Turns Out Palpatine Never Banged Anyone, Or, Why Addressing “Plotholes” Always Fucking Backfires

It’s May the 4th, and may the force be with us all. There’s a bunch of great Star Wars games you can buy from Humble Bundle and put some positivity back into the world, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is coming to an immensely satisfying conclusion, and *checks notes* we’ve confirmed that Sheev Palpatine never had sex with anybody and you can stop asking questions about it.

Ever since J.J Abrams release Rise of Skywalker into the world and completely retconned Rey’s parentage to be “she is related to a man who is strong so please stop sending us hate mail, fan boys”, one question has plagued us all; who the fuck would fuck Emperor Palpatine?

As AV Club points out, the old Star Wars novels make explicit mention of Palpatine having concubines and mistresses, but Disney retconned all that stuff out of the murky gray area of canon it existed in. The novelization of Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker is filling in the story beats and questions that probably didn’t need to answered, but people had questions after the movie, so they’re gonna be answered anyway.

How did Palpatine survive get yeeted down a fucking hole into a reactor? HE MADE A CLONE! Who is Rey’s father? A FAILED CLONE! Nothing to see here, no icky implications about the emperor banging anyone and fathering a child and all the shit that would entail.

Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker is a bad movie, and it is a bad movie primarily because it spends it’s entire run time answering questions and fixing issues that a subset of fanboys had with The Last Jedi. The movie is all plot and no character development. We barely get to see our heroes or our villians feeling anything, as the entire movie is just “go here, get the thing, get some exposition, retcon TLJ, have a fight scene, go to the next place, repeat” until the damn movie ends almost three hours later. It’s a direct result of the filmmakers being so spooked by TLJ’s changing of the status quo and angry fans that they just up and forgot to make a movie that is about anything.

Rise of Skywalker is not a sequel to TLJ. Hell, it’s not even a sequel to The Force Awakens, or any of the other movies in the series. It’s a series of answered questions that just begs more fucking questions. It’s like if they took the midichlorian scene from The Phantom Menace and wrote an entire movie like that.

We wouldn’t have to be thinking about whether Palpatine banged anyone if Rey had just been the daughter of average people. We wouldn’t have to wonder why Rey kissed Kylo Ren after he’s murdered what has to be millions of people if they hadn’t been hell bent on redeeming Kylo Ren. We wouldn’t have a kiss between two unnamed characters smushed into the bottom fourth of a screen because you want gay characters, but you don’t want it to be Finn and Poe. We wouldn’t still be stinging that one of the characters essentially got put on a bus for most of the film so sexists and racists maybe wouldn’t be so angry .

But because Disney and Abrams looked at the reaction to TLJ and decided it had to do a severe course correction, they crafted a movie that answers all the questions, which naturally only leads to more questions, which only leads to the creators having to figure out how to answer those same questions all over again.

It’s one of the more annoying aspects of Disney’s recent output. Because a small cottage injury has started up around “plotholes” in movies, Disney’s efforts (particularly their live action adaptations of children;s classics) keep having to stop the story so the characters can talk at length about a plot point Cinema Sins dinged.

“Why don’t any of the Disney princesses have moms?” BOOM, here’s a 10 minute detour in Beauty in the Beast where Belle learns about how her mother die that does nothing to advance the plot or the character. “Why do all the Disney princesses need a man to validate them?”. SHAZAM, here’s Jasmine singing an entirely new original song about being an independent woman who don’t need no man that completely ignores the fact that the whole reasons she runs away is because she already knows she’s an independent woman who don’t needs no man and they take away basically all of her character development and make her more of a damsel in the live action one and literally the whole animated movie is about how Jasmine is increasingly pissed off at this series of men determining her fate instead of just asking what she wants and giving it to her, oh my God people don’t even pay attention to these movies, do they!? Pay no attention the fact that the movie just stopped cold for 5 minutes so Jasmine can sing how she feels after showing us how she feels 15 minutes ago.

One of the best parts of Avengers: Endgame, to me anyways, is the part where they discuss time travel, and it becomes increasingly clear that the entire concept of them traveling back in time doesn’t make sense, and then the movie just lets it not make sense because this a movie about Paul Rudd being able to turn into a man the size of a skyscraper because something something Pym Particles. I’ve always enjoyed how the MCU doesn’t get bogged down in explaining unimportant shit, and how it doesn’t go out of it’s way to fix it’s own plotholes, and that if they do fix one, they at least make it clear that said plothole makes no sense, because ultimately it doesn’t fucking matter. Treating your audience like a bunch of dumb morons who can’t pay attention is why screenwriters keep making movies about Bruce Wayne’s origin story even though your three year old child can probably tell you how Batman became fucking Batman. I don’t need to see Martha Wayne’s pearls hitting the fucking pavement, he’s fucking Batman. He’s got the most recognizable and retell-able superhero origin story this side of Superman, Spider-Man and Jesus Christ.

It’s nice that Star Wars is going on a bit of a hiatus from the big screen, so that maybe Disney can come to grips with the fact that trying to please an unpleasable portion of an immense fanbase is a pointless endeavor. Fans hated the prequel trilogy and now say it’s better than the sequel trilogy, which just from a filmmaking and story perspective, even if you hate Rise of Skywalker, is fundamentally untrue.

You can’t please people who don’t want to be pleased. Next time, just work on making a good movie, so we don’t have to think about the most evil person in the galaxy not named Donald Trump sleeping with someone.

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About KC Complains A Lot 135 Articles
KC Complains A Lot is another refugee from Deadspin. He enjoys writing and not caving to pressure from herbs.

9 Comments

  1. On the other hand, ugly troll and unindicted war criminal Henry Kissinger got laid a lot so being evil and having power can get you laid.

    • Honestly, a way more interesting plot point that could be expounded on in a new movie would be that Palpatine indeed does have a wife out there and that she is trying to bring back the Empire she feels she has the right to lead and a new ragtag group of rebels would have to stop her…

      But a bunch of people were all “EWW, GROSS, WHO WOULD WILLINGLY HAVE SEX WITH PALPATINE!”, as if we don’t have an example of an ugly bag of deranged, sentient orange skin who has procreated several times with several different women in the White House. So instead it’s just CLONES, CLONES, AND, MORE CLONES!

      Who is Snoke? One of a series of failed clones. Who is Rey’s father? A failed clone. How did Palpatine survive? A clone. Shit, even *Rey* is basically a clone, since Palpatine can just use Force magic to take over her body and live forever.

      There were ways to kinda sort of make Palpatine being Rey’s grandfather interesting I mean if the Palpatines and the Skywalkers really are doomed to Do This Forever, planting the seed that yes, there is a family tree of Palpatines out there just waiting to fuck shit up and her Dad just so happened to not be completely evil is a more intriguing plotpoint than “something something science, something something dark side something unnatural something clones something”. But that would’ve grown or progressed the characters in some sort of way, so that was a no go.

      • It seems no one in the Star Wars universe has sex… except maybe Han and Leia.

        Some (or a lot of folks) pointed out that the Star Wars universe was mostly a boys club. Probably why a lot of moron Incel Star Wars fans are shrieking about ladies playing with their Star Wars figures and toys now.

        One thing I would like to see end is that with trillions of beings in the galaxy far far away why only one or two families get to control its destiny?

  2. …from your lips to the mouse’s ears

    …admittedly the odds aren’t all that much better than prayer but you’d get a solid amen from me

  3. Even though I already wished everyone a Happy May the Fourth in the coffee break thread – I’m going to do it again here because you can never watch this clip too many times.

  4. It’s my opinion that if your media product requires someone to read or watch another media product to understand it, then your product is garbage. I don’t care what the director’s cut is, I don’t care about that interview you gave ti MediaSpin.com. you put out a product for me to consume and it was bad. I especially don’t want to engage with the fanboy/fangirl who cared enough to consume that external media and wants to correct me based on that encyclopedic knowledge.

    I’m not a Star Wars fan and I’ve never watched a full Star Wars film. But I worked at a movie theater when Force Awakens came out and that’s more than enough for me. The absolute hysteria that movie produced from fans coming in to see it gives me PTSD.

    My Being Online, though, has determined that JJ Abrams and Disney really screwed over Rian Johnson who was probably doing exactly what they did, or didn’t tell him to do :create new content, bring in new fans. You can find any number of essays about why it’s important for Rey to have “nobodies” as parents but having her be the child of a clone? Making her Palpatine’s biological daughter? was somehow more profitable than the alternative.

    Disney knows by now how to manufacture controversy and they have willing participants in the people who will consume their products uncritically. And because they own something like 30% of all media produced, we’ll have no respite from their shenanigans. It doesn’t matter to them if their films art artistically bankrupt as long as they remain profitable.

    • It’s just leaving money on the table.

      You’ve got young girls with parents buying them lightsabers and Halloween costumes and pouring money into your coffers, and you let the small contingent of dickheads who will hate whatever you create destroy all that good will.

      Rise of the Skywalker is the ultimate example of a multi-million dollar corporation bending to the will of the few angry white men instead of making metric fucktons of money by ignoring them and making bank off every one else. Even from the most cynical, most capitalistic viewpoint, it makes no sense to look at the amount of money The Last Jedi made and then decide to make the movie they did.

      The only excuse is that white, cissexual patriarchy is the goddamn worse, and it ruins everything.

      • Along with the white supremacy, I imagine that Disney is still under the impression that girls, women, and POC aren’t buying merch. Which has been proven false. More than that, it’s my experience that female fans will provide tons of free advertising by making art and actually engaging with the text of the thing; even if it’s as wrong footed as male nerds, Tumblr discourse was worth millions of dollars at some point precisely because it was a place for people to engage in extensive, exhausting discussions of a franchise. Tangentially , I don’t know how Disney could see the reaction to Black Panther and decide that Finn should be in the background for the rest of the franchise.

        When Force Awakens was first advertised, they made it seem as though Finn would be *the* main character, or would at least be equal to Rey. Two missed opportunities. And of course, there’s what happened to Kelly Marie Tran.

        Disney is very much are interested in aligning with the “wholesome” conservative content that makes conservative Americans happy and they’re more than willing to to give China what it wants. The intersection of that is pew pew lasers for white people and gay kissing that can easily be edited out when needed.

        And a big fuck you to JJ Abrams who is certainly not as clever as he thinks he is and he is certainly not worth the money they pay him.

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