Part 3

But by this point the Obama-era had transitioned into the Trump-era, and all media was rapidly becoming hyper-partisan. Kathleen Kennedy and Rian Jonson decided to turn Star Wars into a new political messaging tool and ostracize fans which they now saw as too old, too male, too problematic. This ultra-2016 mindset of going to war with your own fanbase as a reaction to the Trump presidency culminated in The Last Jedi, whose entire message was a meta one about how bad it is to have cared about a fictional universe and how problematic said fictional universe was. The plot, world, designs, lore were all not just actively secondary but deliberately undermined to look and be stupid. When someone pointed out the star destroyer at the beginning had shields and so should the resistance bombers, Rian said he knew that but deliberately wanted neither to have shields to show how impractical, ineffective, and stupid the whole concept of Star Wars space combat was. The plotholes of the movie were self-aware and replaced with an irreverent Marvel humor. You were a stinky stupid nerd if you cared about who Snoke was or if x didn’t make any sense, it’s a space wizard movie for kids! Older characters were humiliated and killed and Disney’s newer version introduced as replacements, to surely draw in new fans, push out the problematic old ones, and rebrand Star Wars into a suitable mouthpiece for anti-Trump resistance.

There were no new fans, there was no “modern audience” to replace the fans driven away. Star Wars, while broadly popular in the public, was ultimately still niche and fan-driven in terms of who actually consumed it. General audiences soon lost interest with Star Wars after TLJ, with the franchise no longer having anywhere interesting to go and entertainment now becoming driven by social media and less by old mega-IPs.