Rey failed on several occasions with audiences in general. First, some fans weren't happy that she essentially did the exact same story as Luke when TFA came out... only being instantly better than him at learning the force on her own. Then with TLJ, her character was done another disservice by doubling down on this approach. As they basically flipped ESB story and had Rey rejecting Luke's teaching for the better, when arguably when Luke ignored Yoda he paid dearly for it... then on top of that was the obvious trope of having to tear down established characters, read Luke, to make the new character better in comparison. Next, let's not forget now setting up a romance with the man who arguably killed her only father figure just 1 week earlier and nearly cut her friend in half. Really made Rey appear shallow and superficial. In contrast to the approach of having to tear down an established character, like Luke, the Legends character Mara Jade was beloved by nearly everyone because she simultaneously enhanced Luke's character while also being a foil to his idealism with her blunt pragmatism. Then, she wasn't written as stronger or weaker, just very competent but a very different set of skills. Mara was designed to complement Luke. While Rey in contrast had to tear him down to establish herself, doing the exact same thing. Then, we had TRoS where Rey is set up to now not love Kylo but be the other half of his soul without explanation (and being half his age and unrelated was very weird). But the biggest issue was having her take Luke's name after essentially doing everything he did but better too... in a storyline where she didn't respect him and was more raised by Han and Leia. Rey was basically Hollywood 101 of his to copy someone else's homework and still get it wrong. Their strategy was build it and they will come, and when that stopped working was to then insult their customers and tripling down on their bad writing. Characters like Leia, Mara, and Ahsoka worked incredibly well with their male counterparts and enhanced their character arcs and gave them great character dynamics too. Characters like Rey in contrast was basically plagiarism of Luke's character and had to have the storyline degrade his character so she could be better against him. So it's no wonder fans rejected her... her very character rejected their franchise. Both it's key characters and had to undo all the prior accomplishments so Rey could do it again.
Honestly most of the Sequels characters feel like rips on prequel and OT characters. Kylo and Vader's arcs have a lot of similarities (betrayed by the Jedi of their time, destroys the order, struggles with the light and dark sides of the force) Poe and Han? Both hotshot pilots, both have criminal underworld backstories, both are a bit arrogant but ultimately values their friends over everything else Rey and Luke you already covered Finn has pieces of Han's backstory (trained by the empire/first order but abandons them) but they didn't do enough with Finn in later films to really go farther than that Then you have TFA's storyline that basically rips off A New Hope (an important piece of information is held by people on the run from the empire/first order, eventually the main cast end up with it and have to deliver it to the rebellion/resistance, and in the final act the big powerful super weapon gets destroyed). The sequels just didn't have original characters or story in general until TLJ which had its own problems, and TRoS was basically left with a giant clusterfuck to try and clean up as best it could.
This comment nails it. I couldn't agree more. When TFA came out I was ready to embrace Rey, Finn and Poe as the new leads. I really wanted something new, but I got ANH again instead. At the time I theorised this was on purpose. That all those parallelism were there to make a point about the cyclical nature of history, and Rey being so overpowered was a mistery in it of itself for the second movie to explore. I really really thought they were going the Avatar route and they'll make her Anakin reincarnated, which would connect her to Luke, Kylo Ren and both sides of the force. But instead we got a meta "story" made reactionary to public reaction which had nothing to say by the end. But I swear I was so open and ready for those new characters, and clearly it didn't deliver.
Thank you! I’m glad other people get it, I’ve explained this to others and they ignore the franchise history in favor of character attacking those that criticize this trilogy
She didn't fail in the movies, and because of that, she failed with the audiences. Still, I don't think the people are "rejecting" Rey or hate her neccesarily. I think most people just see seven through nine as atrocious films. I was in the minority but I hated The Force Awakens when it came out. And my gripes was the same as GL himself, there was nothing new, it was a poor retelling of ANH. The problem with modern Lucasfilm is, they know how to make interesting Star Wars characters, but they don't know how to write the story out for them. Ben as a fanboy of Vader, neat idea, story fell flat. Finn, a defecting stormtrooper from the First Order, neat idea. story falls flat. Poe, Ace pilot, story falls flat, and even screamed at for doing and acting like the character was thought up to do, and made as an example from a woman with purple hair with the message "Sit down in the corner and shut up." Rey, analog of Luke, cool, story falls flat, because the only thing they thought of that was new was how she did everything well like a perfect princess. She even pulled off airshow post stall maneuvers in the Falcon with zero hours flight time behind the stick of it, just so Finn could get a bullseye shot on a tie in a jammed turret, which Rey could never have set up herself with the exception of plot armor. And if Poe tried that, he'd have been screamed at in the scene after. Every character in the trilogy was mishandled by poor writing, period. New character and the classic ones.
I'm reminded of a time that George RR Martin was asked how he wrote such diverse and well rounded female characters. He said "I just write them like real people". If Rey's story was written more like Luke's, with struggle, triumphs and failures, she wouldn't need to be a Strong Female Character, she'd be beyond that and be a great character, in the company of Leia, Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor.
I would agree with you that a badly written character is a problem but Disney has a way of pushing their politics on screen and they seem to intentionally try to push these superwomen who can do everything men can do just better. Sorry but in my mind pushing that type of woke garbage takes it from a badly written character to the next extreme. Only surprising thing was that I believe she was straight and they didn’t make her a minority
This reminds me of something author Tom Wolfe said when asked how he wrote such realistic women. He said, "I write my women characters the same way I write my male characters. Then I remove all logic." Don't blame me. It was Wolfe who said it.
Rey was written by the kind of person who thinks "Strong Female Character" means "a character who is a strong female," rather than "a female who is a strong character." Of course, the writing room on the sequel trilogy was a bunch of no-balls, corpo shills who are to afraid of making a character "unlikeable" to give them any character traits, let alone flaws, lest it impact action figure sales.
@@cassianogunji It's perhaps ironic that the likes Kathleen Kennedy are actually ruining the 'strong woman' archetype in films. You can have as many badass women characters as you want, but if you can't write them well you can't blame the fans for not liking your character, because you dug the hole for your creation!
Rey was not just a female character, she was overpowered. In the Disney trilogy, women made all the smart decisions and the men were turned into manchild type characters.
Yeah, they do this a lot. They can only have a strong female. But if you look at the old ones, Leia was a strong female and so was solo. Towards the end, she softened up a bit, and his womanizing edge softened.
All the women except Admiral Purple Hair(forgot name), she tried and failed to lead, then tried and failed save her own hide only to make the fluke "one in a million" collision through hyperspace. lol
Scifi and fantasy readers are some of the most open minded and accepting group as long as the story is good, from my experience. That Disney et. al. have managed to alienate that audience is one of the biggest shames of this whole mess.
You don’t even have to be open minded to appreciate a well written, actual strong female character. Unfortunately, there aren’t many of them these days.
Disney SET OUT TO ALIENATE CERTAIN STAR WARS FANS BECAUSE DARTH KK FUKN HATES CERTAIN STAR WARS FANS AND DIDNT WANT THOSE CERTAIN FANS AS DISNEY CUSTOMERS
This the smartest take. I hate when people just slap woke on everything and don't articulate shit. Always find it funny when people talk about needs being racist or bullies. Don't get me wrong, there of course are gonna be some but most were just shy dudes who probably got picked on and were happy to talk to anyone if they could relate to the conversation.
It's more than that. They failed to be respectful to its audience and the legacy characters that came before. Force Awakens had so much hype for all the wrong reasons, that the ones that DID see what was going on in the trailers alone were ahead of the curb. The Last Jedi is the movie that woke everyone up to the true realization of what they asked for. And half of the largest fanbase on earth wanted no part of it.
How they allowed a single frame to be shot without a broad stroke story outline going from A to B to C is one of the biggest crimes in pop culture history.
If Rey would have been a man, I would still have the same complains about "Ron", a poorly written, unsympathetic, unrelateable character with no development at all, a blatant power fantasy of the writer. Even Anakin and JarJar were better fleshed out in the prequels, and they were cringeworthy back then.
What i don't understand about Disney is that they have to humiliate their male heroes. If you humiliate luke, han, thor and so on, you can't explain it away with natural character growth. The problem is that young boys will look for male heroes in other media like anime. It is no suprise that the mario movie was such a success.
Don’t forget Jack Sparrow in the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie. He was dumbed down to a bumbling idiot in order to make the new female lead look better.
That's all Kathleen Kennedy. Kathleen's being humiliated all her life serving coffee when she should have been a visionary film director. Well that's what she thinks in her mind. look at the video footage of her on the stage with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and John Williams and you'll see exactly why
It's the only way they can think to make their female characters look good But a general problem with the industry now is that everyone writes like children. Mocking existing characters, self-inserts, mary sue's, cringe MCU comedy. All symptoms of the same disease. The writers aren't writers, just activists for The Message. And they've infected everything from movies to TV to games to D&D
In one review for the Lone Ranger movie, the reviewer wrote about a scene where the main character is dragged through horse poop, wondering, if the movie treats its main character this way, why should the audience feel any respect towards him? The same principle applies to these other new movies. It's astounding in comparison, reading Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy and the amount of respect the author has for Lucas' characters. Despite Han not being a space wizard, Leia being a pregnant fledgling space wizard, and Luke feeling out of his depths, they each rely on their strengths to help each other through seemingly hopeless conflicts. Han has impressive knowledge to exploit, Luke has the Force and his ethics to guide him, whilst Leia has intellect and her growing connection with the Force, and all of them have diplomatic skills to allow working with others. With an impressive intellect like Thrawn's for them to overcome, it's a riveting narrative building on established lore to make a worthy chapter in the Star Wars continuity. Zahn himself said writing an intelligent character like Thrawn was difficult, yet he seems to have achieved similar success with writing the rest of the cast with intelligence as well. Many contemporary writers refuse to work that hard.
I was really excites when Disney acquired Star Wars and introduced Rey. I couldn't tell you how many times a female has told me dismissively, that she "has never seen Star Wars"...so I welcomed the Rey character, especially after the time I ran across a father excitedly picking out toy lightsabers with his 2 daughters in the toy aisle... BUT... then Disney SQUANDERED all that hope and goodwill, by making Rey the lousiest Mary Sue EVER SEEN!!! She flew the pants off the Millennium Falcon, although we were never told much about her flight experience, She defeated an experienced Force user, trained in combat, although only possessing a lioghtsaber for the on-screen equivalent of MAYBE a mere day or two!! WITH NO TRAINING!! I don't blame Daisy Riddley, (much) DIsney obviously thought they could just shovel out some drivel and fans would swallow it.
Women don't like star wars en masse, men do- injecting stronk female killers into SW won't make women like it. This feminization of star wars thing is a war on nature and God.
I remember playing with toys as a kid and if my hero got stuck in a spot I couldn't figure out a way out I would just pretend they were the strongest, best, smartest and fastest ever while inventing new super powers... I should have gone into writing for Kathleen "the destroyer" Kennedy at 8 years old, unfortunately my imagination is a lot more complicated since then
When she saved Han Solo by fixing the millennium falcon better than he could, for no other reason than to show how much better than him she was, I held out hope that she was luke or Leila’s long lost daughter and had flown on the falcon before and trained at the Jedi academy. But no, none of that, and it remains the most Mary Sue of Mary Sue moments.
@@nocrtname exactly. There were SO many cool things they could have done with her character…SO many ways they could have tied her to the previous films… but, no.. she’s just the bestest EVAR just ‘cause she is…
Chato actually explained this extremely well. Companies often aquire other companies to expand their brand. But sometimes they don't know how to manage them and fail to integrate them well. Disney "princessed" the Marvel and Star Wars brands and assumed they would achieve the same sort of broad appeal that their brand had while retaining their original audiences. But it wasn't a good match, and the original brands lost their identity, as often happens during an acquisition. I should know, I sold my company, and one of my priorities was to see it maintain it's identity and retain it's staff and stay creatively involved. Within a short time I had been asked to move on and stop giving input and all but one of my original employees had left. The new owner wanted freedom and control to use the assets he had purchased as he saw fit. So yes, Disney gained a lot from buying Marvel and Lucasfilm, but in the long run the brands were damaged as they lost their identity in the larger Disney corporate structure. The same thing has happened to Pixar. Disney managed to regenerate its own animation department in the process, but Pixar has by now lost its own unique identity and should really just be collapsed into Disney animation. It's not a premium or differentiated brand, has no different voice or unique identity or style or audience. It's just another Disney animation pipeline. In some ways it's not at all surprising that having Disney eat these brands was hard on them and changed or diluted what made them what they are, or were. People were worried about it when it happened. It just took a little while. It didn't happen all at once up front. It was a process as they were slowly subsumed into the larger corporate entity. I think, in the long run, that Disney just wasn't a great fit for either Marvel or Star Wars (or Fox, but then they don't seem to be trying to keep that brand alive). Disney also runs the risk by incorporating so many brands that are different from it own of diluting it's own brand and losing it's own identity. Disney wants to be all things to all men. And that just might be an enterprise too big and too complex to stand up under it's own weight. It may become necessary for it to collapse and be seperated into smaller, more distinct entities. And that happens with companies too. Their aquire and they sell off.
Also a little detail, that they seem to openly hate men in general. There's that thing in there too, might have some consequences I think. May have had a bit of an effect.
Never really thought of corporate buyouts as company vore, but it does make sense. Dollar Tree has done nothing but go downhill since Dollar General bought them.
I would argue that Rey wasn't the root of the problem. The problem was sacrificing the things we already cared about. The fact that they propped up Rey, as if she was the only thing that mattered, made her the face of the controversy. But in reality most people's problem with the Sequels is that 7 killed off the Jedi, crippled the Republic, and destroyed Luke, Han, & Leia's family. Then 8 dashed all hope that Luke may be up to something clever and hastily wrapped up most of the interesting storylines established in 7. Then 9 piled a bunch of nonsense on top of that. If they had done a Sequel Trilogy focusing on the New Republic, New Jedi Order, and Luke, Han, & Leia dealing with new challenges and overcoming them, then most people wouldn't have been annoyed by a superpowered new character like Rey. But because everything was killed off so totally and hastily -- with Rey being the only one in a position to fix it -- it feels almost like she's "stealing" what ought to have been theirs. That doesn't mean she shouldn't have achievements - but the new characters' achievements should be things added to the old characters' achievements - not just replacing the things the old characters failed to achieve.
I remember they screened the TFA trailer at a Comic-Con I was at. There was general excitement for it, but you can probably guess the one scene that made the audience clap and cheer: The one where Han and Chewie show up and he says "Chewie, we're home." Audiences wanted to see their old favorite characters come back and do cool stuff again. They weren't against new characters... but this new trend of destroying old characters (mostly the male ones) to "make room" is the woke crap that has destroyed these franchises. And yeah... 7 was flawed as hell for the reasons you stated, and also because you apparently had to read a tie-in comicbook to even understand why Leia was leading "The Resistance" instead of being a part of the New Republic's armed forces. (I kept waiting for them to explain that in the SLIGHTEST during the movie.) But then 8 was a trainwreck from the first battle with lore-breaking plot "twists" and extremely irritating characters (Holdo!!). And then 9... yeesh. At least that one was REALLY riffable. But only because all hope had already been lost.
It's very appalling that we're being called any word that ends with "ist" when we literally grew up with female characters who were actual badass. They truly don't get it.
I hate it when the the Star Wars fandom gets slandered yes there is toxicity but 1 not EVERYONE is like that and 2 simply calling it out is not going to stop it…
@@Milothemighty10 Part of the problem though is when the loudest portion of the community are railing against a character because its a woman, if the rest of us aren't speaking up and saying they're wrong, the message the rest of the world gets is that we either agree or don't care. I'm not saying we agree with that portion of the community, or that we don't care. That's what people are going to think though.
@@icoss88 i can only speak for myself, but I'm apathetic to Star Wars nowadays. I really don't care what the rest think. If the rest of the world wants to believe the slanderous ideological cult that think they understand the world better than the rest of us and can fix the problems just because they scream the loudest, so be it. I'm fine with humanity willingly destroying itself, especially if they want to live in ignorance. There is no point dealing with people who will not change their views even if you give them evidence that disproves it. They will only learn when they are hurt by it. And by then, it's too late.
Rey wasn’t rejected because she was a female. All the Star Wars channels became huge after the force awakens. So they accepted her(sure some criticism over her being a Mary sue) but they could have explained that in future movies. Where Ruin Johnson didn’t. He instead made a movie for himself . Rey was just some over powered girl who taught Luke the master a lesson she even beat him in combat. Leia and holdo ended up lecturing Poe despite his anger being justified . Rose had to teach Finn about war(despite him growing up in war) . DJ being a turn coat, hux becoming a punching bag. The only female to suffer any loss in the movie was phasma and she was hardly in in. The only male character to be any good was Kylo ren (when you find out it’s because he was George’s character makes sense) Then Luke dies in the end snd everyone is “oh it’s ok peace and purpose. We have everything we need.” Literally we waited years to see grandmaster Luke and for most of the movie he was just grouchy mark hamil . We finally get to see him in action and he dies. Is the audience were heartbroken where everyone in the movie is totally ok with grandmaster skywalker coming back for one second just to die. Holdo had the same role as Luke yet she was treated more heroically (despite being a new character and not a 40 year beloved one) and the student learned something. We saw the writing on the wall. These were not sequels they were disneys remakes of the original trilogy. So Rey was getting power boosted just to get Luke’s role. She was rejected then because she wasn’t a strong character. She was made to be strong to replace Anakin and Luke (as the chosen one and rebuilder of the Jedi order) so Disney could make Star Wars there own. Now they are doubling down on it with an episode 10. J.s Rey should not be the lead. I’d prefer it’s not even her that rebuilds the Jedi. Have grogu do it.
Disney star wars has included stronk female super killers for the express purpose of emasculating and overshadowing men from TFA onwards. The movie is literally about Rey being an unbeatable super killbot. This is indisputable- failing to acknowledge that breeds further contempt and apathy in the fanbase.
I was simply in the "let's see where they take this" after episode one of this fanfiction trilogy. I had some ideas. I was pumped. A third into the second episode, they had already squandered every chance at a decent story. I gave up. I would have skipped the third one if it wasn't for peer pressure, and I really regret going. It felt like dessecration. Starwars is over. I've moved on. I kept offline copies of the original trilogy in case Disney tries to memory-hole them (wouldn't put it past them...) and yeah, sequel too even though they're not that great, they're ok-ish, but at least they're not trying to stab me.
@@MadsterV I have the theatrical releases of the OT on DVD. It only bugs me that I haven't been able to make copies of them... not to sell, but to preserve. I fear damaging them in any way.
First, I was one of those 80s kids who watched both He-man and She-ra. I never noticed that they stopped making He-man cartoons, but now that I know this, I can't help wondering why. It seems to me that they should have just made both. I would have watched both. Second, Rey is difficult to relate to. Her goal in life is to sit on that dried up rock and wait for her family. What is interesting about that? Luke's goal is to leave the rock he's stuck on for a life of adventure, fighting against the evil Empire. Who would you rather watch?
The "why" was almost definitely a suit who said "well He-man is a super strong guy, and Shera is a super strong woman...why the hell would I fund both they are the same." Thus not realizing that even for those who liked both, they would eventually drift away due to subconsciously(or in other cases consciously) missing He-man as a character and feeling cheated for not seeing his story continue.
The why is for cost cutting issues, they could not afford to animate 2 series at the same time. They intended on running he-man re-runs until she-ra caught up, then the 2 would join in a series together. This never came to be simply due to the audience outgrowing the series, causing the series to die out.
There is ONE Critical Difference between todays MODERN Female Lead in comparison to their Male counterparts is that these Females are OVER POWERED right out of the gate. There is ZERO Character Development. There are NO setbacks or heartaches. There are NO trials or Tribulations for them. there is NO learning Curve. They DESTROY their Enemies, embarrassing and besting them in Combat on their first try with NO training, ESPECIALLY if it'a man, REALLY ESPECIALLY if it is a Caucasian Man, then they get their ARSE handed to them Faster than INSTANTLY. This goes the same for many women authors out there. The Majority of women authors write their Female Protagonist as PERFECT while writing their Male counterparts as bumbling idiots or close to it. Women such as Margaret Weiss and JK Rowling are the exception to this rule. While someone, such as Atwood amplifies it. MALES are BAD and EVIl or CORRUPT and SOULLESS while their Females are Virtuous and Perfect in Every way. Then read many male authors books and novels, the Vast Majority of them will have a STRONG female lead, that is equalled by her male counterparts, or their Male Protagonist will have a Smart, Intelligent, Witty, Sexy, Fun Female Co Pilot that brings a different approach to the table and adds to their Males partnership. Ergo, if it wasn't for the timing of her, the Male would have missed out on a crucial element or perished even. BIG DIFFERENCE. Enter Kennedy and her FORCE is FEMALE and IP DESTRUCTION from the get go. It was by Her Design. She is a Misandrist of the WORST Kind.
They barely qualified the character. The truth is that Rey doesn't have a goal in mind, she is just moving forward. She doesn't know who she is, cannot decide If she wants to leave her rock or stay there waiting forever, and never showed a reason of why she is caring so much about the Resistance. The Empire killed Luke's family, what did the First Order did to Rey? Tried to take a droid from her... That she found 8 hours prior? It's nice for her to be this altruistic, but that's not enough to justify entering a GALACTIC WAR. They had no clue of what to do with Rey, KK demanded a female leas and the left the room, and everybody who knows JJ is aware that he cannot receive such creative liberty, he always fucks up.
He-man, the embodiment of masculinity and men's virtue, was infiltrated and replaced with she-ra, an emblem of female power . If you cannot see the forces at play here you are lost.
Forget about the obviously blatant misogynists - Most people don't hate the sequals because the main character is a woman. They hate it because A) there was never a coherent story or direction to it, and B) They werent really Star Wars movies - they were what some movie executive that hadnt watched them in 30 years THOUGHT a Star Wars movie was. In my opinion they never should have brought Luke, Han or Leia into the story at all. They should have just started fresh far into the future. It would have still had the 2 fatal flaws above, but at least then it wouldnt have carried the baggage of the previous characters legacy with it.
Setting the sequels far enough into the future that the legacy characters are all dead and forgotten would have been far more respectful than the treatment they got
Agreed, except the three principles were already signed, so they were going to get paid, regardless. Disney wasn’t going to let an opportunity to bait and switch go by especially since they had to pay them anyway.
Rey is a Mary Sue and they destroyed Han and Luke. Made them deadbeats and failures. Poe Dameron and Finn as well were chumps also. I bought multiple tickets for multiple viewings of The Force Awakens for my granddaughter who would cosplay Rey. Took the family to see The Force Awakens once and haven't been to a Disney movie since. Die Disney.
I was 7 when "A New Hope" came to theaters. Leah was world shifting for me. To this day, I still love and cherish her character. I was open to Rey. I was hoping JJ Abrams could bring back the things I felt were lacking from the prequels. I did not expect a do over of the arcs and relationships from "A New Hope". Those were Luke, Leah and Han's stories. I did not expect that Rey would be a Palpatine. It would have been far more productive if she had been no one in the galaxy and found her own worth. I was excited that maybe Rey would be someone who is like the Bindu and stands in the middle, between the light and dark side. A person we have never seen before. Nope, she's just a Palpatine. Why has Palpatine returned anyway? He is not such an amazing villain that he can't be supplanted with someone else. But I digress. I personally don't think that Rey, herself was the problem. And I am glad to hear someone take on the expectations of Disney on this. I was annoyed by all the hype about Acolyte and its female cast. I love having strong female leads, but there's something inherently wrong with the system if you have to create with that in mind. It might have worked in the 70s, when women were trying to have a voice. But we have one now, is it equal in every way to men's voices and cachet, no but it is there and doesn't need to be pandered to. Star Wars was one of the few places where characters were equal. It didn't matter who was lead. I think part of why early seasons of the Mandalorian were such a success is because it was a tight, 25 minute story in a familiar setting with characters who were equal. I loved the Armourer and Cara Dune, and they didn't have to be leads. They were just great characters who had opinions and skills that were valid and worthy to the show. I think a female lead is great, but it undermines the story if you use that to make some kind of social statement. Sorry this is so long. I am a huge fan and am old, so I talk a lot. Thanks for the video.
I think you're spot on. I think Disney decided to pander to women and girls with Star Wars. Pandering is just boring by itself. But worse, as you pointed out, they went beyond it to deciding to burn down everything from the original trilogy on top of pandering and creating a huge Mary Sue. I think that Leia was one of the best-written female characters in the past several decades. I've been a fan since I was a little kid. I once heard Carrie Fisher in an interview talking about that metal bikini and the creepy fanboys she had. While I'm sure there are plenty of them, I think that a huge portion of her male fans went beyond being mere fans of her physical attractiveness (although she was definitely attractive). Pretty faces are a dime a dozen in Hollywood. But very few have real enduring power. Leia was a great character because she stood up to Darth Vader; she endured torture to protect her people. She watched her world get destroyed, but instead of crumpling into sadness and depression she stuck with her mission. She was tough without losing her femininity. She put herself at great risk to rescue Han from Jabba's palace. She was kind to Luke when he lost his hand and found out that Vader was his father, throwing him into a major identity crisis and causing him to question his relationship with his mentor. Leia personified strong female leadership and femininity in one package. Had she just been a pretty face or a masculine lead with female plumbing, she'd have been forgotten in a couple of years. If Disney had simply Xeroxed Leia and given her a modern hairdo and makeup in order to make Rey (skipping the metal bikini), it wouldn't have been very creative, but it would have been a major improvement over what they did do. The male fans would have eaten it up. My guess is that they would also have done well with the female fans. But since they were pandering to one particular political definition of "feminine power" in their sequels, they squandered the opportunities provided by a four billion dollar intellectual property. Politics before profits, apparently. As a fellow old(ish) person, that's my rant. Here's to one day getting back to good writing (I hope).
Brony here. It was surprising--and is still _is_ surprising--how much the show staff accepted their surprise new audience. More world-hanging-in-the-balance magic duels between powerful magic users were written in, and there was even an episode where a character went to a convention for an in-universe fandom. (You know, totally things that little girls can relate to.) The convention scene is very much alive and well. I'm going to Everfree in Seattle this August and Trotcon in Dayton, Ohio this July. The voice actors seemed to genuinely like engaging with the fans at conventions where I saw them. At one convention, a VA surprised a fan event for her character--a reformed villain who formerly led a magicless cult--and graced us with her "villain voice," noting a distinct lack of "chanting and marching around" in the rest of the convention, and had deduced that something must have been up. This friendliness towards the audience shouldn't come as a surprise. The show came from Lauren Faust, who complained about previous versions of My Little Pony being too much about stereotypically girly things like "dresses, sleepovers, and endless tea parties." Her goal was to open MLP up to being for girls that, well, were more like her when she growing up. The show's main (mane?) cast shows audiences of all demographics that there's more than one way to be a girl, or by extension any demographic. The sort of love and inclusion that My Little Pony gave--and still gives after the "Generation 5" reboot--to its unexpected new male audience is something that companies which already _have_ male audiences could benefit in taking notes from. If I, a guy, feel more welcome by the My Little Pony show staff than by the Star Wars staff, something is wrong.
Wonderful insightly take. I knew there was a reason our whole family liked to watch some new My Littly Pony haha. I am not a deep fan or anything but I am a father that likes that all my kids like that show.
You even forgot Jyn Erso. That was two female leads back to back for the first two Disney SW movies, and no one complained. Let's remember the switch for most people was triggered by that godawful TLJ.
It's mind-blowing how a multibillion-dollar company can alienate, to the point of push back, its fan base by mishandling the main character of their four-billion-dollar franchise. Remember, it's an entertainment company.
Its like the old saying says:"If you chase two rabbits, both will escape". By trying to expand a franchise that was "mostly" for boys, they lost both boys and girls
Dead on. The solution is know your audience. Make sure that audience can sustain the scale of project your making, and cater to said audience. If you find out you misunderstood your audience (Say, 1/5 were female when you aimed at boys) it's time to find out what drew them. If it's what your already doing? Sweet, bonus audience! If it's something you could do more of without causing issues? Do it, at least in spinoffs. End of the day, the 'wider audience' is a myth.
Agree 100% : "If you chase two rabbits, both will escape" . . . Unfortunately, executives at places like Disney are too blinded to greed to understand this basic wisdom. Combine that situation with a few "girl-power" activists, who keep telling the executives that they can effectively double their ticket sales, by appealing to girls, and you get predictably bad results.
Disney doesn't want one specific audience, they want everyone, the corporate suits only see numbers and lines on a chart and they chose the biggest option available.
@@WillieHoule If anyone has been watching ANY marketing reports, they would see that the decisions are becoming LESS effective at bringing audiences. This HAS to be deliberate destruction of the franchises they bought. They can't be that blind or stupid.
Its the same thing as those superficial, uptight and strict parents telling their kids they cant have ice cream after dinner because its bad for them and then eating an entire bowl of ice cream in front of them. I have family like that, they remind me of Disney. They also watch those liberal minded, women centered and man hating movies too. That content is specifically made for those shitty types of people. Disney is giving content to hateful people.
@@d.t.garcia8705 You missed the point... or maybe just chose to ignore it. Entertainment is a "gendered" thing. Certain forms appeal mostly to men... others appeal mostly to women... while others appeal to both. When you have something intended for one audience or the other, and then try to shift that towards the center, you inherently REDUCE whatever attracted the original audience. The Star Wars sequel trilogy ran off a bunch of their male audience, and failed to attract enough of a female audience to make up for it. To put it another way that isn't gendered... Consider spicy food. Some like it. Some don't. Neither is "wrong". Put too much pepper in your dish, and people are going to refuse to eat it. The more pepper you add, the more people who will refuse to eat it. And yes, entertainment IS gendered... "chick flicks", soap operas, rom-coms, sports...
@@d.t.garcia8705 You think it's sexist to say, for example, that televised sports appeal mostly to men, and not to most women? Or that soap operas appeal mostly to females, and usually not to males?
Thanks for this! I have been saying this for years now. Don't buy IP then change it and whine that you lost the people who loved the original. Most people have forgotten that Disney bought SW and Marvel specifically for the boys. Then cursed therm out! Sick
I don't believe for a moment that they were being disingenuous with their intentions when they bought them. The problem is that Bob Iger was also the one responsible for flooding the company with intersectional feminists because he was irresponsibly using the Walt Disney Company as a tool to further his own personal political ambitions in Democrat party politics, whichever have hilariously seemed to fall flat so far. Now he's trying to salvage his damaged legacy after all of the ways in which he helped enable the decline of everything under the Disney umbrella.
Just finished season 3 of clone wars in my Star Wars chronological rewatch all the way from phantom menace to the mandalorian and more then ever when people accuse Star Wars fans of hating women due to peoples dislike of Rey the number one counter I see is Ahsoka because say what u will about her when she first started but unlike Rey she earned her status as a fan favorite…
Earned being key word. Ahsoka went through hell and back to earn our respect, and then our loyalty. She isn't popular because she's a woman, but because she's a whole character who went from arrogant snobby brat to one of the most quintessential 'true' Jedi we have alongside the likes of Qui-Gon Jinn.
She's not even a fan favorite- she is a fan favorite of a very specific subset of fans that grew up at that time during a Star Wars lull. Star Wars is generational- their plan to start their own feminist Star Wars generation was a massive failure and their plan b of appealing to the ahsoka crowd is too small and niche to make a difference. Their only solution was to use OT characters because all fans of all generations love them. But they would rather die than do that.
@Mister Sparkles I can agree to some extent that Star Wars fandom has a degree of generationalism to it, and I can even be persuaded that Ashoka's biggest fans are those who grew up with TCW, but it seems weird and straight up false to say that her "only" fans are those who grew up with it, nor do I believe in the slightest that the sequels trilogy failed because it tried to cater to "those fans." First of all, she didn't exist to exclusively appeal to a female audience. She isn't a one-dimensional feminist caricature of a woman like Rey is. Ashoka was originally widely disliked by almost everyone and earned a lot of people's respect through her character development and personal growth, something antithetical to the "strong female characters" who have no reason or way to grow except to realize how much more awesome they are. Those last two claims you made just seem wildly out of touch.
Coincidentally, one of the suggested videos after this is about Wonder Woman, and that got me thinking about why the first Wonder Woman movie worked. I think the reason why that movie worked is because it wasn't trying to make a point that "women are better than men". It made sense why Diana was more powerful than everyone else, because she's the daughter of a literal god, but they also made sure to include something for the males to do. I can still say that Steve Trevor is a good character because they made sure he was an important character in the plot, like helping Diana through the war, and sacrificing himself at the end. This is female representation done right. It's not forced, it's not detriment to any other story, it simply showed a strong female character kicking butt, but not upstaging the men. I am a male, and I still loved the movie, and consider it one of the best DCEU movies. This is what they should've done with Rey, as well as Captain Marvel
It also showed Wonder Woman with actual flaws, namely her idealistic and misandrist view of the world. She had real character lessons to learn, not just powering up Dragonball Z style like Captain Marvel did.
Wonder Woman worked because Diana was not only allowed to be an actual woman, but also had a balanced set of virtues and flaws and she treated the men around her as equals, like a true feminist would. Wonder Woman as a character is meant to be what women want to be. And what's better is that they actually kept her comic-accurate costume and it empowered her rather than sexualized her. As Patty Jenkins said, every woman wants to be sexy, therefore so is Wonder Woman.
There is the scene of WW crossing No-Man’sLand. There was an opportunity when Steve says “no man can cross it” for her to say something like “but maybe a woman can cross it” - instead it’s just “it’s what I’m going to do”
@Dark O-man I remember watching that scene and bracing for the cringe, only to be incredibly relieved that they didn't go that cheap and lazy route. The ending was a bit lacking, but the movie as a whole was really good. It's worth pointing out, though, that it wasn't really Patty Jenkins who came up with the story, and if she was involved in that, she was an assist in that. People often ignore the role Zack Snyder played in the development of that story, and he stands out in my mind as the single best example of someone who has at least one "strong female character" that's actually done right. They're incredibly competant and have their own individual agency, but they're actual characters in the way that they have virtues, flaws, strengths, and vulnerabilities, have actual character arcs, and don't exist to put one over on the men. On top of all of that, almost all of them are rid8clously attractive and aren't shy about that without reducing them to nothing more than eye candy.
There is nothing deep or complicated about this. The answer to any question about Rey is: "because". Rey is not believable as a character, a woman, or (and especially) a hero. The answer is usually not complicated. Galadriel and Capt. Marvel are patently unlikable. New Ariel is objectively worse than old Ariel (no motive, worse acting, maybe? better singing? maybe? / I don't wannabe disingenuous, she is clearly a more SKILLED singer, but showing off did make some songs actually worse.) Some are just utterly inconsistent, like Scarlet Witch (who we liked once, before she became inconsistent). And so on. Every female failure is a basic, uncomplicated, easy to define failure of writing. Period. New young replacement characters ALL have the same problem. They aren't people. They are powers wearing new clothes with a stolen identity. This is true for men too. Capt. America doesn't work for the same reason. Miles Morales is the only one that seems to be working at all, and it is because he isn't Peter in new clothes/skin - he is a person.
I used to love Scarlet Witch and generally liked her brutally smacking down Thanos, partly because her powers were well-established and had logical weaknesses (as pointed out in the opening of Civil War) and she had a damn good reason to want Thanos dead. Contrast this with Captain Marvel with her ridiculous power level and having no established dog in the fight with him.
There is ONE Critical Difference between todays MODERN Female Lead in comparison to their Male counterparts is that these Females are OVER POWERED right out of the gate. There is ZERO Character Development. There are NO setbacks or heartaches. There are NO trials or Tribulations for them. there is NO learning Curve. They DESTROY their Enemies, embarrassing and besting them in Combat on their first try with NO training, ESPECIALLY if it'a man, REALLY ESPECIALLY if it is a Caucasian Man, then they get their ARSE handed to them Faster than INSTANTLY. This goes the same for many women authors out there. The Majority of women authors write their Female Protagonist as PERFECT while writing their Male counterparts as bumbling idiots or close to it. Women such as Margaret Weiss and JK Rowling are the exception to this rule. While someone, such as Atwood amplifies it. MALES are BAD and EVIl or CORRUPT and SOULLESS while their Females are Virtuous and Perfect in Every way. Then read many male authors books and novels, the Vast Majority of them will have a STRONG female lead, that is equalled by her male counterparts, or their Male Protagonist will have a Smart, Intelligent, Witty, Sexy, Fun Female Co Pilot that brings a different approach to the table and adds to their Males partnership. Ergo, if it wasn't for the timing of her, the Male would have missed out on a crucial element or perished even. BIG DIFFERENCE. Enter Kennedy and her FORCE is FEMALE and IP DESTRUCTION from the get go. It was by Her Design. She is a Misandrist of the WORST Kind.
You can see the truth behind the filmmakers' intent by the barely concealed malice showed towards Luke and Han. They destroyed their legacy, and then them themselves.
All evidence to the contrary- every single Disney entry has added stronk female characters like Rey, and every single one o them has wounded the brand and turned off fans. Lucas' Star Wars is for boys, always was,always will be and no amount of iconoclasm is going to change that. The next stop in this mess is ahsoka and her band of stronk women killers.
Rey grew up on a sand planet and suddenly was a better pilot and knew the Aluminum Falcon better than Han (with no apparent training) and was a superior Jedi Master to Luke (with no apparent training). Han and Luke are white men deadbeat losers. That was the story from the beginning. Disney is run by people that hate men and white men especially.
It’s ok to admit that boys and girls innately are interested in different things, but that doesn’t exclusively mean they can’t appreciate similar things. But even if they made a My Little Pony with a male lead that doesn’t mean that boys are going to be any more interested in the genre. Put those male ponies into battle armor and send them into combat, and hey, you might have something good! Unicorn Commandos!!
Your idea wouldn't work. I was obsessed with MLP as a teen. It was my way of trying to wrest some form of validation from the 'female world.' I'd been taught that validation from there was the only validation that mattered. It never worked. I just got hurt. And holy hell, you should have seen how they treated male characters in that show.
Did you not watch the video? Girls can be interested in different things but boys are problematic if they don't enjoy girls content. It was his only point in the first 10 mins and you missed it
I think if Rey and the sequels were well written, there'd be zero issues. This includes cancelling the original book canon, throwing George's ideas into the garbage (rather than refining it), and failing utterly to follow up the most defining villain in cinematic history. The girl thing is a problem, but only because it was Kathleen's only concern: make a Skywalker replacement as her own self-insert power fantasy, already better in every way, and quickly bury George and be remembered for her greatness to a new generation that wouldn't know any better.
"You're toxic, trying to keep women out of Star Wars!" " Ahsoka is one of my favorite characters actually." " THAT'S BECAUSE YOU JUST THINK DAWSON IS HOT!" I'm not joking, that is literally their argument. I've had the debate before, that's what they said.
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe died off quickly because the kids watching the cartoon and playing with the toys aged out of it and it didn't pick up any new fans. The same thing happened with G.I. Joe and The Transformers and every other toy line that was made into an afternoon cartoon. All of these franchises peaked early and with each new wave the toys got cheaper-looking and sillier. Cobra-la? Pretenders? It had little to do with She-Ra. I think the biggest problem with the Sequel Trilogy (and Rey) in general is that it was conceived as a soft reboot of the franchise and not a continuation. The way the Star Wars was set up by 1980 is that we would get three trilogies, each covering a generation of Skywalkers, and telling a sweeping, epic story. The Sequel Trilogy floundered because the protagonist wasn't the offspring of Luke. It's like Disney/Lucasfilm went out of their way to insure that the protagonist was anyone but the child of Luke, and that's why the Sequel Trilogy didn't connect and they derailed the franchise. The old EU (starting with Heir to the Empire) worked and the Disney era doesn't. Star Wars might have started off as something for twelve year-old boys in 1977, but it grew into Generation X's "Lord of the Rings" with its own intricate mythology and history. And Disney bought it, not understanding what they were buying, and just wanted to churn out bland, banal content to sell toys and build theme parks and hotels around.
Another one of the reason He-Man toy saes collapsed was because they were so focused on creating and selling new figures, that they stopped making both He-Man and Skelator figures. Meaning those who didn't already have them (and I never did get my Skelator), now never could. It also meant that you couldn't start a collection, because the main Hero and Villian, were no longer available as a starters "entry purchase" to the collection.
Yes, that was a stupid baffling decision. The secondary market wasn't that strong back then... how were the new younger kids going to get into the toys of the franchise? Not via She-Ra.
It's probably been said a million times by now, but the failure of Rey has nothing to do with her being a woman. It's very concerning how hard that sentiment has been pushed on people - the fact that it somehow has anything to do with sexism and misogyny. That kind of thinking is sending society on a downward spiral It all comes down to poor writing and story telling. Rey basically has no character arc at all throughout the trilogy. The only thing that changes about her is that she continues to get absurdly overpowered and skilled with zero explanation. But her as a person doesn't change one bit. She never has any moments of major defeat or failure or setback. Anything bad that ever happens - HAPPENS TO SOMEONE ELSE that's around her. She is able to pull off force abilities that take years for Jedi to master in her very first movie - without having ever met a Jedi or having any idea how the force works or that those abilities even exist. She just does them. She has no issues beating Kylo Ren THE FIRST TIME SHE EVER TURNS ON A LIGHTSABER. Meanwhile, Ben spent almost his entire life being trained by freaking Luke Skywalker, and he should have absolutely stomped her - regardless of his injury She is never forced to fail or grow, she just steamrolls through the entire trilogy and plows through the bad guys while everyone else around her gets hurt or dies They made Luke a pathetic and grumpy old man that refuses to teach her, just so that they can have Rey be like, "Oh yeah, well I don't need your help i can do it on my own" - and then she does. It's really just ridiculous, and a complete waste
You’re DEFINITELY on to something here! “You hate strong women in Star Wars”! “Really? I love Padme, Leia, and Ahsoka! Whatcha talking about?!!” LOVE IT!!!!!!
Characters that are examples of virtue and heroism will appeal to anyone, anytime. Star Wars fans aren't anti-women. They are against feminist propaganda and MaRey Sue 'strong female protaganists'.
I agree with you, but I wouldn’t label this “feminist propaganda”. This is billion dollar corporations co-opting and exploiting the feminist movement, and giving people who want to see good characters (who happen to be women) on-screen for the right reason a bad rep.
@@slicerneons3300 another example of big corporations trying to make money off of feminism without truly helping the cause, unfortunately. they simply want to take money from people who support feminism and women in general without taking the time to create truly great female characters (ie. co-opting it) :/
Imagine spending 4 billion dollars buying an IP just to be THIS inept. Tbh anytime I fail in life I just remember that it didnt cost 4 billion dollars and it encourages me to keep going.
Market share. Star Wars caped with its current audience, the only way to expand was by introducing a new element to find a new audience. Like a burger restaurant adding pizza to the menu. The problem being, if a burger restaurant forgets to make burgers, they'll loose the market they established and only have the smaller pizza market, as there was already strong contenders making pizza. Fav-aloni are chefs making burgers from pizza ingredients, and it shows.
It was what I told my cousin when Disney first bought Star Wars. Leia is now a Disney Princess and they are going to cater Star Wars to girls because they already have Marvel for boys. What I never imagined was that after they failed epicly to make Star Wars the "Marvel for girls" they would proceed to try to instead make Marvel for girls and tank both properties. 😅
Considering Useful Idiots online tend to throw the sexist card around mind you people don't like Rey because she has no flaws or a character arc. People love Female characters who have flaws and a arc instead of being perfect like all the time that is how you create a Strong Female character.
Same for male characters. Like just make the story and arc of a character good and make it make sense. Add some struggle and then have the character overcome struggle.
I don’t think there is intended to be a lot of logic in their accusation of males gatekeeping vs girls not relating. That’s how they feel, so it is the truth.
One would be hard pressed to find anyone who dislikes two of the greatest characters in sci-if storytelling; Ellen Ripley and Sarah Conner. The narrative that you need to see yourself to relate or look up to someone is the dumbest idea to exist. I’ve always liked these two characters and wanted to be strong and determined like them. It’s just that they were written well, and both characters had exhibited past traumas to better themselves,. It’s so simple, just give us good characters and we will love them. They don’t even have to be human.. think about The Brave Little Toaster…
There's a conflict for superheroines and their costume designers--usually the superhero will have ONE costume, his trademark--but a heroine can't wear the same costume twice! Just ask Hollyweird! Gotta keep costume designers in business!
It's REALLY simple, Thor. Luke had a planned story and was handled expertly. Rey had NO planned story and what story we got was handled in a very hamfisted way. Simple as.
i was optimistic for TFA, i didn't even mind it being essentially another "A new hope" "it's fine" i said "they are probably trying to show us they can make another good movie" then TLJ happened. When i saw Luke throwing his lightsaber off the cliff, i got up from the chair and left the room. Nobody is against female leads but EVERYONE is against spitting on established characters
I remember watching She-ra as a child in addition to He-man, because I vaguely remember that there was an Orko-like character on She-ra that would hide somewhere during the episode -- to be revealed at the end -- and it was fun to try to find him. Maybe some of your other viewers can remember that, as well. With that said, I remember being four years old and, my father having gone on a business trip and returned with a gift for me, being completely stunned and confused when he gave me a purple My Little Pony toy. I remember, even as a child, saying, "Uh. This is for girls. Why would I want this?"
I think the issue with "strong female characters" in modern media is that they aren't written as female. We're getting badly written characters shoved into 'male' roles and told we're toxic if we don't like it. There are plenty of good (strong) female characters that are loved by men & women, that isn't the issue. The issue if women are being used as a crutch for bad writing.
I don't think there's any such thing as a "male role"; girls can do pretty much anything a guy can. It's just not being well written because they have an agenda to show women are BETTER.
When Rey was introduced in The Force Awakens, I absolutely enjoyed her character. I even liked specifically that the main character was female, it was something different within Star Wars. It was the writing of The Last Jedi and then Rise of Skywalker that I didn’t like. It wasn’t the character, it’s what they did with the character. Same goes for Finn and Poe, Luke etc..they started strong and then just dropped the ball completely. Daisy Ridley did an excellent job playing Rey. It’s what the writers did with Rey that was lackluster and left wanting.
I really feel bad for Daisy Ridley and John boyega. She really busted her ass for the role and he had such a promising potential story arc. The writing let them both down.
@@nocrtname Absolutely. Incredible things could have happened. All the groundwork was there for something that could have rivaled it’s predecessors. Then someone just flushed it all down the toilet.
If the upcoming Ahsoka series manages to have writing quality and production values anywhere near the ballpark of the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, I'm curious how they'll react to having their narrative utterly destroyed when it becomes a hit. I don't know exactly what they'll say, but I'm pretty sure they won't apologize to us.
@@moffjendob6796 I like waifus better than mary sues. At least Ahsoka has a wide arc of triumphs and challenges. We saw her grow A LOT whereas with Rey...not so much. She was already practically perfect in every way.
I am really hoping the show flops badly so Disney gives up and sells it back to Lucas for a fraction of what they paid for it. There are so many story arcs in the extended Star Wars universe that could be explored but Disney can’t do anything but destroy the franchise with their garbage
I wonder what it would be like if George Lucas was the one to write Rey's backstory. When TFA ended there were many theory videos, forums, etc. trying to figure out Rey's origins. Fast forward to the present and what we got ultimately ended up being worse than what could've been. As it stands, Rey's backstory across the sequel trilogy was all over the place thanks in no small part to Lucasfilm's lack of planning and direction. I don't know what made Kathleen decide to let Rian do what he wants with his part when they were making the sequel trilogy, only for her to call back J.J. again to try to fix the mess Rian made.
"When TFA ended there were many theory videos, forums, etc. trying to figure out Rey's origins." That's because they fell for Jar-Jar Abrams' trick of suckering _you_ into writing _his_ film for him. Remember: At that point Jar-Jar was supposed to be done writing and directing Star Wars films, so he didn't anticipate having to actually clean up his own mess. He could just do his "mystery box" tactic of posing a lot of questions he didn't have the answers to and then fade with his check and the rep for profits associated with the first live-action Star Wars movie in 10 years and the first one with the original cast in 35 years. So he waded in with his usual bad, lazy writing that was disguised by an air of mystery around it to misdirect attention away from its shortcomings. It wasn't until Ruin Johnson *_fucked his movie up even worse_* that Jar-Jar got called back to "fix" things, and even then it was only because multiple other directors were either fired off the project or wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
Disney and Hollywood Idea of strong women is women who can lift the rock, defeat the bad guy , and scream shit Not someone who can make impact to society and contribute to better future
The answer to this question is so simple: Rey is a badly written character (overpowered, no arc etc). That has nothing to do with her being a woman. The problem was that her creators then started to use her womanhood and alleged sexism to distract from their bad writing (it didnt help that truly toxic male "fans" like Nerdrotic seemingly proved their point by blindly attacking anything "woke" regardless of the actual quality of the content). They should focus on making good stories for female and male characters, like in Wonder Woman for example. Im sure most men are adult enough to enjoy female characters just as well as male ones if theyre WRITTEN just as well.
Rey couldn't hold a conversation with any other established female character because she'd put them to sleep because she's got 0 personality, the charisma of a cider block, and the character depth of a child's sand castle bucket. The writers for her have absolutely bo clue what they're doing or how to actually make her appealing to audiences of all backgrounds. No fault to Daisy, she's done and tried her best, its that others have massively let her down.
Strong male characters don't just appeal to men, they appeal to women too. Dumbing all the men down and destroying legacy strong men puts almost everyone off. And no, a prompt up Mary Sue with a non existent personality is not a fair compensation.
The death of Bronyism came because they keep rebooting the show to chase new audiences and that meant they started shedding the Bronies (who were focused on the continuity & characters of the show they liked). A good way to lose an audience -- but it also meant a lot of younger girls checked out too since their characters kept changing or disappearing. My wife and I both liked the "Friendship is Magic" era, but haven't been able to find any new products of that quality for our daughter...
I learned about He'Man's steep toy sales decline a few years ago. I am still amazed how sharp a drop it was. My family had three boys and one girl. We all enjoyed the She-Ra program. My sister had some of the toys, and my brothers and I enjoyed playing with the toys. My classmates, both boys and girls, watched the program as well. Everyone seem to like She-Ra. Everyone within my social circle at least. Now that I've had time to think about it, my family and classmates probably watched She-Ra because there were only a handful of cartoons on for a handful of hours back then. Chooses were limited. However, watching and enjoying a show doesn't necessarily translate to buying merchandise. Without new He-Man cartoons (as well as that bonkers travesty of a live-action movie), I would image that boys were happy enough to just watch a Masters Of The Universe spin-off and play with whatever He-Man toys they already owned. I am very interested to see how well the upcoming Barbie live-action movie will perform. I am sure it will do far better than the live action Jem And The Holograms film. (It would be almost impossible to do worse.) However, it seems that Hollywood has been trying to make big spectacle high profile franchise for girls, and nothing has yet to taken off. Not even the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic film got a direct sequel, despite earning 10 times it's budget at the box office. The 2018 Tomb Raider movie earn around the same as Angelina Jolie's first Tomb Raider movie. Jolie's second Tomb Raider was a box office failure. Why have so many 'strong female lead" action-adventure movies either performed just okay or underperformed?🤷♀ (Don't get me started on Birds Of Prey.) Maybe the problem is not a lack of "strong female characters" for girls and women to "see themselves" in movies. Maybe the problem is that girls and women go to the movies for different wish fulfillment preferences. How else could their be multiple Step Up, Pitch Perfect, Twilight, and Hunger Games movies... but female action adventure sequels tend to flop or never get made? PS: I am not worried about The Marvels. Even the "worst performing" MCU movies earn tons more at the box office than their cinematic contemporaries.
When I saw the Force awakens. And I saw that they were going to use Ray as the focus. I wasn't upset, quite to the contrary I was intrigued. When I saw that they look like they were going to develop a very sophisticated story with Finn. I was enthusiastic. I happily gave them my money and I happily enjoyed the movie. But then Ryan Johnson completely shut down all of those things that interested me. That is when I started to become disappointed in Rey. Suddenly she was a Mary Sue. Suddenly Finn's story evaporated. I understand the arc they were trying to do with Luke. But it came off more as disrespect to the character. This movie , The last Jedi, basically ended my interest in Star Wars the new franchise. I have not even seen the third movie. And disappointingly I heard about horses galloping on Star destroyers in space. This truly sounds like it was written by a 5-year-old. Then I started watching UA-cam videos of people pointing out things that I did not notice. Some of which I agreed with. Some I thought was nitpicking. Some I thought was agenda driven. So I basically just tuned it out. I have my fond memories of standing in line at 7 years old to see the original Star Wars. I have even more fun memories of standing in line to see empire strikes back. And asking people is it good. And everybody and I mean everybody will stunned shock and said you just got to go see it. Talk about driving up enthusiasm. And when the final movie came out that's right you could find me in line. And I was very happy for the end. I thought the ewoks were a little gimmicky. But I understood by that point that there do need to be toy sales. And that was targeted towards the small ones. And I did get a few laughs. But at no point did I feel like I was being excluded. At no point did I feel like I was being lectured to. I was always entertained I was always enthusiastic and it was always in awe. If you made it this far thanks. I didn't proofread it it was all talk to text. And I thank you for your time.
I had the same feeling of disappointment with Hux In TFA he was a potentially terrifying up-and-coming main villain, a literal Space Hitler, and he seemed intimidated by Kylo Then Ryan made him a joke character...
I don't know why I care to point this out, but the horses (yes, they're not made up) are on the Star Destroyed in atmosphere, NOT in space. The reason for that is because the Star Destroyers are incapable of flying UP into space without a big antenna telling them how. So they use the horses in part to break the antenna. Yeah... Palpatine built like 10,000 Star Destroyers on a planet with no discernible food production (and definitely no imports), no apparent raw resources of any kind, brought in crews for those destroyers, fed them somehow, AND fitted ALL OF THE SHIPS with Death Star lasers (seriously), and also somehow resurrected himself. However... he forgot to install the "Up" position on the steering columns. Quality writing without a doubt.
He Man didn't fall off because boys didn't like SheRa. It fell off because they turned She Ra into just another Barbie. Rey wasn't rejected. The way they turned the force into a super power that she just had instead of learned how to use was the problem. The problem was that she had all the powers Luke was supposed to have and he was turned into a creepy old bum who she beat up with a stick.
@@mkhud50n Sometimes I wonder if I've seen the same movie as some commenters. The guy was almost crying while he was on his back and looked at her terrified like he never seen strenght like her.
Interesting breakdown of the He-Man stuff. I wonder if She-Ra would've continued in popularity if the title had simply been more gender neutral, and not "SHE-Ra." As well, how many male side characters were in She-Ra as well? The protagonist's identity doesn't matter if the surrounding cast is diverse/inclusive enough. Moreover, I'm a big fan of Legend of Korra and never had any issue with Rey being the protagonist of the sequel trilogy. I relate to them both just fine! The sex/gender of the protagonist isn't a factor for me. The only issue is if the series as a whole interests me. It's why I like Korra, but not Barbie lol.
I think it would have been more popular if it was airing alongside He-Man and not replacing it. Star Trek Deep Space 9 and Voyager were both running for the same length and were at points concurrent. While they both have their detractors it was clear the creators were trying to appease both sides of the Fanbase with these two shows. DS9 was a darker series with morally complex characters and being set about a space station was more character-driven and serialized than prior series that lacked a heavy focus on the space exploration the franchise is known for. Voyager ultimately became the new TNG-style space exploration episodic adventure series fans expected when it came to air.
As a woman, who liked some things about the sequel trilogy…Rey was not one of them. Do I hate or dislike her? No…but out of all the new characters…I just don’t care about her. She never interested me, or appealed to me on any level. She got to be super powered from the jump and never had any real character development or arch. She really lost me during the last Jedi when she literally said”I need somebody to tell me where I belong in all this” When you grow up wanting to be Leia but then they trash Mara Jade and you get Rey…Disney doesn’t get Star Wars
Honestly if you told me that Disney bought these franchises because they hated them and wanted to ruin them for all time then I could almost believe it. Because at least you could say they've been fairly successful there. But it's sad what they've done. People were excited before the Force Awakens. People were excited even when it seemed like Finn was going to be the new main character of this trilogy. Wow, that didn't end up happening. Rey wasn't good to start, but there was some potential. But the character just can't be salvaged now. And the worst thing is this stupid push for "strong female characters" when there were already great female characters. Some weird mental puzzle that leads to trying to turn these female characters into the worst aspects of guys around them that these writers clearly encountered growing up. Thinking that would make them good...somehow. Sadly we're just in a dark age for cinema. Trash being thrown on the screen for mixed up reasons. We're just going to have to hope and wait for things to improve. Thankfully there are other hobbies to sink times into until things hopefully improve.
The biggest issue isn’t that Rey was female, the issue is she’s a bad character. She broke almost every rule that existed on how Jedi were made. She discovered power after power for no other reason than because. Add to that, many unpopular decisions made in the trilogy were made seemingly due to Rey, or as a way to make Rey alone the savior. I promise that the large majority of people that dislike Rey LOVED Leia.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic succeeded in achieving widespread appeal because it delivered surprisingly engaging characters in a relentlessly optimistic setting at a time when gloomy dystopian fiction was dominating the media landscape, especially in the teen/young adult segment. Disney's Star Wars chases trends, tries to cash in on nostalgia and play around with a setting it makes no effort to understand, and populates itself with profoundly uninteresting characters that are handled in a way that is shockingly disrespectful to both the fans who want to enjoy the series and the very actors that play them. I'd also note that despite having more equitable gender representation, the newest generation of My Little Pony seems to be much less popular than Friendship is Magic was, possibly because it simply isn't that good... If you want viewers to pay attention, you need to write people (or ponies, or aliens, or droids) worth watching. Phoning it in with a checklist of character backgrounds is not how you build a cross-demographic media franchise.
I thought MLP:FIM mostly got so popular because it was written by people who cared. Namely Lauren Faust was the original showrunner and creator who had a sizeable following in the cartoon sphere for her past work on shows like Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends and The Powerpuff Girls which followed her to this series and found she put the same effort into it as her past work.
@@emberfist8347 Yeah, I don't want to devalue the importance of having staff who actually *care* about the product, but I think a key part of that is not being afraid to let the material stand on its own, without leaning too hard on nostalgia baiting or copying successful peers. If your story doesn't stand out from its predecessors or its contemporaries, where's the hook to keep people interested?
It's sad that no matter how many strong female characters we get, the media keeps insisting that women are still underrepresented. What's worse is that nowadays the entertainment industry has begun de-feminizing female characters. Even though strong female characters like Wonder Woman taught that femininity is power. And I don't know how anyone can call the entertainment industry sexist when we do have wonderful female characters like Wonder Woman, Princess Leia, The Bride, Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Galadriel (LOTR version), Arwen, Bastila Shan, Kreia, Katara, Toph, Azula, Korra, Asami, Lin, Jinora, Kyoshi, Kassandra, Evie Frye, Batgirl etc.
Leia follows a long line of strong female characters, going back to the beginning of cinema. One of the earlier sci-fi examples was Constance Moore’s portrayal of Lt. Wilma Deering in 1939’s “Buck Rogers.” Not a screaming damsel in distress, but a competent down-to-business military officer and ace rocketship pilot always in the middle of the action alongside Buck.
I think you are right on with this! I believe that it also poses another question, and that question is: “Why is Bob Eiger allowing Kathleen Kennedy to oversaturate Star Wars with female characters and/or a focus on female characters if the purpose all along for purchasing Lucasfilm was to cater to boys and men?” It just adds to the great mystery of WHY is she still in charge? I don’t get it….
None of these mental gymnastics are necessary. Try is a bad character. Jin was…. better, but Rey was just bad. If they’d created Ellen Ripley with a lightsaber, it would’ve been fine. I can even concoct a story right now: Luke’s temple is in its early stages when he goes missing, and fresh apprentice Ripley is standing in the gap, trying to keep remnants of the Empire from seizing force-sensitive children. The creators are immature and mean-spirited. They mistook disliking poor quality for sexism and, if you will, trashed the playroom to have their way. Then they lashed out at the fans again for not liking the trashed room.
It's the nevereding power struggle perpetuated by bad writers. If you can't identify with the female character, that's because you're misogynist. If you can't identify with the black character (that is a re-skin of a white character), that means you're racist. But once the roles are reversed, oh, well, that doesn't mean girls are misandrist for not liking male characters, that means girls are oppressed and the entertainment caters exclusively to boys and men. And when black people can't enjoy white Ariel or Peter Parker, that's not racism, that's because they're oppressed by cis, straight, entitled, racist, sexist, hom0ph0bic, privileged white men from Hollywood. The idea that the majority doesn't like the controversial character, because it's badly written, that doesn't really end up on the map for them.
Gonna have to say it; no, I don't ever want to watch or play a story that has a female lead as a protagonist. I've had to live with this feminist crap for my entire life, I'm just skipping everything that has a woman pretending to be a man in it. I don't care if that's sexist or not, I'm finished with it.
Okay, that IS genuinely sexist. To avoid female leads simply because you assume they're going to be woke. The problem with media isn't female leads, the problem is that they're not always written right.
I think what happened, is once fans realized they were being manipulated and there was a forced agenda (because Kathleen Kennedy told us), that’s when the fandom had a backlash. People honestly don’t like being manipulated. That’s what it boils down to. People gave Rey a chance because they were just excited, but once fans realized Kathleen Kennedy didn’t really give a shit, everything they did was put under a microscope. This is the direct fault of Kathleen Kennedy.
I'm a woman and Luke and Vader are the reason why I love Star Wars. I never liked Leia that much. I mean, she is great character, but for me, the best female in SW is Mara Jade, who according to Disney no longer exist, so... and Rey had so much potential, but in the end became only Mary Sue and if they think that is the kind of character we want, they are deeply mistaken.
The problem is people marketing the idea of "The Untapped Audience", when they either at best have never put any actual thought into the concept, or worse purposely using it to more covertly push an agenda. The concept of "The Untapped Audience" is often presented as being two parts, The demographic of people that don't have knowledge of the product, and the demographic of people that currently aren't interested in the product. That however isn't actually true, as in reality "The Untapped Audience" is only made up of one part, the demographic of people that don't have knowledge of the product. When it comes to the demographic of people that currently aren't interested in the product, they are not actually a true "Untapped Audience", as in order to reach those folks you need to change your product. If you are changing your product to reach them that means what you are doing is not reaching an "Untapped Audience" but rather changing the intended audience of your product. When you change your product's the intended audience you lose the original intended audience. That's not to say you can't create a new intended audience that also captures the vast majority of the original audience, it's definitely possible to wind up getting a greater number of people interested in the new product then those that no longer have interest in the product. It's just that when you change the intended audience, don't expect the original audience to continue to consume of your product. That's where the major issue is, to often people change the intended audience to reach this version of the "Untapped Audience", and think they are still entitled to the original audience. When that original audience they believed, they were entitled to don't show they get mad and blame the audience.
I was like everyone else -- at the time -- I *liked* the Rey and Finn characters --- "Who is Rey? Who are her parents? Is Rey a Kenobi? Is she a Skywalker? Who is Snoke?" On and on. The Force Awakens was a SUCCESS... but then.... a certain person got elected President, and "The Message" from Hollywood had to be changed... because Disney decided to "Go Woke" and... they went broke.
I think you are right. The problems with Star Wars are firstly that Kathleen don't understand Star wars or what made it so great in the first place. The next thing is that they don't know how to write a strong female character anymore. They write them as flawless beings that knows everything better then any man. It feels that they think strong means physical strong as well. Then we got a strong female character from Favreau. He gave us Cara Dune, one of my favorit characters in the Disney era of Star Wars. But Kathleen fires her, I think it was not only for the post she put out. I think it was because she made Rey look bad. Neither Bob or Kathleen are creative people but it feels they are involving themselves in that, especially KK that makes things worse for the writers and directors. I also don't think we would have gotten Luke at the season 2 final, if Bob hadn't put her away (with Children of blood and bones). He did that to give Favreau creative freedom for the mandowerse. Chapek took her back, do to that she should work with what they pay her for. This was in time for BoBF. We got the scooters and I think the not so recognizable version of Boba thanks to KK. I hope Ahsoka gets to be strong in the way she's been since clone wars They succeeded with Bo-Katan in my opinion We'll see. Got no hope for the Rey movie.
I had a number of younger cousins who were huge He-man fans back in the day. My first Christmas home from college, thanks to my part-time job, I had money to buy them Christmas presents. I asked them what He-man figures they wanted, and they told me that He-man was “a girl’s toy now”. And I got a chance to visit the family of girls I used to sit for and they had bought the huge He-man collection (including the Grayskull playset) from the kid across the street, because he also considered He-man part of the for-girls She-ra toy line now.
Rey’s story and the sequel story arc in general is why she’s not accepted. Ppl associate her w/the sequels and the sequel story is very disconnected to the original 6 which is why Rey isn’t a household name
The answer is a simple one. Force Awakens/Rise of Skywalker was nothing more than remakes of the original trilogy... and replacing Luke with a female lead who had everything handed to her. Luke didn't become a badass overnight when he discovered he had the force, whereas Rey was already manipulating Stormtroopers without having any lessons or guidance. Clearly Disney knows nothing about the Force.
If a show is good written, everyone can enjoy it independent who the target audience is. This is why Disney is not beloved anymore. Children will notice bad writing. Usually quicker than the "fans". It is children who dislike the remakes the most. It has NEVER to do with the gender of a character. Kathleen basically spit on all boys and fans when she said "the force is female", ruined the rules of the force, basically made Dragonball where the ceiling is getting constantly shattered, ruined one of the most beloved fictionally heroes of all time. You are not talking about why me-Rey sues are not liked and why "strong-female-characters" are hated in general, because this is the reason why many modern shows and movies fail. Also the Marvel take is wrong. Phase 1 to Endgame was Marvel. (Black Panther, Captain Marvel and Endgame had Disney influence) Phase 4 was Disney and It flopped and it keeps failing.
5:19 100% true, it started as ironic shitposting on the comics and cartoons board and quickly picked up steam until people were legitimately engaging with it, discussing it, and enjoying it. The shitposting never stopped, it just stopped being ironic, after a whole lot of pissing off most of the rest of the site they were quarantined off onto their own specific board and any pony posting outside of it was punishable with bans. That rule still stands today. 2010-2011 was a hell of a year on that site.
Your numbers on He-Man sales are inaccurate. The He-Man toy line made $400 million from 1982-1986. So while a drop to $7M in 1987 was a huge drop, it wasn’t as ridiculous as 98%.
I think the key is for the entertainment industry to provide MORE options for the consumer, not take away or change things that already have a large fandom and then tell us we are wrong for liking that thing. For example: Changing Star Wars to have 99 percent female leads, and changing, say, the babysitters club to have 99 percent male leads. Because some people in charge have the idea that they need to “fix” these franchises. If they were smart the would keep Star Wars and Babysitters club largely the same (keeping in mind what you said about each franchise’s fans not minding characters of the opposite gender) and instead made NEW franchises that may be similar to the aforementioned franchises, but simply swap the focus from male to female and vice versa. Honestly there’s so much nuance to this issue it’s almost impossible to comment on it without writing a 50 page essay on it, but those are my basic thoughts. Great video, really made me think.
Rey failed on several occasions with audiences in general. First, some fans weren't happy that she essentially did the exact same story as Luke when TFA came out... only being instantly better than him at learning the force on her own.
Then with TLJ, her character was done another disservice by doubling down on this approach. As they basically flipped ESB story and had Rey rejecting Luke's teaching for the better, when arguably when Luke ignored Yoda he paid dearly for it... then on top of that was the obvious trope of having to tear down established characters, read Luke, to make the new character better in comparison. Next, let's not forget now setting up a romance with the man who arguably killed her only father figure just 1 week earlier and nearly cut her friend in half. Really made Rey appear shallow and superficial.
In contrast to the approach of having to tear down an established character, like Luke, the Legends character Mara Jade was beloved by nearly everyone because she simultaneously enhanced Luke's character while also being a foil to his idealism with her blunt pragmatism. Then, she wasn't written as stronger or weaker, just very competent but a very different set of skills. Mara was designed to complement Luke. While Rey in contrast had to tear him down to establish herself, doing the exact same thing.
Then, we had TRoS where Rey is set up to now not love Kylo but be the other half of his soul without explanation (and being half his age and unrelated was very weird). But the biggest issue was having her take Luke's name after essentially doing everything he did but better too... in a storyline where she didn't respect him and was more raised by Han and Leia.
Rey was basically Hollywood 101 of his to copy someone else's homework and still get it wrong. Their strategy was build it and they will come, and when that stopped working was to then insult their customers and tripling down on their bad writing.
Characters like Leia, Mara, and Ahsoka worked incredibly well with their male counterparts and enhanced their character arcs and gave them great character dynamics too. Characters like Rey in contrast was basically plagiarism of Luke's character and had to have the storyline degrade his character so she could be better against him. So it's no wonder fans rejected her... her very character rejected their franchise. Both it's key characters and had to undo all the prior accomplishments so Rey could do it again.
Honestly most of the Sequels characters feel like rips on prequel and OT characters.
Kylo and Vader's arcs have a lot of similarities (betrayed by the Jedi of their time, destroys the order, struggles with the light and dark sides of the force)
Poe and Han? Both hotshot pilots, both have criminal underworld backstories, both are a bit arrogant but ultimately values their friends over everything else
Rey and Luke you already covered
Finn has pieces of Han's backstory (trained by the empire/first order but abandons them) but they didn't do enough with Finn in later films to really go farther than that
Then you have TFA's storyline that basically rips off A New Hope (an important piece of information is held by people on the run from the empire/first order, eventually the main cast end up with it and have to deliver it to the rebellion/resistance, and in the final act the big powerful super weapon gets destroyed).
The sequels just didn't have original characters or story in general until TLJ which had its own problems, and TRoS was basically left with a giant clusterfuck to try and clean up as best it could.
This comment nails it. I couldn't agree more. When TFA came out I was ready to embrace Rey, Finn and Poe as the new leads. I really wanted something new, but I got ANH again instead. At the time I theorised this was on purpose. That all those parallelism were there to make a point about the cyclical nature of history, and Rey being so overpowered was a mistery in it of itself for the second movie to explore. I really really thought they were going the Avatar route and they'll make her Anakin reincarnated, which would connect her to Luke, Kylo Ren and both sides of the force. But instead we got a meta "story" made reactionary to public reaction which had nothing to say by the end. But I swear I was so open and ready for those new characters, and clearly it didn't deliver.
"Rey was basically Hollywood 101 of his to copy someone else's homework and still get it wrong." LMAO
Thank you! I’m glad other people get it, I’ve explained this to others and they ignore the franchise history in favor of character attacking those that criticize this trilogy
She didn't fail in the movies, and because of that, she failed with the audiences.
Still, I don't think the people are "rejecting" Rey or hate her neccesarily. I think most people just see seven through nine as atrocious films. I was in the minority but I hated The Force Awakens when it came out. And my gripes was the same as GL himself, there was nothing new, it was a poor retelling of ANH.
The problem with modern Lucasfilm is, they know how to make interesting Star Wars characters, but they don't know how to write the story out for them. Ben as a fanboy of Vader, neat idea, story fell flat. Finn, a defecting stormtrooper from the First Order, neat idea. story falls flat. Poe, Ace pilot, story falls flat, and even screamed at for doing and acting like the character was thought up to do, and made as an example from a woman with purple hair with the message "Sit down in the corner and shut up." Rey, analog of Luke, cool, story falls flat, because the only thing they thought of that was new was how she did everything well like a perfect princess. She even pulled off airshow post stall maneuvers in the Falcon with zero hours flight time behind the stick of it, just so Finn could get a bullseye shot on a tie in a jammed turret, which Rey could never have set up herself with the exception of plot armor. And if Poe tried that, he'd have been screamed at in the scene after.
Every character in the trilogy was mishandled by poor writing, period. New character and the classic ones.
I'm reminded of a time that George RR Martin was asked how he wrote such diverse and well rounded female characters. He said "I just write them like real people". If Rey's story was written more like Luke's, with struggle, triumphs and failures, she wouldn't need to be a Strong Female Character, she'd be beyond that and be a great character, in the company of Leia, Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor.
Exactly. If the character was Roy Skywalker, he would still be terrible. Ray's problem was never her gender.
I would agree with you that a badly written character is a problem but Disney has a way of pushing their politics on screen and they seem to intentionally try to push these superwomen who can do everything men can do just better. Sorry but in my mind pushing that type of woke garbage takes it from a badly written character to the next extreme. Only surprising thing was that I believe she was straight and they didn’t make her a minority
This reminds me of something author Tom Wolfe said when asked how he wrote such realistic women. He said, "I write my women characters the same way I write my male characters. Then I remove all logic." Don't blame me. It was Wolfe who said it.
Rey was written by the kind of person who thinks "Strong Female Character" means "a character who is a strong female," rather than "a female who is a strong character." Of course, the writing room on the sequel trilogy was a bunch of no-balls, corpo shills who are to afraid of making a character "unlikeable" to give them any character traits, let alone flaws, lest it impact action figure sales.
@@cassianogunji It's perhaps ironic that the likes Kathleen Kennedy are actually ruining the 'strong woman' archetype in films. You can have as many badass women characters as you want, but if you can't write them well you can't blame the fans for not liking your character, because you dug the hole for your creation!
Rey was not just a female character, she was overpowered. In the Disney trilogy, women made all the smart decisions and the men were turned into manchild type characters.
Yeah, they do this a lot. They can only have a strong female. But if you look at the old ones, Leia was a strong female and so was solo. Towards the end, she softened up a bit, and his womanizing edge softened.
All the women except Admiral Purple Hair(forgot name), she tried and failed to lead, then tried and failed save her own hide only to make the fluke "one in a million" collision through hyperspace. lol
I wouldn’t say women made all the smart decisions, Holdo and Rose make pretty much 90% of the dumb decisions in The Last Jedi.
Thats what they try to convey. But it just shows how incompetent the woman are.
But isn’t Starkiller also overpowered? (I still love the Force Unleashed)
Scifi and fantasy readers are some of the most open minded and accepting group as long as the story is good, from my experience. That Disney et. al. have managed to alienate that audience is one of the biggest shames of this whole mess.
This deserves a hammer
You don’t even have to be open minded to appreciate a well written, actual strong female character. Unfortunately, there aren’t many of them these days.
@@billwhipple9039 no it doesnt because he already nailed it
Disney SET OUT TO ALIENATE CERTAIN STAR WARS FANS BECAUSE DARTH KK FUKN HATES CERTAIN STAR WARS FANS AND DIDNT WANT THOSE CERTAIN FANS AS DISNEY CUSTOMERS
This the smartest take. I hate when people just slap woke on everything and don't articulate shit. Always find it funny when people talk about needs being racist or bullies. Don't get me wrong, there of course are gonna be some but most were just shy dudes who probably got picked on and were happy to talk to anyone if they could relate to the conversation.
It wasn't that Rey was a girl that was a problem for us fans.
The problem is that they failed to properly plan out their story.
It's more than that. They failed to be respectful to its audience and the legacy characters that came before. Force Awakens had so much hype for all the wrong reasons, that the ones that DID see what was going on in the trailers alone were ahead of the curb. The Last Jedi is the movie that woke everyone up to the true realization of what they asked for. And half of the largest fanbase on earth wanted no part of it.
Ray is a replacement not an addition, that is the issue with her.
We wanted Luke. Not that !!!
How they allowed a single frame to be shot without a broad stroke story outline going from A to B to C is one of the biggest crimes in pop culture history.
If Rey would have been a man, I would still have the same complains about "Ron", a poorly written, unsympathetic, unrelateable character with no development at all, a blatant power fantasy of the writer.
Even Anakin and JarJar were better fleshed out in the prequels, and they were cringeworthy back then.
What i don't understand about Disney is that they have to humiliate their male heroes. If you humiliate luke, han, thor and so on, you can't explain it away with natural character growth. The problem is that young boys will look for male heroes in other media like anime. It is no suprise that the mario movie was such a success.
Don’t forget Jack Sparrow in the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie. He was dumbed down to a bumbling idiot in order to make the new female lead look better.
@@slashtitan1035 Captain Jack Sparrow!
That's all Kathleen Kennedy. Kathleen's being humiliated all her life serving coffee when she should have been a visionary film director. Well that's what she thinks in her mind. look at the video footage of her on the stage with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and John Williams and you'll see exactly why
It's the only way they can think to make their female characters look good
But a general problem with the industry now is that everyone writes like children. Mocking existing characters, self-inserts, mary sue's, cringe MCU comedy. All symptoms of the same disease. The writers aren't writers, just activists for The Message.
And they've infected everything from movies to TV to games to D&D
In one review for the Lone Ranger movie, the reviewer wrote about a scene where the main character is dragged through horse poop, wondering, if the movie treats its main character this way, why should the audience feel any respect towards him? The same principle applies to these other new movies. It's astounding in comparison, reading Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy and the amount of respect the author has for Lucas' characters. Despite Han not being a space wizard, Leia being a pregnant fledgling space wizard, and Luke feeling out of his depths, they each rely on their strengths to help each other through seemingly hopeless conflicts. Han has impressive knowledge to exploit, Luke has the Force and his ethics to guide him, whilst Leia has intellect and her growing connection with the Force, and all of them have diplomatic skills to allow working with others. With an impressive intellect like Thrawn's for them to overcome, it's a riveting narrative building on established lore to make a worthy chapter in the Star Wars continuity. Zahn himself said writing an intelligent character like Thrawn was difficult, yet he seems to have achieved similar success with writing the rest of the cast with intelligence as well. Many contemporary writers refuse to work that hard.
I was really excites when Disney acquired Star Wars and introduced Rey. I couldn't tell you how many times a female has told me dismissively, that she "has never seen Star Wars"...so I welcomed the Rey character, especially after the time I ran across a father excitedly picking out toy lightsabers with his 2 daughters in the toy aisle... BUT... then Disney SQUANDERED all that hope and goodwill, by making Rey the lousiest Mary Sue EVER SEEN!!! She flew the pants off the Millennium Falcon, although we were never told much about her flight experience, She defeated an experienced Force user, trained in combat, although only possessing a lioghtsaber for the on-screen equivalent of MAYBE a mere day or two!! WITH NO TRAINING!! I don't blame Daisy Riddley, (much) DIsney obviously thought they could just shovel out some drivel and fans would swallow it.
Women don't like star wars en masse, men do- injecting stronk female killers into SW won't make women like it. This feminization of star wars thing is a war on nature and God.
You are 100% correct
I remember playing with toys as a kid and if my hero got stuck in a spot I couldn't figure out a way out I would just pretend they were the strongest, best, smartest and fastest ever while inventing new super powers... I should have gone into writing for Kathleen "the destroyer" Kennedy at 8 years old, unfortunately my imagination is a lot more complicated since then
When she saved Han Solo by fixing the millennium falcon better than he could, for no other reason than to show how much better than him she was, I held out hope that she was luke or Leila’s long lost daughter and had flown on the falcon before and trained at the Jedi academy. But no, none of that, and it remains the most Mary Sue of Mary Sue moments.
@@nocrtname exactly. There were SO many cool things they could have done with her character…SO many ways they could have tied her to the previous films… but, no.. she’s just the bestest EVAR just ‘cause she is…
Chato actually explained this extremely well. Companies often aquire other companies to expand their brand. But sometimes they don't know how to manage them and fail to integrate them well. Disney "princessed" the Marvel and Star Wars brands and assumed they would achieve the same sort of broad appeal that their brand had while retaining their original audiences. But it wasn't a good match, and the original brands lost their identity, as often happens during an acquisition. I should know, I sold my company, and one of my priorities was to see it maintain it's identity and retain it's staff and stay creatively involved. Within a short time I had been asked to move on and stop giving input and all but one of my original employees had left. The new owner wanted freedom and control to use the assets he had purchased as he saw fit.
So yes, Disney gained a lot from buying Marvel and Lucasfilm, but in the long run the brands were damaged as they lost their identity in the larger Disney corporate structure. The same thing has happened to Pixar. Disney managed to regenerate its own animation department in the process, but Pixar has by now lost its own unique identity and should really just be collapsed into Disney animation. It's not a premium or differentiated brand, has no different voice or unique identity or style or audience. It's just another Disney animation pipeline.
In some ways it's not at all surprising that having Disney eat these brands was hard on them and changed or diluted what made them what they are, or were. People were worried about it when it happened. It just took a little while. It didn't happen all at once up front. It was a process as they were slowly subsumed into the larger corporate entity.
I think, in the long run, that Disney just wasn't a great fit for either Marvel or Star Wars (or Fox, but then they don't seem to be trying to keep that brand alive). Disney also runs the risk by incorporating so many brands that are different from it own of diluting it's own brand and losing it's own identity. Disney wants to be all things to all men. And that just might be an enterprise too big and too complex to stand up under it's own weight. It may become necessary for it to collapse and be seperated into smaller, more distinct entities. And that happens with companies too. Their aquire and they sell off.
Also a little detail, that they seem to openly hate men in general. There's that thing in there too, might have some consequences I think. May have had a bit of an effect.
That's a very well thought out reply to this video.
Never really thought of corporate buyouts as company vore, but it does make sense. Dollar Tree has done nothing but go downhill since Dollar General bought them.
I would argue that Rey wasn't the root of the problem. The problem was sacrificing the things we already cared about. The fact that they propped up Rey, as if she was the only thing that mattered, made her the face of the controversy. But in reality most people's problem with the Sequels is that 7 killed off the Jedi, crippled the Republic, and destroyed Luke, Han, & Leia's family. Then 8 dashed all hope that Luke may be up to something clever and hastily wrapped up most of the interesting storylines established in 7. Then 9 piled a bunch of nonsense on top of that.
If they had done a Sequel Trilogy focusing on the New Republic, New Jedi Order, and Luke, Han, & Leia dealing with new challenges and overcoming them, then most people wouldn't have been annoyed by a superpowered new character like Rey.
But because everything was killed off so totally and hastily -- with Rey being the only one in a position to fix it -- it feels almost like she's "stealing" what ought to have been theirs. That doesn't mean she shouldn't have achievements - but the new characters' achievements should be things added to the old characters' achievements - not just replacing the things the old characters failed to achieve.
9 was just plain dumb. I could not believe my eyes. It was 9-year-old level writing.
I remember they screened the TFA trailer at a Comic-Con I was at. There was general excitement for it, but you can probably guess the one scene that made the audience clap and cheer: The one where Han and Chewie show up and he says "Chewie, we're home."
Audiences wanted to see their old favorite characters come back and do cool stuff again. They weren't against new characters... but this new trend of destroying old characters (mostly the male ones) to "make room" is the woke crap that has destroyed these franchises.
And yeah... 7 was flawed as hell for the reasons you stated, and also because you apparently had to read a tie-in comicbook to even understand why Leia was leading "The Resistance" instead of being a part of the New Republic's armed forces. (I kept waiting for them to explain that in the SLIGHTEST during the movie.) But then 8 was a trainwreck from the first battle with lore-breaking plot "twists" and extremely irritating characters (Holdo!!). And then 9... yeesh. At least that one was REALLY riffable. But only because all hope had already been lost.
It's very appalling that we're being called any word that ends with "ist" when we literally grew up with female characters who were actual badass. They truly don't get it.
They’re very out of touch, you might say.
I hate it when the the Star Wars fandom gets slandered yes there is toxicity but 1 not EVERYONE is like that and 2 simply calling it out is not going to stop it…
@@Milothemighty10 Part of the problem though is when the loudest portion of the community are railing against a character because its a woman, if the rest of us aren't speaking up and saying they're wrong, the message the rest of the world gets is that we either agree or don't care. I'm not saying we agree with that portion of the community, or that we don't care. That's what people are going to think though.
@@icoss88 fair enough…
@@icoss88 i can only speak for myself, but I'm apathetic to Star Wars nowadays. I really don't care what the rest think.
If the rest of the world wants to believe the slanderous ideological cult that think they understand the world better than the rest of us and can fix the problems just because they scream the loudest, so be it.
I'm fine with humanity willingly destroying itself, especially if they want to live in ignorance. There is no point dealing with people who will not change their views even if you give them evidence that disproves it. They will only learn when they are hurt by it. And by then, it's too late.
Rey wasn’t rejected because she was a female. All the Star Wars channels became huge after the force awakens. So they accepted her(sure some criticism over her being a Mary sue) but they could have explained that in future movies.
Where Ruin Johnson didn’t. He instead made a movie for himself . Rey was just some over powered girl who taught Luke the master a lesson she even beat him in combat. Leia and holdo ended up lecturing Poe despite his anger being justified . Rose had to teach Finn about war(despite him growing up in war) . DJ being a turn coat, hux becoming a punching bag. The only female to suffer any loss in the movie was phasma and she was hardly in in. The only male character to be any good was Kylo ren (when you find out it’s because he was George’s character makes sense)
Then Luke dies in the end snd everyone is “oh it’s ok peace and purpose. We have everything we need.” Literally we waited years to see grandmaster Luke and for most of the movie he was just grouchy mark hamil . We finally get to see him in action and he dies. Is the audience were heartbroken where everyone in the movie is totally ok with grandmaster skywalker coming back for one second just to die. Holdo had the same role as Luke yet she was treated more heroically (despite being a new character and not a 40 year beloved one) and the student learned something.
We saw the writing on the wall. These were not sequels they were disneys remakes of the original trilogy. So Rey was getting power boosted just to get Luke’s role. She was rejected then because she wasn’t a strong character. She was made to be strong to replace Anakin and Luke (as the chosen one and rebuilder of the Jedi order) so Disney could make Star Wars there own.
Now they are doubling down on it with an episode 10. J.s Rey should not be the lead. I’d prefer it’s not even her that rebuilds the Jedi. Have grogu do it.
Disney star wars has included stronk female super killers for the express purpose of emasculating and overshadowing men from TFA onwards. The movie is literally about Rey being an unbeatable super killbot. This is indisputable- failing to acknowledge that breeds further contempt and apathy in the fanbase.
I was simply in the "let's see where they take this" after episode one of this fanfiction trilogy. I had some ideas. I was pumped. A third into the second episode, they had already squandered every chance at a decent story. I gave up. I would have skipped the third one if it wasn't for peer pressure, and I really regret going. It felt like dessecration.
Starwars is over. I've moved on. I kept offline copies of the original trilogy in case Disney tries to memory-hole them (wouldn't put it past them...) and yeah, sequel too even though they're not that great, they're ok-ish, but at least they're not trying to stab me.
@@MadsterV I have the theatrical releases of the OT on DVD. It only bugs me that I haven't been able to make copies of them... not to sell, but to preserve. I fear damaging them in any way.
@@Swiftbow discs die, all physical media dies. You need a copy that you can keep alive between different media every few years
@@MadsterV Quite true. Need to figure out how to copy to the computer. I know it's doable, probably have to buy something for it.
First, I was one of those 80s kids who watched both He-man and She-ra. I never noticed that they stopped making He-man cartoons, but now that I know this, I can't help wondering why. It seems to me that they should have just made both. I would have watched both. Second, Rey is difficult to relate to. Her goal in life is to sit on that dried up rock and wait for her family. What is interesting about that? Luke's goal is to leave the rock he's stuck on for a life of adventure, fighting against the evil Empire. Who would you rather watch?
The "why" was almost definitely a suit who said "well He-man is a super strong guy, and Shera is a super strong woman...why the hell would I fund both they are the same." Thus not realizing that even for those who liked both, they would eventually drift away due to subconsciously(or in other cases consciously) missing He-man as a character and feeling cheated for not seeing his story continue.
The why is for cost cutting issues, they could not afford to animate 2 series at the same time. They intended on running he-man re-runs until she-ra caught up, then the 2 would join in a series together. This never came to be simply due to the audience outgrowing the series, causing the series to die out.
There is ONE Critical Difference between todays MODERN Female Lead in comparison to their Male counterparts is that these Females are OVER POWERED right out of the gate. There is ZERO Character Development. There are NO setbacks or heartaches. There are NO trials or Tribulations for them. there is NO learning Curve.
They DESTROY their Enemies, embarrassing and besting them in Combat on their first try with NO training, ESPECIALLY if it'a man, REALLY ESPECIALLY if it is a Caucasian Man, then they get their ARSE handed to them Faster than INSTANTLY.
This goes the same for many women authors out there.
The Majority of women authors write their Female Protagonist as PERFECT while writing their Male counterparts as bumbling idiots or close to it. Women such as Margaret Weiss and JK Rowling are the exception to this rule. While someone, such as Atwood amplifies it. MALES are BAD and EVIl or CORRUPT and SOULLESS while their Females are Virtuous and Perfect in Every way.
Then read many male authors books and novels, the Vast Majority of them will have a STRONG female lead, that is equalled by her male counterparts, or their Male Protagonist will have a Smart, Intelligent, Witty, Sexy, Fun Female Co Pilot that brings a different approach to the table and adds to their Males partnership. Ergo, if it wasn't for the timing of her, the Male would have missed out on a crucial element or perished even.
BIG DIFFERENCE.
Enter Kennedy and her FORCE is FEMALE and IP DESTRUCTION from the get go.
It was by Her Design.
She is a Misandrist of the WORST Kind.
They barely qualified the character. The truth is that Rey doesn't have a goal in mind, she is just moving forward. She doesn't know who she is, cannot decide If she wants to leave her rock or stay there waiting forever, and never showed a reason of why she is caring so much about the Resistance.
The Empire killed Luke's family, what did the First Order did to Rey? Tried to take a droid from her... That she found 8 hours prior? It's nice for her to be this altruistic, but that's not enough to justify entering a GALACTIC WAR.
They had no clue of what to do with Rey, KK demanded a female leas and the left the room, and everybody who knows JJ is aware that he cannot receive such creative liberty, he always fucks up.
He-man, the embodiment of masculinity and men's virtue, was infiltrated and replaced with she-ra, an emblem of female power . If you cannot see the forces at play here you are lost.
Forget about the obviously blatant misogynists - Most people don't hate the sequals because the main character is a woman. They hate it because A) there was never a coherent story or direction to it, and B) They werent really Star Wars movies - they were what some movie executive that hadnt watched them in 30 years THOUGHT a Star Wars movie was.
In my opinion they never should have brought Luke, Han or Leia into the story at all. They should have just started fresh far into the future. It would have still had the 2 fatal flaws above, but at least then it wouldnt have carried the baggage of the previous characters legacy with it.
Setting the sequels far enough into the future that the legacy characters are all dead and forgotten would have been far more respectful than the treatment they got
Agreed, except the three principles were already signed, so they were going to get paid, regardless. Disney wasn’t going to let an opportunity to bait and switch go by especially since they had to pay them anyway.
Rey is a Mary Sue and they destroyed Han and Luke. Made them deadbeats and failures. Poe Dameron and Finn as well were chumps also. I bought multiple tickets for multiple viewings of The Force Awakens for my granddaughter who would cosplay Rey. Took the family to see The Force Awakens once and haven't been to a Disney movie since. Die Disney.
I was 7 when "A New Hope" came to theaters. Leah was world shifting for me. To this day, I still love and cherish her character.
I was open to Rey. I was hoping JJ Abrams could bring back the things I felt were lacking from the prequels. I did not expect a do over of the arcs and relationships from "A New Hope". Those were Luke, Leah and Han's stories.
I did not expect that Rey would be a Palpatine. It would have been far more productive if she had been no one in the galaxy and found her own worth.
I was excited that maybe Rey would be someone who is like the Bindu and stands in the middle, between the light and dark side. A person we have never seen before. Nope, she's just a Palpatine.
Why has Palpatine returned anyway? He is not such an amazing villain that he can't be supplanted with someone else. But I digress.
I personally don't think that Rey, herself was the problem. And I am glad to hear someone take on the expectations of Disney on this. I was annoyed by all the hype about Acolyte and its female cast. I love having strong female leads, but there's something inherently wrong with the system if you have to create with that in mind. It might have worked in the 70s, when women were trying to have a voice. But we have one now, is it equal in every way to men's voices and cachet, no but it is there and doesn't need to be pandered to.
Star Wars was one of the few places where characters were equal. It didn't matter who was lead.
I think part of why early seasons of the Mandalorian were such a success is because it was a tight, 25 minute story in a familiar setting with characters who were equal. I loved the Armourer and Cara Dune, and they didn't have to be leads. They were just great characters who had opinions and skills that were valid and worthy to the show.
I think a female lead is great, but it undermines the story if you use that to make some kind of social statement.
Sorry this is so long. I am a huge fan and am old, so I talk a lot.
Thanks for the video.
I think you're spot on. I think Disney decided to pander to women and girls with Star Wars.
Pandering is just boring by itself. But worse, as you pointed out, they went beyond it to deciding to burn down everything from the original trilogy on top of pandering and creating a huge Mary Sue.
I think that Leia was one of the best-written female characters in the past several decades. I've been a fan since I was a little kid.
I once heard Carrie Fisher in an interview talking about that metal bikini and the creepy fanboys she had. While I'm sure there are plenty of them, I think that a huge portion of her male fans went beyond being mere fans of her physical attractiveness (although she was definitely attractive).
Pretty faces are a dime a dozen in Hollywood. But very few have real enduring power. Leia was a great character because she stood up to Darth Vader; she endured torture to protect her people. She watched her world get destroyed, but instead of crumpling into sadness and depression she stuck with her mission. She was tough without losing her femininity. She put herself at great risk to rescue Han from Jabba's palace. She was kind to Luke when he lost his hand and found out that Vader was his father, throwing him into a major identity crisis and causing him to question his relationship with his mentor.
Leia personified strong female leadership and femininity in one package. Had she just been a pretty face or a masculine lead with female plumbing, she'd have been forgotten in a couple of years.
If Disney had simply Xeroxed Leia and given her a modern hairdo and makeup in order to make Rey (skipping the metal bikini), it wouldn't have been very creative, but it would have been a major improvement over what they did do. The male fans would have eaten it up. My guess is that they would also have done well with the female fans. But since they were pandering to one particular political definition of "feminine power" in their sequels, they squandered the opportunities provided by a four billion dollar intellectual property.
Politics before profits, apparently.
As a fellow old(ish) person, that's my rant.
Here's to one day getting back to good writing (I hope).
Brony here.
It was surprising--and is still _is_ surprising--how much the show staff accepted their surprise new audience. More world-hanging-in-the-balance magic duels between powerful magic users were written in, and there was even an episode where a character went to a convention for an in-universe fandom. (You know, totally things that little girls can relate to.) The convention scene is very much alive and well. I'm going to Everfree in Seattle this August and Trotcon in Dayton, Ohio this July. The voice actors seemed to genuinely like engaging with the fans at conventions where I saw them. At one convention, a VA surprised a fan event for her character--a reformed villain who formerly led a magicless cult--and graced us with her "villain voice," noting a distinct lack of "chanting and marching around" in the rest of the convention, and had deduced that something must have been up.
This friendliness towards the audience shouldn't come as a surprise. The show came from Lauren Faust, who complained about previous versions of My Little Pony being too much about stereotypically girly things like "dresses, sleepovers, and endless tea parties." Her goal was to open MLP up to being for girls that, well, were more like her when she growing up. The show's main (mane?) cast shows audiences of all demographics that there's more than one way to be a girl, or by extension any demographic. The sort of love and inclusion that My Little Pony gave--and still gives after the "Generation 5" reboot--to its unexpected new male audience is something that companies which already _have_ male audiences could benefit in taking notes from. If I, a guy, feel more welcome by the My Little Pony show staff than by the Star Wars staff, something is wrong.
Brohoof. /)
Wonderful insightly take. I knew there was a reason our whole family liked to watch some new My Littly Pony haha. I am not a deep fan or anything but I am a father that likes that all my kids like that show.
@@benjaminroe311ify Barring some _weird_ moments, your kids are in good hoofs.
🫡 /)
You even forgot Jyn Erso. That was two female leads back to back for the first two Disney SW movies, and no one complained. Let's remember the switch for most people was triggered by that godawful TLJ.
There were complaints about Jyn.
Jyn was the weakest character in the movie. And most of the characters weren't that good either
I loved Jyn. Actually, Rogue One is the *_ONLY_* Star Wars from the Disney Era I still watch!
@@FreeOpenTruth It starts a little slow, but damn, yeah... that last half... It's the only Star Wars movie to REALLY lean on the "war" aspect.
It's mind-blowing how a multibillion-dollar company can alienate, to the point of push back, its fan base by mishandling the main character of their four-billion-dollar franchise. Remember, it's an entertainment company.
they actively told us to not watch it
It's beyond mishandling. It's dessecration.
Its like the old saying says:"If you chase two rabbits, both will escape". By trying to expand a franchise that was "mostly" for boys, they lost both boys and girls
Dead on. The solution is know your audience. Make sure that audience can sustain the scale of project your making, and cater to said audience. If you find out you misunderstood your audience (Say, 1/5 were female when you aimed at boys) it's time to find out what drew them. If it's what your already doing? Sweet, bonus audience! If it's something you could do more of without causing issues? Do it, at least in spinoffs. End of the day, the 'wider audience' is a myth.
Agree 100% : "If you chase two rabbits, both will escape" . . . Unfortunately, executives at places like Disney are too blinded to greed to understand this basic wisdom. Combine that situation with a few "girl-power" activists, who keep telling the executives that they can effectively double their ticket sales, by appealing to girls, and you get predictably bad results.
@@robrau8795 Yup greed seems to be the main issue, they thought they could double their profit
Disney doesn't want one specific audience, they want everyone, the corporate suits only see numbers and lines on a chart and they chose the biggest option available.
@@WillieHoule If anyone has been watching ANY marketing reports, they would see that the decisions are becoming LESS effective at bringing audiences. This HAS to be deliberate destruction of the franchises they bought. They can't be that blind or stupid.
You nailed it it is the hijackings of franchises meant to be watched primarily by a specific audience taken over and then told it is now not for you.
Its the same thing as those superficial, uptight and strict parents telling their kids they cant have ice cream after dinner because its bad for them and then eating an entire bowl of ice cream in front of them. I have family like that, they remind me of Disney. They also watch those liberal minded, women centered and man hating movies too. That content is specifically made for those shitty types of people. Disney is giving content to hateful people.
If you are arguing that Start Wars has always been and should continue to be for everyone, then I can agree with you.
@@d.t.garcia8705 You missed the point... or maybe just chose to ignore it.
Entertainment is a "gendered" thing. Certain forms appeal mostly to men... others appeal mostly to women... while others appeal to both.
When you have something intended for one audience or the other, and then try to shift that towards the center, you inherently REDUCE whatever attracted the original audience.
The Star Wars sequel trilogy ran off a bunch of their male audience, and failed to attract enough of a female audience to make up for it.
To put it another way that isn't gendered...
Consider spicy food. Some like it. Some don't. Neither is "wrong". Put too much pepper in your dish, and people are going to refuse to eat it. The more pepper you add, the more people who will refuse to eat it.
And yes, entertainment IS gendered... "chick flicks", soap operas, rom-coms, sports...
@nyetzdyec3391 I neither choose to ignore nor missed any point. I simply disagree. That's a sexist point of view.
@@d.t.garcia8705 You think it's sexist to say, for example, that televised sports appeal mostly to men, and not to most women?
Or that soap operas appeal mostly to females, and usually not to males?
Thanks for this! I have been saying this for years now. Don't buy IP then change it and whine that you lost the people who loved the original. Most people have forgotten that Disney bought SW and Marvel specifically for the boys. Then cursed therm out! Sick
I don't believe for a moment that they were being disingenuous with their intentions when they bought them. The problem is that Bob Iger was also the one responsible for flooding the company with intersectional feminists because he was irresponsibly using the Walt Disney Company as a tool to further his own personal political ambitions in Democrat party politics, whichever have hilariously seemed to fall flat so far. Now he's trying to salvage his damaged legacy after all of the ways in which he helped enable the decline of everything under the Disney umbrella.
Just finished season 3 of clone wars in my Star Wars chronological rewatch all the way from phantom menace to the mandalorian and more then ever when people accuse Star Wars fans of hating women due to peoples dislike of Rey the number one counter I see is Ahsoka because say what u will about her when she first started but unlike Rey she earned her status as a fan favorite…
Earned being key word. Ahsoka went through hell and back to earn our respect, and then our loyalty. She isn't popular because she's a woman, but because she's a whole character who went from arrogant snobby brat to one of the most quintessential 'true' Jedi we have alongside the likes of Qui-Gon Jinn.
She's not even a fan favorite- she is a fan favorite of a very specific subset of fans that grew up at that time during a Star Wars lull. Star Wars is generational- their plan to start their own feminist Star Wars generation was a massive failure and their plan b of appealing to the ahsoka crowd is too small and niche to make a difference. Their only solution was to use OT characters because all fans of all generations love them. But they would rather die than do that.
@Mister Sparkles I can agree to some extent that Star Wars fandom has a degree of generationalism to it, and I can even be persuaded that Ashoka's biggest fans are those who grew up with TCW, but it seems weird and straight up false to say that her "only" fans are those who grew up with it, nor do I believe in the slightest that the sequels trilogy failed because it tried to cater to "those fans." First of all, she didn't exist to exclusively appeal to a female audience. She isn't a one-dimensional feminist caricature of a woman like Rey is. Ashoka was originally widely disliked by almost everyone and earned a lot of people's respect through her character development and personal growth, something antithetical to the "strong female characters" who have no reason or way to grow except to realize how much more awesome they are. Those last two claims you made just seem wildly out of touch.
@@Tyler_W out of touch with the redditor crowd that spite likes new star wars?
Nah I grew up with the OT and Asokha is good.
Coincidentally, one of the suggested videos after this is about Wonder Woman, and that got me thinking about why the first Wonder Woman movie worked. I think the reason why that movie worked is because it wasn't trying to make a point that "women are better than men". It made sense why Diana was more powerful than everyone else, because she's the daughter of a literal god, but they also made sure to include something for the males to do. I can still say that Steve Trevor is a good character because they made sure he was an important character in the plot, like helping Diana through the war, and sacrificing himself at the end. This is female representation done right. It's not forced, it's not detriment to any other story, it simply showed a strong female character kicking butt, but not upstaging the men. I am a male, and I still loved the movie, and consider it one of the best DCEU movies. This is what they should've done with Rey, as well as Captain Marvel
It also showed Wonder Woman with actual flaws, namely her idealistic and misandrist view of the world. She had real character lessons to learn, not just powering up Dragonball Z style like Captain Marvel did.
Wonder Woman worked because Diana was not only allowed to be an actual woman, but also had a balanced set of virtues and flaws and she treated the men around her as equals, like a true feminist would.
Wonder Woman as a character is meant to be what women want to be. And what's better is that they actually kept her comic-accurate costume and it empowered her rather than sexualized her.
As Patty Jenkins said, every woman wants to be sexy, therefore so is Wonder Woman.
There is the scene of WW crossing No-Man’sLand. There was an opportunity when Steve says “no man can cross it” for her to say something like “but maybe a woman can cross it” - instead it’s just “it’s what I’m going to do”
@Dark O-man I remember watching that scene and bracing for the cringe, only to be incredibly relieved that they didn't go that cheap and lazy route. The ending was a bit lacking, but the movie as a whole was really good. It's worth pointing out, though, that it wasn't really Patty Jenkins who came up with the story, and if she was involved in that, she was an assist in that. People often ignore the role Zack Snyder played in the development of that story, and he stands out in my mind as the single best example of someone who has at least one "strong female character" that's actually done right. They're incredibly competant and have their own individual agency, but they're actual characters in the way that they have virtues, flaws, strengths, and vulnerabilities, have actual character arcs, and don't exist to put one over on the men. On top of all of that, almost all of them are rid8clously attractive and aren't shy about that without reducing them to nothing more than eye candy.
I never liked Wonder Woman. It was so cliché.
There is nothing deep or complicated about this. The answer to any question about Rey is: "because". Rey is not believable as a character, a woman, or (and especially) a hero.
The answer is usually not complicated. Galadriel and Capt. Marvel are patently unlikable. New Ariel is objectively worse than old Ariel (no motive, worse acting, maybe? better singing? maybe? / I don't wannabe disingenuous, she is clearly a more SKILLED singer, but showing off did make some songs actually worse.) Some are just utterly inconsistent, like Scarlet Witch (who we liked once, before she became inconsistent). And so on. Every female failure is a basic, uncomplicated, easy to define failure of writing. Period.
New young replacement characters ALL have the same problem. They aren't people. They are powers wearing new clothes with a stolen identity. This is true for men too. Capt. America doesn't work for the same reason. Miles Morales is the only one that seems to be working at all, and it is because he isn't Peter in new clothes/skin - he is a person.
I used to love Scarlet Witch and generally liked her brutally smacking down Thanos, partly because her powers were well-established and had logical weaknesses (as pointed out in the opening of Civil War) and she had a damn good reason to want Thanos dead. Contrast this with Captain Marvel with her ridiculous power level and having no established dog in the fight with him.
There is ONE Critical Difference between todays MODERN Female Lead in comparison to their Male counterparts is that these Females are OVER POWERED right out of the gate. There is ZERO Character Development. There are NO setbacks or heartaches. There are NO trials or Tribulations for them. there is NO learning Curve.
They DESTROY their Enemies, embarrassing and besting them in Combat on their first try with NO training, ESPECIALLY if it'a man, REALLY ESPECIALLY if it is a Caucasian Man, then they get their ARSE handed to them Faster than INSTANTLY.
This goes the same for many women authors out there.
The Majority of women authors write their Female Protagonist as PERFECT while writing their Male counterparts as bumbling idiots or close to it. Women such as Margaret Weiss and JK Rowling are the exception to this rule. While someone, such as Atwood amplifies it. MALES are BAD and EVIl or CORRUPT and SOULLESS while their Females are Virtuous and Perfect in Every way.
Then read many male authors books and novels, the Vast Majority of them will have a STRONG female lead, that is equalled by her male counterparts, or their Male Protagonist will have a Smart, Intelligent, Witty, Sexy, Fun Female Co Pilot that brings a different approach to the table and adds to their Males partnership. Ergo, if it wasn't for the timing of her, the Male would have missed out on a crucial element or perished even.
BIG DIFFERENCE.
Enter Kennedy and her FORCE is FEMALE and IP DESTRUCTION from the get go.
It was by Her Design.
She is a Misandrist of the WORST Kind.
Now, do you understand why I call brie larson's character "Captain Goku"?
You can see the truth behind the filmmakers' intent by the barely concealed malice showed towards Luke and Han. They destroyed their legacy, and then them themselves.
Rey was never the problem. The story was.
All evidence to the contrary- every single Disney entry has added stronk female characters like Rey, and every single one o them has wounded the brand and turned off fans. Lucas' Star Wars is for boys, always was,always will be and no amount of iconoclasm is going to change that. The next stop in this mess is ahsoka and her band of stronk women killers.
Rey grew up on a sand planet and suddenly was a better pilot and knew the Aluminum Falcon better than Han (with no apparent training) and was a superior Jedi Master to Luke (with no apparent training). Han and Luke are white men deadbeat losers. That was the story from the beginning. Disney is run by people that hate men and white men especially.
It’s ok to admit that boys and girls innately are interested in different things, but that doesn’t exclusively mean they can’t appreciate similar things.
But even if they made a My Little Pony with a male lead that doesn’t mean that boys are going to be any more interested in the genre. Put those male ponies into battle armor and send them into combat, and hey, you might have something good!
Unicorn Commandos!!
And put them against cyborg alien ponies who call themselves the Destrocon
Take a look at Equestria At War ;) It's a My Little Poney mod for Hearts of Iron 4, so basically MLP with Panzers and Spitfires and its great ! 😅
Your idea wouldn't work. I was obsessed with MLP as a teen. It was my way of trying to wrest some form of validation from the 'female world.' I'd been taught that validation from there was the only validation that mattered. It never worked. I just got hurt.
And holy hell, you should have seen how they treated male characters in that show.
MLP/Warhammer 40K crossover fanfics are a blast
Did you not watch the video? Girls can be interested in different things but boys are problematic if they don't enjoy girls content. It was his only point in the first 10 mins and you missed it
I think if Rey and the sequels were well written, there'd be zero issues. This includes cancelling the original book canon, throwing George's ideas into the garbage (rather than refining it), and failing utterly to follow up the most defining villain in cinematic history. The girl thing is a problem, but only because it was Kathleen's only concern: make a Skywalker replacement as her own self-insert power fantasy, already better in every way, and quickly bury George and be remembered for her greatness to a new generation that wouldn't know any better.
"You're toxic, trying to keep women out of Star Wars!"
" Ahsoka is one of my favorite characters actually."
" THAT'S BECAUSE YOU JUST THINK DAWSON IS HOT!"
I'm not joking, that is literally their argument. I've had the debate before, that's what they said.
To be fair, fans literally fancasted Rosario Dawson, so they're going to be against something done by the fans.
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe died off quickly because the kids watching the cartoon and playing with the toys aged out of it and it didn't pick up any new fans. The same thing happened with G.I. Joe and The Transformers and every other toy line that was made into an afternoon cartoon. All of these franchises peaked early and with each new wave the toys got cheaper-looking and sillier. Cobra-la? Pretenders? It had little to do with She-Ra.
I think the biggest problem with the Sequel Trilogy (and Rey) in general is that it was conceived as a soft reboot of the franchise and not a continuation. The way the Star Wars was set up by 1980 is that we would get three trilogies, each covering a generation of Skywalkers, and telling a sweeping, epic story. The Sequel Trilogy floundered because the protagonist wasn't the offspring of Luke. It's like Disney/Lucasfilm went out of their way to insure that the protagonist was anyone but the child of Luke, and that's why the Sequel Trilogy didn't connect and they derailed the franchise. The old EU (starting with Heir to the Empire) worked and the Disney era doesn't.
Star Wars might have started off as something for twelve year-old boys in 1977, but it grew into Generation X's "Lord of the Rings" with its own intricate mythology and history. And Disney bought it, not understanding what they were buying, and just wanted to churn out bland, banal content to sell toys and build theme parks and hotels around.
Another one of the reason He-Man toy saes collapsed was because they were so focused on creating and selling new figures, that they stopped making both He-Man and Skelator figures.
Meaning those who didn't already have them (and I never did get my Skelator), now never could. It also meant that you couldn't start a collection, because the main Hero and Villian, were no longer available as a starters "entry purchase" to the collection.
Yes, that was a stupid baffling decision. The secondary market wasn't that strong back then... how were the new younger kids going to get into the toys of the franchise? Not via She-Ra.
It's probably been said a million times by now, but the failure of Rey has nothing to do with her being a woman. It's very concerning how hard that sentiment has been pushed on people - the fact that it somehow has anything to do with sexism and misogyny. That kind of thinking is sending society on a downward spiral
It all comes down to poor writing and story telling. Rey basically has no character arc at all throughout the trilogy. The only thing that changes about her is that she continues to get absurdly overpowered and skilled with zero explanation.
But her as a person doesn't change one bit. She never has any moments of major defeat or failure or setback. Anything bad that ever happens - HAPPENS TO SOMEONE ELSE that's around her.
She is able to pull off force abilities that take years for Jedi to master in her very first movie - without having ever met a Jedi or having any idea how the force works or that those abilities even exist. She just does them.
She has no issues beating Kylo Ren THE FIRST TIME SHE EVER TURNS ON A LIGHTSABER. Meanwhile, Ben spent almost his entire life being trained by freaking Luke Skywalker, and he should have absolutely stomped her - regardless of his injury
She is never forced to fail or grow, she just steamrolls through the entire trilogy and plows through the bad guys while everyone else around her gets hurt or dies
They made Luke a pathetic and grumpy old man that refuses to teach her, just so that they can have Rey be like, "Oh yeah, well I don't need your help i can do it on my own" - and then she does.
It's really just ridiculous, and a complete waste
You’re DEFINITELY on to something here!
“You hate strong women in Star Wars”!
“Really? I love Padme, Leia, and Ahsoka! Whatcha talking about?!!” LOVE IT!!!!!!
Characters that are examples of virtue and heroism will appeal to anyone, anytime.
Star Wars fans aren't anti-women. They are against feminist propaganda and MaRey Sue 'strong female protaganists'.
Facts.
This…
I agree with you, but I wouldn’t label this “feminist propaganda”. This is billion dollar corporations co-opting and exploiting the feminist movement, and giving people who want to see good characters (who happen to be women) on-screen for the right reason a bad rep.
@lucyhiggins5631 I refer you to KK and her the force is female shirt.
@@slicerneons3300 another example of big corporations trying to make money off of feminism without truly helping the cause, unfortunately. they simply want to take money from people who support feminism and women in general without taking the time to create truly great female characters (ie. co-opting it) :/
Imagine spending 4 billion dollars buying an IP just to be THIS inept.
Tbh anytime I fail in life I just remember that it didnt cost 4 billion dollars and it encourages me to keep going.
Rey is the example of how NOT to do a star wars female character.
Market share.
Star Wars caped with its current audience, the only way to expand was by introducing a new element to find a new audience.
Like a burger restaurant adding pizza to the menu.
The problem being, if a burger restaurant forgets to make burgers, they'll loose the market they established and only have the smaller pizza market, as there was already strong contenders making pizza.
Fav-aloni are chefs making burgers from pizza ingredients, and it shows.
It was what I told my cousin when Disney first bought Star Wars. Leia is now a Disney Princess and they are going to cater Star Wars to girls because they already have Marvel for boys. What I never imagined was that after they failed epicly to make Star Wars the "Marvel for girls" they would proceed to try to instead make Marvel for girls and tank both properties. 😅
It's incredible how you have this information and a multi million dollar company doesn't.
Considering Useful Idiots online tend to throw the sexist card around mind you people don't like Rey because she has no flaws or a character arc. People love Female characters who have flaws and a arc instead of being perfect like all the time that is how you create a Strong Female character.
Yes, Exactly. Even if we tell them valid reasons on why we don't like Rey, they still don't get it.
Same for male characters. Like just make the story and arc of a character good and make it make sense. Add some struggle and then have the character overcome struggle.
I don’t think there is intended to be a lot of logic in their accusation of males gatekeeping vs girls not relating. That’s how they feel, so it is the truth.
One would be hard pressed to find anyone who dislikes two of the greatest characters in sci-if storytelling; Ellen Ripley and Sarah Conner. The narrative that you need to see yourself to relate or look up to someone is the dumbest idea to exist. I’ve always liked these two characters and wanted to be strong and determined like them. It’s just that they were written well, and both characters had exhibited past traumas to better themselves,.
It’s so simple, just give us good characters and we will love them. They don’t even have to be human.. think about The Brave Little Toaster…
I don't like Sarah Connor. She was okay in the first film, but in T2 she was just a drag to watch.
@@lucasoheyze4597 Each to their own. My point was more about relating to a character regardless of gender or if they look like you.
There's a conflict for superheroines and their costume designers--usually the superhero will have ONE costume, his trademark--but a heroine can't wear the same costume twice! Just ask Hollyweird! Gotta keep costume designers in business!
It's REALLY simple, Thor.
Luke had a planned story and was handled expertly.
Rey had NO planned story and what story we got was handled in a very hamfisted way.
Simple as.
i was optimistic for TFA, i didn't even mind it being essentially another "A new hope"
"it's fine" i said "they are probably trying to show us they can make another good movie"
then TLJ happened.
When i saw Luke throwing his lightsaber off the cliff, i got up from the chair and left the room.
Nobody is against female leads but EVERYONE is against spitting on established characters
Hey, remember that if Disney/Lucasfilm didn't have double standards they wouldn't have any standards at all.
“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it “, Star Wars was never broken in my humble opinion.
So Disney bought 2 franchises to appeal more to a male audience and then preceded to intentionally alienate much of that audience, makes sense.
I remember watching She-ra as a child in addition to He-man, because I vaguely remember that there was an Orko-like character on She-ra that would hide somewhere during the episode -- to be revealed at the end -- and it was fun to try to find him. Maybe some of your other viewers can remember that, as well.
With that said, I remember being four years old and, my father having gone on a business trip and returned with a gift for me, being completely stunned and confused when he gave me a purple My Little Pony toy. I remember, even as a child, saying, "Uh. This is for girls. Why would I want this?"
I think the issue with "strong female characters" in modern media is that they aren't written as female. We're getting badly written characters shoved into 'male' roles and told we're toxic if we don't like it. There are plenty of good (strong) female characters that are loved by men & women, that isn't the issue. The issue if women are being used as a crutch for bad writing.
nobody particularly hated Rogue One, even though Jyn's gender was mostly irrelevant to the plot.
I don't think there's any such thing as a "male role"; girls can do pretty much anything a guy can. It's just not being well written because they have an agenda to show women are BETTER.
I'm just reminded of the line from the Batwoman trailer.
"The suit is perfect."
"It will be... when it's made to fit a woman."
When Rey was introduced in The Force Awakens, I absolutely enjoyed her character. I even liked specifically that the main character was female, it was something different within Star Wars. It was the writing of The Last Jedi and then Rise of Skywalker that I didn’t like. It wasn’t the character, it’s what they did with the character. Same goes for Finn and Poe, Luke etc..they started strong and then just dropped the ball completely. Daisy Ridley did an excellent job playing Rey. It’s what the writers did with Rey that was lackluster and left wanting.
I really feel bad for Daisy Ridley and John boyega. She really busted her ass for the role and he had such a promising potential story arc. The writing let them both down.
@@nocrtname Absolutely. Incredible things could have happened. All the groundwork was there for something that could have rivaled it’s predecessors. Then someone just flushed it all down the toilet.
If the upcoming Ahsoka series manages to have writing quality and production values anywhere near the ballpark of the first two seasons of The Mandalorian, I'm curious how they'll react to having their narrative utterly destroyed when it becomes a hit. I don't know exactly what they'll say, but I'm pretty sure they won't apologize to us.
Sadly, I think we're only trading one producer OC Mary Sue for another producer's OC waifu.
@@moffjendob6796 I like waifus better than mary sues. At least Ahsoka has a wide arc of triumphs and challenges. We saw her grow A LOT whereas with Rey...not so much. She was already practically perfect in every way.
I am really hoping the show flops badly so Disney gives up and sells it back to Lucas for a fraction of what they paid for it. There are so many story arcs in the extended Star Wars universe that could be explored but Disney can’t do anything but destroy the franchise with their garbage
if they don't completely ignore the other Disney films, I don't care about it. They need to be non-canon. Disavowed.
@@MadsterV It will never happen, at least not for a good ten, twenty years.
I wonder what it would be like if George Lucas was the one to write Rey's backstory. When TFA ended there were many theory videos, forums, etc. trying to figure out Rey's origins.
Fast forward to the present and what we got ultimately ended up being worse than what could've been.
As it stands, Rey's backstory across the sequel trilogy was all over the place thanks in no small part to Lucasfilm's lack of planning and direction.
I don't know what made Kathleen decide to let Rian do what he wants with his part when they were making the sequel trilogy, only for her to call back J.J. again to try to fix the mess Rian made.
"When TFA ended there were many theory videos, forums, etc. trying to figure out Rey's origins." That's because they fell for Jar-Jar Abrams' trick of suckering _you_ into writing _his_ film for him.
Remember: At that point Jar-Jar was supposed to be done writing and directing Star Wars films, so he didn't anticipate having to actually clean up his own mess. He could just do his "mystery box" tactic of posing a lot of questions he didn't have the answers to and then fade with his check and the rep for profits associated with the first live-action Star Wars movie in 10 years and the first one with the original cast in 35 years. So he waded in with his usual bad, lazy writing that was disguised by an air of mystery around it to misdirect attention away from its shortcomings. It wasn't until Ruin Johnson *_fucked his movie up even worse_* that Jar-Jar got called back to "fix" things, and even then it was only because multiple other directors were either fired off the project or wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
Disney and Hollywood Idea of strong women is women who can lift the rock, defeat the bad guy , and scream shit
Not someone who can make impact to society and contribute to better future
The answer to this question is so simple: Rey is a badly written character (overpowered, no arc etc). That has nothing to do with her being a woman. The problem was that her creators then started to use her womanhood and alleged sexism to distract from their bad writing (it didnt help that truly toxic male "fans" like Nerdrotic seemingly proved their point by blindly attacking anything "woke" regardless of the actual quality of the content). They should focus on making good stories for female and male characters, like in Wonder Woman for example. Im sure most men are adult enough to enjoy female characters just as well as male ones if theyre WRITTEN just as well.
Just because someone calls something "woke" doesn't mean they're wrong.
Ray is so OP she can shoot down 3 tie fighters with one laser blast from the falcons turret
Rey couldn't hold a conversation with any other established female character because she'd put them to sleep because she's got 0 personality, the charisma of a cider block, and the character depth of a child's sand castle bucket. The writers for her have absolutely bo clue what they're doing or how to actually make her appealing to audiences of all backgrounds. No fault to Daisy, she's done and tried her best, its that others have massively let her down.
Strong male characters don't just appeal to men, they appeal to women too. Dumbing all the men down and destroying legacy strong men puts almost everyone off. And no, a prompt up Mary Sue with a non existent personality is not a fair compensation.
The death of Bronyism came because they keep rebooting the show to chase new audiences and that meant they started shedding the Bronies (who were focused on the continuity & characters of the show they liked). A good way to lose an audience -- but it also meant a lot of younger girls checked out too since their characters kept changing or disappearing. My wife and I both liked the "Friendship is Magic" era, but haven't been able to find any new products of that quality for our daughter...
Male and female entertainment is so divided that Japan even has words for "this show is for guys" (shounen) and "this show is for girls" (Shoujo).
I learned about He'Man's steep toy sales decline a few years ago. I am still amazed how sharp a drop it was.
My family had three boys and one girl. We all enjoyed the She-Ra program. My sister had some of the toys, and my brothers and I enjoyed playing with the toys. My classmates, both boys and girls, watched the program as well. Everyone seem to like She-Ra. Everyone within my social circle at least.
Now that I've had time to think about it, my family and classmates probably watched She-Ra because there were only a handful of cartoons on for a handful of hours back then. Chooses were limited. However, watching and enjoying a show doesn't necessarily translate to buying merchandise. Without new He-Man cartoons (as well as that bonkers travesty of a live-action movie), I would image that boys were happy enough to just watch a Masters Of The Universe spin-off and play with whatever He-Man toys they already owned.
I am very interested to see how well the upcoming Barbie live-action movie will perform. I am sure it will do far better than the live action Jem And The Holograms film. (It would be almost impossible to do worse.) However, it seems that Hollywood has been trying to make big spectacle high profile franchise for girls, and nothing has yet to taken off. Not even the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic film got a direct sequel, despite earning 10 times it's budget at the box office. The 2018 Tomb Raider movie earn around the same as Angelina Jolie's first Tomb Raider movie. Jolie's second Tomb Raider was a box office failure. Why have so many 'strong female lead" action-adventure movies either performed just okay or underperformed?🤷♀ (Don't get me started on Birds Of Prey.)
Maybe the problem is not a lack of "strong female characters" for girls and women to "see themselves" in movies.
Maybe the problem is that girls and women go to the movies for different wish fulfillment preferences. How else could their be multiple Step Up, Pitch Perfect, Twilight, and Hunger Games movies... but female action adventure sequels tend to flop or never get made?
PS: I am not worried about The Marvels. Even the "worst performing" MCU movies earn tons more at the box office than their cinematic contemporaries.
I find the problem back then you had no choice but to watch what was available and boys were watching reruns going the next episode would be a new one
The problem wasn't that many male fans disliked Rey; it was that many Star Wars fans, male and female, disliked Rey.
When I saw the Force awakens. And I saw that they were going to use Ray as the focus. I wasn't upset, quite to the contrary I was intrigued.
When I saw that they look like they were going to develop a very sophisticated story with Finn. I was enthusiastic. I happily gave them my money and I happily enjoyed the movie.
But then Ryan Johnson completely shut down all of those things that interested me.
That is when I started to become disappointed in Rey.
Suddenly she was a Mary Sue. Suddenly Finn's story evaporated. I understand the arc they were trying to do with Luke. But it came off more as disrespect to the character.
This movie , The last Jedi, basically ended my interest in Star Wars the new franchise. I have not even seen the third movie. And disappointingly I heard about horses galloping on Star destroyers in space. This truly sounds like it was written by a 5-year-old.
Then I started watching UA-cam videos of people pointing out things that I did not notice. Some of which I agreed with. Some I thought was nitpicking. Some I thought was agenda driven.
So I basically just tuned it out.
I have my fond memories of standing in line at 7 years old to see the original Star Wars. I have even more fun memories of standing in line to see empire strikes back. And asking people is it good. And everybody and I mean everybody will stunned shock and said you just got to go see it. Talk about driving up enthusiasm.
And when the final movie came out that's right you could find me in line. And I was very happy for the end. I thought the ewoks were a little gimmicky. But I understood by that point that there do need to be toy sales. And that was targeted towards the small ones. And I did get a few laughs. But at no point did I feel like I was being excluded. At no point did I feel like I was being lectured to. I was always entertained I was always enthusiastic and it was always in awe.
If you made it this far thanks. I didn't proofread it it was all talk to text. And I thank you for your time.
I had the same feeling of disappointment with Hux
In TFA he was a potentially terrifying up-and-coming main villain, a literal Space Hitler, and he seemed intimidated by Kylo
Then Ryan made him a joke character...
I don't know why I care to point this out, but the horses (yes, they're not made up) are on the Star Destroyed in atmosphere, NOT in space.
The reason for that is because the Star Destroyers are incapable of flying UP into space without a big antenna telling them how. So they use the horses in part to break the antenna.
Yeah... Palpatine built like 10,000 Star Destroyers on a planet with no discernible food production (and definitely no imports), no apparent raw resources of any kind, brought in crews for those destroyers, fed them somehow, AND fitted ALL OF THE SHIPS with Death Star lasers (seriously), and also somehow resurrected himself. However... he forgot to install the "Up" position on the steering columns. Quality writing without a doubt.
I love that title - “The Rey Conspiracy”.
The division and situation right now in Star Wars is what happens political agendas try to fix problems that don’t or barely even exist
or when political agendas substitute for the genuine creativity that inspired the original Star Wars
We did get another HeMan series, where there's a villain called Kevin Smith who kills HeMan with Mark Hamils Joker
He Man didn't fall off because boys didn't like SheRa. It fell off because they turned She Ra into just another Barbie. Rey wasn't rejected. The way they turned the force into a super power that she just had instead of learned how to use was the problem. The problem was that she had all the powers Luke was supposed to have and he was turned into a creepy old bum who she beat up with a stick.
She didn’t beat Luke, he was testing her. Nobody beats Luke.
@@mkhud50n Rian Johnson beat Luke Skywalker to death ;-)
@@wray2real Nooooooooo!!!!!
@@mkhud50n Sometimes I wonder if I've seen the same movie as some commenters. The guy was almost crying while he was on his back and looked at her terrified like he never seen strenght like her.
@@yusufraage8554 you saw he used the Force and stopped himself from falling on the stairs right?
I'm a guy an grew up in the 90s watching Disney films. I don't remember there being any stigma about it.
Interesting breakdown of the He-Man stuff. I wonder if She-Ra would've continued in popularity if the title had simply been more gender neutral, and not "SHE-Ra." As well, how many male side characters were in She-Ra as well? The protagonist's identity doesn't matter if the surrounding cast is diverse/inclusive enough.
Moreover, I'm a big fan of Legend of Korra and never had any issue with Rey being the protagonist of the sequel trilogy. I relate to them both just fine! The sex/gender of the protagonist isn't a factor for me. The only issue is if the series as a whole interests me. It's why I like Korra, but not Barbie lol.
Korra is so much better written than Rey.
@RacingSnails64
If you don't start fighting for the interests of men women will take everything from you.
I think it would have been more popular if it was airing alongside He-Man and not replacing it. Star Trek Deep Space 9 and Voyager were both running for the same length and were at points concurrent. While they both have their detractors it was clear the creators were trying to appease both sides of the Fanbase with these two shows. DS9 was a darker series with morally complex characters and being set about a space station was more character-driven and serialized than prior series that lacked a heavy focus on the space exploration the franchise is known for. Voyager ultimately became the new TNG-style space exploration episodic adventure series fans expected when it came to air.
As a woman, who liked some things about the sequel trilogy…Rey was not one of them. Do I hate or dislike her? No…but out of all the new characters…I just don’t care about her. She never interested me, or appealed to me on any level. She got to be super powered from the jump and never had any real character development or arch. She really lost me during the last Jedi when she literally said”I need somebody to tell me where I belong in all this” When you grow up wanting to be Leia but then they trash Mara Jade and you get Rey…Disney doesn’t get Star Wars
Honestly if you told me that Disney bought these franchises because they hated them and wanted to ruin them for all time then I could almost believe it. Because at least you could say they've been fairly successful there.
But it's sad what they've done. People were excited before the Force Awakens. People were excited even when it seemed like Finn was going to be the new main character of this trilogy. Wow, that didn't end up happening. Rey wasn't good to start, but there was some potential. But the character just can't be salvaged now. And the worst thing is this stupid push for "strong female characters" when there were already great female characters. Some weird mental puzzle that leads to trying to turn these female characters into the worst aspects of guys around them that these writers clearly encountered growing up. Thinking that would make them good...somehow.
Sadly we're just in a dark age for cinema. Trash being thrown on the screen for mixed up reasons. We're just going to have to hope and wait for things to improve. Thankfully there are other hobbies to sink times into until things hopefully improve.
The biggest issue isn’t that Rey was female, the issue is she’s a bad character. She broke almost every rule that existed on how Jedi were made. She discovered power after power for no other reason than because.
Add to that, many unpopular decisions made in the trilogy were made seemingly due to Rey, or as a way to make Rey alone the savior. I promise that the large majority of people that dislike Rey LOVED Leia.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic succeeded in achieving widespread appeal because it delivered surprisingly engaging characters in a relentlessly optimistic setting at a time when gloomy dystopian fiction was dominating the media landscape, especially in the teen/young adult segment.
Disney's Star Wars chases trends, tries to cash in on nostalgia and play around with a setting it makes no effort to understand, and populates itself with profoundly uninteresting characters that are handled in a way that is shockingly disrespectful to both the fans who want to enjoy the series and the very actors that play them.
I'd also note that despite having more equitable gender representation, the newest generation of My Little Pony seems to be much less popular than Friendship is Magic was, possibly because it simply isn't that good...
If you want viewers to pay attention, you need to write people (or ponies, or aliens, or droids) worth watching. Phoning it in with a checklist of character backgrounds is not how you build a cross-demographic media franchise.
I thought MLP:FIM mostly got so popular because it was written by people who cared. Namely Lauren Faust was the original showrunner and creator who had a sizeable following in the cartoon sphere for her past work on shows like Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends and The Powerpuff Girls which followed her to this series and found she put the same effort into it as her past work.
@@emberfist8347 Yeah, I don't want to devalue the importance of having staff who actually *care* about the product, but I think a key part of that is not being afraid to let the material stand on its own, without leaning too hard on nostalgia baiting or copying successful peers. If your story doesn't stand out from its predecessors or its contemporaries, where's the hook to keep people interested?
I don’t dislike the character or Rey. I dislike bad writing, cruel mean writing. And condescending hypocritical PR.
It's sad that no matter how many strong female characters we get, the media keeps insisting that women are still underrepresented. What's worse is that nowadays the entertainment industry has begun de-feminizing female characters. Even though strong female characters like Wonder Woman taught that femininity is power.
And I don't know how anyone can call the entertainment industry sexist when we do have wonderful female characters like Wonder Woman, Princess Leia, The Bride, Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Galadriel (LOTR version), Arwen, Bastila Shan, Kreia, Katara, Toph, Azula, Korra, Asami, Lin, Jinora, Kyoshi, Kassandra, Evie Frye, Batgirl etc.
Leia follows a long line of strong female characters, going back to the beginning of cinema. One of the earlier sci-fi examples was Constance Moore’s portrayal of Lt. Wilma Deering in 1939’s “Buck Rogers.” Not a screaming damsel in distress, but a competent down-to-business military officer and ace rocketship pilot always in the middle of the action alongside Buck.
Quite. Some of the earliest action series starred women, such as The Perils of Pauline of 1914.
@@johnnhoj6749 - excellent point! That’s actually one I’ve been intending to watch. Now that you’ve reminded me, I need to do that!
I think you are right on with this! I believe that it also poses another question, and that question is: “Why is Bob Eiger allowing Kathleen Kennedy to oversaturate Star Wars with female characters and/or a focus on female characters if the purpose all along for purchasing Lucasfilm was to cater to boys and men?”
It just adds to the great mystery of WHY is she still in charge? I don’t get it….
None of these mental gymnastics are necessary. Try is a bad character. Jin was…. better, but Rey was just bad.
If they’d created Ellen Ripley with a lightsaber, it would’ve been fine. I can even concoct a story right now: Luke’s temple is in its early stages when he goes missing, and fresh apprentice Ripley is standing in the gap, trying to keep remnants of the Empire from seizing force-sensitive children.
The creators are immature and mean-spirited. They mistook disliking poor quality for sexism and, if you will, trashed the playroom to have their way. Then they lashed out at the fans again for not liking the trashed room.
I was thinking about this after I saw the Star Wars Outlaws trailer.
Star Wars fans when women
It's the nevereding power struggle perpetuated by bad writers. If you can't identify with the female character, that's because you're misogynist. If you can't identify with the black character (that is a re-skin of a white character), that means you're racist. But once the roles are reversed, oh, well, that doesn't mean girls are misandrist for not liking male characters, that means girls are oppressed and the entertainment caters exclusively to boys and men. And when black people can't enjoy white Ariel or Peter Parker, that's not racism, that's because they're oppressed by cis, straight, entitled, racist, sexist, hom0ph0bic, privileged white men from Hollywood. The idea that the majority doesn't like the controversial character, because it's badly written, that doesn't really end up on the map for them.
Gonna have to say it; no, I don't ever want to watch or play a story that has a female lead as a protagonist. I've had to live with this feminist crap for my entire life, I'm just skipping everything that has a woman pretending to be a man in it. I don't care if that's sexist or not, I'm finished with it.
Lol what a loser
Okay, that IS genuinely sexist. To avoid female leads simply because you assume they're going to be woke.
The problem with media isn't female leads, the problem is that they're not always written right.
I think what happened, is once fans realized they were being manipulated and there was a forced agenda (because Kathleen Kennedy told us), that’s when the fandom had a backlash. People honestly don’t like being manipulated. That’s what it boils down to. People gave Rey a chance because they were just excited, but once fans realized Kathleen Kennedy didn’t really give a shit, everything they did was put under a microscope. This is the direct fault of Kathleen Kennedy.
First like. 😁
I'm a woman and Luke and Vader are the reason why I love Star Wars. I never liked Leia that much. I mean, she is great character, but for me, the best female in SW is Mara Jade, who according to Disney no longer exist, so... and Rey had so much potential, but in the end became only Mary Sue and if they think that is the kind of character we want, they are deeply mistaken.
Mara Jade Skywalker has more fans than Rey ever will.
The problem is people marketing the idea of "The Untapped Audience", when they either at best have never put any actual thought into the concept, or worse purposely using it to more covertly push an agenda. The concept of "The Untapped Audience" is often presented as being two parts, The demographic of people that don't have knowledge of the product, and the demographic of people that currently aren't interested in the product. That however isn't actually true, as in reality "The Untapped Audience" is only made up of one part, the demographic of people that don't have knowledge of the product. When it comes to the demographic of people that currently aren't interested in the product, they are not actually a true "Untapped Audience", as in order to reach those folks you need to change your product. If you are changing your product to reach them that means what you are doing is not reaching an "Untapped Audience" but rather changing the intended audience of your product. When you change your product's the intended audience you lose the original intended audience. That's not to say you can't create a new intended audience that also captures the vast majority of the original audience, it's definitely possible to wind up getting a greater number of people interested in the new product then those that no longer have interest in the product. It's just that when you change the intended audience, don't expect the original audience to continue to consume of your product. That's where the major issue is, to often people change the intended audience to reach this version of the "Untapped Audience", and think they are still entitled to the original audience. When that original audience they believed, they were entitled to don't show they get mad and blame the audience.
Once again. Another great video. I recall when He-Man was very popular. I wasn’t aware of the plummet in sales after She-Ra debuted.
Just imagine how different everything might have been if Rey hadn't bypassed the compressor...
Funny thing is that she just literally ripped it out. That's not bypassing. XD
@@zephyrerazortail5478 I never saw it. I'm just going by memed. 😬
Even if Rey was a dude named Ray, he would still be a badly written character.
That pic of Scarlett, Cover Girl, and Lady Jaye brought back memories. I loved those cartoons as a kid. G.I.Joe and Transformers especially.
Rey was no character. Characters have arcs and purpose. Rey had nothing but a message.
I was like everyone else -- at the time -- I *liked* the Rey and Finn characters --- "Who is Rey? Who are her parents? Is Rey a Kenobi? Is she a Skywalker? Who is Snoke?" On and on. The Force Awakens was a SUCCESS... but then.... a certain person got elected President, and "The Message" from Hollywood had to be changed... because Disney decided to "Go Woke" and... they went broke.
I think you are right. The problems with Star Wars are firstly that Kathleen don't understand Star wars or what made it so great in the first place.
The next thing is that they don't know how to write a strong female character anymore. They write them as flawless beings that knows everything better then any man. It feels that they think strong means physical strong as well. Then we got a strong female character from Favreau. He gave us Cara Dune, one of my favorit characters in the Disney era of Star Wars. But Kathleen fires her, I think it was not only for the post she put out. I think it was because she made Rey look bad.
Neither Bob or Kathleen are creative people but it feels they are involving themselves in that, especially KK that makes things worse for the writers and directors. I also don't think we would have gotten Luke at the season 2 final, if Bob hadn't put her away (with Children of blood and bones). He did that to give Favreau creative freedom for the mandowerse. Chapek took her back, do to that she should work with what they pay her for. This was in time for BoBF. We got the scooters and I think the not so recognizable version of Boba thanks to KK. I hope Ahsoka gets to be strong in the way she's been since clone wars They succeeded with Bo-Katan in my opinion We'll see. Got no hope for the Rey movie.
I had a number of younger cousins who were huge He-man fans back in the day. My first Christmas home from college, thanks to my part-time job, I had money to buy them Christmas presents. I asked them what He-man figures they wanted, and they told me that He-man was “a girl’s toy now”. And I got a chance to visit the family of girls I used to sit for and they had bought the huge He-man collection (including the Grayskull playset) from the kid across the street, because he also considered He-man part of the for-girls She-ra toy line now.
Rey’s story and the sequel story arc in general is why she’s not accepted. Ppl associate her w/the sequels and the sequel story is very disconnected to the original 6 which is why Rey isn’t a household name
The answer is a simple one. Force Awakens/Rise of Skywalker was nothing more than remakes of the original trilogy... and replacing Luke with a female lead who had everything handed to her. Luke didn't become a badass overnight when he discovered he had the force, whereas Rey was already manipulating Stormtroopers without having any lessons or guidance. Clearly Disney knows nothing about the Force.
If a show is good written, everyone can enjoy it independent who the target audience is.
This is why Disney is not beloved anymore.
Children will notice bad writing. Usually quicker than the "fans".
It is children who dislike the remakes the most.
It has NEVER to do with the gender of a character.
Kathleen basically spit on all boys and fans when she said "the force is female", ruined the rules of the force, basically made Dragonball where the ceiling is getting constantly shattered, ruined one of the most beloved fictionally heroes of all time.
You are not talking about why me-Rey sues are not liked and why "strong-female-characters" are hated in general, because this is the reason why many modern shows and movies fail.
Also the Marvel take is wrong. Phase 1 to Endgame was Marvel. (Black Panther, Captain Marvel and Endgame had Disney influence)
Phase 4 was Disney and It flopped and it keeps failing.
5:19 100% true, it started as ironic shitposting on the comics and cartoons board and quickly picked up steam until people were legitimately engaging with it, discussing it, and enjoying it. The shitposting never stopped, it just stopped being ironic, after a whole lot of pissing off most of the rest of the site they were quarantined off onto their own specific board and any pony posting outside of it was punishable with bans. That rule still stands today. 2010-2011 was a hell of a year on that site.
Your numbers on He-Man sales are inaccurate. The He-Man toy line made $400 million from 1982-1986. So while a drop to $7M in 1987 was a huge drop, it wasn’t as ridiculous as 98%.
I think the key is for the entertainment industry to provide MORE options for the consumer, not take away or change things that already have a large fandom and then tell us we are wrong for liking that thing.
For example:
Changing Star Wars to have 99 percent female leads, and changing, say, the babysitters club to have 99 percent male leads. Because some people in charge have the idea that they need to “fix” these franchises.
If they were smart the would keep Star Wars and Babysitters club largely the same (keeping in mind what you said about each franchise’s fans not minding characters of the opposite gender) and instead made NEW franchises that may be similar to the aforementioned franchises, but simply swap the focus from male to female and vice versa.
Honestly there’s so much nuance to this issue it’s almost impossible to comment on it without writing a 50 page essay on it, but those are my basic thoughts.
Great video, really made me think.