You know you’ve delved too deep into YouTube fandom when you can’t remember which guy with an expensive microphone said what to you while speaking directly into the camera.
However, earlier this week, that was the sarlacc pit I had found myself in. Word had gotten out that fans were bombarding me with criticism The acolyte on Rotten Tomatoes and curiosity got the better of me. First, I watched This video of the guy with a microphonethat he claimed that Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy doesn’t like Star Wars fans and “that (Lucasfilm) started attacking fans before the show even came out; “That was to tell you that they knew they had a lot of garbage.”
Other One person wearing a cap noted: “The main reason this show is such a debacle is because it doesn’t feel like Star Wars… Fans like me, lifelong fans like us, don’t believe this garbage. This is garbage and we need to call them out on it.” After that it was this, which explained that “the very things fans complain about are the same virtue signaling that the Hollywood establishment has so invested in that they simply can’t accept that audiences don’t respond to them.” In turn, the video’s narrator concluded, the industry blames the bombardment of reviews.
It’s hard to say that any of the YouTube experts were “wrong” or “right,” and doing so would be a sure way to become the topic of discussion. next analysis video(Fast forward to 13:51 to see Carrie Fisher yell at my floating head.) What I will suggest is this: everyone is now fighting for the sake of fighting.
To put it in perspective, this is what happened: The Acolyte arrived on Disney+ on June 4. The critical score on the Tomatometer fell somewhere in the 80-plus percent range—not quite “Certified Fresh,” but still pretty solid. In the intervening weeks, the viewership score plummeted and is now around 13 or 14 percent, which has led to reports that the show was being bombarded with reviews, that is, bad faith negative reviews from the audience. Since some reports linked this spate of bad ratings to the show’s diverse cast and LGBTQ+ themes (i.e. “lesbian space witches”), there has been debate over whether the bad reviews came from homophobic, racist, or misogynistic sectors of the fandom. .
Last week, The Hollywood Reporter asked showrunner Leslye Headland (Russian doll) about the response to the show. While he stipulated that he didn’t think his show was “queer with a capital Q,” Headland said it was disheartening “that people would think that if something was gay, that would be bad… it makes me sad that a group of people on the internet would somehow dismantle what I consider to be the most important piece of art I’ve ever made.”
These comments generated a ton of reaction videos, which is how I ended up down the YouTube rabbit hole. Every video I watched was nuanced, but one theme kept coming up that seems to be at the heart of the problem: critics aren’t fans, they just think The acolyte It’s garbage and”no star wars”; Disney’s ownership of Lucasfilm is ruining the franchise, and these angry fans are posting reviews to point out the show’s many flaws.
Taking this at face value, I’d like to say: Hey, okay? Personal feelings about the quality of the show aside (I’m a bad queer person who hasn’t seen The acolyte However, despite the instructions that appeared in this month’s Gay Agenda newsletter; After my YouTube tour (I’m not sure if skipping this show makes me a bad Star Wars fan or a good one), there’s another argument to be made: sometimes franchises have bad installments, or simply installments that not everyone They enjoy it, and that’s okay.
Star Wars, like all brilliant creations, derives its genius from its malleability. George Lucas’s world-building thrives on the fact that anyone can imagine what’s happening three star systems away. Lucas himself reinforced this by turning to different writers and directors to create The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the JediDisney may have gone too far with the amount of content it has created since its $4 billion acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012; even CEO Bob Iger has done so. I admitted it—But trying to say that it is an untouchable franchise that should not be repeated is ridiculous.