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Star Wars: why it sucks, why everyone loves it

It's hard to find a person who dislikes Star Wars, even harder than to find one who dislikes Lord of the Rings. And it's for good reasons. Star Wars has profound strengths:

The Force as a truly *magical* magic system, driven nebulously by emotions and destiny. This is one of my favorite things. I can't think of another well-known story with a magic system that scratches this itch so well.

An attempt to define magic

An appealing theme: temptation. But not in a stupid, power-is-evil way like Lord of the Rings. It's also about redemption, a natural complement to the theme of temptation.

Sword fights are an excellent choice of combat form for storytelling. it's intimate, relatable and visceral because it uses weapons and movements that we can actually play with.

The scale of the universe allows all sorts of stories to be told in Star Wars and for them all to interact and enhance each other rather than conflict.

Some wonderful franchise-wide motifs, like The Force theme.

The Force theme

So, unlike LOTR and Harry Potter, its popularity isn't completely unearned. There's a lot of good ideas here. But there are also systemic flaws with Star Wars, and these are the main reason I'm writing about it, because the flaws get so little attention. No, Star Wars is not a masterpiece. We need better than this.

The temptation/redemption theme is crippled by the perversity of Star Wars morality. Most Star Wars villains are strawman evil and the designated heroes are always the horribly flawed Jedi or those affiliated with them. Worse, the Jedi/Sith dichotomy is nearly built in to the fabric of the universe; these are *the* two sides to the Force, *the* two sides to every conflict. There isn't even any grey. Some EU works do a little better, but I don't think I've ever seen one that portrays the Jedi Way, not just individual Jedi, as wrong. The Jedi ideology is so ingrained into the universe that if there was ever a movie that showed benevolent Force users that aren't Jedi, it would hardly feel like Star Wars anymore.

strawman evil

Why do I rag on the Jedi so much, you ask? There are a few major things:

They forbid "revenge", by which of course they mean any violent outside of *immediate* danger; they usually disapprove of killing a dangerous murderer or tyrant as long as they aren't *in the act* of attacking.

Myopias on violence

Jedi spirituality revolves around the suppression of emotion, and this is just extremely wrong and harmful. Emotions are not a force of evil; they can be a source of exhortation just as much as temptation. Anger, shame, sympathy, and any other emotion can inspire a person to stick their neck out to fight evil, seek self-improvement, or make sacrifices for the less fortunate.

They have a chain of command; there's no basis for such a thing in a group based on a static creed.

They forbid romance. This stems from their suspicion of emotion, so my same argument applies.

Most Star Wars source material is statist, but that's to be expected.

Why you should be an anarchist

There's almost no worldbuilding. It's not just fake sci-fi; for all the Star Wars source material we have, we see almost nothing about what the world is like outside of the spaceships and warfare and politics. What is daily life like in this universe? Is there an internet? What kind of jobs do people have? Pretty much the only legitimate economic occupation we see is "moisture farming". This severely limits what we can do with the Star Wars universe in our imagination.

fake sci-fi

The droid rights problem (more on this in the Solo section). The droids in Star Wars are pretty clearly supposed to be sentient, but aren't treated like it by the "goodguys"; none of the heroes - or even the droids themselves - ever object to them being sold as property or the practice of wiping their memories.

The same thing applies to clones: no rights, they're bred and forced to be soldiers. What's that? They explore this in the Clone Wars show? Yeah, but they don't address the implication that um, the Republic is a slave empire and the heroes shouldn't be fighting for it.

Basically all Star Wars source material features enemy mooks too incompetent to produce decent action scenes. You can't fear for someone being shot at by soldiers that both think and aim like toddlers, and it's not interesting to watch someone overcome such a non-threatening enemy.

Another pervasive flaw with the action scenes is that characters don't experience fear. Everyone in this universe acts stolid while being shot at knowing they could die any second; such unrealistic psychology makes them less sympathetic.

Each trilogy is dominated by a single gender. The original and prequel trilogies have one female character each, neither are Jedi, and Padme exists only to support Anakin's arc. As for Leia, honestly I feel like you could just take her out of the original trilogy and the story would be much the same. I can't think of a scene where she does something that couldn't have been done by another character. In the sequels on the other hand, male characters are constantly sidelined or deglorified while every female character is a Mary Sue; Rey is the most overpowered hero Star Wars has ever seen and Kylo is a total wuss.

Why representation matters

Glorifying a character

Mary Sue

Even aside from these systemic flaws, none of the Star Wars movies are good. Each one is filled with its own additional flaws, most of which area rarely acknowledged, so I'm needed to point them out.

Now, lots of people - maybe *most* - think that the sequel movies were awful. Many also think the prequels were awful. Few people think the original trilogy was awful. But I think all of the trilogies have roughly the same average quality, except for Rise of Skywalker, and that quality is mediocre. Star Wars is popular because it's based on a lot of really good ideas and the systemic flaws aren't any worse than the ones in every other popular story, but story discourse could really benefit from acknowledging more of these movies' flaws.

Episode IV: A New Hope

The intro to the movie is a really big weak point. It isn't until what would have been probably chapter 3 of a novel version that we finally meet the protagonist. If I was watching this movie for the first time, I would have walked out on it at least once by then.

On Chapter 1

Before we cut away from Vader interrogating Leia, it's heavily implied that Leia is about to be gruesomely tortured. Just look at that probe and the way it zooms in on the needle. If they did, Leia should have been at least horribly traumatized when we next see her. If they didn't, that in itself is a plothole. Why would you *not* use physical pain in that situation? It's not like the empire has standards.

Torture is an uncomfortable topic and I'm not saying they should've depicted it. But if they had've confirmed that the Empire does it to prisoners, I think that would've helped make the Empire more scary, and be more consistent with the fact that they're willing to blow up planets as a show of force.

Obi-Wan's implied inaction prior to the story isn't treated properly. He is clearly still a capable Jedi, so why was he living as a hermit on some obscure planet when he could be helping the rebellion? I'd be fine with the idea that he sort of fell into despair after the events of the prequel trilogy, but he should've had some dialogue about how the events of this movie made him realize he had to return.

Luke in the beginning expresses wanting to leave his home and join the rebellion. That's good. It shows us that Luke is a good person who wants to do good things with his life. But then as soon as he's offered the chance to do exactly that and learn the ways of the Force, he suddenly forgets about this and wants to stay home. It's like the hero was trying to make this easy for the writer, but the writer decided to pointlessly retcon his only admirable trait as soon as it became useful.

You might say they wanted to kill off Luke's family first to raise the tension or whatever. But they could still have done that. Luke could have decided to go but wanted to tell his aunt and uncle he was leaving, and found them dead when they got there. They could have pieced together that the stormtroopers traced the droids through the Jawas to the Lars homestead.

The scene where Han shoots Greedo is just awful. Han was very clearly being threatened with death, so what does he do? Say "over my dead body" and then *not* shoot immediately. Any reasonable person would have fired in that situation. Far worse than that is that Greedo actually *missed* from point-blank range; has he never used a blaster before? Even a stormtrooper would have hit that shot!

I also think that as unique and creative as it might have sounded, having main characters with no lines (Chewbacca and to an extent R2) was an incredibly bad decision. The result is that these characters have no personality and we don't really think of them as people, despite that the movie itself does.

No one seems to talk about that scene where C-3PO and R2 play a board game against Chewie. Han's line implying that Chewie might actually pull someone's arms out of their sockets if he lost the game is treated as funny and nothing else, but what about how evil that makes Chewie?

The extra-incompetence of the stormtroopers on the Death Star is excusable if we accept Leia's deduction that the Empire placed a tracking beacon and let them go on purpose, but if she knew they were being tracked, why oh why did they go directly back to the rebel base?

(It also doesn't make sense from the Empire's perspective. If the plan is to let them go and track them, why waste some stormtroopers fighting them, with the risk of accidentally killing them?)

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

I don't know why nobody else says this, but Han and Leia's romance is extremely fucked up! Han's dialogue in the beginning borders on sexual harassment. At least two times later he totally crosses the line into physical assault: once when she falls and Han grabs her and she asks him to let go multiple times and he refuses, and again when he fondles her hand and she tells him to stop and he says "stop what?". Then he kisses her without explicit permission. Of course, Leia doesn't complain because George Lucas apparently thinks this is fine and wants to show the audience that it's fine. It's really, really not.

Luke's behavior when he visits Cloud City doesn't make sense. His stated purpose was to rescue Han and Leia, but after he sees Leia being taken away by stormtroopers he doesn't pursue, but instead goes after Vader, and continues to press the fight when he has multiple chances to disengage. Has he completely forgotten why he's here? *And* he's sufficiently out of his mind to think he might actually defeat Vader?

There are also multiple scenes where the emotions of the characters are so downplayed from how they would realistically be that it cripples the drama, even besides the omnipresent "mortal danger is not scary" failure. Luke should have had some kind of cognition while he was facing Vader in the cave ("WTF is happening? How is Vader here? Should I run and get Yoda's help?"), or while he was hanging on that little beam at the bottom of Cloud City ("Shit, I can't believe I chose to come here with Ben and Yoda both telling me this was a bad idea! Look where it got me!"). But he's just blank the entire time.

C-3PO's incessant dialogue during the whole Cloud City sequence is a plague. Every time a scene is supposed to be intense and exciting we have C-3PO yelling about how much he doubts R2's abilities, and he never says or does anything that matters the whole time.

Copy-paste my criticism of Obi-Wan onto Yoda.

Yoda is wrong about everything. He puts on the first major layer of perverse Jedi spirituality during Luke's training; he's always on about patience without any understanding of the context that patience must be understood in in order to be a virtue. He uses it to mean "You should favor waiting around eating soup and doing nothing over completing your mission that will help liberate the galaxy".

Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

The whole nude Leia thing in the beginning is totally unnecessary and distasteful. I can't tell if this was some kind of disgusting attempt at fanservice, or if the writer somehow thought this made the story better.

In the scene where Luke talks to Ben and Yoda about Vader being his father, it's not believable that he's that hung up about it. Luke didn't grow up with Vader and had never even spoken to him prior to their battle. He doesn't know anything about his father as a person except the long list of atrocities, so it's unrealistic that he felt so strongly about having to fight him. The reluctance was shoehorned in to pander to an audience that has an unjustified belief that one ought to treat one's biological family differently than one would ought to treat any other person who took the same actions.

I'm not the only person to talk about how cringe the Ewoks are. They're halflings who take down high-tech armed and armored soldiers with sticks and spears. It just makes the stormtroopers even more of a joke than they already were. But what I haven't heard anyone else point out is how *evil* they are. The Ewoks kidnap the heroes, who they must've known were people - and even plan to eat Han! - and are still portrayed as goodguys. Clearly, the Ewoks are cannibals who assign no rights to anyone outside their tribe, and should've been treated as villains.

And C-3PO refuses to tell the Ewoks to let the heroes go, because "it's against my programming to impersonate a deity"? Whatever. Nobody liked that character anyway, right?

Leia's unwillingness to talk to Han about what Luke told her is really painful. She is in love with him, and has no motivation to keep this a secret. If she were a real person she would want to talk about her emotional problems to her lover. Not to mention how much it was clearly upsetting Han and giving him a false impression of her choosing Luke as a lover instead of him.

The messed up Jedi spirituality is thicker in this movie than anywhere else in Star Wars. While I'm willing to accept Luke's insistence on trying to convert Vader to the point of turning himself in, there is absolutely no excuse for not taking out the Emperor when he had a clear chance. Apparently "hatred" is such an evil thing in all contexts that you can't kill a dangerous magical tyrant. Nevermind how many stormtroopers they've killed at this point. And then he has to go as far as throwing down his weapon because he's apparently inexplicably become an outright pacifist. For fuck's sake it's amazing how much damage the ideal of "turn the other cheek" has done to our culture's moral compass.

The dialogue between Luke and the Emperor in that scene is also really, really bad. Every time it cuts away and back to Luke looking out the window at the fleet, they exchange almost exactly the same lines. Luke's final refusal line is just "I'll never turn to the dark side", which is a near-verbatim repitition of what he's already said. And it makes matters worse that he claims "You've failed, your highness" as he surrenders and gives up on defeating the Emperor, when he just found out his friends aren't going to either. Apparently he's decided not only that it's immoral to kill dangerous magical tyrants but also that refusing to do so is the very *definition* of victory.

Let's also mention that Luke *didn't actually play a role* in the final downfall of the Empire. Wait, what? How can I say that when he's responsible for converting Vader and thereby killing the Emperor? Think again: the heroes on the ground overcame the Emperor's trap and took down the shield all by themselves. The heroes in space exploited the weakness and took out the Death Star all by themselves. The Death Star would have been destroyed, and both Vader and the Emperor killed, without Luke's involvement in the finale. You might argue that Luke's presence distracted the Emperor from sensing the rebels overcoming his measures, but the Force is such an iffy system that we can't claim that unless the movie says it. And even if that's true it still cripples his role as protagonist of the story to say he was only serving as a distraction. This is actually a very serious failure and only mitigated by how easy it is to not notice.

Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Episode I introduces midichlorians, a horrible worldbuilding mistake. The Force isn't magical anymore. It's just a scientific phenomenon. If Episode I was the first Star Wars movie and they actually did something with that concept, that would be okay, but after the original trilogy builds up the mysticism around the Force, it really isn't okay. At least it's easy to forget about it since the other movies ignore the concept.

A prophecy is introduced, complete with an unspecified prophet and a Chosen One.

Stay away from time travel (and prophecies)

Without knowing the context of the culture it came from, I would think the Jedi are okay with slavery. When Qui-Gon goes to Tatooine and finds slaves, he should have just threatened Watto into letting the slaves go and taken the hyperdrive, but instead he risks the life of a 9-year-old boy in a dangerous race so he can get the parts without upsetting a slaver. What the fuck, Qui-Gon.

It's also a plothole that Anakin won the race. He's just one of probably dozens of racers with no special advantages. We know that he has never even finished a race before, *and* Sebulba sabotaged his pod, but somehow he still wins because the plot needs him to. Come on.

The scene where Anakin greets Padme with "are you an angel?". Ugh... come on, no 9-year-old would ever say that. It's an absurdly heavy-handed way to set up a forced romance in Episode 2.

The scene at the dinner table where Qui-Gon grabs Jar Jar's tongue and holds it for several seconds. This is physical assault. I don't care if his table manners were bad, that doesn't make it okay to just violate someone else's body like that. Especially given Qui-Gon does not own the food or the house, so he shouldn't presume to make the rules over them.

Lots of people know that Jar-Jar is a terrible character so I'll just summarize: he plays no role in the plot except bringing Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon to the Gungan city, so it would've made sense for him to exit the story on Naboo. The writers thought he was funny but he's not. The scenes where he bumbles around in the battle being incredibly successful through pure luck are absolute cringe.

Darth Maul is a very poor antagonist. He has no history, almost no lines, and dies in his first real fight. What they should have done is just kept Darth Maul alive into AotC and even RotS. Scrap Dooku and maybe Grievous as well. Choose 1 good villain over 3 weak villains.

Episode II: Attack of the Clones

This movie was the unfortunate fruition ground of Anakin and Padme's awful romance. They have nothing in common and no chemistry, but are forced together for the sake of the plot.

During Dooku's conversation with the captured Obi-Wan, he flat-out tells him that the republic is under the control of a Sith lord. What conclusion could you possibly draw from that except that Palpatine is the Sith lord we've been looking for? And yet the Jedi don't figure it out until well into the next movie.

There's another problem with the same scene. And this isn't the only place this occurs in Star Wars (it's all over the fiction industry in general), but it's the least defensible if you ask me: when Dooku offers Obi-Wan to join him, why doesn't Obi-Wan pretend to accept in the hopes of maybe backstabbing him later? He has nothing to lose, and this course of action would be completely non-committal. There doesn't seem to be any possible reason not to try this, and the film doesn't even acknowledge it as an option.

The Tusken raider sequence has... some problems. Everyone makes fun of how bad it is that Anakin confesses to killing "not just the men, but the women, *and the children too*", and Padme says "To be angry is to be human" instead of "what the fuck you murderer". But there's even more wrong about this. First, the scene only actually shows him killing their warriors, which makes it seem like the movie is trying to say that Anakin was wrong to kill even their warriors and not just wrong to include the children in his killing. But, did you forget that the raiders *are murderers*? Killing them protects their future victims. Nobody talks about that.

The third issue is the way he mentions the women separately in that sentence. Is this an implication that women shouldn't be judged the same as men who take the same actions, or are the Tusken raiders so partriarchal that the women really no power over it? There's no indication of such.

The gunship argument scene after Padme falls out is awful. Mostly because it's blown way too far out of proportion; Anakin might be in love enough to want to put the ship down but he isn't stupid enough to make it dead obvious in front of Obi-Wan that he's breaking his vows and neither is Obi-Wan stupid enough to not pick up on it after this. For his Jedi apprentice who's dedicated his life to the order and trained against attachment for over a decade to suddenly want to abort the mission and outright say he doesn't care if he gets expelled for it and then for no consequences to follow is absurd.

Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

Way too many times the badguys lose fights because they were morons and tried to capture the heroes instead of killing them. It happens aboard the ship in the beginning when the heroes are brought to Grievous and then escape, it happens with the battle droids in the elevator, and it happens on Utapau when Obi-Wan jumps down and is surrounded by hundreds of enemies and they don't, you know, all attack him at once like reasonable adversaries.

The way this movie treats Padme is really disappointing. AotC set her up as a reasonably strong character (as much as you can be when it's clear you exist just to be a love interest), but in RotS she just has nothing to do for the whole movie. And to top it all off, she *dies of sadness* when her man turns evil? We get it writers, you don't think very highly of women. You didn't have to take it this far.

Grievous is a major disappointment. Like Darth Maul, he looks cool and threatening, but that's all. In the beginning of the movie, his senseless attempt to capture the Jedi instead of killing them predictably ends in disaster, he sends his minions to fight them without lifting a finger himself, he flees when they of course get chopped into pieces effortlessly, all the while claiming "you lose, General Kenobi". In the Utapau scene, he makes the same dumbass tactical mistake, he loses two hands and all of his lightsabers in his first minute of fighting Obi-Wan, and the only time he's able to do so much as land a punch is when Obi-Wan is disarmed. Grievous is the least threatening villain in all of these movies, and that's saying something.

RotS boasts some of the worst dialogue in the franchise. Anakin: "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy!" in a dramatic voice when it kind of disjoints the conversation anyway, followed by Obi-Wan: "Only a Sith deals in absolutes" (in a franchise with such black-and-white morality, really?). And then later Anakin: "From my point of view the Jedi are evil!" What, is Anakin engaging in relativist rhetoric now?

Relativist rhetoric

Episode VII: The Force Awakens

It's unsatisftying that the old man in the beginning who gives Poe the thingy is never mentioned again, as he is strongly implied to be a character with a past that relates to the others. Speaking of Leia, "She's royalty to me", and Kylo speaking to him, "Look how old you've become".

Rey is a Mary Sue. The prequel movies taught us that Jedi need years of training to reach even padawan-level, but Rey uses a mind trick successfully without even five minutes of training. Then she beats a trained Sith lord in a lightsaber fight without having ever held a lightsaber before. It's great that Star Wars finally has a female protagonist, but making her blatantly overpowered *damages* that effect, you want your first female protagonist to be a *good* protagonist.

Han Solo as a character is ruined egregiously by this movie. In the original trilogy, he starts out as a smuggler with no interest in helping the rebellion except for money, and ends up putting aside money and risking his neck to become a hero. It was a good arc. So naturally, in TFA, he's broken up with Leia, ditched the resistance, and gone back to being a smuggler with Chewie. His character arc is completely undone and then he's just killed.

We were promised an explanation of how Maz Kanata got Luke's lightsaber, but never got it.

Really, the First Order built the Death Star 3.0? What a surprise when the Resistance blows it up in the very same movie! When will the badguys stop building super ships? Aaaargh

It's made clear that the politics of the galaxy have changed since the end of the original trilogy, but we aren't shown how. The two sides' names have changed - that implies that the war was over at least temporarily. We're jumping into the middle of the plot in a world we don't know anything about, and never find out what happened.

In the original trilogy, it's made very clear that Leia is force-sensitive, so why didn't Luke just train her? Honestly why bother introducing Rey when you already have a female hero in place and set up to be a Jedi?

Okay, maybe you don't want Leia to be the protagonist since she's not starting from the beginning like Luke and Rey, but she should at least be a Jedi. She could have been Rey's mentor.

Rogue One

In the scene at the rebel base where Jyn is given her mission, it's visually subtle, but Jyn is actually *still handcuffed* while in the rebel base. These rebels apparently have no concept of respecting the basic dignity of someone you want to work for you. That's not how you make the audience root for the rebellion.

Does anyone else think the blind non-Jedi ninja is a mind-numbingly stupid idea? He's like an Ewok in terms of how much he harms the fight scenes.

Most of the names of the members of Rogue One aren't even mentioned in the movie, or if they are it was so discreet that I didn't catch them. The only two I knew by the end of the movie were Jyn and Cassian. It really hurt the relatability of the characters. Plus, when I watched it, I frequently couldn't tell Cassian apart from the other guy who looked like him.

Episode VIII: The Last Jedi

The scene where Leia slaps Poe for successfully taking out an imperial Dreadnaught and saving the day. I knew it was just a matter of time before this fucking trope showed up once Disney got in charge. Though there's also the scene where Luke does similar to Rey, and it's not obvious whether that makes the movie worse by legitimizing assault a second time, or better by showing that it's not a double standard.

Sexist tropes

The part where Rey follows Luke around the island trying to get him to talk to her goes on for far too long. Both the drama and the believability are killed after a while. Not to mention that cow milking scene is disgusting and unnecessary; I had to look away.

Snoke is dead already, before he even gets to do anything. What is it with Star Wars and incompetent, underdeveloped villains?

TFA mentioned the "Knights of Ren", so the burden was on TLJ to explore that. So what did Disney do? Completely ignored it, to the point where you can forget it ever happened.

The scene where Rose stops Finn from sacrificing himself to save the day. That is actually treacherous. Like I've said before, heroes that make mistakes are great, but only if the story properly treats it as a mistake.

Rose's preached moral is bad enough that I'm making it a separate point. "Saving what we love" is exactly what Finn was trying to do! He was going to take out the cannon to save what he loved! Also, it's painfully ironic that the prequel trilogy shows Anakin following this exact advice (saving Padme over destroying the Sith) and, rightly, portrays him as evil for it.

Wait. They actually *kiss* in the scene right after that? Even if you loved her, even if you didn't think what Rose did was treacherous, would you *really* kiss someone right in the middle of a battle?!?

Solo

The biggest thing we have to talk about in Solo in L3's droid rights campaign. Because, as I said above, L3 is right... and that's why this is a criticism. The anti-droid racism is so deeply ingrained in Star Wars that I don't think taking it back and sending this message is a viable solution. You just end up with a self-contradicting franchise. Also, if you're going to deliver a message like that with your movie, it needs to be the focus of the movie. You can't just tack on a super heavy moral about how everything in the franchise is wrong and all the goodguys we've rooted for thus far have been wrong.

Next biggest is one of the most horrible sins of storytelling: the protagonist keeps a secret from the audience. I'm talking about the gambit pileup with the coaxium and Enfys Nest. The audience is clearly led to believe that Han was out of cards - just look at his face when he finds out what Beckett did - but he actually saw it all coming (which is arguably it's own plothole) and won anyway.

Don't have POV characters lie to the audience

I for one wasn't sure why Qi'ra couldn't come with Han in the end. Dryson is dead, if someone else takes over the Crimson Dawn they'll have no way of knowing she killed him, and it's clear she really does love Han.

The revelation that Enfys Nest were goodguys was really unsatisfying because there was no foreshadowing of it. They put the heroes in a lost position and then magically turned the villain good.

Let's also mention the scene where Beckett decides to let Han and Chewie onboard after trying to kill Han, and then there's... no conversation about it?!? The tension in the air would be so strong after that that neither of them would be able to resist talking about it if they were real people. This should have been a great scene for letting the characters develop and bond with each other. But the writers skipped it because they weren't interested in their characters.

The dark battle scene in the beginning was all of confusing at the time, unexplained in retrospect, and seemed to have no place in the plot. Why were those people fighting the empire? They're scoundrels, not rebels. If they get caught by the empire they're supposed to flee, not fight what one of them described as a "war".

While it was a huge relief to me that Han didn't end up winning the Falcon in the first Sabaac match, the scene at the end where he does had no place in the story except patching the inconsistency between Solo and ANH. The story was finished before that. Resolved. But the writers realized that they forgot to accomplish one of the core goals of the movie, so instead of going back and revising their plot, they just added a patch scene at the end. Not to mention the cheating thing is a bit unbelievable. Lando was playing with a bunch of other experienced card game players; if he had more of a certain card than was supposed to be in the deck, wouldn't somebody have noticed during the game? In real life experienced poker players count cards.

Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker

I honestly don't feel like writing a whole thing on this one. MauLer's critique covers it so well. The video's 2 hours, and he says a few things I disagree with, but at least 95% of his criticism is valid.

MauLer's critique

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