I heard that Boyega's been tapped for the Rey movie, but after all that "don't Disney Plus" me shit plus how raw of a deal Finn got it's sort of hard to believe. Daisy coming back at least made sense because she got to play the main character.
"You will drink the wolf piss IPA and eat the wolf poo pellets and you better damn well like it!"
I disagree. 20 minutes into the movie he's shooting his former First Order co-workers then falls in love with Rey at first sight. Him and Rey only get involved in the plot by sheer coincidence, where he then becomes her sidekick. He's a liar and a total pussy who can't do anything on his own. Plus everything he does is played for laughs. He almost has an arc and not being a coward but then he gets almost killed by Kylo and is out of the movie so Rey can meet Luke by herself.
Maybe, but at the same time the Chinese don't give a fuck about Star Wars (or masturbatory nostalgiafests) considering how badly the sequels did over there with a white female protagonist. So it really didn't matter. Sure Disney was TRYING super hard to pander to China, but it failed.
If you follow the plotline of TFA, Finn and Han fit nearly the exact mold that Luke and Kenobi had in ANH (in a poor fashion, but still) and if they did want to copy and paste from A New Hope, they could have used those two.
Again, you just answered it. They had a white FEMALE protagonist. Chinese aren't big on those either. They want manly men saving the day, fighting straightforward battles of good and evil. That's why Optimus Prime does so well there despite the Bayverse Transformers movies being guilty pleasures at best; they want a big male hero (preferably alien, Asian or White) coming in to save the day and kicking ass, making bad guys pay for their crimes.
But they would RATHER have a white (female) than a black person as the lead, no matter the gender. You know the Chinese like white skin and white features over dark skin and facial features of Africans right? The sequels did badly because they're shit but also because unless you have a nostalgic attachment to the Star Wars franchise they don't make any sense. The CGI action scenes can only go so far.
The Chinese would throw both of them away for a male action hero in an instant. A female lead has to be attractive for it to work with them, and Daisy Ridley does not.
But Cassian dies at Rogue One, and it's confirmed they'll only do one more season of Andor, so it's not like they can keep using him.
My problem is Han doesn't teach Rey or Finn anything meaningful. He just kind of chauffeurs them to where they need to go, tell them plot exposition, then dies. The movie says Han is the father Rey never had but I don't believe that because they don't have a relationship.
Finn being the Ex-Stormtrooper should have had focus that he was the leader whenever they were doing spywork shit. And for all I know they kinda did as they go into the military base in TFA and TLJ (still haven't watch Rise of Rey Palpatine).
Funnily enough, that's basically how he was written for the entirety of the post-Endor EU, give or take the lapses into self-doubt or grief that he'd give into in the wake of massive emotional obstacles that staggered him and the other heroes.
When exactly does that happen? I read Fate of the Jedi: Outcast fairly recently, and I can't recall that scene ever happening. I vividly recall the insane fit that causes Valin Horn to go on a public rampage, but nothing with Jaina.
Merging Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon was one of the stupidest "fixes" RLM ever came up with. Everything that makes Qui-Gon interesting lies in his eccentric rule-breaker attitude when it comes to both Jedi and conventional wisdom, which isn't in line with Obi-Wan's character at all, and would be destroyed in a character merge. It just goes to show that the loudest and most autistic people in the Star Wars fanbase often have the worst ideas, and I'm thoroughly relieved they were never listened to.
Obviously just a diversity hire. And a false-flag for a subversion. They were trying to depict him as the leading man, the next Jedi in line, only for it to be Rey instead. Feminism and subversion in one go. "Oh, you think this guy will be the hero? SIKE! It's actually this chick!"
I'd say yes and no. Yes, Phantom Menace got the Jedi right, and no, in ROTS, them twirling before that one strike was them winding up for a heavy blow, right before they tried to Force-push each other, but someone like Shadiversity actually studied the fight and saw that there was a lot of design going into most of the attacks:
I remember reading something about Force levitation getting really advanced in those post-OT years, but the books have a problem with Force power levels due to the fact that you have different authors writing books that have different views on the Force. Sometimes Jedi fight so fast that they're practically blurs (Revenge of the Sith novel) other times they're not so fast and some normie can take advantage of them. (Any book where Karen Traviss writes about the Jedi) It's usually fine if you're just reading a series of novels written by one author, because that keeps things consistent, but if you have a novel series written by multiple authors, then the power scaling will be a clusterfuck because each author insists on their view of the Force and their limits for a Jedi. This is what people in the business call "too many cooks in the kitchen."
I thought Sam and John Doe were just the pre-bastardized versions of Finn and Poe in the final movie. John helps Sam (a former Stormtrooper) defect from the Neo Empire the same way Poe helps Finn leave the Fail Order in TFA. IIRC Sam was never confirmed to be a Solo child, just a Han Solo-esque character as far as I know.
This is me 100%. Growing up Luke was never my favorite SW character. But after watching the OT for the first time in years before TFA came out I really started to appreciate his character and his arc of turning into a Jedi. That's why the sequels feel like such a slap in the face. Luke was a mcguffin in TFA with one entire scene and no dialogue, then he was such an unbearable asshole in TLJ, and by TROS I couldn't care less.
For all I know, you could be right about John Doe just being folded into Poe, but given how his ethnicity and character personality didn't carry over to Poe, who knows.
You don't know what you've got till it's gone. As a kid, I always used to pass over characters like Luke because to my insecure, pre-formed mind, traits like altruism and pure-heartedness were uncool and lame, and nowhere as alluring as all the edgy anti-hero types in fiction.
Everything great about Luke can be summed up in the ROTJ scene where he has the chance to kill Vader without any obstacles to stop him and chooses not to. That's a hero, that's a role model. ST-Luke is just a quipping asshole who barely even feels like a cynical version of the character. The galaxy's in danger and he acts like a flippant douche because of one lost padawan and a school? You literally watched Vader kill Obi-Wan in front of you and bounced back from it. Luke Skywalker is an optimist at heart, that's part of why he's so endearing (even if he can dish out banter towards the likes of C-3PO etc.) and I know people behind the camera understand this because they were able to capture a glimpse of that, however brief, when he rescued Mando and the others from the Dark Troopers. Pure confidence, no hesitation. No MCU-tier dialogue when he comes through the door, just a serene calmness.
Disney-pandering failed the moment they casted a Vietnamese as the token Asian and tried to ship her with black comic relief. To top it all off, she was single-handedly the most useless character in TLJ, cucking Finn out of what would have been a badass moment. Almost deliberately calculated to piss off the average Chinese, as it were. (Didn't help they killed off her good looking "sister" in the first five minutes of the movie.)
Disney's belief that Luke would make the exact same mistakes the old Jedi Order did and lead the galaxy to ruin is so baffling to me, but it makes sense. Rey Skywalker must be the one to kill Palpatine and revive the Jedi Order according to Disney.
Rian's yellow fever got the best of him. He couldn't hire an attractive Chinese actress, he HAD to have one who looked like the kind of girl he wanted to date in high school. The ones that weren't frumpy were out of his league.
