While the latest chapter in the Star Wars saga may have been the darling of the box office this past weekend, it was not coming up roses when it comes to its Rotten Tomatoes audience score. With a critic approval rating up at 92% and a user rating at 54%, the discrepancy raised a few eyebrows. Now, an alt-right group is taking responsibility for this backlash, supposedly using bots to attack the film over a "feminist agenda."
As per The Huffington Post, a Facebook page titled Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys is claiming responsibility for the porous audience score, claiming that the attack was a concerted effort to fight back against, among other things, the franchise's effort to introduce more female characters into the mix. In a message exchange with the news outlet, a representative of the group cited the character of Poe Dameron, played in the movie by Oscar Isaac, as a “victim of the anti-mansplaining movement." Furthermore, he claimed that Poe and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) are in danger of being turned "gay" as a result.
“There were supposed to be a trilogy of books and then some after set in the Legends canon," the unnamed Facebook page rep continued. "But [Lucasfilm executives] Kathleen Kennedy and Pablo Hidalgo wanted to pursue their own feminst [sic] agenda,” he wrote, adding later, “I was never going to like The Last Jedi anyway because [it] erases everything the [Expanded Universe] ever did."
For those wondering if the gripes about the EU rub-off is for real or not: in 2014, a Lucasfilm statement clarified that the series' creator George Lucas “always made it clear that he was not beholden to the EU. He set the films he created as the canon.”