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cams posted:sorry i'm late That line was so stupid when I first heard it, but now it just feels kinda real. Because when people struggle to justify to others horrible things that they've done, they tend to sound really stupid. Anakin's never been much of a thinker and he bought in hard on Palpatine's poo poo without fully understanding it, so he can't really articulate it to Obi-wan. At first I wanted Anakin to be a more serious threat, but now I feel like the movie should've leaned harder into him breaking down and falling to pieces before literally being cut to pieces because of his own hubris. There's a lot of individual parts of the movie that could've worked better, but lacked any kind of focus on whatever they wanted to do. It really needed somebody to sort everything out.
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Feb 5, 2020 06:54
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Randarkman posted:Like what the gently caress dude? Are you even reading any of the posts? I guess if people legitimately enjoy a thing, it's not like shouting at them that their opinion is wrong is going to change much if they haven't already succumbed to social pressure. The prequels aren't great, but they're not total garbage and have some good bits.
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Feb 13, 2020 23:27
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So much of what people end up hating about the prequels isn't even to do with what's in the movies, it's the disruption of their expectations going into the movies. By the prequels' own merits, the worst they get is disjointed or boring, but when it comes down to it, a lot of people's complaints come to their expectations of what Star Wars should be, since the original trilogy sure wasn't about warrior monks under incompetent civil authority being totally unaware of important changes in the world around them or unable to affect much positive change for all their power. Seeing the prequels when you're younger before your expectations have calcified really seems to avoid that kinda thing. I'll admit a lot of what I dislike about Disney's movies comes to wanting things that I had come to expect like interesting technological designs or there being some kind of structural hope throughout the world, and I can't really separate out my deepset worries about Disney's growing control over the industry that tends to strangle new ideas in their crib.
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Feb 14, 2020 01:12
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I watched the first RLM video and hated it. It wasn't just that the guy's voice was hard to listen to or the pretty severe extended gag of murdering prostitutes, it was that its criticism often was that particularly worthless brand of nerd reductionist criticism that tries to technically prove that the film was bad just by identifying plotholes (often maintaining a willful ignorance in order to produce more plotholes) instead of taking a holistic approach that deals with the feelings that movie gives you. Then I decided that since I didn't like the video, I wouldn't go on to watch the rest because surely I could find something better to do with my time. I used to watch the Nostalgia Critic, and I don't need any more of that in my life. After a point, it seems like it's easier to tear things apart regardless of their quality, and the whole thing gets pretty nihilistic.
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Feb 14, 2020 19:54
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In the movie, Sifo-Dias is just a weird name in a weird mystery that never fully gets revealed, although you can sort of figure that Palpatine's playing both sides. I don't even know if it's supposed to be a secret that he's Darth Sideous in the movies, it's unclear. There was an episode of Clone Wars that was just about the mystery of Sifo-Diez, and it was the most confusing drat thing. I think at the end they only barely discover that Count Dooker is Darth Tyrannus, which I also didn't know was a secret.
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Mar 2, 2020 01:14
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Well, Mace Windu cut the head off the only guy who could've told them who sent the assassination, so that mystery's a dead end. They also were now busy with the war, so there wasn't so much time for investigation.reignofevil posted:So really Palpatine's whole plan might not have worked at all if he hadn't gotten lucky when his lackey decided to blame padme for the whole naboo thing and then very luckily for palpatine (again) that same lackey decided he hated her so much that we was going to spend his own money financing assassins to try and kill her. I thought it was Palpatine who wanted the assassination to happen because she was one of the big peacenik senators trying to argue against the formation of an army, which was the lynchpin of his plan. If you missed that, you're not alone, because neither the replacement Padme appointed to work in her stead nor her husband knew anything about it. I'm not even particularly sure why she was against military buildup, since her tenure as queen seems like it would teach the opposite lesson. One of the worst parts about how the prequels were plotted is how basically everything important is to do with the Senate, but the movies are also terrified of boring people with Senate scenes, so you don't see any of the politics that are supposedly driving the plot. There was a whole cut subplot in Revenge of the Sith that was written and filmed about Padme and her senator buddies trying to stop the expansion of the powers of the supreme chancellor and push back against the war effort. There was a whole irony to Anakin reassuring her that he would end the war at any cost when all she wanted was deescalation and peace talks. Which isn't to say that I think Lucas would've been spectacular at actually writing political intrigue and fitting it into the movie, just without the politics things happen for no apparent reason and Padme just isn't a character.
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Mar 2, 2020 19:22
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I'd be cool with the forum pivoting more towards a generic sci-fi umbrella . I had mostly given up Star Wars since I knew I wasn't liking most of the new material, and was generally uncomfortable with Disney's corporate IP management strategies, but this subforum has made me relapse hard. Like here's a pretty good sci-fi umbrella, you could be something like that. 
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Mar 5, 2020 19:37
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Did you know this junkyard slave isn't even old enough to shave? But he can use the force, they say. Did you see him hitting on the queen, though he's just...9 and she's 14, yeah he's probably gonna marry her some day. Well I know he built C-3PO, and I heard how fast his pod can go, and we had nothing to do, so we made a wager or two (woo-oo). He was a meteoric flying ace and the minute Jabba started off that race, you knew who was in first place, oh yeah, it was our boy.
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Mar 6, 2020 07:08
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sweet geek swag posted:He just wanted his own slave. Even more questionable is why he built a droid with near-useless arms who was only really good for translation when he and his mom did physical labor 2house2fly posted:Hey apropos of nothing, remember in episode 2 when Anakin goes back to Tattooine, and he's in this rickshaw? The rickshaw hovers but the droid pulling it has wheels... That one's pretty straightforward. The rickshaw may hover, but it doesn't have any drive mechanism of its own (and potentially an engine on the back would be disruptive in crowded spaces). It's probably not much trouble pulling it with no friction between it and the ground. However floating technology works, it seems like things that can hover, hover on their own with a fixed amount of force between them and the ground without necessarily the ability to pull/push themselves along on their own. Aside from that, it's a neat look.
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Mar 6, 2020 20:32
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They could've used some editing and better directing, but they're fine. I enjoy them, I'm not too bored and they don't make me feel bad. The hate for them is overblown. Of course, from the way that some people act you'd think that they're a deadly poison, and it'd be hard to be anywhere near that bad.
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Mar 12, 2020 01:13
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ItBreathes posted:I wouldn't call any of the TOS cast strapping examples of masculinity, but it was by-and-large heroism and fistfights by the male cast. Star Wars had issues with that in the 90s.    
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Mar 12, 2020 07:22
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Attack of the Clones is the opening of a million possibilities while Revenge of the Sith is the closing of them. RotS is overall better made and more coherent, but it's less fun and doesn't really end well. Not just as in an unhappy ending, but how there's not much connective tissue between all the different scenes and there's no real conclusive final moment. There's Anakin burning to death, Padme giving birth, the rise of Vader, Jimmy Smits getting the last few Jedi together to depart to the distant corners of the galaxy, never to meet again (after barely being in the movie since all the politics were cut), and it's so many things to do in the falling action after you're ready for it to end already. AotC has its most confusing and drawn out bits in the middle and finishes strong. It also feels like its action scenes are more consolidated into a logical sequence of events as opposed to RotS having one big space fight, another big fight on Utapau, a third big fight on Mustafar, two big fights against Palpatine, and hopping around the galaxy during order 66. So much of that doesn't seem like it's furthering the plot so much as being an exciting sidequest. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 04:07 on Mar 19, 2020 |
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Mar 19, 2020 04:02
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It's not so much that it was ever going to be a political thriller, it's the fact that there's space where they could've given more context to the upcoming war that they didn't really take. It makes the moments where there is context seem out of place and confusing, since there's a whole lot happening. Honestly though, the last time I was looking at the prequels in their DVD boxes, the one thing I appreciated most was that none of them was 150 minutes long. Movies these days get real bloated, and I'm really not willing to sit through a lot of the longer runtimes.
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Mar 22, 2020 06:16
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FunkyAl posted:There's barely any action except at the tail end and beginning of it, so while they are spliced together I'd say the two being so seperate is really more of a deliberate choice. And the plot IS a wild bantha chase, with several loose threads, because most of what obi wan is discovering, that he set out to and believes is important, is fake or inceomplete information. Along the way he discovers some crazy truth about the republic from count dooku and sees a bomb called the clone war with a ticking time fuse about to go off, but tragically refuses to stop it from going off. There's the Zam Wessel chase, the fight with Jango on Kamino that segues into a chase through the debris of Geonosis's rings, and the droid factory sequence before the movie goes into the finale sequence of arena/first battle of the clone wars/duel with Dooku. That's not barely any action, even though there's some fairly long exposition on Kamino and a whole diversion with Anakin. I can understand forgetting about the sequence of events though, because there's not much connective tissue binding the movie together. If you remember the middle of the movie as Anakin's whole thing, you'll forget about Kamino, and the droid factory sequence had so little to do with the rest of the plot that it's easy to forget about. It's also easy to forget just how long the droid factory or chase sequence were, since there's a low ratio of plot happening relative to how long the action goes on, just like how the "romance" scenes between Anakin and Padme have a low ratio of plot to screentime, and so fall entirely out of my head when I'm remembering the movie. There's a lot happening, it's just not interlinked. There's a lot you could do with editing if you took it upon yourself to recompose the movie, but there's some issues that could've been solved by editing the screenplay before it went into production, and a lot of it overall comes down to George Lucas not being great when working on his own without other people moderating him and adding their own influence. If you look at the original trilogy when it was being formed, it sure seems like it was all really flexible. I still overall like most of what's there, but I can still see its problems.
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Mar 22, 2020 22:48
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Broadly, the fact that everybody was too distracted by the war to question where the army had come from was part of how the Republic and Jedi order were decadent and easy to fool. That's part of how I wish that the movies had gone forth to present things as corrupt and decaying, since there's no point where the jedi are onscreen where they're meant to look stupid, foolish, or out of touch, but that's what they are. That's what makes the plot work. Alternatively, maybe there should've been a scene where Palpatine was blatantly deflecting the jedi with honeyed words or something, so that it's not the jedi who lost their way, but that Palpatine's just that good.
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Mar 23, 2020 01:54
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Boss Nass had no respect for galactic politics and also couldn't just banish Binks now that he was a big time hero, so he used the Senate as an excuse to get rid of Jar Jar. Basically like how Theodore Roosevelt was causing so much trouble in politics that they gave him a fancy do-nothing job that nobody cared about to get him out of the way, but then the president died and he was next in line. CainFortea posted:Okay, but just because fighting the war becomes the most important thing, that doesn't mean that you should just literally ignore and never think about the first question ever again. After learning about the army, and who ordered it, you'd think that "Why the poo poo did one of us do this and how the gently caress did he do it without us noticing?" would be a close second. You say that, but in the real world important people forget about and ignore the causes of problems all the drat time, and it often feels like I'm the crazy person for remembering and harping on it when everybody else has moved on. Not that it isn't a frustrating audience experience as well. It's still crazy in retrospect that the movie was written before 9/11 and came out a full year before the Iraq war. Mechanically, there's not much similar about the shady reasons for going to war in the movie and the shady reasons that we went to war with in real life, but it still feels oddly prescient. I guess there's more similarities you can draw with Afghanistan, but how much of the movie was already made when that happened. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 07:51 on Mar 23, 2020 |
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Mar 23, 2020 07:46
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CainFortea posted:He persuaded the galaxy to become a fascist dictatorship with him as the dictator. You say that like there aren't places in the real world where most of the ruling class was persuaded to accept a fascist dictatorship. without any space wizard powers (so far as we know). I feel like in the prequels, I would've liked it better if instead of being massively powerful in the force, he was just OK in the force, easily beaten by proper jedi masters, but he just used his big ol' wrinkly brain to create a massive apparatus for destroying the Jedi with, as well as using his powers of social sensitivity and fancy talk to turn Anakin into his obedient servant. Because dictators are seldom powerful or even competent at anything on their own, they just connived a path to power. Of course, that's contrary to how in Return of the Jedi, he's obviously this powerful space wizard what's far beyond Luke's capacity to deal with on his own. Some later stories even go so far as to say that he was somehow using his power to coordinate the empire while sitting on his throne, as if there needs to be more of an excuse why a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by fear would fall apart without its charismatic leader.
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Mar 24, 2020 22:19
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CainFortea posted:The flaw you are referencing is that space wizards can use space magic to influence people to do things they wouldn't normally do. The Roman Republic lasted for a good 500 years before finally biting it. Just because a state is horribly institutionally flawed at the end of its life doesn't mean it was always like that, and it sure doesn't mean that it was smooth sailing for its whole lifetime. The EU has a couple times where the Republic almost died, and at least one big time period where it kinda temporarily dissolved leaving the galaxy as feuding warlords only to reestablish itself later (if that sounds like "not lasting for thousands of years", China pulls that bit all the time with its own history). Definitely by the time of the movies when a big corporation has a senator who can deny military action, and committees for arbitrating conflicts are known to take forever and not get much done, and credits aren't even respected as a currency in the more distant regions, there's some kind of decay going on. If Palpatine was supernaturally convincing, you'd think that he would've shut down Padme's peace movement
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Mar 25, 2020 01:06
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CainFortea posted:Tatooine isn't in the republic. Also, Bongo Bill is saying that the "flaw" existed as a fundamental aspect of the republic at all times. It's just coincidence that it actually becomes a fatal flaw at the same time an evil space wizard decides to become a dictator. Usually the economic influence of the biggest state in the galaxy extends a fair bit beyond its borders, just like how Rome had a significant amount of trade with India or how US dollars are valued far and wide throughout the world. Lack of trust in Republic currency demonstrates a lack of trust in the Republic, like there's nothing that the Republic would ever sell to to Tatooine, or that any Republic citizen coming to Tatooine with something to sell would rather get paid in Huttbucks or sand dollars instead. We definitely see one very bad business in the Republic that's not something you'd like to deal with. sweet geek swag posted:Yoda immediately seizing the army cloned from a man who works for the separatists. This is all so obviously a set up, but no one ever mentions it. By the end of the movie the Jedi have all the proof they need to say the whole war has been rigged they just have to show Jango is the source of the clones! But they just leave the genetic proof of this to rot on the floor of the arena. Bounty hunters often take more than one job. But yeah, another in the column of "too busy with the war to look a gift horse in the mouth".
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Mar 25, 2020 04:30
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It's still worth noting that the movie isn't good criticism of its contemporary politics because the big huge events that changed everything happened after the filming was done. Not that most movies these days are any better at criticizing contemporary politics. CainFortea posted:If your laws don't reach somewhere, and your money is no good there, it isn't part of your polity. It isn't under your influence. Tell that to the Russians that hoard US dollars. Watto not accepting their money isn't the biggest sign of the Republic in decline, but there's also the general fact that most viewers know from the other movies that Tatooine was totally part of the empire with an imperial academy and stormtroopers on the ground and did accept credits, therefore the Republic's reach in episode 1 is less far than we would otherwise expect.
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Mar 25, 2020 18:49
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What I really wanna know is if a facesit interpretation is possible.
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Mar 26, 2020 06:44
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I don't think much is ever particularly clear about the particulars of how senators get chosen. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the local government of each planet choosing their own method, but how coruscant's senators get chosen or who they even are is up in the air. Maybe they don't even get a senator like DC. Nominally there's democracy, but I don't think I've ever seen a story about somebody worrying about votes or polls. When the senate votes on issues, I don't even know if it's one planet one vote or if things are specifically weighted towards the more populated worlds. "Democracy" might just mean the classical sense of a group of many people deciding things rather than our more modern conception of extensively getting some kind of public approval or mandate from the majority of the population. It's probably still preferable to dictatorial imperial rule.
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Mar 28, 2020 07:30
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I like the depiction of Saddam as the initial alleged threat that led into the war but was taken out pretty quickly up top, only for the war to continue for ten more years.
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Mar 30, 2020 17:01
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Mooey Cow posted:Yeah it's a cool style. I guess I can see it, although I've never really seen Gone With the Wind. Wealthy woman brought low by the war, her family's lands ruined, being romanced by a scoundrel in the wake of the devastation from a big battle. It gets said a lot that George Lucas was heavily inspired by pulp fiction and old movies, but not a lot of people consider what that means. Pulp was full of wild adventure and untamed emotions, which is fun, but it also means that all that fun stuff is really embedded in some old ways of thinking that it's worth thinking twice about. Indiana Jones gives lip service to serving some greater scholarly purpose, but he's still stealing ancient treasures from natives. The most philosophically dated thing I can think of that may be wrong with Star Wars is how it has the classical concept of exoticism embedded in it, although it's hard to notice sometimes because it also mixes in plenty of scenes of high-status aliens as well as the skeevy menagerie scenes.
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Mar 31, 2020 20:48
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Cease to Hope posted:star wars is definitely part of a reactionary formalist response to "new hollywood" (or arguably a formalist period of late new hollywood). it has aged better than grease or raiders of the lost ark, though. The old-fashioned exoticism also comes into play with Phantom Menace, where Lucas as an older man who hadn't really made much for a long while went one step further from just having weird aliens speaking weird fictional languages and made them speak in accents. Not accents that particularly line up with any real-world accents, but enough that made people aware enough to start thinking about everything in a new light.
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Apr 1, 2020 05:34
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I don't think the fridge scene is bad because it's implausible; it's bad because it's totally out of place and does nothing for the rest of the movie. It's just gratuitous.A Gnarlacious Bro posted:Would any of the movie geniuses care to speak on watto? On paper, there's nothing wrong with him. His accent doesn't particularly resemble anything real, if anything, it's sort of a cross between russian and italian. His appearance is basically what you'd expect a sleazy alien owner of a junkyard to look like. Dirty and fat. But if you're primed to suspect that there may be some racial stereotypes, like say if there's some weird accents that you're not used to hearing in movies, then it's sort of understandable how you'd fill in the gaps from "sleazy alien businessman" to "sleazy jewish businessman", even though I don't think that there's anything actually coding him as jewish. The fact that strong accents have very much fallen out of use in American media makes people uneasy enough to assume the worst. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Apr 1, 2020 |
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Apr 1, 2020 22:54
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Roth posted:I think it would be better if the thread argued why an alien's depiction isn't racist coding rather than pretend that sci-fi/fantasy doesn't have a history with it. That's kind of what I was obliquely referencing with "classical exoticism". Jar Jar isn't African American, he's an old archetype of a native. Whether that's an indian, african, aborigine, asian, or some kind of islander is up for grabs, (Boss Nass's hat kinda reminds me of a siamese crown) but it's a pretty common archetype in older fiction. Jar Jar even forms a life-debt with Qui-gon like Friday in Robinson Crusoe. Boss Nass is a native king or chief, aloof from outsiders and generally more concerned with his own world, which to us, the viewer, is obviously much smaller than the wider world out there. He's not stupid, just uninterested in whatever foreign bullshit the Naboo are wrapped up in (until it actually affects the gungans). Gungans would fit right in with Tin-Tin or Ducktales. I don't think any of the aliens reflect any specific terrestrial culture, but they do fit into the archetypes of older fiction that were mainly about all the wonders that we might find around the world, which often fell into the imperialist perspective of viewing them as somehow being lesser, since at the time most non-european cultures were busy being subjugated by europeans. Modern fiction is a lot less interested in what wonders may be around the world, because we mostly already know. Sometimes it goes further and refuses to acknowledge any differences between cultures so everybody is just an American. Older fiction had a complex history of depicting native cultures positively or negatively, most current fiction just doesn't depict them at all. Imperialism won, end of story. That's part of why accents faded from use in most fiction, there's a lot less intent to explore the foreign, as well as the association between accents and stereotyping. Not that depicting aliens in whatever way counts as depicting real, underrepresented native cultures. And I have no idea how negative or reductive depictions of wholly fictional peoples fit into the grand scheme of real-world racism. There are fictional races that are just the old stereotypes with the serial numbers filed off, like how the Oompa Loompas were black african pygmies in the book despite being orange with green hair in the movies, but I don't think that the aliens of Phantom Menace are that.
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Apr 2, 2020 17:02
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Mooey Cow posted:Jar-Jar says his day started out with a nice breakfast. Well get this, he lives in a swamp right? What's he eating in that swamp that's so nice? Frogs. He tries eating one raw on Tatooine.
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Apr 2, 2020 23:58
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ruddiger posted:Remember, luck does not exist in the Star Wars universe and everything is the will of the force. It's so weird to me when nerds treat the force as something absolute and just totally overlook the mysticism of it all. Because yes, that's a valid interpretation of the force, but it's also in no way distinct from the universe we live in. At least, not if you compare fictional jedi mysticism with real-world religious mysticism. You might as well turn it around and say "Luck does not exist in the universe and everything is the will of god". You could also bring out the old quote "The Force does not play dice with the universe" -Space Einstein, 15 BBY. How an omnipotent or omniscient entity fits in with a physical world that supposedly runs by consistent laws, and the supposed inherent contradictions between a consistent reality and a sentient will narrating all events is a thoroughly explored field of philosophical thought. We only have it on faith that the force is whatever the Jedi claim it to be, in fact they often aren't really sure themselves and have to deal with horrible assholes with their own totally contrary claims. The fact that the Jedi actually produce miracles does not necessarily prove that their claims are true, although the movies do like to lean towards there being a little something extra. This also does not mean that there isn't an inherent comedy towards something seemingly impossible and goofy happening if there is a supposed allmighty entity behind it. Being a fictional world, we know for a fact that there is a sentient mind creating all the events involved, but that's true for all fiction, even the stories about atheists.
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Apr 3, 2020 02:45
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ruddiger posted:Ah, poo poo. I’ve been got twice in the same day! drat prequeldome! Great job, gnarly bro, I salute your well crafted retorts. That's not it, you're supposed to deny to the last until you shrink into a corn cob.
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Apr 3, 2020 03:12
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You can really go somewhere spooky if you think too hard about different races being differently able because of their  , and it's not really somewhere I wanna be.I'm a little more comfortable with the hardwaretruths of droids. Roth posted:I thought it would be good to encourage conversation based around coding in Star Wars, but I'm not sure this is a good rabbit hole to fall down anymore. The force is written in COBOL.
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Apr 3, 2020 05:36
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It was weird how Boss Nass did that cheek shaking thing, but then it turned out that was just a thing that Brian Blessed does all the time on his own.
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Apr 4, 2020 06:37
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The Gungans' real-world influences are at best, a pastiche of vast disparate elements. Otoh Gunga has some kind of art nouveau look with the metal around its bubbles, Boss Nass's hat is a cross between a Thai crown and a seashell, the gungan ruins look like Olmec heads (although apparently they were originally meant to be a background element on Tatooine), and Tarpals's whiskers look a little like the kind of reverse-hitler fu manchu thing that is often used to give some kind of asian look. Of course, the adjacent Naboo also have some heavy southeast asian influences. A lot of the claims about Gungans ignores the fact that there isn't really that much contrast between them and the humans. When they leave Otoh Gunga and go off to Theed, it's going from a city of spheres to a city of cylinders. It's different, but there's no particular aesthetic reason that they can't get along.  You can try creating metaphors about how the Naboo are up on top of a mountain with a waterfall while the Gungans are down low underwater, but the movie doesn't demonstrate that power dynamic with its plot. The Gungans are independent and only help once the Naboo queen brings herself low before the Gungan boss. FunkyAl posted:There's merit to the argument of Jar Jar being a racist stereotype, in the same basic way that donkey from shrek is, but imo Gungan society is depicted pretty respectfully, almost reverently! That's not actually contrary to old-fashioned media though! While definitely there's a bunch of bloodthirsty savages, there's also a number of long-lost advanced civilizations in secret kingdoms hiding from the rest of the world for whatever reason. Some of that was born out of theories that the great stone ruins couldn't possibly have been built by the people living nearby and no longer building anything big and huge, but some of it was also just the fact that there's something fun to the idea of there being something amazing hidden out there.
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Apr 4, 2020 18:34
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Chastity in a religious order? Ridiculous.
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Apr 4, 2020 19:45
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CainFortea posted:No one likes Solo, so we don't have what we have here in the prequeldome of people desperately trying to defend the indefensible with fan fac and not watching the movies. I think maybe people still need to marinate over the movies for a while before they get their own little following. In ten years maybe people will go wild for the brief bursts of originality in a movie industry that has stagnated even further into safer plots with less motivated action scenes and more blatantly obvious cashgrabs. I think one of the things that drives fans of the sequel movies is the shipping possibility space of who could possibly get with who, which is an element entirely absent in the prequels, and definitely not very strong in the Disney prequels either. One of the biggest issues with prequels is that it's very hard for them to end well. Attack of the Clones is kind of bittersweet, and Revenge of the Sith has a lot of cool bits but its ending bounces between sad and boring, and after you finish watching a movie, the end is what'll stick with you most. Rogue One in theory had more freedom, but for some reason it decided to meticulously eliminate all of its characters so that their entire existence would be embodied in the little mcguffin in A New Hope rather than let people think that the characters could be having some further adventures.
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Apr 5, 2020 18:25
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reignofevil posted:Actually he commits to an elaborate charade involving some kid and a bet on a race and a second bet on some dice and then he cheats on the second bet. Why? Jedi! Watto springs the second bet on Qui-Gon at the last moment when he gets greedy and tries to free the whole family at once. It'd be difficult to cheat the whole race (and he has faith enough in Anakin for some reason), but a I wonder if Obi-Wan even knew about the whole deal with Anakin's mom being a slave, seeing as how Qui-Gon died without telling him anything and Anakin seems to generally have issues communicating about things that are bothering him. I think Yoda was trying to persuade Anakin that being a Jedi wasn't fun and games so he shouldn't be overeager about becoming one, but it scared Anakin into clamming up forevermore. That reminds me of how I should probably go back and start reading Darths and Droids again.
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Apr 6, 2020 19:19
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reignofevil posted:Also honestly given that Qui-gon is already willing to cheat and can move things with his mind (and as per empire strikes back, can do so via a tv monitor from hella far away) he really should have just knocked some crucial bits off of each pod throughout the race. Jogged people's arms and such. Tons of options here! Qui-Gon may be able to do a lot of things with the force, but he has no idea how podracers work. Hence the deleted scene where Anakin asks him why he spent 10 minutes ripping hood ornaments off of other people's pods. Another question you could ask is why didn't Obi-Wan phone the Jedi temple to send space-triple-A to bring them a new engine.
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Apr 6, 2020 22:05
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The EU will always have the same value as it had in the first place: Stories that can be fun to read. Canonicity has nothing to do with quality. Generally canon maintenance is the most tedious thing that nobody cares about except for obsessive nerds. The thing about how Disney explicitly threw out the EU in their "new canon" was because it was transparently superficial. They kinda did, in that they made movies that would then explicitly contradict the old EU timeline, instead of just implicitly like a lot of what the prequels did, but then they kinda didn't, because in many of their licensed works, they continually pull out old EU bits to pad things out, and they made extra-sure to bring back some characters that the fandom loved, like Thrawn, even if Disney Luke never gets to have sex with Mara Jade. They try to keep their foot on both sides of things, both condescendingly dismissing the EU and awkwardly trying to use bits of it to bait in old fans or recycle old stories. The idea they wanted to project was that there was some kind of consistency throughout their new canon with a coherent plan, when they couldn't even keep their plan for the movies together, much less have somebody keeping track of what's going on in the new-EU. Dave Filoni is practically in open rebellion against the concept, since he just keeps throwing in ridiculous deep pull references to the old EU. And none of it changes the way that audiences normally deal with the supposed canonicity of works where they'll just follow what they like and try to reject what they hate. There wouldn't even be this weird corporate discomfort over how audiences respond to the existence of stories that could possibly contradict eachother if it weren't for Disney's fuckery with the copyright system and if IPs had been allowed to keep trickling into public domain so we'd see newer IPs become the same mess as Sherlock Holmes or Wizard of Oz with fanfics being professionally published without licensing.
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Apr 7, 2020 19:32
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Halloween Jack posted:If that were true, every reboot of DC and Marvel Comics wouldn't create a bigger clusterfuck than was there before, 100% of the time. Ostensibly, Marvel doesn't really do canon wipes. DC has gotten into the rhythm of regularly wiping its canon to recreate a thing where heroes have been active for only a few years and nobody punched Hitler. Marvel technically doesn't do that, but it does use its crossover events to forcibly shut down all plotlines in all books so that writers and artists can be reshuffled and all the books can be relaunched with new priorities and different styles. This has the effect of making most long-term stories in superhero comics shaggy dog stories that don't go anywhere until all the people involved have been moved onto different projects. That's why I've tended to get more into manga, where creators have more control and there can be uninterrupted 9 year long runs like Fullmetal Alchemist or even behemoths like the 26 year old Case Closed without swapping out head creatives while the same publishers can put out shorter-run stories with only a few volumes without having to arrange them to fit into the same universe. It's a lot harder for movies to keep a clear voice to their narratives with so many people working on them (and even harder with video games), and the prequels often suffer from too few hands on the till instead of too many, but it didn't seem like Disney had anyone with any particular plan or idea for how their 3...5+ movies (they announced plans for like 9 right after the purchase), and so there was nobody steering anything. Barudak posted:The only things I accept as cannon in Star Wars is the letter W. I accept its full, unquestioned unified cannonicity across all media and branding. While this may be more limited in scope than many of you, I continue to make progress on cannonizing other parts of Star Wars and believe I am near a breakthrough on amerpsands. That letter killed thousands of people in its wars.
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Apr 8, 2020 03:13
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I think by the time that he goes to fight Obi-Wan, he's past the point where he knowingly violated all the values that he followed for most of his life, and he's done a lot of rationalization as to how everything actually fits with his values and just the bulk of the universe betrayed him instead of anything being his fault. He's even being weirdly diplomatic while screaming at Obi-Wan and trying to hack him to bits, "From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!" as if he thinks that he's giving reasoned arguments. It feels dumb, but it is a totally real thing that you can see in the real world, people just weirdly flailing rhetorically because they have gotten into a mindset totally disconnected from what's normal for other people. At the point where he's turning in Palpatine, he's following his duties to the Jedi order, but Palpatine tempts him out of it with the emotional bond he built up with Anakin, and you do also see Palpatine verbally phrasing things as they happen as if the Jedi had doing an illegal coup to seize power for themselves, and he was definitely coaxing Anakin along towards Sith radicalization. You also see on the internet people use Palpatine's words to say "You know what, Palpatine was right, the Jedi were doing an illegal coup," and it's often split between people joking about it like they're trolls and people who genuinely believe that's an insightful hot take, because there's no functional difference between the two. Then they go on to watch some youtube videos and realize, You know what, there aren't any flights over the south pole, and Fema totally is stocking up on coffins, and it wouldn't be too hard to get actors to pretend that their children were shot dead, and hey I keep seeing the jews pop up in all these stories and it just goes on. I keep seeing these stories of people sliding down that path, and every time it just feels so dumb, but it happens. It's not even a thing where the actual information tricking you, but the fact that you build up emotional connections with the bullshit to keep you circling around to find another way it could be true instead of ever rejecting it.
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Apr 10, 2020 20:11
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