Kaelik wrote:Or, alternatively, instead of Abrams being a fanboi who wants to declare himself the winner of internet arguments, Disney on buying Star Wars immediately hired a Story Team who's explicit goal was to sort through Star Wars material and decide what to make cannon, and the decided that instead of Han Solo being an idiot, they would go with the much better and much less stupid explanation provided in material written by actual people employed by Lucas Arts for the actual purpose of fleshing out the world and making Lucas Arts money who invented an actual place called Kessel which has and Actual Black Hole complex right next door, making distance shorter for people willing to travel closer to the black holes.FrankTrollman wrote:And another of the new articles of faith is that the fanwank explanation that contrary to the original script Han was telling the truth when he spouted that Kessel Run nonsense is now the holy writ.
Seriously, nothing in the universe is funnier than people complaining about material written in Star Wars X-Wing books as "fanwank" because it hurts them so much to admit that Han Solo wasn't a dumbshit. Lucas Arts retcons to correct errors are still retcons to correct errors even when they are written by sanctioned authors paid by lucas arts, you don't have to call it fanwank to keep making fun of the original movies, or George Lucas, or Harrison Ford, or people who take star wars seriously and say movies suck because of minor physics errors, you can totally still do all those things without pretending that the hundreds of EU books and EU games are all filthy fanwank, instead of you know, part of the star wars IP that made money for Lucas Arts.
See, it's exactly this sort of shit which is why the EU fans had to be condemned to the outer darkness. Also, it's a very ample demonstration of why embracing the Kessel Run black hole retcon was a very bad call.
See, you know all about those stupid fucking black holes, because you're an annoying and obsessive nerd. But 99% of the people who watch those films don't. And for them, the fact that a ship "made the Kessel run in 12 parsecs" is not grammatical is a bad thing. Even with the explanation that it's technically a thing that could be true in the Star Wars universe, it's still grammatically clunky, and without that obscure and specialized knowledge it's just terminology fail.
If you were able to cut through a mountain pass instead of going around, you wouldn't say that you "made the trip in 12 kilometers!" because that's grammatically clunky. It sounds like you don't know what you're talking about even to people who know what you meant.
Every time someone talks about making the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs, it's like nails on a chalkboard to everyone who knows what a parsec is. Or even to people who know what part of speech a parsec is. It's like when JJ Abrams elected to show trails of the super blasty beam visible from the surface of another planet in real time. You can construct an elaborate in-world explanation for it, but it's still bad for the movie because it takes people out of the movie. It makes people stop and go "wait, that's not how those things work, like at all." And the time you spend post hoc explaining that shit is time that you wouldn't have to spend if you'd just not included any stupid shit in the first place.
Discussing the Kessel Run and parsecs is bad for the film. The official retcon explanation is stupid, and the damage it does to real peoples' enjoyment of the film is not in any way mitigated by getting an explanation later on. There is no payoff there. There is no eureka moment. The big reveal is totally inconsequential. If your script makes people in the audience go "What the fuck?" when the words are first spoken, that's bad. And to excuse doing it, that has to lead to something interesting and cool. The Kessel Run posthoc wall-of-text is neither interesting nor cool. When the other shoe finally drops it's just a pile of gibberish starchart waypoint numbers. Fuck. That.
It's bad storytelling in the name of winning a stupid fan argument that was uninteresting and dumb in 1977.
-Username17