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| Tue Feb 24 03:37:27 UTC 2026 | Just this once and never again, my Disney Star Wars opinion. |
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This is going to be a bit of a rant about media, particularly about takes I keep being steamrolled with whenever I try and act in good faith and make a new friend by discussing our media interests. This is going to be about the ‘Disney ruined Star Wars’ discussion. So, some disclaimers. Do I like Star Wars, specifically the first two trilogies and pre-Disney extended universe? Sure. It's not my favourite sci-fi universe, but I grew up on the original Clone Wars run and KOTOR. I can claim more association with this franchise than most. Do I care for the direction the franchise has been taken since the Disney acquisition and the explosion of streaming series? Not at all, but I will insist my personal reasons why be heard, because I so often find myself being talked over whenever this topic comes up in person, and I just so happen to find myself with this space of my own now. The entire premise of a Star Wars sequel trilogy was boring and creatively bankrupt from the start. I know it’s become a point of contention between millenials and older generations who saw the prequels release and those of us who grew up with them instead, but I honestly will die on the hill that the Star Wars prequels are worth something. I personally respect that George Lucas had something to say about his contemporary political landscape. The entire premise of pitching a prequel trilogy to your kitchy 80s space opera which itself spawned from an incredibly 70s B-movie, and making it a cautionary tale about the rise of totalitarianism is such a choice to me that I find myself respecting it. The sequel trilogy, though? Disney just wanted money, I don’t think anyone will argue that. The sequel trilogy wasn’t bad because the boring female protagonist made a bunch of men upset – Anakin was just as much of a messianic prodigy and it’s worth asking why no one ever cares about that. This trilogy was simply designed to produce more formulaic Star Wars content, to the extent that John Williams had to integrate pretty much every legacy character’s motif into Rey’s theme in order to pay off any possible half-assed reveal of her character that they couldn’t be bothered actually planning ahead of time. Even as a barely-conscious young teen I came out of that theatre thinking ‘they totally just made the first one again.’ I really don’t think it’s much deeper than that. But here’s the rant. We need to be honest, none of the popular discourse about Star Wars following the Disney acquisition has been even remotely in good faith, at least not what I’ve been exposed to. On the off chance you’re reading this and you’re one of the people who cites the efforts to integrate women and more casting and cultural diversity into Star Wars as the reasons it has declined in your eyes, let’s be for fucking real. Star Wars most likely stopped being interesting to you because the people put in charge of it were intentionally put there on the basis of not liking in Star Wars. That’s a decent line of argument, I think there’s plenty of reasons a fan of a franchise might feel alienated by a new direction intentionally designed to attract new eyes to the property. But I lied in my opening, I’ve never heard in-person that Disney ruined Star Wars, invariably what I hear is that ‘feminism ruined Star Wars,’ and I need to talk about that. This is something I’ve had said to me multiple times, with zero sense of irony or self-awareness, and because this is something that’s been idling in my brain for the last day or so since having it happen again, I’m going to take my time to address this theoretical person directly. Get your fucking head out of your ass. Realise for once in your life, that virtually every major franchise until recently has been directly catered to you and your tastes, if you’re a 20 to 40 year old man of any class living in the West. The Star Wars you like hasn’t gone anywhere (ridiculous Special Edition edits aside, that’s a whole other topic) and you have virtually every other successful film, television and comic book franchise catering to you. If this is your first taste of a franchise you like being ruined for the sake of people who didn’t even like it to begin with, I welcome you to one of the most miniscule frustrations of womanhood. I’d like to pivot to one of my favourite pieces of media. I’ve been a distant appreciator of comic books ever since Sam Raimi introduced me to Spider-Man. Growing up though, I was never able to shake the feeling that these comics weren’t really being written for me. Every cover with a woman on it had her all tits-ed up, and characters like Mayday Parker were just not at all written to be even remotely relatable to me, like Peter Parker was for his audience. I loved those Dark Knight and Spidey stories when it came to the more universally-relatable and human elements, sure, but I’m not going to hold any hands about how proportions like these (cover of Spider-Girl issue 1, 1998) can be alienating and harmful to young girls and women. If that upsets you, get a fucking grip and think about someone else for once. Flash forward to 2018, though. Into The Spider-Verse releases, and we got Gwen. They took Gwen Stacy, a character whose historical significance before that was how her death affected the male protagonist, and made her a drummer in a start-up punk rock band with her own baggage and story completely separate from Peter’s familiar origin, and she was my age. I can’t even begin to describe how nice it felt to finally have a comic run that felt like it was made with someone like me in mind, especially post-Comicsgate. When the trailer for Across the Spider-Verse dropped years later, and she had that pride flag on the wall, I genuinely cried. Needless to say, I got caught up on the original Jason Latour Spider-Gwen run and I still massively appreciate his pitch for the character and those original 2015-2019 arcs to this day (here’s your ‘not all men’ moment if you’re really that sensitive.) Regrettably, though, the thing that brought this character to my attention, also saw her popularity skyrocket with the general comic-reader audience as well. I remember really enjoying the Seanan McGuire Ghost-Spider run in 2020, and I was even more floored that a woman and at least one female artist were writing and inking this character now. But then all of a sudden, their run wasn’t renewed. The arc we were right in the middle of was completely abandoned, the character was handed to a new male writer, and all of a sudden we’re on some shitty multiverse story where Gwen’s character is reduced to a lame one-dimensional note about not being there for her friends enough. And of course, just to really usher in the new story, we had to get her all dolled-up and given pornstar proportions for the covers. They even gave her old bangs from the 60s back, because it’s not as if this was an intentionally different take on Gwen Stacy or anything. I tried reading this run, but it just completely lost me, and every time I look back in on the character to see if there’s a new jumping-on point I could try and read again, it’s just the same covers and writing every time. It’s a worse version of the dilemma I hear Star Wars fans bemoan at me constantly, because at least the stories they like were finished. I wanted to dedicate so much space to this tangent to try and make it clear to this theoretical disenfranchised Star Wars fan that you aren’t the first or the only fan who has had this happen to you, but you are so much louder and treated with so much more credibility in your takes by your peers than I’ve ever seen myself or my female friends be treated with. There are absolutely bigger fish to fry when it comes to men speaking over women, but this was supposed to be a piece about annoying Star Wars fans, so that’s the scope I’m limiting myself to here. The short of it is, I don’t care that your franchise got ruined and you think women are to blame, you’ve had the damn thing for fourty years and your favourite parts aren’t going anywhere. Grow a personality, watch something else for once, and stop blaming women for everything you don’t like. There’s a good chance you’ll actually end up better for it if you stop and think about what makes the media you like work for you. If your baggage genuinely is with seeing women on the screen instead of the creative black hole that is franchise media, though, keep that shit in your echochamber and cope harder, you gross fucking chud. |
kibachee 2026 |
