Seto Kaiba

... it strikes me as slightly odd to expect professionalism from what is, by definition, essentially a bootlegging outfit.

I've recently finished the Star Trek: Vanguard novel series that was recommended to me by @Talos. Not quite my cup of tea thanks to the rather relentlessly dark story, but as EU stuff goes it's much better written than average. I'm also following the Yen Press translation of Kugane Maruyama's Overlord light novels. Their translation has been quite good. Currently starting Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow for a change of pace. Some nice proto-Lovecraft existential horror.

Jeez... my sympathies. OK, let's stop there for a moment. "Canon" is a word that's rather difficult to apply to the main Macross continuity at times. Kawamori's view of canon is that there isn't one. He's variously attempted to explain this as either each Macross series being a dramatization of a "true" history we haven't seen or that each Macross title is a stand-alone story with a shared broad strokes-only history. In more practical terms, it's Kawamori's way of not landing Macross in the continuity lockdown mess that Gundam has been in for what feels like forever and a way to dismiss questions about continuity out of hand in interviews. Whether anyone else involved in the running of the Macross franchise actually got that particular memo is unclear, as an awful lot of Macross stuff made after that pronouncement seems to ignore it completely. That kind of loosey-goosey policy would make it rather difficult to sell things like art books or write spinoff materials. It's worth noting that this is a relatively recent decision of Kawamori's, and he's previously expressed somewhat firmer ideas about continuity that line up with what's still being done in official publications. ... a word to the wise, save yourself a LOT of frustration and don't take ANYTHING Berger Stone says seriously. It's hard to tell who exactly is to blame for this one, really. On the one hand, Berger Stone is an extremely shady character and the very picture of an unreliable narrator with a very obvious agenda when it comes to manipulating Xaos. On the other, Macross Delta's writing is spectacularly sloppy garbage throughout the show's second half. Berger spins some very elaborate yarns that contain some very obvious contradictions to those who pay attention. Our protagonists, however, are apparently not sharp enough to notice the parts of Berger's story that don't line up, so he manipulates them fairly easily and seems to be having a lot of fun doing it. (The bit about music as a weapon appears to be something of a pet project of the Epsilon Foundation's, as they were actively trying to weaponize fold songs in the Macross Delta gaiden manga.) That's a very definite maybe. Starting from Macross II, DYRL? has been gradually displacing the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross both aesthetically and narratively. Macross II was also the first sequel that cut a dash between the two versions of the First Space War, more in line with the novelization of DYRL?. If you look carefully, you'll notice both Macross 7 and Macross Frontier used the DYRL? version instead of the TV version. One of the things that came in with Macross Plus and Macross 7 was the view that the series continuity was the more correct version but that DYRL? visual aesthetics and other parts of it were also "true". For instance, the TV and Movie VF-1s were both used during the war with the TV version being the VF-1 from the earliest production blocks and the one used for the movie being a block update introduced shortly after the war started. Another example was that Exsedol's appearance in the TV and Movie versions were both true... the TV version was his miclone appearance with his role-specific genetic mods stripped out and the movie version was his true giant appearance. This same philosophy of "TV for timeline, Movie for aesthetic" seems to have gotten carried over to subsequent titles as well. Macross Frontier's prequel Macross the Ride generally follows the TV version of events but they also explicitly assert the existence of the YF-29. (If you look carefully, you'll notice there's a BAD model of the TV version SDF-1 Macross on Ernest Johnson's desk.) That said, it should be remembered that we're basically watching Berger Stone's PowerPoint presentation and not an actual depiction of events, so his choice of soundtrack may be biased by his personal tastes or whatever dramatization of Lynn Minmay's life he thought the crew would've seen most recently. The battle itself did go on for many hours, so there is the distinct possibility Minmay sang most or all of her repertoire during it.

I'm not sure there's any reasonable doubt that it doesn't all revolve around Burnham anymore, as Season Two has seen both Spock hang an enormous lampshade on it by chewing her out for her wanting to make everything all about her followed by future Control revealing she's the only one that can supposedly stop it, then the reveal that the Red Angel was her supposedly-dead mother who's been altering history left, right, and center to un-kill her literally hundreds of times (she's apparently more death-prone than Hank and Dean Venure) and then present-day Control revealing that she's the only one its predictive model thinks can actually prevent it from achieving its goal. It's hard to argue that it's not all about her when mulitple characters with future knowledge have clearly stated it really is all about her. Really, from what I've seen, heard, and read in the Star Trek fan community it doesn't appear to be a matter of race or sex that made Anson Mount's Captain Pike and Doug Jones's Commander Saru much more popular. They're more appealing to the audience than Burnham because they're not a-holes. Michael Burnham is kind of an a-hole. She's arrogant, she's rude, she's condescending in the extreme, she's a poster child for disruptive workplace behavior and she's frequently openly disrespectful of both fellow officers and superiors, and she's got that martyr complex causing her to annoy everyone else. She's basically an even more annoying and overdramatic version of Wesley Crusher and you know how fans hated HIM. Tilly seems to get more of a pass because some people believe she's a representation character for fans on the autism spectrum while others think she's essentially a homage to Star Trek fans themselves. Personally I find her annoying. Mirror Georgeau tests unusually well with the audience, which is weird since she's a one-dimensional asian femme fatale character in the Bond villain's sidekick category... she's horribly amoral, she knows kung fu, she wears exclusively tight black leather outfits, her dialog is mostly catty remarks and sexual solicitation, and she's promiscuous to the point sleeping with anything that moves and tells everyone about it at the first opportunity. It doesn't help that the writers keep trying to build an unrepentant mass-murdering despot with the blood of billions of innocents on her hands as "a very fine person" because of their obsession with Section 31. (An obsession that prompted them to propose two different Section 31 TV shows, one featuring Michelle Yeoh and the other allegedly featuring Sir Patrick Stewart.)

You could get a display box for it with UV-filtering glass/plexiglass.

... you seem to be operating under a severe misconception about what Macross is. Macross is, and always has been, a romance story driven by music set against a backdrop of space warfare. The space warfare stuff is B-plot, not the focus of the story. Also, no offense, but that sounds absolutely awful.

That's Robotech for "cancelled".

If your logic circuits came to any other conclusion, I'd be recommending you contact a service technician immediately. Another Macross Delta movie didn't make sense... it made cents, as in "dollars and". Given that Macross Delta is more or less just an overwrought commercial for Walkure's CDs, you can expect all five to be present and contractually immune from anything that might constitute more than superficial character development. Can't do anything that might make the girls less marketable as waifu material after all. Oh, undoubtedly... the only question there is whether it'll be all tease and denial or just a messy finish that leaves everyone unsatisfied. Xaos will be around. It's an interstellar conglomerate whose star has been on the rise for the last decade or so. The entertainment division managing Walkure and the other Tactical Sound Units and the PMC division providing security personnel in the Brisingr globular cluster are just two of their many business ventures. Their main business ventures are in fold navigation (cargo/passenger transport?) and fold communications. They've been in business for 50+ years, so they're not gonna vanish overnight. The VF-31's going to be around for a while, even if we don't necessarily see it, since it's tipped to be next main fighter for the Brisingr Alliance NUNS when it's formally adopted two or three years down the line (c.2069-2070) and we can expect it'll get twenty or more years in that role before its replacement starts to be phased in. I'm inclined to wonder if it will wind up being widely adopted, since it's a latecomer to the 5th Generation and by all accounts the VF-24 and VF-25 made considerable inroads in that field already. The writing quality of Delta's second half suggests pocket lint and a particularly exhausted gerbil.

Based on what King Grammier VI said on the subject in The White Knight of the Black Wing, the New Unification Government wasn't just strictly regulating how much fold quartz that planets like Windermere IV were allowed to export at a time. They also apparently exercised direct oversight of the actual mining/extraction operations themselves to ensure that no shortsighted idiot with dollar-sign wingding eyes was going to do something apocalyptically stupid like attacking a Vajra hive or recklessly invading a Protoculture ruin keeping some ridiculous superweapon from the schism war sealed. If nothing else, it proves the New UN Gov't is learning from its mistakes and becoming rather genre-savvy. (For their part, the Vajra aren't ones to take attacks laying down and at least one faction of ancient Protoculture realized that a Keep Out sign can be self-enforcing if it's made in the form of a swarm of heavily armed and highly aggressive self-replicating biotechnological killing machines that take violent exception to intruders.) I doubt it would've worked out... Windermere IV wanted to have full control over their fold quartz mining and exports. They didn't have the technological base to manufacture their own overtechnology, so it'd be down to them and not the New UN Government to try to attract private enterprise to Windermere IV to build fold systems there. Even then, it likely wouldn't have appeased King Grammier since the workforce would likely have been brought in from offworld to do the manufacturing and most of the money would likely end up flowing into the offworld coffers of whatever corporation set up shop there. The net economic stimulus would probably be pretty small. Really, I expect the next Delta movie will likely go somewhere else. Windermere IV was pretty comprehensively declawed at the end of Macross Delta. Prince Heinz II was permanently out of action thanks to having abused his runes to the point that he's as infirm at age 9 as his father was at 35, they lost the Star Shrine, and the Aerial Knights took heavy losses including the Knight-Commander, the White Knight of Darwent, and several of their top aces. The whole galaxy is wise to their plan to use their food exports to spread Var syndrome, so their economy's headed down the tubes and they've lost their exclusive business partner in the Epsilon Foundation so military procurement is a great big goose egg. If it wasn't an agri-world, any future visit to Windermere IV would probably feature them boiling their boots for nourishment.

I'm familiar enough with the EU from my day job, I'm just saying that I can't really think of anything said thus far in Macross that'd support the idea of different levels of NUNG membership. The Windermere IV situation kind of presented it as an all-or-nothing affair. They didn't really get to pick and choose which NUNG policies they had to follow... they tried to negotiate opting out of a couple parts of the terms and conditions and were rebuffed, which was depicted as part of what convinced King Grammier that there was no diplomatic solution to Windermere IV's economic crisis in the gaiden manga White Knight of the Black Wing. (In all fairness to the New Unification Government, Grammier was trying to negotiate his way out of having to abide by what was essentially a strategic arms anti-proliferation treaty aimed at controllng the spread of dimensional warheads. They can hardly be blamed for saying no, even if Grammier didn't want to hear it.)

This actually came up in Macross Frontier... I believe it was episode 12. Fold faults are at their most dangerous when you don't know they're there. Blindly plowing into one is incredibly dangerous, since powering through an unexpected fault or two can leave a ship without enough stored energy to return to realspace like what had allegedly happened to the SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global. A ship that's blessed with good luck might just get knocked back to realspace in an ugly mess the way Megaroad-04 was. If you know they're there and you know how severe they are you can factor them into the computations for fold navigation, avoiding ones too severe to attempt to cross and banking enough energy to safely traverse the weaker ones that can't be avoided practically or economically. The catch is that doing so greatly increases the disparity between the subjective and objective passage of time in the ship. The trip to Gallia IV was a great example of this. By avoiding some faults and crossing others, the most efficient route to Gallia IV felt like a short commuter flight to the Galaxy Starliner's crew and passengers but was actually over 7 days of real time (a whopping +172.25 hour adjustment to ship time) as a result of the fold faults magnifying the disparity between the pace of time in realspace vs. fold space. The New UN Spacy's fleet probably planned to just power through the well-charted fold faults surrounding Windermere IV on their way to attack it. Their ships are at least theoretically capable of interplanetary flight in a reasonable timeframe, but you sacrifice the advantage of surprise doing so. Folding there might take longer due to the faults, but they'll only know you're coming shortly before you arrive, and surprise is an important advantage when you're planning to drop a planet-killing dimensional bomb on an enemy planet.

You could make a compelling case that Windermere IV actually deserves the appellation "backwater", since it's so far off the beaten path that the SDF-5 Megaroad-04 only found it by crashing into the fold faults around it, it's isolated by those same fold faults, its economy is stagnant, underdeveloped, and principally agricultural, the locals are living with the cultural values of a bygone era, and there's more than a little folksy racism on display. As I remarked a bit snarkily on some of the episode reviews, you can practically hear banjos on the fold jump there.

Well, I'm not sure about the idea of different levels of membership... but Kawamori did indicate in the Otona Anime #9 interview about Macross Frontier that the European Union was the modern governing body most closely resembling the function of the New Unification Government (c.2059). Zola's status was never really discussed... though as I recall it was generally assumed that the planet was something akin to a protectorate back before Macross Frontier. Now they seem to be full members who are simply too peace-loving to want to maintain a proper military so they have a well-equipped but studiously non-lethal space police force instead. Given what's said in Macross Delta and the gaiden manga, Windermere IV and the other worlds of the Brisingr globular cluster are (or were, in Windermere case) full New Unification Government members with all the ups and downs that entails. The Kingdom of the Wind's war of independence was essentially fought because Windermere IV's leaders felt that its membership in the New Unification Government was all give and no take. Specifically, because their planet was so remote and isolated by fold faults they were having troubles with growing their economy, and they felt the government was not only not doing enough to help but actively hurting their situation via the heavy restrictions it imposed on mining and trading in fold quartz (Windermere IV's only significant non-agricultural resource). They were also less than thrilled by the losses they took as a result of having sent reinforcements to support neighboring systems attacked by rogue Zentradi as per their obligations as a New UN Government member. (It was almost a war fought over "What have you done for me lately?"... since Windermere IV was benefitting significantly from all the technology they were importing.) One of the things established back in Macross 7 and finessed heavily by Frontier was that the individual emigrant fleet and planet governments have a lot of latitude in deciding how to organize and equip their local defense forces. They operate under the auspices of the New UN Forces, but they're not necessarily all organized the same. Macross Galaxy's was a corporate army that operated as the fleet's local New UN Forces. Windermere IV's Aerial Knights were the same, operating as their planet's New UN Spacy defense force during the world's thirty-three year stint as a New UN Government member, reinforcing other NUNG member worlds under attack and so on. Their different taste in equipment seems to have had its roots in their feudal martial tradition more than anything organizational. That's probably got a lot more to do with the sheer remoteness of the Brisingr globular cluster than anything else. The Brisingr globular cluster is 10+ years from Earth by space fold, in a fairly isolated region of the galaxy. It's noted to have had some moderately negative consequences for their economic growth. The Brisingr Alliance is basically space-NATO meets space-NAFTA, a mutual defense and economic partnership of astrographically-close states. Their isolation and the ensuing economic problems were cited as a reason they opted to develop their own 5th Generation VF, to stimulate their own economy, keep the cash inside the cluster, and to hopefully produce something they could sell in export. (In a close parallel to the Mitsubishi ATD-X/X-2, including in that they basically ended up buying a ton of hardware from the outside anyway.) The difficulty with getting the Federal New UN Forces involved in the conflict with Windermere IV was explicitly political, the conflict was seen as a tiff between emigrant planets so the federal forces were taking a hands-off approach because getting involved would be politically difficult. (The heavy-handed suppression of emigrant planets in the 2040s and 2050s hadn't exactly been forgotten yet... you might remember them as the events that came to a head in the Macross VF-X2 game.) With respect to the above about the local government of the NUNG member states having broad authority over the maintenance of their armed forces, Macross-29's case is one of the fleet government voluntarily disbanding its armed forces. Macross-29 was a gathering place of sorts for people with strong pacifist leanings, and many of its inhabitants moved there from elsewhere in the galaxy to get away from various conflicts. That profound aversion to conflict led the fleet to disband its armed forces and install pacifist doormat Serge Glass (brother to deceased Macross Frontier fleet president Howard Glass) as City-29's mayor. Macross-29's severe trade deficit and the ensuing economic crash were a product of the City-29 government's commitment to its policy of total pacifism and unarmed neutrality. It made the Macross-29 fleet government into extreme doormats in their trade negotiations with neighboring fleets and nearby planets. They were so conflict-averse that they would eventually agree to even the most unilaterally unfavorable terms if it meant avoiding a fight, so their neighbors took merciless advantage of them until their economy was teetering at the brink of total collapse and high unemployment had riled the population enough that a significant portion of it was ready to remove Glass by the ballot or the bullet and start busting heads if that's what it took to balance trade with their neighbors. That, of course, was embodied by the Neo Zentran political movement that favored reinstating the fleet's armed forces and assuming a stronger posture in the fleet's negotiations with its neighbors. (The two prominent sides of the Neo Zentran movement being, essentially, those who favored "ballot" like the protagonist and those who favored "bullet".)

Random question... anyone still have a copy of that .zip archive containing Macross 30 art assets that was doing the rounds a couple years back?

I've got a plan in the works to go quite a bit farther than that. Over the last couple of years various folks have gently suggested I really need to properly organize and systematize my collection of Macross knowledge and/or start publishing all the translations and analyses I've done over the years. I've been supporting the Macross Mecha Manual by handling its web hosting and providing translations for some of its articles, but the scope of my own work has increased quite a bit and no longer really fits within the site's narrow focus. I didn't really have the time to do anything about it until last year, when my day job had a reorg that solved my team's critical manpower shortage. Not having to log 20+ hours of OT every week freed up a lot of time for other pursuits, so a few friends and I started giving serious thought to creating a Macross reference site with proper academic rigor. Right now, the site itself is still a work in progress. Designs for the various pages are more or less finalized, but the actual coding is slow going since my web design skills are rusty as hell after five years of not being used. I've got all the tools together except for a replacement for my ancient scanner that won't work on Windows 10 (recommendations would be enthusiastically welcomed), and at some point in the coming months I'm gonna have to find an artist to commission a few simple pieces that my art-fu is too weak to do myself.

Kinda burned out on superhero movies in general, but this looks like it might actually be pretty interesting if they stay away from the special effects extravaganza shenanigans.

CBS All Access just dropped the latest episode of Star Trek: Discovery... "Through the Valley of Shadows". All in all, great B and C plots that feel like real Star Trek... and the crappy Burnham-centric A-plot continues to circle the drain and get dumber all the time. Next episode looks to be headed into action-heavy territory, as the teaser consists entirely of the USS Discovery and USS Enterprise preparing for a battle against Section 31's fleet. This, at least, goes a small way towards explaining why Section 31 was forgotten by Picard's time... it was destroyed by Control, much like it was repeatedly destroyed and refounded by Control in the relaunch novel series.

For what it's worth, I've found that the difference between being funny-bad and embarrassing-bad usually lies in how seriously the cast is taking the truly awful screenplay they've been handed. When the cast know they've been handed a real turd of a screenplay and make a heroic professional effort with it anyway, the result is usually a painful-to-watch mess that leaves you feeling a little bad for the cast. Treating an awful screenplay with the same gravitas as an Oscar-worthy one just highlights how bad the screenplay was to begin with. On the other hand, when the cast know they've been handed a steamer and either try and utterly fail to make a professional effort or simply can't be arsed, a truly bad screenplay can be transmuted into unintentional comedy gold. A cast that decides to either have fun or be completely unprofessional with a bad screenplay can be enormously entertaining. Starship Troopers 2 always felt to me like it belonged to the latter class, where the cut-rate cast knew from the outset that the screenplay would be illustrated with stinklines and went about Shatnering it up any time they stepped in front of the camera. Watching them overact the hell out of every scene made a painfully generic sci-fi horror plot actually kind of fun, especially when the bottom fell out near the end and it devolved into a snarky zombie action flick instead. Historically, Robotech has always desperately wanted to be taken seriously as both a science fiction series and an anime series. They don't have the talent pool to turn out screenplays that aren't dreadful and are so committed to taking them completely seriously that the end result crosses the line twice into unwatchable stupidity. If they stopped taking themselves and the series so seriously they could maybe achieve something in the field of ironic retro camp humor, but they seem to be holding out hope for a big budget sci-fi action movie like Paramount's Transformers film franchise, Star Trek, or Star Wars.

How is this crap still in print? HOW? Seriously, we're hitting levels of soap opera BS and M. Night Shyamalan hack twists that shouldn't be possible.

Eh... there's a not-so-fine line between "so bad it's funny" and "so bad you're embarrassed on behalf of people involved in it". On the one side you've got your Dooms and your Plan 9 From Outer Spaces, but original Robotech productions usually land on the other side where films like the Star Wars Holiday Special, Ishtar, and Dragonball Evolution live. They would be VERY lucky to get something even as funny-bad as Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation or Reefer Madness.

Yes, it does... but in the most stringently literal sense there is nothing new to see there. Excluding its gunpod, which did not get a cutaway or anything, it's all weaponry we've seen before in other books. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-11 Thunderbolt is absolutely a book worth having and has a lot of frankly gorgeous art, but like the books for the VF-0, VF-1 Vol.2, Battroid Valkyrie, and Squadrons, it's one of the books where the real gems are in the text rather than the art.

You're right. I've revealed I'm also a filthy filthy casual when it comes to comic books. I confused publishers for my two examples of botched representation characters, the other one being the first token black character in the Legion of Super Heroes who happened to have been written as a racist by a racist (Tyroc). They'd be a lot better off if they'd just go off the rails with it and let the story go where it will.

With what IP? How do you do a Netflix-style reboot of a property that doesn't actually own - and thus can't use - most of its story or any of its design works? That's the eternal sticking point for Robotech. Copyright law with respect to derivative works being what it is, Harmony Gold can't claim ownership of 99.9% of what's in Robotech and thus 2/3 of it is off the table for future adaptations without the written blessing of Tatsunoko's lawyers and a hefty check for royalties owed and the remaining 1/3 is just plain off the table permanently. They can't pull a Voltron: Legendary Defender and make new designs based on the existing ones because that'd be copyright infringement if they did it without permission. Seems like they'll make a movie about anything these days... except Robotech. They'll never recapture the magic of that one year where the April Fool's joke was a report stating they'd fired the Yunes and had security walk them out of the building, complete with a photograph of (IIRC) Tommy hauling his crap out of the building in a cardboard box.

Eh... I'm not sure I would go quite that far. Yeah, the Star Wars sequel trilogy is stuck with the catch-22 that comes with trying to promote your characters based on minority representation. They've got instant appeal in some demographics, but at the same time they're limited in how they can develop those characters by the potential backlash they'll face if what they do with a representational character's story offends the demographic they set out to represent.1 Far from being "retarded", I'd call it a surprisingly easy pitfall for writers to fall into given that everything they do has to be strained through the peculiar social tone-deafness that seems to affect most large corporations. Doubly so in this current age of increasing social awareness, where many corporate executives, politicians, and other social movers and shakers are taking their athlete's foot cream orally in industrial quantities. Moreover, I would say that this isn't an insurmountable or unavoidable problem for Star Wars. Rogue One: a Star Wars Story demonstrated beyond doubt that Disney absolutely can do diverse casting correctly (by not making it an end unto itself and boasting about it), and I don't think Rey or Finn are unsalvageable in that regard either. In fact, for reasons that I will get into below, I find them to be the two Star Wars characters with the most narrative potential... in part because of what Rian Johnson did in The Last Jedi. Oh please no, we don't need someone Lucas-ing things up... the odds of a dramatic increase in quality are vastly outweighed by them adding more gimmicky bullsh*t that wasn't necessary. I guess you haven't been paying much attention, because opinion of the series was steadily trending upward starting from the Short Treks to the midpoint of Season Two, where the bottom fell out after the show fell off the wagon and resumed its bad habits. I know I'll keep watching for the foreseeable future because the last two Short Treks and season two's first half proved that CBS absolutely CAN do Star Trek right... which makes it all the more baffling when the writing quality takes a dive and we're back to a mary sue main character and a plot where the writers keep forgetting there are facts the characters shouldn't know yet. Not voicing an opinion because other fans don't agree with you strikes me as as intellectual cowardice. A robust exchange of views is a fundamental of discussion in general. If you have a thoughtful analysis to share, share it. We don't bite. To be brutally frank, I cannot say that I blame anyone for being pessimistic about Star Wars IX's prospects. Not just because pessimism is an inherently liberating philosophy where things almost always turn out better than you expected and you're braced for the worst when they don't, but because they have every reason to expect that Star Wars IX is going to be a stinker after the last several films. There's a point where it stops being pessimism and starts being pattern recognition... which you could argue is around the point where that discontent starts putting the kind of measurable dent in the box office take that would spell the demise of a lesser franchise. I don't really have a stake in it since I'm a filthy casual who thought The Force Awakens was entertaining if a bit unimaginative in a standard popcorn flick sort of way and wasn't all that bothered by The Last Jedi except for Rose and her plot tumor, but for the sake of fairness I would question what exactly the fans who were so disappointed by those films (and maybe Solo) have in the way of cause for optimism regarding Star Wars IX? Apart from the fact that a marginally less sh*tty director is in charge (I can't bring myself to call Abrams "good" after the last three Star Trek movies, sorry), all they've really got is two dueling creators whose visions of Star Wars aren't even on the same page. I did say I rather liked the poster... but hey, since I promised it to TehPW, try this one on for size: For all the vitriol that's been directed at Rey and Finn over their acknowledged status as representational characters and the writing problems that brought with it, I think they're two of the most interesting characters Star Wars has ever had. Both the original Star Wars trilogy and the Star Wars prequel trilogy revolved around a Chosen Hero of Ultimate Destiny. Luke Skywalker never really had much in the way of agency in how he lived his life. The Jedi Order sent him to Tatooine to be raised by his aunt and uncle, who conspired to keep him on the farm and far removed from anything resembling a choice about how to live his life. He got railroaded into following Obi-wan Kenobi offworld, joining the Rebel Alliance, and becoming a Jedi Knight. He didn't choose anything in his life because destiny and other people chose for him. (Admittedly if the ghost of Alec Guinness showed up and told me I had stuff to be getting on with, you'd bet I'd hustle too, so I can't hold that against him.) Anakin Skywalker had an even more exaggerated version of the same problem, since the Force and destiny shat him into being and he was more or less immediately labeled The Chosen One with the Great Destiny of defeating the Dark Side. That dogged him for his entire run until Obi-wan hacked off a bunch of his extremities, then yelled at him for screwing up his preordained destiny, and ran off. Rey and Finn are the first Star Wars protagonists to have agency. They're not being railroaded into things by the Force enforcing a great destiny because of their bloodline or any of that nonsense. They are, for all intents and purposes, random people whose fates were shaped by their morals and the choices they made based on them. Rey was a junk collector on a planet with an even better claim to being farthest from the bright center of the universe than Tatooine does (sorry Luke) who had at least half a dozen opportunities to bail on the adventure she's on and return to living as a junk collector on her sh*thole home planet. She strongly considered it several times, but in the end the choices she made set her on her collision course with Finn, Han Solo, the Resistance, Kylo Ren and Snoke, and ultimately Master Skywalker. Likewise, Finn could've turned a blind eye to the First Order's crimes, but he didn't. He could've chosen to run and hide once he got to Jakku, maybe take passage elsewhere. He could've chosen to take that flight to the Outer Rim. He also had many opportunities to opt out and run away, but every time he made a conscious (often visibly reluctant) choice to do what was right instead of what was easy. They're heroes because they were nobodies from nowhere who dared to be badass. They're not part of a chosen bloodline of the destined. It could've been anybody, which sends a powerful message in-universe and to the audience. For that reason, I'm interested in seeing where the final movie of this Star Wars trilogy is headed. They're products of their own choices and their fates are not preordained by the Force, so anything could happen. Will Rey keep stubbornly trying to find a hidden iota of good in the spoiled brat who is now the last of the Skywalker line, or will she make Sith sashimi out of him and prevent a recurrence of the problem a generation or two down the line? Will Finn become a leader in the new Rebellion or just stay a capable right hand man? Will Poe Dameron not suck at something besides piloting ever? Rian Johnson made a lot of terrible creative choices, but he left some story hooks open that Abrams would be a fool to pass on. This is supposedly the swansong of the entire main Star Wars film series, so they've got a lot of loose threads to tie up, and since they're operating with a good deal more freedom than usual it'll be interesting to see what they do with it. 1. Such as what happened when Marvel Comics revealed the backstory of their landmark representational African-American character The Falcon, and in a moment of supreme tone-deaf idiocy revealed that he wasn't a straight-laced kid... he was a career criminal who'd been brainwashed into believing he'd been an upstanding citizen all his life by a Nazi supervillain (Red Skull). More recently, Star Trek: Discovery found itself under fire for heavily advertising the presence of a gay couple on the cast and killing one of them off part of the way through the first season.

I get that this is essentially an indie effort, but quality-wise this doesn't look all that much better from what was available back in the 80's. They might do OK as long as the manufacturing is done on the assumption of ultra-low-volume sales.