Has Disney already bastardized its newly acquired Star Wars franchise beyond saving? Prolific blogger Bradford C. Walker presents a well-sourced case for concern.
One more big red flag keeps coming up in the new stuff for Star Wars: Moral Relativism.
This keeps appearing. It started with all that “Grey Jedi” bullshit during the Expanded Universe, and now in the new canon you see it in the comics and novels first before it comes to television and the films. Rogue One was the first big show of it in action, as usual done with plausible dependability, but now with the Bendu in Rebels and all the fan-blather that the new trailer prompted we’re getting more of that Fan-Dumb that I find bothersome and stupid.
Again, for those that missed it the last time I posted it, this is George laying out what the Force is about. Note the date; this was a writers’ meeting for Season 3 of The Clone Wars, which is in the new canon unchanged so this IS the official position (i.e. “Yes, the Jedi are correct.”)
The video that Bradford refers to is only five minutes long and is required viewing for anyone who still labors under the illusion that Disney is competent to helm this franchise.
I’ve always maintained that Lucas is the best idea man in the business. Say what you will about the artistic failure of the prequel trilogy, Lucas has a rare talent for perfectly managing his vast stable of influences and synthesizing them into something greater than the sum of their parts. His main deficiency is as a director. The concepts that he lays out in plain language above are far more elegant and internally consistent than they’re made to appear on film. It’s a problem of telling vs. showing.
Ascended Fans who’ve been led into error by Lucas’ difficulties with showing what he wanted say are compounding the signal to noise problem while adding more problems of their own. Bradford explains:
Go on, try to lie to me and say that you can mix Good and Evil like that. That “balance”, that “grey”, is just an excuse for moral degeneracy. It’s not like we don’t see, in graphic detail, MULTIPLE TIMES where this goes and how this ends- both in multiple stories and in real life. He said nothing that wiser, smarter, and far more holy men haven’t said many times before (and got martyred for it); he just put on new trappings and sold it well. Star Wars is Superversive.
Which is why I find the official stuff out of the official love-in throwing up so many red flags for this–again, remember who’s running the show now: Ascended Fans, no less prone to Fan-Dumb than the rest–that I cannot ignore it. Nothing would destroy the value of the franchise faster than diving into that known fraud of Moral Relativism.
As wiser men than I have pointed out, the devil’s lie isn’t that black is white. It’s that everything is gray. Only moral idiots and psychopaths would fall for the line that murder, theft, and lies are intrinsically good. The con that opens with, “There is no black or white, and only you can determine the difference between good and evil for yourself,” is a far more seductive–and effective–assault on objective morality.
Nothing will get me committed to making a fork faster than proof positive that this form of pozzing is now policy- and yes, even something so beloved as that can be forked, successfully, and made to surpass it far sooner than you’d think.
Disney has given ample warning that they always intended to murder Star Wars and dress up their cynical corporate agenda in its flayed skin. Star Wars is dead. It’s just not broke…yet.
The comments on Bradford’s original post are a goldmine of theologically informed criticism.
Durandel Almiras:
Vox Day has said similar, that if they mess up Star Wars, and it looks like they will, then it needs to be forked and said forking will do far better. He thinks it needs doing regardless of the next two films simply because of the theology of the force, if you will, is messed up (and mideclorians). Why would killing the bad guy who is killing your friends make you suddenly evil and have a penchant for ruling a galaxy wide tyranny? The Light/Good vs. Dark/Evil needs to be preserved and moral relativism rejected, but the functionality of the force needs to make more sense in regarding the human condition. The Dark side needs to act more like sin that is always tempting the user and encourages the person once they start down that road…think of how St. Ignatius explains encouragement in Discernment of Spirits.
I think many of us SW fans would like a fork of the series that made sense to the human condition and stayed closer to the pulp that inspired it while also adopting superversive standards.
Jon Mollison:
You ain’t kidding about that last bit. Hell, in a lot of ways Star Wars was just a forked Buck Rogers.
Archaeopteryx:
A lot of it seems like Lucas, and/or EU creators keep trying to have the Force simultaneously represent Good/Evil and Yin/Yang (or they have somehow confused to two concepts). This confusion is why crazy shit like righteous anger at injustice can turn people ‘dark’. It also would contribute to people trying to come up with various Grey Jedi philosophies in attempts to solve this discrepancy, even if they don’t consciously realize there is such.
And as the man of the hour, Bradford gets the last word:
Part of it is that fans often take what a character says as being wholly correct, and don’t pay attention to the actions and their consequences. The result is that they miss when characters are wrong in word, deed, or both and thus subtlety is lost. That inability to deal in such things is a big reason for a lot of Fan Dumb (which feeds back into the miseducation of recent generations, but that’s another post).
But now? Post-buyout we’re seeing this come from the top, and (as with the previous post) I think this is Kathleen Kennedy pushing a policy. I can’t prove it yet (unlike the feminism fraud), but I suspect it.
That’s the big difference. It’s one thing to have an incompetent, and therefore inconsistent, editorial oversight. It’s another to impose relativism by policy from the head office.
A major reason that movie studios, comic book companies, and big publishing houses can continue to push corporate propaganda against their customers’ wishes is the international conglomerate sugar daddies whose deep pockets insulate their subsidiaries from the natural consequences of their bad decisions. You won’t see a course correction until the parent company starts getting hit where it hurts: in the pocketbook.
As Bradford and his astute commenters have said, forking such co-opted IPs can help to hasten the onset of this salutary pain.
Star Wars came about as a reinvention of classic stories from the pulp era. There comes a time when all works of human hands are in need of renewal. For Star Wars, that moment is long overdue.
May the fork be with you.
–Nathan Housley