You are welcome to call it a semantic gloss if it makes you feel better...
Irony.
And you are welcome to call fumbles complications if it makes you feel better, but it doesn't change fundamentally what is going on which is that the roll of a 1 just made the situation markedly worse in some fashion. The roll of the 1 in some fashion empowers the GM to inject something into the fiction which changes the stakes for the worse.
Now, in your Han Solo example one could easily say that Han Solo's Natural 1 does not represent a critical fumble, but a complication introduced by a GM Intrusion. He attempted to open a blast door - rolled a 1 - but the GM decides that his tinkering instead caused a secondary blast door to also seal itself. It's also possible that Han Solo is not rolling Natural 1s and auto-failures in these occasions you list, but is simply failing his checks. Are you sure that Han Solo is rolling a 1?
Of course we can't perfectly equate action within a movie not created as a result of gameplay to action created as a result of any particular game system, so I can't be 'sure' that Han Solo rolls a 1 whenever he tries to hot wire the blast doors. However, the example is I think still perfectly germane.
Han Solo's player proposes to hot wire the blast doors.
The stakes are either the blast doors remain closed or the blast doors open.
The GM sets the difficulty of this action.
Han Solo's player rolls, but no only does he fail, he fails by some margin that indicates a fumble within the system.
The GM inserts a new complication. Not only do the doors remain closed, but now "matters are worse" - a second set of blast doors closes.
This is I think a very good example of GM fictional intrusion in the event of a fumble. In this example, it doesn't matter whether or not the second set of blast doors even existed prior to the fumble - the GM is empowered to create them in response to the fumble result.
And the situation is in context funny, and meant to be funny, and Han - the long suffering, often bumbling, sometimes tortured, sometimes inadvertent hero - becomes to a certain extent the object of ridicule from the audience. This is both the intention of the author - we are meant to laugh at his folly - and a rather unavoidable result of displays of incompetence. But we are also meant to empathize with this 'regular guy' optimistically facing one new impossible challenge after the other without surrender - "Never tell me the odds!" He has his moments of shining awesome to go along with his fumbles.
Now, if it makes 'Hans' player feel better to call his fumbles 'complications', that's fine I guess for marketing, but that's a nod to Han's player's immaturity who apparently wants to believe he only has shining moments of awesome and never bumbling stumbling steps along the way. It's also a bit of self-deception on the part of the GM, who is busy creating fumbles but avoiding all 'negative' language as if somehow failure could be sufficiently padded as to never sting a little. Indeed, if it is the goal to avoid that sting of failure and that sense of bumbling hero in a story that we get when Han makes the problem dramatically worse, one wonders why you have a 'introduce complications on a 1 rule' in the first place. Far from shifting the tone away from a cultural norm surrounding the roll of 1 on a D20 roll, the system is in fact creating a cultural norm where none necessarily existed before. For example, in my D&D 3.X game, it's not even necessarily true that a roll of 1 is anything other than success, and indeed obtaining a degree of skill that provides for autosuccess on simple actions is a rather important part of the game - the player is empowered to propose actions, even stunts, that can't fail. And in many D20 games, rolling a 1 provides no special complication, as the GM is not empowered to intrude into fiction to turn that bad roll into a significant fiction altering event. The roll of a 1 in D&D by default implies no more serious bumbling of an action than throwing up an air ball in a game of basketball.
And yet this is the guy that says of his system:
we don’t want to run games that “punish” players for rolling bad. A GM intrusion isn’t meant to be “punishment”—it’s meant to make things more interesting. But a fumble, for many people, just seems like a moment for everyone to laugh at them, and that’s not always fun
This is nonsense, both as it pertains to Monte's system specifically, and as it pertains to his claim that the roll of a 1 in his system is not a fumble and to the idea of fumbles generally.
Even games without fumbles still punish players for rolling bad. You don't need to roll a 1 to fail a saving throw and die. You don't need a roll a 1 to miss an attack. My current campaign has a PC whose shtick is making magically enhanced attacks and then using True Strike to ensure that investment is not wasted. Not unsurprisingly, his rolls of a 1 stand out especially - not because they generally lead to fumble - but because those 'rare' rolls waste all the investment in resources and preparation he put into the attack. I don't know how many times he's muttered the mantra, "Not a 1... not a 1... not a 1...", only to throw that dreaded 1 and moan in agony.
Yet Monte seems to think that not only should a player not experience that, but in his game which explicitly creates a fumble mechanic on the throw of a 1(!!!), that the game isn't to punish players for bad rolls. This is just epic levels of self-delusion.
You just can't separate out the idea of "punishment" with "making things more interesting" unless the thing that "makes things more interesting" in fact rewards the player. If "makes things more interesting" is to mean in any sense, "Matters just got worse", then of course it punishes the player for failure... and that's perfectly OK! And it's perfectly ok to laugh at failure as well, and to take some pleasure - even as the person enduring the failure - in the resulting consequences. If Monte didn't actually believe that, he would have never created the "introduce complications on a 1" rule in the first place.
To drill this down to the heart of the matter, what Monte is touching on but not actually saying is the idea of "fail forward" explicitly stated in other systems. "Fail forward" is an extremely divisive issue in game design, in part because the term is used to mean slightly different things in different systems. But the way it is often used in discussions of the concept of "complications" is exactly the incoherent way that Monte is doing when he says things like "we don’t want to run games that “punish” players for rolling bad." You'll see advocates for "fail forward" taking it to the extreme of, "failure is bad, so games shouldn't have it". And that's why Monte's essay is generating such controversy, because when you say something like "we don't want to run games that "punish" players for rolling bad", he seems to be validating that extreme "failure is bad, so it's wrong" position that both misunderstands what real problem "fail forward" was originally intended to solve and how essential failure is to an enjoyable game.
Monte's GM insertion mechanic is NOT a true "fail forward" mechanic. It's a true fumble mechanic. The whole, "it doesn't have to be a fumble, because we wouldn't want to have the audience (the other players) laughing at a characters missteps" thing is ridiculous.
