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Sullivan
@Sullivan
Sullivan
@Sullivan

On Yoda, Ironic Memes, and the End of Lore:

Lately I have been thinking about “Yoda”. 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. Don’t look this up in case I’m wrong. I’m sure you’ve felt it too…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 they’re trying to Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius-style manifest into our reality a secret, good version of those movies that might even be better than the originals. And it’s 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 I’m describing this part. Do you not know about Baby Yoda?? Whatever, it’s 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. I’ve always been generally opposed to the codification of fictional settings and our culture’s eagerness to apply enlightenment-era liberal scientific reality to america’s 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 60’s and 70’s fizzled out, Reagan ushered in a new era of evil, and George Lucas’ 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, “not good”. But in many ways, they are his most personal movies: The “Star Wars” 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. “Around the survivors a perimeter create.”

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, that’s fine- George doesn’t care, he calls the lightsabers “laser swords”, and he’s 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 life’s 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 you’ve 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 can’t fault them- it’s 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. He’s 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 he’s like, idk, getting space Colombia to open up its Lithium trade and so on. And he’s a little FREAK! And now there’s a baby version of him, or his ‘species’, in The Mandalorian. His species?? Answer me, before The Mandalorian (and Yaddle), did you ever seriously wonder about Yoda’s “species”?? My impression of Star Wars aliens as a kid was that aliens were all completely different, that “Alien” 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 “Aliens”.

Because why would you ever want to see a guy you’ve seen before, when you could see a NEW guy? They’re not FROM anywhere- or if they are, we’re not going there. Just like the blue milk or the fact that there’s no written text, zippers, buttons, or wheels anywhere, that the ships don't look like rockets,- it’s 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 I’m 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.

screenshot of a comic panel with a "cheeked up" yoda ludicrously crawling around saying "...what..." while a speech bubble comes from out of the frame saying "welcome to your new home, FREAK." That image is next to a screenshot of a news article speculating as to why Yaddle, another member of "yoda's species", doesn't speak like him in Tales of the Jedi, the new disney plus series

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 “Reality” 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 won’t go to heaven. There’s 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 can’t sustain the scrutiny of being transformed from a bombastic maniac into an underwritten ecofascist Johnny Cash’s-cover-of-Hurt dad who BRUTALLY massacres the entire cast. He’s a big purple guy who casts spells. He’s not cerebral, and certainly not the type of cerebral that the Russo Brothers were trying to evoke. It’s 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 don’t 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 can’t 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.

screenshot of a tweet by wint @dril "in real life yoda would get eaten by a dog"

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in reply to @Sullivan's post:

NireBryce
@NireBryce

I know I say this to everyone but I think you should revisit the prequels if you haven't recently. I like them a lot more now that I have a lot more perspective, and think that a lot of why I thought they were bad is intentional choices about what happens when you shelter people from the evils of the universe. That doesn't make it a GREAT movie, but it does make me respect it a lot more.

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

Not that that's the only take. But after seeing the interview with him where he says he wasn't inspired to write the rebels because of French Resistance fighters (from his previous world war 2 works, this would be a reasonable assumption) but instead, he based them on the Vietnamese resistance against the American and French empire in the Vietnam war, I sort of have an entirely different lens for all of the movies.

Especially since his eldest kid would be 16 as episode 1 released, with 11 and 6 being the other ages.

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Sullivan
@Sullivan

oh yeah, im well aware of the AWESOME Viet Cong stuff (slightly tarnished by george pressing the issue in ROTJ with ewoks playing drums on skulls, etc). Lucas is a very interesting guy who had a lot of cool stuff to express, and I'm glad he made the prequels the way he wanted them- I have an immense respect for what he did, (i think the film industry learned all the wrong lessons from his visual ambition- now we use CGI to composite Tom Holland into a fake new york city street instead of make more movies like Speed Racer)- I just dont like them very much.

As ambitious and inventive they are, I just can't get past the fact that they aren't good movies (to me). And that's leaving out the racism, the extraordinarily weird plotting, just how UGLY it all looks (and I know its because they needed to do it so they could advance the tech, but....good god!) Like, they're not very fun to watch, and I like for my Star Wars movies to move. Like. I see what he's going for, it just really, really doesn't work for me. I keep imagining the Star Wars prequels we could have had in my head. But that's my problem. I do (hypocritically) also resent how poorly it integrates into the original series as well! I feel like he could do all this while actually making these movies adventures.

I think it's interesting to see all the creators who came after incorporating Lucas' extremely cynical approach to the Star Wars fundamentals back into the framework of an adventure story (much of Filoni's ouvre, and TFA/TLJ both being metatextually about the fandom trauma of the prequels), but the Canon of it all ends up feeling like these poor storytellers are the little dutch boy at the dam. Stewardship of a long running story doesnt necessarily mean we have to commit so hard to decisions that make internal consistency so difficult to achieve, imo.

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mammonmachine
@mammonmachine

I remember being immensely entertained by the movies when they came out, and immediately picking up on all the bush-era allegories in the movies; they were not subtle at all! All of that was quite fun and enjoyable, but it's a little surprising that there's so much praise at the left-leaning aspects of the trilogy as if it was very subversive and radical for its time when in reality it reflected a popular and prevalent American liberal democrat perspective. Granted at the time there was not nearly such a radical split on the left, but I think it's pretty conservative and obvious in its observations. I love it when creators do weird and unpleasant stuff with their creations, and there's a lot to enjoy about the prequels as their own thing and as a surprisingly personal work. There's a lot of fascinating stuff in there! Just not the world, storytelling, characters or politics, which generally people might think of as most of the actual movie.

Maybe part of the reassessment of the prequels beyond the modern context of presenting them as The Same Story is that there's more enthusiasm and interest in the present moment for appraising media less for what the work itself and for its creation and context. I'm not exactly sure why, other than it's a swing in the opposite direction from considering work only as the work itself. The modern internet loves deep dives and explainers, and in the early 2000s and before that context was harder to find.

Some of the context is obvious, wrong, or painfully contradicted by the work itself. There's a massive gulf between Lucas's inspirations and the actual execution of those ideas in the movies. Secondary sources can easily paint a grand vision that just isn't found in the final product, but even so, that information is still interesting and creatively inspiring. I think it might be somewhat mistaken to attribute the qualities of a creative process to the end result, but where else does it live? Now that franchises like Star Wars are a big ball of a million different historical sources, the lore is mixed together with the real world history and inspirations.

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pervocracy
@pervocracy

I've started to appreciate how weird they are. There's a ton of stuff in there that's embarrassing or offputting or outright offensive... but that's because they took chances. Like, a huge criticism of the films at the time was that George Lucas was unwilling to take advice or criticism from cooler heads, but "design by committee" is rarely a compliment. This was auteur incompetence, by God.

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belarius
@belarius

I feel like there are two crucial points interwoven throughout here, and I agree with both of them. The first is that art, being a narrative fabrication, need not be consistent, and the modern obsession with 'canon' imposes an impossible standard onto works that are in some way related. The marketing implications of a "cinematic universe" are the pernicious endgame of this process, in which stories are not only bound to an impossible standard of consistency, but in which a whole host of media properties must be consumed for that ostensibly consistent world to be coherent. It's as though we've taken Sagan's, "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" and created it's terrifying inverse, "you will have to study for a lifetime before you can understand that what you are eating is pie." It's unsustainable and some people are starting to opt out.

The second, related point is an embrace of the attitude that some art is not just trash, but great trash. I don't mean that the art in question is without value, or disposable, or lacking in nuance, but rather that its artistry is executed without a pretentious aspiration to being timeless, perfect, and unassailable. Many people I've met (almost all of whom are much younger than myself) like the SW Prequels quite a lot, and do so fully acknowledging that they have elements that are naive, or problematic, or narratively suboptimal. The Prequels feel pulpy and indulgent in a way that passes the vibe check. These younger viewers can tell that these movies came for a Good Time, not for a Great Courses Plus time. Its puts the Prequels in the company of other goofy sci-fi spectacles like The Fifth Element and Redline, and about as far away as possible from the operatic aspirations of films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Interstellar. In my opinion, a lot of trashy movies are getting fond reappraisals, even as they are also being cut apart at the joints for their problems, because they feel like films that were made by people. Being able to see the flaws and the seams and the mistakes feels like a theme park to audiences that are tired of watching meticulously scrubbed AU newsreels.

The solution, I think, to the problems posed by the current state of affairs is to acknowledge that every single choice in fiction, including the choice of whether to maintain continuity, is a creative and artistic choice. Movies are made by many people, and each film is, to varying degrees, a collective mix of those choices. A series of films is even less coherent, because even more people are making those choices. He, she, they, every ship and place and bit of backstory is (as they say) just lines. If breaking continuity makes for a better story, maybe that's the better play.

So, my take is that the obsession with canon and with cinematic universes is a flattening of that artistic reality. It's not just the insistence that Yoda Was A Real Guy, it's a choice to erase the multitude of viewpoints that created the art in the first place, to wholly reject the cultural and historical world that gave rise to the art and attempt to live in the simulacrum instead. Yoda's original performance is enriched by an audience's familiarity with The Muppet Show: Sex And Violence, not diminished by it, just as the original writing of Yoda is enriched by a knowledge of martial art movie tropes. Regardless of where you stand vis-a-vis the Death of the Author, I'd hope we can all at least agree that the Authors exist and celebrate their choices, rather than trying to render them invisible and taboo.

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Sullivan
@Sullivan

i come across as much harder on Canon than I truly am, mainly because its become fully enshrined as a Brand Strategy, and often leads to the most appallingly uninteresting explorations of the work its meant to keep consistent (solo, book of boba, the MCU). I feel like it's possible to accomplish this "consistent fictional setting" premise in a thrilling and exciting way.

I feel like Andor, including its post-credits stinger that some people didn't like, is a great example of having a worthwhile answer for "why are we exploring THIS?" It always comes down to having a real story to tell. I do think it's telling that the story nobody was asking for turned out to be the most compelling, but that's not only on the premise. that team did an incredible job. Basically, you need to have something much BETTER than what people were expecting, if you must fill in the corners.

You make a good point that the original choices of the artists disappear in the envelope of IP management, that Canon plays a part of reducing all the intentional artistic choices into contextless detail- I think that lesson is most importantly internalized by the people currently telling these stories. So much of these modern stories feel totally mired in all the crap that came before, the connections arent joyous, they're belabored. I wish people remembered that they are in control of what they're making. They are making choices right NOW. The demands of the lore will not make the story any good. Only good old fashioned creativity will.

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belarius
@belarius

Absolutely agree. Canon is a creative choice: Leveraging it has consequences that benefit some narratives (such as multi-volume book series that are meant to feel like history). The more people make contributions to a shared IP that has made "canon" part of its brand, however, the greater the constraint on the new stories you can tell and the more difficult it becomes to onboard new audiences. And for that matter, canon as a brand strategy does not deserve the same credit as canon as artistic choice. Art > content.

At the same time, ignoring or even defying canon serves other stories much better. My favorite example is Red Dwarf. Many of its strongest seasons actively rewrite the show's internal history, and do so precisely because the changes better serve the jokes being told in the current episode. Since it's a sitcom with a small recurring cast of characters whose broad personalities can be understood in about 20 seconds, there's no real cost to making everything around them mutable.

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sepia-official
@sepia-official

When I was very young I didn't realize that Yoda was supposed to be an alien at all. I thought the idea was just that that's what you look like when you live to 900 through your mastery of the Force. I still like this idea better than there being a whole Yoda species including babies.

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Sullivan
@Sullivan

I completely get this. If I were ever tasked with creating an "origin" for Yoda I'd have to imagine he started as a like, an actual frog, who was the magic familiar for some legendary jedi from 1000 years past, and through his little goblin antics taught him and his friends all kinds of lessons about the Force, and then he just kept on living and they were like "oh...huh... maybe yoda wasnt really our pet". Like I'd have Yoda as a statement about the sort of totalizing influence of the Force in a similar way. he's like a rock that sat still for so long it became self-aware. he certainly wasn't colin powell

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NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

There’s a distressing trend in our culture of every long-running franchise eventually bending towards Eugenics in one way or another.

Distressingly, it doesn't even have to be a franchise! Reading SFF in general is a minefield of eugenics. Often with bonus "authoritarianism is good when the good, special people do it" for good measure.

But yeah, all good points in this post. I've written on here about how Brands and Franchises are allergic to ambiguity and this is an aspect of that, I think. No narrative void can be left unfilled, no room for mystery or wonder because we need to ensure only the most literal, surface level, objective interpretation of the story. This is also useful because the stories can take on a morally didactic quality, without risking the audience taking the wrong lesson by inserting their own interpretation.

Yes, there is a eugenics streak on Star Wars, but only if you think about it. You're not supposed to. Simply take the "Good vs. Evil" thing at face value, anything else is overthinking, overanalyzing, looking too much into it, and it's just a fun movie! Stop bringing politics into it.

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silasoftrees
@silasoftrees

i like a lot of this post except for the anti-yoda conclusion, i think yoda existing is cool and good, i think every work of art should feature a little yoda in there, like a memento mori but instead of reminding you of death he reminds you that this is all just imaginary pretend stuff.

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rp0
@rp0

I think it's interesting how comics, as old as they are, are no longer able to contain the strain of canonical consistency, though they still very much try in one way or another. Batman hardly has a singular canon anymore, he has become kaleidoscopic in how to tell a story about him. Perhaps it will be inevitable that Star Wars will have the same result.

Which only makes me think about even older stories and how they are inevitably co-opted, adapted, and repurposed to be whatever they need to be.

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secrets
@secrets

Not sure what other outcome there can be when you pit the constraints of what is ultimately the registered trademark of a large corporation against the demand to constantly use that extremely static, defined thing to tell new stories. The full scope of what Batman can be, at least for longer than one story arc that will be immediately disavowed, was established better part of a century ago. Whatever he is now must always refer back to and be immediately recognizable as That Batman, frozen in time. But Batman must constantly be put through new and ever-escalating crises in order to exhaust the novelty potential of his character, and the effort to square these two commercial drives into some unified whole that somehow comprises the linear chronological events in the life of a human being who did all that shit and is still out there punching Long Islanders in warehouses makes him monstrous.

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pervocracy
@pervocracy

I love this post. The whole gimmick with Yoda originally was that he didn't look or act like anyone important. Luke thought he was just some busybody swamp hermit before coming to understand he was a sacred busybody swamp hermit.

(My personal belief was that Yoda had always lived in that swamp, had never had any adventures himself, but with simple living and great age he had developed such a deep wisdom that Jedi began making pilgrimages to bask in it. Which would be a great example of how the Force touches all of us and has nothing to do with special bloodlines or formal training, wouldn't it.)

Anyway, this is a classic fairytale scenario--don't judge a book by its cover!--that's made moot by giving Yoda any backstory. It's like going back and explaining that the Tortoise won because the Hare had narcolepsy. It's not even contradicting the original point, it's suggesting that you never understood there was one in the first place.

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