atomicheavybike:

awesomeswimmer21:

skywalkerrains:

awesomeswimmer21:

I think one of the things that I can’t stand about RJ’s writing is that I feel like he’s making what he’s trying to do SO OBVIOUS. There’s no deftness or subtlety. 

While watching TLJ I knew exactly what he wanted me to feel or think when it was happening. But I believe that if the writer knows what they’re doing, I should just feel or think that way instead of thinking “So the writer is clearly trying to make me feel bad for him… Ok the writer clearly wants me to like this character because they keep pushing them on me… Ok now I’m supposed to think this is funny… Now I’m supposed to be impressed….Ok now I’m clearly supposed to ruminate on the evils of wealth”.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I feel like he basically takes everything he wants the audience to think and feel and instead of gently guiding us to where he wants us to go, he basically pushes us…off a cliff

Excellent point! Well said. It is honestly the mark of a bad writer when they force an audience to feel something rather than lead them to feel something.

Thank you and yes! And it honestly kind of pisses me off when I can tell that a writer is very clearly trying to manipulate my feelings a certain way. I mean all writers obviously do that, but I shouldn’t be aware of it. The writing should be good enough to immerse me in the story so I don’t notice that the writer is clearly trying to get a certain reaction out of me.

But RJ’s writing was so hamfisted that I could never get fully in the story. And I think a large part of that was that there were times where he was clearly using his new characters as his kind of proxies. I cant get into a story when I keep feeling like the writer is stepping in and talking to me or the audience directly.

I mean it really was just all about RJ and what he wanted to tell us, the audience, or get us to feel. He didn’t create the new characters the way he did because it made sense to the story or who they would be as people or because it was necessary. He did it because he wanted his own mouthpieces. In other words, it wasn’t about the characters or the story and what the audience might actually want. It was about him.

So much this. It infuriated me how often he had characters say the subtext – which is, you know, the exact opposite of how subtext is supposed to function . The most egregious example is Rose’s awful “not fighting the things we hate but saving the things we love speech’.

And the absolute worst thing is that the subtext they were saying wasn’t *actually* the subtext, however much RJ might have intended it to be. He kept telling us what he was trying to do, as if he thought we were too stupid to understand it on our own, and then failing to even do it.

Take Rose and her ‘saving what we love’ speech – all well and good, except that’s precisely what Finn was already trying to do in their very first scene together, and she tasered and then lectured him about it.

And as for failure being the best teacher, what does anyone in the movie actually learn from their failures? Is Luke’s failure with Kylo Ren meant to teach him to withdraw from the world? To re-engage with it? To take Rey on as a student or to reject her?

I mean, I guess Rey’s failure to turn Kylo Ren to the Light does teach her she needs to fight him – ie fight the thing she hates. Like Rose’s subtext tells us not to. And since that’s what she was already doing in TFA anyway it seems like a supremely pointless lesson.

The movie is a hot mess textually and subtextually.