Lately I have been thinking about āYodaā. The strange little man from Star Wars. I have been contemplating Yoda. Based off my general impression with absolutely no collected evidence of any kind, I feel like people are sort of turning on Yoda. More people online are being mean to Yoda than ever before. Donāt look this up in case Iām wrong. Iām sure youāve felt it tooā¦I see memes and jokes about Yoda all the time- people joking about feeding yoda chocolate, yoda smoking weed, etc. I could go on. I have a theory as to why this is happening. I think the canon is buckling under Yoda.
I think this ironic perspective on Yoda could be blamed on the Star Wars Prequels, and their current cultural reappraisal- all the kids who grew up with them are adults now, and theyāre trying to Tlƶn, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius-style manifest into our reality a secret, good version of those movies that might even be better than the originals. And itās only gotten worse with the massive success of The Mandalorian on Disney Plus, a whole tv show that was shot inside the holodeck from Star Trek and has a Precious Moments-looking ass adorable baby version of Yoda. Not sure why Iām describing this part. Do you not know about Baby Yoda?? Whatever, itās important for my point.
I think Star Wars (and our entire culture) is reaching sort of a breaking point with all of its shared-universe internal consistency stuff. Honestly I think the whole thing is inherently inside the breaking point. Iāve always been generally opposed to the codification of fictional settings and our cultureās eagerness to apply enlightenment-era liberal scientific reality to americaās biggest fairytale franchise (STAR WARS!) has always rankled me- despite my own delight at seeing Things I Recognize. Sincerely: the magic is often contained inside the mystery.
Expanding a narrative world -into a sequel, a spinoff, whatever- necessitates taking a bit of mystery or novelty out of your original work. Doing anything like that is Repeating Yourself, and often a little repetition is good for rhythm! Ultimately, I just dont think fiction and our modern conception of scientific reality are meant to intersect quite so much as they currently do, no matter how fun it can be to explain that the guy the guy from Cloud City carrying the ice cream maker was actually doing a super important mission.
I think Yoda is the biggest victim of this contradiction in the Star Wars setting. Lucas introduced him as a sly little elf: a kung-fu master in the Shaw Brothers tradition, dispensing platitudes and pulling silly pranks. And he was beloved in that role. People LOVED that little freak. He was perfect as a freak! He is in every respect, a little Tom Bombadil silly guy. Then, the cultural revolution of the 60ās and 70ās fizzled out, Reagan ushered in a new era of evil, and George Lucasā wife left him for the artist who designed the giant stained-glass window at Skywalker Ranch.
Then came Desert Storm and Bush II, and eventually, after Attack of the Clones was already out the door, 9/11. It seems that Lucas returned to his massive career-defining franchise with a newfound cynicism and calcified creative instincts- the Prequels are, suffice it to say, ānot goodā. But in many ways, they are his most personal movies: The āStar Warsā are a toxic force that drives our hero apart from his great love, the heroic Jedi are dogmatic assholes, and the US is a fascist dictatorship (he made some points!). Yoda has been transformed into a septic Donald Rumsfeld-type guy who does CGI wuxia backflips and has a tiny green lightsaber. āAround the survivors a perimeter create.ā
Like so many things in the Prequels, the Yoda of this story makes no god-damned SENSE compared to the Yoda of the originals-and honestly, thatās fine- George doesnāt care, he calls the lightsabers ālaser swordsā, and heās right to do it. He can fuck around with his story as much as he wants. He clearly had a lot to work out about his hopes for the future of digital filmmaking, America, and his complicated relationship with his lifeās work. So why SHOULD it be compatible with the source material? Those were different movies (they were also better movies, but thats beside the point).
Well, to the modern nerd, that is unacceptable. The Yoda of the prequels IS the Yoda of the originals, after all. He is a real guy, and he went from one movie over to the other movie. Perhaps he also met like 50 other guys youāve never heard of while he was at it. So why is he so different? I guess losing a fight to a 70-year-old pervert evidently drove him insane and made him into a goblin, somehow, or, he was just inexplicably lying in the original movies. Whatever it is, it has to make just enough sense to justify everything that came before. There is a real, incontrovertible history here. Nobody MADE these movies, no decisions went into them, they are simply historical documents.
This is the approach Disney has taken. They have teams of guys determining if Han Solo has ever eaten pizza so some person writing a comic book can pull the trigger on the Han Solo Pizza Arc. I canāt fault them- itās nice to have consistency, and people love exploring the margins of a compelling setting. But making Yoda a coherent figure is a bit too much to ask. Heās too silly in the first place. Making him such a dramatic character in the prequels was already wayyy too much to ask. Watching that guy bounce around elicits a similar feeling to when your edible hits a bit too hard.
I mean, Yoda is an important FIGURE in the Star Wars universe- he has big arcs in the Clone Wars cartoon where heās like, idk, getting space Colombia to open up its Lithium trade and so on. And heās a little FREAK! And now thereās a baby version of him, or his āspeciesā, in The Mandalorian. His species?? Answer me, before The Mandalorian (and Yaddle), did you ever seriously wonder about Yodaās āspeciesā?? My impression of Star Wars aliens as a kid was that aliens were all completely different, that āAlienā was a type of guy you could be, like if a bug alien and a blue alien had a kid, it might come out as a Chewbacca. They were just āAliensā.
Because why would you ever want to see a guy youāve seen before, when you could see a NEW guy? Theyāre not FROM anywhere- or if they are, weāre not going there. Just like the blue milk or the fact that thereās no written text, zippers, buttons, or wheels anywhere, that the ships don't look like rockets,- itās all meant to evoke a feeling of intuitive magic and wonder. Everything that could be mundane is exciting. Even the MILK. There was never any underlying logic beyond that instinct.
Now, we are being forced to examine things about this setting that were never mean to be investigated. The only answers are utterly ridiculous. Are we seriously going to eventually get an emotional scene in The Mandalorian season 5 where Din Djarin hands Grogu off to his fellow Yodas on the fucking Yoda Planet?? Yodatopia? Little Yodas flying around in Jetsons cars and shit? Yoda taxonomy? Blue Yodas? Where does it end?? If you think Iām being too harsh on The Mandalorian, remember that the last season had a cgi neural-net-voiced Luke Skywalker rescue Grogu from a bunch of Bionicles that were going to use his magical eugenics-blood to bring Sheev Palpatine back to life so he could appear in The Rise of Skywalker, a Star Wars movie so universally hated that it united the entire political spectrum (that had just been viciously Culture-Warring over The Last Jedi) in glorious concord over how fucking appalling it was. All this for TROS! Dave Filoni would GLADLY take you to the Yoda Planet. I bet he thinks about its social structure at night.

My point is, we made Yoda too real. We made everything in Star Wars too Real. It used to be Hyperreal -the ideal realm of the fairytale- now base liberal conceptions of āRealityā intrude into our cultural imagination: morality is good vs evil- not a holistic and spiritual relationship with the self and the universe, material concerns do not motivate action-only being Good or being Bad, and the world is full of concrete scientific answers- magic is a list of easily reproducible scientific equations reliant on your genealogy, and it comes from a Magic Planet that is half Good and half Evil. And some beings are just Not ever going to be connected to the flow of all life. Star Wars is (unwittingly) saying that your slaves wonāt go to heaven. Thereās a distressing trend in our culture of every long-running franchise eventually bending towards Eugenics in one way or another.
I think people might be, on some level, rebelling against the demands that they take Yoda seriously in the same vein that our entire culture sort of immediately agreed that Thanos from The Avengers movies was a very stupid character. Once he started taking center stage, Thanos became the focus of thousands of increasingly ironic and self-referential memes. Thanos canāt sustain the scrutiny of being transformed from a bombastic maniac into an underwritten ecofascist Johnny Cashās-cover-of-Hurt dad who BRUTALLY massacres the entire cast. Heās a big purple guy who casts spells. Heās not cerebral, and certainly not the type of cerebral that the Russo Brothers were trying to evoke. Itās just stupid. Its stupid!
There is a creative void underneath Yoda and Thanos. The teams in charge of these characters necessarily cannot acknowledge the real problem with them- that they just fundamentally donāt make sense as consistent or credible characters in the sort of story they are trying to tell. They stretched him too thin, fitting this character into contexts he's tonally incompatible with for whatever reason. That contradiction grows like a tumor into the entire work, with every new appearance trying to paper over another bizarre contradiction, forever.
As these Brands try to expand, searching for more and more narrative territory to exploit, they start making weirder and weirder bets while still trying to smooth those choices over for mass-market appeal- or they back themselves into a corner like they have with Yoda. But there are some things so indelibly stupid that you canāt really smooth them out- the weirdness WAS the point. The audience can sense the void, and they are going to fill it with whatever their instincts lead them to. Once, Yoda delighted us by being a little freak- now he torments us, and we punish him for it.

All I could possibly add to this, apart from cheering like my local sports team is winning against all odds, is that the "hyperreal," from Eco's work at least, and drawing I think on Baudrillard, better describes this morass of nonsense nerd culture and pop media have gotten us into. In Travels in Hyperreality, Eco actually uses Disneyland as his example of the hyperreal: a fake place so carefully detailed as to efface the real, becoming better than the real could ever be.
Plenty of people have come to the same conclusions about Disneyland and the Mouse generally, but I bring it up only because I Disney has been doing this for a long time, and for every person who memes Thanos into ludicrousness there is a YouTuber who will tell you, while you eat your lunch at your keyboard, that Thanos is an incredible character because he's so real and his concerns are so valid.
Actually I thought of one other thing: Azuma's Otaku. I need to reread it, but the Database Animal is perhaps one of the single most important pieces of cultural analysis I've seen in my life, and more people need to look into it.
That's not a dig at the author I'm rebugging here, again, my sports team is winning. Against all odds. Azuma just seems to have vanished in critical discourse generally and I don't know if I'm just more of a weeb than I thought, and nobody else heard of the book to begin with, or what.
I've been thinking about qualities inherent to stories vs. qualities imposed on them by readers. Well, specifically, I've been thinking about plot. The approach I find most compelling is that plot isn't fundamental and inevitable; writers arrange units of language in a structure that seems pleasing, and "plot" is how readers make sense of moving through that structure in whatever sequence. Samuel Delany, in About Writing, described it like this:
Most beginning writers are [...] unaware of how fragile the desire to know what comes next actually is--or how easily it's subverted.
Plot exists as a synopsis that often has no correspondence to text.
He's also clear that writing for an audience involves meeting audience expectations to some degree, but that's why the above posts made me think of this.
If the audience is conditioned to expect plot as we usually understand it and to think that good fiction is materially the same thing as a certain kind of plot--whether by previous generations of media likers, or some other cultural impetus, or because it benefits a company like Disney to maintain feedback cycles that give them agency in shaping audience desires--we're going to end up with a lot of stories conducive to plot. A litfic writer might call it "plot-driven" fiction, but litfic writers' role in selling Cold War American values as common-sense standards of prose craft disqualifies them from sounding off about most things as far as I'm concerned, and also it's not plot-driven except insofar as it includes a driver's seat tailored to plot's specific ass topography. They're stories structured such that they invite readers to interpret them as plot.
So, with that in mind, I don't hate plot. Anything can be a needless constraint if we demand it of writers, but plot is still a convenient way of talking about sequential media generally. It's so convenient that, despite being a bit of a ridiculous proposition in video games, we came up with a whole term ("ludonarrative") to account for it.
I do, however, hate worldbuilding.
Every story may have a "setting" in the broad sense of a set of baseline assumptions, but a story isn't a world, all fiction is fantasy, and suspension of disbelief isn't real. The demand for worldbuilding, aka lore--in terms of what's actually being asked of a writer, the demand for sheer volume, for unwavering consistency in the application of story elements, and for everything to come with an explanation attached--is how we end up with these bloated amusement park wiki-fuel settings (re: Baudrillard and Eco, maybe partly because of the conditions of postmodernity, though iirc Azuma's otaku is more driven by specifics pulled from a giant meta-database, the hunt for the perfect 2D wife/giant robot/whatever without much regard for the media on its own terms, as if the pleasures of the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Dragonball, and Jim Carrey's The Mask are basically the same because for you they're "about" a character being green). Longass parenthetical aside, though, the problem isn't just that the Star Wars and Marvel universes are essentially load-bearing drywall at this point. If the only organizing principle nerds will accept is the order and data transparency of a spreadsheet, what are we leaving in the slush pile?
This isn't a "kids these days" rant about how interesting writing is impossible now--a lot of writers are producing a lot of interesting work, some even within the corporate frameworks from which none of us can escape. But many aren't getting paid for it, or paid enough, and you simply gotta eat.