The last Jedi

Read this on Quora - long but found it interestingAs I teach my 6th graders about making text-based inferences, I find a common pattern. Many a 6th grader will read something in a novel and say something like:I infer that he will find his dad.I infer that they’re about to get in trouble.I infer that he’s going to betray them.Do you see the pattern?All his life has he looked away ,,, to the future. To the horizon. Never his mind on where he was! What he was doing!It’s surprisingly hard to get a child to make inferences about what’s happening in the story right now, rather than making predictions about what’s going to happen.I don’t have a neurological or developmental explanation for this, but my personal suspicion as a teacher is that it’s easier to assume something will be important later because that preserves the possibility that its significance will be large and obvious, whereas present-tense inferences frequently require the student to notice smaller, subtler things, or to think about more complex topics.This is not a violation of the Chekhov's Gun rule of thumb. Chekhov’s Gun (if you introduce a gun on the mantelpiece early in the story, it needs to fire by the end) is only a statement that story elements all need to have a clear reason to be in the story. It is not a statement that all story elements need to do the obvious thing, or that all story elements need to have a payoff later. If you introduce a gun on the mantelpiece in chapter 3, and the reader can immediately realize that this is the character’s grandfather’s gun, indicating to the reader that he wants to be his grandfather even though he outwardly says he hates his grandfather, then the gun has already “fired.” It has served its purpose.Here’s another common misconception among my students:I infer that he is feeling betrayed because that’s what I would feel if my best friend did that to me.This might be a reasonable inference, but it oftentimes isn’t. It’s very common to see this kind of thinking even in the face of textual evidence to the contrary - say, that the character actually feels sad, but not betrayed. Essentially, the student makes a connection to the text and then gets stuck on it, ignoring all contrary evidence. The student’s point of view is conflated with the character’s.There are plenty of reasons why somebody might not like The Last Jedi, but the only times I’ve ever heard somebody say it “ruined” what The Force Awakens “set up,” it’s been a case of anticipating future payoff and not seeing the current purpose or confusing perspectives.Let’s take a minor example to start: the Knights of Ren. Snoke says:Even you, master of the Knights of Ren, have never faced such a test.Even without knowing anything about the Knights of Ren other than that Kylo is [one of] their master[s], “master of the Knights of Ren” implies that Kylo Ren is a person who is superior to his peers, and thus, any challenge that he finds challenging is likely to be serious business. It’s a helpful reminder for the audience, who might be tempted to see Kylo as nothing but a whiny child. He is a whiny child, but the Knights of Ren reference reminds us he is also unusually capable.That’s all impact that the audience can get right there in the theater on a first-time view. It has altered or informed our view of Kylo. It has served a purpose. The gun has fired.But if you don’t recognize that, you could be forgiven for thinking that Chekhov’s Knights of Ren have not yet “done anything,” and thus it is reasonable to expect them to do something of significance at some point.Another example: Snoke himself.When the audience is introduced to Snoke, it comes as a bit of a surprise. The First Order’s origins are easy enough to infer from on-screen evidence: they fairly scream “Space Nazis from Space Argentina,” and therefore are almost certainly fanatical remnants of the Empire who have fled beyond the reach of the New Republic and spent 30 years plotting revenge. You don’t, and shouldn’t, need any novels to tell you that.But Snoke is less clear. Why do the Space Nazis in Space Argentina have a Diet Caffeine Free Space Satan? It’s understandable for the audience to wonder.The thing is, it’s very clear from the way people talk about him in The Force Awakens that absolutely none of the characters wonder where Snoke came from. Evidently, they all know and find it unworthy of comment. Given that, while it is reasonable for the audience to wonder, it would not be reasonable to expect the film to explain.And as for Snoke’s significance in the story, he’s introduced as an antagonist to Kylo Ren, not to the Resistance. He doubts and gaslights Kylo in his very first scene, while the Resistance hardly seems to worry about him at all.The reasonable expectation is that he’s being set up as a character challenge for Kylo to overcome, not as a strategic challenge for the Resistance. When that is what he proves to be in The Last Jedi, his gun has fired. The audience’s continued curiosity about where he came from is, from the story’s perspective, irrelevant.Likewise with Rey’s origins. The audience may wonder whether a Force champion can just … arise, but none of the characters ever do. Snoke brings up that “awakening” to Kylo, and Kylo just acknowledges that he, too, has felt it. Done and dusted. Apparently this isn’t weird.The audience can be forgiven for going, “Wait, that isn’t weird? It seems weird. Does nobody in-universe think this worthy of comment?” But the characters clearly don’t think it’s worthy of comment, and we shouldn’t make the mistake of getting so fixated on our point of view that we miss the characters’.If you do miss the fact that none of the characters find Rey’s awakening anomalous, then you might well look for a hidden explanation, such as in her parentage … and you might well miss the otherwise much more obvious fact that Rey’s parentage is chiefly important for her character motivation; namely, it is her excuse not to leave Jakku to go on her adventure.And then you might well miss the fact that Rey confronts her fear of having to be a hero in her own right in The Last Jedi (that’s the point of the cave scene, for instance). The parentage gun goes off right on-screen and you might well miss it if you were fixated on looking at the parentage question to satisfy your own curiosity rather than for how it fits into the text of the film itself.As I said, there are reasons why a person might not like The Last Jedi. If you don’t believe me, I am certain some of the comments to this answer will consist of people saying, “I didn’t like the film for perfectly legitimate story reasons” (fine, but likely irrelevant to the question).But for people that specifically don’t like The Last Jedi because it ruined what The Force Awakens “set up,” I think it’s because they missed what The Force Awakens did and did not set up. via /r/StarWars https://ift.tt/2ABrS6v