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kleinbl00  ·  2060 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What Happens When Fandom Doesn't Grow Up?

STAR WARS: Robots escape the Empire in search of an ancient ally. They find him and with him, a young warrior in training. The warrior and the ally make it off planet (barely) but end up at a world-killing base. The warrior escapes the base when the ally sacrifices himself and sets an example that the warrior uses to rally the rebels and destroy the base.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: The rebels have been found on an icy planet. They escape after a battle but the warrior diverts to complete his training. While there he learns of his legacy. Meanwhile the rebels escape through an asteroid field to end up at an ally's base only to be betrayed. The empire sets a trap, the warrior shows up and has an epic battle (and his legacy). He escapes, barely, with the help of his friends.

RETURN OF THE JEDI: The rebels rally to save a friend. The warrior returns to complete his training only to discover that his master is dying. The rebels must destroy another world-killer with the help of indigenous people and the warrior must save his legacy, his life and the rebels.

THE LAST JEDI: A new warrior must be trained by the master, who refuses to do it. The rebels try to take out the empire but they suck. They're on the run but the empire can't quite catch them. So some of them escape to the Casino Planet where they're captured. But they get away on horseback. Where they're rescued by a thief. Who actually turns them in. Meanwhile the rebels are still incongruously on the run. There's a bad warrior and a good warrior and they snapchat a few times. Then they get together and kill the emperor but aren't friends and one of them gets away for some reason. There are wisecracks and puffins that look like BatBoy. Also the Dark Side of the Force lives in a hole that looks disconcertingly like a gaping asshole.

I will not mock you for liking The Last Jedi but you can't argue that it's objectively on par with the original trilogy. The movies could be cheap Hong Kong martial arts films and everything after the first two-three movies would still be pale imitations. This is a problem, as I said, that Hollywood is not addressing: movies suck now. Pick your best modern superhero movie (a genre not known for quality) and compare it to Superman 2. It's been downhill for a while now, but it's really hard to deny.

Not that everyone isn't trying.

I'm aware of ComicsGate. I also witnessed the chairman of DC comics say "by our best guess there are 200,000 comics readers in the United States. Green Lantern has an audience of maybe 7 million. If those 200,000 comics readers object to something we do with Green Lantern, that's a price we'll happily pay."

And that was ten years ago.

Comics readers are the coal miners of entertainment. They're completely fucking irrelevant to every single aspect of the rest of the industry yet whenever they open their pie holes to whinge about the Human Torch being black we're all required to care for some fucking reason. Comic Book Sunday is every comic book fan in Los Angeles, showing up to hang out with every comic book industry guy in Los Angeles, and on any given Sunday there's like 50 people there.

Yeah, sure. There's 24 million "comic book fans" in the United States. If only 50 people can show up for free comics out of a city of 20 million, that number is abject bullshit.