So, as part of this book promotion, I have to be on social media. It’s part of advertising Beer Run. This has introduced me to the world of Twitter. My first tweet. “I am now on Twitter. The world will now be able to hear my thoughts. And I’ll say something really offensive and embarrassing! I will get canceled! Then I’ll get fired! My wife and kids will leave me! And I’ll be eating beans under a bridge! Wait, why am I joining Twitter again? Oh yeah! To promote my upcoming book, Beer Run, coming soon from Solstice Publishing!”

Tongue in cheek, of course. If you want to actually see my offensive and insensitive comments, you have to buy the book first. I want to get paid before becoming a pariah. But I did get into one Twitter fight. You see, someone asked the Twitterverse to rank the season finale of Rings of Power on a 1-10 scale. Everyone else was giving it either a 1 or a 2 or a 9 or a 10. I gave it a 6 I like the show overall, but there are a few parts that don’t work for me. What annoyed me with this episode is that they kept Sauron’s identity “secret,” and yet the fans guessed it correctly before the reveal: Halbrand is Sauron. They also had this Stranger who they teased might be Sauron, and a group of messengers who looked like the leader might be Sauron. The Stranger was pretty obviously Gandalf, at least from where I was standing.

Anyway, I pointed this out and someone responded by saying “Yeah, like Season 8 of Game of Thrones proved that subverting expectations always works.” The problem with this response is that the showrunners were obviously trying to subvert expectations with Halbrand, but they failed. Their foreshadowing was too obvious to pull off the surprise. He was ironically right. Subverting expectations doesn’t always work. And this was a classic example of it.

Here’s the deeper point I’d like to make in this blog post, and I’d like to start by being controversial: I liked the ending of Game of Thrones. It was a return to form for a show that subverted expectations by killing off Ned Stark in Season 1, ended Season 3 with the Red Wedding, and then immediately followed up by killing off Joffrey, letting you know that the blood rains down on the wicked as much as the righteous. If anything, the show had become too conventional since bringing Jon Snow back from the dead.

Furthermore, it did something that is very risky in this day and age: hold a mirror up to the audience. That Danaerys Targaryen is not a nice person is something that is obvious once you look at her actions objectively. Sure, she freed slaves. And she crucified people. A lot of them. But they were bad people, so we cheered for her. Tyrion tried to negotiate a peace with the slavers. She lost patience with that strategy and burned them alive. She invaded cultures she knew nothing about and imposed her rule on them using brute force, both in Slavers Bay and on the Dothraki. What happened at King’s Landing shouldn’t have surprised anyone, but we saw the story from her perspective and she was the hero of her own story. Don’t blame the showrunners if you named your kid after her. Blame yourself for not seeing that committing war crimes against bad people is still committing war crimes.

I also liked the Last Jedi. There I said it. Wasn’t overly impressed with it. A little like Rings of Power, but it wasn’t the disaster people kept complaining about. The movie had some flaws, but the complaints were too silly to hate the movie that much. I heard complaints about the science of the movie. It’s Star Wars, not Star Trek. They don’t care about science. It’s a movie series based on pure romanticism. Rose is an annoying character, they said. Well, I find Rose to be less annoying than constantly shoehorning in old characters for the sake of fan service, or keeping old characters alive despite them being blasted into space. Once again, on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the Wilhelm scream and 10 being Jar Jar Binks, I’d give Rose a 3. The biggest complaint had to do with the portrayal of Luke as this bitter old man. The problem is that everything Luke said about the Jedi was accurate. They did fail the Republic. And then the complaint came about Luke being able to project himself onto another world. You mean you can believe in a force that can move objects, brainwash stormtroopers, and speak to the dead, but astral projection is a bridge too far?

Then came the next movie which undid everything. No, literally, they tried to undo everything. Rey’s parents weren’t junkies anymore. She’s the emperor’s granddaughter. No longer are people unwilling to help the desperate Resistance. Instead, random groups without coordination will just show up out of the blue. Kylo Ren and Rey actually do end up together in the end, despite that making no damned sense. Did Rey just decide one day, “Yeah, you may have killed Hahn, but I forgive you, baby?” Rise of Skywalker represented the triumph of fan service over cinema that challenged the audience.

Of course, the entire sequel trilogy was fan service. The Force Awakens was basically a New Hope all over again. They started on a desert planet and even created a new Death Star. Even the Last Jedi made its ending a tribute to the fans. The reason for this was obvious: to distance itself from the prequels as much as possible.

Let me state this: the prequels were not good movies. In the original Star Wars, when Hahn and Luke are trying to free Leia, Hahn gets into an awkward conversation while trying to impersonate a prison official and then blasts the communicator, saying “I wasn’t wanting to hold a committee meeting.” In the Phantom Menace, there is an actual committee meeting. The acting was wooden, and some of the lines were infamous. (“I don’t like sand.” )In between the excessive CGI, the annoying kid, and the racist stereotypes right from the 1930s serials George Lucas was ripping off, we can safely say the films missed the target.

What we can say is that Lucas was aiming at something challenging. Unlike the original series, the prequels are morally complex. We know from the start that Anakin will one day be Darth Vader, and yet we’re supposed to cheer for him. Far from being angels of light, the Jedi are found to be capable of deceit and cunning. We know the creation of the stormtroopers isn’t a good sign, but at first, they’re very helpful in fighting the trade federation. We’re made to cheer for people who we know will be the villain someday.

Finally, Lucas says something important about why free societies fail. It’s just like Padme said, we lose democracy when we lose faith in it. It begins with a crisis that makes the limited government look weak. In this case, the Trade Federation keeps rebelling. The government expands its powers, with the creation of the clone army. Term limits are cast aside. Special powers are granted to the executive. All in the name of dealing with the crisis. Then there’s the appeal to unity for the sake of unity. “The politicians should just get together and decide what’s good for the people, and do it.” “They do, but they can’t agree.” “Someone should make them.” “That sound’s like a dictatorship to me.” “Well, if it works.” This is a conversation between Padme and Anakin, but it could be happening in every barbershop in America. The average American is bombarded with news telling him that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket and that our politicians can’t agree on so much as what direction the sun rises in. America’s democratic institutions are under attack because we’ve lost faith in the ability of those institutions to handle the problems of the modern world. In between the jumping Yodas and constant attempts to claw characters from the old trilogy into the new one, George Lucas made a very prescient point about free societies. They’re based on an act of faith.

So what’s the point of this very loooong rant? I appreciate what George Lucas tried to do even if he failed, and I appreciate what the Rings of Power tried to do, even if they failed. So, Amazon, bad job subverting my expectations. Thank you.