By David Futrelle
Star Wars’ worst fans are losing their shit (once again) at the news that Disney is producing a new “female-centric” Star Wars series with a woman at the helm: Leslye Headland, the co-creator and main force behind Netflix’ also quite female-centric series Russian Doll, an ingenious and surprisingly earthy sci-fi series centered around time loops and alternate universes.
So naturally the nay-sayers are out in force (get it?) to protest against Headland’s hiring because, well, they think it’s all part of some dastardly plot to ruin Star Wars forever, as if George Lucas hadn’t already done with the prequels. As far as these guys are concerned, though, it’s Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy who is destroying the franchise with decisions like this one.
So what in particular is making these fans so angry? I’ve gone through hundreds of tweets on the subject and as far as I can tell, there are really only a few main arguments, if they can be called that. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Reasons to hate the new Star Wars series according to some angry dudes.
Because Headland is feminist, the show will be nothing but propaganda — just like the (shudder) lady version of Ghostbusters.
A “female-centric” show will “exclude” male fans in favor of women, who don’t actually care about Star Wars.
There are already too many women in Star Wars.
Any show with too many women in it will turn all womany like some sort of Lifetime movie.
As someone who has watched Russian Doll (twice!), I can say with some assurance that whatever Headland does with the show it will look nothing like a Lifetime movie.
A female-centric show will by its very nature be “bigoted” against white people and men.
Some of the other, er, arguments against her hiring are a little less coherent.
Something, something WAHMEN.
Something, something CUNT.
The critics can’t decide if this is little more than a “cash grab” by Disney …
… or if the company is actually courting doom because if you “get woke” you “go broke.”
But my favorite of all the haters has to be this self-described “Conservative, Christian Geek” who’s mad that they didn’t hire him instead of the woman who helmed one of the most creative original science-fiction series in recent memory.
My take? Way to go, Disney — but unironically. Russian Doll was brilliant, and I’m eager to see what Headland does with this.
Also, anything that makes these particular baby men cry is a good thing.
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As we’re speaking about women protagonists.
https://www.livekindly.co/james-cameron-just-made-a-film-about-all-female-vegan-anti-poachers/
@Cheerful Warthog
I don’t really think we can say that the wokeness has been there the whole time. There’s definitely a fair amount of racial and ethnic stereotyping in the films, especially the prequels. Like Watto (a Jewish caricature), Jar Jar Binks (a Jamaican caricature), or the Nemodians (Asian caricatures).
@Masse_mysteria
That seems to be the viewpoint that libertarians take on many issues. They also get very annoyed when the free market results in things like boycotts.
Libertarians: If you don’t like the product, don’t buy it. Don’t complain online and cancel it.
Leftists: Ok, we’ll boycott this company for unethical treatment of workers.
Libertarians: No, not like that!
Their so-called “cancel culture” (a bit of a misnomer, as no one ever seems to stay cancelled for any amount of time) is simply the free market in effect.
Man, these guys must have hated the Rebels series. Especially after the writers ran out of ideas for all the male leads early in season 3 and it was basically the Hera and Sabine show.
@nagflar : can be partially woke. Someone can be progressive on some aspect, regressive on other.
The original star wars trilogy probably wasn’t overall progressive even for its time, but it feel more like an unaware bigot with good intentions than anything else. The racism in Star Wars is very often for the sake of a joke, which is a shitty thing to do, but generally one done without intention other than enforcing the statu quo.
On a related note, Ghostbusters (2016) is a legitimately good movie, and I don’t trust men who insist otherwise.
Thanks for the Russian Doll recommendation. I just watched the first two episodes and I am so in.
I am beginning the think the main thing many Star Wars fans enjoy is complaining about Star Wars.
@moregeekthan
I think that’s true for a lot of comic and video game fans. They never seem to talk about the media they like, just the things they hate about it. That’s a general trend among reactionaries: they’d rather rant about new things they hate than discuss anything else.
@ Fenton – I don’t disagree with your analysis, but I think you left out an important part: the Christopher Nolan Batman movies. We may be uncomfortable with them here (at best), and for good reason, but after the early X-Men movies and the Tobey Maguire Spider Man movies fizzled out in the early Aughts with thoroughly disappointing finales, comic book movies were in danger of fading back into the former “comic book movie” niche – i.e., only nerds were interested, and they were generally disappointed by the results. The Nolan Batman films not only resurrected the genre, but proved that they could be Mega-Ultra-Super-Hits with a broad audience. I firmly believe that if there had been no Batman Begins, there would have been no Iron Man, and thus no MCU.
Which is ironic, really. That a hymn to the War On Terror directed by a right winger could lead to something that makes babymen weep about wokeness.
I wonder if the finale of the last Batman film was inspired by this:
IANAL, but I do believe that all convictions under the Ew That Is For Girls Treaty (ETIFGT) have been expunged.
@Fenton:
Of course, Marvel was largely responsible for that bubble popping, and their greed was responsible for their own bankruptcy in the process.
(Capsule summary: in 1994 Marvel bought Heroes World Distribution, which at the time was the third largest comic book distributor in North America, and declared that they would be exclusively distributing their comics through Heroes World. Their idea was that since all comic book shops wanted Marvel comics, and most comic book shops only wanted to deal with one distributor, this would cut out most of the other companies from the direct market entirely. Diamond Distribution, facing a serious cut to their own income from this, negotiated with DC to go exclusive with them. DC agreed, setting off a chain reaction where almost everybody but Marvel went exclusive with Diamond. Meanwhile, the contracts and information requests Marvel sent around for retailers who wanted to work with Heroes World were so intrusive that a number of retailers figured Marvel wouldn’t want to know this information unless Marvel planned to open up its own retail shops and cut them out, too, so they refused. Marvel’s great plan ended up kneecapping themselves as well as everybody else, and in 1996 Marvel filed for bankruptcy and in 1997 they got bought by Toy Biz and signed a distribution deal with Diamond, leaving Diamond as the only major distributor in North America. Diamond then decided that they didn’t need to carry comics that weren’t profitable enough, resulting in them killing off most of the smaller comics publishers.
Marvel lit the fuse that blew up the comics industry in the mid-90s.)
@ jenora
I can pretend this is on topic because it’s about space and we’ve been talking about Star Wars.
You seen this?
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2020/04/aa36602-19/aa36602-19.html
Does this mean everything we know about the universe is wrong; or do you reckon they’ve probably got a loose cable somewhere or the wrong formula in a spreadsheet cell?
@moregeekthan
They even get that wrong. That’s no way to have fun.
I love Star Trek TOS and I love complaining about it. I do not like the new Star Trek movies, and while I will complain about them, I don’t like doing it. I can’t imagine my first reaction to the words “Star Trek” being a rant about the new movies when I could just as soon go on and on about TOS.
(I can only imagine Joe Salazar up there complaining about ultra wokeness and listing Star Trek is talking about the new series?)
But this isn’t, like, the new sequel series, right? It’s just (yet another) Disney-era Star Wars spin-off, of which there quite a few at this point.
If these guys want to watch a male-focused Star Wars TV series, they’ve already got The Mandalorian. They’ll be pleased to know that there are even some feminists complaining about its lack of female representation.
See also Doctor Who fans and Game of Thrones fans.
Is anyone else hoping this female centric series will feature Doctor Aphra? Because I think that would be cool even if it was just a one off appearance
@Alan:
Hadn’t seen that before, and my space investigation expertise (out of date as it is) lies more towards the radio end of the spectrum than the X-ray end.
That said, reading the abstract, looks like it basically boils down to ‘there is increasing evidence that there’s a directionality to the Universe in the X-Ray spectrum, and we don’t know why, or if it’s limited to the X-Ray spectrum’. Pretty much a call for more research and a warning that other work being done that assumed no differences should be looked at again.
One possibility other than ‘everything we know is wrong’ and ‘there’s a mistake on our end’ would be ‘there’s something else out there we haven’t seen yet that’s messing with our measurements’.
We already know there are some things we don’t know about this sort of thing: there are two basic classes of ways of measuring the distance of really distant objects (distance ladder and cosmic remnants), and the various ways of measuring within a class are consistent with each other, but the two classes give different results. Not massively different, but different enough that as the accuracy of the measurements got better the two classes stopped overlapping. Nobody’s quite sure yet how that is going to work out.
Sadly, the Universe is one of those things that we can’t re-run to see if things work differently the next time.
@Aaron
But, but, but, even one show geared towards women invalidates all the ones for men! /s
@Jenora Feuer
Maybe the next iteration could have someone other than Donald Trump as president.
@ jenora
Me too. “What, the solar system is heliocentric?”
I’m very drawn the the idea that there have been multiple Big Bangs; either sequentially or in different ‘dimensions’. I can imagine that all the physical properties and constants of each iteration are different. We just happen to live in one where everything was conducive to life arising; hence why the universe appears to be so ‘fine tuned’. Just when it hasn’t been there’s been no-one around to comment on it.
@Alan Robertshaw
If such is the case, I would wonder if there were any where life arose but was majorly different than in our universe (for example, ammonia-based life due to colder temperatures rather than water-based, or with silicon in place of carbon).
@ naglfar
Wouldn’t surprise me. Hereditabilty seems to be an intrinsic consequence of chemistry. I suspect that will remain true in any universe. So when you’ve got a lot of space and a lot of time then who knows what might arise.
Maybe there are universes where life evolves at a quantum scale, and whole empires rise and collapse in nanoseconds; or other universes where ice ages pass whilst the inhabitants make snap decisions.
@Alan, Naglfar:
Well, my knowledge isn’t that out of date, but it was still over fifteen years ago, and I was more an engineer building equipment than one of the scientists.
That’s pretty much the ‘Weak Anthropic Principle’; the idea that things are the way they are, because if they weren’t, nobody would be around to ask why. Scientifically it’s pretty much a null hypothesis; it’s a background idea that we test things against, and nobody really wants to fall back to it if there might be an actual reason that we haven’t found yet.
(Yes, there’s a Strong Anthropic Principle, too, and most scientists consider it pretty much mysticism, while the Weak Anthropic Principle is just annoyingly obvious and doesn’t say anything useful.)
The idea that there have been multiple Big Bangs is actually a lot more mainstream now, especially since the idea of ‘inflation’ in the early universe hit in the 1980s. The current model (as I understand it) is pretty much that the general… ‘meta-verse’, maybe, is in a constant state of inflation, and occasionally bits of it condense out like droplets of water forming on the underside of a steam hood and form universes like the one we live in. The Big Bang wasn’t the start of an explosion, so much as it was a pocket where an otherwise ongoing explosion ended and allowed our universe to stabilize.
This is obviously not something anybody has any way of proving, but it’s more consistent with what we see than most other ideas.
@ jenora
There’s a cosmologist who has some interesting ideas on whether it might actually be testable. Her theory predicts two cold spots in the CMB.
Can’t for the life of me remember her name though. Think she has a Spanish or Italian accent?
@Moggie:
“But how am I to know the good side from the bad?”
@Alan Robertshaw:
That’s all very good, but doesn’t he have an Avatar movie or three that he’s supposed to finish first? They’re already wayyyy past due and therefore should be his number one priority.
@various:
On the topic of that paper, well, it sounds like maybe dark energy is stretching things more in one direction than in the others? It would be interesting if so, and to find out why.
On the more general topic of multiple bangs, anthropics, and the like: well, first a diversion into quantum mechanics. <assorted groans from audience> Bear with me. As of the Aspect experiment and its various sequels, I think it’s fair to say that so-called local realism is dead. As a doornail. Which leaves roughly three alternatives. One would be nonlocal realism: we have some kind of FTL signaling. So far, no evidence for that, and it might break relativity or worse. An FTL carrier particle would be a tachyon, and tachyons destabilize the vacuum, etc.
Option number two, being flogged heavily by much of the scientifically-oriented lay-audience press lately, is some sort of panpsychism: mentation as fundamental, and really able to “collapse” some kind of “probability wavefunction” just by looking at it funny. This has all kinds of problems of its own, including that collapse is nonunitary, fundamentally non-time-reversible (thus breaking a fundamental symmetry, and by Noether’s theorem also breaking an invariant, and in this case that invariant is energy conservation! If the world is fundamentally different after vs. before an observation, in a discontinuous break, energy can disappear or appear during that break), discontinuous and undifferentiable, etc.
Option number three, which everyone seems to be desperately trying to avoid admitting is almost certainly true, is many-worlds via decoherence. And many-worlds gets you a bunch of anthropic effects. The earliest branchings would have been during the symmetry-breaking era, and those branches would have a wide variety of values for the forces’ coupling strengths and other properties we usually think of as “constants”. Fine-tuning is then easily explained: if values that support the emergence of intelligent life are possible at all, then the branch where those values are attained will have intelligent observers in at least some of the superposed histories, and bam, here we are in that branch in one of the histories where intelligent life subsequently arose. And the universe remains differentiable, continuous, time-reversible (modulo thermodynamic irreversibility, including that of the branching itself), and all those other nice properties. Heck, we even get to keep energy conservation. And unitarity. God may sometimes throw the dice where we can’t see them, but never where even he can’t, and information that fell into a black hole is only as destroyed as if it went up in an ordinary bonfire, which is fortunate because otherwise what happens to us if, from someone else’s point of view, we’re on the other side of a Rindler horizon? Or the cosmological one?