So... Star Wars [Spoilers]

[Ancient History]

Let's not suck Abram's dick here too hard. Or Lucas' for that matter. Star Wars (Episode IV) was visually groundbreaking, had a fantastic score, and was supremely weird, but it wasn't necessarily a complicated and the writing in the original trilogy wasn't particularly fucking good or deep. It was a space opera film which proved so successful that it spawned a trilogy, and the whole Force schtick became increasingly more important to the plot as episodes V and VI wore on - but episode VI is still basically a rehash of episode IV where you have to destroy a giant fucking space station.

So when we're talking about the prequel trilogy or the sequel trilogy, it's not that you needed to add depth, and by and large they did not. They didn't need to add deep lore about the Force, and again, by and large they didn't. What stuff that Episodes I-III did add as far as midichlorians, prophecies, and bullshit Jedi entrance requirements and Force-powered impregnations weren't exactly embraced by the fanbase either.

What Episodes I-III managed to do was make space wizards with laser swords fucking boring.

What Episodes VII-IX managed to do was make space wizards with laser swords feel like there were no more stories worth telling.

VII is basically a direct retread of IV for most of the major plot points...and at the end, I don't care enough about the characters or plot to watch VIII or IX. What's the payoff? They spent all of VII telling us that nothing that happened in VI made any fucking difference! It was so unimaginative of a reboot that it makes the prior movies retroactively worse.

[deaddmwalking]

3. Try to do something radically different with the property.And then have fans hate you for screwing up existing continuity and ruining their nostalgia trip.

I disagree with this one.

Episode 7 tries to reset the Star Wars Universe to the same state as the beginning of Episode 4. Consequently, everything that the heroes did in episodes 4-6 was moot. There's a new Death Star, there is a new Empire, there is a new rebel alliance and it's all so fucked up that it is all the same.

The end of the Empire was not a stable world. Spending 20-40 years of building a new Republic and having challenges and problems and Star Destroy captains turning pirate means you have a world where adventure makes sense. Like, getting to a world where Neo-Imperialists are staging protests on Corsucant and they drive a landspeeder through counterprotesters would get you to where Episode 7 started without having to retroactively make everything in the original trilogy pointless.

Like, at the end of Jedi we were happy that the good guys won. The message of the new trilogy could have been and arguably should have been that every generation is called on to fight again for the cause of justice.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Just sticking to modern properties, the Mandalorian from what I see is well-received and Rogue One was also well-received. Clone Wars isn't as widespread but the fans seem to love it and from what I can tell normies are okay with it.

The problem with Star Wars isn't that of intellectual or aesthetic exhaustion of the property. The problem is that it's being run by people who bring nothing new to the table. George Lucas' qualification for Star Wars was wanting to synthesize samurai movies, New Age mysticism, and 50s sci-fi television into a coherent property. Abrams' big idea for Star Wars is that he watched Star Wars and wanted to tweak the basic formula a bit; Johnson's big idea is that he read the wikipedia summary for Star Wars and wanted to show off his Big Brain with his shallow subversions.

[Stahlseele]

Rogue one COULD have been better.
According to several people involved, Disney came in and demanded huge changes to be made to make it more family friendly.

[MGuy]

KOTOR is regarded as a deeper take on the force and intergalactic conflicts in the Star Wars mythos. In Kotor 1 one of the old characters even points out that 'every' generation has a big war for everything and he's been in a few of'em himself. In Kotor 2 Kreia goes on rants about how she hates the force and that it seems to perpetuate conflicts. Both games have loads of commentary about the Star Wars universe. Republic commando gave me a better sense of how the Clones operated during the Clone Wars. My fondest memories of Star Wars from when I was younger was playing games like Rogue Squadron. The games, to me, have always been much more interesting than the movies.

Expanded universe material seems to be extremely hit or miss. I for one liked the clone war cartoon run they did between episode's 2 and 3, the "General Grievous" there was way more compelling than the one that dies in Episode 3 (and less Saturday morning cartoonish than the one in the Clone Wars series). The Clone Wars show (after the first season apparently) is well liked and showed how the Jedi could be pretty shitty. It also gave a more convincing arc for how Anakin could have been Vader the whole time he was fighting. Mandolorian seems like a bunch of samurai/westerns with star wars skins. It is a very simple show and fans are claiming that 'it' should have been made instead of the new trilogy.

I don't think Star Wars fans 'needed' more depth. Tons of it already existed. I'm really sure that Disney could've just scavenged well beloved fan material and regurgitated it in their new films with their own Disney approved changes to crank out easy success after easy success. Seems to me they thought they could just jump into it without giving any thought to what they were doing and I have no idea why that seemed like it was a good idea.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Seems to me they thought they could just jump into it without giving any thought to what they were doing and I have no idea why that seemed like it was a good idea.

Because they're Disney and people will watch it anyway. Because it's Disney. Where else are you gonna go, bitch? They keep gobbling everything up so you'll have nowhere to run.

[MGuy]

Seems to me they thought they could just jump into it without giving any thought to what they were doing and I have no idea why that seemed like it was a good idea.

Because they're Disney and people will watch it anyway. Because it's Disney. Where else are you gonna go, bitch? They keep gobbling everything up so you'll have nowhere to run.

There's that sure. I just don't understand why you would spend so much money to make something that people don't like when you could be more efficient and also evil by cribbing work that was already done for you.

[DSMatticus]

So, it's worth remembering that the original plan was to give the whole trilogy to Abrams and let him turn them into unambitious, uncontroversial nostalgia-fueled popcorn flicks.

Abrams declined to do all three movies, but he agreed to do the first and document what he was setting up for the second and third so they could be handed off to other people. Disney said good enough, and handed off the second movie to Rian Johnson and the third to Colin Trevorrow.

I'm not going to say Rian Johnson is incompetent. I'm not even going to say that Rian Johnson doesn't care about what he makes. Looper and Knives Out are both, if nothing else, ambitious attempts at storytelling into which Rian Johnson very clearly put his passion. But Rian Johnson very clearly did not care for Abrams' direction and also very clearly did not give a fuck about building a story in the Star Wars universe. And Colin Trevorrow's take on The Last Jedi was apparently so bad that Disney got down on their knees and begged Abrams to come back and save them. And it's very obvious that when Abrams came back he was mostly just pissed off that Johnson had screwed up his trilogy.

So the original vision for the new trilogy was to achieve widespread consumer appeal through technically well-executed mediocrity, and that got derailed by someone who was 100% just there for the Disney bucks but is also a mildly creative dude who wanted to put their own spin on things while they were there, and then that in turn was also derailed by the original guy coming back to throw a fit about what had happened while he was gone.

On the creative side of things, the trilogy aimed low and missed - but in the end it is still technically well-executed mediocrity. That aspect of the film-making isn't really affected by the Abrams-Johnson pissing content. So... they're decent popcorn munchers for the average theater-goer. And three months from now more people will still be talking about the end of Game of Thrones than they will any of the three Star Wars movies.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

People still talk about the end of Game of Thrones?

[Koumei]

So I'm generally not interested in Star Wars. I hated the prequels and didn't actually watch ep 3 at all, I'ven't played any of the games since ~2010, I have zero interest in the extended universe stuff and have never had the need to go back and watch the originals.

But I did watch episodes 7-9 (not the side spin-off ones even though they're apparently better?) and enjoyed them for what they were: big-budged action scenes. When you walk in with that expectation and "hopefully they will end the series and resolve anything outstanding for character hooks" then you can absolutely enjoy episode 9. That said it also doesn't make me want to dive into side-lore, watch the series on Disney+ or anything like that.

Anyway I do have one question: is there any reason behind the naming of Star Destroyers? Given it's the Death Stars that have planet-busting powers (let's put aside the ep9 Destroyer fleet for the time being), and even then only the mkIII Death Star has star destroying capabilities (eating them for fuel), was their purpose to bring enough firepower (and assorted docked tie fighters etc) to wipe out a star system's worth of defences, or is it just the same reason as we name our missiles "Hellfire" and so on?

[phlapjackage]

People still talk about the end of Game of Thrones?

r/freefolk was a good place for this up until the witcher series came out

and enjoyed them for what they were: big-budged action scenes

The action scenes were pretty good in 9 I thought, EXCEPT for any scenes involved lightsaber duels. To paraphrase another post, "who would've thought they could make space wizards fighting with laser swords so boring?" The only interesting lightsaber fight in the new triology was Finn v Ren, and that never really went anywhere after.

[Username17]

Anyway I do have one question: is there any reason behind the naming of Star Destroyers?

Destroyers are a type of ship that is able to carry the heavy armaments of the period. A Star Destroyer is a space ship capable of doing the same.

Now in normal naval language the Destroyer is the smallest ship class capable of fielding then-current heavy armaments. Cruisers and Battleships are larger ship classes. This makes the terminology of "Star Destroyer" super weird, because they appear to be really big relative to other war ships of the period. And it makes the existence of "Super Star Destroyers" even weirder, because we would expect those ship larger classes to be called "Star Cruisers" or "Battle Stars". But of course, Battle Star is a different science fiction property.

The problem with Star Wars isn't that of intellectual or aesthetic exhaustion of the property. The problem is that it's being run by people who bring nothing new to the table. George Lucas' qualification for Star Wars was wanting to synthesize samurai movies, New Age mysticism, and 50s sci-fi television into a coherent property. Abrams' big idea for Star Wars is that he watched Star Wars and wanted to tweak the basic formula a bit; Johnson's big idea is that he read the wikipedia summary for Star Wars and wanted to show off his Big Brain with his shallow subversions.

The thing is that there are still a lot of Samurai works to rip off and set in space. A New Hope is basically The Hidden Fortress. The Mandalorian is basically Lone Wolf and Cub. You know, Kurosawa made a lot of films, and you could rip a lot of them off for more Star Wars properties.

Like Star Wars: Seven Samurai. The Empire has fallen and a group of ex-Imperial soldiers have gone bandit and are putting the screws in on a border outpost. Seven warriors take up the side of defending the town. The warriors include people who used to fight on behalf of the Empire and the Rebellion and also include one of the new Jedi trainees who is powerful but inexperienced.

Or Star Wars: Rashomon. There's been a fight in a cantina and one of the New Republic magistrates asks the witnesses what happened. You get a series of alternate accounts which replay the events in slightly different ways about who shot first and such. In the end we find that the guy who shot first and lied about it was also doing it for higher motives and he walks off with the child he is now protecting.

Or Star Wars: Yojimbo. A newly minted Jedi goes to a border city that is being run by two crime syndicates. Let's say one is Hutts and the other is Crimson Dawn. The new Jedi's presence destabilizes things and the crime syndicates attempt to use him or her to get at the other. Things escalate quickly into all out war and one of the syndicates massacres the other and then the Jedi massacres the victorious syndicate.

Or Star Wars: Sanjuro. A group of earnest New Republic officials suspect that a local governor is corrupt, so they tell a Jedi and a different official. But really the other official is the corrupt one! So now the Jedi has to defend the various earnest officials and their families from assassinations and kidnapping attempts until they work their way up to the real corrupt official, who commits suicide by jumping into one of those Star Wars bottomless pits.

This isn't difficult, right. Telling Star Wars stories is easy, because it follows a formula. The problem with the Prequel material is that Lucas tried to expand beyond his skill and tried to make something bigger and more epic than he could do without editors. The problem with the Sequel material is that Abrams and Johnson are familiar with the original Star Wars movies but not familiar with the broader body or work that Star Wars is part of. So they can't really do anything but shallow rehashes of the original movies and comment on how sad it is that they can't do anything but shallow rehashes of the same material - even though obviously there's enough Samurai and Western movies that you could make new "original Star Wars" movies every year for twenty years without ever having to write a genuinely new plot.

-Username17

[phlapjackage]

Star Wars: Grave of the Fireflies. A tuskan raider boy and his young sister try to survive on their own in the wastes after having their whole village wiped out by a Sith Lord.

[MGuy]

I fucking hate looper. If anything Looper is proof that Rian Johnson doesn't care about setting elements even HE invents.

[hyzmarca]

Destroyers are a type of ship that is able to carry the heavy armaments of the period. A Star Destroyer is a space ship capable of doing the same.

This is incorrect. In navy parlance, destroyer is shorthand for torpedo boat destroyer. They came into use with the advent of torpedoes because a swarm of tiny, inexpensive and unarmored boats carrying big-ass bombs can destroy a huge and expensive battleship while at the same time being too small for large battleship guns to effectively target and too numerous for it to matter if they could.

The point of the destroyer is to screen the battleship from small attack craft, by carrying smaller, faster, and more agile guns that can effectively target tiny fast-moving but poorly armored craft and being fast enough to intercept those craft before they're close enough to attack the battleship.

No one uses battleships anymore, so modern destroyers mostly screen carriers. And they carry guided missiles because guided missiles obsoleted big battleship guns and it's cheaper to have a destroyer perform a dual role than to build a dedicated missile cruiser. A modern destroyer has the tonnage of a WWII cruiser and is vastly superior to a WWII battleship, but that's entirely a result of mission creep due to cost cutting.

One would assume that a star destroyer is a ship meant to destroy stars. But obviously that isn't the case. I'd say that sounding cool mattered most.

[Koumei]

Thanks for the Naval info (and the further questions/annoyances raised).

To paraphrase another post, "who would've thought they could make space wizards fighting with laser swords so boring?"

I saw the live action version of La Blue Girl over a decade ago, and that made me realise "somebody can make ninja lesbians boring", so I accept that anything can be made boring if you try hard enough (or possibly if you don't try at all).

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I dunno, I find Japanese porn incredibly unappealing. The women shriek and make faces like they're getting their toenails ripped off, forcing mosaics onto their porn is the third worst thing Americans did to Japan, and the models tend to look and act WAAAAAAY too young. None of these things expand dong.

[Dean]

forcing mosaics onto their porn is the third worst thing Americans did to Japan.

What does this sentence mean, tell me more.

[Username17]

forcing mosaics onto their porn is the third worst thing Americans did to Japan.

What does this sentence mean, tell me more.

During the reconstruction after World War II, the American forces had a military commander that had great amounts of personal leeway in what he was allowed to demand and inflict on the Japanese people, government, and laws. Essentially, Douglas MacArthur was made Shogun from 1945 to 1951. And while many of the things he oversaw were positive or essentially inevitable based on the ideas of American and Japanese technocrats of the period, his weird personal hangups also got encoded into law.

So MacArthur inflicted a set of obscenity laws on Japan that were incredibly specific in what was an was not allowed to be shown. And the results of those autocratic and insane dictates were that you could have pornography but it had to fit in around a checklist of arbitrary no-nos. And that is why you have tentacle porn and mosaic pixilation porn and such. Because that way you are showing the pornography but you aren't specifically showing the prohibited images as described in the mad Shogun's demands.

And even though those obscenity laws don't exist as such any more, there's still a lot of cultural inertia. Because for two entire generations that is simply what pornography looked like. New generations of Japanese pornographers don't have to swap out penises for pixels, but that's normal for them now.

And then of course the United States also inflicted the Japanese people with Baseball and nuked a couple of cities, so that's never going to be worse than the third worst thing that happened to Japan by American hands.

-Username17

[Koumei]

I dunno, I find Japanese porn incredibly unappealing.

Your criticisms there are generally valid, but in this case they just looked incredibly bored. Look, I get that plenty of lesbians in porn are actually straight but willing to fist someone else for some cash, it's probably less gross and demeaning than working in retail. But you'd expect some kind of effort.

[Iduno]

Look, I get that plenty of lesbians in porn are actually straight but willing to fist someone else for some cash, it's probably less gross and demeaning than working in retail.

This is why I like Koumei. I laugh, and them I'm depressed.

[hyzmarca]

How do the Star Wars Sequals shit on the previous trillogies. Let me count the ways.

1) Makes the Rebellion's victory worse tham completely pointless. The Empire just builds a bigger Death Star and destroys the New Republic. Somehow, leaving the Sith in charge would have had a smaller body count.

2) Hyperspace ramming destroys the WWII carrier paradigm. Star Wars space combat is just WWII naval combat translated to space. It's meant to evoke the WWII movies that George Lucas watched as a child. And it does a good job. Hyperspace ramming makes for a dramatic scene, but it also makes everyone idiots for not just using hyperspace cruise missiles for everything.

3)Anakin wasn't the Chosen One (Rey was). The Phantom Menace retroactively established that Anakin was always destined to restore balance to the force by destroying the Sith. He accomplished this destiny by killing Palpatine and himself, the last two remaining Sith. Except now he didn't kill Palpatine at all.

4) Anakin was right to join Palpatine in the hope of developing a technique to defeat death. This is a big one that's easy to miss. Anakin was traumatized by his inability to save his mother's life, fearful for his wife's life, and generally frustrated by his lack of power over death. Yoda advised him that death was inevitable and he needed to accept this. Instead he rejected it and made a vain attempt to find a way to cheat death with Palpatine offered him the possibility. But this was foolish and wrong.
Fast forward to The Rise of Skywalker and resurrecting the dead is apparently easy. In order for Anakin's fall to work, resurrection needs to be impossible.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I dunno, I find Japanese porn incredibly unappealing.

Your criticisms there are generally valid, but in this case they just looked incredibly bored. Look, I get that plenty of lesbians in porn are actually straight but willing to fist someone else for some cash, it's probably less gross and demeaning than working in retail. But you'd expect some kind of effort.

As someone who in the past has fisted people he's not even remotely physically attracted to, I would agree with all points made. And trust me, my sexuality has brought me to some dark places (not with children, animals, or non-consenting adults, mind you. But there are things I wish I didn't remember). Still no excuse for lack of professionalism.

[Prak]

So, I saw Rise of Skywalker yesterday. It's certainly not high art or anything, and it's nowhere near as good as The Mandalorian, but it was entertaining. Like, sure, if I wrote it, I'd def go some different directions-

Like, not having Rey and Ren kiss, making Rey, Finn and Poe an explicit triad, not bothering to make yet another "tiny and cute and plushable" alien species...

...having C-3P0 realize that he can just fucking back up his own memory prior to the memory wipe, given that it took R2 less than a goddamned minute to restore it

Hell, I'd also just show Rey being centered between the Light and the Dark more explicitly, and not make this whole "she is drawn to the dark but must face the light" bullshit

-but it was certainly entertaining.

[Koumei]

making Rey, Finn and Poe an explicit triad

I mean, they cut a "less than one second" lesbian kiss from the release in one of the homophobic countries, do you really think they're going to try something that will ruffle feathers in more countries and also is more of a big thing that is harder to cut?

At the end of the day, if you want inclusiveness and even a hint of backbone, you can basically set fire to all of Hollywood and "stuff that gets advertised on commercial TV". I'd generally suggest pornography as a good start.