Star Wars: The Last Jedi - A response

A guest post by Marcus A. Roberts

Barely a day goes by when I don’t rant about TLJ so in the public safety interest of my friends and family over the holidays, Stefan has kindly allowed me to put down an (edited) version of my take on this. 

*Spoilers*

Kingsguard in the concentration camps

This post comes out of a new series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to mini-podcasts I'm doing with Sean T. Collins answering questions by listeners of the podcast. Give the Patreon a look!

 The shades dismounted from  their ghostly horses. When they drew their longswords, it made not a  sound. "He was going to burn the city," Jaime said. "To leave Robert  only ashes."

 "He was your king," said Darry.  

"You swore to keep him safe," said Whent.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Warning: There be spoilers (duh).

 

Since watching "The Last Jedi", I have been absolutely dumbfounded by the criticisms this movie receives. It's not that I don't get some people not liking it - I actually have a pretty spirited discussion with Sean, since he disliked the movie and I didn't -, yet, so much of what I hear and read on the Internet is showing a lack of understanding what the movie is actually about. Finn's mission to the Casino doesn't change or achieve anything? No really? This is a) false and b) kind of the point, but more on that in a minute.

 

I don't even want to go in the gross misreadings that abound in the right-wing sphere, where Star Wars was "ruined" by the fact that an Asian-American actor has a major speaking role and women aren't told by men what to do (seriously, there's a host of criticism in that vein from the #Gamergate-scum around). 

 

So let me take the opportunity to lay out some of the plots and themes for you. 

Space Lions

This post comes out of a new series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to mini-podcasts I'm doing with Sean T. Collins answering questions by listeners of the podcast. Give the Patreon a look!

I watched Shut Up And Sit Down's documentary "Space Lions" about Twilight Imperium Fourth Edition the other day. For those of you uninitiated to any of these terms: Shut Up and Sit Down are a great YouTube review channel about boardgames and "Twilight Imperium" is the definitive game of epic space operas, about which I wrote before.