Larry Correia’s Russian Bot Review of Last Jedi
The esteemed and unconquerable whom the wise and the great in whispered tones revere as ‘The Mountain Who Writes’ whom the vulgar called Larry Correia, International Lord of Hate, has been disturbed in the throes of his muses by idiocy so severe that it registers on the Richter scale. Below is the opening.
By all means, go to his website, read the whole thing, and buy a few more of his books. Language warnings and spoiler warnings, etc.:
http://monsterhunternation.com/2018/10/02/my-russian-bot-review-of-the-last-jedi/the-last-jedi/
Okay, I should be working on the end of Monster Hunter Guardian, but then I saw this dumb ass article, and it absolutely demanded a response. I saw the Last Jedi. I talked about it a little bit on Facebook, but once I started optioning books to Hollywood I quit reviewing movies on my blog. But damn it, this has pushed me too far!
That’s right. Supposedly most of the people who hated The Last Jedi were Russian robots.
And so this was me, thirty seconds after I read that nonsense.
So today, don’t think of me as American novelist Larry Correia. I’m Lavrenty Krasnov, Cossack movie reviewer, who thinks that the Last Jedi was a dumpster fire of suck.
Pass the vodka, comrades, because shit is about to get real.
Oh yeah, I’m going to warn you now, there’s going to be a lot of profanity in this review.
First off, I don’t know how many Russian bots are on Twitter, but as for me and my house, we’re actual humans. And we were dumb enough to go watch Last Jedi opening week. My initial comment upon leaving the theater was something to the effect of “that was the prettiest nonsensical bullshit plot I’ve ever seen.”
The earlier Force Awakens was one of those movies where you have fun as you watch it, and you don’t think about it too hard at the time because by the time you can ponder on a plot hole, it’s already moved quickly onto the next cool visual. But when you leave the theater and you start talking about it with your kids, all the many flaws begin to stick out.
Last Jedi was that turned up to 10 and then the knob got broken off, so Rian Johnson could stick it up his butt. Because in addition to being stupid, it also pretentiously threw away any interesting or good story and character bits from the first movie which could’ve been developed into something interesting.
***
I’ve been a Star Wars fan since I was a kid. And since I was a nerd, I didn’t just watch the movies, I also played the role playing game (old school West End Games), read the comic books, and got together with my friend’s to play with their Star Wars toys. I didn’t have many Star Wars toys myself, because we were poor (and full disclosure, when I did scrape together the money, I got GI Joes instead because I thought their action figures were way cooler. Their knees and elbows bent! Kung Fu Grip, bitches!) And when I was in college I read a pile of the Expanded Universe books. (Tim Zahn is still the king and Admiral Thrawn is a far more compelling bad guy than all the weak ass new villains put together).
Like most 40 somethings, I watched the prequels and thought they were pretty lame, but then I had a bunch of kids, and it was Clone Wars city in my house. You can’t walk ten feet without tripping over a Star Wars toy. My son has the AT-AT. The big one. The one the size of a dog. The one that I would’ve murdered someone for at that age. And the Legos, holy shit, we’ve spent I don’t know how much money on Star Wars Legos. My kids have the big Millennium Falcon. Do you have any idea how cool that friggin’ thing is?
I also like Rogue One. Mad props for doing something different and interesting WHILE NOT SPITTING ON THE FANS.
But then along comes Last Jedi… and what a farce that was.
When Solo rolled around, even though you literally can’t not step on a Storm Trooper action figure anywhere in my house, I asked the kids, “Hey, Solo is out this week. You guys want to go see it?” And I got a chorus of mehs. They didn’t care enough to bother.
The Last Jedi had killed their enthusiasm.
And you’ve got to understand. Me and my kids, we do movies right. So when we go to the theater we go to the one with the comfy recliner chairs, I even spring for sodas and candy bars, and then we always go out to eat afterwards, and Dad pays for it all. And I raised a bunch of cheap mercenary capitalists, so they understand Take Advantage Of Dad Paying For Stuff Whenever Possible.
But nothing. Just a chorus of meh.
So how fucking much did Last Jedi have to suck to kill the enthusiasm of a bunch of Star Wars dorks that they couldn’t even bother to unass the couch to watch Solo, eat snacks, and then get pizza?
It sucked all the suck. That’s how much.
***
The plot of the Last Jedi feels like fan fiction written by a pretentious English major trying to wow the teacher with his deconstructionist brilliance. So while he simultaneously tries to beat by beat match the previous works (in a hamfisted way) he’s also going to “subvert” everything (SO EDGY!).
Characters
Characters are the single most important thing in most stories. They are the best tool a writer has to work with to tell an awesome story. When we last we saw these characters introduced in Force Awakens, sure, there were some flaws, (like holy shit Rey is OP), but there were also a lot of interesting potential threads left that could be developed into—
Fuck. Fin’s just comic relief now. Way to go, Rain.
No really, Fin was by far the most interesting character, with the most interesting arc, and the most potential for development after TFA. Rain, or whatever weird ass way his name is spelled, I don’t even care anymore, just pissed all over that. Apparently when Fin was in medical stasis he dropped about 15 IQ points.
But fucking up a new character is one thing… Ruining legends is a crime.
Luke was a travesty. That was just bullshit right there. If I’d had a look at the script beforehand I would have rolled it up tight and smacked Ryan over the head with it while shouting “what the fuck is wrong with you! You’ve been given custody of one of the most beloved characters in history and this is what you do with him?”
And the fact that nobody at Disney did that is the real travesty.
Listen, I’ve written in other people’s universes. And the first damned thing you do is your basic homework of what makes it tick, and what things are sacred. You don’t try to “subvert” what came before. You see why people loved it and then you build on it.
Read the whole thing.
http://monsterhunternation.com/2018/10/02/my-russian-bot-review-of-the-last-jedi/the-last-jedi/
He says in one go what it takes me sixteen columns to say, but his points match mine; as would, I assume, they match the conclusions of any real writers who look at the cracked mechanics of the writing in this dog’s breakfast.
Let me echo his statement. I have also written in other people’s universes, including Larry’s. I always do my darnest to sculpt my muse to theirs: No monkeying around with the source material, no games with the established canon, no trying to break the mood, and no exasperating or irking the paying customers.
Writers are in the clown business. I make play-pretend for a living. I pretend that a villain blows up a planet, or a space hero rescues a space princess, the knight fights bravely and the saint dies nobly, the dog talks comically, the bomb goes off, the ship sinks, the child is born, the lonely maiden lost in the woods sees the unicorn by moonlight gleaming in the meadow, and she finds her home again … and the readers laugh and clap.
We are competing for the reader’s beer money. He could be playing a video game or watching a rerun instead of reading your inkblots, so you darned well better make sure the inkblot has deeper, more likable characters and a more thrilling plot than the game or the rerun.
When you are writing in someone else’s background, it is not only your own beloved fans entrusted to your care, but his.
And your readers are entrusting you not just with your dreams, but theirs. The reason why it is so absurd, and so cruel, to make the argument that the artist owes nothing to his fans, and he can therefore betray them at will, is that it puts what should be a relationship of mutual respect, and, yes, mutual love, onto a legalistic footing of rights and duties.
I used to love the Star Wars franchise. Obviously, this is not the same type of love as I have toward wife or child or friend, flag or cross, but it is deeper than mere sentiment. These things lived in my imagination for decades: I made room for them in my life and thought. Call it fan-love if you must.
Johnson and Kennedy and those who betrayed that love now defend their decision by belittling it, saying I am fool for having felt such devotion, as are those like me.
My love has turned to hate, or at least, to fan-hate. Hell hath no fury like a fanboy scorned.
A closing comment:
I have not read the Russian Bot fanfic called, for some reason, a scientific study, because I am too old and wary. However, souls not yet overwhelmed with disgust for the rampant dishonesty that passes for scientific studies these days have braved the wilds where my timid heart dare not go.
The bold Rudolph Harrier brings back this report.
Quick summary: Introduction claiming that Star Wars had always been left-wing, and that more specifically recent movies were ultimately about how bad the wars in the Middle East were and how bad Republicans like George W Bush and Newt Gingrinch were. It is of course discussed how horrible President Trump is. Next is a discussion of similar studies, which again of course were related to GamerGate. After that we get into the actual study.
The methodology was performing a “manual sentiment analysis” of about 1000 tweets. That is, the author read the tweets and determined if they were for the Last Jedi or against it (one constant feature of these papers is that you can never say that you did something like that, you always have to use more sciencey terms to sound serious). The author then looked through the accounts of those who posted “negative” comments (there’s no indication that he investigated whether people positive of the film had ulterior motives). He then classified them into the categories of “political agenda,” “troll/sock puppet/bots” and “real fantagonists” (his term, not mine).
He used an automated program of someone else’s design to detect trolls based of criteria like not changing profile picture, frequent posting, and using shorter words. Such a method would certainly have many false positives, but this possibility is not discussed anywhere in the paper. He does say that after he used the automated program that there was an “extra, qualitative inspection” (i.e. that he looked at them and said “yeah that looks like a bot account.” Notably, he does mention that one thing he looked at was whether they retweeted from right-wing sources; if they did that was evidence that they were bots.) Similar methods were used to determine the nefarious Russian hacker accounts.
Other accounts were thrown into the “political agenda” or “real fantagonist” categories by his own analysis of their other posts. For example, if an account had posts which were pro-Trump or used the term “SJW,” that meant that their tweets about star wars were just part of a political agenda.
Finally we have a conclusion where the evils of right-wingers and Russians are discussed at length.
So it’s about what you’d expect.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
