Star Wars Inspired Rebellion Against Bad Fiction

The Star Wars to which my title refers is The Force Awakens.  Although the original 3 movies have their physics and character flaws, I liked the stories well enough to let them go.  I can even watch the prequels without too many cringes, although they compound physics issues with very flawed personality portrayals.

But The Force Awakens went too far.  It had more physics issues, more personality issues, rehashed plot points of the previous movies.  The powers that be decided to oversimplify the future of the series by doing a violent reset. One of the key figures in the new movies did a similar thing with Star Trek.  I am hard pressed to decide which is the worse reset.  I do not want to go into details regarding the issues with the new directions of these 2 series.  There is plenty said on IMDB and YouTube.  I am actually endeavoring to minimize my memory of those resets.  In Star Trek's case, I rewatched and reread my Star Trek collection.  I wasn't as big of a Star Wars fan so I only had the 6 movies and a couple of books.  So I was willing to watch The Force Awakens even after it was disclosed that it would go into an entirely different direction than the Expanded Universe of the books.  But my opinion of SW: TFA was low enough where I decided to get a bunch of the old stories to overwrite what I watched.

Before anyone gets the wrong impression, I am not fanatical about maintaining continuity with what has been previously written or filmed. One of the things which religion taught me is to not take fiction too seriously.

In some ways, the bad fiction of the new Star Trek and Star Wars has similarities with how filmmakers treat source material in general.  I am OK with films which stray from the story in the source material if the fictional story is better or the historical events more accurate. But too many movies with differing story lines have also been inferior.  To me, this actually becomes an ethical issue when portraying historical events.  Too many people accept the fictional portrayals of history, sometimes even about important events.  Even politicians are using this tendency.  Some politicians get elected because of their fictions.

But there are problems with even some original stories.  Yet even people who agree with me on some of these criticisms will still watch shoddy stories because of attractive visuals or exciting action sequences.  But I've had enough of crappy stories or bad historical portrayals.  My feelings have been further reinforced by the election of Donald Trump for U.S. President.  He made almost an art form out of false statements and excessive use of adjectives and adverbs over substance.  Yet enough people bought what he was saying for him to win the electoral vote.  Fuck, even some liberals voted for him.

Too many people believe things based on the tone of someone's voice or other superficial elements.  Too many people believe what's written because it feels a certain way.  Too many people accept bad fiction masquerading as history.  And there are simply too many bad stories in general.

But there is also a lot of good stuff.  And there can be more if we force the powers that be to do better.  I call for a rebellion against the dark forces used by bad storytellers and pseudohistory.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/02/yes-donald-trump-lies-a-lot-and-news-organizations-should-say-so/?utm_term=.398a9ddc6d44