s.i.r.e. posted:

I completely forgot that Yoda was analogous to Rey by being the main character in OT and the films are about his story.

Brother Entropy posted:

what does any of that have to do with the claim that rey proves that anyone can be a wizard even if your parents were muggles

bushisms.txt posted:

The nutrilogy is particularly meta textual about canon between the old and the new.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

No it’s not.

Zoran posted:

To me, this seems like one of those wild misunderstandings that nevertheless penetrated popular culture. Yes, Luke and Leia do turn out to inherit Anakin Skywalker's strength in the Force. In a typical fantasy, this would mean they have a divine right to rule, and the usurper king must be dethroned because he's illegitimate. Instead, Leia becomes a revolutionary—although she starts as an upper-class liberal snob—who opposes the Empire because it's fascist. Luke throws away all his worldly power, refuses to become what his father is, and in so doing inspires Vader to destroy evil. The father dies to redeem the galaxy because the son was willing to do it first.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

Leia is a revolutionary because she's an artiscorat. She wants to restore power to the Senate.

No Mods No Masters posted:

The only way to understand Leia's character is to fully realize and accept just how deeply Hillary she is

Zoran posted:

That’s obviously what she is in A New Hope. By the time of Return of the Jedi, my read is that she is radicalized. Jabba is her mirror image, since he's really nothing more than another aristocrat on a different world. She is enslaved by this figure, and then she kills him with his own tool of oppression.

For the rest of the film, she has no special role in the rebel hierarchy anymore. She doesn’t lead the final battle. She has subsumed herself fully into the cause, and now she is just another foot soldier wearing the same guerrilla outfit as everyone else. Eventually she encounters another oppressed race of people, makes common cause with them, and battles alongside them for their liberation and her own.

The sequels say that Leia ends up as one of the last people still carrying on the fight against fascists, and that actually rings true to me. The part in the old and new EU where she's a high-ranking, vaguely liberal politician does not.

Zoran posted:

My point is that these things change. We don’t ever get a clear picture of the entire Rebellion's ideology, so we can only rely on what we see in the main characters as proxies. Luke ultimately rejects Obi-Wan's goals. Leia gives up the trappings of aristocracy. Han throws away his livelihood for the cause, even when given multiple chances to run away and start up his independent business again.

Zoran posted:

Nobody really gets into this Rebellion for completely selfless reasons, and yet they grow into much better people because of it. And the Rebellion, for its part, becomes a multi-racial coalition that actually does liberate oppressed peoples.

Wheat Loaf posted:

I elaborated on it in the other thread.

Basically, Snoke is in constant pain from his injuries - this is very plain from the film, so much so I'm surprised it hasn't been commented on more often - and wants to be euthanised, but no-one in the First Order would be willing to or capable of doing it and he himself is too fearful of death (again, very plain from both the text of the film and its subtext) to commit suicide.

The reason he is training Kylo is because he wants to create someone powerful enough to put him out of his misery; that's why he says Kylo could be "a new Vader", because Vader killed his master. It's why he wants to find and kill Luke; because, lacking the whole story, he almost certainly believes Luke would try to turn Kylo away from the dark side and thus undo all of his hard work.

When he is describing Kylo's actions, he is in fact describing his own actions. He has become caught up in the moment (as is communicated by his facial expression and his voice) and without even realising it he is turning the lightsaber to kill his true enemy, not realising that he - Snoke - is his own "true enemy", just as Palpatine's overconfidence was his weakness (see Snoke's declarations about how he cannot be beaten and cannot be betrayed).

However, because his mind is clouded by the dark side, he has managed to trick himself into thinking that Kylo is the one controlling the lightsaber even as he is doing it himself, because it is the only way he, with his aforementioned crippling fear of death, can ever commit suicide; by tricking himself into believing that someone else is killing him. The expression he makes when he is stabbed isn't shock at being betrayed by his own apprentice, because that is the expression that people make when they accidentally fatally stab themselves (as described and discussed in sources too numerous to review here).

There's no joshing or anything like that - this is clearly, unequivocally and incontrovertibly what happens in the film.

Zoran posted:

Luke has a non-specific dislike for the Empire that comes across as basically a vague libertarianism.

Wheat Loaf posted:

If the Separatists had won the Clone Wars, the OT would have been about Luke's rise to middle-management in the Trade Federation, realising his career is going nowhere and recruiting Han, Leia, Lando and the rest to start his own rival company. The climactic scene of ESB would have been Skywalker LLC's flotation on the Coruscant Stock Exchange and then ROTJ would be boardroom politics to fend off a leveraged buyout by Palpatine facilitated by Darth Vader's private equity fund.

galagazombie posted:

The politics in the OT are vague enough that all we really know is that the Empire is totalitarian and evil while the Rebels like "freedom" and want to bring back a system that at least called itself democratic. The PT goes more in-depth explicitly showing that at least the "good" noble titles to be fancy names for elected positions like Padme being a Queen who had to get elected and then leave after her term was up. The Separatists are explicitly shown to be made of anti-democratic elements whose raison d'être is to get rid of governments power over big business. While the proto-rebellion is made of Senators disillusioned with the undemocratic turn the Republic itself has taken and make a secret cabal to reform it, which turns into the Rebellion. Funnily enough Bail Organa isn't a King in the prequels, which means he either got elected to Kingship after, or that The Empire has encouraged/forced planets into real-world style monarchies.

galagazombie posted:

The Separatists are explicitly shown to be made of anti-democratic elements whose raison d'être is to get rid of governments power over big business.

Preston Waters posted:

if late '90s Lucas directed the OT instead of late '70s Lucas, we'd have ended up with something not very different than this. Except the climax of the death star blowing up would be the dot com bubble bursting...

Nude Bog Lurker posted:

Are the Separatists shown to be anti-democratic? They're certainly anti-Republic, but the Republic Senate seems to be hazily democratic at best - why does the Trade Federation have a seat?

Nude Bog Lurker posted:

Are the Separatists shown to be anti-democratic? They're certainly anti-Republic, but the Republic Senate seems to be hazily democratic at best - why does the Trade Federation have a seat?

thrawn527 posted:

Preston Waters posted:

Snoke's death was pretty much just a response to all fan speculators on youtube (eg, "IS SNOKE MACE WINDU??!"). It was Rian Johnson screeching the car to a halt and scolding us for being little brats for asking the wrong questions.

bushisms.txt posted:

Yes it is.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Rey has a long succession of parental figures including Luke Skywalker’s brother-in-law, Luke Skywalker’s sister, and Luke Skywalker himself.

People really need to actually watch the movies

bushisms.txt posted:

Both her and kylo hold on to totems of the OT, and kylo is mad hes not the badass he's "supposed to be"(just ask the "hardcore"fans) despite following all the guidelines an uber nerd of the canon has given him.

Wheat Loaf posted:

Presuming you'd be transplanting late 90s Lucas back to the late 70s so he's working on the OT with a PT mindset, it'd probably be all about the 1973 oil hyperfuel crisis and post-Vietnam post-Clone Wars galactic malaise.

Luke would almost certainly promise to bring about "Morning in the Galaxy" at some stage and demand that Mr Palpatine tear down this Death Star.


If you're happy to acknowledge the Clone Wars cartoon, it portrays the Separatists as having its own parliament of elected representatives in opposition to the Republic senate. However, all we ever see in the movies is a ruling council of honest business leaders who only want to extend the prosperity hoarded by the liberal Core Worlds elite to the non-human minorities in the Outer Rim.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

You said that Rey is special because she’s not part of the Skywalker family.

Now you are saying that Rey is a part of the Skywalker family, and this prevents her from being special.

Your thought processes are all disorganized.

bushisms.txt posted:

Both her and kylo hold on to totems of the OT, and kylo is mad hes not the badass he's "supposed to be"(just ask the "hardcore"fans) despite following all the guidelines an uber nerd of the canon has given him.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

Kylo Ren isn't angry because he's not an insecure Star Wars fan. He's angry because his own family tried to murder him in his sleep.

bushisms.txt posted:

It's both.

bushisms.txt posted:

No, I said the nutrilogy is metacommenting on the canon of the franchise. You said she has three parental figures, 2 of which die atoning for doing things the old way, the other almost dies. Rey isn't a part of the family, unless you want to get into fan fiction, and the movie is saying she can still be the hero. She spends two movies waiting for the og heroes to take over because she doesn't believe she has a right to a part in the story.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

Kylo Ren isn't a Star Wars fan. There's no Star Wars franchise that exists within the world of the story for him to be a fan of.

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Your entire ‘metacommentary’ is then based on the bizarre premise that real-world children watched Star Wars and grew horribly depressed because Luke Skywalker isn’t their real-world biological father.

Bholder posted:

Why is it so bad that instead of "I am your father" it's "I am your boyfriend".