You didn't watch The Acolyte. I know this because you still have brain cells capable of reading what I'm writing, and viewing The Acolyte for more than 15 minutes fries so many of them that it can cause an acute reduction in gray matter.
But there's a scene in this bit of horrible Disney-approved bout of Star Wars fan-fiction where a bunch of lesbian space witches create twins with the Force, which is something that, up until that very moment, was Anakin Skywalker's thing. The Force created him to bring balance to itself by impregnating Shmi Skywalker. This is what made Anakin, later the infamous villain Darth Vader, so special.
But not anymore. Apparently, a group of lesbian space witches can gin up a kid through a little chant and dance routine. The moment that happened in the show, the Star Wars universe fell apart. Nothing mattered.
I remember voicing this issue out loud in articles, YouTube, and social media in general. And while most were in agreement with me, some responded with a mentality that, as a habitual fiction writer, made me want to scream at my screen.
The summary of the response was this: "Yeah bro, a fantasy story set in a universe with spaceships, aliens, and space wizards totally can't have room in it for The Acolyte's plot."
Correct. It can't. Because it breaks the logic of the universe.
The "logic" of a universe is infinitely important to the story. There's a saying among writers that you don't write a story, you write a universe, which means you have to develop a functioning world. If you create a world where everyone is a robot, but suddenly there's a biological human in the mix, you have to develop a storyline that explains why that human is there among the machines. Even if that human is an infinitesimal part of the story, that small little thread can, if pulled by the human brain, unravel your entire story and remove the reader/viewer from the world.
The Acolyte was full of these loose threads, effectively breaking the universe's logic and destroying Star Wars.
Read: There's a Logic to Every Story, and Breaking Even a Little Hurts It a Lot
A lot of my readers were outraged about this very thing. You all told me so in the comments, but as you know, Star Wars isn't the only victim of this. It happens all the time.
It happened to Star Wars, The Little Mermaid, Lord of the Rings, Cowboy Bebop, and now The Odyssey, and soon The Chronicles of Narnia, where Aslan is now a female voiced by Meryl Streep.
Great liberties are taken by writers who want to shove in characters, characteristics, plotlines, and more that actually break the world they're writing in, all so they can corrupt, hijack, and utilize the story to push whatever modern-day agenda they want.
In my last VIP, I talked about how Elon Musk said that Grok Imagine, his AI program, will remake The Odyssey with "historical accuracy," and this line was jumped on by his detractors, including those in the access media who were trying to look like they were laughing at Musk over his comments. If you read them more carefully, you can actually sense the fear behind the word, but I digress.
Read: The Age of AI Movies Will Be Driven by Spite
Here's what Variety said:
Given the presence of cyclops, six-headed monsters and a witch who turns sailors into pigs in “The Odyssey,” a nearly 2,800 year old epic considered to be a work of fiction, how “historically accurate” any retelling — AI generated or otherwise — can be is likely to be called into question.
Yes, it's an "epic work of fiction." It's an epic work of fiction that intersects and works with the real world at a certain time and place. That means there was no one walking around in full steel plate armor. There wasn't a black Spartan princess. The gods had certain qualities and played important roles. Their perception of reality was often filtered through that lens.
Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" takes so many liberties that the historical facts that formed the logic of the universe of Homer's epic are more or less destroyed, pulling you so far out of the story that you have to view it less as a story and more as a statement about the importance of modern values such as diversity and inclusion. You're no longer watching a film, so much as a form of activism.
However, these people shrug and, as they said to Musk, it's a fantasy story. Introducing these things doesn't make a difference. Just shut up, eat the slop we feed you, be thankful for the next round of slop we make, and sit there as we erode the stories that form the foundation of Western culture.
It blows my mind that these people get paid millions and millions of dollars to suck at writing stories, starting with the fact that they can't even keep the logic of the world they're writing in straight.
There are only two reasons for this. Either they're unforgivably incompetent and have no business writing anything more intellectually challenging than "A cat sat on the mat."
Or, they hate the story they're writing, but they recognize its value and thus actively work to corrupt it so that the story's value is dramatically decreased.
I think it's a combo of the two, but the former is accidental, and the latter is intentional. Either way, they demonstrate a massive lack of appreciation for what they're holding in their hands, and it drives me nuts that these people were allowed to do something great with something greater, and they used it as mental toilet paper.
