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Jon Auerbach's avatar

Great post! I'm really enjoying your Thoughts posts. You bring a ton of nuance and insight into these complicated topics. One quibble: Rian Johnson was never directing/writing Episode IX. Instead it was supposed to be Colin Trevorrow (director of Jurassic World), who was no doubt scrapped for the reason you posit in your post. His script leaked online last year and it sounds like it was the complete opposite of Rise of Skywalker, in that it made hard choices and continued the themes of TLJ:

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a30882356/full-star-wars-9-original-duel-of-fates-script-colin-trevorrow/

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DGil's avatar

An excellent read! Us Star Wars fans have a ton to live down, and seeing where the particularly toxic and depressingly relentlessly vocal among us came from was worth reading, thanks!

Personally, I disagree about Star Wars being a Western (it has a ton of Western elements of course) as I find it a sci-fi war movie, but a lot of the inherent bootstrapping macho exceptionalism you mentioned is also found in war movies, so I still agree with your overall points in where the Fandom Menace arose. Also really nitpicky, but I don't recall Rian ever being attached to TROS, instead Colin Trevorrow was, but once Duel of the Fates was revealed to be ghastly, they promptly booted him off and had JJ take the skeleton if the script and rework it with Chris Terrio into TROS. I wanted to see Finn lead a Stormtrooper rebellion on the FO Destroyer in the final battle myself, but your idea of the two fighting at the end is simply electrifying, I'd have loved to have seen that.

You ma'am, understand Star Wars very well, and have this diehard Star Wars fan's complete respect!

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