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A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.... everything has gone horribly wrong! Today, we are talking about Kathleen Napoleon Kennedy who I nicknamed after that pig from Animal Farm that proclaimed “all animals are now free” before screwing them over. Some of you might be thinking that I am biased. Yeah, I am. This is an article containing the inherent biases of the articlist. Bare in mind that this was from what I could find out about her when I was writing this so please comment if I have missed anything. So yeah, let’s talk about why are being biased towards Kathleen Kennedy today. She deserves it, for God’s sake.
Episode I: The Pandering
A few weeks ago, a new South Park special was released on Paramount +, Joining the Panderverse. Itself covers Disney, Hollywood and the entertainment media industry for shamelessly and thoughtlessly race and gender swapping characters in a weak attempt to pander and virtue signal, a practice I handily referred to as ‘corporate diversity’, as well as issues like A.I. taking over peoples’ jobs, the overuse of Multiverses to lazily bring back characters, and people who react to anything progressive or diverse by screaming ‘woke’ at it. One particular person who has been put into the crosshairs of criticism thanks to the special is Kathleen Kennedy and for good reason. The current president of LucasFilm has been responsible for taking one of the most popular and lucrative franchises of its time and ruining it to bloody heck and, in my professional opinion, her ‘work’ in doing so has inspired those in the industry to take the ball and run to the hills with it. But first thing’s first.
Episode II: The Legacy That Was
Star Wars was once a household name and a worldwide phenomenon. Created by George Lucas, the Original Trilogy told the tale of Jedi Knight and hero Luke Skywalker. From his humble beginnings as a space-farm boy (?) who get embroiled in the war against the Empire, Luke grows to become a powerful Jedi Knight who eventually vanquishes the forces of darkness and brings his father back from his dark fate as Darth Vader. It was brilliant. A fantastic tale of self-discovery that shows that anyone can have the potential to be their own hero and achieve great things. The rather divisive Prequel Trilogy showed much of the backstory of the Star Wars universe as well as told the tale Anakin Skywalker’s beginnings as a slave to his rise to Jedi Knight to his tragic fall from grace. The expanded universe series shows greater depth on the Star Wars universe and the Legacy characters as well as introduced newer characters like Thrawn and Mara Jade, though I can’t really say much on that because I didn’t really read much of that. And even some of the TV series at the time were decent like Clone Wars and Rebels, which took place during and after the events of Star Wars 2 and 3. These days, the Star Wars franchise is a mess of live-action con jobs and Mary Sues, and we can all blame Kathleen Kennedy for her significant part in ruining the whole franchise. Kennedy was placed as the head of Lucasfilm by George Lucas to keep Star Wars from going off the rails. However, she wanted the Force to be ‘female’ and after she taking control of Lucasfilm, she set about manufacturing the template.
Episode III: The Shape of Things to Come
Kathleen Kennedy sided with Bob Iger and rejected George’s story for the Sequel Trilogy as soon as the deal is signed, while also de-canonising the expanded universe. Episode 7, The Force Awakens introduced us to Kennedy’s self-insert character Rey Palpatine (though we wouldn’t know her origins until Episode 9) and while there was some initial interest in her backstory and her apparent connection to the Force, it soon became clear that she was nothing but a walking plot device, easily breezing through any ‘challenge’ she faced. She had intricate knowledge of the Han Solo’s ship the Millennium Falcon despite never even entering it prior to the movie, she easily overpowers Kylo Ren’s Mind Trick powers despite never having any training to control the Force prior to that point and she easily defeats Kylo Ren in a lightsaber duel at the end of the film despite never being trained to wield a lightsaber in the first place. When I first watched that travesty, I watched it because I thought that Kylo Ren was cool. I mean the guy literally stopped a laser blast in midair, for God’s sake. But as the film went on and I saw how pathetic he was, I checked out. Needless to say, I didn’t watch either of the films that came after. From there, things would only get worse and because The Force Awakens was a box office success, Bob Iger stepped back and allowed Kennedy more creative freedom in the sequels. As well as reducing the hopeful and optimistic Luke Skywalker into a shell of his former self, the following two films showed Rey destroying her grandfather Emperor Palpatine whose return completely undermined Anakin’s sacrifice at the end of Episode 6, becoming whatever a ‘Force Dyad’ is, being the cause of the last Skywalker’s demise, appropriating the Skywalker name and going on to ‘rebuilding’ the Jedi Order which was Luke’s storyline before Disney screwed that up. There can be no question. The Sequel Trinity set the tone for this generation, providing a queue that wanna-be Hollywood writers and producers eagerly picked up. Utterly humiliate the characters people loved and replace them with generic, thread-bare, overpowered self-inserts that the audience was supposed to love. I mean Disney and Hollywood is run by Execs who care more about money than quality writing anyway so I guess the snowball effect of the industry’s ruination was always going to happen but it was Kennedy who spear-headed the procedure, enabling everyone else.
Episode IV: The Kennedy Menace
Since then, Kennedy has only doubled down on her agenda, further damaging the Star Wars brand in the process. Created by filmmaker and Star Wars fan Jon Favreau, The Mandalorian was initially a breath of fresh air for Star Wars fans, a series about the titular Mandalorian Din-Djarin who is trusted with the care of Grogu, an infant version of Yoda’s species, and gets embroiled in larger events. At the end of Season 2 when Grogu was handed to a CGI rendered Luke Skywalker to be trained in the ways of the force, something that couldn’t have happened in the Sequel Trilogy, it was speculated that Mandalorian was made to try and write the Sequel Trilogy out of the Star Wars canon. But after Kathleen Kennedy took credit for the series, despite the rumours that she was banned from the set during the making of the series, and using it to maintain her position at LucasFilm, Jon gave all this up and allowed her to meddle in Season 3. After firing Gina Carano and throwing Favreau plans for the Mandoverse out the window, Kennedy pretty much undid what the show was building towards, hastily reuniting Grogu with Din-Djarin and sidelining the titular Mandalorian in favour of the well-established character from Rebels tragically turned into another self-insert girl boss, Bo-Katan. Since then, Kennedy would go from strength to strength, further pusher her influence on the company and the franchises under it. Boba Fett was consistently sidelined by his sidekick in his own show. The Kenobi series, which shouldn’t even exist as a concept in my option, sidelined the character the show is named after in favour of Reva, a heroine so memorable that I had to look her name up. Both Willow and Indiana Jones were humiliated and sidelined for apparent sorceress Elora Danan and Jones’ apparent goddaughter Helena Shaw respectably. The Ahsoka series was just a boring mess around and managed to ruin a well-written character from Clone Wars/Rebels that had a decent following. Oh, and we will soon have another Star Wars film featuring Rey Palpatine! Yay…… All of this leading to the part when the South Park special that called out Hollywood’s bollocks came out.
Episode V: Gina Carano Strikes Back
Thanks to the South Park special, Kathleen Kennedy has become a complete joke though you could argue that she was already a joke to begin with. Its just that that joke is now being shown to a larger audience. The phrase “put a chick in it, make her lame and gay” has become a meme as it shows how lazy and how much of a nothing Corporate Diversity is. Suffice to say, Kennedy reportedly did not take the special that portrayed her as a sympathetic but slightly disconnected executive well. Anyway, a day after the special came out, Gina Carano came out with a lengthy tweet blasting Kennedy for a variety of things including making her sit in a Zoom call with 40-something man-children screaming at her. Jesus. After corporate mouthpieces tried to claim that she was insane, she fired back with a very lengthy twitter post calling them out for acting like Disney’s guard dogs in a sense, barking and snapping at anyone who dares criticise them. She also criticised Disney’s management for how far the company has fallen. The tweets speak for themselves and I recommend reading them, but I wonder if those aforemented corporate shills thought that daddy Disney will ever give them head pats. Funny how Disney crows so much about how strong and independent girl bosses are while also attacking an actor who is actually strong and independent because she called them out of their bollocks. Its almost as if corporate pandering towards minorities is inherently toothless. South Park was the domino to fall so to speak and with rumours that Gina has receipts on Kennedy’s past behaviour while she’s the head of the company, I suspect that it won’t be the last.
Episode VI: Hindsight is 20/20
Frankly, Kennedy would’ve had a better career at LucasFilm taking notes and making coffees. Kathleen Kennedy has gotten to the position she was in because she used her connections to her father and later her husband to put her name on projects she had little to no creative input in and after she became the head of the company, it’s become more and more clear that she has no real understanding of Star Wars, let alone anything else the company has made. EA failing to produce anything of quality while the franchise was at its high was nothing compared to the sheer incompetence on display here. Star Wars was once a universe full of story and lore enough to appeal to audiences everywhere but because this embarrassment of a studio head was so creatively bankrupt, she mismanaged a multi-billion dollar franchise to the point when barely anyone gives a damn anymore. I am not saying that she was intentionally trying to sink Lucasfilm. Like her South Park counterpart, I’m sure that she had the best of intentions when she took control of the company. But as the president of a studio with 2 household names under its belt, she tripped over herself to make the degradation of modern entertainment standard and ensured that it would only get worse from 2015 till now. And she didn’t have to contribute to the industry’s ruination. She could’ve -and should’ve- stuck with George Lucas’ original vision since he, you know, made the franchise in the first place. But instead, she chose to indulge in her baser instincts and push her agenda at the expense of the franchise itself. “Put a chick in it, make her lame and gay.” This is the mantra of the current entertainment media industry. This is and always will be her legacy. A legacy of mismanagement, hubris and eventual failure.
Now, I know that some of you reading this are thinking that I am overblowing it. You’re thinking that it is ridiculous to assert that Kathleen Kennedy is why many movies and TV shows, even those outside of Disney, are terribly written, and I agree with you. It is ridiculous, especially since there are many amateur writers as well as execs who are more directly responsible for many of those things (looking at you, Bob Iger). However, when you look at many of these strong female characters we see in modern products share much of the same DNA as Ray Palpatine. And while correlation isn’t causation, given that Force Awakens and The Last Jedi were released in 2015 and 2017 respectively, combined with how popular and influential Star Wars was at the time, the notion that it was Kennedy who kick-started this girl-boss trend isn’t entirely out of the question. As always, please share this journal entry if you want to. You don't have to, but I and others would appreciate it if you did. If you have your own opinions on this, or if you have something to add to this, please comment below. And please check my other journal entries I made. They're made especially for you. Thank you for your concern.