Why Palpatine Influcing Kylo Ren was a Bad Idea

[phantom000]

If Anakin was created by Palpatine and Rey was Palpatine's granddaughter does that mean that Rey is actually Luke's cousin? Does that mean that Reylo is a cousin romance once-removed? Damn Tatooine and Jaaku rednecks.

This is why they needed to get away from Palpatine as the big bad of SW. It just keeps making everything more and more convoluted and undermines anything they try to do aside from just retelling the OT, which is a weak concept at best.

The idea that Palpatine created Anakin raises a LOT of questions that are likely never going to be answered and if they ever are they will likely make little to no sense. If Palpatine created Anakin why didn't he locate him to obtain as much power as possible instead of letting him be found by the Jedi which is one of the factors that ultimately led to Palpatine's death? Why would Palpatine bother locating and recruiting Sith apprentice if he can literally just will someone into existence and make the chosen one? How did the Jedi NOT notice THAT amount of power being used when they can sense a single person across the galaxy doing a simple Force Pull?

It reminds me of comic books when at the end of the story the villain boasts how all their previous set backs were all part of their grand plan. At best it sounds like an idol boast and at worse the writer trying to pull a stupid retcon. This is why I think Palpatine is a poor villain. In ROTJ when he talks to Vader and Luke about how he has foreseen everything and all is going according to his plans, it feels more like him trying to give the illusion that he is in control when he isn't.

It doesn't make me want to hear his grand scheme, it just makes me want him to shut up!

It's revealed that only a first one can use the Sword of Protection and that Mara had sealed Etheria in an alternate dimension. In order to complete her objective Light Hope used all her power (which was likely, and unknowingly, aided by Hordak's attempts to create a portal) to open a portal and bring Adora to Etheria so she could become She-Ra. However, Light Hope's systems were severally damaged as a result of being off-line for several years so she ended up dropping Adora off within Horde Territory so Light Hope couldn't get Adora as she had planned.

Few questions, all answered and all fit what we learn over the series

Now imagine for a moment that Horde Prime explained that he was the one who sent Adora to Etheria to pull it back to this dimension. Or if Thanos told Stark that he had planned for Loki and Ultron to be defeated, or for Starlord to run off with the power stone? Because then everyone would know they were full of crap.

[McAvoy]

Palpatine is just a simple fact that Abrams just cannot write something original it seems when it comes to an established franchise. This. Oukd have easily been a Kylo Ren show where he was shown to be irredeemable. Or anything else. Or they could have kept Snoke and the clones.

I have felt for a long time that Abrams is a hack. Great director if someone else writes the stories.

[phantom000]

Palpatine is just a simple fact that Abrams just cannot write something original it seems when it comes to an established franchise. This. Oukd have easily been a Kylo Ren show where he was shown to be irredeemable. Or anything else. Or they could have kept Snoke and the clones.

I have felt for a long time that Abrams is a hack. Great director if someone else writes the stories.

George Lucas seems to be kinda the opposite; great writer, lousy director. With one exception, that being ANH, most people seem to agree his directed films range from okay to bad.

[McAvoy]

Palpatine is just a simple fact that Abrams just cannot write something original it seems when it comes to an established franchise. This. Oukd have easily been a Kylo Ren show where he was shown to be irredeemable. Or anything else. Or they could have kept Snoke and the clones.

I have felt for a long time that Abrams is a hack. Great director if someone else writes the stories.

George Lucas seems to be kinda the opposite; great writer, lousy director. With one exception, that being ANH, most people seem to agree his directed films range from okay to bad.

He is an ideas man. More of a technical director who likes the behind the scenes stuff more than anything else. But I don't think he is a great writer. He did go through a shit ton of ideas before ANH.

The prequels kinda show how much of so-so writer.

[phantom000]

Palpatine is just a simple fact that Abrams just cannot write something original it seems when it comes to an established franchise. This. Oukd have easily been a Kylo Ren show where he was shown to be irredeemable. Or anything else. Or they could have kept Snoke and the clones.

I have felt for a long time that Abrams is a hack. Great director if someone else writes the stories.

George Lucas seems to be kinda the opposite; great writer, lousy director. With one exception, that being ANH, most people seem to agree his directed films range from okay to bad.

He is an ideas man. More of a technical director who likes the behind the scenes stuff more than anything else. But I don't think he is a great writer. He did go through a shit ton of ideas before ANH.

The prequels kinda show how much of so-so writer.

I haven't watched Chuck's series on the background of SW, but I do know he did not direct The Empire Strikes Back which is still considered by a lot of people, fans and critics, to be the best SW film, but he did write it. He also wrote, but did not direct, ROTJ or The Indiana Jones films. I've heard that Willow was supposed to be the start of a fantasy trilogy but the sequels were never made so Lucas turned his ideas into novels, which were actually pretty good.

So it seems like he is a better writer than a director.

[Beastro]

All of your examples do not have things like copywrite afflicting them as well as constant milking.

The Shakespeare mention reminds me of the comedy Hamlet 2 where time travel is used to side step the all the dead at the end of the first, all simply done to continue the story on.

You don't need to have a story that is deep and meaningful to stand the test of time. You don't even need to be a technically GOOD story to stand the test of time. You just need to connect with people and as a result they will keep that story with them forever and often they will share that story with their kids and their children's children.

But A Christmas Carol and the other examples you cite are deep and meaningful stories. Whatever motives were behind them mean little because those motives did not get in the way of the storytelling that would cheapen them. Not all of writing is conscious, and often the best writing comes from when it is the least conscious; the Prequels are a testament to that fact, IMO.

If Plan 9 From Outer Space can stand the test of time then Superheroes and Star Wars will be just fine. Dumb and Fun, is often enough.

The best that can be said is that the detritus will wash off and the solid core of value will survive. We don't know how many stupid variations many Greeks bards did to one up one another retelling the Iliad, but we know they didn't survive.

Hopefully in time, what contains and limits popular fiction will fall away, but for the present it dominates and chokes it.

Romeo and Juliet which is about 2 dumb teens and their equally dumb families fighting for reasons that are never elaborated on and as a result of everyone being stupid several people get killed and the title characters take their own life. The play even tells you at the start how this is going to end so there are very few surprises before the story even starts. This is considered one of Shakespeare's most popular stories and is easily the most iconic love story of all time. Hell, Much Ado About Nothing is as stupid and fun as a Shakespeare play can get and it's still hugely popular.

And yet there are things to analyze within them with some of that stupidity being part of the meaning. R&J is about how dumb, naive and even dangerous teenage concepts of romance are, but so many love those concepts that it was taken at face value (one could argue that it fell prey to the trap Catcher in the Rye did)

I love Plan 9 because it reveals the underbelly of a lot of Modernist thinking that is better buried in more polished up works. It's the mirror image of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" stripped of it's idealism and charming moralizing. It has the same message and is delivered in a way to make you reflect on the silly aspects of its misanthropy and its whole-hearted self-fear that apply to The Day the Earth Stood Still.

This clip as so much about us in the past 400 years, both in the arrogance cried out against and the arrogant contempt towards it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qro7oBzUBos

Both movies compliment one another by showing the valid criticisms of both positions the movies present.

You can say a lot about Plan 9, but you cannot say it was soulless.

Shakespeare and Dickens, as well as others like Chaucer and Dante, are writers whose stories have been re-invented countless times. Their work has been retold again and again, but usually it's someone else interpretation of it. Every film version of A Christmas Carol is someone else telling the story. You could perhaps make an argument that each would qualify as a different story, but I personally won't go that far. Still, saying they are all the same because it's A Christmas Carol is really over-simplifying it.

All works are birthed this way. The new is birthed from the old and doesn't stand completely on its own.

Everyone of us is a mix of our parents and those which came before us which the newness that makes us unique is sublimated in.

Superheroes, especially ones that have been in print for decades like Superman or Spiderman, are a kind of fuzzy grey area between these two because in theory it is a single story, but they have been written by so many different people that each has written their own version of the character. Things can get interesting when you have someone writing a character they have been reading about for as long as they can remember because that's how long the comics have been in print. The result is that the same character can be radically different. That is what DC wanted to explore in Crisis on Infinite Earths because the Superman of 1985 was not the Superman of 1938.

Superheroes are archetypes that can be expressed in many similar, yet different ways. See the different takes upon the Joker as people play with his relation to things like humour, darkness, mischief and chaos.

I do not deny elements like this, I just wish they were freer to be expressed rather than restrained by the need to repeat nostalgia or to rake in more money.

"Deep," "meaningful" and especially "good" are very subjective terms because people usually have very different ideas on what they consider "good" and even if two people agree that something is "good" they can have very different opinions on how or why it is good.

Things resonate with people for a reason. Take fantasy and why the archetype is set in a vague Medieval atmosphere (and why the exceptions are so deliberate in avoiding repeating that setting). Even Game of Thrones was a produce of that in that its themes were a direct counter-reaction to typical fantasy tropes.

The structure of Force Awakens is emulative of New Hope, but it's fine for telling a new story. Inversely, the negative reception to Last Jedi had to do with it sprawling too much, though it's still emulating Empire Strikes Back in structure. The positive reception on the other hand greatly applauded its ability to expand the story, I'd say stronger than that of Force Awakens in the same vein.

As much as I dislike The Last Jedi, I do like something different was tried story wise. I think usurping expectations went too far, among other things. I do think it's definitely better than Rise of Skywalker since that movie is just one giant mess.

You don't go testing new waters in the middle of a three part arc. It should have been a stand alone or its elements should have been better integrated. It was thrown in because those behind this trilogy don't care about storytelling, however much Rian Johnson might. It doesn't matter whatever that reason is, but some practically hold it in contempt.

George Lucas seems to be kinda the opposite; great writer, lousy director. With one exception, that being ANH, most people seem to agree his directed films range from okay to bad.

ANH was good because of all the pressures placed on Lucas and everyone else to make it work. Adversity produces the best of humanity, which is why the Prequels did the opposite.

[McAvoy]

Oh, don't get me wrong. It was a bad idea to do the type of storytelling Rian Johnson wanted to do in the middle of a trilogy. I don't like how he destroyed Luke, and I know what he was trying to with Holdo but he executed it poorly. The Space Casino arc isn't a bad thing its just that the way it was protrayed, made that whole thing useless.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

There needed to be more character buildup with Holdo. That was quite a hostile takeover for the audience alone. I only care to bring this up because the writing of Johnson is otherwise for better or worse rich. For as enlightened as she was supposed to come across as salt of the earth, they purposely made her a tangential character serving only as a foil to Poe's ego. They could have had a scene with Leia or Rey in which she establishes herself as someone the audience wants to listen to, so much so as to give balanced tension with the actual protagonist you're rooting for. As far as I remember they jump right into the tension with the drama and melodrama being no different from each other.

As bad as the scenes are written I think Laura Dern stole them with her acting.

[McAvoy]

There needed to be more character buildup with Holdo. That was quite a hostile takeover for the audience alone. I only care to bring this up because the writing of Johnson is otherwise for better or worse rich. For as enlightened as she was supposed to come across as salt of the earth, they purposely made her a tangential character serving only as a foil to Poe's ego. They could have had a scene with Leia or Rey in which she establishes herself as someone the audience wants to listen to, so much so as to give balanced tension with the actual protagonist you're rooting for. As far as I remember they jump right into the tension with the drama and melodrama being no different from each other.

As bad as the scenes are written I think Laura Dern stole them with her acting.

You are right. A few lines probably would have made her introduction less jarring then it should have. She went on the attack on Poe from nearly the beginning. I think that scene of her attack on flyboys could have been written softer.

Edit: Almost forgot, Holdo basically wanted Poe to follow orders even if he knew nothing of them overall. This coming from a group of Rebels...

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

There needed to be more character buildup with Holdo. That was quite a hostile takeover for the audience alone. I only care to bring this up because the writing of Johnson is otherwise for better or worse rich. For as enlightened as she was supposed to come across as salt of the earth, they purposely made her a tangential character serving only as a foil to Poe's ego. They could have had a scene with Leia or Rey in which she establishes herself as someone the audience wants to listen to, so much so as to give balanced tension with the actual protagonist you're rooting for. As far as I remember they jump right into the tension with the drama and melodrama being no different from each other.

As bad as the scenes are written I think Laura Dern stole them with her acting.

You are right. A few lines probably would have made her introduction less jarring then it should have. She went on the attack on Poe from nearly the beginning. I think that scene of her attack on flyboys could have been written softer.

Edit: Almost forgot, Holdo basically wanted Poe to follow orders even if he knew nothing of them overall. This coming from a group of Rebels...

Well, Holdo is written to be right, and I don't disagree with her. But it's a basic message of making collected and measured decisions when you're able to make the best of the information you have. Poe from the get go is just trying to engage in battle and her response is a pretty standard directive decision to not start fighting yet, but it's clear from how the writing plays out immediately that it's a problem for him.

And yes, it's like that from the get go, and just seems kind of obvious in message. Another issue is that I don't remember this being a character flaw of Poe in the first movie or anything.