Amazing video produced by Jessie Gender along with a group of creators whom many of them are from the ** LGBTIAQ+ community** .
I knew from my anthropology class many years ago that George Lucas borrowed concept from the The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
What I did not know is that the author, Joseph Campbell is:
- A misogynist
- An antisemite
- Didn’t research properly
This explains why the hero must be a (white) men.
Carl Jung’s theory about collective unconsciousness and archetypes are also outdated and discarded by psychology.
The archetypes reduce women to “mother”, “Goddess”. etc. but never the hero.
Also, since Jung’s theory categories people neatly into archetypes, those who does not fit social norm (LGBTQIA+ people) were never represented.
When the creation is based on such shaky foundations, no wonder the Star Wars fandom turns out to be racist and misogynist.
Btw, do you know who else’s book borrows heavily from Jung? Jordan Peterson.
Okay, I’m going to go on a bit of a rant now, and it’s nothing against this particular creator. But at some point I have to put my foot down and say: No. Fuck this video.
I don’t know who started this damn trend, but I’m so tired of these unnecessarily long videos. Your video should never be 4, 5 or even 6 hours long. What the fuck! Amazing documentaries have been made for decades and they never reached that amount of time. There is no reason why a video should be 6 hours long. I have other shit to do. At some point, just publish a book…
And I know, that sweet retention time. But you can’t convince me you had so much to say and that everything in this video is so important that nothing couldn’t be taken out. I don’t believe you. I don’t need to click on this video to know it could be two and a half hours long at best. And if really, you have that much to say? Cut that shit into a series, then!
Look, I already find it hard to watch a 30 minute video essay. Because most of the time, it doesn’t need to be that long and the person making it just won’t get to the damn point.
Like, let’s say I’m watching a video about a game. If I’m watching this, chances are I already know the game. Or at least, just give some brief context. You don’t have to “but actually… whats’s a video game?” me and then to go into thé whole fucking history of video games and tell me about how life was for the developer when they was a sperm in someone’s balls…
I’ll say this though, I used to make videos. I would write, record and edit the whole thing on my own. So a six hours long project? Yeah, I respect the hell out of that. But at some point, you need to think of the viewer. It’s unreasonable to ask someone to take this much time to do anything in their day. Cut it into multiple parts, I know chapters are a thing but YouTube remembering where I stopped watching is far too inconsistent for that.
Yeah, I was going to give this a watch, but 6 hours? I think I got the main points from the synopsis.
I love to rag on Star Wars as much as any salty millennial, but fucking get on with it.
Hey. Its okay to not spend the hours watching the video. Just move on.
As for who started this trend, blame Google. At some point the alogarithm started rewarding long videos because they help user engagement.
Well, but what if I want to see the video because their view on a certain topic interests me. I think it js totally fair to criticise someone for making too long videos.
ETA: just saw that your post’s title is “must watch video…”. But than you tell someone to just not watch it??
You don’t have to watch long form content if you don’t want to.
I really enjoy this kind of content and leave it on in the background when I do things
And yet I’m entertained for the entirety of hbomberguy and folding ideas videos. To each their own.
Hbomberguy makes long videos yes, but he doesn’t make six hours long videos. He still makes his points concise and presents them in interesting and entertaining ways. Only in his last video does he cross the threshold into 3 hours long videos, and in that one he even says, in the video, that there was an entire section that he wrote and edited and then cut out because it muddied the point of his video.
Maybe it’s a question of where to draw the line, but I think hbomberguy is very much not the norm for long-form content creators. And I do not appreciate having long videos for the sake of having a video be long.
To me, video essays that break past how long a movie is feel the same. Sure, I might not have time for a 6 hour where I have time for a 4 hour, but they feel the same in how they’re structured and presented.
Yes, definitely this! Especially because while watching the video I often asked myself what the point was that they didn’t make before. They repeated themselves a lot in this video. Due to the length and my decreasing attention span I actually took less out of this video if it had been like 2 hours long. And I would watch a 2 hour video again if I want to make sure I got it. But making a nearly 6 hour video felt sooo unnecessary, repetitive and tiresome.
When the creation is based on such shaky foundations, no wonder the Star Wars fandom turns out to be racist and misogynist.
I’m not convinced of this. There are plenty of creators who are shitty people, but nevertheless ended up with fandoms that are incredibly inclusive. For example, Anne McCaffrey was incredibly homophobic, misogynistic, and classist, and the fandom simply discarded those elements of her books and uses its own interpretation of the worlds she created that are more inclusive. And an awful lot of Harry Potter fans very pointedly reject JK Rowling’s transphobia, which is reflected in their interpretation of the Harry Potter universe.
It’s not the foundations that determine how racist and misogynistic a fandom is. It’s the type of fans. Star Wars has a lot of white male fans, and spaces inhabited by a large proportion of white male fans are more racist and misogynistic regardless of fandom. When you start looking at the fandom spaces with lots of women and LGBT people, you see a lot more inclusivity. You can barely move for LGBT-positive Star Wars fanfiction, a space that is traditionally overwhelmingly female and LGBT.
I agree about the demographics of Star Wars fans.
I have seen many YouTube videos by white male fans who keep complaining that all they want to see is the hero’s journey and the new Star Wars movies are bad because they “go woke” or something like that. Its very toxic and unwelcoming.
The real problem with the sequels, is that they’re a poor rehash of the other films, so for anyone who’s watched the original trilogy and the prequels, all that’s left in the sequels are some slightly better SFX, some different goofy parts, plus some poorly added racial elements that come from nowhere and go nowhere (see: Rose x Finn). Of course it didn’t help that Carrie Fisher would pass away and they had to use CGI to paste her in, but even Rey’s “hero journey” is kind of “meh” compared to Luke’s or Anakin’s, and IMO they didn’t give her enough screen time.
jar
Agreed. This is also discussed in the video. The sequels are just rehash of the original trilogy and that is by design because that’s what Disney does.
It really is! I definitely think fandom spaces like YouTube do tend to be disproportionately male, with all the toxicity that comes with it. Not that the more female and LGBT dominated fandom spaces don’t have their fair share of toxicity, but I’d rather deal with “my preferred gay couple is better than your preferred gay couple” than “gay couples shouldn’t even exist”. It’s much easier to agree to disagree when the disagreement is about personal taste rather than whether some people even have a right to live.
Anne McCaffrey was incredibly homophobic, misogynistic, and classist
According to her, the Dragons of Pern would systematically choose gay riders… then she added some BS on top of that, trying to justify the scientific imperative of having as many dragons as possible… but where is the classist thing coming from?
Only blue and green dragons would systematically choose gay riders, and those were largely considered disposable - although a few appeared in the narrative, most often they were only mentioned in the stats of how many of each colour hatched and how many died. Gold, bronze, and brown dragons wouldn’t choose gay riders, and riders of those dragons were the only ones eligible for any leadership positions. So by default, gay riders were automatically and permanently relegated to subordinate positions due to their sexuality. When you combine dragons being picky about their rider’s sexuality while also insisting that each colour of dragon prefers certain personality types, you end up with some really unfortunate implications. The best thing the Pern fandom did for the fandom was decide that dragons don’t care about someone’s sexuality, severing the implied link between sexuality and competence (since green dragons were persistently described as being flighty, unreliable, and dramatic.)
And the classist elements are there all through the entire series. It’s supposed to be some amazing feminist story because only women can ride gold dragons, and gold dragons are the highest ranking ones. But they’re also only a tiny handful of all dragons, less than 1%, and all the other women on Pern are largely treated like shit because they’re only seen as breeders for the next generation. Conveniently, most gold riders also seemed to come from particular bloodlines, with it being noted that Ruatha Hold in particular provided a lot of them. So basically the message here is that a small portion of women, if they come from sufficiently good bloodlines, are worthy of being treated with respect, but none of the others are.
Pern is absolutely classist as hell, and any stories about characters from lower classes always inevitably end up with them becoming a higher class, whether that’s Impressing a dragon (preferably bronze or gold), joining a crafthall (preferably the Harpers, given that being a musician, archivist, or spy has more “prestige” than being a tanner or blacksmith), or being given land in the Southern Continent to become members of the aristocracy themselves. So one could argue that there’s an aspirational element, but “lower class person can only achieve anything of note if the upper class give them the opportunity to become upper class” is still pretty classist, especially given that with the dragons, it’s related to a genetic trait and also requires a specific combination of sexuality and personality.
There were also specific rules about what colour Pernese people had to be, but because this simultaneously made blonde haired and blue eyed people incredibly rare as well as black people, you can argue the toss about whether Anne McCaffrey was also a racist. Obviously by modern standards, “all the human races interbred so much that everybody averaged out to looking kind of Latino” is not a great look, but it was common in a lot of sci-fi of the 70s as a means of implying that everybody stopped caring about race. But the Ruatha Hold family were specifically established in one of the books as founded by red haired blue eyed people, so Anne McCaffrey’s most favoured family line on Pern also happened to be really, really white…
And the problem is that it’s not just that the world was like this, because obviously what an author writes is different to what they believe. But the portions of the fandom aged 35+, who were active in the fandom in the early days of the internet, can confirm that Anne McCaffrey actually believed it, and regularly attacked fans who didn’t agree with her, either on her forums or through cease and desist letters from her lawyers. (I got one. I was 16.)
Don’t get me wrong, I do love Pern as a setting. I still dabble occasionally, but only because when Anne died, Todd McCaffrey did away with sending threatening letters to any fan who stepped out of line, and the fandom as a whole decided to make Pern less homophobic, less misogynistic, less classist, and less racist. I feel like fans today, who have only experienced the adjustments fandom made to Pern, have no real idea of just how toxic it was in the past.
cease and desist letters from her lawyers. (I got one. I was 16)
Ouch. I’m sorry, didn’t know that.
I binge-read a lot of the books in the late 1990s, but didn’t engage with the online fandom. My interpretation was that it depicted a degenerated advanced society that got forced into something like a Medieval structure because of the Fall, with the Southern continent being a chance to escape it and build something different.
Based on IRL observation, it looked plausible that in a world plagued by regular extinction level events, people would fall back to the minimum required for survival.
I think it’s definitely one of those series that looks worse in hindsight - and when we’re adults - than it did in the 90s. But like… it’s one thing to write a society that, due to external factors, has a definite class system, but quite another for the author to reinforce it through their choices - like defaulting to only gold and bronze dragons being worth anything. There were many parts of the narrative where a rider didn’t need a bronze/gold dragon for story reasons (would the events of Dolphins of Pern have been any different if T’lion’s dragon had been green or blue rather than bronze? Would Menolly’s story have been any less compelling if the majority of her firelizards had been green or blue, rather than a largely ignored minority?), so the choice to make sure that a character who is supposed to be sympathetic has the “best” dragon/firelizard colour is very much classism on the author’s part, albeit through the metaphor of an alien species with a caste system.
Agreed. I mostly ignored all of those aspects as part of “suspension of disbelief”… and probably read the books too fast to really reflect on much of the stuff. Also read some of them translated, and others in English while still learning it, so probably missed a lot of the nuances both ways.
With hindsight, what I think looks the worst, is learning that she would C&D anyone for not interpreting them “the right way”. That’s low.
With hindsight, what I think looks the worst, is learning that she would C&D anyone for not interpreting them “the right way”. That’s low.
Yep! Especially since most of the people she was threatening were kids. I know there was at least one person, slightly older, who fought it and the matter went to court. I’ve always wondered what the judge thought, having to make a decision regarding an old lady suing a 20-something woman over fictional dragons being depicted in the “wrong” way. The fan won the case, probably because the whole thing was ridiculous.
At nearly 6 hours long I can confidently say that some things should just be a very long blog post. There’s no way I can parse and digest a complex argument about popular media via a youtube video of that size. It’s just…I got stuff to do.
I don’t understand long format videos because to me they only exist because of two reasons
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the researcher has done an enormous and thorough job on the subject which requires lots of detail to understand
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the producer had lots of content and was too lazy to condense it all so they just mashed everything together and let the viewer figure it all out themselves.
The best and most informative documentaries to me are an hour or less … if I’m going to watch something longer it’s going to be a series of well produced and well written episodes created and produced by writers, researchers and presenters who carefully present the content in a clear concise way.
I am not going to watch a six hour slog written and produced by someone I’ve never heard of and has little to no credentials in writing or producing.
I don’t mind independent projects but at six hours long, I really have to be convinced by someone significant to spend that much time.
I’m always down for a 6 hour Hbomberguy video, but I accept that treatment from nobody else.
Essayists gotta earn my trust first, and the more people making super long videos, the higher the standard I expect them to meet to be worth my time.
One of the longest documentaries I ever watched was - ‘Hypernormalisation’ - (2016 by Adam Curtis, an award winning BBC documentary film maker)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6156350/
At almost three hours long, I had to watch it over two or three days. It’s a lot of detail but a well thought out story line to give you an insight as to how and why the world is what it is today. This is the kind of documentary that I enjoy sitting through for long periods.
I’ll going to give it a shot tomorrow. It’ll be nice background noise before the holiday 🎄 Hopefully I’m not about to wreck my suggestions, I’ve been burned before!
Situations like this are why I disabled youtube suggestions. I only see suggestions if I want them.
It’s why papers in college have word limits - you need to be able to pick what’s most important and make your point.
With this video it’s the second option. They had lots of content and did not condense it sufficiently. They repeat themselves all the time and it’s hard to tell what’s new information and what they’ve already mentioned before…
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I understand your concern. I watched it in several sessions over a few days, like watching seminars of a subject. I was not sure too but now I can say its worth it.
To be fair, it’s weirder to not be some form of a bigot when you’re born in 1904. And it’s also not surprising that it isn’t researched properly. Psychology today still isn’t researched properly.
I’ll eventually watch it in my mornings, but I hope it’s more than just “some show is anti-LGBTQ because the boomer who made it learned from someone older than him.”
The main thing that would make me think a fanbase is bad is if the fanbase has higher than normal ‘problematic group’. Star wars is popular enough you’re going to get every type of fan. There is always a small vocal majority in the fanbase. If one out of every thousand fans is a vocal asshole, then a billion fans you’re going to get a million vocal assholes. That wouldn’t be anti-LGBT that would be par for the course. It would be society, not the show’s fault. If it has less than a million then I would say it tries to welcome LGBT folk, because it’s going against the norms of society.
This video was soooo long and soooo good. I’d recommend watching on Nebula if you have it (since they could use some stuff that would get copyright strikes on YouTube) and it gets the creators more money, since YouTube demonitized them anyway.
Hear hear for more nebula love and awareness.
I nag/question whenever I can about Nebula and fediverse integration. I think I’ve spoken to some creators on there too (who are also on the fediverse). There’s an obvious alignment of values here and a whole audience that Nebula aren’t engaging with.
The only issue or cultural friction I can see is a broader issue that the fediverse needs to sort out anyway … how to manage our relationship to money and those who want to earn some living from their activity here.
I am strongly considering subscribing to Nebula as a lot of content creators I like are there. Also, YouTube is getting worse by the day.
So am I not allowed to like Star Wars because I’m bi? Or perhaps I’m not actually bi? Someone let me know if I should be feeling bad rn. I’m having a hard time coming to the conclusion from this 6 hour video.
You are certainly welcome to like it. I like Star Wars otherwise I wouldn’t bother with watching this video.
The thing is though, if you search for Star Wars related videos on YouTube made by so called fans, it is very easy to find stuff like Star Wars sequel trilogy was ruined because Rey is a woman or The Last Jedi sucked because it pandered to SJW, or something along the line. There is definitely a problem with this fandom.
Of course, because Star Wars has such wide appeal. Extremists shout louder and more often than moderates, which is why you’ll find way more extremist content than moderate content. Which lends to the perception that Star Wars fans are bigoted and lunatics.
But this is selection bias. You’re more likely going to find people shouting about how something sucks and potentially even being a bigot than people who happily enjoy Star Wars for what it is.
Labelling fandoms as inherently toxic or bigoted or whatever else just oversimplifies it all. Under these definitions, I fall within the fandom of Star Wars. Under the same definitions in this video, I’m anti LGBTQI and a supporter of Jungian psychology and Jordan Peterson. This is counter to reality though.
Of course you’re allowed to like it. Even if something is bad for you there is a reason “guilty pleasure” is a thing. I haven’t watched the video so I don’t know what all it says.
I’m in the camp that says the Jedi is a fascist organization and I think the grey Jedi are a cool group. You should look them up, you might like them because they’re both light and dark side.
I think analyzing the story and context through a critical psychology lens and determining that all of the fandom must have a unified ideology is silly and the product of someone having way too much time and imagination on their hands.
I liked action and lightsabers and space ships as a kid. Doesn’t mean I’m a fascist or anti lgbtqia+. This reductive thinking that often is pushed here serves no purpose other than to further divide and classify people.
Jedi are idealogues just like the Sith. They complete each other because they’re both extremists on opposite spectrums. The Jedi had big gaping flaws throughout their history, obviously so have the Sith.
I’m just here for Jar Jar.
While I agree with you it would make a more interesting story to have a balance of dark and light, it’s important to note George Lucas’ interpretation of the Force is that there is no ‘light side’ but rather there is The Force and there is going against the will of the Force, aka the Dark Side. Therefore, to Lucas’ POV, the Jedi are sometimes misguided but intrisically good while the Sith are intrisically evil.
In my personal interpretation tho (which I think Clone Wars and other media tend to agree with me) Jedi in the prequels were blinded by the power they achieved and hence were ignorant and complacent to the bad stuff they indirectly and directly did or helped do. Which is why Gray Jedi (Jedi that didn’t follow the Council) were closer to being like what Jedi were supposed to be, than the others were.
This isn’t an attack on you, but a personal belief. I don’t care what the authors intentions are. They can shed light on something but once it’s out, the media is out of their hands. Great example is the book “starship troopers” and the movie.
Another thing I dislike is the ‘natural’ fallacy. Because force is described as ‘natural’. What’s natural is death, life, decay, growth, order, disorder. What the Jedi were shown to be is a weird sex cult that prevented people from getting in unless you had a ‘birth right’.
If grey Jedi is what all jedi were supposed to be, then that is one thing. But that isn’t what was shown.
Yeah, The Force involves life and death. The Force’s will is actually to embrace a balance of both. But Dark Side users go against the will of the Force, for the sake of power or even for the sake of extending their own life or others.
I would argue that Luke and Ahsoka are great examples of gray Jedi (especially if we don’t count sequel material). In Luke’s case, in the OT it could be argued that his love for his friends, when he leaves Yoda to save them, and his belief that there was still good inside his father, made him a better Jedi than all before him. To me, he rejected tradition to do what was right. And that is what makes a great Jedi.
Relevant readings:
Eight Reasons Why The Hero’s Journey Sucks
https://gizmodo.com/eight-reasons-why-the-heros-journey-sucks-345313
Why Structures Like The Hero’s Journey Don’t Work
https://mythcreants.com/blog/why-structures-like-the-heros-journey-dont-work/
Second these. I also love her video about RoboCop as an allegory for the transgender experience.
Thanks for the recommendation. Will check them out!
Couldn’t you at least wait until the weekend to make my watchlist grow 😭 I just watched the piano guy’s inaccuracy video and then the one about the country song, I’ve only got so many hours!
Christmas is probably the only chance I have enough time to watch this video…
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