I wrote about how Mass Effect 3 was a catalyst for the state of fandom back in March. When fans aren't being breathlessly enthusiastic about a thing, they're pissing each other off by being self aware enough to know they have a problem, but not self aware enough to actually grow as a person Star Wars in the Disney era is a poor example of a winner in this game.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is the most talked about of the three films that make up the Sequel trilogy. Rian Johnson's film is one of the franchise's boldest steps to date along with Andor and Ahsoka Tano.
I hadn't seen The Last Jedi in a while, so I re watched it before I wrote this. I think my opinion on Canto Bight has now firmly settled on "good concept, well-intentioned but ultimately hokey execution", what sticks out is how secure in itself it remains. Star Wars and the people involved in it feel like they are taking refuge in its decades-long nostalgia, and mostly want to play with toys that they already know people like.
You can see the promise of the entire franchise when it breaks out of its well-established mold. It feels like Last Jedi is trying to widen the scope of Star Wars beyond the original trilogy, and it fell into two separate trilogies and ancillary material of debatable canon. The ultimate core is rock solid and confident that it can stick the landing even if it doesn't stand the test of time.
For a film about characters trying to break out of cycles they may or may not be aware they are actively in, that message didn't fit in with reality. Disney was ill-equipped to deal with the blowback from those pockets of fans after Last Jedi. The combination of fandom becoming a corporate approved weapon and fans refusing to tell bad actors to get lost resulted in a beast that may never actually go away. It shouldn't have taken harassment campaigns against its actors for Disney to speak up and protect it's talent.
It is not easy to say that anyone walked away from Last Jedi with a clear winner. The new Peacock series Poker Face and the Knives Out franchise is at the expense of Johnson's own Star Wars trilogy, which has been put on hold until the end of the year. Disney has spent years being in a weird nostalgia tug of war with diminishing returns and insistence that more films would be made, and then not making them, even though it is a box office success. The Rise of Skywalker spends a good amount of its running time actively going to Last Jedi's character and plot beats in a way that has more often than not been read as revenge or at its most charitable read.
There are no hopes that Star Wars will be boring to talk about or that conversations won't go towards Last Jedi. We will never be free of this film because of the plot and character choices of Johnson. It used to be possible to get away from it all after a certain event. It is no longer possible to let the past die. This is always what it was supposed to be.
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