i don't think there's a timeline close to our own where it actually gets made & i don't think these decisions were actually made in direct reaction to the thing i'm about to name, but i'm SO curious abt the completely theoretical version of the obi-wan show if fan reaction to "luke skywalker is actually much more complicated than we thought & has made mistakes" wasn't so. uh. bad,?
first note: despite riding hard for TLJ, i'm not 100% bought in on the luke aspects of it. i always found his character changes to feel understandable, but not inevitable. that's a perfectly fine route to take, especially in a series with so many moving parts you want to line up, but i never personally felt it was necessarily the most interesting thing they could have done with him. but i also think that's fine, bc it's one choice out of hundreds. that said, as rian johnson puts out more stuff & his favourite themes become more & more evident, i tend to increasingly see grumpy isolated luke as a mildly bland & ultimately forgivable johnsoncore "the best choice is ALWAYS the choice that Subverts Expectations™"
obviously, a lot of people who also aren't bought in on it took it a lot more personally than i did, or at least landed further away from agreeing it made any sense, & were. like very vocally angry abt that. & i don't think disney star wars employees at any point literally said "we CAN'T let obi-wan come out of this show any darker, more difficult & complex, or At Fault than we already know him to be; look at what happened when we tried that with luke!!" buuuuut...........
it's so, so, so sad & such a missed opportunity that we don't get to have obi-wan really & truly having to sit with having made mistakes. we get anakin telling him "you didn't do this to me; i did this to myself" & that's the end of the conversation. there's no obi-wan even getting to agree that ultimately anakin made all his own shitty choices but obi-wan still failed him & harmed him, or obi-wan trying to push back & in the process of getting nowhere realising that his beloved anakin is truly gone.
of course, a huge part of this is that obi-wan is like The Paragon Jedi & the series can't let him admit fault without admitting the fault of the jedi, which the franchise largely doesn't want to do. ESPECIALLY in a full-throated nostalgiabait series like this one. even if obi-wan retreats into denial, if he admits even for a second that the jedi systematically failed this child so horrifically that it allowed him to grow into the man he is, the cracks have been pointed out & we would know that obi-wan is choosing to just ignore them. which is compelling! but not what they're interested in. there's so much potential in their relationship, even as they awkwardly set it up in this show!! they just can't pay it off, for so many reasons, & it makes me crazy!!!
what does it mean to forgive yourself for harming someone when the person you harmed won't even recognise there was harm? if someone doesn't accept your apology, not because you haven't earned it or they just don't forgive you or any genuine reason, but bc they're too self-centered & clouded by self-hatred to admit you have anything to apologise for? how do you grapple with taking responsibility for something when you're literally not being allowed to claim that you're responsible? do you maybe not do it well & end up changing your name & going to live in a fuckin desert for a couple decades, too scared to make human connection in case you cause that grievous harm again? or is it something else? do you grapple with it, truly stare it in the face & confront it & yourself, & find true full & honest peace? even without the grace of an apology being accepted? we can't ask any of these questions if obi-wan can't be allowed to carry the fact that he & the jedi did harm.
anakin wanted to save the people he loved & when he couldn't, he let it make him into a monster. when obi-wan finds that same """weakness""" in himself, that he really & truly wants to save this person he loves so much, & he can't do it, what does he become? what does it mean to him??? what does it mean that they both took new names & "killed" the versions of themselves that were in the jedi temple? what is it for obi-wan to accept anakin's death again? what about what he figures out here changes things for him? what have we learned here that couldn't be inferred from the way he talks abt anakin & darth vader later?
if star wars wouldn't keep returning to these same characters, it wouldn't have to deal with not being able to do anything new or potentially risky with them bc that weird multi billion dollar franchise fear that guides all their decisions, but it does, so, you know, it does, & thirty-something lesbians in their star wars pajama pants on their couch go absolutely insane abt it, & then, well, that's, so you know, star wars. star wars would literally............. like star wars would literally be so good if it were good
Not canons added to. Most of all, not IPs built on. But when only an elite few have permission to touch the holy writ of canon and massive resources are lavished on their projects while others are suppressed, all sentiment becomes bound up in that canon. Then the owners whose power and profit is bound to that sentiment are incentivized to make nobody upset, and so all sentiment becomes nostalgia and all nostalgia becomes tinged with valium and opium.
Shakespeare didn't invent his most remembered characters from whole cloth. He wrote the version of popular ideas at his time which survived - not to take away from the wit of them at all. Homer is remembered as the composer of the well known stories of Odysseus and Troy, but it's certain they weren't the first or only versions of that story. The story of Amaterasu restoring the land from darkness wasn't invented for Ookami, it was a legend with hundreds or thousands of retellings already. I could list examples forever.
Star Wars is, at the moment, one thing. It used to be a different one thing, because there used to be a different canon, before the way was cleared to make a new movie trilogy and many fans felt slighted by the denouncing of their favorite parts of what came before. Arbitrary and enforced private ownership of the canon obviously does not lead to the best possible version, protected from polluting influences. It is when messy and contradictory influences and ideas can run rampant and make a million and one versions of the story that it evolves true meaning.
IMO, the fanfic on AO3, the lewd fan art on rule34, the RPG sessions in a dozen different systems of thousands of fans, the stories in the heads of thousands of players of SWTOR and Galaxies (old version and new), the events sketched in thousands of instances of the old Decipher CCG, every playthrough of X-Wing, Dark Forces, and all the other video games - these stories are all at least as important as a Netflix show or main movie. Many of them make no sense; a few of them are the best thing ever conceived in the fictional universe. Not just one best either, but a million best versions to suit the needs of different people at different times.
I'm so tired of the way ownership distorts and flattens meaning.
It's cool, I don't need to worry about understanding archetypes or tropes, I just need to pay attention to a relatively small set of works that a corporation, or a professor, or my that one friend I listen to, tells me are real.
I'm not different, really; I avoid consuming fan works because I simply do not have the attention span (also my brain stopped being able to read long form prose a while ago).
But one of the things that I've enjoyed a lot about villainess shit is how much playful remixing there is of different themes and story elements. It's just fun. But it's overwhelming because there's just a firehose of content.
(I've joked before that we need an Aarne-Thompson of villainess stuff -- of course, I'm sure a lot of that role is already fulfilled by tvtropes)
