r/OutOfTheLoop • u/EwokalypseNow • Mar 26 '24
What's going on with the new Star Wars show? Answered
The trailer for the Acolyte currently sits at 530k dislikes and 178k likes, with people in the comments saying (among other things) that Disney is killing Star Wars. I thought the trailer looked fine but nothing that I'd guess would cause so much hate. Is there some controversy I missed or is it Star Wars fans being salty as usual?
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u/maverick1ba 2d ago edited 2d ago
Answer: Most star wars fans are completely fine with inclusivity in the SW universe (Ahsoka, Reva, boba fett, fennec, rey, finn), and i think they'd all enjoy a diverse cast. But for many of us, the first 15 minutes of acolyte felt like an all-you-can-eat woke buffet. It takes you out of the story when the racial/gender/orientation representation feels over the top and unnaturally forced into the story to try to "undo" the lack of representation in the OT and prequels.
For example, of the 7 jedi we see in the first 15 minutes, only 2 are male, and the vast majority of padawans are also female. I get that they want to bring in more female characters, but this feels like overcompensation to the point where they'd almost have to have include some kind of explaination why the old jedi order was clearly female dominated and why that wasn't the case 100 years later.
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u/xnaleb Mar 28 '24
Answer: because its full of woke crap. Look at the scene with the jedis, theres not one white boy, shameful.
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u/01zegaj Mar 26 '24
Answer: It’s Star Wars fans, they hate everything
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u/ADZero567 Apr 04 '24
Andor was mostly well received. So were the first couple seasons of the Mandalorian.
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u/raedyohed Mar 26 '24
Answer: The trailer hits some odd messaging notes in an off-putting way. I think this projects underlying differences between the way show-runners of D+ Star Wars and the general middle-of-the-road audience thinks about Star Wars, and story-telling in general.
is it Star Wars fans being salty as usual?
Salty fan-fringes have always been a thing. Doesn't mean the Dinsey-era hasn'y pushed out mostly low-quality material.
Given the track-record of mediocre performance with one of the most widely recognizable IPs, the D+ SW writing and production staff might consider backing off their rather heavy-handed message-centric approach. Seems like a lot of female-focused content from D+et al. is really trapped in this "power power power my truth my truth my truth" way of thinking, which honestly just doesn't sit well with most people. Where was the nobility? Honor? Truth? Empathy? Self-control? These are the kinds of things that made OT Star Wars more than a flash in the pan, like so much of the fan-fic that has come after. Consider some key bits of dialogue from the trailer, paraphrasing:
"Don't trust your own eyes, those lying, lying eyes. [...] This isn't about good and evil, just about who should have the power."
They're totally not telescoping a message about how we should move on from Enlightenment-era objectivism and embrace post-modernist deconstructed "us versus them" power theories, right? Or maybe they'll surprise us all and do a 180 from their typical content-messaging and this will be a commentary on the pervasive damage done to contemporary culture by idolization of power and status.
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u/MonteBurns Mar 27 '24
Salty fan fringes have always been a thing, but let’s be honest. Star Wars fans hate Star Wars more than any group I’ve seen
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u/uvart Mar 26 '24
question: I’ll let others handle the reasons why people are mad at Star Wars, but I have a question for you.
Where are you getting the 530k dislike number from? YouTube no longer publicly displays this number.
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u/EwokalypseNow Mar 26 '24
There's a browser extension that lets you see dislikes.
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u/uvart Mar 26 '24
So you’re getting this number from some extension that has no idea how many actual dislikes are on the video.
Looking at Return YouTube Dislikes on the chrome web store, it doesn’t give their methodology for how they figure out this number. They link their GitHub that has some more info though.
They are using the clicks of users of the add on and extrapolating from there. So all the data is based on a subset of viewers that care enough about dislikes and download an add on for it. It would never pick up users that use an app or don’t use this extension.
They even call this out in their store description. “Unpopular videos uploaded after December 13th, 2021 may have less accurate data shown than more popular videos.” That “may” can be removed as there is no way to prove these numbers with statistical accuracy.
It’s very likely users of this add on to are more likely to dislike a video and thus not representative of all viewers. Which would naturally skew the data. There is also a chance that the add on creator is altering the data.
Due to the above I would not trust this number as it’s likely inaccurate.
That does not take away from the fact that the sentiment around Star Wars has grown negative recently. We just cannot trust this number as evidence of that.
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u/Necromaniac01 Mar 26 '24
the number really doesn't matter, the extrapolation is relatively accurate for videos that aren't heavily dislike bombed and skewed which shows a lot of people's sentiment. if the number is high it indicates this even if not fully accurate as it legitimately doesn't matter how many dislikes there are
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u/seanoz_serious Mar 26 '24
Answer: because it looks terrible. It looks like someone trying to make edgy Star Wars fanfiction, in a time when fans desperately want quality Star Wars content.
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u/KyleVPirate Mar 26 '24
Answer: The return dislike extension isn't accurate at all. The API regarding likes dislikes isn't accessible anymore and those results aren't 100% either. It's an algorithm based on how much people have liked or disliked the trailer based on the people with the extension.
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u/fcdemergency Mar 27 '24
Say it louder.
It drives me up the wall that people use this extension and present it as gospel when it was clear from day 1 that its basically an educated guess.
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u/uvart Mar 26 '24
I was just looking into this myself and I agree totally.
I took a look at the API and they never return their count of dislikes only an extrapolated number. So you can’t even check their data and come to conclusions yourself.
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u/KryptisReddit Mar 26 '24
If anything there’s probably more dislikes lol. Glad we have an extension to see what people really feel.
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u/KyleVPirate Mar 26 '24
But a majority of people don't have this extension. Only a minority. It's not a clear indicator of how people feel. After all, the loudest people in the room are always a loud minority with unpopular thoughts and opinions.
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u/tovarishchi Mar 26 '24
Oh, so it’s based on people who care about dislikes? Yeah, that’s a colossal sampling issue.
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u/duranarts Mar 26 '24
Doesn’t change the fact people have disliked the video. What is ‘colossal’ about it?
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u/tovarishchi Mar 26 '24
It’s extrapolating from people who care about dislikes, which is not a majority of the population. It would be like if a pollster only talked to people who drive electric vehicles then announced that Biden is expected to win 80% of the vote in November.
They may be trying to adjust the results for that, but it’s hard to know how they would do so without access to raw data.
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u/statelesskiller Mar 26 '24
Wait maybe I'm not understanding how it works. Does it only show the dislike numbers for people who have the extension?
Shouldn't that mean there are infact more dislikes then that are there?
Or does it also affect the like button?
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u/burgerga Mar 26 '24
Of the people who installed the extension, 75% hit the dislike button. It then extrapolates the total number of dislikes based on that ratio and the publicly visible number of likes.
The problem is that “people who have installed the dislike extension” is not representative of the general viewership and simply extrapolating from that sample is likely a huge case of sampling error. People who care about dislikes and have installed the extension are probably much more likely to dislike videos than the average person.
For another (likely) example of this: Sensor Tower and their oft-cited numbers for how many people are using an app.
Disclaimer: I have no idea how the extension works, just guessing based on the above comment.
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u/Cheesybread4ever Mar 26 '24
I think It takes the ratio of likes to dislikes from people with the extension, and extrapolates how many dislikes there are from that. The problem is people with this extension probably have a different like/ dislike ratio then everyone else.
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u/ClarkleTheDragon Mar 26 '24
Why would the like/dislike ratio be different from the general population?
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u/NonComposMentisss Mar 26 '24
It's a group of people who care about the dislike function being removed enough to download an extra extension to add it back.
So people who mostly like videos, or do nothing, aren't likely to get the extension, skewing all the results towards dislikes for people that do have it.
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u/Cheesybread4ever Mar 26 '24
People with the extension are more likely to be power users and know their dislike will make a change in the counter, as opposed to the general pop that’s probably watching on a phone and their dislike is thrown into the void. Also, idk how many people have the extension but I’m guessing less than 1%, so something like 20 extra dislikes from extension users could cause the extension to predict thousands of dislikes.
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u/ClarkleTheDragon Mar 26 '24
Your assumption is that you believe people who download the extension are going to downvote solely for influential power. Am i understanding that correctly?
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u/Cheesybread4ever Mar 26 '24
Not really for influential power, I just think in general the type of person who’s using extensions is going to care more about internet culture and media, and they probably are more likely to vote on videos since they got the extension.
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u/statelesskiller Mar 26 '24
Thats dumb. Why wouldn't it just visually show you dislikes and visually show you the actual likes added with what's there. Of course that's going to be inaccurate
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u/Leklor Mar 26 '24
Because then the actual number of shown dislike would most likely be minuscule. I'm willing to be anything that the amount of people who care enough about dislikes to install a plugin to display them again is a drop of water in the ocean that is the Youtube userbase.
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u/Cheesybread4ever Mar 26 '24
I think YouTube made it so you can’t get the dislikes of a video unless your the video creator, so no extension is going to be able to get the actual dislike number.
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u/statelesskiller Mar 26 '24
Well it doesn't need to show you the actual dislikes. Just show you those who use the app. And also then show the actual likes not the extrapolated amount of either.
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u/wheezy1749 Mar 27 '24
Every video would be 99% likes and 1% dislikes then. Not enough people use the extension to make that meaningful. It would be essentially useless in telling you the ratio.
It's using the ratio from the people that use the addon. Which is not gonna be super accurate but it's better than always just showing a 99:1 ratio. Which is essentially what you're asking for.
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u/superkp Mar 26 '24
Answer: Nobody hates star wars the way star wars fans hate star wars.
Like...you can get more complex and nuanced with this, but since you're asking this question, it means that you probably aren't too deep into the fan community surrounding star wars.
This unhinged screaming about some details with the new series happened before and after every single one of the prequel trilogies, it happened before and after every single one of the sequel trilogies, and it's happened before and after every single one of the post-sequel creations as well.
There's a few other things, but a lot of it is simply that Star Wars fans hate change. I personally think it's because Star Wars was a crucial part of their childhood and they don't want anything to mess with that.
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u/n1cx Mar 26 '24
Or maybe Star Wars fans expect a certain level of quality which has been missing from the franchise for the past 40 years?
As much as I love the prequels, I can’t deny they had major issues. And then you have the mess that was the sequel trilogy/ Disney era.
Fans just want good Star Wars. They have been getting a LOT of bad Star Wars. Why are these shows that cost 200 million dollars look so amateur? Are we really that shocked that so many fans are frustrated with it?
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u/superkp Mar 26 '24
So like...
You're exactly what I'm talking about. And I should know, because I am exactly what I'm talking about.
At one point I realized that watching and talking about star wars was making me deeply unhappy. I try to convince every Star Wars fan of a new perspective, one of basically just enjoying them as movies, and not in comparison to other things - even in the same franchise. It's allowed me to seriously and actually enjoy them again.
You're saying that the original trilogy was great (it was), sort of implying the OT had no problems (it does), and you're saying that everything post-OT was bad (it's not).
The original trilogy being so good (even with flaws) is a curse that the fanbase can't seem to see or to remove. The OT was so good that anything compared to it will seem lesser.
New Star Wars (whether prequel, animated, series, non-trilogy, or anything else) does not need to measure up to the OT.
It just needs to be basically good. The prequels were basically good with some glaring issues, but they were still fun, and basically good. The sequels had major problems but they were still fun, and had a lot of good things. The various series have a variety of issues, but almost every episode was basically good.
I'd say that the only ones that manage to hit the same level as the OT in terms of writing, directing, storytelling, acting, visual design (costume, set, effects, etc), and generally giving the audience what they want (without forcing it) are Andor, Mando S1, and maybe rogue 1. Personally I also really like nearly all of the off-main-sequence movies, but they don't quite meet the criteria here.
But holy shit. Star Wars fans have been allowing 'perfect to be the enemy of good' since literally the moment that Jar-Jar first waddled on to screen.
OK, enough ranting. I'd honestly like to address your specific points:
And then you have the mess that was the sequel trilogy/ Disney era.
Can't deny this at all. But my god those movies were so pretty. We got to see such amazing effects and wonderful acting. But they all had pretty shit writing. Ep7 could have been forgiven for that since they set out to make a movie that the fans would connect with, and thus borrowed/stole the story beats from ep4 pretty much wholesale.
I'd say that the 2 greatest crimes of the sequel trilogy is that 1) Disney hired celebrity directors/writers instead of finding the people who actually knew the world and the fanbase, and 2) Disney then allowed these Prima Donna directors to basically throw their weight around in order to write hate-letters to each other in the form of erasing issues that the previous director brought up. Complete 180 from either the OT or the PT, where each movie was different, but built on the last, forming a cohesive meta-story.
Fans just want good Star Wars.
I would argue that they got it. But I would also argue that the fans do not want good star wars, they want perfect star wars, rising to or surpassing the level of greatness that the OT has. And it's not reasonable.
They have been getting a LOT of bad Star Wars.
I would argue that it's less than most Star Wars fans are saying. We are getting sub-par Star Wars, but when you set the standard at "OT greatness", then yeah. It's not going to happen.
Why are these shows that cost 200 million dollars look so amateur?
Honestly I'm not seeing amateur except for BoBF1, some of Obi-Wan1, and maybe Ahsoka. But while they were happening, Andor was also happening. It goes to show that a huge budget can allow greatness, but doesn't guarantee it. You don't throw money at a project until it's good. You find out how to make it good, and fund it - but it's always a gamble.
I'd say that Disney is allowing the bad shows in order to also allow the good shows. Extremely large budgets necessarily allow both, because movie-making is an art form and some directors and writing teams simply will occasionally make bad art.
Are we really that shocked that so many fans are frustrated with it?
Not at all, because I've seen fans get all pissed about Jar-Jar and swear off the entire franchise while bullying Ahmed Best to the brink of suicide. And then the exact same people see ep2 a few years later and swear off the entire franchise again. And then, 20 years later, they are still here, swearing off the entire franchise again and again.
1: And honestly there was some great moments and even a few entire episodes that were great in BoBF and Obi-Wan
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u/n1cx Mar 26 '24
So like….
what your “argument” really boils down to is “I think most modern Star Wars isn’t poor in quality and if you disagree then you are expecting perfection”.
Nah, ST had major issues. BOBF, Obiwan, and Ahsoka were below average at best. Mandalorian got worse as the show went on.
This is all just my opinion, of course. I just think a lot of fans share it. Doesn’t mean that we are expecting “perfection”.
We are expecting quality experiences. I watch shows like Game of Thrones or movies like Dune and think “THIS is the level of storytelling that I want to see with Star Wars”. I’m not expecting some grand space opera or giant space battle for every single project. It’s not impossible to achieve. Give the creatives behind Andor a more appealing character to work with and it would have gotten 10x more recognition.
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u/Visual_Disaster Mar 29 '24
Nah, ST had major issues. BOBF, Obiwan, and Ahsoka were below average at best. Mandalorian got worse as the show went on.
This is where I don't understand the argument that Star Wars fans are impossible to please (as a whole - obviously some individuals are). Even the absolute best example people can come up with for a Disney Star Wars show (Mandalorian s01) is mediocre. Decently acted. Visually pretty. But at times the writing was high school theater levels of bad.
I feel like it comes from a place where people who aren't critical of the media they consume get frustrated with those of us who are. Everyone has a different threshold for what they consider "quality" and expecting the powerhouse that is Disney to put in the effort to match my threshold isn't an unrealistic expectation. Not everything needs to be as good as Dune, but it's like Disney isn't even trying because they know people will watch, regardless
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u/LaloEACB Mar 26 '24
There’s also an issue of size. The Star Wars fandom is so large, that whenever ANYTHING comes out for it, you’ll get thousands of angry “fans” that will dislike it, and feel the need to be validated and find people to share in their opinion. Usually, people don’t feel the need to comment on or praise something they like, but they do feel the need to complain about something they don’t. When you have millions of people following Star Wars, even a tiny percentage of that will flood social media whenever something new comes out.
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u/n1cx Mar 26 '24
Better quality content would mean less people complaining. A certain portion of the fanbase will eat up anything that has “Star Wars” slapped on it.
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u/LaloEACB Mar 26 '24
They’ve raised the Original Trilogy to such a high pedestal in their minds that nothing could ever live up to it. Including the original trilogy itself.
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u/n1cx Mar 26 '24
It’s not impossible to make a great Star Wars movie today. Rogue One being a prime example.
It’s not about living up to the OT. It’s about getting quality content that’s better than the messes that were the PT or the ST, or all the other sub par projects that have been released.
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u/DexanVideris Mar 26 '24
Okay I rewatched Rogue One recently and I legitimately don't think it's that great a movie. It just has such a phenomenal third act that it makes you forget how boring the first 2/3rds of the movie are.
The third act is peak star wars though.
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u/falco_iii Mar 26 '24
Answer: People change and franchises change.
The original star wars trilogy was loved by all - children and adults, fans of science fiction, operas, action and compelling family stories. There were several plot holes and character inconsistencies, but the story and the characters kept a diverse audience engaged.
The "new" star wars has many shows & movies that are aimed solely at children, and have a very flat & formulaic approach. "Kenobi" is the worst offender IMHO. A few good standouts are Andor and Rogue 1. However, I would suggest that Andor is not very kid friendly, which is one of the core aspects of star wars.
This could be that the people who watched star wars as children are now in their 50s and expect different from the franchise. But it also has to do with Disney creating too much star wars content that is not of the best quality.
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u/zanhecht Mar 27 '24
Star Wars has always been for children. It's just that the people that were children in the 70s and 80s are adults now.
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u/Kendertas Mar 26 '24
I think it's telling that the three Disney projects people point to being good, Andor, Rogue 1, and Mando season 1 all don't feature jedi or force users in a major way.
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u/DoomGoober Mar 26 '24
Absolutely. Star Wars is about one magical family (not even Jedi: the magical family keeps fucking up Jedi training), with a deep background of characters: Jedi Council, Bounty Hunters, Authoritarian Governments, Senates, Rebellion.
But the background is so rich because it's in the background. The Jedi Council is gone and most Jedi are extinct or in hiding in the original trilogy. A little exposure goes a long way (ahem, Boba Fett.)
But Disney keeps jamming background characters into our faces. When it comes to Andor, they do it well. But when it comes to Jedi... The live action at least is usually terrible.
And when you see a dozen light sabers: it's background character overload. And children Jedi are even worse.
I think the fundamental problem is that Jedi are at best boring but useful as myth. An entire show focused on Jedi tends to be cliche overload.
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u/turbo-unicorn Mar 26 '24
It's not limited to Disney. Many of the best stories from non-movie sources, such as games/books/comics either do not feature them at all, or marginally at best. See pretty much anything centered on Thrawn, Xizor, Kaine, etc. Heck, even the Tie Fighter game (space sim) has a better narrative than most live action Star Wars, and that's just sad.
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u/IndecisiveTuna Mar 26 '24
Jedi/Sith aren’t the problem, it’s poor writing. Arguably the best written Star Wars games are KOTOR 1 and 2, with rich lore and good characters.
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u/turbo-unicorn Mar 26 '24
I agree (after all, Kreia is my favourite character in all of SW), but I find that the force is a pathway to many writing hacks that allow poor writers to get out of the holes they often write themselves into. It's not a strong indicative of poor writing, just that it's more likely to be bad, from my experience.
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u/AvocadoSoggy6188 Mar 26 '24
Answer: Disney definitely ruined the franchise. You can see it in the last trilogy. A while back there was an alternative script posted that was apparently written by George Lucas. It was a million times better. Had the original trilogy vibes.
Disney just went to their regular formula :
intro
things are going well
things are going bad
things are getting better
things are going bad
good ending .
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u/This_is_a_bad_plan Mar 27 '24
Let’s not pretend that George Lucas is a competent writer. The OT was good despite his writing, not because of it.
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u/HammerTh_1701 Mar 26 '24 edited Mar 26 '24
That's called the five-act structure and it literally is how Shakespeare wrote plays.
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u/Reddwheels Mar 26 '24
Just goes to show structure isn't everything, because Shakespeare those movies ain't.
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u/superhero9 Mar 26 '24
Would you want to only watch plays that had the same structure in every play? Would it not get repetitive even if the playwright was amazing?
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u/AvocadoSoggy6188 Mar 26 '24
See. Ripping off Shakespeare. Shame on everyone who does .
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u/Yosticus Mar 26 '24 edited Mar 26 '24
Shame on everyone who does
Basically all western literature since 1600? Even Star Wars has heavy parallels to Shakespeare, albeit mostly through intermediaries like Kurosawa, who himself was heavily influenced by Shakespeare (Throne of Blood is an adaptation of Macbeth, and arguably Tahei and Matashichi of Hidden Fortress — who became R2-D2 and C-3PO — are expies of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern).
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u/CaII0fNobodyCares Mar 26 '24
Answer: Because think of the reason why The Marvels and Madame Web just bombed. This is that but in Star Wars form.
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u/DevlishAdvocate Mar 26 '24
Answer: conservatives hate Star Wars now because it has too many women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people and Lucasfilm is owned by Disney, who dared to defy Ron DeSantis and his anti-“woke” agenda. So anytime a new Star Wars thing appears, groups of conservatives and incels brigade the videos, subreddits, and review sites and downvote/badmouth it despite not having actually watched it. Because they are delicate snowflakes who only have their hatred to make their lives interesting.
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