Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Star Wars, and the problem with Rey" video.

When Luke said to Kylo "see you around", I expected him to show up repeatedly as a force ghost to heckle Kylo at various points.
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@Mikito456 If Feminism were simply "equality between the sexes", grievance hustlers wouldn't have much to talk about. Another confounding factor is that the sexes aren't equivalent in very important ways, that no one wants to talk about (especially the grievance hustlers).
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@Mikito456 Don't care how big the words are. Just use less of them. I just don't have the time.
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@Mikito456 I agree with equality of opportunity (and that should settle the matter, but....) I suspect where we disagree is I think Nature will have the final say as to what the outcomes are going to be. One aspect of Nature is that there is a very pronounced bimodal distribution in humanity because the vast majority of us either have an XX or XY chromosome pair, and that has a meaningful effect that will always frustrate any efforts to make all outcomes equal, no matter how much unhappiness we cause by forcing Nature to fit ideology. To bring it back to the original point, these differences are reflected in our stories and archetypes, and will persist despite any efforts of ideology.
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@Mikito456 Not saying women don't do a lot of other things, just saying it's the most miraculous, and it's certainly the most tied to femininity in something as primordial as archetypal storytelling. Labor is an unfortunate side-effect of this ability, not anything they do to "earn it".
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@Mikito456 Sorry man, TL:DR.
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Rey was created by women, whose most miraculous power in this life (the ability to create new human beings) is given to them without any effort on their part whatsoever. "What shall I do with this awesome power that I have?" is a legitimate question for women to ask. BUT it's at right angles to a Hero's Journey, which is at the foundation of Star Wars. So she doesn't belong, as the center of the story.
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@Mikito456 I think you should back away from fashionable ideology and look at this from the perspective of general human experience. In that general human experience (which, if our society ignores it, will lead to the society vanishing entirely) women have babies, and our human stories reflect the characteristics of that phenomenon. When something is specifically coded female, like the Mary Sue archetype is, it relates directly to that. When a woman is given miraculous powers she has done nothing to gain, it has absolutely nothing to do with the Hero's Journey. That's why Rey's (or any Mary Sue's) story does not resonate (does not belong) at the center of a saga devoted to the Hero's Journey. As a side character, sure, but not as the main.
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@Mikito456 I think that our common humanity (both with one another today and with past generations) means archetypes are unlikely to change. Reality is likely to drive ideologies towards existing archetypes, more than archetypes can be driven towards ideologies.
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@Mikito456 It's only unoriginal if you've seen the movie before. Star Wars is often called a "kid's movie" because to many adults it's a rehash. And no, I don't think that archetypes are likely to be affected by "gender and sexuality" at all. Gender is only meaningful insofar as it deals with reproduction (other stories, which affect men and women equally, are human stories, not gendered stories). Stories about atypical sexualities will never be more than niche subculture -- archetypes are generalizations after all, and generalizing from exceptions is a self-contradiction.
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@Mikito456 That's the thing, culture is built on the reality of the human condition. Cultures that ignore that don't last; the word "decadence" exists for a reason, and its association with a loss of classical virtue also exists for a reason.
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@Mikito456 Decadence has nothing to do with "the expense of others"; it's a matter of waste and weakness caused by a loss of virtue. Many societies collapse when women tend not to give birth. A collapsing birthrate was apparent during the fall of the Roman Republic, for example, then again during the fall of the Roman Empire. Were Shakespeare's Julius Caesar or Milton's Satan not complex relatable villains? How about Enkidu, for heaven's sake? I don't think there's too much new under the sun. It's narcissistic to think that today is so much different, story-wise. If you'd like to claim that some things go in and out of fashion, I'd buy that, although there are through lines even so... these are called Archetypes, and they don't really change.
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So is this the knee in the curve, where TCD truly becomes the rancorous raconteur we know and love?
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