I was watching a YouTube video earlier today wherein the channel owner posted a "if I wrote The Last Jedi" fanfic. I stopped less than 6 minutes into the video, when his Kylo Ren used his "sacred Skywalker blood" to gain access Vader's fortress on Mustafar.

Sacred Skywalker blood? I have never once used this phrase or even thought of it in those terms. Is this a EU thing? Is this why people are so negative about TLJ? Because they consider the Skywalker line sacred?

That's not even remotely why I'm negative about TLJ.

I think you answered your own question when you stated 'fanfic'. Skywalkers are... celebrities, due to the whole famous for saving the galaxy, but the only thing in the movies that could possibly relate to sacred blood, is all of the fun Anakin details from ep 1 =/

3 hours ago, Vek Baustrade said:

I was watching a YouTube video earlier today wherein the channel owner posted a "if I wrote The Last Jedi" fanfic. I stopped less than 6 minutes into the video, when his Kylo Ren used his "sacred Skywalker blood" to gain access Vader's fortress on Mustafar.

Sacred Skywalker blood? I have never once used this phrase or even thought of it in those terms. Is this a EU thing? Is this why people are so negative about TLJ? Because they consider the Skywalker line sacred?

Oh, my sweet summer child. . . that's not even the tip of the iceberg of insanity when you start delving into the realm of fanfiction.

Reading The Necronomicon is easier on your mental health.

EDIT: I say this as the author of several terribly, embarrassingly bad fanfics which shall never see the light of day, and one moderately decent one in progress.

I admit, I was bewildered by what I saw, but I am not an EU guy, so I wondered if there was something in the novels that really played up the Chosen One blood line. I've spoken to a few friends about their TLJ grievances, and most come down to Luke not conforming to their expectations, and that seemed to be the gist of this guy's rewrite. My friends have read heavily in the EU books, so they have a different idea of who Luke was that I do. They have a reverence for him that I lack. (Don't get me wrong, Luke is awesome.) It led me to I wonder if the novels had appointed divinity upon the Skywalkers, like sacred suggests. I may have panic-posted slightly, because what I heard was so far from my interpretation.

Curse you and your trickery, fanfic!

6 hours ago, Vek Baustrade said:

I was watching a YouTube video earlier today wherein the channel owner posted a "if I wrote The Last Jedi" fanfic. I stopped less than 6 minutes into the video, when his Kylo Ren used his "sacred Skywalker blood" to gain access Vader's fortress on Mustafar.

Sacred Skywalker blood? I have never once used this phrase or even thought of it in those terms. Is this a EU thing? Is this why people are so negative about TLJ? Because they consider the Skywalker line sacred?

It's a fanfic thing, just like every other insane plot twist fans make up for their own stories. Of course, since many people, myself included, consider most of the EU material as nothing but published fanfiction, both for it's quality, and for it's conflicting and opposing concepts presented, you could say yes it's EU. Because EU is trash, and fanfic is trash, thus they are the same

As to why people are negative about TLJ.....no I would definitely say that's not the reason why people are mad at the movie. Seeing as TLJ didn't have Sacred Skywalker Blood, that would be hard to justify as a reason to dislike the film. That's like saying you hate Blazing Saddles because at the end, all the Knights don't have the big fight, because the cops show up and arrest them. It's just something that isn't even in the film, so it makes for a poor criticism.

Now, that being said, a lot of people have developed, what I consider an unhealthy hate for anything Skywalker. How they think the story needs to move away from the Skywalkers, even though the stated plan for the new trilogy, was to continue the Skywalker storyline. Considering how a lot of the obsession with everything Skywalker, seems to come from the Legacy/EU stuff, I find it funny that people will say things like "the story always boils around the Skywalkers!" even though the films largely ignore the EU stuff. But yeah, I mean, if you are going to have the Force in your Star Wars story, given the way the story ended in Return, I find it strange to think that the Skywalkers wouldn't still have a major role to play, in things Forcey at least. Which is exactly what they did in TLJ really. Every plot element, that had nothing to do with the Force, had zero input from Luke, up until the climax. But seeing as he was the only known, living Force user after the Emperor's purge, this is to be expected. So the cries from the masses to "branch out", seem to me at least to be.

1. A little pre-mature, as they are clearly building up to an expanded roster of Force users, but they have to clean up all the loose plot threads from the OT, because if they don't every fan will have a seizure of nerd-rage and twitter-storm Disney....like they are already doing for other reasons.

2. Ignoring the very simple, and necessary need for this focus, due to narrative reasons.

But, asking fans of nerd stuff to think logically about the stuff they are obsessed with, is an effort in futility, so I've kind of given up on that front, and just shake my head at their ravings.

I really liked TLJ, because it was, if such a thing exists, an affectionate deconstruction of Star Wars.

It really tackles a lot of the questions that Star Wars raises, but doesn't really address, especially as regards the nature of the Force. And I particularly liked Luke's character arc, his belief that the Jedi should end comes from pretty sound reasoning. . . because the Jedi Order is always the birthing place of the next big Dark Side threat. Granted, no Jedi=no Darksiders is a bit too simplistic, but it at least starts from sound reasoning. And over the course of the film, Luke learns the true lesson: you're only beaten when you give up.

Interestingly, I can see how both EU and non-EU fans can be turned off by TLJ. For the EU fans, authors god into a bad habit of making Luke a walking God Mode Sue, taking Vader's boast that "the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force" a little too literally and having Luke using the Force to pretty much literally handwave away whatever that story's problem was. Personally, I hated that, because the Force is so much more than just the universe's most awesome hammer, but people who grew up reading those stories now seeing Luke actually cut off from the Force could be a bit traumatic. Then again, he does save the day with an impossibly impressive use of the Force, so. . . .

For the non-EU fans, seeing Luke go from the idealistic, strong, moral hero to a broken man deliberately letting the galaxy go to **** because he's afraid to get involved can also be a bit traumatic. I'm sure I'm not alone when I say Luke Skywalker is the hero I pretended to be as a child, and him becoming this was something I could never have anticipated. But I love a good character arc, and Luke's arc is firmly regaining his faith in the Force and his own ability to do good, and I have no problem with that. Getting Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight back at the end of the film is a reward, its seeing our hero back in action, back in top form, one last time. Mark Hamill himself told Rian Johnson that he disagreed with every choice being made for Luke's character in the film, though he has since started to jump on people using that quote to mean "see, even Luke thinks the film sucks!" and has stated he considers it a great story.

Honestly, a lot of the criticisms of TLJ are very similar to the ones ESB received when it came out in theaters, and RotJ was seen as a return to form when it was released. It wasn't until the whole trilogy was complete and on VHS, where people could watch them consistently backwards and forwards, that ESB came to be acclaimed as the best film of the three. I believe TLJ will probably get a similar reception. . . once people start letting go of their expectations of what the film should have been, and start looking at it for what it is and what it's saying, I believe it will receive a larger amount of appreciation than it gets now.

Hey, even the prequels have been somewhat vindicated by a generation growing up with them, not tainted by the hype built up by the twenty-year wait between OT and PT, so anything's possible.

It's funny that a number of folks here pissed and moaned that Abrams took "no chances" with The Force Awakens, giving audiences a "copy and paste" of A New Hope (when the truth is TFA is only a "copy" in the broadest of strokes). And then comes The Last Jedi which does some pretty big narrative risks and dares to break the mold by having the heroes make some pretty major blunders (Poe especially, who really did need to be taken down several pegs if he was going to be an effective leader), which leaves many of the same folks that crapped on TFA for being unoriginal now crapping on TLJ for being too different.

With regards to Luke, like ErikModi I too held Luke as a childhood hero, far more so than Han, and yet I can appreciate the story arc that Luke was on. Here was someone that was being held to an impossible standard, and never really had a chance to recover from a highly traumatic incident. As for how he confronted the First Order, that was probably the most Jedi way to do so; rather than doing a bunch of Force Unleashed type of crap, he held the FO's military at bay with an illusion, using the Force not to attack but to defend. Personally, I'd have been interested in seeing how Luke would have grown after coming to his new understanding in the wake of his conversation with Yoda, but for the sake of the story that the new trilogy is telling and that the mantle of hero is being passed to a new generation I get that Luke had to die, especially if the idea is to use this trilogy to close the door on the story of the Skywalkers (i.e. the one family whose drama keeps frelling over the galaxy) so as to make room for new heroes such as Rey and Finn and Poe.

With regards to the EU, the biggest problem was that they kept trotting out Luke, Han, and Leia to solve the latest crisis of the week, and efforts to develop a new group of major characters/heroes rarely bore fruit (about the only exceptions to this were Mara Jade, Corran Horn, and Kyle Katarn, along with Thrawn for the Empire even if he died at the end of the series that introduced him) because it was always so easy to go back to the Yavin Trio, especially with Space!Wizard Luke using the Force to fix whatever problem was presented. That the EU authors of the 90's kept trotting out the same few plots didn't do them any favors either. And don't even get me started on the Vong or the crapfests that came after the NJO series, especially given the wildly uneven quality of writing through the series due to rotating authors, not all of whom appeared to be on the same page in terms of characterization or where the overall story was going.

That's not to say the entire EU was garbage, but you had to dig through a mountain of crap to find a few good gems, such as the Thrawn Trilogy (Timothy Zahn had a much better handle on the Force and how it was used than any other EU author I've read, many of whom seemed to take WEG's books about the Force being superpowers a bit too literally) and the X-Wing series (which weren't exactly my cup of tea, but I can appreciate their quality, especially with Wraith Squadron being a prime example of an Age of Rebellion campaign). But I honestly do feel the franchise is better off with the continuity reboot and Lucasfilm having a tighter handle on things going forward instead of the massive and often self-conflicting mess that the EU became.

7 hours ago, ErikModi said:

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5 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

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I think this pair of videos basically sum up my thoughts on a lot of the issues with the story, though I never though about the King Arthur arc for Luke until it was presented, which was interesting to consider, especially with how things end up for Arthur. I personally don't have an issue with TLJ's plot. The issues I have with that film are more the structure and some of the directorial/visual choices made(Flying Leia, and the Cave scene with Rey being my biggest issues). The narrative itself, and the direction they took the various main characters, zero problem.

I try to be practical when it comes to this stuff. It's been 30 years, the main characters can't do a 30 year re-enactment of all the stuff they did. So it makes sense to just remove some of the major players, and turn them into hermits, to justify why they didn't really shape the galaxy directly, hands on. Han and Luke both left due to the same issue basically, so we can explain why they are now 30+ years older, and not doing action scenes anymore. Fans might hate that idea, that their immortal heroes are actually aging, but the actors have to deal with reality. So just sort of handwaving away the intervening time, and telling a new story with the cast you have, felt logical to me.

But yeah, I think Bob's take on this is a pretty comprehensive take, in my opinion anyway. I know they've been posted elsewhere, but I think they're relevant to this thread too.

To the "Sacred Skywalker Blood" thing, ya it's weird to refer to it as that I could see Kylo's blood being able to open something of Vader's (in this guys horrible fanfic) simply because of DNA Markers. Also Snooke does refer to Kylo's Blood heritage in the beginning of TLJ (just rewatched last night) but I think that's more of an ancestry thing then anything Sacred, that being said in the cannon universe the Skywalker's are the only demonstration we have of force users having kids. The Jedi did not allow such attachments and the kids were stronger in the force then their father, Luke was able to hold his own against Vader with comparably little training, and then goes on to restart the order (which lets face it Luke is so unqualified for, he is basically a padawan himself) so I can see where someone (with little sense) could refer to it as Sacred Skywalker Blood, especially with Anakin basically being Jesus in the prequels (It's even hinted at that Anakin had no father in the sense that one never existed so... ya)

@KungFuFerret I'm a fan of Bob's work and enjoyed his TLJ analysis. The Arthur parallels were an insight I'd considered, but he articulates them really well in the video you cite.

My primary issues with the film are pacing related (the Kanto Bight arc), though I think Johnson also undermines the gravity of the story by going to the bathos well a little too frequently.

3 minutes ago, Vek Baustrade said:

I think Johnson also undermines the gravity of the story by going to the bathos well a little too frequently.

I'll say it's way too frequently. It really pulled me out of the story more than a few times.

I also found the "Force sexting" between Kylo and Rey to be aggravatingly dull and wearying, and this goes double for the Rey in cave scene.

The red suited guards of Stoke also seemed cartoonish rather than threatening. The fight with them wasn't exciting--it looked more like ballet than combat to me with way too many shots of unnecessary posing.

21 minutes ago, HappyDaze said:

and this goes double for the Rey in cave scene.

That scene just missed the mark for me. I get that the point Johnson's making is that Rey doesn't need anything external, that the answers she seeks are within, but the scene doesn't succeed in saying that with its mirror imagery. There's a dozen different ways it could've been better conveyed.

1 hour ago, HappyDaze said:

I'll say it's way too frequently. It really pulled me out of the story more than a few times.

I also found the "Force sexting" between Kylo and Rey to be aggravatingly dull and wearying, and this goes double for the Rey in cave scene.

The red suited guards of Stoke also seemed cartoonish rather than threatening. The fight with them wasn't exciting--it looked more like ballet than combat to me with way too many shots of unnecessary posing.

I didn't really have an issue with them having their long distance conversations. Considering long distance communication like this was established in Empire, when Luke called to Leia, it didn't feel out of place. And personally, I thought it made sense that the two of them would reach out to each other. Being the only other person who might understand some of the issues they are dealing with.

1 hour ago, Vek Baustrade said:

That scene just missed the mark for me. I get that the point Johnson's making is that Rey doesn't need anything external, that the answers she seeks are within, but the scene doesn't succeed in saying that with its mirror imagery. There's a dozen different ways it could've been better conveyed.

For me it was the narration bit during that scene I found jarring. It's the only point in the film where this is done, and it felt so obvious in what it was describing that I just remember thinking "why are we hearing this? The scene is conveying it just fine silently." I get that they were transitioning into it being her telling Kylo, but still, it just didn't work for me, narratively. I think that scene would've been far more powerful if it had been silent, or at least no narration. Perhaps with some distant voices that she responded saying something like "mother? father?" and then she comes to the mirror. Way more effective in my mind. But overall, I found it a fairly minor point. It made that scene annoying to watch, and it pulled me out of the narrative. But it was hardly a game breaker for me. It was simply one of the flaws in the movie, that overall, did a good job telling the story it was trying to tell, in my opinion anyway.