and "The Empire Strikes Back" triumphed in Lucas' diminished creative role. "The Return of the Jedi" was very problematic but its highlights are perhaps the best of Star Wars for me so I really like the movie regardless.

whyd din't you post this in the last jedi thread

You are a part of the Disney fandom and a traitor. Take him away!

dunno



I don't like TLJ, but TFA and R1 are better than the prequels.

Oops guys in the first post I meant "The Return of the Jedi" is problematic but has some of the whole saga's highlights for me. NOT The Last Jedi! BUT I WENT BACK AND EDITED IT

Ah that makes much more sense.

I'll let Vader know that he won't be required to dispose of you. Ahem. Darth, you there? Hello?

I still think Lucas' ideas for the Sequel Trilogy. Albiet him not in charge of: DIrecting, writing, producing, merchandising -- Would be better than this hen house Disney Bull****.

.

BTW, Kroko, while we're talking of the brilliance of the OT, we'd be remiss not to mention the brilliance of Ralph McQuarrie. I think a lot of what we here on Massassi.net consider to be "Star Wars" really depends on the artistic vision of this man.

Sure thing.

Hear, hear, gentlemen. Let's raise a glass to the brilliance of Ralph McQuarrie, which we would be remiss not to mention.

Wha

Dammit Thrawn, you revived this thread for that?

It was a very bad post and it was eating me up that nobody had commented on it

Well, that thing did continue in the EP8 thread afterwards.

You know, it's an interesting observation (really stretching the "interesting" part here, but whatever). A lot of Koobie's banning had to do with volume instead of content (of course, the remaining reasons were mostly about the content...).

The reddit.txt Pagewizard/ragna/etc. types we still have 'round here tend to make a few posts, disappear for months and repeat the process.

And obviously, while everyone else forgets, I don't.

So, here’s a thing. I’m posting it here because, even though it reminded me of a discussion in the Episode 8 thread, it seems more appropriate for this one.

https://bragrman.com/2018/01/02/netflixs-bright-and-the-problems-of-world-building/

In summary: when you don’t think things through, your story ends up having issues.

This also reminded me of a discussion I had IRL a while back. People always talk about how TFA took its cues from ANH. I’ve even heard some people say it’s practically a remake, which seems somewhat hysterical, but also not without some merit. As we were talking about it, I started to think about what that actually means, and what the major differences between the movies are.

The big one? Everything in ANH happens for a reason. Nothing in TFA happens for any reason at all.

Just think about this.

At the beginning of the movie, Leia is taking the Death Star plans to Tatooine. Why? Because Obi-Wan Kenobi is there, watching over Luke. They hire Han Solo. Why? Because Han Solo works for Jabba the Hutt, who is also on Tatooine. They go to Alderaan, and run into the Death Star. Why? Both cases because Leia’s father lived there, the former to deliver the plans, the latter to kill him. There’s enough happenstance to make the story surprising, and that’s about it.

TFA?

At the beginning of the movie there’s an old guy on Jakku handing a map to Poe Dameron. Why? Why was he hiding on Jakku, specifically? Why did he have the map? Why did Poe visit him at that particular time, after so many years? How did Poe find him? How did the First Order find him? How did the First Order know to attack when they did? Dunno. Then, BB-8 meets Rey while wandering a planet-sized desert. Why? Dunno. He wasn’t looking for her or anything. Meanwhile, Finn crashes his TIE a walkable distance away from Rey’s trading camp, where BB-8 recognizes him. Why? Because he’s wearing Poe’s jacket. Why? Because he found it in the desert, after it got cleanly blown off his body in the crash... without harming Poe at all... errr. Anyway. Finn and Rey take off in the Millennium Falcon, and they get intercepted by Han Solo. Why? Dunno. Happened to spot them while smuggling some hentai thing, I guess. Han takes them to see low-rent Yoda. Why? Dunno, I guess because he thinks some trustworthy criminal in her criminal dive bar might fly Finn to super secret guerilla soldier camp where his wife lives, but I don’t remember for sure. What I do remember for sure is that low-rent Yoda has Anakin’s lightsaber. Why? Dunno. Then the New Republic gets destroyed, whatever that is, and Kylo Ren shows up to steal back the map. Why? How? idk, the force maybe? This convinces Han Solo to make that trip to guerilla base after all. Why? Dunno, but it’s kind of a dick move considering how much trouble going to low-rent Yoda’s bar caused everyone. And then at the very end, R2-D2 wakes up and gives them the rest of the map. Why? Why was he in low power mode in the first place? Why did he wake up exactly then? Why did he have only part of the map? Why did he have that specific part? Dunno.

And it’s not just how the events are motivated, it’s the people, too.

Why did the stormtroopers slaughter the Jawas and Larses? Because the Death Star plans were leaked, there was a real risk that someone who saw the plans might report what they’d seen, or that someone might have made a copy. Killing everybody was the easiest way to prevent the information from getting out.

Why did the stormtroopers massacre the other people in the Jakku village? The map was missing, so killing everybody meant possibly killing someone with valuable information, or who had seen the map before. Unlike the Death Star plans, Ren had no reason to fear someone looking at the map - presumably, if they intended to find Skywalker, they would have done it in the prior 30 years. On the contrary, leaving someone alive who goes looking for him would be a great opportunity to follow that person. Massacring the village was just evil for evil’s sake, some basic bro comic book ****.

Oh, also, it’s how the events are given gravity.

Why do we care when the Imperial Senate was dissolved in ANH? Because Leia was hiding behind it. “The Imperial Senate will not sit still for this”, “I’m a member of the Imperial Senate”. You got the sense that when the characters are talking about this later on, that they’d just striked out a significant check against the Emperor’s power.

So when the New Republic’s senate gets vaporized, we care, right? Well, not so much. The New Republic was almost never mentioned, and when it was, it was a stupid bureaucracy that refused to fight space nazis, who were, if anything, actually working against Leia. So why would anybody care that this event happened? Dunno.

Christ, I never thought I’d make a comparison between Star Wars writing that would be favourable to George Lucas.

That's nice, but I found your post hard to read because I remember well less than half of what happened in TFA.

It's pretty accurate.

I think the aspect of world-building that bugs me the most in (both) the new movies is the inexplicable wealth and power of the first order. In ANH/RotJ the empire literally runs the Galaxy and has a massive tax base so, okay, they can afford to build a death star.

The first order is...an upstart terrorist organization? Where did their money come from, to build another death star? (And a huge evil space fleet) It's made worse in TLJ when they tell the audience that "selling weapons to the first order is the only way to get THIS rich." Why? Doesn't that make the first order...orders of magnitude richer than anyone else in the galaxy? How'd they get their money?

I read a little on wookieepedia and the answer, apparently, is "illegal gambling." So uh

Oh my god, yes. This is the worst.

Compare that to the Legends/EU stuff. In the old novel Darksaber, the Hutts try to build their own Death Star. They explicitly can’t afford to build it, though. Nobody can. Their Death Star ends up being a glitchy and underbuilt piece of crap that explodes the first time they try to use it (IIRC). The old EU novels were unrestrained superweapon-madness, but even they tackled worldbuilding issues better than this.

In other words: second systems designed by a committee usually suck.

Yes, but I don’t think that’s quite what’s happening. It seems like there are catastrophic failures of preproduction all over the film industry. It’s like writers don’t actually give a **** about establishing setting anymore, they only care about the story beats. Movies never make any ****ing sense anymore.

Dude space ISIS would have been ****ing rad for the new SW. Like have some asymmetric space warfare **** going on.

Also I've heard that the First Order makes sense if you read the novels.

Which is the same complaint people had about the Trade Federation.

Having core worldbuilding and plot not shown on screen just doesn't work.

The Trade Federation always seemed obvious to me. I mean, it’s right in the opening crawl:



The Trade Federation is a business cartel that doesn’t want to pay taxes, and they’re trying to make an example of Naboo (showing what would happen to the other member worlds if trade stopped). At least, that’s what people are supposed to believe.

It could have been done better, but at least those details existed. For example, they didn’t reveal the fact that the Republic had no permanent military until the next movie, which explains why the Trade Federation was militarized (they had to protect their own shipping lanes because the Republic couldn’t). That’s the kind of oversight that confuses viewers, but at least the concept wasn’t half-baked going in.

The First Order, on the other hand. No ****in clue what’s going on there.

Also, has anybody else noticed how much Star Wars ****s all over democracy? Ranked in ascending order of effectiveness:

- The New Republic, which deliberately ignores an existential threat for no particular reason, and is utterly destroyed along with its entire military after the loss of a single star system.
- The Old Republic, which is so gridlocked that they eventually vote against democracy.
- The Resistance, a self-organizing paramilitary group that goes to pieces after losing the one person everybody likes.
- The Rebel Alliance, an association of self-appointed warlords that almost surrenders to the Empire because none of them want to risk attacking the Death Star.
- The Galactic Empire, a totalitarian dictatorship that reunites, rebuilds, and polices the entire galaxy almost immediately out of a devastating galaxy spanning war. It eventually falls, but only after losing a moon-sized warship, a massive starfleet, most of its military leadership, its leader and his successor on the same day. Even then, their remnants hold out for years after their central leadership has been destroyed.
- The First Order, a brutal totalitarian dictatorship that comes out of nowhere to achieve decisive victory over the only other major government of its time. Survives losing its leader and a planet-sized warship.

Is this some kind of demented propaganda or something?

Star Wars space combat was apparently inspired by World War II air combat. Why stop there?

This scene was cut from A New Hope, but Bigg's line just after the two minute mark:

[quote=Biggs Darklighter]What good’s all your uncle’s work if the Empire takes it over? You know they’ve already started to nationalize commerce in the central systems? It won’t be long before your uncle is just a tenant, slaving for the greater glory of the Empire.[/quote]

sounds a whole lot like the F.A. Hayek's reasoning in his early 1940's book which basically lambasted any form of "central planning" as a stepping stone to fascism of the sort that had just emerged in Nazi Germany.

So basically the Empire is a galactic Third Reich, whereas the glorious rebellion is a basically a bunch of second amendment toting freedom fighters hellbent on restoring the apparently anarcho-capitalist (as Jon said, the central government has no military) Old Republic.

Basically Jon what you are experiencing is the cognitive dissonance between two things you most passionately post about on this board: Star Wars and democratic socialism vs. libertarian fascism.

The good news is that if you accept all that, then the entire Star Wars saga is one big demonstration that anarcho capitalism is a horrrrible idea.

Asymmetric warfare? Um, did you even watch a new hope?

Remember how right winger in chief used to talk about the freedom fighters in Afghanistan?

Lol asymmetric warfare means preying on locals and setting IEDs everywhere, not brave heroism in terrible odds.

Was the revolutionary war not an example of asymmetric warfare?

I don't see anything here about morality.

Yavin IV was Vader's 9/11.

Also, remember what Bill Maher said that got his show cancelled? Was he wrong? Just asking.

Somewhat but not entirely, although I was referring more to ISIS/VC/al-Qaeda tactics.

The Ewoks were little fuzzy terrorists who used some asymmetric tactics.

Child soldiers

So now this thread went from "ROTJ was the weakest one of the OT since it had most Lucas in it" to "they should bring Yuuzhan Vong back".

That's it.

The Yuuzhan Vong—"Children of Yun-Yuuzhan", also called the Chosen Race, known to the Chiss and Ferroans as the Far Outsiders, and sometimes incorrectly abbreviated to Vong (which implied that one was disowned by their family and their gods)

I'm happy to have learned this distinct through Wookieepedia.

Whoa. RotJ just got 8 levels deeper.

They're anti-colonial freedom fighters fighting their colonial oppressors.

As soon as I wrote that I was taken aback at how terribly dark this thread has gotten....

They're also cute and cuddly!