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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.

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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 takeaway to that is that he's never met a jedi, nor was there existence common knowledge. Not what you'd expect when they were spacecops for a thousand years up until 20 years ago. When han would have been like 10-15.

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.

skasion posted:

They were known to exist, but as figures of myth and propaganda. They’re cops in the sense that they work for the government, but there’s not a Jedi on every street corner, they’re doing special secret missions for the chancellors. They’re closer to like James Bond than Chief Wiggum. They’re remote from the common people, cloistered in their temple. Nobody outside the charmed circle of our protagonists really knows what’s up with them. Think of baby Anakin on Tatooine dreaming that someday a Jedi would come to end slavery, or the narrator of Clone Wars tooting the horn of the Jedi as defenders of the republic leading us in war against the nasty separatists (the “propaganda newsreel” style of the Clone Wars recaps is not accidental). The whole point of Palpatine’s plan against them is to take advantage of that remoteness by giving them a new identity as the leaders of a giant war raging across the galaxy. The Jedi become generals and then, when they attack him, it’s a clear cut case of attempted coup by a small military elite. If the military elite also claimed to be wizards, isn’t it likely enough that that was propaganda too, and they were really just using smoke and mirrors?

Again, the twenty year gap is built into the original movie and is not something the prequels invented. I really don’t think it’s at all a stretch for a hard boiled skeptical guy like Han to not believe in the supposed wizards until he sees them.

Basically everyone in the prequels can identify a jedi on sight. Even some lizardman on a rock in the middle of nowhere knows that jedi have mind powers, how it looks when they use them, and that he's got an special resistance to it. They were just common knowledge.

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.

skasion posted:

No, Watto mocks Qui-gon for acting like “some kind of Jedi” and for using “mind tricks”. If he actually realized he was a Jedi, this joke wouldn’t make sense: the point is that it’s absurd for some fuckhead space bum on Tatooine to be acting like Jedi are supposed to act, because it’s implausible for him to really be one. I think the best guide to what the average guy thinks about jedi in the prequels is Anakin: Jedi carry laser swords, they do good deeds, and they can’t be killed. That is, they’re fairy tale figures. They’re not exactly firmly grounded in the realm of reason and knowledge.

People on Coruscant can recognize a Jedi when they see one (Dexter’s waitress can recognize one, and she’s a robot). But Coruscant is probably the only place in the galaxy where people see Jedi with any regularity. The trade federation viceroy says he’s never met a Jedi Knight, though his aide has. This aide also has a reasonable appreciation that Jedi are very powerful and shouldn’t be messed with. This is a recurring theme in the Star Wars movies. Admiral Motti calls Vader a fraud who’s acting like a Jedi to scare people, but Moff Tarkin knows Vader’s Jedi senses and powers are real, even if he thinks of them as being old-fashioned and specific to Vader. Han sneers at the idea of an all powerful force at first, but after what he sees in the movie, he wishes that the force be with Luke. More directly, Admiral Ozzel in ESB thinks that he can second-guess Vader’s intuition, so Vader chokes him to death in front of his officers to make the point. The Force and the magic of the Jedi aren’t assumed by everyone to be true: only the people who want to believe and the people who see them in the flesh actually believe, everyone else is a skeptic.

Implausible for one to be there, yes, but he still knows how they act, and how being a troidarian relates to that, he's familiar with them, (especially) even though he's got almost no chance of interacting with one. Also, I don't think a starry-eyed slave boy is a good representation for the average guy.

The parts about the OT are the disconnect in question, the Jedi are way too prevalent in society in the prequels for that level of unfamiliarity to be reasonable.

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.

Force abilities also grow substantially throughout the ot. Iirc the only force powers seen in anh are noise making, suggestion, and some extrasensory perception. There's no force push/pull until empire, lightning until jedi.

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.

reignofevil posted:

It depends I guess on how you interpret Vader choking a dude.

EVIL!

Somehow I forgot about that while writing, but I think the core point still stands.

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.

Cornwind Evil posted:

Speaking of starship nonsense

The Last Jedi had its good points and its bad points, but here's what bugged me the most: left with no other options, the general in charge uses hyperspace to turn her ship into a giant laser-missile that wrecks the poo poo out of the First Order fleet and slices the super ultra giant ship in half before it ever gets to do anything. Okay fine.

All I ask is a reason why this was never done before. I'll take any sort of hand waves about circumstances and the right galactic positioning and all that, because losing one ship and person to rip the hell out of a whole army is such a potent tactic it should have been discovered and accounted for in defences centuries if not eons ago. It really strikes me as a fan who grew up who thought the move up and how clever it was and how effective it could be and just plopped it in when they got a chance to write something in the OFFICIAL accounts without thinking it through.

I don't need much Star Wars, I'm already accepting a world with magic space wizards and weapons so big they're built into planets, just some sort of reason will do! Even if it's in some side material or in a tweet!

Didn't you see RoS? It was a one-in-a-million shot, would never work again.

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.

Cornwind Evil posted:

Sure. Why not?

This is an actual question. Why wouldn't it? Aim ship at fleet, do same thing. Why does it not work now?

:thejoke:

It was a dumb thing for TLJ to do since now the big scary capital ships that define space combat in star wars are defenseless against anything with a hyperdrive, which can't be that expensive if every fighter in the rebel fleet has one.

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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.

Cornwind Evil posted:

What annoys me is there's an easy fix.

The whole plot is hinged on that the villains have a new plot device that lets them track people through hyperspace, which is otherwise nigh impossible. Have the rebel leader realize she can reverse it: this will 'stick' her ship to the main ship in a way that normally wouldn't happen. Without this, if she tried to do this 'hyperspace missile, the odds of her hitting anything are minuscule. Voila, same scene, the villains are hoist by their own petard in classic fashion by human ingenuity and the willingness to sacrifice, nothing is rendered impotent, nor does the entire galaxy look like idiots for never thinking of such a move in the who knows how many years the galaxy has been having star wars.

Then again, that's just movies in general. I remember reading once that just because you rendered the whole movie plot moot doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you're a smartass, because virtually NO entertainment will stand up to that sort of probing.

Very little probing is needed here, none at all, some might say, which is the problem. Plot holes happen, they're generally not the largest setpiece in the movie.

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