IX, Chris Terrio co-writing, now due Dec 2019
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Is she the defacto lead of ANH? What is her role in the climax of ANH?
KoopaTheCasual
Junior Member
Oh I'm well aware of the Luke double standard. I chalk it up to wish-fulfillment character coupled with nostalgia.
And I'm sorry if I overstated the critique of Prequel Anakin being OP, since I wasn't really a forum dweller back then, and all my interactions are anecdotal about how bullshit easy everything was for him.
No, that's head in the sand levels of ignorance, and is not ok. I refuse to cosign that.
Like you said, that's the basis of superheroes. That's just dudes being butthurt.
Except all of the wisest Jedi in known existence said "no, you're wrong, sorry, he's an evil asshole"
Subpar Spatula
Banned
Doesn't mean he can't do great things.
Bobby Roberts
Banned
This "errr" and "ummm" shit is breaking out like a rash today.
Also I'm not sure I understand your question, or if you understood the point being made in the tweets you're referencing.
Basically: The nature of The Force Awakens is automatically different than A New Hope by dint of who is carrying the film and what they represent, and the only way to make facile comparisons to A New Hope really stick is to essentially erase their genders and colors.
You're doing that right now.
Bobby Roberts
Banned
I have heard variations on this story a lot. It's undeniable, to me, the impact this film had on people who otherwise have not felt all that welcomed by either this series or its fandom.
KoopaTheCasual
Junior Member
Also reiterating that I can't stand the "The Force Awakens is just A New Hope" critique.
It literally doesn't make any sense to anyone, who examines the parallels for more than 10 seconds. TFA was a great movie and people need to just deal with that.
It literally doesn't make any sense to anyone, who examines the parallels for more than 10 seconds. TFA was a great movie and people need to just deal with that.
Inferno313
Banned
Leia's role in A New Hope was absolutely to be the damsel in distress. She subverts that trope, in what was a pretty progressive way for the 1970s, but by being tough, capable, and able to protect herself once she's rescued. However she still doesn't really become a major player in the narrative until the last 45 minutes, still exists largely to be rescued by the men, and still gets sidelined for the last set-piece of the film.
It's in Empire where she really graduated to being a co-lead.
It's in Empire where she really graduated to being a co-lead.
Elfstar
Member
You guys can't ignore the fact that both Luke and Anakin got their butt kicked several times.
I don't think that the Rey character is bad or something like that, it's just that her "power awakening" scenes maybe felt a bit abrupt and rushed.
I don't know why people are being so aggressive and balligerent about this.
I don't think that the Rey character is bad or something like that, it's just that her "power awakening" scenes maybe felt a bit abrupt and rushed.
I don't know why people are being so aggressive and balligerent about this.
Inferno313
Banned
Yup. My fiancé had the same reaction. She always liked Star Wars, but The Force Awakens was the film that made her love Star Wars for the first time. Now she gets as excited as I do everytime there's a new film. She even mentioned wanting to binge-watch Rebels the other day.
Didn't Rey also get her ass kicked by Kylo Ren the first time? That's why she gets captured in the first place.
Heh, my girlfriend has definitely not taken that plunge, but TFA was far and away her favorite even though she liked, to varying degrees, the OT before it.
Herr Schwarz
Banned
You can say the same . about the new star treks and to a lesser extent the marvel/dc stuff.
It's almost as if there's a method to it that is "safe".
It's almost as if there's a method to it that is "safe".
Inferno313
Banned
Did you miss the whole part where she gets her butt kicked and is taken hostage?
Not in the same sense that Rey is, no.
As an annecdote, watching TFA in theaters with my mid-50s mother really illustrates the difference. She saw all the original films in theaters, but never really got all that excited about them. They were fun movies to her, but she never got into them. Never wanted to really talk about them, beyond them being fun. As soon as TFA ended, she giddily turned to my father and started gushing about how awesome Rey was and how much she wanted to know more about this character. This is something I've literally never seen her do as long as I've been alive and aware of her reaction to movies. Unless something has changed, she's looking forward to TLJ in theaters, which is something that she rarely does anymore.
The reality was that a Star Wars truly clicked for her, almost four decades later, because she had a character she could lose herself in that was truly a hero in the story. Leia is central to ANH and does get some great heroic moments, but then she goes almost immediately back to being a passive character almost as soon as she is active. This doesn't really change for ESB, and then RotJ allows her more heroics than the previous two movies combined, but still ultimately have her fail and suffer embarrassments the rest of the heroes generally don't. Leia's a great character regardless, but she's a far cry from what Rey actually represents. Both to little girls now and the little girls who were denied that 40 years ago.
Yeah, the character itself is subverted to an extent, because she's not a dainty, aloof character who is so delicate she might as well be made of glass. But she is still literally a princess that needs to be rescued by the heroes who storm the castle of the evil black knight. The whole sequence where they rescue Leia is practically a cut scene from The Adventures of Robin Hood. By design.
Inferno313
Banned
I mean, only if they're going to resort to nasty sexist and racist drivel. This is important stuff to talk about when discussing media.
itwasTuesday
He wasn't alone.
guys I've found the perfect gif for contemporary star wars threads on gaf
CosRey looks so confused by this means of attack.
I just came up with that term, CosRey is for cosplayers who dress up as Rey from Star Wars (2015). Feel free to use.
Bobby Roberts
Banned
I mean, not to gild the lily or anything, but Rey lived in indentured servitude, alone, with UNKAR PLUTT as the closest thing to a parental figure, for over a decade in a desolate slum, before rejecting her destiny to chase a fantasy of her dead parents ever returning for her, before getting defeated, kidnapped, and fucking MIND-RAPED while chained to a fucking torture chair.
She was then thrown into a tree and knocked out.
Here's the thing: People are acting like some unknown entity sorta willed these characters into existence and unfairly blessed them with positives that our beloved characters from 40 years ago were denied, while ignoring that
a) the people who created Rey & Finn & Poe are two writers who thought this shit through pretty thoroughly on the character side, one of which was the guy responsible for deepening and making meaningful the basic 2D archetypes from 1977
b) The struggles both sets of heroes (or all three sets, rather, taking the prequels into account) are NOT that far removed from each other.
I often get the sense a lot of people start arguing this shit from the perspective that these characters are like, historical figures as opposed to fictional ones representing archetypes from mythology that's millenia old at this point. There's a context here that just gets chucked in the interests of pointing out just how unfair all this is to... to who? To LUKE? To "good storytelling?"
People run at this film headlong like Quixote to right a wrong they don't seem to quite grasp in the first place. It's not even about film criticism in a lot of instances. It's using film criticism as a means to explain/correct some sort of deeper injustice where Rey gets to be the sort of hero Luke always was, but just a little bit better.
Well
The only people getting banned are assholes. We've had a perfectly fine discussion about sex and race that hasn't gotten anybody banned yet.
Chained Prometheus
Member
Hell, Rey also gets rekt at the very start of that final fight between her, Finn and Kylo. Dude straight up Force Pushes her right into a tree to knock her out.
Ristifer
Member
When does Anakin get his butt kicked in TPM?
SuperBanana
Banned
They're saying TFA is nothing like ANH because of it's lead characters. That has nothing to do with how the storyboard is pretty much lifting scenes from one movie and putting it in the new one. Why does it have to be one of the other? The people saying "It's JUST like A New Hope" are talking about this.
You can have the new lead characters, women characters, POC characters and NOT copy the scenes straight out of another film.
Subpar Spatula
Banned
she should have mind controlled him. she was pretty good at it by then.
Inferno313
Banned
They're saying TFA is nothing like ANH because of it's lead characters. That has nothing to do with how the storyboard is pretty much lifting scenes from one movie and putting it in the new one. Why does it have to be one of the other? The people saying "It's JUST like A New Hope" are talking about this.
You can have the new lead characters, women characters, POC characters and NOT copy the scenes straight out of another film.
I'm just gonna quote myself from earlier in the thread, tired of having to address the same arguments over and over.
And even Empire still largely limits her heroics and even makes her the passive one in her own romance subplot.
RotJ is really the only one that remotely lets her cut loose as a hero.
Inferno313
Banned
While simultaneously degrading her by forcing her into a skimpy outfit to enact a sex-slave scenario.
Bobby Roberts
Banned
They're not even saying this though
And your example is pretty goddamned superficial.
And you're still erasing the importance and weight of our leads' gender and color on audiences and in the storytelling itself.
Yup. They gave her the Huttslayer moment, but they basically reverse engineered their way to it after deciding first on her costume. Which isn't even hyperbole or exaggeration: They decided they needed to soften Leia after Empire (Fisher agreed with this), and their solution to this (non-) problem was to put her in a bikini and make Fisher lose another 15 pounds.
She got her moment, yes. A couple of em. But they brought her low first in order to do it.
Subpar Spatula
Banned
k... and? people are supposed to forgive things they dislike because the characters are different? k.
They're saying TFA is nothing like ANH because of it's lead characters. That has nothing to do with how the storyboard is pretty much lifting scenes from one movie and putting it in the new one. Why does it have to be one of the other? The people saying "It's JUST like A New Hope" are talking about this.
You can have the new lead characters, women characters, POC characters and NOT copy the scenes straight out of another film.
This is the kind of reductionist shit that so many of us are sick of. You point to the obvious callbacks and homages, and ignore the context around them. "Look, this thing is like other thing. I recognize thing. I did it." TFA is only a copy of ANH if you point to the obvious surface level stuff. But if you actually point to what the movie is about, how it is about it, like, the actual story the movie tells, the journey the characters go on, it's completely new.
DeathoftheEndless
Crashing this plane... with no survivors!
You're ignoring the context of those images to make them seem more similar than they really are.
Exactly.
Leia was a great character regardless and this isn't to say people are wrong to latch on to her, but there's a reason Rey has likely become just as beloved after just one movie. She's the hero Leia was never allowed to be, and she got to be that right up front.
Inferno313
Banned
The point is that you can't say "the story is the exact same!" when the characters, the backbone of ANY story, are WILDLY different.
That's also a lame, superficial thing to dislike, regardless.
SuperBanana
Banned
Kylo is pretty much Anakin but the 3 main characters are different enough. That still doesn't change the fact that copying scenes make people feel like it's A New Hope. They basically went through a checklist of things to copy then put new characters in the slots. Ok cool, new characters are nice but that doesn't fundamentally change a movie from feeling the same as another when you're very intentionally trying to soft reboot it.
From the trailer of The Last Jedi there are already some major scenes that look straight out of ESB. These are soft reboots. That's what they are.
Subpar Spatula
Banned
it's not. but, like, why care if people dislike it for having similar beats to ANH?
Inferno313
Banned
Why discuss a movie in a discussion thread about said movie?
And this is what happens when you do a surface reading that strips all context and awareness out.
Kylo trying to be Anakin/Vader but failing at it is the entire point of the character and what gives him all the depth grognards keep complaining he lacks. Kylo is desperately trying to be his grandfather and wants to bask in the legacy he has built up around him, but has none of what made Anakin, both as a Jedi Knight and as Vader, such a powerful force in the galaxy.
Plot points only matter to the extent the "why" (narrative) around them does.
Bobby Roberts
Banned
Chained Prometheus
Member
Wow. Just... wow. Surprised you actually went there.
I kinda hate having to point out the obvious fact that that would have never worked to begin with. Jedi Mind Tricks generally only work for people with weaker minds.
Also, don't even act like you'd be okay with it if she had tried it on Kylo and it actually worked.
Subpar Spatula
Banned
that's not an answer. you're trying to say it's wrong for them to not like it because they believe it follows similar beats.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
The frustration comes from how many scenes are straight up ignored by people criticizing the film as they come up with new ways to say Rey did the force wrong. For instance your post.
Inferno313
Banned
I don't understand what this means so I will continue to regurgitate that thing I read on Reddit for the umpteenth time, thank you very much.
Robdraggoo
Member
The entire jedi council gives him the middle finger
This isn't a knock on anyone who found enjoyment in something because they identified with a character, but I've never really understood that kind of feeling. I don't think I've ever identified with a single character in Star Wars except, funny enough, TPM Anakin (I was 10 when the movie came out and I looked like him, same haircut and all), and even as a kid my interest in that movie was primarily what Palpatine was up to rather than Anakin's story, because I was a weird kid like that.
I'm not sure if this is because I generally don't have any interest in self-inserting or if it's because there are so many white male movie characters that I do it subconsciously and don't know it. But I've never had a problem watching something and feeling for a character who didn't resemble me or who came from a different background.
Perhaps it's easier to say that I've always watched movies aware of myself as an outside viewer and I don't get involved in them from the viewpoint of being "in the world". Even as a kid when I would daydream or play with toys it wasn't that I was pretending to be someone else but that I was thinking about the characters' adventures.
I'm not sure if this is because I generally don't have any interest in self-inserting or if it's because there are so many white male movie characters that I do it subconsciously and don't know it. But I've never had a problem watching something and feeling for a character who didn't resemble me or who came from a different background.
Perhaps it's easier to say that I've always watched movies aware of myself as an outside viewer and I don't get involved in them from the viewpoint of being "in the world". Even as a kid when I would daydream or play with toys it wasn't that I was pretending to be someone else but that I was thinking about the characters' adventures.
Inferno313
Banned
Sure. Because the beats of a New Hope weren't even created by A New Hope. That film has one of the most formulaic plots of all time, but you know what? That's fine. It was intentional in fact. Plot hardly fucking matters. It's a tool to facilitate character growth and exploration.
PeskyToaster
Member
Me neither. Even just going by plot points they only really line up in the beginning and quickly diverge which was probably done on purpose. None of the characters match their supposed analogues aside from extremely superficial similarities but then you might as well say TFA is a remake of Harry Potter.
Unrelated to your post but the lightsaber fight in TFA lets me know that JJ gets it. It's visually gorgeous. The blues, the snow, the nighttime, the lights of the sabers, the trees. So damn GOOOOOD. Visually gorgeous and emotionally charged. And wow! look at how the camera and actors move. Seems familiar.
Like looking in a mirror.
Inferno313
Banned
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