Thread by @HNIJohnMiller

1) I have but one Festivus Greivance this year.

Disney.

Kathleen Kennedy.

You motherfuckers better pucker your buttholes.

2) See, here’s the thing about Star Wars.

It is *the* American icon. It is one of the most identifiably American cultural icons. You see a lightsaber? You see an X-Wing? Star Wars. There isn’t a person in the US who can’t at least give you a rough top-down sketch of the Falcon.

3) And see, its not just about Star Wars.

Without Star Wars, Star Trek would have been a 1 or 2 season cult classic few remember. We wouldn’t have William Shatner or Leonard Nimoy.

4) No, Star Wars didn’t invent sci fi, but it made it the cash cow that the genre is, and everything after Star Wars owes Lucas for fighting tooth and nail to carve out the niche that let them follow.

What, you think John Carter of Mars was setting any precedents?

5) It’s not just sci fi either. Star Wars REVOLUTIONIZED what fandom could be. You think we would have had Schwarzeneggar as Conan in the 1982 movie if Star Wars in 1977 had flopped?

The point of Star Wars was that it made it ok for movies to take RISKS. To GAMBLE.

6) Even the Prequel trilogy, as silly of a mess that was, proved it was safe to experiment. The bad guys won, everyone went in knowing the bad guys would win, but we went to see it anyways.

More than that, it drove interest in what came BEFORE.

7) An interesting note about Star Wars’ expanded universe: dozens, hundreds, of authors, contributors, artists, etc, they did something that no ither story franchise has done to that scale since.

They all coordinated.

8) All these disparate individuals would gather, they’d meet, they’d debate, and they’d plan. They built careers planning out how the Star Wars expanded universe would grow. They developed ‘levels’ of canon to allow new writers to experiment without messing with the core universe

9) So what does Disney do the minute they get ahold of the franchise?

They Thanos snap everything outside the movies into oblivion.

And then Kathleen Kennedy has the GALL to complain about how they don’t have source material to work on, after they ignored Lucas’ movie pitches.

10) My Festivus greivance against Disney is that after destroying what took decades to build and was unprecedented, a franchise universe built by 100’s of individual authors coordinating and producing and succeeding while doing so, they replaced it with... nothing.

11) The Prequels at least gave us battle droids. The Prequels at least gave us podracing. The Prequels at least gave us SOMETHING, even if it was just a taste wanting us to to further back.

What does the Disney trilogy give us?

12) My favorite starfighter growing up was the B-Wing. You know, the one that had the wings folding out to make it look like a t. It was so weird and interesting I fell in love with it. It only appeared for a few minutes in Return of the Jedi, but it was UNIQUE.

13) The Last Jedi, I don’t know if some fucking dumbass saw a b-wing, misunderstood wtf they were looking at, and made it into an easily shot tub of lard dropping balls on shit, but that wasn’t iconic. That was a flying piece of shit.

14) Characters? What characters? Finn came the closest to an actual heroes journey, and his can be summed up as ‘tossed his boss into a garbage disposal, got lightsabered into a coma, then watched his now-former boss get a hanger dropped on her.’

Inspiring, let me tell you.

15) There’s nothing memorable here, nothing interesting, just a series of set pieces with no rhyme or reason because what the fuck is a story?

Does anyone even remember what that fuckoff big fucking star destroyer looked like? It looked like a massive frisbee. Does anyone care?

16) And its clear Disney doesn’t give a fuck not only with the movies.

You want to know what happened in the comics?

They got so lazy with picking one of the artists, the artist literally copied 3d printing models of some starfighters to use in the comic.

17) The worse part? The 3d models were for a tabletop game. They had pegs sticking out the bottom as part of the model.

The fucking idiot artist LEFT THE PEGS ON THE MODELS WHEN HE COPIED THEM INTO THE COMIC.

He’s still employed as an artist for the comic last I heard.

18) Quality control. It’s important. If you have a crappy burger that makes Taco Hell seem like health food, you don’t go back to that burger place.

When Disney pumps out two utter pieces of shit with the Star Wars label on them, I don’t fall for it a third time.

19) My Festivus grievance is to Disney for taking a cultural icon, destroying everything that helped sustain said cultural icon, bitching about how they had nothing to work with, and then not even bothering to do quality control on what they made after.

Fuck you Disney. I’m out.

/end