deaddmwalking wrote:The craziest thing to ME is that I've been responding to your actual argument the whole time.
I know you think that. I am telling you that you are wrong.
Oh great thinker, please find anywhere where I have implied your argument is that women shouldn't be protagonists.
I didn't say that you, specifically, believed this, because I'm not giving you any hints as to where you went wrong. Again and still: I am not engaging with you until you can
accurately represent my own arguments to me. Even if you think they're wrong! Like, Frank is (
mostly, at least) accurately portraying my argument. He then gives reasons he disagrees with my argument. And his reasons are hilariously stupid, and he is constantly backpedaling away from most of them and refusing to acknowledge that he's done so, even when I repeatedly ask him to make explicitly clear whether or not he stands by them. Like, I'm focusing on the "goalpost shifting" accusation right now, but we're seriously just getting started. There is a
lot of stuff which Frank has just stopped talking about, because oops, turns out it was completely wrong, so instead he backpedals to something similar and hopes no one will notice.
But, like, as stupid as Frank's position is,
he is talking to me. His position is an
inadequate response to mine, but it is a response to mine
at all. And until you can rise to that level, until you can preface an argument against my position with an even
mostly accurate statement of what that position
is, I'm not talking to you. Because what's the point, when you discard any of my words you find inconvenient to instead pretend I've said something else?
And if you want to drag up 'entrance into the hobby', I maintain that your statements of desire serve to reduce entry into the hobby even if your stated aim is to avoid that. Like saying 'we need to increase the amount of legal immigration to this country so I'm going to start separating children from their parents when they enter illegally' - it's certainly not clear that your prescription promotes your stated aim.
Your position is that statements made to a forum that consists entirely of pre-existing hobbyists and which have essentially no chance of reaching people who aren't already in the hobby are going to prevent people from entering the hobby? That's what you're gonna backpedal to? And make no mistake, that
is backpedaling, because your last statement on the subject maintained that you believed I actively opposed the growth of hobbies. And this backpedal doesn't really restore my confidence in your ability to parse English, considering it took no less than
three statements that I oppose gatekeeping before you caught on that maybe I don't like gatekeeping, and then
after that you
still alleged that I opposed the growth of the hobby and only disliked the specific practice of gatekeeping, and now, after I have pointed out how stupid you are for saying that
multiple times, you have
finally arrived at a conclusion that doesn't require you to actually directly articulate my argument or respond to its specific points at all, thus insulating yourself from your continued incapability to do that. Like, it's not that you accused me of
lying, you just acted as though my stated position was opposed to growth of hobbies after I informed you that it wasn't a total of
four times. I'm not going through that extended process here in this thread of telling you what my argument is over and over and over again until you finally retreat to a position that accuses me of doing some harm in a way that's so vague that you don't actually have to explain what my argument even is.
Anyway, speaking of Frank:
That Anakin used the Force to influence Zam is simply canon.
Nope. Novelizations are not canon and weren't at the time of the release of TFA, nor was the novelization written by George Lucas or with his direct input. This is not the official statement of the actual people fucking writing that fucking thing, it's the statement of RA Salvatore. The novels frequently contain minor alterations to the film, like the presence of conversations that didn't happen (even in deleted scenes) or the exclusion of conversations that did and so forth. Your original claim was that you had a
script, so let's see it.
It is just factually canon that Mind Trick is an entry level ability that is sometimes the first displayed power of a Force sensitive character. It just is. Claiming otherwise makes you wrong. That's not up for debate.
So this here is a baseless assertion. You just claim that you're so right you don't even need to say why. Note that the last time we had this conversation, it ended with you saying "it makes sense if you read the books!" and refusing to divulge why you think the consensus position that this is a fanboy's concession that the media in question fails on its own merits is for some reason invalid.
he claims that if you toss out the entirety of canon and focus only on some set of movies that he has personally seen, then it becomes reasonable to assume that Jedi Mind Trick is gated for use by powerful and fully trained Jedi Knights.
Now, see, I feel kind of bad for saying that you correctly identified my argument earlier, because this isn't it, but hey, you got
some of it right, so there's that. No, this isn't about the movies I have personally seen. My knowledge of Star Wars lore goes much deeper, but it doesn't matter, because again: Star Wars is fiction. My understanding of Star Wars canon is not a reserve of truths that can be busted out to win debates (although it is worth noting that if it were, most of your claims would
still be false under the canon that TFA is actually in, and the ones leftover would be merely
indeterminate, not actually confirmed true). It's trivia with no bearing on the conversation. It's not like real science where facts remain valid no matter how well known they are. The number of minds which contain the lore compared to the number which need it
is the validity of the lore, because the minds of the audience are real and the Star Wars galaxy is not. If all people who believe in global warming vanished tomorrow along with all record of the studies done to find it, that wouldn't change global warming at all. If all people who knew about Grand Admiral Thrawn vanished tomorrow along with all media containing him, then Grand Admiral Thrawn is no more. The ratio doesn't do your position any favors even before we get into the fact that all the lore you're referencing - literally
every scrap of it - was decanonized by the movie you're trying to defend with it.
Chamomile's argument for why it would be reasonable to believe that only high level characters should be able to use Mind Trick is an "Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence" argument.
Again, wrong. My argument is about the rules of storytelling, that scenes establish precedent. This isn't hard.
Getting lost in the weeds about little shit like Chamomile having to claim that Highschool Graduate Anakin is "basically the same" as Masters Degree in Jediology Obi-Wan and in no way similar to "literally the same age Rey,"
It has been explained to you both how in the perspective of a movie-going audience (which matters) and in the actual canon (which does not, although it's worth noting that I'm citing exclusively things
which are still canon) that Anakin is indeed more comparable to Obi-Wan than to Rey. You haven't actually countered this at all, you're just refusing to acknowledge it.
So, like, everything,
every single paragraph of this post, is either you refusing to engage with my actual supporting points and just declaring that they are wrong with no evidence, misunderstanding what the argument actually is in a way that is suspiciously helpful to your ability to refute it, or on the top level case, just being factually wrong about who wrote what and what the canon is under Disney.
Still waiting for you to affirm whether you stand by your earlier accusations of goalpost shifting or if you concede they were baseless. And while we're at it, let's add in a request whether you stand by your assertion that Anakin's use of the Force was in the script or if you concede that it was exclusive to the (decanonized and written by the Drizz't guy, not someone who actively worked on the film in any capacity) novel.
EDIT: Also, does the novel make any mention of Obi-Wan even expressing alarm at Anakin's use of the Force? And if so, does it say it does so because he has spontaneously manifested mind trick and not because he is using the Force in anger? Because that distinction is critical both to your assertion that Anakin is using mind trick for the first time
and to my assertion that you have failed to understand Obi-Wan's alarm in the context of Anakin's obvious and ham-handed character arc. Even if Anakin's use of mind trick actually
was in the film and not just the novelization (which it is not), that's actually less than halfway from where you are to where you need to be.
