Star Wars

[silk solar]

ahsoka ||i cannot tell you anything that has been communicated about ezra as a person in this show. sabine or ahsoka too, to be honest. i should not have to go to another series to get a character's personality ||

mando i think has a clear direction as a show

it just isnt so grandiose

and it has lost steam

[quick ibex]

s1 and 2 do

3 doesnt

[wispy vortex]

||do you mean does he know he is Anakin? As far as I know, no. But he met Vader||

[silk solar]

||yeah that is what i meant||

[quick ibex]

||IIRC i think he knows vaders a former jedi but doesnt know hes anakin specifically||

[wispy vortex]

||He may know he is Ahsoka’s former master, but it’s unclear whether he heard that||

Rebels ||I do think the whole time travel thing is the weakest part of Rebels||

[silk solar]

the what

[wispy vortex]

Oh

[silk solar]

ahsoka 8 ||why are we just getting the reason for sabine and ahsoka's split now||

[wispy vortex]

Big Rebels spoilers ||So Ahsoka sacrificed her life stalling Vader to let Ezra escape. Then weird World Between Worlds time travel shenanigans and Ezra pulled her into the present and saved her life.||

[silk solar]

||also why is it dumb smh||

[quick ibex]

||Its dumb but its not the weakest part||

[wispy vortex]

||Any time travel in Star Wars is weak||

[quick ibex]

||its a pretty weak part of the show but the entirety of zebs character (especially him becoming bffs with the guy who orchestarted his species genocide) is so so much weaker and much more important||

[silk solar]

ahsoka 8 ||why is ahsoka talking to sabine about what it means to be a jedi. ahsoka is not a jedi||

||i feel like that is a pretty crazy error||

[autumn hemlock]

(I'm late, but...) Please consult SpaceDuck's profile

[silk solar]

||is this show gaslighting me??||

[wispy vortex]

Yes

[autumn hemlock]

||High School dropout gives lecture on what it means to have a PHD||

[silk solar]

||what is the point of writing two non standard master-apprentice relationships if you are just going to revert to the default||

[quick ibex]

This specific moment is what made me quit star wars

[silk solar]

a little harsh but i respect it

[quick ibex]

Andor s2 was after this and that was good

but i dont think im gonna watch a new star wars show ever again

maybe that star wars starfighter movie is thats good (lol)

[silk solar]

||how is sabine helping out with the gate she cant use the force on command||

||ok i dont need crazy choreography, but just having everyone in a line firing at each other is insane||

[quick ibex]

anyway what are yalls thoughts on my movie ranking

I almost forgot to put solo on the list

[silk solar]

i have only watched TLJ soon enough to give it a clear score

the rest i havent seen in like a decade

i dont need to rewatch ep IX tbh

[quick ibex]

IX i havent watched since it came out

[bitter trail]

i can't really separate 4 5 and 6 out from each other although i guess i'd put rotj on the top

pretty standard take tho

still haven't seen 9 and at this point, kind of interested in seeing if that can be permanent

[quick ibex]

ROTJ on the top is surprising

[silk solar]

i remember not loving rogue one but looking at the list it may be top 5

[bitter trail]

i am an individual with thoughts developed before i found out there was a popular opinion about certain movies

[quick ibex]

even before i knew about peoples opinions on star wars rotj was always my least favorite of the original trilogy

[bitter trail]

so why the surprise

[quick ibex]

idk it just feels like its good but doesnt feel on the level of ANH or empire

[bitter trail]

hmm

[silk solar]

ahsoka 8 ||why can sabine deflect blasters so well? i always assumed that was a force thing||

[wispy lichen]

RotJ is my top SW movie as well

As a quick order:
6 > 5 = 3 = 4 > Rogue One > 1 > 2 > 7 > Solo > 9 > 8

In general the more mystical SW is my thing and ||Luke|| is tied for my top SW character spot alongside ||Jacen and Mara ||

[silk solar]

2 above 7 is tough

[echo echo]

I'd rate Solo above any of the prequels easily

[wispy lichen]

I like the PT

[wispy vortex]

ANH is my favorite

[echo echo]

Boring, but not cringe

[quick ibex]

is this list designed to ragebait me specifically

[wispy lichen]

Love the PT actually. Lots of nostalgia involved, sure, but I do love them.

[wispy lichen]

Why would it ragebait you??? Lol

[echo echo]

TLJ Discourse

I feel like RotJ is for the Luke Enjoyers

[wispy lichen]

I hate TLJ and no talking about it is not gonna change anything

[quick ibex]

TLJ in last and 2 above 7 and 3 equal to 4

[silk solar]

ahsoka 8 ||i refuse to believe ahsoka is losing to this witch lady im sorry||

[wispy lichen]

RotJ is for the Luke enjoyers yea

RotJ is also the mainline movie with I’d say the best mystical Star Wars

[silk solar]

the problem with RotJ is what happens to literally all the other characters lmao

[wispy lichen]

I think Star wars works best for me when mythological or mystical

[quick ibex]

ROTJ has some great stuff and great moments its just not one of the all time great movies like 4 and 5 are

to me at least

[silk solar]

i feel like half of RotJ is a 9/10 and the other half is a 5

[wispy lichen]

I saw RotJ when it had it’s rerelease in theaters recently

10/10 experience

RotJ has the single best movie scene in SW IMO

[quick ibex]

Which scene do you mean here

[echo echo]

Common "Main Characters Who Aren't Also Chosen Ones Like The Main Main Character So They Get Written Into Half Baked Side Content In The Final Battle Because They Aren't Chosen" chosen one story L

[wispy lichen]

RotJ ||throne room ofc||

[silk solar]

ahsoka 8 ||i know the meme of ezra stealing stormtrooper armor and they are literally doing it again||

[quick ibex]

Oh i agree

here

best scene in all of SW the problem is the rest of the movie

[silk solar]

i think the outline for han and leia stopped like 20 mins into 6

[wispy lichen]

I mean I was very careful to say movie

[silk solar]

rotj ||the throne room is like 30 mins of screentime lmao||

[wispy lichen]

Scene in general goes firmly to some book scenes

[wispy lichen]

☺️

[quick ibex]

well i dont really care that much for the books

thb

[wispy vortex]

Theres some amazing scenes in Clone Wars

[wispy lichen]

Rebels has good scenes too

Bad Batch gets an award for ||a very shocking death that is permanent ||

[quick ibex]

some andor scenes might be in compotetiion for best scene in all of star wars too imo

[wispy lichen]

Hm let me make my top ten scenes list

[wispy vortex]

The Scariff sequence on Rogue One too

||The corvette shoving the Star Destroyer was so cool, and the running battle around the lakes||

[silk solar]

ahsoka ||does sabine know who ahsoka's master was?||

[bitter trail]

andor does indeed have some moments that are now my top star wars moments, something that hasn't happened SINCE original trilogy

[wispy vortex]

Not on screen, but who knows what happened

[bitter trail]

rogue one came close but then andor kind of blew that out of the water

[echo echo]

As with the best stories in a series Andor makes ANH and Rogue One both better

[bitter trail]

andor all but general ||i think i could make an argument for like, anything with luthen in it||

[wispy vortex]

||His speech in particular||

[silk solar]

bruh lmao

[echo echo]

Very much on the Endwalker makes Shadowbringers better level for me

[quick ibex]

andor is so so good better call saul tier show

actually i dont think its as good as better call sal

but it comes close

[wispy vortex]

S1 is at that level

[silk solar]

ahsoka 8 ||is anyone upset that thrawn escaped? they just kinda 😐 ||

[echo echo]

It takes a very deft touch to go back and add information to a story in such a way that isn't distracting or weird or worse which undermines the original telling, but god damn did Andor do it (the PT did not)

Especially back-in-time information

[wispy lichen]

1. ||All is One|| from NJO Traitor
2. || “I am a Jedi like my father before me” || RotJ
3. ||Binary Sunset || ANH
4. ||the final battle of NJO || NJO Unifying Force
5. ||Yoda training Luke || ESB
6. ||Scene with Ganner || NJO Traitor
7. ||Scene with Anakin || NJO Star By Star
8. ||Ahsoka Leaves || TCW
9. ||Twin Suns || Rebels
10. ||Obi Wan vs Anakin|| RotS

[silk solar]

PT also has some stuff that hurt the sequel for me

PT ||mitichlorians and anakin jesus baby are so dumb ||

||honestly a lot of the damage the prequels did gets underdiscussed||

[bitter trail]

phantom menace does get points for being my introduction into star wars, when mom and dad were watching it fresh out on vhs and let us "sneak" out of our rooms and watch it with them very late and then dad asked after, "did you know there is MORE star wars???" and then rented the OT on vhs for us and that was it

[silk solar]

SW all ||yoda got character assasinated way more than luke ever did imo||

[wispy vortex]

||Tbh I didnt find the final battle in NJO very good. I think Borleias is better. Or exchange it for Bilbringi||

Everything else is perfect

[echo echo]

This is why I wanna see your PT rewatch liveblog

[wispy lichen]

||Borleias is excellent. Love Borleias. Allston ||

[silk solar]

you are swaying my fickle mind kon

[bitter trail]

when i got to pick the class movie, i picked rotj, and all the boys complained that i didn't pick phantom menace instead

[echo echo]

When you cut through the decades of memes rosily tinting those movies they really do make some shockingly bad choices

[wispy lichen]

I love the PT. I get why people hate them but I love them.

[wispy vortex]

same

[silk solar]

my biggest structural critique of the PT is that ep 1 should be attack of the clones, ep 2 should be the clone wars, and then ep 3 should be the same

[echo echo]

I don't know that you even have to go that far

[wispy lichen]

I suspect my #1 will always be my number 1

[echo echo]

I do think [PM] ||you need to see Anakin getting recruited, as a not-child. I do think it should have been young Hayden Christiansen though||

||I think he needs to be a character and not a spunky plot device though||

[silk solar]

||people call rey a mary sue but no star wars character has ever or will ever be as mary sue as anakin in PM||

[bitter trail]

i love the pt memes and all, but at this point in the ups and downs of my feelings for the pt is that i can do without them. i do have a hard time mentally and emotionally finding the throughline from rots to anh, everything except andor and ro that attempts to connect the dots is too pt than ot for me

every time i go back, i just feel... idk, like i'm too old for it? whereas ot still feels as relevant to me now as it did when i was 9

[silk solar]

ahsoka 8 ||why in the actual hell would ezra wear the armor onto the ship||

[bright blade]

Ahsoka 8 ||I think that's our boi Ezra being a troll.||

[silk solar]

finished ahsoka

very very frustrating show

i dont think anything was fatally bad, so s2 could just be better

[wispy lichen]

I don’t have quite as strong negative feelings as you, but I do mostly agree S2 is where this show lives or dies

[echo echo]

Andor is my personal prequel story

[wispy lichen]

S1 has a soft spot for me for ||being a sequel to my fav SW show, featuring a lot of characters I love, and being the most mythological SW we have gotten in a really long time ||

[echo echo]

Being this reliant on a second season even not considering the like what four or five year gap to be good is just

What are we doing here

I don't even think its bad exactly

[wispy lichen]

I agree

It should have just been an animated 25 episode season or smth

It being live action and the strikes killed a lot of this show

[echo echo]

Animation with a parity script would not have fixed this

Live action is mostly not the problem here

[wispy lichen]

I think LA caused a trickle down effect or problems

[quick ibex]

the problem is that the writings not good

[wispy lichen]

||Like Ashley is flat out a better Ahsoka. The LA also has a bunch of exposure problems and formatting changes to be “exciting” screen worthy that animation never seems to worry about ||

[echo echo]

I agree that Rosario Dawson mailed in her performance and that even with the same poor script that Ashley Eckstein would not have

I think that's mostly where it begins and ends for me in terms of evaluating animated as a better choice here

[silk solar]

||i feel like we didnt get much mythology. the other ones must be barren||

[wispy lichen]

||there is NO mythology in anything it’s unfortunate ||

I starve so I have to accept crumbs

[echo echo]

I don't entirely agree with the Jesse Cox criticism of Ahsoka but I think his summary of it ||that nothing happens in it except Ahsoka and friends trade places with Ezra and Thrawn and friends|| highlights that Ahsoka s1 really doesn't have a story unto itself at all, which I do agree with

There's no beginning middle and end. Baseline, it barely qualifies as a story at all

And animating this not-story doesn't fix it

[quick ibex]

ahsoka just has the worst tendencies of the star wars shows all bundeld together

[silk solar]

ahsoka ||people joke this is rebels season 5. its not. it is the first half of rebels season 6. there is a ton of skipped over story material that doesnt really have answers, but that mystery is never leveraged in an interesting way. its not that i dont know what sabine and ahsoka didnt work the first time, is that nothing in the writing depends on that being the case. if ahsoka never trained sabine, the story happens exactly the same way||

[wispy lichen]

I do think this just shows how much we desperately need actual force-centric Jedi content because it’s been too long

[echo echo]

https://tenor.com/view/jedi-survivor-cal-kestis-grown-star-wars-jedi-gif-27218097

[quick ibex]

the issue is just the story feels like someone playing with toys

[silk solar]

||as for the trading places thing, i think that is mostly a function of the character writing being so flat that the only way to describe progress is with plot, which is not how stories should work. the end should feel like this big oh crap moment. we failed. bad. but we have this glimmer of hope bc ezra is back, but it cost us ahsoka and sabine. but instead it is just... flat? ezra doesnt seem that upset over leaving sabine. sabine doesnt seem that upset to be trapped in the space booonies. we are just where we are||

[silk solar]

stop doxxing me

[wispy lichen]

Cal is a good character but ||Cal’s journey is not tied to the force. It is tied to existing in a post-Jedi world as a Jedi. If Jedi 3 focused on Cal sitting and thinking about the force for hours or discussing mystical concepts it wouldn’t be a good action game lol ||

[silk solar]

i feel like the bigger issue is that there was an 8 episode show named after a jedi (or ronin, no one knows?) and i didnt learn anything about the force or even the opinion on the various charcters on the force

[echo echo]

Cal's journey is tied to the Force but in a much less cerebral, more instinctual way than is commonly portrayed imo

[wispy lichen]

||the Jedi games are fundamentally action games and that’s good. They are fun games. ||

[wispy lichen]

I’d argue it’s more like what we see a lot of

We rarely see the more mystical side

All Jedi are instinct driven action heroes now

[silk solar]

that i agree is a problem

[wispy lichen]

Luke Skywalker is interesting because ||he sits and meditates and thinks ||

[silk solar]

although tbf the prequels really started that

[echo echo]

The Force has always been about instinct

Literally from the beginning

[wispy lichen]

In the PT ||this exists at least partially as a contrast between the action driven Anakin and the meditative council. they encourage thought and meditation. Anakin wants to act. that struggle between action and patience is fundamental to Jedi conflicts in ideology ||

[silk solar]

i dont think luke in OT is a very intellectual character

more emotional than anything i would say

[echo echo]

Luke does basically zero sitting and thinking [OT] ||and the one time Yoda tells him to sit and think he runs off instead and imo the story vindicates him in that||

[wispy lichen]

||the story criticizes him in that constantly. It is frequently pointed to as his biggest failing. ||

||he SHOULD have contemplated not rushed in||

||that’s what Luke himself says in RotJ||

[silk solar]

||i cant think of a single time in the prequels, or any star wars really, where thinking and meditating caused a character to do something different than what they would have otherwise done. possibly luke in between 5 and 6 but that is off screened||

[echo echo]

||Yoda, and to a lesser extent Obi-wan criticize him for being a man of action but they're also the losers who created Darth Vader and Luke is the one who saved him so ||

[wispy lichen]

||Luke saves him after refusing to fight and act. His choice to refuse action is what allows his true love to emerge. ||

[silk solar]

||i also think the jedi in the PT are portrayed as bad, but the story never really agrees on what they did wrong and so it isnt clear if its the conservative and passive nature of the council or the fact they all became war generals||

[echo echo]

||Luke follows a correct instinct in the moment after a whole ass movie of action put him in a position where his refusal to fight had any meaning at all||

[wispy lichen]

PT ||I think the Jedi are portrayed as a tragedy in slow motion, we see the flaws but they are ultimately the good guys and so the flaws are exploited by the true bad guy to make everything fall to ruin||

[silk solar]

||what are their flaws?||

man i really should do that PT rewatch

[wispy lichen]

PT ||depends on who you talk to. I think the refusal to engage with human relationships to a full extent while still intervening in the world promoted apathetic disinterest ||

||I’m pro Jedi marriage tho||

||because I think if Jedi are intervening in the world, they must be of the world and come to understand different facets of love while still being able to let go ||

[wispy lichen]

I think we disagree about fundamental nature of the character in RotJ, which is fine, but also I don’t think we’ll agree lol

[bright blade]

PT thoughts regarding Jedi ||I'd say Palpatine's turning of Anakin to the Dark Side was in part due to the Jedi pushing him away from the Light. They already distrusted him and ostracized him and kept pushing him out of the circle, and Palpatine exploited that to make himself seem like the only real ally Anakin had. The RotS novelization does an especially good job of depicting this.||

[wispy lichen]

As far as this goes (SW gen) ||it’s most common in the EU books and the games where the conflict between action and reflection is core ||

[wispy lichen]

|| I think Stover feels very sympathetic to the Jedi in the novel ||

[silk solar]

yeah when it comes to film i just dont think it is there hardly at all

ofc they have never nailed down a philosophy for jedi on screen so it is hard to know

[wispy lichen]

It is there, but it’s extrapolated on so can easily be ascribed to something else

Like EU authors just decided to interpret things one way

But other interpretations can exist

[silk solar]

ep 7-9 doesnt have any of this

[bright blade]

RotS novelization ||I kind of agree. Stover does a good job representing all sides of the story. He just did such a darn good job. Well, everything except Dooku. I feel like he kind of botched Dooku's character, but in every other sense he gave a good sense of perspective for all sides of the conflict.||

[silk solar]

except some nods in 8, ig, but that is more mystical than philosophical

1-3 just straight up doesnt

[wispy lichen]

1-3 do under the facet of ||action vs. inaction, rashness vs. meditation||

Like that conflict is fundamentally there and there is a reason Legends focuses SO MUCH on it

[silk solar]

||i dont really know how that is philosophy. meditation is not directly related to philosophy at all. having the jedi tell people to think things thorugh isnt philosophical unless there is some structure for the conclusions they are supposed to reach||

[wispy vortex]

||replace meditation with consideration||

[silk solar]

||now one interpreation of the jedi in the prequels is that they are so obsessed with the forms they lost the meaning, but that feels more speculative than anything||

[wispy lichen]

||it’s moreso like… is the role of the Jedi to rush and act instinctually or is it the role of the Jedi to meditate and contemplate? ||

[silk solar]

consideration is also disjoint from philosophy

[echo echo]

Don't think this changes SpaceDuck's conclusion

[silk solar]

i would not consider this a philosophical question with how it is presented in the story

most irl sects where meditation is done operate under some philosophy that guides what they are trying to accomplish, but people of every ideaology contemplate

[wispy lichen]

Not in 1-6 but definitely in expanded media

[echo echo]

PT ||The story also repeatedly vindicates Anakin on this until it decides to stop vindicating him on this||

[silk solar]

that is more personality than philosophy

[wispy lichen]

In 1-6 it’s more a conflict central to the themes

[silk solar]

SW films all ||its like in episode 8 when they try to critisize po for being a rash rogue pilot when 1) they won the battle and 2) that is literally how every battle in star wars has been won||

films ||the most philosophical part I can remember is when yoda talks about anger leading to hate and all that, but that is also more emotional and also just wrong lmao||

||and then they have him lead an army of clones he met 20 mins ago into battle, but he wasnt angry at the time ig so its fine?||

[wispy lichen]

This is directly discussed later lol

Like, I get it 1-6 don’t talk about this, but a lot of books and games analyze concepts like these to death

[silk solar]

my personal take is to not give credit to things for what other stories do if they are separated enough

so if book 1 brings up something that book 2 expounds upon, yeah sure

but ideally for me, star wars would be a visual story, and so i judge it primarily off the content of the shows and movies. the games and books should be supplementary, but too often i feel like they fill in stuff that should have just been on screen to begin with

[wispy lichen]

I see Legends novels as drawing a through line that connects the lore all together in a neat package

And Legends novels are my primary SW content in my mind

[silk solar]

like when i look at the OT, i feel like i got a complete narrative experience. finding out more gives me more information, but with the prequel or ahsoka i need that information to even parse what the story is supposed to be

[wispy lichen]

Legends games too

[wispy lichen]

I get that and I think that’s why it’s totally fair to have different interpretations on the same concepts

[echo echo]

I kind of have a hard time giving the PT even the credit of Legends patching things up, especially since PT seemed kind of content to broadly ignore Legends

[silk solar]

most of it isnt canon anyways

so we are really talking about two disjoint universes

[echo echo]

But it isn't like we got a ton of Legends getting in there and recontextualizing the PT in the, what, half decade after the PT finished before Disney bought Star Wars?

Seven years

[quick ibex]

and then we never get any sore of depth for the CIS

[glad mason]

I actually think aotc was the worst star wars movie of all time based on the fact I feel asleep while watching it and managed to stay awake for every other movie

[wispy lichen]

A lot was done over the course of PT releases

[wispy lichen]

Fair enough, I don’t agree, but fair enough.

[echo echo]

During the releases yes, but I really do mean taking the prequels as a whole and taking a different look at them, which I think is different than at least the stuff among this I gave read which is more supplemental in nature

[wispy lichen]

Most of the stuff I’ve read that improved the PT were post RotJ content so it didn’t feel fair to say “it all helps” lol.

[echo echo]

As much as this is weird to say I do kind of think people needed more than "just" seven years to really wrap their brains around what the PT was and try and make something sensible out of it

[wispy lichen]

While I’m not interested in proving the merit of the PT, I am interested in how Jedi are portrayed across time in Legends vs. Canon and there’s some interesting philosophical debates that happen within Legends. KOTOR is a great example of something that is more explicit about such a debate. ||Revan in rushing off to help the galaxy was rash and unthinking. He was acting without detached contemplation. He also falls to the Dark Side. And yet, those who preached detachment and contemplation and chose inaction resulted in countless deaths as the Mandalorians swept across the galaxy.
So… should the Jedi contemplate or act? Should action override peaceful demeanor? Jedi are reflections outward of what they are within, so without that contemplation they act on the road to the Dark Side, but was that a better way when people were suffering?||
I think this ^ is similar to underlying concepts happening in the PT and OT and it feels like authors in Legends tied this all together

[echo echo]

To my memory the idea engaged with the most was "Jedi don't get married, that's An Attachment" and I feel like in some ways that's the tip of an iceberg of absurdity where if you think about what's being presented in the PT it becomes deeply silly very quickly

[wispy lichen]

I think it helps that Legends authors were clearly consulting with George Lucas about OT themes and so were able to integrate them into (Legends) ||Luke’s story of realizing he has been too rash all his life and must stop using the force as a tool of action ||

[wispy lichen]

Within the movies themselves, I’d agree.
I think we disagree on how to view the movies, whether they are the “core” media or just one small piece in a larger story.

I personally prefer to treat SW as a grand narrative, not a core movie series with supplemental media and I think that’s part of why I love it

[glad mason]

i liked the idea of a monastic order tbh, there's something very appealing about the ethics of ascetism

[wispy lichen]

It’s part of the two contradictory halves of the Jedi and the conflict between which half they should emphasize. ||are Jedi monks who should detach and contemplate or worldly interventionists meant to mediate and join in conflicts?||

||and beyond that Jedi in relationships aren’t properly letting go of those they lose and so fall to the Dark Side ||

[echo echo]

I don't hate the entire idea on its merits as an idea, but if they wanted to make the Jedi appear ascetic this is the only thing they did and it comes off as borrowing from Buddhism without understanding anything about Bhuddism

Like if you showed me a Jedi hermit on an asteroid or something along those lines, other signs that this was really A Thing

[glad mason]

tbf a lot of buddhism in practice is like... not very philosophical

[echo echo]

But the prequels just kind of harp repeatedly on family relations and that's it

I'd say "give me a Jolee Bindo" but even Jolee had left the Jedi order

[wispy lichen]

There’s actually a name for this let me find it

Basically Jedi Sabbatical

[echo echo]

No but the justification here is "attachments are inherently bad" which is a Bhuddist or at least Bhuddist-inspired idea

[wispy lichen]

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Barash_Vow

[wispy lichen]

Tbf I see the “attachments are bad” concept (which yeah Lucas wholeheartedly espoused) as a failing of the Jedi and something (RotJ) ||Luke in embracing love and connection is able to fulfill his role as a Jedi far better ||

[echo echo]

Sure this is a thing Legends looked at what Lucas was doing and ran with more successfully, but I mean in the prequels

[wispy lichen]

I see it as this story of (PT, OT) || Luke becoming what the Jedi were always meant to be and creating a Jedi Order surrounded by love, rather than disconnection ||

[wispy lichen]

Right. We see SW media’s core differently.

[echo echo]

It isn't about the media core or not

Its about, what are these movies saying on their own?

[wispy lichen]

You prefer to interpret the movies on their own, I prefer to interpret them as one part of the whole of Star Wars

[echo echo]

Any part of Star Wars should be able to speak for itself

Much like with the Ahsoka criticism from last night if you need some other story to come along and make yours make sense it wasn't actually a good story to begin with

[wispy lichen]

And much like with Ahsoka, I love it anyway because of caring more about overarching story than individual entries

These different ways of viewing the franchise are why we won’t agree on this lol

[echo echo]

I mean it isn't even really about "the franchise" its about evaluating a story on its merits. A season of TV or a trilogy should be able to say something sensible without asking me to go read a bunch of supplemental material

The PT presents itself as a complete story

Engaging with it in that way is not unfair to the PT

[bitter trail]

I also don't see Star Wars as a grand narrative because I can't make the connection between PT and OT work, they're too far apart

[wispy lichen]

It’s not unfair, I agree

I’m not telling you you’re wrong to view it that way

[bitter trail]

I wouldn't go to Luke when describing what doesn't work about the way the PT Jedi story d falls short

[wispy lichen]

But I do have reasons for my own views that aren’t wrong either

[bitter trail]

and in fact I think I'd make a point of not going to Luke to fix PT's shortcomings

[echo echo]

The thing is, I often will and often do read the supplemental material but I feel less inclined to do so when it feels required to make baseline sense of what's happening here

People tell me to read a book and watch an anime(?) and then Final Fantasy XV goes from the worst game you've ever played to a masterpiece and I simply won't do that

[wispy lichen]

And that’s fair

[silk solar]

I think with things like this is less about the quality and understanding of the work and more just sunk cost

Or transferring over the quality of one thing to another

[glad mason]

Late to the convo but I think the actual transition from PT -> OT is fine and almost all of the ideas in the PT hold up. It’s just that the execution is not good, both for the pacing etc and more specifically in terms of Anakins characterization

[silk solar]

Idk i feel people have fallen into the cadence of prequels being good ideas with bad execution, and idk if i agree

Looking back it also had a lot of bad ideas

[autumn hemlock]

Alternatively, it's Survivorship Bias, or at least a close cousin. If most people that've consumed all of a wide media thing think it's great, a non-negligible amount of that will be because people that enjoy a thing in the first place are more likely to consume all the adjacent media.

If someone insists the MCU really comes together if you watch everything, that doesn't actually tell me the MCU really comes together. It just tells me that they like the MCU.

[silk solar]

Very good point

[bitter trail]

I do not think the ideas of the PT line up with the OT whatsoever

[silk solar]

When i do my rewatch i will try to nail down what ideas the PT do or do not have

Idk if there is universal agreement on that either

[echo echo]

Lucas was very obviously in a different place in life imo

Part of me also feels like sometimes he forgot that this was Darth Vader's Tragic Backstory and thinks Anakin is just outright The Hero

[silk solar]

SW movies ||i just dont think he was a good enough writer to pull off what he wanted to pull off||

||OT is a very simple story emotionally||

||anakin’s arc is really tough to get right||

[autumn hemlock]

||I think he could've pulled it off if there was someone in the room that was allowed to say "No George, that doesn't work".||

[silk solar]

||yes if someone else wrote it for him he could do it ||

[quick ibex]

||if people did that we wouldnt have gotten ratts tyrells family so smh bad idea||

[echo echo]

Co-write, at least

I'll give Lucas the credit of coming up with a decently good percentage of good ideas

The problem is, he doesn't know the difference between his good ideas and his bad ones

Further, of his ideas that are hits they are high percentage home runs

Though, I'm not sure he's very good at recognizing those either

[silk solar]

bc im going to do a rewatch in the near future i should get my impressions down early

SW films ||i havent seen the prequels in essentially a decade or more, at this point, but it is hard to remember what is in them by osmosis. to go off what kon said, what is often sighted is there strengths is in my opinion the easiest thing to get write about stories. art is 99% execution, and i got tab over and open a google doc and throw in some vagueries about light and dark and love and hate and betrayals and master and apprentices and have it come out close to what the prequels are conceptually. but stories are not their wikipedia summaries||

||the OT is much simpler conceptually than the PT or ST, but its execution is in a different galaxy compared to those other movies. by expectation is to get frustrated scene by scene with the writing and then say, yeah, ig they were going for X, but who cares if you didnt get there. ||

||do or do not and all that||

||still, im open to revising my opinion. rarely do i come out of these types of explorations with just my opinions validated. im sure if i rewatched the OT i would have similar shifts as well||

[heavy linden]

Lucas was great with the worldbuilding, great with developing memorable characters, but could have used a little more help with the dialogue and directing, particularly when it came to the PT. I always thought the ST just had the opposite problems, washy characters but some great performances, great direction, great execution, with inconsistent and sometimes nonsensical worldbuilding decisions, like ST ||hyperdrive suicide missiles would have made destroying the Death Star trivial, or force healing suddenly being a thing everyone can just do||

(though maybe I shouldn't say great execution)

I just quote what Lucas said about TLJ, it was 'beautifully made'

[silk solar]

ST ||i think the worldbuilding decisions are minor in the face of the script issues||

[heavy linden]

ST ||I guess the point I'm going for is, like, the dialogue in the ST is fine, the overarching pitch of a plot isn't, and it's just in most ways the opposite strenghts and weaknesses of the prequels||

ST ||and the point I'm making is flawed because there are some pretty bad lines in the sequels, I'm aware||

[silk solar]

I was going to say lmao

||i think the plot of prequels is also really bad||

||like what even happens in the phantom menace||

[heavy linden]

PT ||valid, I mean it's basically just a worldbuilding expo plus Anakin backstory, it doesn't tell that much of a story other than how Anakin got mixed up in all this||

[quick ibex]

ST ||The script isnt the issue for TLJ Tbh tljs issue is that its a TFA sequel it would be OT level if it just wasnt a sequel to TFA||

[silk solar]

||8 is def hampered by 7 and 9 but i dont see a way for it to get as good as the OT||

[wispy lichen]

My mom took me to our local theater for MaG today

||Overall 7/10 movie. Looked really good and makes me hopeful for future Star wars movies ||

||I liked the X-wings. Want more X-wings||

||I get the action scenes were the point but also the non-action scenes were the best parts||

Also I see what @silk solar meant about the Minions trailer before M and G

||they are summong eldritch demons now ||

[silk solar]

it is baffling right?

[wispy lichen]

They literally ||summoned Cthulhu|| it’s crazy

[silk solar]

@echo echo seems M and G actually dropped 69%

[echo echo]

nice

I like TLJ's for its swings

I want more of what it wanted to do in Star Wars

Is it successful? No. Could it have been in a world where Disney weren't artistic cowards? Maybe, but we'll never know

[quick ibex]

TLJ i think is just one of the best looking movies ever made

[echo echo]

Whose fault is it? I dunno but Rian Johnson otherwise makes excellent movies

[quick ibex]

TLJs issue came from coming after TFA and sticking too close to the orignal trilogy IMO

[echo echo]

One of the swings I like about it is the dialogue it tries to have with the OT

[quick ibex]

thats not what i mean

i mean more it being just a purely rebels vs empire story

agian

[silk solar]

i think TLJ was the last time star wars had a coherent vision

[echo echo]

I mean, same as with the Ahsoka etc criticisms of the last 24hr, it only did if the stories around it delivered

They did not

[silk solar]

i dont think ahsoka had a vision tbh

[echo echo]

I mean that it is reliant on what's around

It can't have a fully coherent vision as the middle part of a trilogy

[silk solar]

ahsoka ||i dont think ahsoka properly set up anything to do with thrawn or its main chracacters. the full content of the change present in the series is who is in the pocket dimension ||

[wispy lichen]

<@&1396936875054203020>

Quick check before we move on tomorrow

[autumn hemlock]

The first like 20 chapters of DT1 felt like such a slog... Things are definitely moving along now though (CH30)

[echo echo]

TLJ works much harder to try and push an idea than Ahsoka does, I agree, but in do or do not land I don't think it does or can be any more effective at it

[wispy lichen]

That’s interesting I found this book pretty fluid lol
I do think VP feels like a slog in parts tho

DT1 first 20 chapters or so ||I really like the Anakin/Mara and Ganner/Corran chapters though ||

[autumn hemlock]

DT general ||I think it just has too many PoVs, it's building tension in like 5 different planets||

[wispy lichen]

||that’s fair. once it converges the plot improves for sure ||

[silk solar]

ironically i scored them about the same

[glad mason]

Star Wars ||I’ve been thinking about the prequels a lot and it’s really actually astonishing how bad the world building is, because the only “cultures” that exist in SW (out of the dozens of places they go to) are Mandalore and Dathomir (excluding cultures established in Andor)||

||you could not name a single thing about a single species or place that shows up in the PT, which is a shame in a show allegedly about politics||

[lavish flame]

I'd definitely agree it had a vision but idk if it was coherent.

TLJ was visually a fantastic movie but it may as well have been made by Vince Russo with the amount of swerves it had in terms of any cohesive vision or ideas.

[silk solar]

TLJ ||Rey’s arc makes sense and it is clear rian knew what he wanted to do with luke||

[lavish flame]

TLJ ||I think having a vision needs more than just individual character journeys making a base level of sense. The movie does essentially paint them into a corner with the way they're done. Snoke becomes pointless quickly and is forgotten. Like did Rian really plan to have the guy who lost in one movie and got humiliated in this one as the big bad. Finn seemed to have been particularly lost in the shuffle with one of the more ludicrous arcs and the sorta worldbuilding around the movie is all very scatterbrained.||

[echo echo]

I think its more than this. I came away from TLJ excited about the future of Star Wars because he clearly presented some baseline ideas I was excited about other movies following up

Didn't happen of course

[lavish flame]

TLJ ||It feels more like the movie I'd make if I thought I was only going to get one movie and to leave as much of a mark i could while ensuring that no matter which way you went at the end, it wouldn't work.||

[lavish flame]

I actually went into the movie very excited and came out with dread in my heart that there's no way they'd do anything good anymore.

[echo echo]

I knew exactly what I wanted the movie that would become Rise of Skywalker to do and was excited to see it

There were plenty of alarm bells going into RoS' actual release so by the time it actually came out I was no longer excited, but the months after TLJ were a very good time for me

[lavish flame]

Oh what would that be? ||I felt like there was absolutely no way forward. Going back to rey vs kylo, which they inevitably would, likely wouldn't work.||

[echo echo]

TLJ ||I don't know why not. The core of the movie I wanted to see was Kylo doubling down on being the bad guy in his own right, while being Force ghost haunted my a mocking Mark Hamill||

||Anakin feels like he has a weird lack of agency in his own fall to the Dark Side and I'd have loved to have seen a movie about a successor who has much more agency in his evil than Vader did||

[lavish flame]

||To me the movie fundamentally has lost most of its tension by this point because what's kylo ren really going to do in a svelte one and half hours that will make him a big threat considering all we've seen this guy do so far is lose. Kylo Ren and Rey didn't really come out of the movie as stronger characters to me and he just never really felt like the big threat he was apparently going to be.||

[silk solar]

||doubling down on TLJ being Kylo's villain origin story, where he rejects every attempt to bring him to the light, would justify him having an elevated threat in movie 3. and him being responsible for the deaths of the entire original trinity is a pretty big feather in his cap||

[lavish flame]

||Rey has shown she can beat this guy, and she's gonna beat this guy sorta comes across as the core of the movie unless they were willing to end the trilogy with him winning.||

[silk solar]

||also TLJ wanted rey to be a reverse Luke. Luke thought he was a nobody and was horrified to find out he was somebody. Rey wanted to be somebody and was dissapointed to find out she was nobody. Makes her an interesting coutnerpoint to Mr MC Kylor, kid of leia and han and trained by Luke. I think Rian was clearly writing against the moral determinism SW often dips its toes into||

[echo echo]

Star Wars extremely general ||Darth Vader being the real power behind a weasely useless Emperor and then eventually killing that Emperor is an idea they explored in the OT before Empire came out, and I think it would have been a decently good idea to explore in altered form here||

[silk solar]

||finn and po's arc just suck no contention there||

[lavish flame]

Yeah but for all this, ||wouldn't the move have been to give him an actual win over Luke or even Rey at the end of TLJ?||

[silk solar]

||yeah, but tbc i dont think TLJ is good. just that it had a clear vision. you are talking about execution stuff, which implies what it wants to do is clear. you cant do the same thing for RoS||

[echo echo]

TLJ ||Rey's shown she can beat a conflicted Kylo who's pulling his punches trying to recruit her. I'd have been very easy to sell on a like powerup scene early in ep9 where Kylo embraces his ideology fully and commits to killing the new trio because they won't stop interfering with his plans||

[lavish flame]

||He sorta ends up humiliated again cuz I guess they wanted to not do ESB again.||

[lavish flame]

||Ehh, I don't know at that point. Rey was also significantly weaker already when they first fought. He certainly doesn't come across as an intelligent, powerful entity even if you show him beating up some randos for a bit.||

[echo echo]

||When they first fought Kylo was already shot by Chewie and injured by Finn||

[lavish flame]

||Kylo Ren as a character definitely comes more into a sense of being kinda lame as a person(not as a character). He really doesn't seem to succeed all that much when he doesn't have overwhelming odds.||

[lavish flame]

||Yeah and Rey was completely untrained, like Finn. I get what you're saying, but in terms of menace coming into the last movie, his competition is also Vader and Palps.||

Honestly all of the writing team needed to watch pro wrestling.

You never put the babyface on top before the rubber.

[echo echo]

||It is, but this is also a different movie. I think they'd have had to shuffle things around a bit but framing it as a villain origin story (probably cut short at the end of 9, I expect) does make room for Kylo to be imperfect in his strength||

[lavish flame]

||Yeah but I'd assume an origin story has to have a villain at the end and this dude is losing almost certainly.||

[glad mason]

Star Wars ||the thing that really sunk the sequels was not committing to make Kylo Ren fully evil and the main villain. He’s a fascinating concept and so well executed by Adam Driver||

[lavish flame]

||The kylo ren character never quite works well unless he's a lackey with the way he's set up from the start.||

[echo echo]

||That's fine, I think. People complain about Rey being overpowered but I think her first real victory being over an embryonic Sith like Kylo is completely fine||

[glad mason]

||sequels should’ve been the story of Kylo corrupting Rey and Finn having to kill both of them||

[lavish flame]

||If they wanted him as the big bad they legitimately should've gone down the legends route.||

||Start the movie with him already as in charge of the dark side forces and whatnot.||

[glad mason]

SW ||disagree, I think Kylo should’ve started the story as redeemable and gone more and more over the edge with every movie||

[lavish flame]

SW ||Or have the long term planning to make a trilogy where he's this protagonist before another trilogy where he's this antagonist.||

||Because the guy we see in TFA and TLJ is just not main villain material.||

||He's a well executed character but never a character who really feels all that menacing even as he does theoretically menacing things.||

[echo echo]

SW ||I think taking TFW and TLJ as-is and making the trilogy a story where Kylo is the protagonist but also the bad guy and also dies at the end is a fascinating swing! They could have done that with what they had||

[lavish flame]

||Adam driver is a great actor in the sense he's very expressive but his read on him also made him look as if he was always on the verge of tears, which makes for a really interesting character who's very unfit for the requirements that being a big bad would have of him.||

||If you want to make a more pathetic or at emotionally weaker big bad then you either have to give them some asset unique to them that makes them particularly robust as a villain.||

[glad mason]

SW all ||Kylo Ren as an emotionally unstable, mentally unbalanced man child who consciously chooses the dark side in pursuit of power, and Rey becoming corrupted by him due to her own naïveté and desire to belong works but I think the ending has to be Finn killing both of them||

||it’s the story of two weak people who are corrupted by the dark side and chose not to turn back to the light||

[lavish flame]

I think (the boys spoilers) ||Homelander is a great example of the trope taken to perfection because he's incredibly powerful compared to anyone else on screen at any given point.|| SW ||But just this idiot who's really not that good and just in his own origin is... Whatever.||

[bitter trail]

SW ||Well, on some level, then you have to revise the "why is Kylo evil" flashback bit in TLJ because it was not good||

[glad mason]

SW ||well, they'd have to show how kylo actually fell in the first place||

[silk solar]

||it never actually explains why he is evil||

||it never explains why he is tempted by the darkside, why what luke did would lead to him killing other younglings, or why he would continue on the dark side afterwards||

||the flashback doesnt really make any sense for a lot of reasons, but i did not leave that movie thinking yeah, i get why kylo is doing what he is doing||

||could have taken a route where kylo is just fated to be a sith. actually play off the concept of balance (because balance means no sith in the OT?) and have that be the tragedy, but that is headcanon and not in the film||

[glad mason]

||that's fundamentally not what balance means||

[bitter trail]

TLJ ||and, as I've gone on at length in other channels pre-star wars channel before, it wasn't good Luke writing at all. I'm disappointed with what all three movies did with the main trio from OT, but one among many of my complaints is that I dislike how Luke has nothing to show for all the time post ROTJ of what he was doing with his life, it was blanked out because Rian or whoever thought Kylo was the only interesting thing to do with Luke||

[glad mason]

SW ||"balance" being dark and light is like the perfect meal being equal parts mold and no mold||

[silk solar]

||i agree but no movie actually does this ||

||to quote a critical dragon, "anakin brought balance to force. before him, way more jedi than sith. after him, the same number. balance!"||

||kylo's character being an argument for why the sith are philosophically necessary could be interesting but, again, not in the movies||

[wispy lichen]

I agree with everything you say here

TLJ || I think TLJ had more of interest to say than RoS but because it mauls my favorite it is my least favorite SW entry||

[wispy vortex]

||Idk. There definitely are. Look at the Gungans, or the rest of Naboo.||

[unkempt sail]

haha I was just coming to say PT ||this is gungan erasure||

[supple star]

||Wookie erasure as well||

[heavy linden]

I think the best point against Lucas’ worldbuilding is how generic each planet seems to be, like it’s the desert planet, the forest planet, the ice planet, the city planet, or whatever,

Probably not the worst idea for a 2 hour movie but when you try to expand beyond that it’s a little dry

[autumn hemlock]

Nah, even if we ignore the fact that we're only ever looking at like a city-sized block of any given planet, most planets are homogenous compared to Earth.

Like the weird thing about Tatooine isn't that it's all desert all the time, it's that there's breathable air.

[wispy vortex]

Naboo wasn’t homogenous

[autumn hemlock]

(TPM) ||Hell, the planet we see more than one part of, Naboo, is shown to have dense forests, sprawling plains, swamps, and more||

[silk solar]

Good

[warm thicket]

The lack of appreciation for the scale of a planet is something that bugs me about a lot of sci fi, especially Star Wars. So often a character will be looking for another character and find them in basically no time.
If I was trying to hide and had an entire galaxy there's absolutely no way you'd ever find me

[autumn hemlock]

Eh, it depends, do I have a picture of you, a list of known aliases, a last known location, and an internet connection?

[heavy linden]

Eh, I wouldn't be using 'most planets' as a frame of reference, I'd compare them to 'most inhabited planets', which as far as humans currently know, our frame of reference is one planet

[warm thicket]

[Empire Strikes Back] ||Yoda|| is, I think, the only character to successfully just pick a random location on a random planet. Everyone else, it seems, just lives a 10 minute walk from the nearest spaceport.

[autumn hemlock]

I mean, in that case Star Wars should only be on one planet ever because we only know of one planet that's capable of holding life, no?

[heavy linden]

No

[autumn hemlock]

(Also our desert and ice planet examples in Star Wars are pretty clearly barely-or-negligibly terraformed, it tracks that they'd still strongly resemble whatever they're getting pulled out of)

[warm thicket]

I think even on modern day earth you would struggle to find me if I moved to a different state, let alone another country, and I truly wanted to hide. A whole other planet? Nah, you ain't finding me

[heavy linden]

I don't know if I got 'terraformed' out of a planet like Tattooine, seemed like it had a fair amount of native life on it the way it was presented

[autumn hemlock]

It's easier than you'd think. Me personally? Nah, I probably couldn't find you, I don't have the skill set or practice. But PIs can do a lot more than you'd expect

[heavy linden]

maybe some extended materials decided to present it that way, idk

[warm thicket]

Hoth certainly had minimal terraforming, Tatooine was just kinda supposed to be backwoods out of the way desert planet (and be Arakis/Dune), Endor was a moon so it was likely rather small

That being said, "I included world building to make all of my planets homogenous" doesn't change that all of the planets are one-note

[autumn hemlock]

For example, you're trying to hide. The first step is being not where you were. How do you do that? Almost anything you do will generate records, never mind the internet-connected cameras that are all over the place these days

[warm thicket]

[Attack of the Clones] ||I'll just remove books about the state I'm fleeing to from the local library and the cops will be thwarted||

||"There's a state-shaped hole in every map we have. Is there a state there?"
"Can't be, or we'd have records of it."||

[autumn hemlock]

||Turns out the Great Lakes are actually a nation that borders the US and Canada||

[unkempt sail]

there's the ol' joke that wyoming (or Idaho) doesn't really exist- I remember seeing it pop up on the garfield animated show (though the joke applies to other municipalities apparently)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy#Similar_satirical_conspiracy_theories

[autumn hemlock]

Oh wait, no, better ||This really just begs the question: Who is hiding in Atlantis?||

[wispy vortex]

||Atlantians||

[warm thicket]

||I think Delta Airlines, they have a hub there||

[echo echo]

I do think that for what its worth when space travel is trivially easy like it is in Star Wars, planets often having one or two primary municipalities makes a decent amount of sense

Tatooine gets what, three? And that's kind of a lot

[unkempt sail]

space nevada, with a reno/vegas/carson city situation maybe

[unkempt sail]

partly because show discussion reminded me of MG's rand perspectives and how they make more sense with the above discussions on Luke, but if I wanna bring more WOT to star wars

wot all/SW legends general (up to book club) ||like i think THAT would be an interesting breakdown of Luke's jedi academy, if someone else took over but Luke would never leave it to fester in light of other threats, I think?||

[wispy lichen]

WoT all / SW all || It’s similar to the Kyp Durron plotline with Exar Kun ||

[unkempt sail]

ah yeah, I guess it is more edgy out of a young character than an older one

[wispy vortex]

But he was there for that

Ish

[wispy lichen]

yea I generally tend to think SW all ||Kyp and Kylo bear a lot of similarity and Kylo being older and more aggressive might make his takeover of Luke's academy feel less like a teenage tantrum||

SW all ||I think the meat of the issue with Luke's Order is his mistakes become permanent in canon and cannot be repaired||

SW all and WoT all || having someone take over his Order ala Taim (older, more mature and intentional) would be a lot better than we got in either Legends or canon. Beyond that though, Luke needs some remnant remaining (a Logain's followers of sorts) or to redeem the lost||

[silk solar]

||it also doesnt accomplish anything and resets the universe||

||the SW world at the end of ep 9 is in the same place as the end of ep 6 with different names||

[wispy vortex]

||Same with the beginning of 4 and 7||

[unkempt sail]

hm, so wot/sw all ||if Ahsoha had more of a Logain type vibe trying to keep a remnant of Jedi culture alive, would that've made her show more meaningful?||

instead of [ahsoka] ||I'm a non-trad jedi training another non-trad jedi||

[silk solar]

||honestly her being a non trad jedi doesnt matter at all. She acts exactly like a jedi would and trades sabine exactly like any padawan||

[wispy lichen]

Ahsoka ||I think Ahsoka works best as a non Jedi entity. Ezra should be the Jedi core of the show||

[wispy vortex]

Yeah

Tbh I like Ahsoka as more ||of a nomad, training her own apprentices, flitting in and out of the Jedi academy. Not a Jedi, but she still sees the value of their teachings.||

[silk solar]

||bc ahsoka is effectively a jedi, ezra’s place in the story is less clear||

ahsoka all ||is ezra a padawan or a master at that point anwyays||

[wispy vortex]

||A bit like Thracia Cho Leem||

[wispy lichen]

||probably a Knight, depending on how much he meditated over the 10 years maybe close to a master ||

[wispy vortex]

||A knight at best||

[unkempt sail]

wot gen ||so Ahsoka is Cadsuane, you say||

/j

[wispy vortex]

Lmao

||Even less attached to the Tower||

[silk solar]

Getting conflicting info lmao

||also if he is to be a knight doesn’t he need luke to knight him?||

[wispy vortex]

||Nobody knighted Luke. It’s become fairly fluid and unofficial since the order fell||

[silk solar]

||yoda effectively did imo, even if he didnt get a ceremony. Plus no one in world is contesting the title||

[glad mason]

Wot/sw ||I think the only way to be okay with Ahsoka living is if she’s completely given up on the Jedi order||

[silk solar]

||ahsoka probably should have died in order 66 and she 100% should have been killed by vader||

[pearl fox]

||The ever growing list of jedi who survived order 66 because they are incapable of setting anything in any other period despite the fact that star wars technology and aesthetics are basically stagnant for millennia so it doesn't even really matter if you set your thing 1000 years ago, is pretty funny tho||

[silk solar]

||called order 66 bc they killed 66 jedi||

Ahsoka ||i feel like literally the only reason ahsoka isnt a jedi is to not contradict the OT but Filoni really just wants to write her as a jedi||

[silk solar]

i am watching Solo rn

solo ||why is it all so blue||

[wispy vortex]

https://tenor.com/view/blue-color-gif-26141026

[silk solar]

solo ||i actually really like how he gets his name||

[wispy vortex]

It’s so stupid 😭

||It’s just his name!||

[silk solar]

||i think it works with the No Past angle they are going with||

||it also nicely characterizes the empire||

[supple star]

The scene has been a little flanderized by the fandom. It really isn’t as offending as people remember.

Most memes of it change the dialogue

[silk solar]

this is why i like watching things with fresh eyes

sometimes the fandom gets it wrong

||it would be a bad scene if han picked the name||

solo ||really like the WW1 angle they are going wtih for the rank and file. both affirms the stormtroopers as being elite and the emire's apathy. unfortunately no other star wars picks up on this, except for possibly Andor, which isnt star wars so idk why i brought it up||

[wispy lichen]

<@&1396936875054203020> today we move onto the second Dark Tide book, Dark Tide II: Ruin by Michael Stackpole.
Our next book will be Agents of Chaos I: Hero’s Trial by James Luceno.

DT1 all ||I liked this one better this time through. I think having read the X-Wing books gave me greater appreciation for the Corran and Gavin PoVs. ||

[wispy vortex]

||I love grown up Gavin||

[unkempt sail]

Hmmm library does not have this next duology though they sure have a lot of other Luceno Star Wars books

[silk solar]

solo ||ok she did not become his top lieutenant that fast ||

alright toll the hounds beckons but solo ~ 50 mins solo ||p good. nothing spectacular. train sequence was entertaining, kicks the piss out of any M and G scene||

[glad mason]

It’s lowkey dumb 😭

[echo echo]

Anti-prequeled

[echo echo]

Its an alright movie! Ron Howard doesn't really make bad movies!

He often makes alright movies

[silk solar]

I think the actor playing han is really good

Emilia clarke is actually pretty bad so far

And not in the good way

[silk solar]

h8r

[echo echo]

I think she's got a big personality and she can turn it off to appear aloof for GoT and then the rest of the time she's just not acting

Wrong for a role like this

[silk solar]

Ive seen her in interviews

She can emote

[echo echo]

She can, but as herself

I think when she has to play a role that's more than just suppressing her face, she doesn't know what to do with it

[silk solar]

solo ||i think i know who the bond villain is working for and i am already angry||

[silk solar]

solo ||this movie has lost steam||

||droid civil rights?||

solo ||ok actually how did the bad guys know that they were taking the falcon||

||emilia clarke double crossed them||

||no other way||

||droid sex??||

[echo echo]

Solo ||This whole thing with the droid is why the movie is so dunkable||

[silk solar]

||actually a massive self own||

solo ||SW will never solve the waves of enemies shooting at the good guys and missing, but by and large the action in this movie is actually pretty good!||

[wispy lichen]

I like him too

[wispy lichen]

Solo ||now, Lando being pan isn’t like… surprising but with that man’s rizz does he need a sex droid?||

[silk solar]

||also they really buried the pan thing||

[wispy vortex]

||Donald Glover is so amazing as Lando. Best part||

[wispy lichen]

||yeah people acted like it was a whole big thing the “Solo movie makes Lando pan!” But…? He is having sex with a droid…? That doesn’t feel like comfirmation of anything beyond Lando liking toys in bed I’d think lol||

||if they wanted to they could have been more explicit about it XD||

[silk solar]

||i am mad about him having sex with droids lmao||

btw

[wispy lichen]

||Lando should be pulling all the aliens and humans not droids yeah||

[silk solar]

still mad about the slander, the disastrous allegations, about ||people not liking how han got his name||

blasphemy

[lavish flame]

||I don't mind the idea of exploring droid sapience and whatnot but solo was such a weird film to do it with.||

[wispy lichen]

People do look for things to hate about the movie

[silk solar]

||this is a universe that named the MC of the show that bridgers the PT and the OT Ezra BRIDGER and they dare be mad someone got their name diagetically?||

||please locate your nearest mirror and reflect||

[wispy vortex]

||But those toys aren’t usually sentient||

[bitter trail]

i read the han solo trilogy so i already thought that was a good enough backstory for me so i dismissed this as regular disney bs

[wispy vortex]

Also should we move to #you-people

[wispy lichen]

|| I do wonder about droid consent ||

[silk solar]

they also did through a very 2018 lens

[lavish flame]

||I think the impulse to give everything a reason in movies like this is a bit eye roll worthy. Like it can just be his name.||

[wispy vortex]

Now see that’s a good question

[silk solar]

||broadly i agree, but this one actually makes sense ||

||i dont punish good writing for bad writing||

[echo echo]

I think I actually like Solo better than the Han trilogy

[lavish flame]

||I don't think it's particularly good writing. It's just kinda there.||

||It's not the worst way to do it, but it's an okay implementation of an already bad idea.||

[autumn hemlock]

Solo all ||It's nice to see Star Wars thinking about droid sapience and droid slavery, but making Lando the owner of a droid that wants to be free is certainly a choice.||

[silk solar]

solo ||i think it is one of the few times the empire feels like an empire||

[echo echo]

||Is the idea bad?||

||I'm not sure I'm super convinced that it is baseline a bad idea||

[echo echo]

https://klipy.com/gifs/andor-syril-karn-2

[wispy vortex]

read his profile

[silk solar]

i dont want to jinx it

me and kon may be besties

[lavish flame]

The idea that the character can't just have names, traits, etc. and the prequel must add to stuff to explain how they got very basic things about them is a pretty bad idea.

[echo echo]

Fundamentally?

Again, I don't think I agree

It isn't the most compelling thing a prequel can do but it isn't inherently offensive either

[silk solar]

i could list like 15 example that are worse than that moment

[echo echo]

I can think of examples of this thing being done badly in this movie

[silk solar]

||it makes sense for the scenario set up, characterizes han, characterizes the empire, and is small moment that doesnt invalidate anything that comes after||

[echo echo]

That isn't one of them imo

[lavish flame]

I mean, i could list 15 movies worse than Gremlins 2, doesn't make Gremlins 2 a good movie.

[echo echo]

But I'm pretty neutral at the idea

[silk solar]

in a world where PT ||anakin is force jesus i think we are good lmao||

[lavish flame]

I think that's a separate issue entirely.

[echo echo]

Solo ||I think I'm more inclined to say doing all of the things at once -- the gun, the vest, Chewie, the Falcon, the name -- is worthy of critically considering if it is good, but the name specifically simply doesn't bother me||

[silk solar]

solo ||it is also tough in a movie where they come at 15 min increments||

[lavish flame]

I think a movie really needs to either work for a moment like that to feel justified or it needs to be a question people have been asking already.

Like building the whole movie around it could sometimes work but then it's not even the same trope anymore.

[silk solar]

i feel like it would be far worse if it was a big deal

too marvel

[lavish flame]

Depends on how it's written. Build up let's you do a much longer and more complicated series of writing and it definitely lowers the floor but also improves the ceiling.

[silk solar]

solo ||oh no the double cross 😐 ||

[echo echo]

Yeah I think the last think Star Wars needs is more Significant Things

Small relatively self-contained stories even at the movie level I think are fine and good

(Of course, Solo was trying to do more than just be self-contained but as of now that's a dead thread)

[silk solar]

quick scene. gets in and out. nothing too spectucular

[echo echo]

Short story vibes

[lavish flame]

Not with this trope.

I mean, can you think of a particular example where it really enriches the narrative?

[echo echo]

I think the movie is fine!

Like, Solo. The movie. It works for me

[wispy lichen]

Solo is solid

8/10

[lavish flame]

I think the movie is fine too, but I think this impulse to just answer completely unasked questions to fill air time is a bit much.

[echo echo]

Its a little hamfisted but a movie can be far worse than hamfisted

[lavish flame]

I like the movie way more than I like any of the ST.

[hardy jungle]

wanted to remember what part on R5 blew and ended up finding out that there are two separate, conflicting explanations for R5-D4’s bad motivator, a thing that obviously did not need explaining. Owen was dealing with shady scrap dealers who were trying to scam him with a broken droid. The droid happened to visibly malfunction as they were taking it off the lot. Nobody should be asking why this occurred. But it got two distinct conflicting explanations.

I don’t know if there’s anything more Star Wars than that

[silk solar]

solo ||boooo darth maul boooooooo||

[unkempt sail]

I like the actress who plays Enfys Nest but between Solo and FATWS I just want her to have meatier roles that give her more to do

[lavish flame]

||He's the forrest gump of this era of star wars.||

[echo echo]

Do you know the whole schtick here?

[silk solar]

solo ||what is the canonical answer on whether han shot first ||

[echo echo]

When are you asking

[silk solar]

||he is like the ruler of the criminal underwolrd or smthng||

[silk solar]

now

[echo echo]

More than that

[echo echo]

Who knows

[lavish flame]

||Yeah they had big plans for this guy.||

[echo echo]

Disney is quietly putting up a 4k original cut of Star Wars where he shoots first so

[wispy lichen]

||Han shot first||

[wispy lichen]

||this was before he got thrown in everything tbf. It was a hint what he was up to||

[hardy jungle]

i can’t wait for there to be a future Star Wars project that somehow conclusively answers if Han shot first by making it plot-integral. answering, for the first time, a question people have been asking, but in the worst way possible. Macklunkey!

[autumn hemlock]

ANH ||If he only shoots first, they're still cowards||

[echo echo]

Solo, things that never happened ||The whole plan was for Solo to be the beginning of a micro Thanos style arc where Darth Maul was taken down by a Scum And Villainy team, including Qira, Obi-wan, Boba Fett, Han, Lando, and potentially more. After Solo bombed they retooled the in-production Obi-wan and Boba Fett entries into Kenobi and Book of Boba Fett||

[autumn hemlock]

The secret backstory of the mimic assassin that had taken the shape of a cantina wall before they were shot by a dying Rodian.

[lavish flame]

Rebels ||Isn't he already in rebels by this stage? I swear s2 was out by then.||

[hardy jungle]

||the people who came up with Han Shot First really blundered by failing to consider those two seconds can be recut in such a way that Han shoots first but not so decisively first that Greedo is dead before he can draw, which was the original state of affairs and the intent behind the slogan||

[wispy vortex]

Is it? ||Special editions changed it||

[lavish flame]

Star wars general ||They'd probably beat Vader twice along the way too.||

[autumn hemlock]

||Eh, Disney SW has mostly been good about respecting the Vader. They'd be rebuilding after getting Vader'd, if anything.||

[lavish flame]

Rebels ||I do love the actual ending for maul though. What a sequence.||

[silk solar]

||i knew about the retooling not the avengers plan||

honestly that is dumb

[silk solar]

||what is the point of forming the scum avengers when maul gets washed by social security obi wan||

[lavish flame]

SW general ||He's lost and barely survived a lot. It's not even a matter of respect I think, but because they've used him so much he's eventually bound to lose sometimes and that compounds up.||

[lavish flame]

||The scum avengers seemingly would've included Obi wan?||

||Which is its own can of worms.||

[silk solar]

||how when obi wan and han dont know each other||

[lavish flame]

||Has that ever really stopped star wars?||

[silk solar]

finished solo

that was a positive filmic experience

[wispy lichen]

Rebels ||ngl what we got was better. A short duel between Maul and Kenobi was great ||

[lavish flame]

Were you watching with someone or was it a...

[wispy lichen]

Yea. Good SW movie. Shame it flopped and they took away all the wrong lessons.

[silk solar]

beginning was the best, they didnt know what to do with the middle, and the end is eh

[hardy jungle]

TCW ||no, no it has not. they did seven whole seasons where the main protagonist and a central antagonist could never meet each other because of an off-handed comment in Sith establishing that this is their first meeting||

[silk solar]

somehow a top 5 star wars movie

solo ||also somehow the ONLY boots on the ground pov of the empire?||

[lavish flame]

||Yeah but then Obi wan doesn't recognise r2 for whatever reason, iirc. Lucas in particular never really cared||

[echo echo]

This is, unironically and more than any other consideration, why Andor is such a central part of Star Wars for me now

[wispy lichen]

Imagine what could have been if we started recasting actors without CGI nonsense

[lavish flame]

Obi wan and ANH ||In general Vader and Obi Wan still technically works I guess but it definitely feels way more awkward with Obi wan in the middle.||

[lavish flame]

They really just badly need to move off and commit to different eras.

There's still life in star wars but it's so aggressively saturated.

[autumn hemlock]

||Nah, Ben's an old-school flesh supremacist, he doesn't believe it's worth remembering any droid, ever.||

[hardy jungle]

ANH/RotS ||saw a skit recently where Han goes “I don’t believe in that hokey ‘force’ nonsense” and Chewie goes “Rggghhhggggh” and Han goes “You knew Grand Master Yoda? You saw his heroic force feats in person? And you never thought to tell me.”||

[silk solar]

Dude who played han was great

Can we please recast Luke for god’s sake

[lavish flame]

They tried with high republic and now have mostly dropped any hopes of really taking it mainstream I think.

[silk solar]

Its time

[wispy lichen]

The guy that they ||do the CGI Luke face on is a ringer so why tf are we not just having him play Luke ||

[autumn hemlock]

Fine, but only if the replacement is also the Joker's VA~

[echo echo]

Trying to like face-and-tone match Harrison Ford of all people I think would have gone badly and the single best part of Solo (and I'm gonna guess a Ron Howard original) was realizing that

[lavish flame]

Would it work with a joker actor? I've got jared leto on the phone right here.

[wispy lichen]

Boba Fett show

[silk solar]

Bruh

[wispy lichen]

Like what are we doing here

[autumn hemlock]

Y'know, apparently he's really into getting into character on-set and with the cast/crew. That might be a big net-positive to the world...

[lavish flame]

Wow for a second on my mobile screen the left image looked really horrifying lmao.

[echo echo]

Yeah

[echo echo]

It is horrifying!

Everything about it is horrifying

[lavish flame]

Yeah it is but i thought that was his face just naturally.

Extremely uncanny valley due to the dots and whatnot which just smudge right into the image at first glance.

[hardy jungle]

i was born with a terrible burden: a set of moles on my face perfectly spaced for motion capture

[lavish flame]

Honestly taking a method actor and making them play a moral paragon could be a funny idea for a meta movie.

[wispy vortex]

ikr

[wispy lichen]

Insane

[silk solar]

How scared are they to do something new they wont recast 70 year old actors

[lavish flame]

They should do a plotline where they have a Luke clone and it's this guy without any CGI.

[wispy vortex]

Luuke time?

[lavish flame]

Exactly.

And then they, scene by scene, turn down the cgi on real luke.

[autumn hemlock]

Nah, they don't want to copy Legends too closely. This'd be Lukee.

[echo echo]

For what its worth, I don't think much of anything they've tried new has worked in any financial sense

[lavish flame]

So that a few hours in you've successfully confused the audience into think Luke is Luke.

[echo echo]

Mando, maybe? That kind of qualifies as "new"?

[lavish flame]

I feel like very little has worked for them for the most part in general.

I'd say TFA and TLJ were the only massive successes.

TROS made a lot of money iirc but it was a very big drop.

The TV shows are harder to judge but mando, rebels and the small remaining part of clone wars feel like the only standouts.

[echo echo]

Oh Mando s1 at least was hard carrying D+ to the extent that D+ was being carried at all

That was a runaway success and probably saved a lot of jobs

[lavish flame]

That's done now, i guess?

[echo echo]

Andor, Skeleton Crew, and Acolyte all did in the same ballpark of poorly, and more poorly than the more critically panned Book of Boba Fett and Kenobi

[echo echo]

I do genuinely wonder if they put all live action Star Wars projects on ice for a while

69% is

Its bad

[lavish flame]

I think we still get the gosling movie.

[echo echo]

Oh yeah stuff that's basically done does get squirted out but it might not get any marketing

[supple star]

They are filming Starfighter right now. And Ashoka season two is happening.

[wispy vortex]

I think they finished filming on Starfighter

[silk solar]

It really is lucky no one under 50 has seen a western

Or read lone wolf and cub

[echo echo]

I can see Ahsoka s2 getting binned

[wispy lichen]

Ahsoka S2 is done

[lavish flame]

Tbf as a big western fan mando was actually decently functional as a western.

[wispy lichen]

Out this fall / winter

Maybe early next year

[echo echo]

I mean Star Wars has always been Western-adjacent insofar as it has always been samurai adjacent, that's not why I think it isn't new and I'm down for genre fusion

[lavish flame]

Most westerns aren't great anyways so it's probably above average.

[wispy lichen]

So Ahsoka S2 and Starfighter are both coming out

[supple star]

To be fair the number of shows and movies that have come out recently this applies to.

[echo echo]

Google says early 2027 for Ahsoka

[silk solar]

My one issue with solo is ||han is characterized as a straight up good guy. Maybe they were going to have him lose hope in later movies, but as is it is a weird place to leave him||

[echo echo]

Its been punted several times already though so even if it has technically wrapped it doesn't look like it has had a healthy production cycle

[silk solar]

Well, issue in a macro sense

[wispy lichen]

I mean

[echo echo]

||Han's always been a good guy, he just doesn't know it||

[wispy lichen]

Strikes, Ray Stevenson, etc.

It hasn’t been healthy

[lavish flame]

Is there any big push to go anywhere with star wars at the moment?

[wispy lichen]

I think Disney is just trying to fill out space for it’s release

[wispy vortex]

Not on the screen

Theres the High Republic project thats chugging along

[echo echo]

||Best characterization of Han I've ever seen is that Han thinks he's Lando and Lando thinks he's Han. Han sees himself as a grubby scum and villainy guy but he's about as overtly good guy as the rogue archetype gets, while Lando thinks the story is about him and wears the protagonist's clothes but does not have the protagonist's heart||

[wispy vortex]

||I dont know, Lando always ends up doing the right thing in the end||

[echo echo]

Cameron Monaghan has been pushing for a live action Cal Kestis project of some kind

[lavish flame]

Hasn't that also lost steam for the most part?

[supple star]

High Republic has finished, the are just a few side comics now.

[wispy lichen]

They do need a new big book series

[silk solar]

||this is weird with qira being like “you are a good guy” lmao||

[wispy lichen]

With THR gone, we need something to fill the void

[echo echo]

||Yeah but he has to try, it never seems to come natural to him and you always wonder (except perhaps in stories where he's being used as a Han stand-in, which does confuse the issue||

[supple star]

The Final book came out last year I think. I need to get around to reading it.

[wispy vortex]

||Not at all. Even against his will, he ends up choosing to help Han in whatever scheme he is doing. If Han asked, he would donate everything he has towards the cause||

[lavish flame]

"With a remake and a new game both in development, I'm sure they'll go back to kotor!" Said the man, lying to himself.

[wispy lichen]

The remake will come trust

[echo echo]

The remake "in development"

I do not take Saber at their word

[supple star]

I don’t really know what is currently going on in the comics space, I think the main stuff is post-RoTJ aftermath stuff.

[wispy vortex]

Silksong all over again

[wispy lichen]

I do agree this is the era I want rn

[lavish flame]

Different situation from silksong because there it was more about the game definitely coming but no news and here there's just no news.

[wispy lichen]

Go to the Old Republic I beg

[echo echo]

The Old Republic is kind of a weird bag though

[silk solar]

I think we need positive timeline momentum in star wars

[lavish flame]

Kotor or something entirely fresh in an even older era is the only thing that would really excite me about star wars beyond video games.

[silk solar]

Idc if filoni has to hit the time travel button to get his blorbos in those stories, just do it

[echo echo]

It is a very easy sell to people already read in on the Old Republic, but it is a very hard sell on people not read in on the Old Republic because it has a mountain of lore almost as big as the Skywalker era

[supple star]

Starfighter needs to be a strong step forward past TROS

[wintry lark]

They can do a lore reset to some extent, considering it hasn't been shown in canon before

[supple star]

Set up a new status quo for the galaxy

[wispy lichen]

I think there should be a dual thrust: rebuilding the Old Republic using Legends as a baseline with minor improvements to the cores of KOTOR 1 and 2, but otherwise taking liberty.

Then, establishing a future for the Republic and Jedi Order and jumping hundreds of years into the future.

[echo echo]

If you're gonna do KOTOR as a movie, for example, it takes a very tight script to convey to the audience The Twist without spoiling it and without leaving the audience confused in two and a half hours. Very specific needle to thread and Star Wars hasn't had a script that tight maybe ever

[lavish flame]

Ideally they restart the whole era for canon with some big jump.

[echo echo]

Certainly not in the last couple decades

[wispy lichen]

KOTOR kinda needs to be a game tbh

[wintry lark]

I feel like the twist really only works in an interactive medium

[lavish flame]

Honestly the way I'd do it is by abandoning the twist.

Start with the mandalorian wars.

[echo echo]

I don't think so at all, there are plenty of stories with similar twists conveyed very effectively

[wispy lichen]

I’d make a movie about a masked figure leading the Mando Wars

[supple star]

But I doubt if Starfighter fail they will do their NJO movie

[wispy lichen]

Never show the face

[silk solar]

Personally, nothing pre ep 4 compels me

Im really good with all that stuff, have all the story i need

[echo echo]

https://klipy.com/gifs/fierce-look-cassian-andor

[wispy lichen]

Then, the game can release and be the game

A Mando Wars movie can work

Just start after ||Revan has taken up the call and the mask||

[lavish flame]

I think you could reasonably do a whole trilogy on just the mandalorian wars but there's no way they'd ever invest so much into that.

[wispy vortex]

If I could make a Star Wars movie it would be Rogue Squadron

[silk solar]

TAP THE SIGN

[wispy lichen]

It would sell well tho

[wispy vortex]

Main character Wedge or Corran

[wispy lichen]

Too many KOTOR fans would get pulled in by the bait if done well

[echo echo]

Honestly the Mandalorian Wars might have been the best way to cash in on The Mandalorian

[lavish flame]

Yeah I agree but a whole trilogy would definitely need spoiling that twist.

[wispy vortex]

There would be zero mention of the force

[wispy lichen]

If I could make any movie it would be an alternate timeline NJO but alas

[wispy vortex]

No way that would work as one movie

[wispy lichen]

It would be a series yea

Or a series of movies

[supple star]

That was supposed to be the first of the new movie. But it is in development hell if it hasn’t been canceled

[silk solar]

Does the mandalorian acknowledge ahsoka ||the purge of mandalore||

[wispy lichen]

Like 10 movies lmao

[wispy lichen]

Yes

Big plot point

[lavish flame]

Kotor spoilers ||I'm imagining movie 1 as a political drama and the ramp up of the war, the war starts halfway through movie and we see a big battlefield defeat for the republic, the movie ends with Revan and Alek breaking apart from the jedi.||

[silk solar]

Do we ever see it

Fascinating

[supple star]

||minor flashbacks||

[echo echo]

Mando actual spoilers ||Mando is picked up as a child after the purge IIRC||

[wispy lichen]

||we see Mandalore in the aftermath and we see some flashes of the destruction||

[echo echo]

||After the purge and as a result of it||

[wispy lichen]

||yeah Children of the Watch seemed to have radicalized around Maul’s death / the purge ||

[supple star]

||no during the clone wars||

[wispy vortex]

||Yeah, Mando was not a child during the purge||

[lavish flame]

Kotor ||Movie 2 is about the reversal of the war and 3 is finally about the final battle and the fall of both Revan and malak, no matter which direction you wanna go with it.||

[wispy lichen]

Man I love KOTOR

KOTOR 2 peak gaming experience

[lavish flame]

It's obviously too highly scaled and not feasible but you could make three trilogies off of this.

[wispy lichen]

||I love sitting for hours listening to dialogue about the force from a crazy old hag ||

[supple star]

I do hope the Dawn of the Jedi movie gets made.

[wispy lichen]

https://tenor.com/view/doom-glowing-eyes-video-game-gif-17663260

[wispy vortex]

https://tenor.com/view/droid-b1-gif-19907265

[supple star]

It and NJO seem most likely to me out of all of the “announced” movies.

[lavish flame]

||Easily one of the best villain sets in all gaming, let alone star wars.||

||I stole Sion's entrance for the opening of my novel.||

[wispy lichen]

KOTOR 2 ||

“I would have killed the galaxy to preserve you. I would have let the galaxy die. You are more rare than you know, and what you have taught yourself must not be allowed to die. You are not a Jedi. Not truly. And it is for that that I love you."||

[lavish flame]

Kotor 2 ||Honestly Kreia is really funny as a character when you realise she really just wants to be the force.||

||Or at least how she sees the force.||

||This active, participating entity that doesn't actively favour light or dark, pushes things in a certain direction and really doesn't care for dogma nor require anyone else's aide. And she can't stand the fact that it's not her that's doing it.||

[wispy lichen]

||yea Kreia is a hypocrite who hates en external entity because she failed at her own life. She desired control and mastery. She desired to be the manipulator. And she hated what she perceived as manipulating her.

I like to see it with an extra layer that the force didn’t screw her over. Her evil deeds and cruel focus on allowing strength to flourish did that to herself. ||

[lavish flame]

||I think her early life definitely got screwed over but not really by the force.||

[wispy lichen]

||yea I think of the force as impartial ||

[lavish flame]

||I don't remember exactly, but it's implied that she was a jedi in love with a general and they maybe had handmaiden and then he died. Kreia got booted from the jedi and was assumed dead. Her seemingly favourite padawan also fell so things were not looking great for her anyways.||

||Then for some reason she really though Sion and Nhilus were... Good dudes to gang up with?||

[wispy lichen]

||yea she was given many reasons to doubt and to become non-conventional, but out of that she chose darkness and the ways of the sith||

||she could have been like Jolee, just vibing. But no she had to be special and unique and I think that is what damned her. ||

[lavish flame]

||Like I know sith betrayal is a common thing but these guys are the most aggressively anti social people I can imagine.||

[lavish flame]

||Better than jolee, even. She even has a daughter left.||

[wispy lichen]

KOTOR 2 ||it’s very hard to say Kreia was right when she is the betrayer. She couldn’t believe in an ideal and so jumped to its opposite instead of finding another way. ||

||I do love Kreia’s character tho. So complex and interesting. ||

[lavish flame]

||No I mean the betrayal from Sion and Nhilus.||

||Iirc they betrayed her and humiliated her.||

[wispy lichen]

||they raped her I think||

[lavish flame]

||Which... She really should've seen coming.||

[wispy lichen]

||but yeah. She kinda chose two very evil guys as her followers…. What did she think would happen???||

[lavish flame]

||Yeah that's definitely a possible implication.||

[wispy lichen]

KOTOR 2 || the way of the sith is betrayal||

[lavish flame]

||Particularly these two guys lol.||

||They're the most comically evil people in the galaxy.||

||One of the dudes is barely even sapient at this stage.||

||Like I get Palps trusting Vader or whatever.||

[wispy lichen]

|| angry scot and eldritch demon /s ||

[lavish flame]

||I really like how their trinity works.||

||The one with too much personality, the one who's personality is one emotion, and the one with no personality.||

||Honestly as a kid I didn't understand what she was trying at all.||

||It doesn't help that the game is already somewhat broken due to the cut content.||

||It's really funny how her writing improves Revan as a character by so much. She really makes him such a larger than life figure in just the way she speaks about him. He feels so much more like a big deal despite all the things we're discussing about him having happened already.||

[wispy lichen]

This scene is my favorite example of that

|| https://youtu.be/Oxw990MXqbk?si=T8gXQy6zjnV6x9q7 ||

[lavish flame]

||I definitely think any writer for a work that includes revan badly needs to keep this in their mind.||

[bright blade]

||https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_0cKSeufhE|| Spoilers for Andor Season 2 Episode 10

This is a silly YTP, but I got a good laugh out of it. Not often you get funny memes out of a series like Andor.

[quick ibex]

you get funny mems out of a series like andor all the time

im shocked you never see andor edits anywehre though

[bright blade]

I do, but it's been a while since I saw a new one, let alone one that wasn't an edit of KALKITE

[restive bluff]

I saw one just the other day
(Andor all) https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYzsfXbgWCH

Otherwise SWFT has a few good ones on YouTube https://youtu.be/wQd4JdFP0d0

[bright blade]

I was talking about funny edits, that was downright tragic 😭

[dry herald]

https://tenor.com/view/meme-cow-gif-17428338243821361151

[bright blade]

Actually the perfect gif for that

[silk solar]

alright time to start the phantom menace a @echo echo 's behalf

i am not watching this in one sitting tbc

first time i have seen this in 10 odd years

PM ||so who is taxing who here, or are people just mad about taxes||

[echo echo]

PM ||Do you mean the Trade Federation blockade?||

[silk solar]

||well someone is mad about taxes, and in response the trade federation blockaded a planet, which doesnt make a ton of sense. sidious diff ig||

spoilers for all SW films btw ||ig sidious wanted qui gon and obi wan dead specifically?||

||some weird editing moments after they get gassed. not sure why the droid didnt spill the beans or why obi wan is jumping||

||ok are the asian accents intentional bc 😭 ||

[quick ibex]

PM||The politics in the prequels are weird tbh||

[silk solar]

||wait do they have flash powers wtf||

[quick ibex]

||I thinkl they suffer from them both trying to be a political thriller and being a cool action movie about good and evil||

[silk solar]

||i am not convinced george knows what trade is||

[echo echo]

||tHe NeGoTiAtIoNs WeRe ShOrT||

[quick ibex]

||You see thsi is where disney lets me rewrite the politis of the prequels and then pays me for it ||

[silk solar]

||so, the trade federation gets a franchise from the senate, which would obviously be revoked after an invasion. so why the hell are they invading? I know sidious wants them to, but what is actually stopping a republic fleet from showing up ||

||ig this is all sidious's plan but idk how this helps him at all really||

[echo echo]

Phantom Menace ||No standing army||

||Whole point of Attack of the Clones||

[silk solar]

||"we will find the jedi " runs one over with a tank nope nothing here||

[silk solar]

||fair enough||

[bitter trail]

pt ||to generate a situation where the republic would agree they need one, timed for when they receive one||

[silk solar]

||jar jar is so much worse than i remember lmao||

||the editing of this movie is really poor. in 90 secs of screen time they are at the previously unmentioned gungan city for no reason||

||can you just hotwire anything in the star wars universe?||

||why are we cutting back and forth between the actual political developments and this core sequence||

||i like how they just stroll into the hangar without anyone noticing||

||F tier blockade||

PM ||doesnt obi wan knowing R2 open up a massive plot hole||

[supple star]

||Not from a certain point of view||

[silk solar]

||why is bringing the haindmaiden bad when you have a gungan||

[autumn hemlock]

TPM ||The Gungan knows he's a weirdo nobody cares about, a Queen's handmaiden might think she's important||

||Alternatively, because George wants the Comic Relief Character to tag along||

[silk solar]

||bringing a native from a planet that is famously blockaded is a bad idea||

[autumn hemlock]

||Nah, on Tatooine he's just another weird alien. Also the blockade is fairly recent.||

[silk solar]

||well we have mr jedi, a gungan, and a 14 year old girl. still weird||

||oh look jar jar messed up. who could have predicted||

PM ||anakin building 3P0 is so dumb||

||100x worse than how han got his name||

||he is literally 10 lmao||

||why are they telling this 10 year old what is going on||

||fully convinced qui gon could just steal the money ||

PM ||anakin being force jesus is the single worst decision in star wars and i dont think it is close tbh||

||midichlorians are a close second. i think it essentially contradicts the OT too||

ok taking a break, will pick up tomorrow probably

thank you for your attention

||i think its biggest sin so far is it just being really dull||

[wispy vortex]

||So, basically for a long time the Outer Rim was a free trade zone where the Trade Federation could operate untaxed. They used that to acquire lots of client states, until they controlled huge blocs of votes in the Senate. They traded a bit of taxation for their own representation in the Senate. Valorum and some senators didn’t like their power, and tried to abolish the free trade zones, leading to the blockade in protest||

[silk solar]

||see that makes sense and should be in the movie||

[wispy vortex]

Additionally, ||Palpatine was playing both sides. He was pushing Valorum to tax the Trade Federation, while as Sidious pushing them to blockade Naboo, increasing tensions in the republic, boosting the political stature of him as Senator of Naboo, and causing a vote of no confidence in Valorum, priming him to take over the Supreme Chancellorship||

[silk solar]

||that part i think makes sense remembering the entire trilogy||

[wispy vortex]

In the rest of the trilogy ||Palpatine incites the Clone Wars, turning himself into an immensely popular wartime leader. He draws more and more power to himself in the name of emergency powers, then simultaneously decapitates both the Seperatist leadership and the Jedi, ending the war at a stroke, while using the victory and “Jedi rebellion” momentum to establish the Empire.||

[echo echo]

In an extremely broad sense the prequels do make sense

Unlike the sequels

[silk solar]

i mean yes and no

I think broad strokes the story probably holds up, but when you dig into the details it is a mess

PM ||pod racing for instance||

But unlike the sequels it does not flagrantly contradict itself

How well it communicates the parts of itself that do make sense?

Eh

[echo echo]

Yeah

Agree with all of that

[silk solar]

As an example

PM ||it is established that the trade federation is exacting violence upon naboo citizens to pressure the queen to sign a treaty. Fine. This is something occupying forces do even to the modern day. But this is boring bc there is not a scene that makes that emotionally resonant or ties it into a specific character. It is just stated bc george read that is how invasions work, ig? And also to raise stakes, but those stakes are undermined by qui gon wasting a day pod racing instead of just stealing the hyperdrive parts or whatever||

[quick ibex]

PM||Well if they didnt do podracing how else could they sell podracing games and toys||

[wispy vortex]

||tbf he was less interested in the hyperdrive at that point, and more interested in Anakin||

[silk solar]

||priorities man there is a time limit here||

[echo echo]

Phantom Menace ||The actual staged nature of the blockade mixed with the lack of urgency from primary characters makes the situation on the ground feel fake when it should not, yeah||

||Padme comes off as petulant, not urgent||

||Entitled, even||

[silk solar]

PM ||actually unbelievable how irresponsible qui gon gin is for putting anakin in this race||

||luckily for the movie liam neeson sells jedi swag better than anyone except prime ewen mcgregor, but like, come on||

[silk solar]

||our of character she just goes along with the podracing plan||

||really weird there is no soundtrack during the pod racing scene||

PM ||literally no reason to not just take the mom and run||

||qui gon a little too chill with the slavery thing||

||shocked the shmi thing isnt talked about more. they just left her lmao. probably stops vader if they dont||

||wait naboo is a democracy? how do they have a queen?||

[wispy vortex]

||Elected monarch. President they call a queen||

[silk solar]

https://tenor.com/view/zaunvi-caitvitwt-gif-1251875630135871970

||then why is she 14||

[echo echo]

||Making the two of them older solves so many problems!||

[bitter trail]

pt ||one supposes so that the age gap between her and anakin isn't so bad||

[autumn hemlock]

||I don't have any exact numbers, but Star Wars does a lot of little things that make me think a SWU standard year is longer than an Earth year.||

[silk solar]

||how old are they when they start dating?||

[echo echo]

Phantom Menace ||I kind of get what George was going for here. There's a need for an urgent sidequest that involves the discovery of Anakin and promotes the idea of him being powerful, I'm just not sure Space NASCAR was the play||

[echo echo]

||~10 years later I believe||

[silk solar]

||i think george thinks anakin is the greatest character in the history of fiction and it really shows||

||blows rey out of the water when it comes to narrative favoritism ||

||and rey isnt that bad tbc||

[echo echo]

PT ||"Why aren't we [the Jedi] doing anything about this whole slavery thing, my literal mother is still out there and still a slave" is a conversation that literally never happens and it is baffling||

[silk solar]

this is why i like going through these movies bc a lot of the talking about points about them are just wrong

||"who taught rey how to use a lightsaber" idk an 8 year created sentient robot life and beat space jeff gordon in the daytona 500 what do you want from me||

[heavy linden]

PT ||funny how Anakin magically goes from [being portrayed by an actor roughly] 8 years younger than Natalie Portman to 1 year older||

[silk solar]

||qui gon really hit her with the thoughts and prayers||

||sorry maam i cant go against a now destitute used car salesman||

[echo echo]

Yeah I think people operate off memory when talking about these movies and they're bad in really specific ways that I think are genuinely very fixable

[silk solar]

btw

the bad lip syncing wtih the trade federation and the asian accents

awful

[echo echo]

Mhmm

Watto's also outright a Jewish stereotype

[silk solar]

great point didnt even clock that

and, the gungans

[wintry lark]

||The Phantom Menace would have been better if Hayden Christensen was in it||

[echo echo]

Many are saying this

No shade at Jake Lloyd!

[silk solar]

as far as child actors go, could def be worse

lucas dialogue isnt helping his case

[echo echo]

I just think having the whole trilogy in front of them and taking another like year to get more eyes on these scripts solves so many problems

[silk solar]

well that is the thing isnt it

[echo echo]

Yeah

[silk solar]

the issue with directors/heads of dept/writers is that they dont have time for second drafts

same with filoni

[echo echo]

Well

[silk solar]

i dont think ahsoka got a major revision

[echo echo]

I don't know that anyone is going to tell George Lucas in the late 90s that he can't take some more time on these scripts

[silk solar]

agreed

[echo echo]

Especially when he hadn't made a Star Wars movie in like 15 years

[silk solar]

i think he would be the one to give himself an extension lmao

so really he had 15 years to write it

[echo echo]

Yesn't. He was Doing Stuff during that time

[wintry lark]

I definitely think the model he used in ESB, where he comes up with the story but it's written and directed by other people, would have been the right choice for... pretty much all of the Star Wars movies actually

[echo echo]

Mostly tech stuff that he then turned around and used in the PT

[silk solar]

editing doesnt take too much time

i mean it is different, lucas writes like he loves the characters too much. based on the scripts i cant tell if filoni cares about any of ahsoka's cast

which i know for other reasons to not be true, but it is baffling

[echo echo]

A lot of it was transitioning a lot of parts of the filmmaking process to full digital

Lucas is most known for Star Wars but his biggest influence on the film industry legit probably is on the tech side

[wintry lark]

To be fair, Star Wars is mostly famous because of stuff he did on the tech side

[neon panther]

You know that 3PO droids, like, already exist? Anakin didn't just magic up a new droid.

Also, stealing his mother might be an issue when the bomb implanted inside her blows up.