'Not How I Wanted It' as Criticism

I’ve been out for a bit the last couple of days, so there’s even LESS planning on this Saturday Note than usual. 

Presently I am reading a book about medieval manuscripts. Not sure what I’m watching, other than occasional Elementary episodes. Still playing Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. I’ve got it on the schedule to paint and finally do those Titan’s Curse annotations, too.

‘Not How I Wanted It’ as Criticism

I don’t know why I’m still thinking about Star Wars.

There’s a set of video essays on YouTube that I think are very, very good, talking about how George Lucas built Star Wars, what he was trying to say, how many critics don’t understand that, and how the Sequel Trilogy would have turned out if he’d been in charge of them. I do not think there is a better scholar on the subject on YouTube that I can think of. It’s pretty impressive. However, when it comes to discussion livestreams and such, I feel like this guy’s criticism of modern Star Wars–and pretty much all of it, from the Sequel Trilogy to Andor to Maul: Shadow Lord–boils down to, “That’s not what George Lucas would have done, therefore, it’s not Star Wars.”

And I suppose there’s something to that criticism, that Star Wars was of George Lucas and if you don’t like how other people handled the story, you don’t consider it as good, or worth watching, or whatever. Okay, fine. But as a criticism in and of itself, that’s pretty darn weaksauce.

[The one that really bothered me was the assertion that the problem with Maul: Shadow Lord was that it was making Maul into a more tragic villain: still a villain, but with more complex tragic motivations. That wasn’t what Lucas intended, and so they didn’t like it. That’s dumb, because you’re essentially complaining that the problem is that a character is being fleshed out beyond just being a one-dimensional, cruel villain.]

This is a problem I see crop up in criticism a lot: that someone says a movie or book or whatever is bad, not because of anything objective about the work itself, but because it wasn’t what the critic wanted out of the work. For instance, I remember a critic who gave a pretty bad review to Tron: Legacy because it didn’t use its premise to explore how the Internet has affected gaming and technology in the years since the original. Except it’s not like Tron was ever supposed to be about those things, and it isn’t as if Legacy didn’t already have an interesting story about the guy who created this technology living within it as a godlike being, when one of his creations turned against him.

“This isn’t what I wanted!” Well, it never said it was going to be that, so why are you complaining?

[This isn’t a problem when a story is falsely advertised as one thing and doesn’t actually deliver that result. For instance, Halo 5 had an aggressive advertising campaign implying that Locke and Master Chief’s conflict with each other was going to be the main focus of the story, with one becoming a criminal in the eyes of humanity and the other becoming so focused on following the law that he misses the bigger threat in attempts to arrest or even kill Chief. Except their conflict is not a huge part of the story at all, they fight once and move on. Some reviewers rightfully called out the studio for the incredibly misleading advertising.]

Sometimes we’ll get into some fuzzy areas, to–like, if you have a story set during the Civil War, the audience should expect that the subject of slavery might come up once or twice in the story. For that to not be addressed, I think it’s probably fairly understandable that a reviewer might take points off for not talking about it.

In most cases though, it’s important to try to review a story on its own terms. That doesn’t mean going in with no expectations whatsoever, just you should not let your expectations be too much of a factor in making your final judgment. If something doesn’t work for you, that’s fine–but don’t hold it against a text that it’s not what you expected, because it’s not as if the writer is obliged to give you exactly what you want. It’s certainly nice if an author does that! It’s not always going to happen, though, nor should you expect him or her to do so.

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