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Defiance Industries
Jul 22, 2010

A five-star manufacturer


Thrawn mostly works because Zahn is a more clever writer than most of the people doing a Star War. That's all there is to it, really. Anderson tried to do exactly the same thing with Daala and she's a joke.

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Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

Thrawn was absolutely Space Rommel in every way, and I don't think that's a knock against him in most of his appearances because in most of his appearances he's still just a villain who is ultimately trying to oppress people and curtail their freedoms, if one thats a bit more noble and likable and thus kind of tragic than typical for Imperials. But yes, the retcon concerning the Vong and the Empire being created to oppose them is beyond stupid in a thousand ways, not the least being that it ascribes altruism to Palpatine's motives. The fact that the Actual Nazi contingent of the Star Wars fanbase continues to parrot this talking point which is easily debunked using in-universe facts is one of the many reasons I don't engage with the Star Wars Fandom anymore.

Say what you will about the Post-Disney Star Wars Universe, but they sure as gently caress understand that the Empire was 100% bad all the way, period, and aren't constantly trying to rehabilitate it somehow because Stormtroopers are just so neato.

Sanguinia fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Feb 14, 2021

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


nothing about palpatine was altruistic even with the vong looming, imo. at most, it justifies the creation of stupid poo poo like the death star but obviously does not justify its use as an internal terror weapon or the empire's overall fascism

Up Circle
Apr 3, 2008
zahn and whoever wrote kotor 2 using the exact same retcon to the motivations for thrawn/revan within a few years of each other felt like it should have been considered plagiarism

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

I think technically the sources that retcon Palpatine into knowing about and planning for the Vong invasion also go further to say that he was planning to conquer the whole of the galaxy and then use it to conquer the further reaches of the universe, but definitely that's a few steps further than he managed to get. I guess you always gotta have goals to reach for.

karmicknight
Aug 21, 2011
I forget what book it was in, maybe the bug trilogy or somewhere within the NJO series, but there is deffo an exchange between a surviving space nazi and like han solo, where the nazi opines "if only the empire had been around to stop the vong" and getting told "no, the empire was a bunch a stupid gently caress ups. they would have built a superweapon that then blew up and got themselves killed. idiots"

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

The thing I always come back to is how much of the Imperial military was devoted entirely to maintaining its police state. There were like three of four Star Destroyers maintaining garrison on loving TATOOINE. Who thinks that there's NOT going to be internal revolt DURING the Vong Invasion if the Empire is still in power?

Sir DonkeyPunch
Mar 23, 2007

I didn't hear no bell

reignofevil posted:

I've read the saga of seven suns buddy, no dice.

THANK YOU

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Sanguinia posted:

The thing I always come back to is how much of the Imperial military was devoted entirely to maintaining its police state. There were like three of four Star Destroyers maintaining garrison on loving TATOOINE. Who thinks that there's NOT going to be internal revolt DURING the Vong Invasion if the Empire is still in power?

big "two intelligence officers for every civilian" vibes

e: Wookiepedia says that Tatooine has has between 80k and 200k people living on it, so that garrison force would be 111k to 148k, which, yes this is very silly speculation etc but is also very funny

Tulip fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Feb 15, 2021

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl
weren't the impstars at Tatooine because of Leia and the Death Star plans? like there's nothing saying just because we only saw Vader's ship grabbing the Tantive IV that his was the only ship involved in the pursuit.

karmicknight
Aug 21, 2011
Yeah Solo specifically big ups "not your local patrols, I'm talking the big corellian ships"

Polaron
Oct 13, 2010

The Oncoming Storm

karmicknight posted:

I forget what book it was in, maybe the bug trilogy or somewhere within the NJO series, but there is deffo an exchange between a surviving space nazi and like han solo, where the nazi opines "if only the empire had been around to stop the vong" and getting told "no, the empire was a bunch a stupid gently caress ups. they would have built a superweapon that then blew up and got themselves killed. idiots"

"That's not what The Empire would have done, Commander. What the Empire would have done was build a super-colossal Yuuzhan Vong-killing battle machine. They would have called it the Nova Colossus or the Galaxy Destructor or the Nostril of Palpatine or something equally grandiose. They would have spent billions of credits, employed thousands of contractors and subcontractors, and equipped it with the latest in death-dealing technology. And you know what would have happened? It wouldn't have worked. They'd forget to bolt down a metal plate over an access hatch leading to the main reactors, or some other mistake, and a hotshot enemy pilot would drop a bomb down there and blow the whole thing up. Now that's what the Empire would have done."

reignofevil
Nov 7, 2008
Edit- I got beaten like a badly behaved bantha

reignofevil
Nov 7, 2008
The EU books may have gotten a poo poo ton wrong but one thing they mostly had figured out was that the Bad Guys should be portrayed as gigantic wasteful morons and that if the Good Guys aren't building gigantic planet destroying superweapons it's not because the idea never occurred to them, it's because they aren't gigantic loving idiots. You know, people you can root for!

Cornwind Evil
Dec 14, 2004


The undisputed world champion of wrestling effortposting
Speaking of 'The Empire is a bunch of incompetent shits' makes me think of something I noticed about the Bane line of Sith.

Bane's whole idea was 'Too many Sith weakens them, it allows weaker Sith to gang up on and kill stronger ones, then they fall apart etc etc", ergo there could only be two, and either the apprentice would surpass the master or there would be constant dead apprentices until they did, and eventually there would be a strong enough Sith to destroy the Jedi.

Except the Bane-line Sith who get the majority of the attention, or did, NONE of them followed Bane's plan. Bane's own apprentice Zannah was content to just wait for Bane to die of old age (which assumingly would be the safeguard if the master died before a selected apprentice was ready): Bane had to force her hand and during the process he used an attempted Dark Side possession technique that if it had worked would have overwritten Zannah's mind (it was in fact written that it might have worked, though I think the official line was that it didn't, but Zannah picked up some of Bane's traits in fighting off the possession). Skip ahead to near the films' times: Darth Plagueis' master wanted to basically turn himself into a swarm of memetic bacteria or something to constantly recreate his body and hence live forever, Plagueis of course wanted to be immortal, and Sidious/Palpatine wanted to clone himself; none of them followed the idea that they would either destroy the Jedi or be another stair on the path to this.

Which of course makes sense, because to be a Sith is to be a selfish rear end in a top hat. Bane was trying to herd the proverbial mass of cats.

Defiance Industries
Jul 22, 2010

A five-star manufacturer


I believe that swarm of microbes was called maxi-clorians

reignofevil
Nov 7, 2008
One problem is that Darth Bane's entire schtick was written after George Lucas had done all his contributing so that half ain't gonna line up and then Disney did not give even a single rats rear end about it so that half ain't gonna line up either.

Name Change
Oct 9, 2005


Cornwind Evil posted:

Speaking of 'The Empire is a bunch of incompetent shits' makes me think of something I noticed about the Bane line of Sith.

Bane's whole idea was 'Too many Sith weakens them, it allows weaker Sith to gang up on and kill stronger ones, then they fall apart etc etc", ergo there could only be two, and either the apprentice would surpass the master or there would be constant dead apprentices until they did, and eventually there would be a strong enough Sith to destroy the Jedi.

Except the Bane-line Sith who get the majority of the attention, or did, NONE of them followed Bane's plan. Bane's own apprentice Zannah was content to just wait for Bane to die of old age (which assumingly would be the safeguard if the master died before a selected apprentice was ready): Bane had to force her hand and during the process he used an attempted Dark Side possession technique that if it had worked would have overwritten Zannah's mind (it was in fact written that it might have worked, though I think the official line was that it didn't, but Zannah picked up some of Bane's traits in fighting off the possession). Skip ahead to near the films' times: Darth Plagueis' master wanted to basically turn himself into a swarm of memetic bacteria or something to constantly recreate his body and hence live forever, Plagueis of course wanted to be immortal, and Sidious/Palpatine wanted to clone himself; none of them followed the idea that they would either destroy the Jedi or be another stair on the path to this.

Which of course makes sense, because to be a Sith is to be a selfish rear end in a top hat. Bane was trying to herd the proverbial mass of cats.

Also according to the EU and even the shows, both Sidious and Vader had a bunch of semi-secret apprentices who totally weren't Sith, no really.

This ranged from people who were being groomed to help each Sith kill off the other, to an entire dojo of inquisikids

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Defiance Industries posted:

Thrawn mostly works because Zahn is a more clever writer than most of the people doing a Star War. That's all there is to it, really. Anderson tried to do exactly the same thing with Daala and she's a joke.

Yeah, Zahn also understood that Thrawn was a bad guy no matter how appealing he may have looked. I still remember one of Princess Leia's thoughts in the original trilogy that introduced Thrawn about him. "Thrawn would smile, and speak politely, and take her children away". Kinda answered the whole "good or bad guy" question right there I think.

Sodomy Hussein posted:

Also according to the EU and even the shows, both Sidious and Vader had a bunch of semi-secret apprentices who totally weren't Sith, no really.

This ranged from people who were being groomed to help each Sith kill off the other, to an entire dojo of inquisikids

Yeah, they dangled the whole "show yourself better than my apprentice/help me kill my master and you can be a Sith too!" thing to get a bunch of willing patsies. Which makes a certain sense, having long gaps training up a new Sith would be very dangerous to the Rule Of Two if something killed the survivor while he was alone, so better to have a replacement for a dead apprentice near to hand once an opening emerges. And hey, if one of your attack dogs happens to wind up stronger than your current apprentice and kills him, you get an instant upgrade without having to lift a finger. Can't even say it doesn't fit the movies since it sure explains the Vader and the Emperor both working on Luke, each with a very different idea whose apprentice he would be.

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


the inquisitors are not sith because they were not given access to the religious aspect of force training, in the same way that anakin wouldn't have been a jedi if qui-gon had just taught him how to access the force consciously and then left

for an inquisitor, the dark side is a tool. for folks like ol' sheevy p it's a lifestyle

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

The Sith cheat and break rules a lot. Inquisitors are in theory supposed to get less training than proper Sith, but they can still go rogue if you're not careful. Happened with Darth Maul, happened with Dooku's secret apprentice, Palpatine made Dooku get rid of Ventress.

At the very least, the rule means that wherever you find one Sith, there's another Sith hiding right behind them.

indigi
Jul 20, 2004

how can we not talk about family
when family's all that we got?
if Vader managed to kill Sheev the empire would collapse within like a year, he’s got absolutely no political savvy and seemingly no allies anywhere. it’d be a free for all

OctoberCountry
Oct 9, 2012

SlothfulCobra posted:

My introduction to Luke's Jedi academy was the Junior Jedi Knight books, that I read after I ran out of Jedi Apprentice books. I think they were for a lower reading level than I was used to, and they basically amounted to your standard kids wandering off to find an amazing world kids' story like the magic treehouse books, but they still had some notable bits.



The books focused on Anakin Solo who was mostly in a class by himself because he was so much younger than Luke's first batch of kids. His one classmate was Tahiri, an orphan girl from Tatooine.

That little chinchilla thing is actually an ancient jedi master named Ikrit who they found hibernating in the Palace of Woolamander. He missed out on the Jedi purges by sleeping for 400 years. He was there because he found the golden globe behind him which is filled with the tortured souls of Massassi children that were imprisoned by an even more ancient sith lord to harvest their power. Only a force-sensitive child could safely touch the globe to release the souls though, so instead of...going back to Coruscant to get some younglings, he just decided to wait until some came his way.

Man, thos just reminds me that Tahiri ended up having one of the most hosed up character arcs in the EU

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

OctoberCountry posted:

Man, thos just reminds me that Tahiri ended up having one of the most hosed up character arcs in the EU

It’s true, they really put her through the wringer. It would almost have been artistically courageous how much conflict she goes through if not for the fact that it mostly happened because nobody could decide what they wanted to do with her so they just bounced her from trauma to trauma as window dressing to other characters’ arcs

OctoberCountry
Oct 9, 2012

skasion posted:

It’s true, they really put her through the wringer. It would almost have been artistically courageous how much conflict she goes through if not for the fact that it mostly happened because nobody could decide what they wanted to do with her so they just bounced her from trauma to trauma as window dressing to other characters’ arcs

Troy Denning seemed to really have a thing for torturing and mutilating female characters

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?

OctoberCountry posted:

Troy Denning seemed to really have a thing for torturing and mutilating female characters

Yeah he was obviously a complete creep and it bums me out how much work he kept getting. First Star Wars book I read that made me put it down in disgust was the beginning of the NJO book he did where scantily clad exotic dancer gets her face melted off with acid in the opening chapter. I mean I guess it’s not that far from Return of the Jedi feeding scantily clad exotic dancer to a monster just offscreen, but it’s too far, all the same.

Cornwind Evil
Dec 14, 2004


The undisputed world champion of wrestling effortposting

indigi posted:

if Vader managed to kill Sheev the empire would collapse within like a year, he’s got absolutely no political savvy and seemingly no allies anywhere. it’d be a free for all

In theory, that would be fine. Bane's whole endgame plan was 'create a Sith that would destroy the Jedi'. Sidious did that, more or less. Maybe at that time it would be time for something new.

Or maybe not. Wasn't there some bit with the 150 years later stories where the Sith Lord who had gone back to having a larger group under him spoke with Bane via a holocron and Bane was basically "You hosed it all up, you jackass."? Then again, by then it was clear the Jedi would JUST NOT GO AWAY no matter how hard you broke them, so...

Which makes me think of how confusing holocrons are. They're supposed to basically be Star Wars flashdrives, except it seems they also have a copy of their main user's mind and you can basically talk to the OG user even if they've been dead for eons.

Cornwind Evil fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Feb 22, 2021

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


nah the flash drive thing comes from games and a few authors misunderstanding them. holocrons are force-tech, like lightsabers; you have to be a force-sensitive to create one and imprint your personality onto it. it's kind of like making a force ghost before you're actually dead, and having it possess the holocron. like callista, except as far as i know luke never wanted to gently caress a holocron (just a regular computer)

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

Jedi holocrons are cubes, but Sith holocrons are pyramids. That's all I know for sure.

In Rebels they came up with the idea that if you use two of them together then you can answer any question in the universe, but they'll also explode, which seemed really dumb to me.

indigi
Jul 20, 2004

how can we not talk about family
when family's all that we got?

Cornwind Evil posted:

Then again, by then it was clear the Jedi would JUST NOT GO AWAY no matter how hard you broke them, so...

you'd think at some point over the millennia someone would realize this happens for both sides

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008
Probation
Can't post for 15 hours!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzk78aItaUQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG6ftV2bz2E

Polaron
Oct 13, 2010

The Oncoming Storm

She's not wrong.

Cornwind Evil
Dec 14, 2004


The undisputed world champion of wrestling effortposting
Another thing my friend pointed out to me.

The fact that Lucas was more or less writing by the seat of his pants and never actually intended to have a nine film storyline managed to be worked around in some cases (Obi-Wan said Yoda trained him, we see Yoda training a bunch of Jedi children so assumingly Obi-Wan was trained by Yoda that way, Darth Vader killed Luke's father, by accepting the dark side Anakin Skywalker DID die, etc), but in less than twenty years the Jedi went from being everywhere to basically unknown. Han Solo thinks they're a myth. Maybe that could be explained away that those born around the time don't know, but Han strikes me to have been at least a young child if not a pre-teen when Palpatine took over. It only took twenty years for the Jedi to be erased from history? On a galactic-wide civilization scale?

If they ever remake the 9 film core series, they should try doing it from an organic starting standpoint instead of having to write around what was already established.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

That's a reason to not bother trying to treat sith ideology like it's a serious idea worth considering because they're all evil jerks who think they're gonna be the ones to take control of the system instead of being devoured by it.

Kinda like real fascism, except real-world fascists often try to teach the lower-down followers some kind of subservience instead of being power-hungry, which I guess Palpatine got right.

I think in the emperor clone stories they implied that the emperor's soul couldn't be distributed between bodies at once, and then in the stories where Jedi get cloned without Palpatine's weird soul-transfer technique get more and more unstable. Also all of those stories were terrible, best not to mess with cloning magic.

Cornwind Evil posted:

in less than twenty years the Jedi went from being everywhere to basically unknown. Han Solo thinks they're a myth.

The biggest line of reasoning I've seen is that Jedi weren't necessarily all that common throughout the galaxy. There are plenty of planets where Jedi almost never visit, and especially during the clone wars, all the Jedi were busy fighting the war and even less visible to the common man.

But also if the Empire is doing their best to suppress the Jedi and stop anyone from celebrating them, then yeah, people will forget about them and doubt the few stories they do hear. There are people who doubt that the earth is round, and weird space-wizards are something that's pretty easy to doubt.

SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Feb 24, 2021

skasion
Feb 13, 2012

Why don't you perform zazen, facing a wall?
The twenty year gap is built into the story. The purge of the Jedi can only be as old as Luke, because he’s Anakin’s kid.

I think the objection that it’s impossible for the Jedi have been mythicized in twenty years doesn’t hold up. The event that formed the empire was that it destroyed the Jedi for being a seditious cult that threatened the rule of law. The empire is a totalitarian state and there is no one to oppose its worldview on the Jedi — except the terrorist rebels, who themselves maintain ties to the hidden Jedi and who invoke the Force in a religious way. An imperial military commander like Motti can dismiss the Force to Vader’s face because he himself buys into the propaganda. A skeptical, worldly-wise character like Han can think the whole thing is bullshit. And some backwater dork like Luke can have never heard of any of it and be completely confused.

Fantastic Foreskin
Jan 6, 2013

A golden helix streaked skyward from the Helvault. A thunderous explosion shattered the silver monolith and Avacyn emerged, free from her prison at last.

The problem is simple, too many jedi in the prequels. It's hard to be a band of itinerant monk-knights when you've got a sweet highrise in the capital of the galaxy.

Defiance Industries
Jul 22, 2010

A five-star manufacturer


SlothfulCobra posted:

The biggest line of reasoning I've seen is that Jedi weren't necessarily all that common throughout the galaxy. There are plenty of planets where Jedi almost never visit, and especially during the clone wars, all the Jedi were busy fighting the war and even less visible to the common man.

The Clone Wars TV show established that the Jedi were big heroes that the Republic constantly talked up, though. Sure, most people in the MCU during WWII never met Captain America, but they sure as poo poo know who he is.

Some Goon posted:

The problem is simple, too many jedi in the prequels. It's hard to be a band of itinerant monk-knights when you've got a sweet highrise in the capital of the galaxy.

This is the correct answer. George Lucas knew lightsabers got people excited so he had a million Jedi on screen all the loving time.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

Also apparently the Force is well-known enough for the Rebels to use it as a generic blessing.

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


han was a street kid. he didn't grow up hearing about jedi on the holonews or whatever, he was a bit busy not dying of starvation and by the time that wasn't the case everyone was towing the empire's line

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Defiance Industries
Jul 22, 2010

A five-star manufacturer


Everything in Star Wars is based on what George Lucas remembers from being a kid, so going to a movie only cost two space pennies and it was probably the only thing poor street kids could do to have fun.

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