The problem isn't female leads, it' trash-tier writing. Like introducing a self-conscious stormtrooper and then having him unemotionally kill his mates pretty much immediately. Or introducing a nobody and then make her the child of a somehow™️ returned supervillain. Or having your minor villain and your female lead fall in love and then having them pretty much just revert back to where they were before. Or replacing the Death Star with an intergalactic Death Shotgun. The list goes on
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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The problem isn’t female leads, it’ trash-tier writing.
Worst part about the sequels was the compulsive need to regurgitate elements of the prior series.
- Empire is back, kids!
- Death Star Plus
- And we're back on Tantoine again
- Harrison Ford again
- Getting killed by Discount Darth Vader to buy time to escape the Knock Off Death Star
- Only a direct hit on the main loud farting sounds
There's so much lore from the books and the games and the toys and the cutting room floor of the original movies. And they had a ton of good ideas at the outset. A storm trooper who defects? A six foot tall super trooper in mirror armor? A Sith Lord who isn't stoic and morose, but hot headed and self-destructive? These are cool good ideas!
Shame they got drowned out in Disney fueled nostalgia.
It was lack of common direction through the trilogy. JJ set up his signature mystery boxes in the first movie, only for Rian to ignore those and leave nothing to work with for the next one.
I believe the reason why Palpatine somehow returned was because Rian killed off Snoke, and they really needed some big baddie Kylo and Rey could team up against so Kylo could have his redemption arc.
i much prefer where rian johnson was going, even though the main plot was meh. he left so many open plot threads that tied into the old eu that they could have used, but then jj went back to his first idea.
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only for Rian to ignore those and leave nothing to work with for the next one.
JJ choosing to ignore the second movie doesn't mean "nothing was left". Baring the bizarre casino, TLJ was the most interesting SW story since RotS. Episode IX could've been an amazing finale coming out of that, but JJ did what JJ always does and absolutely failed to deliver.
*Also, I feel it's important to point out the "Mystery Box" was and is bullshit, lazy writing. Yes, it's important to leave things in a story for the audience to wonder about and anticipate. That's not a valid excuse to throw esoteric shit at the wall and call it a day. The audience doesn't need to know where the plot is going, but the fucking writer should. JJ left Rian with hollow shell of "intrigue" with nothing substantial, got pissy when Rian did what he wanted with that, then shit out a boring finale trying to reverse everything back.
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A thousand times this. People hate bad female actors not because they are female but because they are bad actors.
Kal el no
Sometimes, but more often bad writing can make a great actress look like a bad female actor.
Natalie Portman can act, but those prequels were rough on her reputation. The camp value od the prequels wasn't immediately apparent and it was rough on her.
I remember someone saying that they thought Ewan McGregor and Liam Neesan were great, and the response was 'yeah, in Trainspotting and Schindlers list.'
Some people just hate women and they suck, but often the something with a female lead just sucks. It sucks that the former complicates the latter.
Wasn't the woman from the Twilight movies accused of being a terrible actress and it nearly ruined her career, until she started getting other roles and her reputation turned right around. She even commented on it saying "Yeaaaah.. Bella was a garbage nothing of a character. I did everything they asked of me, she's just that terrible."
Kristen Stewart I think her name was?
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South park has an entire season about this. They basically tried to make the new Star Wars as nostalgic as possible to people who liked the original trilogy.
Wait you mean rebels are gone and the empire too? Let’s do resistance vs first order then. Let’s make a planet that’s almost the same as tatooine. A villain that’s almost the same as Vader, with a similar ending. And the list goes on. Hell let’s even bring a quick force heal (previously unheard of/impossible) from someone who’s totally untrained. That’ll teach em.
But imo the most frustrating part was when Rey at the end decided that she was a Skywalker. Like, what??? They could have made it end with “Rey who? Just Rey” to mean that we aren’t defined by out family’s actions, but instead she decided she belonged to someone’s family she hardly knows.
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This would be a better comic if they chose a franchise that hadn't been enshittified to the nth degree.
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The fat nerd on youtube is right about it sucking ass, not because of the female lead tho
The sequel trilogy was bad. Get over it. You want a good female lead in Star Wars? Look at Old Republic video game.
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So we can't admit a bad movie is bad because itnhappens to have a female lead?
Is the reason it's bad because it has a female lead? Not without being a misogynist.
If it's for another reason, sure! Ghostbusters 2016 was shit, but not because it had female leads.
Which was a movie when anyone who criticized it got labeled an incel
Anyone disingenuous enough to not care why the movie was being criticized wasn't worth paying attention to, anyway.
It seemed to be the pioneer of that, yeah. That was the first one where I got "Say you like this, or we can't be friends anymore."
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Ep 7 was ok, but it relied too much on nostalgia. Ep 8 was a clusterfuck of terrible decisions. I didn't watch Ep 9 and I'm happy with that.
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Star Wars comes to mind immediately.
What's funny is I liked Rey as a character and the first movie was fine, but it quickly went downhill with the next two and I haven't watched any of them since.
But I've probably watched Rogue One about a dozen times so far and it's one of the best modern Star Wars movie we've had.
A crap movie is a crap movie. Just sucks to get tossed in the incel pile because incels hate a specific movie too.
Star Wars comes to mind immediately.
I wonder if that's because the comic is about Star Wars...
and I haven't watched any of them since.
No one has, since they don't exist.
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Rogue one was the peak
Andor, especially season 2.
I don't know, man. Without watching any reviews or commentaries I could have listed numerous issues with the sequel trilogy right after watching the individual movies. Sure, there were some I missed that only added oil to the fire, but it was still extremely obvious that the movies are horrendous.
Some people, perhaps a good number, do in fact blindly follow influencers' opinions and hate what they hate. This, however, in no capacity affects the fact that those movies are pieces of garbage. Whether you've come to this conclusion yourself, or you learned about it from someone else, the simple fact remains.
There's also another point to consider. Movie reviews and analyses are very common. Name any movie and there's nearly a guarantee that there are at least a few people analyzing their details and posting the findings on YouTube or elsewhere. There's nothing wrong with watching those videos and having them affect your opinion on the movie.
Personally, I've watched many different reviews, critiques and analyses of various movies, including Star Wars. In many cases, my opinion of the movies was improved due to broader context, technical details such as how VFX were made, plot elements I might have missed or other valuable information that may or may not have been obvious to me when first watching. I think this is a perfectly natural phenomenon. You like something, so you dive deeper to learn more, leading to you liking it more or less in the process.
However, in the case of most recent Star Wars movies, there's usually no additional context or details to learn, other than "the director changed 8 times and none of those 8 people knew what they were doing". You wouldn't know that from watching the movie, and personally, I think it's perfectly acceptable to give extra criticism to the company, based on external information.
At the end of the day, it's another corporation ruining what people love and this sole fact is enough to feel angry and spread negative sentiment towards that company. They 100% deserve it. Just make sure to hate the company and not other fans.
I mean the sequels deserve a majority of the criticism they received. They were safe, retreaded what the original trilogy did, and have no lasting cultural impact.
Rouge One always had a female lead and was fantastic. Actually added something into the series in a meaningful way and is beloved by fans.
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Check their she hulk reviews for their baromoter. That was when I lost my patience with Den of Nerds.
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I've watched the newer Star Wars movies and honestly? I thought the old ones were like kind of all right, nothing I'm absolutely batshit insane in love with but i hate all the ones that came out under disney. I should watch the shows sometime, I haven't watched any of the newer Star Wars shows
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why you pluralize
Very good faith argument right there, lol.
Seems like the social engineering that Disney has subjected you to has worked well.
The way I see it, they have always used diversity as a shield against any and all criticism leveled at their lazy, corporate, shitty movies based on beloved franchises. Saddest part is that people like whoever made this comic completely gobbled up those talking points, ignoring the fact that these movies genuinely suck and are in no way empowering nor inclusive in any deeper way than on the surface.
I also say this as a woman who has tried several times to get into star wars and failed to find even the original trilogy appealing: every single sloppy movie Disney has shat out the last decade or so, with extreme few exceptions, has been some pandering, childish and condescending bs that makes me as a woman feel talked down to and I hate that they pretend like this is the best women can expect and that any criticism leveled as their piss poor products is supposedly attacks against us women and that Disney is somehow our defenders. Fuck right off.
It is a soulless corporate tactic to use diversity to snuff out conversation and criticism and anyone who falls for that shit is not someone I'd want to know, because ironically, I sincerely doubt a person like that is able to form any independent thought without having the corporate, pre-approved PC talking points fed to them through media.
Hilarious.
Havent seen anything newer than episode 7, but that one was kinda mid so I didnt even care to watch the newer ones.
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Could one issue be that professional writers, on average, give female leads worse scripts to work with? Not always intentionally.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MostWritersAreMale
I feel like this is a pattern in Star Wars. Not just with Rey, but Ahsoka and The Acolyte too.
As for why this is a tragedy, I would cite the A/B examples of AC: Odyssey and Cyberpunk 2077 where, given the literally identical gender neutral writing, the women VAs utterly nail their scripts.
I wonder what’d happen if TV got the same treatment.
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