ambiguous.

A former staff engineer, who recently left Tumblr and asked to remain anonymous for professional reasons, tells Vox that the NSFW ban was “in the works for about six months as an official project,” adding that it was given additional resources and named “Project X” in September, shortly before it was announced to the rest of the company at an all-hands meeting. “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway,” the former engineer told me. “Verizon pushed it out the door after the child pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn.

Porn on Tumblr is something Verizon needs to wipe out if it’s going to make any money off what it thinks is actually valuable about the platform — enormous fandom and social justice communities that, just before the Verizon acquisition, Khalaf was insisting the staff figure out how to better monetize.

On that note-

Vulture reports on why Colin Trevorrow left Episode IX – per “speculation from a ranking Hollywood movie insider with direct knowledge of the productions on both The Book of Henry and Jurassic World” – that the director’s ego might have gotten in the way. Basically – do not mess with Kathleen Kennedy.

“When the reviews for Book of Henry came out, there was immediately conjecture that Kathy was going to dump him because they weren’t thrilled with working with him anyway,” the executive continues. “He’s a difficult guy. He’s really, really, really confident. Let’s call it that.”

Kennedy is in an unprecedented position in Hollywood for a woman. She is in control of the entirety of the Star Wars franchise—what movies are made, what stories are told, what merchandise is sold—and she is the final authority. Disney will no doubt replace her the minute the franchise stumbles, but the past two movies have gotten good reviews and staggering box office numbers and The Last Jedi looks to be just as successful, so she is, for now, in one of the safest spots in Hollywood. The last female executive with that kind of power was probably Lucille Ball.

Which means that if you are part of the franchise, you answer to Kennedy and moreover you have to play by her rules. The stories have to get her buy-in, the actors have to get her approval, and the directors have to behave the way she expects them to. And it’s very apparent that Gareth Edwards, Josh, Trank, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and now Colin Treverrow have all fallen short of those expectations in one way or another. (You may say to yourself “wait a minute, Gareth Edwards wasn’t fired!” To which I will reply, “lol.”)

Now, nothing hugely out of the ordinary has been reported in re: Edwards or Trank or Lord & Miller or Trevorrow’s antics — mostly it’s been stuff like “ego” or unprofessional behavior or whatnot. But that’s exactly my point: white male directors are, for the first time, being fired over things that they should have been getting fired for years ago.

Hollywood is far too enamored of the genius auteur trope (and Kennedy is no exception, hence why she hired these dudes in the first place) and indulges the most horrifying behavior from the men it deems “visionary.” Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Mel Gibson, Sean Penn, Johnny Depp, David O. Russell: men with long and ugly histories are venerated without a second thought, so much so that the ones who are merely outrageous don’t even ping the radar. Rupert Sanders has an affair with Kristen Stewart and gets her booted out of the sequel to “Snow White” (when Stewart played the title character); Jennifer Lawrence tears her diaphragm hyperventilating while filming Darren Aronofsky’s latest whatever-the-fuck thing “mother” is gonna turn out to be; Lars Von Trier…continues to be himself. None of it raises an eyebrow (with the exception of the Sanders/Stewart fling, but that’s because people blamed Stewart, who was 21, for seducing Sanders, who was 40) and all of those men have very successful careers. Being an asshole is perfectly acceptable — everywhere else but Star Wars.

On Star Wars, Kennedy is holding the directors she hires to a very basic standard of professionalism and none of them are able to handle it; and for the first time in their lives, they’re actually suffering the consequences. Bad scripts are thrown out and writers replaced; bad dailies and reports of cast unhappiness get directors the boot. It’s astonishing — but it shouldn’t be. There’s no indication that Kennedy is too demanding or that her standards are too high; but there’s every indication that these dudes have been getting away with absolute murder on their other sets.