We Are For The Big: General Star Wars Thread [Archive] (2024)

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pendell

2024-07-19, 10:33 PM

This thread was actually asked for in a Certain other thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?668970-Star-Wars-The-Acolyte-II-The-Power-of-One-Too-Many&p=26046366#post26046366). So those of you who are in timeline-2 in which Disney did not publish any Star Wars-related shows this year, well, here is the place to discuss it.

Of course, we can certainly discuss events in the main timeline , and feel sorry for the poor people who can't jump timelines and are forced to living with that particular show as being in their memories forever. But it's not the main focus.

What to talk about , what to talk about ...

The Jedi are the real villains, and Greedo shot first.

Let the games begin!

Tongue-in-cheek,

Brian P.

Palanan

2024-07-19, 10:56 PM

I approve in all respects. Exemplary choice of thread title.

And I wouldn't mind hearing more about Mordar's theories on what would have happened if Order 66 had made a clean sweep of all the Jedi.

Also, alternate Force traditions. I just came across a mention of a group called the Fallanassi, who conceived of the Force as the "White Current," and who evidently coexisted quite well with the Jedi. I'd be interested to know just how many other Force traditions are out there (presumably all in the EU) and how often they manage to share Force-space with our favorite monastic order of space wizards.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-20, 06:45 AM

I will christen this thread with a take hotter than the twin stars Tatooine orbits.

Jawas are just Ewoks wearing cloaks so you cant see their faces. Pelli Moto says Jawas are furry, so I rest my case.

Palanan

2024-07-20, 01:28 PM

So, to pick up on a thought from a prior thread which shall not be named:

Originally Posted by Palanan
[Anakin] killed a prisoner of war who had just been disarmed (or at least dishanded) and was no threat to anyonenot in that moment and not in the foreseeable future.

Palpatines line that He was too dangerous to live was a flimsy justification at best; once in Jedi custody Dooku would have had no prospect of ever returning to power.

Originally Posted by Infernally Clay
Do you need your hands to use the Force? 'cause now I'm wondering if disarming (ha!) Dooku really made him any less of a threat.

I would say it didprobably in part from the physical shock and pain, but far more so from the shock of sudden abandonment by Palpatine. Even if Anakin had resisted Palps pressure to kill Dooku, it wouldnt have been lost on Dooku that his former master had just thrown him under the hoverbus.

From what we've seen in Clone Wars and Bad Batch, Dooku was an unassailable warlord with a great fortress full of plundered wealth, and his power both temporal and in the Force seems to have led him to forget one of the fundamental aspects of the Sith, which is that betrayal is always a nanosecond away. Dooku seems to have become highly complacent in his positionespecially since the Clone Wars had been going to plan until that pointand the shock of Palpatines betrayal would probably have rendered him a broken husk.

He might have recovered his bearings given time, but Id say that at least for the remainder of the battle he would have been effectively neutralized. Although Palpatine probably wouldve found a way to kill him as the Invisible Hand was plunging deeper into the atmo.

Mechalich

2024-07-20, 08:01 PM

If Anakin refused to kill Dooku, Palpatine could have simply picked up one of Dooku's lightsabers, now lying on the deck, and done it himself. Doing so wouldn't have revealed anything, since anyone can pick up a lighsaber and stab someone. I don't think it likely that Anakin would have tried to stop Palpatine in the moment, even if he ostensibly should have done so. And Palps really needs to take the opportunity while Obi-Wan is unconscious, since Obi-Wan would stop him.

The implication of this is somewhat curious. It moves Anakin slightly more toward the light and a little bit further from Palpatine. It's also possible that witnessing Palpatine kill his own apprentice, a connection Anakin should make, would be enough to make him hesitate just a little when the time comes. Is that enough? Maybe, maybe not.

pendell

2024-07-20, 08:33 PM

Here's how I see it playing out. Anakin spares Dooku, then faces the problem the four of them have to escape from a disintegrating ship. He can't carry Obi-wan AND guard Dooku, so he'll probably force Dooku to carry Obi-wan while he guards Dooku. Palpatine waits for his chance, and at the opportune moment a chunk of debris "accidentally" quashes them both.

I will christen this thread with a take hotter than the twin stars Tatooine orbits.

Jawas are just Ewoks wearing cloaks so you cant see their faces. Pelli Moto says Jawas are furry, so I rest my case.

ACKSHUALLY, from a meta-perspective this is probably true. How much do you want to bet that the same short actors who would eventually play in the Hobbit played Jawas in the first episode and Ewoks in the third?

Checking -- ah ha! Jack Purvis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Purvis_(actor)) played the chief Jawa AND Teebo, one of the Ewoks. Warwick Davis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warwick_Davis) didn't play a Jawa, but he played Wicket in Ep . 6 and Willow in the movie as well as .. *double checks * a LOT of Star Wars media since then, including the sequel trilogy. Pretty impressive.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

SerTabris

2024-07-21, 03:21 AM

If we're including the old EU stuff in this, my last lingering hot take from there is that Tenel Ka dated the wrong twin.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-21, 06:32 AM

If you want an EU-based hot take, then Luke should have been successful in rebuilding the Jedi Order. Forget all this Last Jedi nonsense. The Force Awakens should've opened up with something like...

"Soon after the fall of the Empire, Luke Skywalker established a haven for all the Jedi and their students that had survived Imperial rule. Thus the Jedi Order was reborn. Yet in the chaos of the years that followed, with many systems refusing to join the new Galactic Republic for fear history would merely repeat itself, Luke Skywalker decided the Jedi Order would not become involved.

In the darkest shadows of the galaxy, the Sith Eternal plots to finish what Darth Sidious began. The Sith Lords may be gone but there are always others ready to take their place. For thirty years the Jedi have sequestered themselves on the planet Ahch-To, the birthplace of their Order, unaware just how much the galaxy will need them in the days ahead."

GloatingSwine

2024-07-21, 07:31 AM

I've said it repeatedly, but the OT characters should have been restricted to cameos in the new movies. They should have been off kissing crowds and waving at babies and all the other things politicians need to do to keep the galaxy running.

Their contribution should have been at most giving a bit of advice at the right time rather than trying to keep them present in the narrative.

Errorname

2024-07-21, 08:39 AM

If you want an EU-based hot take, then Luke should have been successful in rebuilding the Jedi Order. Forget all this Last Jedi nonsense.

Fundamentally correct. The absolute most destructive thing the Sequels did was a thirty year time-skip where everything went wrong offscreen.

I am not against the idea of the Star Wars saga turning tragic. If you want the heroes to grow old and have their victories turn bitter with the years that would be depressing but tragic endings are well within the spirit of an epic saga. Luke failing to rebuild the Jedi while Han and Leia's marriage comes apart at the seams is not a bad story, but you've gotta show it to me. It's the drama, it's the tragedy and they just skip over it, bring everyone back to square one so they can do the original story again with the understudies.

Eh. That just shifts it into the other mode of legacy sequel, it's the Jurassic World approach, and that didn't turn in any better results.

That Episode 7 needed the old characters in prominent roles is probably correct, I think that was the right call. It just should have been different roles and while I hate to say it maybe also different actors, I think the need to write around both how old the cast got and the very real risk that they wouldn't all live to see Episode 9 really limited their options.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-21, 09:24 AM

Eh. That just shifts it into the other mode of legacy sequel, it's the Jurassic World approach, and that didn't turn in any better results.

It's also the Next Generation approach, and that's about as good as results get for legacy continuations of franchises with the word "Star" in the title :P

Peelee

2024-07-21, 09:29 AM

Eh. That just shifts it into the other mode of legacy sequel, it's the Jurassic World approach, and that didn't turn in any better results.

Jurassic World wasn't not good because of how it handled legacy characters, it was not good because they phone in the script. If anything, JW's handling of legacy characters was one of it's strongest features. Saying it didn't turn in better results is fine, but linking that in any way to it's lack of legacy characters doesn't fit.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-21, 09:56 AM

Their contribution should have been at most giving a bit of advice at the right time rather than trying to keep them present in the narrative.

Luke wouldn't be there physically to help Rey because he'd be dead but, if the set up of the trilogy is that Luke's best students each have their own ideas on who succeeds him as Grandmaster of the Jedi Order and what direction the Jedi Order needs to go in, for example, you can have Luke show up as a Force ghost only to her. In effect he would he choosing his successor, but it wouldn't be anyone he trained while he was alive.

Errorname

2024-07-21, 09:58 AM

It's also the Next Generation approach, and that's about as good as results get for legacy continuations of franchises with the word "Star" in the title :P

Yeah, but if you were advertising Next Generation as Star Trek Season Four, suddenly it becomes a bit more of a problem. If you want to make Episode 7, it really should follow on from Episode 6.

It's fair that those movies have bigger problems and that the first two avoiding legacy characters didn't really make them worse, but it didn't make them better either.

Peelee

2024-07-21, 10:07 AM

Yeah, but if you were advertising Next Generation as Star Trek Season Four, suddenly it becomes a bit more of a problem. If you want to make Episode 7, it really should follow on from Episode 6.

Why? Episode III and IV are different generations, so the precedent is already there. And it wasn't advertised as the next season, it was advertised as the next generation.

It's fair that those movies have bigger problems and that the first two avoiding legacy characters didn't really make them worse, but it didn't make them better either.
I disagree. But even accepting your premise, at worst it's neutral, so i don't see the problem.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-21, 10:15 AM

Yeah, though it's p. easy to do the same amount of time skip as they did and have the original characters alive but offscreen occupied in ways that stop them sticking their oar into the current crisis. They're all heroes of the Rebellion, high profile people in the New Republic, teachers of a new Jedi Order, and so on. They can't be seen to run around panicking even if the new crisis that makes the plot is really serious, so they advise and guide the new heroes. (One to set them on the path in the first place, one to offer guidance at their lowest point, and one to reward their triumph at the end.)

Errorname

2024-07-21, 10:40 AM

Korra very much did not go for everyone else is gone, you had decently prominent appearances from most of the original cast. I think they mostly went for the longer timeskip because the conceit of the series meant that their kid protagonist needed to be dead so his successor could be called.

Why? Episode III and IV are different generations, so the precedent is already there.

The surviving main characters from Episode III come back in IV and V and the reveal of the next generation of heroes is the ending note of the Prequels. If Episode VI ended with a tease about Snoke, Kylo being born and Rey on some distant planet it'd be a lot easier to justify the state of things in Episode VII

And it wasn't advertised as the next season, it was advertised as the next generation.

Yes, that's why that sentence had an "if" in it. It was a hypothetical, that Next Generation was marketed as a successor rather than a direct sequel was the point.

I disagree. But even accepting your premise, at worst it's neutral, so i don't see the problem.

I also think that a version of the sequel trilogy that is actually good and worth making probably does continue the stories of the original characters. I think if you want to justify an Episode VII, you kind of do need to follow up on the old cast.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-21, 11:18 AM

Nothing justifies the state of things at the start of Episode 7 as it was. The sequel trilogy started with the premise that everything the OT fought for was stupid and wrong, the new Republic can't even handle Sith Martin Bormann in Space Argentina, the new Jedi lasted about ten minutes, and Han is back to being a nobody smuggler on the run from space mafia and all because JJ Abrams wanted to mash his Kenner toys together like when he was a kid.

The premise for a proper next generation followup has to start with the opposite of that. No remnants of the Empire, the Jedi stable and expanding, and something new and interesting happening to threaten what was built last time, not what was built being deleted in one scene by the old enemy without ever being on screen.

Peelee

2024-07-21, 11:36 AM

Yes, that's why that sentence had an "if" in it. It was a hypothetical
So it had no bearing on the discussion? Odd thing to bring up, then.

I brought up the Jurassic World films as movies which had similar pressures to the sequels which largely avoided legacy characters in the first two installments and that weren't improved by it.
Ignoring that the pressures were nowhere near similar, what do you mean by "weren't improved" there? Bringing the legacy characters in would only have made the already bad films needlessly worse, so they were definitely improved by not including them.

ecarden

2024-07-21, 11:47 AM

Their contribution should have been at most giving a bit of advice at the right time rather than trying to keep them present in the narrative.

I don't know that I'd go so far as cameos, but certainly they needed a bit less space then they got. The other thing that either needed to go, or be reshuffled was the 1 OT Trio member dies each movie. Now, this is really hard given Harrison Ford's desire to minimize his involvement, so if you really wanted to do that, you basically had to get him first...except you didn't, as we see that if you back up the money truck enough, he's willing to do a cameo in Episode 9.

Given (my limited knowledge of their) availability and health, it is wild to me that they chose to put Carrie's ending at episode 9, and have Mark appear for five seconds in 7 and die in 8, only to return briefly in 9. I see why they liked it so much, it's a very cool idea and gives it a very nice appearance and symmetry (1-6 are Vader's story, divided in half, 4-9 are the OT Trio's story, divided in half, while also setting up that 7-12 will be someone else's story), but...well, that doesn't actually make it a good idea, especially if you're dealing with actual people, rather than animated/written characters.

Zevox

2024-07-21, 01:18 PM

If you want an EU-based hot take, then Luke should have been successful in rebuilding the Jedi Order. Forget all this Last Jedi nonsense.
100% agreed.

Their contribution should have been at most giving a bit of advice at the right time rather than trying to keep them present in the narrative.
Would've been better, for sure. The original characters did not need to play any significant role - or even any physical role - in the sequels; what they needed was to have a legacy, an impact on the setting from what they achieved. Instead, we were given them being present, but their legacies were obliterated from the get-go.

I think The Legend of Korra did it right. It's set, like, seventy years later. After that much time basically everyone from the original trilogy would have passed away from old age. You get to have a cameo from Leia, maybe, or maybe Chewbacca but everyone else is gone.
Agreed. For all the problems The Legend of Korra had in its early seasons, it definitely did this right. The world changed as a result of Aang and the others' actions, and we see that clearly. Most of the main group is now dead or too old to do what they once did, but aside from Sokka being largely ignored, we know and see their legacies within the world.

Korra very much did not go for everyone else is gone, you had decently prominent appearances from most of the original cast.
:smallconfused: Are you misremembering the show? It very much didn't do that. Only Toph had a prominent appearance, and only in season 4 as a supporting mentor character for Korra while she was suffering from her PTSD. Katara showed up at the start but did nothing, Zuko was in a few episodes in season 3 but they were basically glorified cameos where he did nothing of significance, and the others were all either dead or no-shows. Due to Korra's difficulty with her Avatar powers and the way season 2 ended we didn't even get much of spirit-advisor Aang.

Errorname

2024-07-21, 01:52 PM

Star Trek: The Next Generation is standalone. It takes place in the same chronology as TOS, but it doesn't really function as part of the same overarching story. And that's fine, that's good for what Star Trek is, but I don't think that's what the sequels should have been. If you want to make Star Wars: Episode VII, it should be a cohesive story with what came before.

The prequels were like that because they were prequels.

Yeah, but importantly they were made to work as part of a cohesive whole with the Original Trilogy. Episode III leads pretty directly into Episode IV and the surviving main characters of the prequels are still active in the story.

So it had no bearing on the discussion? Odd thing to bring up, then.

I am trying to say that TNG is framed and presented differently to how Episode VII. TNG is not presented as a direct continuation of the previous story in the way that anything titled Episode VII would have to be.

Peelee

2024-07-21, 02:03 PM

Star Trek: The Next Generation is standalone. It takes place in the same chronology as TOS, but it doesn't really function as part of the same overarching story.

Overarching story? You mean like a couple of the films? Because Star Trek TOS (and TAS) was episodic.

Also, the bigger issue with the EU was that Han, Leia, Luke, and occasionally Lando were solving virtually every crisis that arose ij the Republic. Thats exactly what the sequels needed ro step away from, and there's no pressing need to have the legacy characters be in any prominent role in the story other than you just think they should.

Errorname

2024-07-21, 02:27 PM

Overarching story? You mean like a couple of the films? Because Star Trek TOS (and TAS) was episodic.

Yeah, Star Trek the episodic TV show isn't really a great comparison to a 6 Film Saga in terms of narrative structure, it's not a comparison I would be making if someone else hadn't brought it up.

I think they should be prominent because Episode 7 should be a continuation of Episode 6.

I guess you could solve that by not marketing it as the next numbered entry in the series and doing the clean and clear break "this is a new thing for a new audience" that TNG and Korra did, but I do think that's a different project than what's implied by a sequel trilogy.

pendell

2024-07-21, 03:17 PM

In fairness, the idea of a republic, formed after the destruction of an Empire, lasting less than thirty years before collapsing back into Empire, is not without real-world precedent. It's just that it makes the entire OT trilogy pointless. TBH, I would have preferred it if they had just done the ST as a straight reboot of the OT ... Luke Skywalker never existed, Rey Skywalker is the person on a farm world dreaming of adventure. A large part of my dissatisfaction with the ST revolves around the way the triumph of the OT was rendered entirely moot. And all that in ten minutes of screen time, as you say.

The Zahn novels, which I loved, showed the galaxy still very much in flux 5 years later. If we're going to keep the OT around, we should set the events about a century or two in the future when all the OT characters are dead. The First Order should also earn its victory, as Thrawn came within an ace of doing. The New Republic in those stories was competent and skilled -- just not as competent as skilled as Thrawn, who consistently outplayed them until the treachery which is the foundation of the Empire proved his undoing. For the First Order to take over the galaxy in twenty minutes requires massive idiot balling of the entire Republic.

To say nothing of "somehow, Palpatine returned. " Come on. Is it really that hard to create and build a new antagonist who can be credible and scary without almost literally pulling the corpse of Palpatine back out of the ground?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Peelee

2024-07-21, 04:00 PM

Yeah, Star Trek the episodic TV show isn't really a great comparison to a 6 Film Saga in terms of narrative structure, it's not a comparison I would be making if someone else hadn't brought it up.

I think they should be prominent because Episode 7 should be a continuation of Episode 6.

Episode 7 can be a continuation, thematically. It was already coming off 30 years after Episode 6, the absolute insistence that it must be a straight continuation of all the same characters for no reason other than you think it schould doesn't really hold. Especially in a setting where you have literally an entire galaxy of stories able to take place, you can still have the legacy characters doing whatever very important jobs they're doing off camera in expository, because they already had their trilogy, and despite your repeated insistence, they are not mandatory inclusionary characters that must be put in.

Mechalich

2024-07-21, 04:12 PM

I think they should be prominent because Episode 7 should be a continuation of Episode 6.

Not only could they have solved it by doing that, but they also absolutely should have done that. Calling The Force Awakens 'episode VII' was the biggest unforced era of Disney Star Wars and one of the biggest in franchise fiction history.

It's worth noting that, in Legends, an EU 'Legend of Korra' style series does exist. It's called Star Wars: Legacy (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Legacy), a comics series set from 130-138 ABY (roughly one hundred years after the Yuuzhan Vong War) and has an almost entirely new cast who include distant descendants of the OT mains. For example, the nominal protagonist is Cade Skywalker (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Cade_Skywalker), Luke's great-great-grandson. Luke's Force Ghost talks to him regularly. Additionally, R2-D2, who being a droid is effectively immortal, remains a supporting character in the series and therefore preserves a link to the past.

Legacy, it's worth noting, is also really good, and while it is layered far too deeply in a massive amount of Legends lore: the Yuuzhan Vong War, the Fel Dynasty, who Darth Krayt is, and a whole bunch of other stuff that make it impossible to use as a movie plot, it is certainly a template for how to produce new material following a major timeskip.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-21, 05:40 PM

This, we can put down to Rian Johnson. Evidently the plan was originally that Rey would be Luke's daughter and Ben would be Leia's son and the Skywalker cousins would ultimately team up to defeat Snoke, except I guess Snoke was originally going to siphon power from them both and become young again? Either way Ben was never meant to be the bad guy and Snoke was never meant to die in the second movie.

Except Johnson, of course, decided to kill Snoke off and say Rey's parents were nobody important. It's not that these plot lines are bad, they're very good, but they don't work within a trilogy that's being treated like a relay race so Disney can get the movies out faster.

That's why Rey's parents ended up being nobody important but also she's technically Palpatine's granddaughter, with Palpatine himself returning because Snoke was dead and you can't have Ben become a good guy if he's the main bad guy. Even Vader needed someone to turn against, after all. The Emperor exists, narratively, so he can be betrayed by a bad guy turning good.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-07-21, 06:02 PM

I've never heard any of that. I remember hearing that Abrams had zero plan beyond his own movie and basically dumped his conclusion in Johnson's lap. There never was any overarching plot for the trilogy. Maybe in hindsight, Rey and Ben being cousins and teaming up to defeat Snoke was how Abrams would've done it, but nothing in the first movie suggests they're related. Why would Luke dump his daughter off on an meaningless junk planet in the first place? The whole movie is classic Abrams mystery box storytelling and he's on record as saying the existence of the boxes is more important than anything they can contain. He's not interested in the answers, so I doubt he had this huge storyline payoff planned.

The sequels have too many problems to blame them on just one person, though. Force Awakens is a travesty of a setup, clearing the board just to mine Rebellion vs. Empire all over again. Last Jedi is a shotgun of ideas, half of which miss the mark and contradict the setting. Rise of Skywalker is a corporatized hail-mary that accepts the plot is terrible and tries to cover it up with fast-tracked meaningless spectacle. Throughout all of them, characters get shuffled around in importance or outright dropped so new ones can be introduced. There's no coherent arcs developed. If anything, the issue is that no one person was really in charge - there was no vision for the films. They sprung from Disney buying Star Wars and deciding they needed to make back the cash, not a desire to tell the continuing story of the Star Wars universe.

I will say that I find the idea of Rey being a completely unrelated character more interesting than linking her to anyone in the established canon. It would've worked better if they'd pushed the timeline further out so that the major question of the sequels followed the thought "The Empire was brought down by a small group of heroes. The Republic was kept stable by those same heroes. Now they're gone, what do we do without our heroes?" with the answer being "We find new heroes." (Which is a terrible idea in reality, but works really well for the stories Star Wars is about.)

ecarden

2024-07-21, 06:16 PM

Eh, I disagree. I think what they should have done was treated Episodes 1-6 as the model, even if stuff is actually being backfilled and treated 7-9 as telling its own story, but also showing us the aftermath/epilogue of 4-6, just as 4-6 show the aftermath/epilogue of 1-3.

So the OT heroes are in the role of Vader, Mon Mothma, Obi-Wan, Palpatine, et. al. They're the mentors, the leaders, the planners and the inspiration for the new characters. This also sets a straightforward pattern they could use for the 'main-line' Star Wars films/universe which would encourage moving forward (though admittedly, getting stuck chronologically was not as obvious a problem before the ST crashed).

This is the story I've heard most frequently, though I've also heard some conspiratorial muttering about there actually being a plan, but the backlash to Episode VIII meant the plan was abandoned and they changed course altogether. Not sure I believe it, as the evidence is usually 'it would be too dumb to have a planned film trilogy without a plan,' and I find it best never to underestimate the capacity for stupidity.

Lurkmoar

2024-07-21, 06:41 PM

Seeing as this is a general Star Wars thread...

Best songs? I tend to go Imperial March, Star Wars main theme, whatever the name of that song is when Luke is staring at the twin suns in A New Hope and Duel of the Fates.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-07-21, 06:54 PM

Seeing as this is a general Star Wars thread...

Best songs? I tend to go Imperial March, Star Wars main theme, whatever the name of that song is when Luke is staring at the twin suns in A New Hope and Duel of the Fates.

I've always really liked the Victory Celebration (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IuCH_dYuBI) from the end of Return of the Jedi. It's just an all around excellent reprise of the Jedi theme combined with the cathartic tone of "It's finally over. We won." that segues straight into the main fanfare.

I also have a weird fondness for Hyperspace (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEWMsMulVuM) from Empire Strikes Back. It's not really something you actively listen to, but for a relatively simple track, it does a great job maintaining the tension without being repetitive. It's so good it gets lifted and put into video games without much editing and works just as well.

Peelee

2024-07-21, 07:47 PM

whatever the name of that song is when Luke is staring at the twin suns in A New Hope

That is called Binary Sunset, and is the best song and also that is the best scene in all of Star wars and I will die on this hill.

Errorname

2024-07-21, 10:14 PM

It was already coming off 30 years after Episode 6, the absolute insistence that it must be a straight continuation of all the same characters for no reason other than you think it schould doesn't really hold.

As mentioned I already think that timeskip was too severe and that VII starts with the feeling that we've missed like three episodes worth of plot.

I don't think new Star Wars movies have to continue the story with the same main characters. Rogue One doesn't and it's probably the best one they made, but I think if you're making a numbered sequel you absolutely should continue the stories of the characters the story was about.

I think it would be very hard to sell producers and marketers on the idea of not calling it Episode VII, I think they understood that there would be a massive amount of fan enthusiasm for that idea, but considering what Disney actually wanted to make marketing their movies as an entirely new Star Wars saga to "the Skywalker Saga" would have probably been for the best.

This, we can put down to Rian Johnson. Evidently the plan was originally that Rey would be Luke's daughter

I have doubts about this. For one it'd be very easy for this to make Luke seem like a deadbeat, but given what I've heard about the Lucas pitch that eventually morphed into Force Awakens I think the intent would have been more "Rey is Luke's adopted daughter / star pupil", which I do think they were trying for but utterly failed to sell because she only meets Luke at the end of Episode VII and only gets like a week tops to actually bond with him.

There's no way they didn't have some sense of what they wanted to do after Last Jedi, and that Rise of Skywalker is kneejerk scrambling to react to the divisive response of the last movie is blindingly obvious, but I think it's possible to have done a lot of planning but to not actually have a plan.

Best songs? I tend to go Imperial March, Star Wars main theme, whatever the name of that song is when Luke is staring at the twin suns in A New Hope and Duel of the Fates.

Yeah those are all pretty hard to beat.

Mechalich

2024-07-22, 12:30 AM

I don't think that's a hard sell. A hard sell would have been trying to make new films without including Luke, Han, and Leia in some capacity. That requirement meant that the new films under Disney had to take place around 30 ABY in order to make everything work with the ages of the actors in question. They could have done anything they wanted with the story so long as they set it around that time. What appears to have happened it that, subsequent to hiring him, Kathleen Kennedy let JJ Abrams do whatever he wanted. Abrams is a massive hack, so he created a reboot/retread version of the OT exactly the same thing he'd done with Star Trek only a few years earlier (to great financial and career success mind you, so I can certainly see why he thought that would work).

Producing TFA as 'episode VII' represents a fundamental failure to understand basic elements of storytelling. RotJ is the end of the Skywalker Saga, with the Skywalker in question being Anakin. That's it. There is no more. Timothy Zahn, by the way, understood this, and the Thrawn Trilogy and essentially all Legends works from 4-19 ABY exist within the denouement of said Saga, it's all stuff that happened 'after the end' cleaning up various loose ends (not every work understood this, such as Dark Empire).

The challenge Disney faced was the same challenge that Del Rey faced when they took over the novel line and were handed the New Republic and Empire finally making peace in Zahn's novel Vision of the Future. They needed to create a new story. A story that used the already extant setting and characters to be sure, but still fundamentally new. Del Rey came up with the Yuuzhan Vong War, and while that story was a spectacular mess, it did manage to fulfill that most basic of requirements. Disney failed to clear this most fundamental bar.

Timing has a lot to do with this. One issue is Carrie Fisher's death on Dec 27, 2016. The initial script for TRoS, written by Colin Trevorrow, was rendered more or less completely unusable by this, which is something no one could have predicted. Attempts to rewrite the script continued until at least Sep 2017, when Trevorrow was ultimately let go (it has long been believed that this was done at least partly in response to Trevorrow's disastrous film The Book of Henry, which released in June 2017). Abrams was quickly placed in play to direct Episode IX, but at this point we're barely two years out from the release date and Abrams had nothing.

Then TLJ comes out and the internet and Star Wars fandom explode. Abrams is placed in the extremely unenviable position of having to try and put together a final film built with an extremely divisive predecessor and the lack of any viable villain since TLJ sawed Snoke in half in an extreme rush. They had to generate the movie super fast and there was no time for second guess or restructuring, or anything. Abrams, it should be noted, wanted six months more, and was overruled. And while six months might not have made the story any better, TRoS has very real editing issues that are just embarrassing on a film of its size and can presumably be traced directly to this time compression.

Really, after TLJ exploded all over everything, it probably would have been best to push back TRoS a full year and figure out the best possible option with extensive testing of ideas in the effort to make the most broadly appealing film possible. That didn't happen.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-07-22, 01:24 AM

I'll disagree on one thing. They had a viable villain. The end of TLJ clearly sets up Kylo Ren as the ultimate villain of the trilogy. He succeeds Snoke via murderous coup, takes over the First Order, and is driven to mad anger by Rey's rejection and Luke's triumph over him. It's only bringing Palpatine back that relegates him back to being the second stringer, unsure of his position.

SerTabris

2024-07-22, 02:59 AM

Abrams is a massive hack, so he created a reboot/retread version of the OT exactly the same thing he'd done with Star Trek only a few years earlier (to great financial and career success mind you, so I can certainly see why he thought that would work).

This part I remember being relatively optimistic about; one of the big things I felt was off about his Star Trek films was that it seemed like he'd rather be making Star Wars, so I figured if he actually was making Star Wars that would probably be fine.

I think this would fit perfectly fine, but given the 'we just don't want anyone mad at us' feeling of Rise of Skywalker, Kylo Ren was too popular for that. (I don't get the appeal, but I don't get the appeal of any men, so.) Though I still wouldn't have expected digging up plot beats from an old video game as a solution to that. Force bond between the two most prominent Force-users linked to a redemption arc? Star maps? Secret Sith fleet from nowhere with a secret emperor? All of that is KotOR stuff. Would have even made more sense if they went a little further and actually threw in a Star Forge.

Mechalich

2024-07-22, 05:36 AM

The conclusion of TLJ tries to set up Kylo Ren as the main villain. The problem is, like many of the things TLJ does, what it says is totally undercut by what we see. Specifically, yes, General Hux proclaims Kylo as the Supreme Leader of the First Order, and then...watches him get totally embarrassed by not-even-in-person-Luke-Skywalker and to completely lose his cool in doing so. And this is after he lost to Rey in TFA. The ultimate villain cannot be someone who's been beaten by the heroes in every encounter so far. Also, Abrams has said that Kylo's redemption was one of the things that was part of initial writing sessions for the ST, so he was never going to take that route.

I recall being optimistic about JJ Abrams as Director, without realizing he'd been hired as writer-director with almost total creative control (a status that Rian Johnson and Colin Trevorrow were also initially granted). Abrams is a competent director. I'll stand by that assessment. Heck, even TFA, for all it's flaws, is mostly a well-directed film (the rathtar sequence is the only bad bit in this regard). The problems are all on the writing side, because Abrams is a complete hack writer. He has basically one technique, the 'mystery box' which inevitably falls apart in the end, which is why he has a record of really bad endings on his resume.

If a real writing team had handed Abrams three great scripts and been given the authority to fight their own corner in terms of production, I think he could have turned that into three solid films.

And, ultimately, that's Disney Star Wars in a nutshell: a failure to focus on writing bringing down everything else.

Errorname

2024-07-22, 07:17 AM

I think this would fit perfectly fine, but given the 'we just don't want anyone mad at us' feeling of Rise of Skywalker, Kylo Ren was too popular for that.

It's funny because Kylo's fanbase still hated it because they wanted him to live and get the girl, which I don't think the films could ever have sold with the time they had left.

Would have even made more sense if they went a little further and actually threw in a Star Forge.

They should have done it. Would justify how the First Order has all the military power it does and it would be able to fill the Death Star "thing that must be destroyed to win" role without just being the Death Star again.

Plus a magic shipyard seems like a slam-dunk for a talented art team to make look really cool.

General Hux proclaims Kylo as the Supreme Leader of the First Order, and then...watches him get totally embarrassed by not-even-in-person-Luke-Skywalker and to completely lose his cool in doing so. And this is after he lost to Rey in TFA. The ultimate villain cannot be someone who's been beaten by the heroes in every encounter so far.

I think you'd basically need to give him some sort of power-up in the final film if he's the big bad, but you could probably sell that. It's definitely a better idea than introducing a secret mastermind like Palpatine.

Also, Abrams has said that Kylo's redemption was one of the things that was part of initial writing sessions for the ST, so he was never going to take that route.

I know the DOTF script tried to have their cake and eat it too by having Kylo be the big bad who gets a moment of redemption in his final moments. I don't know how that would have played, but probably better than what ended up happening.

BloodSquirrel

2024-07-22, 07:52 AM

I'll once again post my open challenge for anyone who thinks that TLJ provided Abrams with any workable material for a third act:

Can you explain what, exactly, a "proper follow-up" to TLJ would have looked like, and give at least a rough outline to the plot. So far, I've yet to get any takers.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-22, 07:55 AM

What appears to have happened it that, subsequent to hiring him, Kathleen Kennedy let JJ Abrams do whatever he wanted. Abrams is a massive hack, so he created a reboot/retread version of the OT exactly the same thing he'd done with Star Trek only a few years earlier (to great financial and career success mind you, so I can certainly see why he thought that would work).

I think this whole "full creative freedom" thing is honestly just PR talk. As you say yourself, Abrams brought Star Trek back into the limelight with hugely successful movies and I can almost guarantee that is exactly why he was brought in for Star Wars.

I don't believe for a second that Abrams was given a blank cheque and told he can make whatever movie he wants. Before he came along The Force Awakens had a writer's room comprised of Michael Arndt, Simon Kinberg, Lawrence Kasdan, Pablo Hidalgo, and Kiri Hart and there's no way they threw out months of work just like that. It makes much more sense to me that Abrams was given the current draft of script and a very particular brief and he had x amount of months to get the film made in time for its 2015 release. Indeed the only reason Arndt was let go was because he wouldn't have finished the script in time.

And it did work. The Force Awakens made over two billion dollars and is pretty much universally loved. Abrams did exactly what he was asked to do, so I wouldn't really call him a massive hack for that. Yeah Rise of Skywalker sucked but nobody could have salvaged that situation. Dude had a few months to write a movie that somehow had to take Luke being dead, Snoke being dead, Rey's parents being nobodies and Ben being a complete loser and make it all work. That was never going to happen. Even Rian Johnson turned down making Episode IX and that kinda says everything that needs to be said.

BloodSquirrel

2024-07-22, 08:03 AM

What they should have done was scrap Episode 9, move the timeline a few decades into the future, and start with a more or less clean slate.

TLJ didn't leave anything that particularly needed to be resolved. It's main effect was to reset Star Wars back to the beginning of A New Hope, with a new version of the Empire, a new version of the resistance, and not much else. The old heroes were dead, the new heroes had their character arcs aborted, and what little TFA did to set up some kind of new status quo was tossed away for the lulz. You could start the next movie with "The First Order has been ruling the Galaxy for the last forty years, the resisbellion has been fighting them and losing, and now here's a plucky new bunch of heroes to save the day" without the audience missing anything.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-22, 08:37 AM

I'll once again post my open challenge for anyone who thinks that TLJ provided Abrams with any workable material for a third act:

Can you explain what, exactly, a "proper follow-up" to TLJ would have looked like, and give at least a rough outline to the plot. So far, I've yet to get any takers.

Personally? I'd have made the Knights of Ren the Big Bad. Forget the First Order being Imperial remnants with a new paint job, they're actually adherents of the Sith Eternal and the Knights of Ren are the most fanatically devoted. Ben just assumes they'll fall in line now he's in charge - but they don't. They don't care about taking over the galaxy, they only care that Snoke was in truth Darth Plagueis and Ben killed him after he had survived Palpatine's assassination attempt sixty years ago and they aren't happy about it. There are rules for this sort of thing.

Throw in a whole backstory about how Palpatine had abandoned and betrayed the Sith Eternal, forsaking Sith tradition to satisfy his own lust for an empire that he alone would rule forever, so when Plagueis returned the servants of the Sith were overjoyed. Things would finally be right again. Explain that the Knights of Ren are in fact the most powerful servants of the Sith Eternal and tradition dictates they are the candidates for a Sith Lord's apprentice. That Darth Maul was the last Knight of Ren to serve as a Sith Lord's apprentice and Palpatine broke from tradition by choosing Darth Tyranus and then Darth Vader as his apprentices and have the Sith Eternal believe both were failures because they weren't true Sith, they were merely Jedi.

So the Knights of Ren determine that Ben, as a mere Jedi as well, must die and once he is dead they will kill each other until only two are left standing - those twp would become the new Sith Lords, master and apprentice. Present it as completely nuts and Rey doesn't want anything to do with it, but Luke and Leia practically beg her to save Ben and Luke in particular presents it as an opportunity to prevent the Sith from rising again.

So Rey and Finn, who is also a Jedi but on his own path to save the other stormtroopers, lead the attack against the First Order and the Sith Eternal and Ben eventually joins up with them. We get an epic three versus five battle at the end as the Resistance, aided by all the stormtroopers Finn saved, wipes out the First Order. The Knights of Ren are all killed and the Sith Eternal retreats into the unknown, aware it would take centuries for them to recover from the events of the last sixty years.

Ben goes into self-imposed exile because he can't ask for forgiveness for what he has done until he forgives himself and he isn't sure he ever will. Rey goes onto establish the Jedi Order and heads off in search of her first students. Finn makes it his life's purpose to rehabilitate and reintegrate the stormtroopers. The three may never see each other again, but who knows? The Force works in mysterious ways.

The end.

Batcathat

2024-07-22, 08:56 AM

The Force Awakens made over two billion dollars and is pretty much universally loved.

It was? While not as divisive as what followed, my impression was always that people at best considered it a decently entertaining rehash of the first movie. So not exactly hated, but "universally loved" seems like an overstatement.

Errorname

2024-07-22, 09:01 AM

Can you explain what, exactly, a "proper follow-up" to TLJ would have looked like, and give at least a rough outline to the plot. So far, I've yet to get any takers.

Well, Duel of the Fates, for one. I don't think it would have been a great movie, but I think it would have resulted in a mostly cohesive trilogy.

What little TFA did to set up some kind of new status quo was tossed away for the lulz.

I really don't see it, TLJ failed at a lot of things but I think it's pretty directly following the setups TFA put down.

Also people who are cool and correct understand that Force Awakens fumbled the groundwork for the trilogy to come massively, and that it should bear the brunt of the blame for how badly the trilogy turned out.

I genuinely hate it more than Rise of Skywalker, which at least has the appeal of watching a trainwreck.

BloodSquirrel

2024-07-22, 09:03 AM

The end.

Well, that's certainly a direction you could take things in, but it's very much a "And now for something completely different!" one. It also kind of sidelines Rey as the main protagonist in favor of Kylo Ren- which is kind of fair, in a sense, because Daisy Ridley is unfortunately kind of a weak performer* compared to her co-stars, but also kind of drives home just how little there is for her character to do post TLJ.

I also think it would make more sense if the Knights of Ren are fine, in principle, with Kylo killing Snoke, but also see him as too weak to be the new master. It's not like a true Sith would have any problem with openly challenging Kylo's position out of pure ambition and desire for power. Make one of the knights a more disciplined, more strategic rival for power and have the rest of the knights line up behind him because they see him as the winning side. It would even allow you to provide a contrast between Ben and true, pure Sith devotee, which you could build off of for Ben's redemption.

*I liked her in TFA, where she could get by most only charm, but she really couldn't handle the heavier scenes in TLJ and RoS.

pendell

2024-07-22, 09:06 AM

I found it a serviceable reboot of the first episode of the original OT but didn't especially love it. The most I can say for it is it's the only movie in the sequel trilogy I could tolerate watching.

What I didn't care for was the superlaser gimmick of Starkiller base; somehow a small breakaway faction can build a superweapon which outstrips the original Death Star, which took the entire Empire decades to build. Or that it caused the entire Republic to fall apart in less than ten minutes of film. I was spoiled by the Zahn novels, which were a much more beliveeble and interesting story of the post-Endor GFFA than Disney Star Wars. Maybe if I had been six years old all over again, watching it for the first time, I'd have felt differently.

The problem is that when Star Wars first came out, I was utterly blown away by it. When my parents told me they were taking me to see Star Wars, I thought it would be like the war movies I was, at the time, seeing on our color TV set -- old, grainy, black and white images of men in uniform looking terrified as machine guns chattered in the background. I didn't like them and thought I would be bored out of my mind.

I was BLOWN AWAY by what I actually saw in the theater. The Tantive IV and the Devastator scene rocked my world and the movie didnt' slow down for two hours.

It was a life-changing event, in some ways.

Thing is, it's now forty years on. Nothing about Star Wars is groundbreaking in that sense any more. Computer graphics and fantastic visuals are common in superhero movies. If I were six years old again, I might find TFA pretty mind candy, but I don't think it'd have near the impact that it did back in the old days when such movies were rare, and it would be half a decade between new episodes.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Clertar

2024-07-22, 09:16 AM

Seeing as this is a general Star Wars thread...

Best songs?

Bushes of Love.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-22, 09:18 AM

I mean, you don't make over two billion dollars at the box office with a "decently entertaining" movie that wasn't "exactly hated". If you take the Rotten Tomatoes score into consideration then The Force Awakens is considered to be on par with A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. Those are the three highest rated Star Wars movies. Clearly audiences and critics both absolutely loved it for it to become as massive a success as it was.

Batcathat

2024-07-22, 09:26 AM

I mean, it was certainly successful (but then again, so was Phantom Menance, which I don't think anyone would consider "universally loved") but I've heard enough people who just think it's meh or outright dislike it to seriously question it being universally loved.

Errorname

2024-07-22, 09:35 AM

I mean, you don't make over two billion dollars at the box office with a "decently entertaining" movie that wasn't "exactly hated".

There are plenty of movies that have brought in over a billion dollars while being unwatchable garbage, so unless you want to go to bat for Transformers 4, Jurassic World 2 and On Stranger Tides I wouldn't use a big box office haul as evidence of quality.

Star Wars is reliably a massive money-maker, even when it sucks, the sort of franchise where Rise of Skywalker "only" making a billion dollars is a disappointing turnout.

Palanan

2024-07-22, 09:36 AM

Originally Posted by Infernally Clay
Personally? I'd have made the Knights of Ren the Big Bad.

I love this concept.

Not sure if Id make Finn a Jedi, but otherwise Id pay real money to see this on the big screen. What you've described would make for a truly satisfying Star Wars finale when the credits roll.

Originally Posted by Batcathat
While not as divisive as what followed, my impression was always that people at best considered [TFA] a decently entertaining rehash of the first movie.

When it first came out, I recall the reactions being divided between cheap retread and warm frothy bubble bath of Star Wars-yness.

Im in the second category. I love it, I enjoy it, will never not love those T-70s coming across the lake. But its so frothy it doesnt make a good foundation for a trilogy.

Originally Posted by BloodSquirrel
I liked [Daisy Ridley] in TFA, where she could get by most only charm, but she really couldn't handle the heavier scenes in TLJ and RoS.

Agreed entirely.

Theres an interesting contrast in Chaos Walking, if anyone saw that, which pairs Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland. In that context its easy to see whos the far better actor. Ridley just doesnt have the talent or the depth.

Originally Posted by Errorname
Also people who are cool and correct.

What.

Im not sure what youre trying to say here.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-22, 09:44 AM

There are degrees of success. The Phantom Menace did indeed make a lot of money, albeit not as much as The Force Awakens, but contemporary critics were not kind to it and audiences didnt really like it all that much either. Its one of those movies that has grown on people in the years since, like the prequel trilogy as a whole really, but The Phantom Menace still usually ranks near the bottom of Star Wars movies. I dont know anyone who puts The Force Awakens lower than third or fourth.

If a movie can make two billion dollars at the box office and receive almost universal praise and that isnt enough for it to be considered pretty much universally loved I dont know what would fit the criteria. I guess no Star Wars movie does.

Errorname

2024-07-22, 09:45 AM

Im not sure what youre trying to say here.

That the opinion I agree with is the correct one that cool people have. I was just making a joke, albeit not a very good one.

I have definitely seen other people besides me in the "Force Awakens actually sucks" camp. I think it's a movie that's reliant on the hype of Star Wars being back and the promise of what comes next, and once that promise was fulfilled the illusion breaks and you're left with an empty husk of a movie.

I dont know anyone who puts The Force Awakens lower than third or fourth.

I don't have a great offhand recall of people's Star Wars rankings, but I've definitely seen it lower than that. I certainly would put it lower than that, sixth at best, probably lower.

Batcathat

2024-07-22, 09:56 AM

Sure, but my point is that my experience was that it was pretty far from universal praise. But I suppose we're getting into the definitions of "universal" and "love" and it's not a hill I'm particularly interested in dying on, so we can agree to disagree on that matter.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-22, 09:58 AM

I don't have a great offhand recall of people's Star Wars rankings, but I've definitely seen it lower than that. I certainly would put it lower than that, sixth at best, probably lower.

So if there are at most two or three movies worse than it, I can only assume you put The Force Awakens in the same boat as Attack of the Clones and Rise of Skywalker. Thats just harsh. D:

BloodSquirrel

2024-07-22, 10:17 AM

Well, Duel of the Fates, for one. I don't think it would have been a great movie, but I think it would have resulted in a mostly cohesive trilogy.

Duel of Fates isn't really that fundamentally different from RoS. Instead of Palpatine returning, we get a new ancient Sith to replace Snoke. You can pretty much see how the climax is kind of the same as RoS, just with Kylo instead of Palpatine. We get the same Rey dark-side fakeout. What, exactly, makes it more cohesive as a follow-up than RoS?

And I think the "not a great movie" says a lot there. It was scrapped in favor of RoS for a reason, which is that it really isn't a particularly cohesive movie on its own, but just an attempt to smash something together with whatever parts they still had lying around. Which was pretty much what RoS turned out to be anyway. Most of the obvious changes (such as Palpatine's death-star-laser-fleet instead of some kind of galactic broadcast device) are really more like MacGuffin swaps than any kind of significant thematic change.

I really don't see it, TLJ failed at a lot of things but I think it's pretty directly following the setups TFA put down.

TFA: Rey wants to find her parents because she was raised alone and wants to feel like she has a place where she belongs.
TLJ: Rey thinks that her parents must have been important or something but they're just dead.

TFA: Snoke is the new villain
TLJ: Snoke is dead, lol.

TFA: Luke is in exile for some mysterious reason, and it's important to the galaxy that Rey finds him before Kylo Ren does!
TLJ: Luke is just old and grump. Then he dies.

I mean, yes, TLJ picks up the pieces where TFA left off, but it breaks most of them and shoves the rest up its nose. The second act of a trilogy is supposed to build on those pieces so that the last act can resolve them in a dramatic and climactic way.

I think that TFA had plenty of fundamental problems- it's in way too much of a hurry to get to the action and so it does the bare minimum to establish that anything of important has happened since RotJ. Every event and development since then is either a step backwards toward the pre-RotJ status quo or left mostly for future movies to fill out. There's a New Republic. The entire cast of the OT had a grand total of one romantic relationship between the lot of them and produced one child. It goes for an even bigger Death Star right out of the gate and can't wait to blow it up again.

But one thing it does is leave plenty of ground for a follow-up to pick a direction, and a lot of scattered hooks that a good writer could have picked up on. The movie asks plenty of questions that can be answered, as evidenced by the theory mills that popped up afterward (and ceased to exist post-TLJ). Are they great questions? Not really. But good writers have done more with less. Case in point: "A child who was abandoned finds and confronts the parents that abandoned her" is a perfectly good premise for an entire movie on its own. It's not the kind of "Rey is Obi-Wan's daughter!" twist that a lazy theorist might expect, but it doesn't have to be. It's perfectly dramatic in its own way, and could fit perfectly within the structure of a Space Opera.

TFA is Abrams at his best: setting up mysteries and characters that entice people and make them want answers. RoS is Abrams at this worst: assembling the pieces of the story into an ending to make the story into a coherent hole. Except that TLJ happened in the middle and made him try to do that except without the mysteries he set up in TFA.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-22, 10:27 AM

That sounds terrible enough that I almost believe it except that I also know that there was never a plan. These were mysteries set up to get the internet to talk about what they might mean, and what the answers were were somebody else's problem entirely.

And when JJ actually had to get involved with the answers he just turned them into hollow and dreary fanservice of the most pathetic kind.

Anyone who suggested bringing Palpatine back in the writer's room should have been fed to the ewoks.

Errorname

2024-07-22, 10:57 AM

So if there are at most two or three movies worse than it, I can only assume you put The Force Awakens in the same boat as Attack of the Clones and Rise of Skywalker. Thats just harsh. D:

Yeah, Attack of the Clones and Rise of Skywalker are the only movies I would say are inarguably worse than Force Awakens (and frankly I still like them both better, they're bad in more interesting ways).

"Instead of Palpatine returning, we get a new ancient sith (in a much smaller less destructive role)" is the big one. Also better handling of the non-Rey supporting characters.

Again, low bar. I do not think I would have liked this movie (I have never liked any Colin Trevorrow movie), but it would have avoided the worst pitfalls that TROS fell into and resulted in a relatively consistent trilogy.

TFA: Snoke is the new villain
TLJ: Snoke is dead, lol

TFA: Luke is in exile for some mysterious reason, and it's important to the galaxy that Rey finds him before Kylo Ren does!
TLJ: Luke is just old and grump. Then he dies.

I think literally all these examples are the correct and logical payoff to the setup in Force Awakens. Like these were the parts of the movie that actually worked.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-22, 11:06 AM

And when JJ actually had to get involved with the answers he just turned them into hollow and dreary fanservice of the most pathetic kind.

Anyone who suggested bringing Palpatine back in the writer's room should have been fed to the ewoks.

I'm just not sure where this idea that there was no plan comes from, because according to even people involved in just The Force Awakens itself both Michael Arndt and J.J. Abrams had independently produced drafts for Episode VIII and Episode IX. Clearly there was some direction these movies were meant to head in. Is it because Kathleen Kennedy said there was no plan? Even though she was pretty adamant the plan had always been to bring Palpatine back and she even released concept art of him dating back to 2014 to prove it? Part of her job is to basically just say whatever people want to hear so their butts are in those seats on opening weekend.

The whole "there was no plan" thing honestly just comes across as an excuse for executive meddling and a guy that clearly wanted to make the best movie he could regardless of whether or not it'd be a great second act in a trilogy. The Force Awakens literally had a writer's room. Multiple top level people working at Lucasfilm, including Pablo Hidalgo, worked together to determine what happened in that movie and it is impossible to believe not one of them had any idea what they were doing or what would happen next and they were all just making it up as they went along.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-07-22, 11:52 AM

I'd be very interested to actually see either of the drafts for Abrams Ep 8 + 9, because the man hates explaining his mysteries. On top of that, I don't actually see a lot of original direction for where TFA ended. It followed A New Hope so closely and set up a galaxy that mirrored the original trilogy so much that there wasn't much other direction you could naturally go in. The superweapon is destroyed, the protagonist is off training with an old master, and our other heroes are left to weather the villainous counterattack. Without breaking from the natural set up, you just get Empire Strikes Back Again. Not that Johnson's script turned out phenomenal, but he had to toss Abram's setup in the trash to redirect the sequels anywhere interesting. And then Rise of Skywalker tried its damnedest to be Return of the Jedi 2: The Jedi Return Harder anyway (Abrams even introduces a criminal backstory for Poe and an old partner-in-crime friend because obviously that's what you do with the Han Solo-type.)

The whole thing reminds me of Mass Effect, where the third game gets all the flack for disappointing writing, when it's really the second game's fault for not setting up anything interesting to build off of.

Zevox

2024-07-22, 11:55 AM

I dont know anyone who puts The Force Awakens lower than third or fourth.

I don't have a great offhand recall of people's Star Wars rankings, but I've definitely seen it lower than that. I certainly would put it lower than that, sixth at best, probably lower.
Yeah, I certainly put it lower as well. At least sixth, to be precise - below the original trilogy, Rogue One, and Solo. And I'd probably rather re-watch Revenge of the Sith than The Force Awakens, even though that's a rather flawed film too.

BloodSquirrel

2024-07-22, 12:01 PM

"Instead of Palpatine returning, we get a new ancient sith (in a much smaller less destructive role)" is the big one. Also better handling of the non-Rey supporting characters.

Less destructive, but also not very effective at solving the problem that Palpatine was brought in to solve. Episode 9 needed a main villain. Kylo wasn't built up very well to take the role, and they also wanted to redeem him (which is a problem that itself that stems from him not being set up for the main villain role) which is hard to pull off if you don't have a bigger villain for them to redeem themselves by helping defeat. Duel of Fates tries to solve the problem by making up something new which doesn't really have much weight with the audience and also doesn't fill the role that the Emperor had with Vader. It provides him with a mechanical power-up and not much else.

And I'd say that there's a running theme there with the differences and similarities between DoF and RoS. Both scripts are trying to solve the same problems and work around the same gaps that resulted from TLJ. DoF has less offensive solutions, but also rather weak ones. RoS recognizes that DoF just doesn't have the oomph it needs, so it tries to take some desperate, but problematic measures to amp things up. You can very much see how RoS evolved from DoF, and the fundamental weaknesses are in both scripts.

I agree that RoS made plenty of unforced errors and that a better writer could have come up with more elegance solutions, but I doubt that anyone could have made the whole thing look cohesive in retrospect.

Also, "better handling of non-Rey supporting characters" is kind of debatable. At best, it reverts Finn back to his role from TFA, which isn't exactly a feather in TLJ's cap, and at worst it's the same kind of "give the characters busywork" that RoS's MacGuffin hunt did.

I think literally all these examples are the correct and logical payoff to the setup in Force Awakens. Like these were the parts of the movie that actually worked.

Putting aside how I disagree with this on its face, it doesn't change the fact that cutting those threads in TLJ without anything to replace them left RoS with nothing to work with.

BloodSquirrel

2024-07-22, 12:09 PM

I haven't heard anything about there being drafts for VIII and IX and I'd be really curious to see the source on that. It's also hard to believe that Palpatine coming back was planned ahead of time, given that Duel of Fates doesn't use the idea.

I'm sure plenty of people at Lucasfilm had ideas, but that's very different from having everyone agree on them and turning them into a coherent outline for a trilogy. Which, for some reason, Johnson was just allowed to throw out? If the executive running the studio hasn't signed off on your plan and never had any intention of following it then "they didn't have a plan" is an entirely true statement. A lot of individual ideas about a plan does not suffice to constitute a plan.

This is, in the first place, massively overselling how similar TFA and ANH actually were. Case in point: TFA doesn't end with the The First Order in control of the galaxy. They dealt The New Republic a serious blow, but jumping straight from that to "They've conquered the entire galaxy and Leia's group is the only resistance left" is a leap that TLJ made.

More importantly however, it rests on the absurd assertion that ESB was the only direction in which Star Wars could have taken after ANH. Neither TLJ nor ESB were strictly dictated by their predecessors. In fact, the direction that TLJ took wasn't even dictated by TFA and then the first 75% of TLJ. I've proposed before that you could make the entire trilogy much more interesting if Rey decided to join Kylo Ren at the end of TLJ. That's a massive difference in direction for the whole trilogy, would very easily follow from what was laid out up until then with only a few (if any) minor tweaks, and would fix a lot of TLJ's internal problems by giving some of the "subversions" more of an actual point.

Cazero

2024-07-22, 12:23 PM

Episode 9 needed a main villain. Kylo wasn't built up very well to take the role
Bull. ****.
Kylo Ren has been growing in power, cunning and evil all throughout episodes 7 and 8, culminating with his assassination of his master like all powerful Sith eventually do. And he has an army.
Nobody showed for the last stand at Krait. The First Order intimidated the entire galaxy.
Kylo Ren commands them by force. He's a rabid dog in charge of an overwhelming force that will destroy everything on it's path until he's satisfied. If you can't make a proper villain from that, you're not even trying.

But nooooo, let's bring back an old schemer from the dead without a scheme and pull an armada out of his ass, that will make a better movie.

BloodSquirrel

2024-07-22, 12:31 PM

Bull. ****.
Kylo Ren has been growing in power, cunning and evil all throughout episodes 7 and 8, culminating with his assassination of his master like all powerful Sith eventually do. And he has an army.
Nobody showed for the last stand at Krait. The First Order intimidated the entire galaxy.
Kylo Ren commands them by force. He's a rabid dog in charge of an overwhelming force that will destroy everything on it's path until he's satisfied. If you can't make a proper villain from that, you're not even trying.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-07-22, 12:38 PM

I looked it up. Apparently it comes from an interview with Daisy Ridley (https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/03/02/jj-abrams-wrote-drafts-for-star-wars-8-and-9-says-daisy-ridley) where she says Abrams wrote early drafts for both movies. Unfortunately, the original Geek Le Mag interview seems to have been taken down or never published online. Personally, I don't think this is as solid as it sounds. "Early draft" can mean a lot of things in Hollywood and most certainly doesn't mean there was a whole script. Most likely he had a rough outline and some notes.

Yeah, but Darth Vader was utterly humiliated throughout A New Hope - his last scene has him comically spinning off into space - and still went on to be one of the most threatening villains in fiction. It's not impossible to show a Kylo who, after being conflicted and humiliated, firmly centers himself in the Dark Side and becomes terrifying. After all, the dude is a Skywalker. Heck, have him relocate his base to Vader's castle on Mustafar and commune with the residual Dark Side vibes there - bam, instant explanation for a powerup.

Cazero

2024-07-22, 12:51 PM

Vader was sent flying like Team Rocket by someone who wasn't even Force sensitive at the end of episode 4.
Completely humiliated. Lost all credibility as a threat. Or did he?
You just hate Kylo Ren.

Zevox

2024-07-22, 01:08 PM

Kylo lost to Rey twice, gets humiliated by Luke, and is almost universally described by people as being more like an angry child that a Sith Lord. "Oh but he's really powerful" is a hack writer's idea of how to make a villain compelling. Making the villain powerful is easy. Making him intimidating takes a lot more skill.
Indeed. Kylo Ren was a sorry excuse for a villain, one of the biggest things wrong with the sequel trilogy, and there's no lack of other things wrong with it to compete for that title.

Snoke, for all that he was a cheap Palpatine knock-off, was at least a credible threat who was achieving his aims competently, up until he was unceremoniously offed. Kylo never even managed that. I can easily understand why they'd feel they need another villain to carry the third film, even if Palpatine was a dumb choice for it - there's no way a character whose whole concept was literally "pathetic Vader wannabe" from the beginning and never outgrew that could take that role.

VoxRationis

2024-07-22, 01:13 PM

I'll once again post my open challenge for anyone who thinks that TLJ provided Abrams with any workable material for a third act:

Can you explain what, exactly, a "proper follow-up" to TLJ would have looked like, and give at least a rough outline to the plot. So far, I've yet to get any takers.

All right, I'll bite. (You did ask for a rough outline, so I'm including some multiple-choice elements here.)

"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."

TLJ ends with both sides of the conflict in utter tatters. The Resistance has lost its entire fleet, much of its command leadership, apparently the confidence of its allies, and the spiritual support of the Jedi, save for Rey, a few old books, and occasional Force ghost visits. The First Order has lost two superweapons, constructed to surpass those of the Empire on a fraction of the industrial base, in the space of a few days, as well as many capital ships and Force only knows how many personnel. Its greatest Force-user and most experienced leaders are dead, leaving mostly the callow and unstable Ren and Hux. Even leaving Crait will likely prove difficult for Kylo Ren and his subordinates; what remains of his army will probably have much of its strength trapped there until relays of picket ships can be summoned to take them elsewhere.

Episode IX begins, then, in a condition of interstate anarchy. The Republic and Empire are both, for all practical purposes, dead; even their remnants are the merest dying embers in the vast swamp that is the galaxy. The episode focuses on what people are doing in the aftermath, on what they will build from scratch. The surviving leadership of the Republic/Resistance cease attempting to hold a central government and focus on trying to build concord between the thousands of polities throughout the galaxy. Rey focuses on rediscovering the mysteries of the Force that were only hinted to her in her interrupted training (much as Luke's training had been cursory before her).

All around them, though, we see the series' title, "Star Wars", made truth for the first time. A warlord era has settled over the galaxy. Anyone with a ship the likes of the Millennium Falcon or Slave I can accord themselves a ruler of something, at their whim and their peril, for the threat of conquest or usurpation ever hangs over the warlords' heads. More well-established planetary governments, such as those of Naboo or Corellia, increasingly make moves at each others' expense, seizing resources or unilaterally imposing tariffs and conditions on interplanetary commerce. Criminal syndicates act increasingly openly and in some cases declare themselves states (at least when it behooves them, as when claiming diplomatic immunity).

(The lion's share of this is in the background; we don't have space in the movie to flesh out too much of the details for a galaxy's worth of disputes. But we do see the common citizenry suffering as trade slows or as local tyrants reimpose the sorts of intrusive checkpoints from the days of the Empire, and we see protagonists from Team Statecraft (Leia, Lando, Mon Mothma, what have you) coming out of tense and raucous meetings, at loggerheads, in order to receive calls from the more active protagonists.)

A single interplanetary conflict among the Core Worlds (or other local powers that had been middling before but now count as great powers in this new geopolitical landscape) comes to the fore during the course of the movie. This could be seen as an amoral conflict, with both sides being equally selfish, or both could see themselves as in the right (such as both having legitimate historical claims to a piece of territory, or viewing a trade conflict through different sets of underlying legal principles), or something in between. Tensions build between the two powers, and both begin to mobilize their navies, and Team Statecraft cannot prevent the two actors from doing so, especially as both parties can find the color of law to gird their increasingly lawless actions. Eventually, this builds to a battle unlike any seen since Endor, and arguably since the Clone Wars: a fleet engagement between peer forces. Both sides lack capital ships, and starfighters are few and far between, so this will look very different from the fights we've seen thus far in the series. This provides our obligatory space fight, but critically, the heroes aren't on either side and want peace, not victory. (Set design should make sure both sides look heroic, and music should underscore the senseless tragedy of the fighting.) Depending on Kylo Ren's arc through this movie (see below), this battle could end in a couple of ways. If Kylo's embarking on his own state building enterprise during this time, he could arrive with a fleet of his own, and the heroes are called upon to get the two sides to make peace in order to oppose him. If he doesn't have a fleet, he shows up as a personal obstacle, hampering the heroes' attempts to defuse the situation.

Critically, at the end of the movie, the diplomacy is not done. There's no New New Republic. All is not well with the world. Nonetheless, the local conflict is resolved through the protagonists' efforts, probably with the aid of Team Action, with the implication that there is cause for hope for a more peaceful galaxy.

There are two main options for what Kylo Ren is doing during this time:
Mirroring the attempts of Leia/Lando, etc., to bring peace to the galaxy through diplomacy, Kylo Ren tries to knit it together again by force. He can't accomplish this with what he has. The Janissary model of stormtrooper recruitment, always somewhat difficult for the First Order to sustain, is now completely incapable of replenishing both the losses of the last two films and the ongoing casualties from the endemic warfare. He therefore builds a feudal state built on forcing local powers to swear fealty to him, using the rapidly crumbling First Order military as a supporting force for his own personal strength. Depending on the tone one desires for the movie (and what thesis it holds on power and state formation), Kylo's efforts might be the cruel work that is needed, a king to unite before the revolution to democratize, or they might be counterproductive. If one wishes to emphasize the edgy, "balance of light and dark" metaphysics that were hinted at in TLJ, maybe both are needed. Otherwise, it could be shown that fear of Kylo and warlords like him is driving a security dilemma among the states of the galaxy, only furthering the insecurity of all.
Kylo Ren begins with something approaching a military (if a much diminished one), but finds he cannot hope to hold it together. No one in senior leadership respects him, and he, never having been anything but a cudgel for Snoke, doesn't have the experience or understanding of statecraft or war that he needs. Every scene, he discovers that more of his forces have melted away, either by desertion or by logistical failures. At the end of the first third of the movie, he struggles even to staff the bridge of his flagship. Maddened by the Dark Side and his frustrated ambitions, he abandons the First Order and seeks revenge on his surviving enemies. His path is haunted by both real and imagined ghosts: Han, Luke, Vader (or so he imagines). He spends much of the film, then, almost acting the part of a rabid dog, lashing out at whatever seems nearby in the hopes that it will ease his pain. Even when he kills a protagonist, he finds his heart is no more healed than it ever was. Thereafter, though, he finds that the mask of Vader slips away, and it is in truth the corrupting whispers of Snoke (possibly Palpatine, but I prefer Snoke for this, as the two have a direct connection). In horror, he banishes the apparition, but Luke is able to reach out to him and save him as he never could in life. He (and the real Anakin) teaches Kylo that he can never expect peace of mind when he has given himself to the Dark Side. Ben Solo repents and works to achieve transcendence (possibly reaching out to Leia or Rey to apologize or offer some kind of support) before departing the physical world.

At the same time, Rey's attempting to rediscover traditions of the Force and struggling between the very imminent threat of losing the Jedi tradition completely and the very imminent conflicts blossoming around her. What exactly she encounters on her exploration of metaphysics and what her arc looks like can vary a lot without changing the broad strokes of the plot as outlined above, depending on what the author wants to say about the Force.
Maybe the conclusion is that the past must be abandoned, and Rey forgoes her attempts to rebuild the Jedi (perhaps concluding that their failures indicate that their teachings don't have the moral authority to properly guide the future) in order to focus on resolving conflicts in the immediate moment.
Maybe she is forced to try and intercede in the fleet battle and dies, ending the line of Jedi, in the process of settling the dispute (say, by sustaining a mortal wound in a duel with Kylo Ren as she buys time for rogue characters to broadcast a false retreat order to the fleets).
Maybe she has revelatory experiences through study and visions and translates those into teachings that defuse the present war.
Perhaps she brings the Force to bear in such a way that the combatants understand the way their hatred and aggression will only beget their own destruction.

BloodSquirrel

2024-07-22, 01:14 PM

Vader didn't lose to Luke twice. And "comically spilling off into space" was him surviving the Death Star blowing up after Han barely stopped him from killing Luke. This is a really, really silly attempt to retcon Vader into not having been an intimidating villain in ANH.

And, yeah, you could turn Kylo into a better villain, if you, I don't know, spent the second act of the trilogy doing that? Kind of like TFA implied they were going to do with the whole "complete his training bit" that TLJ ignored?

This is why I say they should have just let TLJ be the end of a duology and started a new trilogy. There's a hell of a lot more you can do with the state of things as TLJ left them if you have more movies to work with instead of trying to speedrun all of your build-up in the third act.

Indeed. Kylo Ren was a sorry excuse for a villain, one of the biggest things wrong with the sequel trilogy, and there's no lack of other things wrong with it to compete for that title.

Snoke being a cheap Palpatine knock-off is also more of TLJ's fault than TFA. Yeah, he isn't developed much in TFA, but neither was Palpatine until at least RotJ. People at least found him interesting enough to ask questions.

And, like I said, you can show Kylo Ren growing into the role, but you need to put considerably more into than "he went to Mustafar and snorted some dark side co*ke and now he's a badass". Having his second duel with Rey at the end of TLJ show how much he's improved (after doing some actual training in TLJ) and ending the movie by showing him more in control and, I don't know, giving a speech to the galaxy about his big new villain plans would go a long way.

But that didn't happen, because for all of the bluster about TLJ it never actually committed to its ideas or any real direction.

Mordar

2024-07-22, 01:18 PM

I think literally all these examples are the correct and logical payoff to the setup in Force Awakens. Like these were the parts of the movie that actually worked.

Invoking logic that disregards underpinnings of pulp (space) fantasy in pulp (space) fantasy to justify deconstruction of pulp (space) fantasy. That's Forces within Forces wrapped by Forces, I guess.

I mean, they could have had Rey and Maz doing a whole "Waiting for Godot" bit where Luke never shows up and that would have been a logical progression from Force Awakens as well.

*****

So, What If...Order 66 wiped out the Jedi?

Now, I'm not a Star Wars scholar by any stretch of the imagination, so will need help on some time line elements, so please chime in where errors exist.

Palpatine survives Mace Windu's confrontation thanks to the timely intervention of Anakin, retreats to his command center, and issues the command that triggers Contingency Order 66. Much proceeds as we were shown, with at least three major changes - Cody's AT-TE doesn't miss Obi-won, Gree kills Yoda, and Ahsoka dies onboard ship (despite not really being Jedi). All of the Jedi embedded with Clone troops die. Anakin leads the assault on the Temple and finishes the local purge. Those that originally escaped do not, in this scenario. Only those not in contact with Clones, nor at the Temple (or other designated hubs) - or suckered into returning - survive...let's say no more than 30, and none of the named or established leadership.

So, what happens (or doesn't happen) next? I assume the following minor change:

Anakin leads the attack on the Temple, visits Padme, heads to Mustafar and executes the Separatist leadership;
Palpatine secures victory in the Senate;
Padme deduces what has happened and leaves Coruscant to find Anakin on Mustafar;
Padme confronts Anakin in the carnage of his attack and reacts with horror;

So, now is the divergence greatest. In Revenge, Anakin chokes Padme out (because of the appearance of Obi-won?) and later Obi-won rescues her, then consolidates forces with Senator Organa and Yoda on the Polis Massa, she dies in childbirth and the twins are assigned to Obi-won and Senator Organa for fostering; while Vader is rescued by Palpatine and reforged into his cyborg body, told he killed Padme in his tantrum, and they spend 20-ish years consolidating rule, chasing Jedi, and generally being dark and evil.

So, from here:

Padme confronts Anakin in the carnage and seeing the slaughtered bodies escalates her verbal attack;
Anakin responds either by Force choke or Force push, injuring her significantly;
He loads her into her shuttle med-stasis and rushes back to Coruscant;
Palpatine greets him and assigns "top medical staff" to take care of Padme;
She dies via intentional medical "error" and the timeline resumes as above - Palpatine kills the medical staff, tells Anakin she died of her wounds and completes the separation of Anakin from his old life;

Thus we have the Dawn of the Empire, headed by Sidious and fully-human Vader...perhaps not as powerful for the loss of his humanity. The Death Star remains on the horizon, the Rebellion still as its early leaders, and the Jedi as an order are extinguished from the Galaxy.

Now, building to the fulfillment of the Prophecy of Anakin...stay tuned!

- M

Infernally Clay

2024-07-22, 01:21 PM

Vader was sent flying like Team Rocket by someone who wasn't even Force sensitive at the end of episode 4.
Completely humiliated. Lost all credibility as a threat. Or did he?
You just hate Kylo Ren.

The thing with Vader is, the dude had great presence. He was tall and imposing and he dominated the scene whenever he appeared and he wasn't the butt of any jokes. Even to this day, when Vader shows up, you know he will kill you for even the slightest inconvenience and he's the nice one compared to Palpatine.

What did Kylo Ren do? Smash up computer consoles out of childish anger whenever things didn't go his way. He was a complete gag character. His outbursts weren't intimidating they were actual jokes played at his own expense and on more than a few occasions his subordinates gave him the funniest looks.

Hux had a similar problem. That speech he gave in The Force Awakens was remarkable, painting him as an extremist fanatic that could play the charismatic leader as necessary, then in the next movie it's all out the window as he falls prey to a protracted prank phone call.

Could Ben Solo and Hux have become incredible villains? Sure, but the movies they were in - especially The Last Jedi - wanted to paint them as pathetic manbabies we should laugh at and when you're laughing at the bad guy they're no longer very good bad guys.

Cazero

2024-07-22, 01:23 PM

there's no way a character whose whole concept was literally "pathetic Vader wannabe" from the beginning and never outgrew that could take that role.
Kylo Ren outgrew that. At Snoke's command. By killing him. Delicious irony and absolute Sith power move. What's not to like?

Mordar

2024-07-22, 01:26 PM

Vader was sent flying like Team Rocket by someone who wasn't even Force sensitive at the end of episode 4.
Completely humiliated. Lost all credibility as a threat. Or did he?
You just hate Kylo Ren.

Indeed. Kylo Ren was a sorry excuse for a villain, one of the biggest things wrong with the sequel trilogy, and there's no lack of other things wrong with it to compete for that title.

As a reminder, I am on record liking Rey *better* than Luke (New Hope vs Force Awakens).

Now Kylo Ren, on the other hand...he was a spoiled, Vader-wannabe, edgelord baby.

And then I realized...that was *exactly* what he was supposed to be. A high-powered kid rebelling against his straight-laced parents and uncle, chasing the ghost of his grandfather and carrying illusions of what Vader meant. And that was a starting point for the arc that while maybe I wouldn't have chosen, I could see great potential in a redemption arc culminating in Rey and Ren defeating Snoke and the Order, then creating some kind of new Force "school" ala Miyagi-do-Eagle-Claw, but a bijillion times better. But oh-so-much not as romantic partners.

- M

VoxRationis

2024-07-22, 01:34 PM

Now Kylo Ren, on the other hand...he was a spoiled, Vader-wannabe, edgelord baby.

And then I realized...that was *exactly* what he was supposed to be.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-07-22, 01:34 PM

Vader spinning off into space was because he got clipped by the Falcon, took out his own wingman, and spun out of the trench. He even stammers a hilarious "WAT!?" when it happens. Had nothing to do with the Death Star blowing up. On top of that, he gets clowned on the whole movie. Leia talks back to him. His officers make jokes at his expense. Obi-wan peaces out in front of him and he's left poking at his discarded clothes. Vader is really not an intimidating villain in A New Hope (at least, as a kid, I thought he was more cool than scary). He's an awesome design and is otherwise portrayed as kind of a dumb mook. He's not even the main antagonist - that's Tarkin. It's not until Empire Strikes Back, especially Cloud City, that he becomes the villainous force he's known as.

You could 100% have made Kylo Ren work as a main villain. He already has the gravitas. The opening scene of The Force Awakens shows him in a better light than anything Vader gets before Empire. Plus he has killing Han on his resume. Drop the childish tantrums and make him a stone cold sociopath bent on a revenge campaign across the galaxy, maybe give a Jabba's palace sort of scene where he kills off a character or two to show how much of a threat he's become. It'd work. Sure, it would've been better if it happened sooner, but he was still perfectly usable from the ending of TLJ.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-07-22, 01:43 PM

Oh god, are there actually people who didn't understand that TFA Kylo Ren is supposed to be a lost kid pretending to be Vader? The scary part, that they didn't lean into enough, is that a child throwing a temper tantrum with a loaded weapon is still more than capable of killing you with that weapon.

BloodSquirrel

2024-07-22, 01:44 PM

All right, I'll bite. (You did ask for a rough outline, so I'm including some multiple-choice elements here.)

"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."

That's not a plot outline, that's a description for the status quo for the beginning of a new trilogy, a vague thematic description of how it ends, and few different options for the general direction you could take Rey/Ben. It also kind of ignores the ending of TLJ right out of the gate, given that TLJ strongly establishes that the FO has won and is in charge now (I'd walk that part back too, if I was writing a follow-up, but it would be a definite walk-back and not following what TLJ implies).

It's kind of demonstrating my point: Your first impulse is to start laying the groundwork for a story that isn't there right now. You don't even get to the "plot" part.

I'm going to go ahead and say that if you have to try this hard to denigrate Vader's status as an iconic villain in order to explain why Kylo Ren is totes a great villain for real, then Kylo Ren is not actually a very good villain.

VoxRationis

2024-07-22, 01:59 PM

I mean, I'm sure there's somebody somewhere on the Internet that didn't get the memo.

My point, though, not explicitly stated, was that Kylo Ren's issues weren't the results of a few incoherent scenes undercutting an otherwise worthy villain, but rather were baked into the character from the ground up. I don't think he ever really had the gravitas you were talking about except in that very first scene, but that was in a tactical context; in that same scene, Random Flamethrower Trooper also had an intimidating mien. Even killing Snoke didn't really change that, nor would we expect it to. As you said, dangerous on a personal/tactical level does not equal a menacing villain on a broader level.

Zevox

2024-07-22, 02:02 PM

Kylo Ren outgrew that. At Snoke's command. By killing him. Delicious irony and absolute Sith power move. What's not to like?
Everything before and after that, as well as the event you're referencing itself.

Kylo was a petulant child who took an opportunity that presented itself when the writers handed Snoke the idiot ball, because of resentment from Snoke's earlier criticism and disciplining of him. His every action thereafter showed he was no different for having done so, still just a pathetic, unstable man-child, who could no more lead an evil empire than he could hold back his own temper-tantrums. He did not grow and change from TLJ, he remained what he always was.

Agreed. Except for eight-year-olds looking at toy displays in Target, the audience is, I think, supposed to understand Kylo Ren as a pathetic figure, pitiable and broken even though he is dangerous. The idea that he is attempting to mimic Vader but doesn't really have the temperament to do so is pretty explicitly called out in the text; it's not an unintended flaw in the writing.
Being an intended flaw in the writing (which to be clear, yes, it was always obvious it was intentional) does not make it better; arguably, it makes it worse. At least an unintended flaw is accidental, rather than a self-inflicted wound.

Errorname

2024-07-22, 02:06 PM

Yeah, I certainly put it lower as well. At least sixth, to be precise - below the original trilogy, Rogue One, and Solo. And I'd probably rather re-watch Revenge of the Sith than The Force Awakens, even though that's a rather flawed film too.

I can imagine a good version of Revenge of the Sith with relatively few changes. To make Force Awakens good you need to throw out basically the entire script and start from a fresh premise.

It provides him with a mechanical power-up and not much else.

I am generally in favour of that. Frankly the correct replacement for Tor Valum was like, a Sith Holocron or something.

Putting aside how I disagree with this on its face, it doesn't change the fact that cutting those threads in TLJ without anything to replace them left RoS with nothing to work with.

Snoke isn't a thread. He's a copy of Palpatine that jammed in the printer, him as a wannabe poser is the most value you're gonna get out of the character. Likewise Rey's parentage is an empty mystery, there's no alternate solve that makes it compelling.

I think that gives TFA more credit than it deserves. I do not think JJ's vision was for the destruction of not-Coruscant to be the thing that wakes the New Republic and gets Leia the backing of an actual state, it was him saying "we blew up the politics planet, it's just gonna be rebels vs empire again, no trade disputes here!".

TLJ is the moment it becomes clear how stupid that was, and Johnson absolutely had the chance to say "no, actually that's really stupid and we aren't doing it" and bring in the New Republic navy or something, but I put the blame squarely on TFA for that choice.

You just hate Kylo Ren.

Not unjustifiably, mind! He does suck.

But given the setup they had in Episode VII, he was the best they were gonna get for a Big Bad.

I mean, they could have had Rey and Maz doing a whole "Waiting for Godot" bit where Luke never shows up and that would have been a logical progression from Force Awakens as well.

A sudden genre shift into absurdism isn't really the same thing as the logical output to the input. The great legend disappearing into exile after a great tragedy that took place under his watch leads pretty naturally into him being old and grouchy and needing to learn to care again, that's just how this sort of story generally goes.

Unfortunately it runs into the problem where making your new replacement characters being lesser imitations of what came before part of the text doesn't fix that your new cast is still lesser imitations of the previous cast.

It's a really common legacy sequel problem. Being meta about the problems with your writing doesn't make them go away, it just means that you knew better and did it anyways.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-07-22, 02:09 PM

If that's what you think I was doing, I think you need to read better.

BloodSquirrel

2024-07-22, 02:20 PM

Being an intended flaw in the writing (which to be clear, yes, it was always obvious it was intentional) does not make it better; arguably, it makes it worse. At least an unintended flaw is accidental, rather than a self-inflicted wound.

It's not a flaw with the character concept put forward in TFA; Kylo Ren works perfectly well as a tool in Snoke's arsenal and the nexus of conflict that affects Luke, Han, and Leia. He's probably the best-written part of TFA, and it wouldn't have been that hard to show him stepping up, committing to the Dark Side, and becoming a villain for real. Driver definitely has the presence to pull it off.

Darth Credence

2024-07-22, 02:21 PM

Vader captured a rebel ship, choked the commander to death with his bare hands, sent troops to the surface where they butchered Jawas and the Lars family (and actually found the droids, but couldn't get them before they blasted out of the port), tortured the damsel in distress, killed a large number of the attacking ships, and almost certainly would have succeeded in killing the hero had it not been for the Force working against him. (AoO - he did not get clipped by the Falcon. The Falcon showed up after every other combat-worthy ship besides Luke's had been taken off the board. Han shot one of Vader's wingmen, prompting Vader to say "What?", because it seemed that every other ship was taken out. The other wingman panicked and swerved directly into Vader's ship, then into a wall. Vader spun out but was able to regain control of the ship quickly. Just not quicker than Luke could blow up the Death Star, leaving Vader alone. Vader did the right thing and went to rejoin the Empire.)

Kylo Ren was obsessed with Vader, and wanted to be him. In doing so, he latched onto Snoke before we ever meet him, and it is implied that Snoke has specifically kept him weak. But in his first movie, he finds the village where the information he is looking for is, kills most of them, captures the Resistance agent who briefly had the data, and took him back to his ship. Politics intrude, and that person gets away with a defecting stormtrooper, which sets off rage issues for him. If Ren was in charge like Vader was (was he?), he then sent troops who found the droid, and launched an air strike that came close but failed to end the rebels. He put out a galaxy-wide call looking for them, which paid off, and also brought the knowledge that his father was involved. He went there, captured the person with knowledge he needed, and returned. He had about as much luck getting the info out of Rey as Vader did from Leia. Rey escaped right before being rescued by Han, Chewie, and Luke Finn, and they put in a plan to get out of there. Ren set people after them and went looking himself to find his father. (Probably his biggest mistake - had he learned from Vader, he'd have shot down the ships trying to blow up the base.) He gets shot, and between his wounds and his deliberate lack of training, he is unable to kill Rey.

I do not see a major difference in effectiveness or intimidation factor between the two in the first movie. The second movie, however, was a pretty much wall to wall win for Vader, from the battle of Hoth to capturing Han and Leia and toying with Luke in a long lightsaber duel. Ren, meanwhile, talks shirtlessly with Rey. When he does something, it's effective, until the end - he is shown to be a skilled pilot (which is why he should have fought in ships the day before when he could have saved the superweapon) and lightsaber duelist, and knows enough of the Force to kill Snoke. But in the end, he's evenly matched with someone who has had three lessons in the Force from someone who professes a desire for the Jedi to end. Maybe he's still feeling the wound, since it happened the day before, but I would have thought they would have thrown him in a bacta tank. But far, far worse, he lost a duel to a force projection, and let the remnant of the Resistance escape because he couldn't even use the Force to figure out that wasn't really Luke. The best thing TRoS did, IMO, was have Hux see Ren as a joke because of that and want him ended.

In the first movie, it seems clear to me that Ren is a Vader wannabe, but that does not make him less dangerous or intimidating. Shouting "More!" to get his people to keep on shooting at a ghost was what made him a joke, IMO. One can obviously write a biased account of the movies to make either seem less than they were.

While we're on the topic of TLJ, I maintain that its worst sin was picking up immediately after the end of TFA. By doing that, there was no time for Ren to complete his training with Snoke that was mentioned at the end of TFA; it means that none of the characters can have any growth, and you're stuck with Finn trying to run away again; and it makes the opening crawl silly because now it says that the First Order went from a joke to reigning over the galaxy in a day in which they had not yet even engaged with the remnants of the Resistance. Set it six months later, pick up with Rey working with Luke but clashing with him over the direction of the Jedi, or even that she has left Luke when he couldn't help her. Show Ren being instructed by Snoke, perhaps even some foreshadowing of how he could kill Snoke later, then have them interrupt with the First Order having found the Resistance and Ren and Snoke joining the pursuit. The main beats of the movie could be the same, but we'd at least have justification for the FO becoming the supreme power, and for people not coming to the Resistance's aid - the day after Hosnian Prime exploded, a lot of people would not even know about it, and a lot of others would see now as the time to jump in before the FO can take hold. Skip 6 months, and they could have fully taken hold of the galaxy.

VoxRationis

2024-07-22, 02:23 PM

I don't think Kylo's being petulant is a flaw. I think it's actually one of the things the ST does better. It's consistent and believable and clearly separates a character from their OT counterpart; I think VII and IX in particular could have done more to try and distinguish themselves more from the original films.

It was also kind of necessary from a meta-textual perspective. The Dark Side heavy of the ST was always going to be compared to Vader, and it would have been extremely hard to avoid the character being criticized for being either a pale imitation of Vader in spite of the storyteller's efforts otherwise or for being Vader, but bigger, the way everything else in the ST is a bigger, more powerful version of something from the OT. Instead, they made a character who was a pale imitation of Vader in spite of the character's efforts otherwise, and made that failure and vulnerability a driving force in why the character acted the way he did.

Avoiding the Vader-wannabe characterization would have either required pulling off a character along the lines of Vader in a way that was comparable to one of the most iconic villains in film, but didn't feel like a cheap upstaging of that villain, or not having a boots-on-the-ground villain at all. I don't think basically any Hollywood writing team (much less the one for TFA) could be confident in their ability to pull off the former, and the latter option would have required a very different sort of Star Wars movie.

Zevox

2024-07-22, 02:24 PM

I can imagine a good version of Revenge of the Sith with relatively few changes. To make Force Awakens good you need to throw out basically the entire script and start from a fresh premise.
True. What makes The Force Awakens okay is in the execution - for all the weakness of the concept, it's done fine for what it had to work with. Revenge of the Sith is kind of the reverse, albeit it does suffer the least from the poor execution out of the prequel trilogy (much like TFA suffers the least from its poor concept out of the sequels). To me that averages out to them being roughly on par. Your mileage may vary.

If that's what you think I was doing, I think you need to read better.

The question was "What villain did TLJ leave us with?" It left us with Kylo. People pointed out that Kylo was humiliated so it wouldn't work, therefore I (and Cazero) pointed out that Vader was arguably just as toothless in A New Hope, yet went on to become a great villain despite being humiliated several times. I'm not claiming that Kylo was a more intimidating villain than Vader, just that he had the potential to be written into a better one.
If you can't tell the difference between Vader's ship being damaged in a surprise attack such that he lost control of it and the instances of Kylo Ren failing through the sequels, I don't know what to tell you. There's nothing comparable about how they reflect on the characters.

pendell

2024-07-22, 02:26 PM

You found that comical? I didn't.

Darth Vader had been a menace throughout the movie. He forced Obi-Wan to become One With The Force. He deduced the attack plan faster than whoever it was told Tarkin "we've analyzed their attack plan sir, there is a danger". He led his fighter group personally , thwarted the Y-wing group, and shot down Red Leader. Which shows, by the way, just how good Red Leader was that he evaded Vader long enough to take his target. That makes him a better pilot than anyone else in the movie, especially since he's an ordinary pilot, not a Jedi.

Red Leader did all non-Force guided humans could do, and it wasn't enough. But I digress.

Vader shot him down and was within a trigger squeeze of zapping Luke short of his target when Han chased him off because Tarkin was too lazy or arrogant to provide Vader any top cover, such that it's pretty much Vader all by himself with his two wingman playing hero. Vader was the best Imperial pilot in the battle, but he's still only got the one TIE fighter.

In the next movie, he triumphs pretty much throughout the entire movie. He correctly identifies the Rebel base over the objections of his subordinate. He orders the successful attack on Hoth, then singlemindedly pursues the Falcon, eventually catches them, then tortures the crew to lure Luke out of hiding. This strategy succeeds ; He fails by a whisker to trap Luke in carbonite, then easily bests him in a lightsaber duel. The only thing that really went wrong for him is that , when he held his hand out to Luke, Luke chose death instead. There really wasn't any control he had over that.

Vader is a serious threat throughout the movies and I find nothing comical about him being rammed by his wingman and sent into an uncontrollable spin in Episode 4. He didn't cause the accident -- his panicky wingman, screaming "Look out!" did. Left to himself, I think Vader would have Stayed On Target, vaped Luke, and changed the course of history.

Putting him into an uncontrollable spin -- something which is absolutely a thing in aircraft -- allowed the heroes to neutralize Vader for long enough to take the shot. Anything else would have required killing him or something which would make him look stupid.

No, Vader wasn't humiliated in Episode 4 or 5. He's an ominous threat throughout the movies right up to the point Luke at least vanquishes him in the throne room. In my view.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-22, 02:27 PM

Snoke was a nobody destined by the story for nothing.

From the moment he appeared at the end of TFA as a gigantic hologram you should have immediately thought "there is a Supreme Leader who is compensating for something".

There's a reason I sarcastically call him Sith Martin Bormann. He's a nobody from the old regime.

BloodSquirrel

2024-07-22, 02:36 PM

I'm going to go ahead and do what I did last time we had a general thread and link to the original forum thread for The Force Awakens:

https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?472370-Star-Wars-7-The-Force-awakens&highlight=The+Force+Awakens

Reading that thread really, really drives home how much of current opinion about TFA is a product of people looking back on the trilogy as a whole. Opinion was far more positive at the time, and there certainly wasn't anybody who thought that the next movie was going to look like TLJ.

Zevox

2024-07-22, 02:37 PM

But, again, instead of taking his character in that direction, TLJ misreads TFA, doubles down on the manchild part, kills Snoke, has him lose to Rey for a second time, now without the excuse of being injured going into the fight, and ends the movie with him screaming at a ghost.
I'll agree at least that it was still possible to make him into a more serious villain after TFA, had they decided to give him an arc that involved him changing into one in the second film. He could also have remained just a tool for Snoke, if they'd instead committed to Snoke being the main villain. In neither of those instances would I ever have liked his character concept, but they would have been better than what was done with him, at least.

After TLJ as it was though? No, he can't be the main villain, any more than he could've done that in the second movie after TFA.

I don't think Kylo's being petulant is a flaw. I think it's actually one of the things the ST does better.
I think it's one of the worst decisions they made with the sequels. A villain like that is just a complete waste of time, in my view - workable only as a minor joke character, not someone central to the narrative. Yes, they needed to distinguish the new villains from Vader and Palpatine, but there were plenty of other ways to do that. It's not like villain concepts that aren't stoic monsters (Vader) or overconfident mustache-twirlingly evil (Palpatine) are in short supply.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-07-22, 03:00 PM

You found that comical? I didn't.

You don't find this (https://youtu.be/6H0vFP_jXN4?feature=shared&t=364) comical at all? Because it's clearly meant to be. James Earl Jones' delivery of "WHAT?" in a higher pitched tone and the co*ckpit view of him spinning wildly into space don't indicate a serious scene to me. Lucas loved hammy comedy and A New Hope has the most of it. This is the same movie where Han Solo enacts a Benny Hill skit where he chases one stormtrooper down a hall only to immediately come running back chased by half a dozen of them.

Vader gets some licks in over the course of the movie, but he's not treated with the same reverence he is in every other piece of Star Wars media and gets trashed on a lot throughout. Which is fairly similar to Kylo by the end of TLJ. Yeah, he was the butt of some scenes, but he also burns down a village, kills Han and Snoke, and has his crew terrified of him. He ended up as a wet fart because they flip-flopped his characterization and rushed a redemption story that wasn't earned, but I still believe he could've made a good main villain for the third movie if they committed to it.

Errorname

2024-07-22, 03:03 PM

Snoke was a nobody destined by the story for nothing.

Yeah, literally my only beef with how TLJ dispatches him is they shouldn't have shown him with actual impressive force powers, and he should have given a sentence or two of exposition to Rey about being the last of Palpatine's old court or something.

Genuinely one of my biggest frustrations with TLJ is how stuff like Snoke and the Hyperspace Ram would have taken extremely minimal patch jobs to smooth over and they just don't bother. Bigger problems require more complex solutions, but literally these are things you could have fixed in post with ADR, no excuse.

A lot of Force Awakens is built on the promise of it getting really cool sequels, so it's not surprising that reception was warmer back before people realized it was not going to get really cool sequels, and I think you can blame stuff like Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker for failing to deliver on that promise, but I think the actual truth is that those promises were hollow.

There are fundamental choices made in Force Awakens in terms of who the characters are, where they're starting and the state of the setting that are just broken in ways that can't be fixed.

BloodSquirrel

2024-07-22, 03:23 PM

There are fundamental choices made in Force Awakens in terms of who the characters are, where they're starting and the state of the setting that are just broken in ways that can't be fixed.

This demonstrates, however, that people looked at TFA and thought "Hey, the sequels tot his movie could be pretty cool, and here are a lot of various ideas about what they could do with the set-up". That the direction that TLJ took them in is being treated as so obvious that there were no alternatives is objectively untrue, because nobody thought those directions were obvious at the time.

I'm still not seeing what fundamental problems there were with Finn, Rey, Poe, or Ben other than being sketched a little thinly (which sequels can easily fix) which is actually a problem with TFA and not the later movies. TFA's fundamental problems were more about badly it handled the period between the trilogies and the lack of creativity with Starkiller Base.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-22, 03:39 PM

What's the use of having a mind if you never change it?

It's worth pointing out that what's happening with TFA now is criticism of it on its own merits. The warm and rosy glow of being A New Star Wars Movie passed it by and still would have if it had been followed by anything or nothing.

TFA is a movie where you realise the next morning just how much work the makeup was doing, and maybe gnaw your arm off to escape.

Mordar

2024-07-22, 03:51 PM

While the actual style in which I provided the response was reduction to the absurd to help with the shorthand, a exposition heavy film (could even avoid this by using a lot of flashback/cuts) where the mystery box engages with the only person we know to have connection to the Jedi part of Rey isn't a sudden genre shift...it is the Obi-won Ep IV and Yoda Ep V training sequences that provide the audient with understanding. The style of delivery could still be done in a Star Wars vein - third person view of action sequences, things no one could have witnessed, etc - but been a radically different movie than the Slow Speed Chase with Optional Space Gas, and (speaking of absurd) Half-Baked Side Plot to Nowhere we got.

I think it's one of the worst decisions they made with the sequels. A villain like that is just a complete waste of time, in my view - workable only as a minor joke character, not someone central to the narrative. Yes, they needed to distinguish the new villains from Vader and Palpatine, but there were plenty of other ways to do that. It's not like villain concepts that aren't stoic monsters (Vader) or overconfident mustache-twirlingly evil (Palpatine) are in short supply.

- M

pendell

2024-07-22, 03:56 PM

I think a lot of the hate for Force Awakens (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6TSAX5F2lA&pp=ygUfdGhlIGZvcmNlIGF3YWtlbnMgOSB5ZWFycyBsYXRlcg% 3D%3D) is based on viewing it retrospectively through the lens of the entire trilogy in context. At the time, it was a serviceable movie. Some bad decisions, but it was still a reasonable foundation for someone to build on. If Ep. 8 and 9 were better, I think it would be viewed far more positively today.

But ... The Last Jedi ... well, imagine Star Wars is a swimming pool and The Last Jedi is a big bottle of purple dye someone threw into it. It spreads throughout the pool in all directions so that everything else is tinged a little bit purple, even if it wasn't when it got in.

TLJ badly broke the Trilogy and JJ Abrams' rescue mission in Ep. 9 somehow made things even worse.

TFA wasn't a terrible movie, I contend. The memories today are less because TFA itself was bad as because the entire trilogy was bad and it drags down TFA retroactively with it.

HOWEVER, I also think that we shouldn't judge TFA purely on the box office as to whether it was a good movie or not. It was the first new star wars movie in three decades. LucasArts had cultivate fan good will for all that time with outstanding novels (Zahn, others), Comic Books (Dark Horse), Video Games (Xwing, KOTOR, many others) and TV shows (clone wars).

Given that record, they could have taken a film of three dogs running loose in a field, rebranded them Wookies, and they'd still have made a bazillion dollars.

From the first movie.

Since then, Disney has been making steady withdrawals from the bank of fan good will and making precious few deposits (Mandalorian, Andor, Jedi Survivor?). To the point that making a new show isn't a guaranteed hit any more; the terrible choices have more or less zeroed out their goodwill account.

And yes, some of those decisions are down to the political and cultural messaging the showrunners tried to add in. Look -- I get it. It's 2024. There's a new generation of moviegoers out there who have different ideas and assumptions than existed back in the 70s. I get that we want to make this show for women, black people, gay people and everyone else. We didn't want a show about White Savior and his other, lesser sidekicks who primarily exist to showcase how awesome he is. I get there's a huge market for movies in China and India that utterly dwarfs the western market, and we wnt shows that will play well there. I get all that and accept that.

Thing is ... it takes skill to pull something like that off and they just didn't do it. The ideal is to reach out to a new audience while leaving enough member berrys in to keep the olds happy and paying for tickets. As it is, they seem to have failed to interest new demographics while antagonizing the once-children now-adult white males who have shelled out billions of dollars for star wars and its products for five decades.

I think others in this thread had the right idea -- the way to handle it was to give the legacy OT characters their medals, then put them on a bus or time skip far enough in the future that they are all dead, so the actors don't need to be onscreen except for flashbacks. That would allow the older characters to be seen and recognized without getting in the way of the newer, younger heroes. As it was, it seemed like the major way the showrunners tried to build up the new characters was by humiliating, de-powering, idiot balling, or just plain villainizing the old ones. As one example, the original Luke Skywalker from the OT would never try to murder one of his own students in their sleep no matter how terrifying a force vision he received.

I think that was their single biggest mistake; it antagonized the old fan base while the new generation just flat wasn't interesting enough for Gen Z to get into. As I said, they didn't really bring anything to the table you couldn't already get from a superhero movie, so it didn't create the kind of lasting, passionate fan love that characterized the OT.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Mechalich

2024-07-22, 04:23 PM

One thing about TFA is that, if you somehow took all the Star Wars out of it, Rebel Moon style, it would still be a serviceable space opera film. In fact, it's a significantly better film than most of the generic space opera produced at roughly the same time. Consider such films as Ender's Game, John Carter, Jupiter Ascending, and Valerian, all also produced during the 2010s and so, so much worse than TFA as films. For people who don't care about Star Wars much or at all, and who don't invest a lot of intellectual energy into it beyond 'cool space opera,' TFA is a perfectly acceptable way to spend two hours.

The film has real problems: Finn's character is a mess, Poe should have died, Starkiller Base is just kind of dumb, the second half is paced too quickly and really needs some extra exposition to add dramatic heft, but it works.

TLJ badly broke the Trilogy and JJ Abrams' rescue mission in Ep. 9 somehow made things even worse.

TFA wasn't a terrible movie, I contend. The memories today are less because TFA itself was bad as because the entire trilogy was bad and it drags down TFA retroactively with it.

There's an interesting comparison with the Abrams Star Trek films. Star Trek 2009 is looked back on fondly, even though it has almost all the same problems TFA does with regard to setting up sequels and managing the franchise. However, while Star Trek Into Darkness is not a good film, it's just dumb bad, and the resulting third film Star Trek Beyond is simply bland and forgettable. And if someone wanted to make a fourth film starring Jaylah at the Academy or something the internet would be like 'sure, whatever' rather than exploding into fiery rage like it has over the proposed Rey movie.

TFA sets up some things for sequels that are certainly troubling. For example, the whole Rey's parents thing, if played completely straight - making her Obi-Wan's descendant - or Snoke the same way - making him Darth Plagueis - are extremely cliche and dumb. However, it's possible to make a good, fun movie that has a lot of dumb cliches. Additionally, the damage done to a franchise that simply dumb and bad is minimal compared to a bad production that has things to say and manages to say all sorts of terrible things. Legends has a lot of really dumb novels, like The Crystal Star, that ultimately mean nothing to the franchise because it simply does not matter that they exist, while at the same time less dumb novels like the Jedi Academy Trilogy are far more damaging because they produced horrible precedents, like forgiving Kyp Durron for dark side genocide. TLJ is the latter sort of product. It's a movie that's trying to be all smart and subversive and fails, and in its failure does exponentially more damaging to the franchise than a straightforward follow-up that's just kind of crummy and cliche could have accomplished.

Manga Shoggoth

2024-07-22, 04:38 PM

Speaking as someone who saw the original film in the cinema when it first came out: No part of that clip is comical. Vader was an imposing villain throughout the film, and the whole scene is setting up "The antagonist escapes death to fight another day".

Errorname

2024-07-22, 04:39 PM

Here's the thing, it's easy to trust that there is a plan and ignore warning signs when the plan hasn't actually been implemented and all you have is the promise "we're going to take this somewhere cool". Hardly a problem unique to the sequel trilogy.

but been a radically different movie than the Slow Speed Chase with Optional Space Gas, and (speaking of absurd) Half-Baked Side Plot to Nowhere we got.

I would agree that both the Poe and Finn plots in TLJ were quite bad, but the stuff with Snoke, Rey's parents and Luke are mostly in the Rey/Kylo plotline which I think was mostly solid and easily the best material in the Sequel trilogy.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-22, 05:07 PM

It ain't saying a lot to say it's the best material in the sequel trilogy and it's only true in a vacuum as well, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Sacrificing so much to get a "mostly solid" plot line between Rey and Ben that ultimately goes nowhere is absolutely just a waste of everyone's time.

Mechalich

2024-07-22, 05:13 PM

Yeah. If, if, Rey had taken Kylo's hand on the Supremacy in TLJ, then that would have been something. There are places to go with that approach. I don't exactly like them, but it's absolutely a path that exists. Instead, TLJ refuses to have the courage of its own convictions and the whole subplot just collapses in on itself, something the movie does repeatedly.

Errorname

2024-07-22, 05:19 PM

I don't know if they were sacrificing much to get it, again I have a low opinion of the Rey parentage/Luke exile/Snoke setups they were working with.

I think the things that really don't work about TLJ are in the other plotlines and largely separate from the Rey and Kylo stuff. A TLJ that had Poe or Finn plotlines that were good would not require significant alteration to the Rey plotline.

Zevox

2024-07-22, 05:32 PM

You don't find this (https://youtu.be/6H0vFP_jXN4?feature=shared&t=364) comical at all?
I know I'm not the one who was asked, but I can honestly say that even when I first saw it as a kid I don't recall finding anything funny about that scene, no.

Like I said, I think it starting point, and better for redemption arc, but I can see the petulant spoiled brat as a solid origin for a Cinematic Villain (and sadly, a real life villain). Though clearly a radically different form, consider the villain of It's a Good Life. Plus it could open some interesting lines about the unpredictability of the enemy.
I'm afraid the comparison would require me to be familiar with It's a Good Life, which I'm not, so I can't speak to that. I can only reiterate that my personal opinion is that this was a terrible way to do a villain. Even as a starting point for a redemption arc, they'd need to give me more reason to want to see Kylo redeemed than they did. As-is the only reason I can think of is simply that he was Han and Leia's son, and given they had him kill Han, they seriously damaged that as a reason for me to want that right from the first movie. That felt like a "no going back" moment where he closed any possibility of redemption and was committed to being a villain.

After TLJ, barring Rise of Skywalker getting very positive word of mouth (which was the only way I was going to go see it), the only thing I cared about from it was that I legitimately wanted them to kill Kylo Ren, so there'd be no risk of him ever being the main villain of a future movie. I was at least pleased they did that, if about little else that I heard about the movie.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-07-22, 05:43 PM

I'm not really sure what seeing it in the theater has to do with anything, but I'll respect your opinion on the matter. I still think Star Wars has a lot of intentionally goofy scenes in it and that's one of them. Vader's treated significantly more seriously in the followups and the closest scene to him getting shot out of the trench while shouting "Nani?!" like an anime stereotype is when Boba Fett gets unceremoniously shot into the Sarlacc, which is also played for laughs. Maybe you don't see the comedy in it, but comedy's highly subjective anyway.

Mordar

2024-07-22, 05:44 PM

I'm afraid the comparison would require me to be familiar with It's a Good Life, which I'm not, so I can't speak to that. I can only reiterate that my personal opinion is that this was a terrible way to do a villain.

Rod Serling's scary villain ever...a spoiled 8 year old boy with limitless power. it is an episode of the Twilight Zone that I think it sequeled in one of the movies, but I strongly recommend anyone who has ever liked any Twilight Zone to watch this episode if they have not.

Even as a starting point for a redemption arc, they'd need to give me more reason to want to see Kylo redeemed than they did. As-is the only reason I can think of is simply that he was Han and Leia's son, and given they had him kill Han, they seriously damaged that as a reason for me to want that right from the first movie. That felt like a "no going back" moment where he closed any possibility of redemption and was committed to being a villain.

Thing one: We don't have to root for a redemption arc for it to be meaningful or well-executed. For instance, it can be a "balance of the Force thing". And remember, it doesn't have to make him a hero. Case in point: Vader was *never* a hero, and a moment to end the Emperor because he was going to kill Vader's kid isn't the Face turn that it might appear to be...and everyone I know thought Vader was a great villain (that kind of started as a spoiled teen, now that I think about it...).

Thing two: Absolutely. This had to have been established and maintained in a universe where The Last Jedi was never made. But yeah, a movie is always in danger when you start wanting characters dead because they are annoying...

ETAA:

It probably relates to when it was first seen...in this case, 1977. I'm in the "no part of that was funny at the time" crowd. I agree with the insertion of humor...almost always better than the MCU version (and I liked a lot of MCU) - for instance, Han and Chewie chasing the Stormtroopers on the Death Star, and the banter between Han and Leia during the rescue.

But there is a big distinction between Boba Fett with his 6:30 of screen time across 2 movies and four whole lines...and the dark ominous force of Dark Ominous Force.

- M

Zevox

2024-07-22, 06:01 PM

Thing one: We don't have to root for a redemption arc for it to be meaningful or well-executed. For instance, it can be a "balance of the Force thing". And remember, it doesn't have to make him a hero.
Perhaps. Though a "balance the Force thing" would ring utterly hollow to me, personally. I've never liked that prophecy schtick from the prequels either.

Case in point: Vader was *never* a hero, and a moment to end the Emperor because he was going to kill Vader's kid isn't the Face turn that it might appear to be...and everyone I know thought Vader was a great villain (that kind of started as a spoiled teen, now that I think about it...).
Fair, though I would argue Vader's redemption was never so much about him as it was about Luke. Coming into his own as a Jedi in a very idealistic fashion, choosing peace and (familial) love over violence and hate, and finding that does indeed pay off against all odds. And if we wanted to distinguish the new villains from the old, trying to pull another Vader-style redemption would seem to be the opposite of what we'd want, no?

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-07-22, 06:09 PM

But there is a big distinction between Boba Fett with his 6:30 of screen time across 2 movies and four whole lines...and the dark ominous force of Dark Ominous Force.

- M

Vader's only in A New Hope for 8 minutes. It's not that much of a distinction.

I get the idea that seeing it in theaters means one saw it without outside expectations, but I saw it in the 80s. My dad threw the movie on and told me he thought I'd like it. It's not like I'm a GenZ kid growing up in the social media era where it's impossible to escape Star Wars' impact. I didn't know anything about the film going in, either, and it came across as a pretty funny end to Vader. Here's this dude dressed in all black, graced by the deep voice of Jones, and he ends up spinning off like a cartoon character. Maybe it came across funnier because I saw it when I was younger. It's never been uproariously comical, but it does get a little chuckle out of me to this day.

Mordar

2024-07-22, 06:33 PM

Vader's only in A New Hope for 8 minutes. It's not that much of a distinction.

How many of the 8 minutes is Vader the focus or advancing thew story, and how many of the 6:30 is (a) Boba in the background doing not much of anything, or (b) sharing the space with Vader?

Come on, it is a known strangeness that Boba generated such a cult following despite having nothing going for him besides cool looking armor.

Nah, I was 7 when I saw it, so it isn't age. When in the 80s? Maybe that informs it, particularly if it were later 80s after the wave of Funny Action started (initiated by Arnold)? Also - did you find it funny like an intentional gag funny, or like pent-up-tension-for-heroes and Han saves the day with a big smile on his face funny?

- M

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-07-22, 06:44 PM

I'd definitely say it's more of a chuckle and back to the action funny, not a roll out of my seat cackling reaction. It's just a "hehe" moment that lingers a bit.

I saw it in the later 80s, though I can't remember if this was before or after my dad started showing me Arnold flicks. I know he let me watch Conan far earlier than a kid should, but that's not really Arnold's goofy era.

Palanan

2024-07-22, 07:56 PM

Originally Posted by Manga Shoggoth
Speaking as someone who saw the original film in the cinema when it first came out: No part of that clip is comical.

Likewise. Vader was pure villain, everyone understood he was a villain, and there was absolutely no thought of making him comical.

Originally Posted by ArmyOfOptimists
I'm not really sure what seeing it in the theater has to do with anything.

Because those of us who did so saw it without reference to anything that came after. No legends, no lore, no EU, no prequels, just that one movie.

And in that movie, Vader was unquestionably villainous and downright frightening. Any notions of his being comical are simply not in the movie, and probably owe more to the intervening 44 years and the various ancillary media that have grown up, i.e. Robot Chicken, etc. etc. None of that existed when the movie first opened.

Originally Posted by ArmyOfOptimists
Vader's only in A New Hope for 8 minutes. It's not that much of a distinction.

Its a world of difference, and I think everyone understands that it is.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-07-22, 09:06 PM

Because those of us who did so saw it without reference to anything that came after. No legends, no lore, no EU, no prequels, just that one movie.

There was none of that when I saw Star Wars either (I mean, there were probably some EU books but I certainly didn't know about them). Heck, I've been pretty open about my love for the Original Trilogy and feeling like most of the rest of Star Wars is a step down, sometimes several steps down.

Shopped it around to other people I know. They all agreed it was, at the very least, a goofy scene and pointed out several others in the same movie they found funny without asking (including Vader poking Obi-Wan's robes with his toe). I think sometimes you all take Star Wars more seriously than it is. That's a fair opinion, I can't tell you what to find funny, but the assumption that anyone else must be a kid who doesn't have a real perspective is uncalled for.

Palanan

2024-07-22, 09:17 PM

Originally Posted by ArmyOfOptimists
including Vader poking Obi-Wan's robes with his toe.

I cant fathom what could be amusing about this. Ben has just sacrificed himself so Luke and the Rebellion can live. Vaders reaction is one of disbelief, and nudging the robes with his boot is a simple human reaction, probably the only humanizing moment for Vader in the movie.

It's a scene of loss and sacrifice. There's nothing intentionally "funny" in it.

Originally Posted by ArmyOfOptimists
but the assumption that anyone else must be a kid who doesn't have a real perspective is uncalled for.

Not sure where youre getting this from. No one here has said this.

VoxRationis

2024-07-22, 09:30 PM

It's kind of demonstrating my point: Your first impulse is to start laying the groundwork for a story that isn't there right now. You don't even get to the "plot" part.

I mean, I did put the plot points in there, but they are sort of buried and set amongst a number of "maybe this, maybe that" options, so perhaps I'll state them more explicitly.

I'm also going with what we're shown, not what we're told, regarding the FO's strength at the end of TLJ. We're told that the First Order has a commanding position in the galaxy and that the fight now is to keep hope alive through its dominion, but we're shown that they got all their stuff wrecked and have the lion's share of their forces trapped on a remote planet no one cares about. I don't think it's that much of a retcon to say that the Pyrrhic victories of TLJ cripple them; it's certainly less so than saying, "Yeah, they bounce back because a bunch of Sith artisans hand-crafted a bunch of Star Destroyers, which is a thing you can apparently do, and loaded each one with a Death Star cannon, which is also a thing you can apparently do, and... I don't know how they crewed the damn things; I guess they put out a bunch of help-wanted ads."

As the dramatis personae part ways from Crait, the protagonists attempt to go to ground and organize more resistance in the Core worlds they expect will soon be overrun by a First Order blitzkrieg.

Kylo attempts to organize such a blitzkrieg, but he's got a Supremacy's worth of ground forces (minus the ones that got atomized by Holdo in the last movie) on a planet and nowhere near that quantity of hyperspace-capable transports close at hand. Knowing that the Supremacy won't be anywhere near operational again for years, if ever, he instead takes a shuttle to the nearest First Order base and leaves Hux to organize efforts to mobilize the army on Crait.

Time passes. The protagonists find that the destruction of the New Republic's central government has produced a power vacuum. While some people are trying to organize emergency elections, they don't have any actual authority to do so, and local powers are starting to exert autonomy. Two of the major Core powers, Corellia and, say, Naboo or Chandrila or something, get at loggerheads and start to use their objectively small but relatively powerful navies to intimidate the other. Team Good meets the president (or whatever) of Corellia, who is something of a war hawk, and fail to convince him to stand down.

Kylo managed to keep control of a First Order base, but he finds that Hux just ran off with a ship's worth of troops at the first opportunity. He tracks him down and kills him (it's kind of hard to imagine a story for episode IX that doesn't involve Hux getting team-killed), but finds troops and ships slipping through his fingers quickly; even when their commanders stay loyal to him, the support arm of the military is falling apart. Moreover, he's starting to fall apart; he is haunted by his father, by Luke, and by "Vader," and his problems are the sort that don't yield to brute force, making him more and more frustrated and unstable. His lack of real understanding of war or statesmanship only worsen his issues. He consolidates what he has into a single ship and does a tour of the Outer Rim, browbeating individual warlords and crime syndicates into submission. We get scenes of him failing to mind-trick Hutts and then just threatening them with a lightsaber. These personality-centered gangs are easier to keep in line so long as Kylo can keep the personalities afraid of him (and so long as he doesn't expect too much out of them).

Intercut with this, Rey studies the Force during this time, wrestling with her instincts to do something about the urgent crises but keenly aware of how close the Jedi tradition is to extinction. Her old habit of flirting with the Dark Side haunts her. Over the course of her studies, however, her meditative experiences show her the usefulness of letting go; when she tries to force things, the Force does not respond so well to her.

Corellia exerts its power more and more aggressively, matched by its rival. Our protagonists, despairing of convincing these parties to stand down by words alone, set about recruiting a peacekeeping coalition that will intercede against whatever side opens fire. In the process, however, they see the warband-building that Kylo Ren is doing, running across Kylo's royal procession, as it were. They collect evidence of this threat and have a harrowing adventure trying to escape from Kylo & minions. This provides much of the middle-act action.

In the Core, initial reports of Ren's growing horde are dismissed as irrelevant; even after all he has done, Kylo's force is both poorly led and a fraction of the tonnage that the Core worlds can bear. Focused on the broader navy, the leader of Corellia ignores both Kylo's flagship and his personal strength. War breaks out in a battle of frigates against frigates, with nary a fighter to be seen. The president of Corellia sees the fighting and privately wavers in his resolution, as the fighting is vicious. Noble and brave people on both sides die horribly; the brilliance and grandeur of each side's martial leitmotifs and fine livery (and remember, we've picked two sources of "good guy" ships for our conflict) give way to a melancholy score and the savagery of space battles. Nonetheless, his forces claw out an advantage.

Meanwhile, Rey and Ren have one final confrontation, on the bridge of Ren's flagship as it stages for its first big attack on the Core. (Rey's pretty well established as being good at sneaking through bad-guy lairs, but we can also play with the idea that "letting go" with the Force helps her by giving her a sort of aura of non-presence.) Finally confronted with his real enemy, Kylo fights savagely, overcoming Rey's own spirited combat style. Rey pivots, however, and starts fighting with serenity, giving ground and evading rather than attacking. She never scores another hit, but Kylo, distracted by the voice of "Vader" as it turns into that of Snoke, badly injures himself with his cross-guard blades in his desperate and increasingly unhinged attacks. The fight lost, he drops to his knees, expecting the coup de grace, but Rey turns to him and tells him that it's not too late to let go of his hatred. He retorts that he's long past the point of forgiveness, and then hears the voice of Anakin Skywalker for the first time, telling him that it's not about forgiveness, but about finding peace in the Force. (At this point, you could have Kylo let go of the Dark Side at the very end, as Anakin did, or you could have him fail to do that and die, with a snarl on his lips, as his own last victim. I think either one could be argued to work.) Rey sabotages Kylo's Star Destroyer and leaves.

On Corellia, the protagonists show the president their recording of Kylo Ren's warlike speeches to his forces. Kylo's rhetoric mirrors the president's own in several respects. Leia and company entreat the head of state one more time, and this time, it sticks. Disgusted with his actions, he gives the order to retreat and turns to call his counterpart and offer terms.

Now, this is a first-draft approach, one that picks a particular philosophical approach which may or may not strike your fancy. I'm not a great writer in any case. I think it demonstrates, though, that you can absolutely write a story that builds on TLJ rather than clumsily attempting to retcon everything.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-07-22, 09:58 PM

It's a scene of loss and sacrifice. There's nothing intentionally "funny" in it.

I get the feeling you're interpreting me saying "It's funny" to mean I find the whole scene immensely comical and I was cackling like mad at it. It's humorous levity. Darth Vader defeating his reviled former master and then bewilderingly poking his foot into the left over clothing is a small piece of absurdity in an otherwise serious scene. What's he looking for? A small piece left behind? A tiny, naked Obi-Wan running away because he shrunk himself? There are a ton of little jokes in the movie, from the used car salesman antics of the Jawas to 3PO thinking they all died in the trash compactor to Leia smack-talking the group during the rescue attempt. I don't find Vader an exception. He's got a couple moments that are chuckle-worthy.

Honestly, I find it a little weird that people steadfastly refuse to see the humor in this stuff, but to each their own. I've got my own weird perspectives on things.

Not sure where youre getting this from. No one here has said this.

People don't qualify their opinions just because they're keen to share extra information. Two people now have pulled the "I saw it in theaters" qualifier. You went further and added in that believed it was important because it meant a viewing with "No legends, no lore, no EU, no prequels, just that one movie." The implication in those statements is that you have a better perspective because it's unclouded by years of alternate media and pop culture osmosis. Which actually is a fair point, but you can get that experience without being in a theater in 1977, so I questioned why that's the metric used. Especially since I already stated I saw it in the 80s before social media, the prequels, and everything else. Yeah, I saw it like ten years after release, but it was still just Star Wars with no other meaning to me. The only conclusion I could come up with is somehow you believe that being an original theater-goer elevates your opinion above mine.

That you further started speaking on behalf of "everyone" solidified your tone as talking down. Maybe not your intent, but that's how it comes across.

This is silly discussion to go any further on. I find some humor in OG Vader. Obviously, you don't. I think it validates Kylo as a theoretical final villain. You don't. There's really not much more to talk about. We see Star Wars differently. At the end of the day, that's the whole reason these topics go 50 pages deep and then further on. Star Wars is a huge setting that's been so many different things, some part of it will appeal to almost anyone. Who then goes searching for more and finds the rest of the material unappealing because it's so tonally distant. Then they become yet another person lamenting that "Star Wars could be good, but they only make bad stuff now."

Palanan

2024-07-22, 10:17 PM

Originally Posted by ArmyOfOptimists
I get the feeling you're interpreting me.

Im not.

Originally Posted by ArmyOfOptimists
The only conclusion I could come up with is somehow you believe.

I dont.

Originally Posted by ArmyOfOptimists
to mean I find the whole scene immensely comical and I was cackling like mad at it.

somehow you believe that being an original theater-goer elevates your opinion above mine.

None of this ever entered my mind. These are your suppositions, and theyre not accurate.

Please dont make assumptions about what I interpret or believe.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-23, 04:50 AM

I find some humor in OG Vader. Obviously, you don't. I think it validates Kylo as a theoretical final villain. You don't. There's really not much more to talk about.

To be fair there's a difference between finding Vader choking out one subordinate only to turn to the guy right next to him and tell him he's promoted funny and finding Vader getting knocked away by the Millennium Falcon funny.

There are clearly moments where Vader does something funny but it is never at the expense of his own character. He is never the punchline of a joke. Another amusing moment, for example, is after several movies of killing his own subordinates for being insufficiently successful at their jobs, he turns around and says to one of them "Just be glad you're dealing with me because the Emperor isn't as lenient as I am".

Surely you can at least acknowledge that such humour is different to Kylo Ren smashing up a console with his lightsaber as two subordinates walk into the room, give each other funny looks and then immediately walk out again. Ben was the joke, he was the punchline. It's impossible to take him seriously when even the movies themselves do not.

I remember comments like "when Vader was angry it was scary, but when Ben got angry he was like a five year old having a tantrum", "Kylo Ren did more damage to his own ship than he did to the Resistance", "Ben makes his grandfather seem emotionally stable and mature".

Batcathat

2024-07-23, 05:47 AM

To be fair, it wouldn't be the first time a character evolves from goofy to legitimate threat (there's a trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NotSoHarmlessVillain) for it, naturally).

Personally, I think Kylo could probably work as a scary big bad, though scary in the same way that an unbalanced serial killer is scary, rather than the more dignified scariness of someone like Vader.

On a slightly unrelated note, I always thought it was kinda funny how the character who was explicitly trying to emulate someone from the previous movies was one of the only things in the Force Awakens that didn't feel like a rehash of the original movies (admittedly, that's mostly true of Finn as well, but while I thought a defecting Stormtrooper was a good idea, it was one that didn't really live up to its potential).

Murk

2024-07-23, 05:47 AM

I think a lot of the hate for Force Awakens is based on viewing it retrospectively through the lens of the entire trilogy in context. At the time, it was a serviceable movie. If Ep. 8 and 9 were better, I think it would be viewed far more positively today.

I'm sure that's true to some extent, but I think this is a much bigger part of it:

HOWEVER, I also think that we shouldn't judge TFA purely on the box office as to whether it was a good movie or not. It was the first new star wars movie in three decades.

At least more than fans sometimes think it is.

It is of course purely anecdotal, but I saw TFA in theater with my whole direct family:
- Me, a lifelong Star Wars fan
- My brother and father, lifelong Star Wars fans
- Two other brothers, lapsed Star Wars fans who dropped the franchise on adulthood
- My mom, who hadn't seen anything Star Wars since 1977
- Two girlfriends, who only suffered through the movies for our sake.

That's eight people, only three of whom were "fans".
And that's because TFA wasn't just another Star Wars movie. It was an event. It didn't only bring in Star Wars fans, but everyone adjacent to the fandom as well.

Yet out of the eight people above who saw The Force Awakens, only two saw any Star Wars movie or series since then: my brother and father.*

The other two brothers would have given TFA positive reviews! But it was not good enough to resurrect their childhood Star Wars fandom.
My mom also would have given TFA positive reviews! But she was never going to see the next one; maybe in fifty years.
The girlfriends didn't find TFA any worse than the previous movies, but they wouldn't go on their own account.
And I hated TFA and my fandom died with it.

I suspect that's actually pretty representative for the audience of TFA as a whole.
Of the fans, the majority really liked it, and a minority disliked it.
And of the enormous group of non-fans that saw it, most of them liked it -- but not enough to become fans.

TFA was a once-in-decades event, so it was inevitably succesful, and most people liked it. But it utterly failed in doing what it was supposed to do: revive the franchise into a year-on-year moneymaking blokbuster machine.

(*For what it's worth: my brother and father loyally kept watching all Star Wars movies in theatres and all series on Disney+... up until Kenobi finally did them in.)

Murk

2024-07-23, 05:48 AM

Huh, this posted double.

Mechalich

2024-07-23, 06:22 AM

I posted similar to this above, and I fully agree. TFA, on its own, is similar to a mid-tier Marvel film (Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, since it's also a space opera, comes to mind as a reasonable comp). It's an eminently watchable film, and people aren't adverse to seeing it, but it doesn't inspire anything beyond that.

I have to say that this was an entirely unreasonable goal. Disney thought they could use Star Wars to duplicate the MCU. They were not, it should be noted, the only ones who thought they could do this - DC, with a franchise much better aligned to the purpose, also tried and failed in this regard, and so did others in a lesser way (anyone remember the 'Dark Universe'?). Looking at it now, the MCU seems to have been something of a unique series of events, and it looks unlikely that it will be able to sustain itself in the post-Endgame era. Disney failed in the same way Peter Jackson's Hobbit films failed: greatness doesn't follow a formula and can't be duplicated. Star Wars, like LotR, still breeds fans today, but it does so by sitting people down in front of the Original Trilogy, not trying to recapture the magic using a new imitation.

Ultimately, Star Wars is like any other long-running franchise. To be successful, the individual entries in that franchise still have to be good, and to get the benefit of being in the franchise they also have to play to the strengths of that franchise, not fight against them.

A corollary to that is that when a product within the franchise fails it is better for the franchise as a whole if it fails simply because it's just bad rather than because it was set in opposition to the core traits of the franchise. For example, while the various productions created/helmed/written by Dave Filoni range from very good- Mando season one, portions of TCW and Rebels - to genuinely awful - the second halves of Ahsoka and Boba Fett especially - they all fit the franchise. People didn't write internet hate pieces or denigrate the fans because they didn't like Book of Boba Fett, the fandom just collectively agreed it sucked and moved on. By contrast, the worst entries of Disney Star Wars are productions like TLJ and The Acolyte that are both bad in and of themselves and also go out of their way to infect the rest of the franchise with their problems.

On the opposite end, something that is good and leverages the strengths of the franchise can achieve beautiful artistic symmetry. Andor is the obvious example here. Andor is telling a story about authoritarianism, the abuse of power, the sacrifices necessary for liberty, and all that good stuff, and in the Galactic Empire is has an absolutely perfect vehicle to carry that story, one that's far more powerful than anything Tony Gilroy could have made up himself while also not carrying any of the baggage of using a real-life historical regime in the role. You could make a generic version of Andor and while it would still be good, it would not be able to capture the tightness and vigor Andor does by virtue of being Star Wars.

Disney's goal, from the start, should simply have been to tell good Star Wars stories and trust that this would, as it had for forty years prior, bring in money accordingly. And, outside of the live action film and TV zone, and even occasionally within it, they have proven capable of doing this. Unfortunately, all their bad bets have been their biggest ones.

pendell

2024-07-23, 07:38 AM

Harrison Ford was a comical character. I found the hallway scene funny, as well as many of his quips. I didn't find Vader spinning off into space funny at all. When you're suddenly attacked from out of nowhere, "WHAT?" is an entirely serious, reasonable thing to say.

We have to pick on Vader just a little bit because the "greatest starfighter pilot in the galaxy" got target fixation and forgot to check six. So did both of his wingmen. Why else have them if not to watch his back and prevent something like the Falcon from blind-siding him?

No, I didn't see that as funny. I saw it as a serious scene played straight. Episode IV has its share of comical moments. This was not, in my view, one of them.

I didn't see any of Vader's moments as comical. Some of his lines, such as "I find your lack of faith disturbing" are a LITTLE comical, but its undercut by the fact he's choking someone.

Likewise, when he's poking at the empty robes of Obi-wan, I don't see that as funny as I see that as bewilderment. Him not understanding what has happened.

The entire scene is:
-- Obi-wan surrenders. Vader swings his sword. Obi-wan drops, Luke screams NO! Stormtroopers fire. Tense , dramatic music plays as Luke is momentarily berserk, forgetting everything, even his own safety, as he fires blindly at the stormtroopers to try to erase, to undo what has just happened.

Vader, meanwhile, bewildered, pokes at the empty robes trying to figure out just what happened. He's never seen this before. This isn't the first Jedi he's killed, after all.

Obi-wan's voice whispers in Luke's head and this snaps him out of his grief and despair long enough for him to shoot the door lock just as Vader snaps out of his reverie and begins striding towards the Falcon with a crowd of stormtroopers running up behind him. The Falcon makes his getaway while Luke stares at the gaming table in the lounge, muttering "I can't believe he's gone..."

That's a scene played for tragedy -- the death of the mentor -- and there's absolutely nothing funny about it. Not to me. The setup, the music, the action beats, none of them have room for a funny bit in there.

Y'know what? I've seen that movie in live theaters repeatedly with large , packed houses. NO ONE in the theater EVER laughed at that scene. Not once. No one EVER found Vader poking through the robes funny. I suppose it takes all kinds, and we're all fans together, but I would say your viewpoint is decidedly in the minority.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Trixie_One

2024-07-23, 07:39 AM

See I don't think it was TFA that failed in that. TFA did the job it was meant to do which was be a fun rehash of New Hope to persuade everyone that Disney was a safe pair of hands, and got plenty of people into the theatre to see it. That's a solid start to get people to keep coming back, and people did. Rogue One also did fine with decent audiences and critical reception. It was Last Jedi where the cracks started to show with the incredibly split audience reaction. Now Solo was what really caused the failure of the project, as even with what is generally reckoned to be a solidly entertaining film, that was no longer enough, and barely anyone went to see it. That I'd argue more than anything was what made Disney rethink that this year-on-year machine was just not going to be a thing that was going to work.

Errorname

2024-07-23, 07:56 AM

TFA did the job it was meant to do which was be a fun rehash of New Hope to persuade everyone that Disney was a safe pair of hands, and got plenty of people into the theatre to see it.

This is not a job worth doing.

Not from an artistic perspective at least, it's a sensible business decision but it's a massive handicap for every movie that comes after it.

BloodSquirrel

2024-07-23, 08:15 AM

This is not a job worth doing.

Not from an artistic perspective at least, it's a sensible business decision but it's a massive handicap for every movie that comes after it.

From an artistic perspective, managing your audience's expectations, building trust with them, and doing what you have to in order to get them involved with your story are very valid and important goals. A safe "win back the audience" movie is absolutely the right artistic choice before easing them into whatever other direction you want to take them in.

Art does not exist in a vacuum. It needs to take into account the culture around it, and how it will shape the expectations the audience brings to it. Making a movie that's part of an existing series that suffers from massive mood whiplash or is tonally dissonant from the previous entries is straight-up bad writing, and anyone who confuses it for artistic integrity is unqualified to be making films.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-23, 08:26 AM

Being a rehash of A New Hope was where the problems started, of course. That is not what the job of the movie should have been, the job of the movie should have been to tell an accessible new story in the universe of Star Wars.

Batcathat

2024-07-23, 08:30 AM

Yeah, it seems like there should be plenty of middle ground between "entirely different" and "(almost) entirely the same". Now, as previously noted the movie did very well, but I'm mostly on the side of any new Star Wars movie at that point that wasn't dramatically bad or divisive likely doing about as well.

Errorname

2024-07-23, 08:37 AM

A safe "win back the audience" movie is absolutely the right artistic choice before easing them into whatever other direction you want to take them in.

There is no such thing as a safe "win back the audience" movie. Art is always a gamble and the fact that the "safe" choices made in Force Awakens effectively locked them into directions that turned out to be wildly unpopular in the later movies should be proof of that.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-23, 08:49 AM

To be fair, it wouldn't be the first time a character evolves from goofy to legitimate threat (there's a trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NotSoHarmlessVillain) for it, naturally).

Oh I don't disagree that Ben could have become something more, but there was a turning point and he... forgot to take it.

Killing Snoke should have been that moment, but instead of that being when Ben Solo truly became a threat he runs off to Crait and is embarrassed so badly that we're right back at square one where nobody can take him seriously.

It probably doesn't help that Vader wasn't conflicted. He knew he had done terrible things and he hated himself for his weakness, yet he was in too deep to save himself. His redemption was never on the cards until it was and even though other shows have given us other characters attempting to get through to Vader they were never enough. Vader was not created to be redeemed and in a lot of ways his redemption isn't even about him but Luke's rejection of the old Jedi ways.

Yet Ben wasn't just a character who was meant to try and fail to emulate his grandfather, he was created to literally be Darth Vader except he was designed to always be redeemed. That was always the plan, from page 1. Going from goofy to legitimate threat is one thing but going from goofy to legitimate threat to hero is too much for three movies, so instead they settled from goofy to hero.

Darth Credence

2024-07-23, 09:50 AM

While I'm thinking about it, does anyone want to explain the thread title? I've done some searches, and the best I can come up with is a bad meme about replacing "Sith" with "Big" in RotS.

Palanan

2024-07-23, 10:00 AM

Originally Posted by Infernally Clay
Killing Snoke should have been that moment, but instead of that being when Ben Solo truly became a threat he runs off to Crait and is embarrassed so badly that we're right back at square one where nobody can take him seriously.

The audience might not take him seriously after his duel with Luke (although that wasnt my reaction) but Kylo doesnt exactly have to worry about what his troops think.

Order troops to secure the facility on Crait, then return to orbit in his bat-ship. Order a complete bombardment of the facility from orbit, then kill the pilots of his bat-ship. Image problem solved.

The only one left who could be a problem is Hux, but Hux was always going to be a problem and Kylo was always going to have to deal with him at some point, so that cancels out.

Originally Posted by Darth Credence
While I'm thinking about it, does anyone want to explain the thread title?

Its from the last couple pages of the Ac*lyt* thread, in which pendell mentioned a rather strange version of Revenge of the Siththe dialogue having been translated into Chinese, and the result then fed back into Google for retranslation into English.

Thus Kenobis line, Sith lords are our speciality, somehow becomes We are for the big. Funny enough that pendell used it for the thread title here.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-23, 10:11 AM

The audience might not take him seriously after his duel with Luke (although that wasnt my reaction) but Kylo doesnt exactly have to worry about what his troops think.

The only one left who could be a problem is Hux, but Hux was always going to be a problem and Kylo was always going to have to deal with him at some point, so that cancels out.

The audience is what matters and if the audience cannot take him seriously then they'll never believe he's a threat, but it's worth pointing out that Ben yelling "MOAR!" only earned him skeptical side eyes from even his troops. I don't believe they were particularly impressed and it's easy to see why. Snoke was, if nothing else, in control of his faculties. Ben does not inspire such confidence.

It's just like Hux, actually, since you mention him. Did he become anything but a complete loser after the prank phone call? Could anyone take him seriously after that?

BloodSquirrel

2024-07-23, 10:21 AM

You keep asserting this, but so far you've given very sparse reason for us to believe that the choices made in TFA locked them into TLJ. As I've already pointed out- you could radically change the direction that TLJ took in the last ten minutes of the movie by having Rey accept Kylo's offer with making almost no changes to what came before. You're basing your arguments on a completely unjustified determinism that can be demonstrated to not be true.

Manga Shoggoth

2024-07-23, 10:54 AM

The MCU started slowly with several largely unrelated films, and once it proved successful, slowly built up its shared universe and worked itself towards Endgame.

Most of the othe competitors dived in and slammed a shared universe in, to the detriment of the story (Dark Universe was the worst - everything was shoehorned into one film).

Disney had the advantage of the shared universe already being set up for them, and they still fumbled it by not concentrating on writing good stories.

I'm not sure about The Hobbit, though. That was more destroyed by stuffing lots of story that simply did not belong and did nothing to further the plot, just to pad a one-and-a-half film book into three films.

...

Absolutely. In the entertainment industry, you have one job: Entertain. Do it right and everyone will remember. Do it wrong and no-one will forget.

pendell

2024-07-23, 11:28 AM

While I'm thinking about it, does anyone want to explain the thread title? I've done some searches, and the best I can come up with is a bad meme about replacing "Sith" with "Big" in RotS.

It's a riff off of the fan-redub of Star Wars Episode 3 Star War The Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West HD (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XziLNeFm1ok)

The story of this version is , first, someone made a bootleg Chinese fan-translation of the movie.

After that, another party ran it through google translate to get it back into English.

And then , as the final cherry on top, we get high-quality voice actors to read the lines in the translation and dub it in .

*I* couldn't stop laughing when I watched it two nights ago, being an amateur linguist as I am.

The most critical thing about the show is that it could translate common English words pretty well, but it rapidly hit the rocks when it tried to deal with proper nouns or science fiction concepts. "Sith", for example, is constantly translated as "West". "Obi-wan" is translated "Ratio" and so on. So "Revenge of the Sith" -- when ran through this translation system -- becomes "Backstroke of the West".

The thread title comes from the moment when Obi-Wan and Anakin confront Dooku aboard the flagship Invisible. The lines in particular are:

Palpatine: "Careful, he is a big." [You're no match for him, he's a Sith Lord!]
Obi-Wan: "Prime Minister, we are for the big" [Sith Lords are our specialty] .

Not professional quality , but I think it's worth at least a B for effort as an undergrad project.

The capping line , as far as I'm concerned , is the moment Vader is told Padme is dead. His concluding "NOOOOOO!" becomes, in this translation, "DO NOT WANT!" And I absolutely insist that this is how the ending scene should have played out. FIGHT ME.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Lurkmoar

2024-07-23, 11:45 AM

A big melodramatic NOOOO is fine for a Space Opera which Star Wars is.

DO NOT WANT, now that's the stuff that memes are made of.

Mordar

2024-07-23, 11:48 AM

Honestly, I find it a little weird that people steadfastly refuse to see the humor in this stuff, but to each their own. I've got my own weird perspectives on things.

I think I can kind of see it...but perhaps my dissonance is with the words you're using like "goofy" or that it was played for humor. I see that Vader is the Straight Man and taken in isolation some of the sequences certainly play as...maybe gallows humory? SW has the clear light pulp bits - Han and 3PO responsible for the majority of these - and the cavalier lines - Han and Leia get pretty much all of these - and then an occasional "whoa" chuckle (the toe pokes, the post-choke-promotion Piett probably doesn't really want now). But the last plays more like a tension-release while the previous two are straight humor/funny, and if you take chunks out of the movie context (particularly the toe poke) it can be a straight-funny bit ripe for re-contextualization.

Using terms like "...pulled the...qualifier" handily dismisses any possibility other than "go mow my lawn, kid". For instance, it misses the fact that even *COMPLETELY* ignoring all other things Star Wars, the media environment is radically different in 1987 then it was in 1977. So no, you (general usage you, not ArmyOfOptimists you) can't replicate the state of people seeing Star Wars for the first time in 1977 vs 1987 - any more than I can replicate the conditions and expectations present in 1939 when 7 year olds walked in to The Wizard of Oz. There was such a radical shift in action movies and TV and cartoons in that 10-year span (yes, I know you said 86, but I'm rounding) that dramatically changes how we view stuff that we see for the first time, regardless of when it was initially presented.

To personalize it, I was far enough outside the original target audience for the rubber-suit Godzilla that even as a little I thought it was funny. That wasn't the intent and was, in fact, contrary to the vision that Toho and Ishiro Honda had for the series - despite Toho eventually leaning in to it. It doesn't mean I didn't get it 'cause I was a punk kid...it means that it presents radically differently to someone born well after the release, or someone consuming it a decade after it made its impact.

So yeah...wasn't denigrating you, just speaking to the differences in time and place.

That you further started speaking on behalf of "everyone" solidified your tone as talking down. Maybe not your intent, but that's how it comes across.

I honestly don't remember anyone laughing at Vader in the original release...definitely at Han and 3PO and the occasional era-appropriate "sick burn" appreciation at Leia busting Han's chops. I remember literal cheers when Han returned and ejected Vader, but that was tension release for sure. Even as a small child at that point I remember the massive focus by grown-ups on Star Wars...not just elementary school kids, not just comic nerds...but massive mainstream focus. It might not have been a hive mind, but I have to say, other than a few country-rallying things that we won't specifically name, this was the single most unified I have ever seen public opinion (and even though I didn't fully recognize it at the time, it has been reinforced through retrospectives and documentaries 30+ years ago). So this is a space I give a little more grace to "everyone".

In that vein I'll ask for a little latitude for those that got to first experience it when it was really brand new to the world. It sounds like you're a touch younger than my brother, so you guys got to get the cool toys like MotU, GI Joe, and Sega.

I do think there is a cleverness to the spinning-out-of-control ejection from the trench. It brings a moment of joy and levity (including whoops and cheers) and allows the Big Bad Wolf to be trounced but without undercutting how serious, frightening and intimidating the character presents. That's probably why I am resistant to the "funny" designator.

So I think there are moments where things happening to Vader result in outbursts of positive release, but not the same in tenor or design as the two troopers wisely turning around and leaving before Kylo Ren turns his tantrum their way. I do disagree on it being impossible to take him seriously...I fear the unpredictable lone individual with moderate power *MUCH* more than I fear the highly powerful even-keeled (even if the keel is always at villain depth) despot. But, there was a lot more work to do for Ren, and a lot fewer shirtless scenes to show.

Palpatine: "Careful, he is a big." [You're no match for him, he's a Sith Lord!]
Obi-Wan: "Prime Minister, we are for the big" [Sith Lords are our specialty] .

Now, of course, we must make this to a second 50-page thread, and DO [NOT] WANT must be the title.

- M

Errorname

2024-07-23, 12:28 PM

I mean, you are stuck with the villains being the Empire again but worse this time. You are stuck with Han Solo as a deadbeat dad who got murdered by his evil son. You are stuck with Luke Skywalker having utterly failed and consigned himself to exile.

These are big decisions that massively recontextualize the original trilogy's ending and none of them are easy to change course on.

Now, of course, we must make this to a second 50-page thread, and DO [NOT] WANT must be the title.

Hey, it's an open ended Star Wars thread, we'll get there. People love arguing about Star Wars.

Mordar

2024-07-23, 12:47 PM

Hey, it's an open ended Star Wars thread, we'll get there. People love arguing about Star Wars.

Sorry, I meant like...today. :smallbiggrin:

- M

pendell

2024-07-23, 12:59 PM

Sorry, I meant like...today. :smallbiggrin:

- M

Sorry, do not want ::smallbiggrin:

Tongue-in-cheek,

Brian P.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-23, 01:04 PM

Sorry, I meant like...today. :smallbiggrin:

- M

I'm sure I can manage that.

https://i.ibb.co/YB6ssmz/IMG-1190.png

Zevox

2024-07-23, 01:43 PM

He has gone missing.
He's being hunted by the First Order, who will not rest until he's destroyed.
He's referred to as "the last Jedi" in the opening crawl, implying he either hasn't reestablished the Jedi in the intervening years, did but the others are lost, or did so in secret.
He did not tell anyone you'd expect where he went, but for some reason our unnamed old man from the opening had a map to him - a map which was also incomplete without the bulk of it that was stored in R2-D2.
We finally see the planet he's on in the end, but besides the visual of the island he's on nothing about it is established, not even a name.

There were plenty of directions that could've been taken. It was TLJ that decided the specific one.

oudeis

2024-07-23, 01:45 PM

I don't believe Ben/Kylo was ever intended to be a serious threat, or at least a serious challenge to Rey. Before we even get to the character, we need to talk about the actor they cast and his on-screen presence.

Darth Vader was played by David Prowse, a 6'7", 250-lb powerlifter who could bench-press 500 pounds- yes, I read all the magazines when Star Wars first came out. He absolutely looked like someone who could lift a man one-handed by the throat and crush his neck by squeezing (I certainly believed that Prowse himself could do that at the time). Vader towered over everyone else on screen and James Earl Jones gave him the voice of the thunder itself.

And no, ArmyofOptimists, his startled 'What?!?! was not in any way comical. He had just killed seven Rebel pilots, including Luke's friend, blasted R2-D2, and was about to kill Luke himself before Han came charging out of the sun to rescue him.

Hayden Christensen was not a good choice to play Anakin. Better and more experienced actors than him foundered under the weight of Lucas' godawful dialogue and terrible acting direction, so I don't blame him for his performance, but he was just physically wrong for the part. This was evident from his first moment on the screen and was painfully hammered home in the 'Frankenstein Unbound' scene in RotS where he breaks free of his bonds. He looked like a kid in a Darth Vader costume.

As for Adam Driver: bluntly, he didn't have any presence as BenRen. He was physically unimpressive even before he took his helmet off, and once he did... We're not supposed to judge people on their appearance- I'm certainly in no position to throw stones- and Hollywood focuses far too much on looks instead of talent, but it was like someone had gone out of their way to cast the least appealing actor they could find. He was almost the literal embodiement of how Snape was described in Harry Potter. Unlike Snape, however, who was almost wholly a comic-relief villain until he became a tragic figure, Kylo Ren was ostensibly meant to be the primary villain of the sequels. The role needed someone who was credibly intimidating even when they weren't speaking. Peter Cushing's almost skull-like visage would have been imposing even without his crisp enunciation. Christopher Lee was almost as tall as Prowse, and had a voice equal to Jones. Driver looked like a rodent in comparison, and repeated shots of him lounging around shirtless didn't make him more menacing. Again, I think this was intentional.

And now we come to the character himself.

As others have pointed out, tantrums aren't frightening, they are tantrums. He even managed to make a lightsaber unimpressive. If he'd gone berserk and slaughtered some of his men that would have been something, but the movies went out their way to deny him even that. As much as all of the above served to undercut him as a villain, his actions made his failure complete. Rey slapped him down almost without effort in almost every direct confrontation or contest:

She not only resists his attempts to probe her mind, but she is easily able to penetrate his psychic defenses and reveal that he still wears Vader Underoos or whatever.
She is able to summon Luke's lightsaber to herself- literally right in his face- where he cannot.
She kicks his ass in every aspect of their fight- Force to Force, mind to mind, and saber to saber.

All this was before what they did to the character in TLJ. It wasn't that BenRen was damaged by bad writing, it's that he wasn't a credible enemy because he was never meant to be. He was meant to be a twerp that talked mean and did vicious things so we would cheer all the harder when the heroine curbstomps him without breaking a sweat . While I'm sure this was gratifying to some in the audience, it is bad storytelling in and of itself and an even worse idea when you are trying to create the principal antagonist of a trilogy. No amount of rewrites or retcons for TRoS could have undone the deliberate subversion they inflicted on the character from his inception.

Precure

2024-07-23, 02:15 PM

Interesting question. Perhaps we can use a simile: If the Republic is a body, the Jedi are the body's immune system. The Sith are a virus. You can fully expect an immune system to have trouble with a new virus variant (as I'm sure we already remember from 2020) and sometimes the changes are too far, too fast for the immune system to cope, no matter how good it is.

And there's a potential counterfactual: Flash back to Mace Windu entering the Chancellor's office to arrest Palpatine. Imagine Palpatine genuinely surrenders, is put in restraints, made to do the perf walk in an orange jumpsuit or its equivalent to the Senate for trial, as Mace originally intended: "The Senate will decide your fate."

The odds are pretty good that the Senate finds Palpatine not guilty. Impeachment is a political act, not a legal one, and Palpatine is extraordinarily popular. Not only is he the hero-executive of the war, along the lines of Churchill or Lincoln, but he's also got a network of friends and favors all throughout the Senate. I think the only way you could get a guilty verdict is if the Jedi mass force-persuaded the whole lot, and I'm not sure that's even possible.

Having declared Palpatine not guilty, their next step is to order the arrest of Mace Windu on charges of treason. The Jedi will not accept rule by a Sith, and so we get something very like Order 66 anyway.

This would be a good argument that the Jedi were going to lose whatever they did.

But I think there is still some fault to find. Remember that scene where, after Palpatine resisted, Mace Windu decides to kill him. He tells Anakin "he controls the Senate and the course, he's too dangerous to be left alive!"

In that moment, Mace is both echoing Palpatine's own words to Anakin on the Confederacy flagship and taking the action Palpatine ordered Anakin to do -- to kill a seemingly helpless prisoner without trial.

In that moment, Anakin can't see any moral difference between Palpatine and Mace. Nor can we, the audience. The equivalence has been made as anviliciously obvious as possible.

And I find it telling that Mace notes he "controls the senate and the courts" -- in other words, Mace knows already that the Republic isn't going to convict Palpatine, just as I mentioned in my counterfactual. Which is why he tries to reverse history with an assassination. Which is what it is. For all that Palpatine is a villain, he is absolutely right that the Jedi are trying to kill him and take over -- which is what they will have to do if they are to have a prayer of setting things right. They're acting in accordance with the Dark Side. From the best of motives, yes. And there's still a galaxy level of moral difference between the men who have become grimy in war and are prepared to kill a dictator and the man who would wipe out entire planets on a whim. But the fact is, they're playing Palpatine's game by Palpatine's rules. That's why he's always one step ahead of them. True light, altruism, throwing away the lightsaber as in Episode 6, confuses and perplexes him. He doesn't understand the Light Side at all. But he understands the Dark Side better than anyone else alive.

By the end of Episode III, the Jedi are sufficiently operating on Dark Side parameters that Palpatine can run rings around them while they are as lost , blind, as babes in the woods. It's because, somewhere along the line, they've lost their way. That's why Qui-Gonn didn't fit in with them, and that's why Palpatine is able to defeat them.

And so I believe it was an institutional failure on the parts of both the Republic and the Jedi.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Very informative post, and I agree with it completely.

Errorname

2024-07-23, 02:25 PM

There were plenty of directions that could've been taken. It was TLJ that decided the specific one.

Luke is established to have unambiguously failed at establishing a new Jedi Order or preventing the return of the Empire and as having left the known galaxy for unknown reasons to go to Skellig Michael, which is a stunning environment but not exactly a versatile one.

This establishes very hard limits on what Luke did in the intervening years, and showing Rey finding him places some strong limits on what he's been doing since he vanished. They might not say the name "Ahch-to", but they show Rey climb to the summit and show a lot of the island in the process which fill in a lot of detail about what exists in this environment. It would not be easy to reveal the island as being anything other than an ancient monastery. Luke is clearly meant to be in self-imposed exile like Yoda and Obi-Wan were, and while you could do something different it would require a serious course correction.

It's the same thing as TLJ establishing that the New Republic is gone and the First Order reigns. It's very much what Force Awakens was setting up, even if technically Last Jedi still had time to say "no, actually we're doing something else"

Mordar

2024-07-23, 03:34 PM

Wait, do we really know that? We know he disappeared. We know (I think?) something bad happened. Been too long since I watched all of TFA. I know there were several articles speculating about where Luke was and what he was doing there and why he went.

But that ruined templey place could have been a lot of things...including a new school for Jedi, a Sith temple, tomb or treasure trove...many possibilities were laid out in speculative articles at the time.

- M

Zevox

2024-07-23, 04:11 PM

Luke is established to have unambiguously failed at establishing a new Jedi Order or preventing the return of the Empire
Neither of those is true. It's established that Luke is still considered the last Jedi, which implies that he has not established a new Jedi Order, but why that is is not established. It could be he hasn't attempted it - perhaps he hasn't felt qualified to teach the Jedi ways to others, felt a need to continue his own training or simply try to live as a fully-fledged Jedi for some time before he tried to do that. Perhaps he tried and failed, the route they wound up going. Perhaps he actually has done so, but did so in secret, and thus neither the First Order nor the rest of the galaxy at large is aware of it. Nothing beyond the reference to him as "the last Jedi" in the opening crawl, and the lack of mention of any others in the film, tells us anything about the status of that.

Further, nothing in the film states or implies Luke tried to stop the First Order and failed. If anything he opening crawl actually implies that the First Order rose after Luke went missing. It reads: "In his absence, the sinister First Order has risen from the ashes of the Empire." Not the way you'd normally phrase it if the First Order's rise was something he'd already tried to stop and failed.

This establishes very hard limits on what Luke did in the intervening years, and showing Rey finding him places some strong limits on what he's been doing since he vanished.
Not really. He needs to be on that island on a planet that matches what we see at the end of the film. You can't suddenly have it be a bastion of civilization, but beyond that, it's pretty wide open (especially since we see other islands on this planet, so he doesn't need to be confined just to that one either). And he can have been there for any number of reasons, self-imposed exile is by no stretch of the imagination a given. He could be hiding from Snoke for one reason or another, he could be seeking lost Jedi knowledge, he could have set up a new Jedi Temple on this world in secret for one reason or another, etc. Really, his having kept what he was doing a secret is a bigger constraint than anything else, and there's still any number of reasons you can concoct for that.

Errorname

2024-07-23, 04:29 PM

We know Kylo was Luke's student, we know he destroyed Luke's Jedi Order and burned the temple down, and I think it's stated outright that Kylo killed every student that didn't side with him (implying the Knights of Ren were fellow students, which was dropped).

The set design (or rather lack thereof) does not give you much in the way of leeway. They used an actual monastery as their shooting location with very simple stone construction, and Han's dialogue strongly indicates Luke was looking for the first Jedi Temple.

Your options are basically bitter exile or a quest for ancient Jedi knowledge.

Neither of those is true. It's established that Luke is still considered the last Jedi, which implies that he has not established a new Jedi Order, but why that is is not established.

No, it is stated definitively that Luke tried to train a new generation of Jedi and that Kylo destroyed everything (https://youtu.be/Sl0HLZMLtP8?t=102)

Further, nothing in the film states or implies Luke tried to stop the First Order and failed.

The simple fact of the First Order's existence means that Luke couldn't stop it, which is the constraint. There was some leeway in terms of the why, but that the First Order rose at all is not negotiable.

You are locked into a story where Luke has both failed to restore the Jedi and failed to stop the return of the Empire. There's no way around that.

he could have set up a new Jedi Temple on this world in secret for one reason or another

Can't work around the buildings being visibly ancient, and the implication is definitely that he's alone on the island, but they could have given him a few acolytes. Did have room for that.

Zevox

2024-07-23, 04:50 PM

No, it is stated definitively that Luke tried to train a new generation of Jedi and that Kylo destroyed everything (https://youtu.be/Sl0HLZMLtP8?t=102)
Alright, fair; I had gone back to peruse the film when listing my points, but I wasn't rewatching it completely and forgot about that scene. So that part, at least, is also established, though it still leaves a lot of leeway in what Luke was doing when he went missing. And "seeking the first Jedi Temple" as Han's speculation certainly feels like it implies he's looking for something - lost knowledge, some relic, whatever - rather than just going into exile out of depression and self-pity.

The simple fact of the First Order's existence means that Luke couldn't stop it, which is the constraint.
Again, no it doesn't. It says nothing about Luke at all, and the text crawl if anything implies that the First Order rose after he went missing.

Can't work around the buildings being visibly ancient,
Don't need to. He needn't be limited to the one island, and even if he using it for whatever he's up to he needn't have set up the building to be using it.

Mordar

2024-07-23, 05:06 PM

Moving some text around, forgive if it creates unintended linkages:

No, it is stated definitively that Luke tried to train a new generation of Jedi and that Kylo destroyed everything (https://youtu.be/Sl0HLZMLtP8?t=102)

"...turned against him and destroyed it all..." could have meanings other than literally killed everyone and burned the physical structure to the ground, though.

Your options are basically bitter exile or a quest for ancient Jedi knowledge.

Han does suggest people think that...but (a) that doesn't mean they were right, (b) that doesn't mean he found it/that's where he is, but my favorite is (c) that doesn't mean it is what he thought it was going to be, because he is still a novitiate scratching at the knowledge of the Order. So I agree that quest for ancient Jedi knowledge is best option and good choice...particularly if where it really leads is Force knowledge with Jedi interpretation as secondary.

Remember, the last proto-person could also be viewed as the progenitor of the first person-person. The Last Jedi title doesn't need to mean a sad ending.

You are locked into a story where Luke has both failed to restore the Jedi and failed to stop the return of the Empire. There's no way around that.

Didn't, not couldn't. Any clues we have to his inclination to even try are as Zevok suggests...it arose in his absence. He wasn't there to even be asked if he cared to stop it.

Can't work around the buildings being visibly ancient, and the implication is definitely that he's alone on the island, but they could have given him a few acolytes. Did have room for that.

Yup...ancient buildings with ancient knowledge far from primary areas of travel...could be lots of things including Jedi home temple.

While we know the trend/trope/beats are for Part II to be the darkest, it doesn't mean it needed to be all dark. Remember, Empire gave us Dagobah and Yoda and the vital training montage. The pastiche model holds that Episode VIII could have followed the same beats with Luke/Rey, and Rey becoming the first of a new tradition. And we didn't need Luke to die in VIII or IX for that matter.

- M

LibraryOgre

2024-07-23, 05:31 PM

I am a big fan of alternate Force traditions... I figure almost every culture in the Galaxy has something like a Force tradition, even if they don't think of it remotely as the Jedi do (though, for gaming purposes, I still have them divide it up as Control, Sense, and Alter). When I make a new species, I think about their Force tradition, and how that influences how they approach the world.

Consider, for a minute, Logray. Threepio being lifted was clearly outside his experience, but, as shaman, I would be willing to bet that he has something like Sense powers. 2e had Tyia (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Tyia), but there's the Nightsisters of Dathomir, and pretty much any kind you want to make up. I made one up for Minotaurs (https://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/2019/03/krynnish-minotaurs-in-star-wars.html), one for Star Dragons (https://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/2019/06/dragons-in-spaaaaaaaccccceeeee.html), and one for the Mawg of Druidia (https://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/2021/09/mawg-of-druidia.html). It doesn't need to be hugely mechanically different, just a different take on things.

Errorname

2024-07-23, 05:39 PM

Again, no it doesn't. It says nothing about Luke at all, and the text crawl if anything implies that the First Order rose after he went missing.

Didn't, not couldn't. Any clues we have to his inclination to even try are as Zevok suggests...it arose in his absence. He wasn't there to even be asked if he cared to stop it.

The film gives reason to believe it had at least started before Luke went missing (Rey has a vision of him in front of a massive fire, I think it's stated outright that he went missing after Kylo turned, it's stated outright that Snoke is the one who corrupted Kylo), but even if Luke vanished for unrelated reasons and the galaxy went to hell in his absence, that still means Luke failed.

Luke's twin goals of restoring the Jedi and defeating the Empire are both inarguable failures at the start point of Force Awakens, neither can be worked around.

He needn't be limited to the one island, and even if he using it for whatever he's up to he needn't have set up the building to be using it.

Gonna note that we get a lot of establishing shots of the island with no visible transport beside the Falcon.

Same with bringing the New Republic in. Last Jedi could have said (and probably should have said) that having the New Republic get completely blown up by a super death star is dumb as hell and we aren't doing that, but that is a course correction from the status quo that Force Awakens was clearly trying to set-up and it's going to be much harder to sell to your audience than it would have been if Force Awakens hadn't said "we'll just blow up the Politics planet so it's just Rebels v Empire again!"

"...turned against him and destroyed it all..." could have meanings other than literally killed everyone and burned the physical structure to the ground, though.

We do literally see the fire in Rey's Vision, and I am certain it was established that there were no survivors that didn't join the Knights of Ren somewhere, although I'm not going to scan through the whole movie and all the promo material to find where.

Yup...ancient buildings with ancient knowledge far from primary areas of travel...could be lots of things including Jedi home temple.

Yeah, I think you've got enough space for Luke to be looking for ancient Jedi knowledge, like an old buried holocron or something.

That does require coming up with some important new macguffin and a reason why it's taken so long to find. It's a plotline that would have had it's own challenges, but it would have meant Luke's failures were less prominent in the narrative and might have avoided some of the backlash.

Again, not all of these constraints are as hard as "Han was a bad dad to his only child who turned into a wannabe sith and murdered him" or "the villains are going to just be the Empire again but worse this time". But they're still massively constraining the space of possibility for the story, you have to work with what Force Awakens put down and most of what Force Awakens put down was kinda bad.

Mechalich

2024-07-23, 06:12 PM

Well, in some cultures Force sensitivity will be sufficiently rare to preclude the development of a Force Tradition. We don't know how common Force sensitivity is, and it seems to vary across species, but a plausible estimate is something in the range of 1 in 1 million to 1 in 10 million. So, any culture below ten million people in size might have whole generations pass without anyone being sensitive at all. Additionally, most sensitives will not manifest any conscious abilities unless trained. Even a very strong sensitive, like Luke Skywalker, didn't spontaneously manifest any obvious abilities until he'd been trained, weaker sensitives might go their whole lives without realizing their capability unless trained. This means you probably need to go up another order of magnitude, to the 100 million mark, before a population hits the point where someone develops a series of Force using practices that it can pass on. However, the average planet in Star Wars has less than 100 million people.

A good example of how this works is the character of Nadia Grell (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Nadia_Grell), from SWTOR. She's a Sarkhai, a near-human species from a recently contacted forested planet, and she's strong enough to spontaneously manifest some Force use, but none of the other Sarkhai have any idea what Force abilities are (Nadia's father is their Senator, if anyone knew, he'd know). Instead, she ends up becoming a Jedi through her associated with the Barsen'thor (the Jedi Consular PC). It is likely that this sort of assimilation into the Jedi Order has happened to many civilizations (especially during the Old Republic Era when the Jedi Order was much larger and less exclusive).

As such, those independent Force Tradition that remain need to have some reason why they have avoided/resisted this process. Sometimes, this is simply pure cultural pride, like in the case of the Baran Do Sages of the Kel Dor species. Sometimes its ideological: the Fallanassi are strict pacifists and recoil from the Jedi way. Sometimes it's a matter of species psychology. The Aing-Tii are bizarre aliens who simply don't conceptualize the Force in anything even close to a Human way. Pure isolation is, of course, a good reason, and applies to things like Ewok shamans. It goes on.

Mathematically, the Jedi Order has never, ever, represented the majority of the Force Sensitives in the galaxy. Even if Force Users are 1 in a billion there would be 100 million of them in the galaxy, and even the largest Old Republic Jedi Order we might imagine was never that big (I'd give the Jedi+Sith a 10 million historical upper bound). This leads to the conclusion that there are a massive number of small, localized, and mostly unobtrusive Force Traditions scattered across the galaxy. The Fallanassi appear to be a good example of this. There don't seem to ever be more than a few hundred of them, in a handful of locations, at any given time.

LibraryOgre

2024-07-23, 06:48 PM

This leads to the conclusion that there are a massive number of small, localized, and mostly unobtrusive Force Traditions scattered across the galaxy. The Fallanassi appear to be a good example of this. There don't seem to ever be more than a few hundred of them, in a handful of locations, at any given time.

Exactly. Now, I assume Force Sensitivity to be more common than 1 in 10 million... the Force exists in all living things, after all. As far back as RotJ, Lucas said that everyone has has the potential to use the Force, (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Force-sensitive#Behind_the_scenes) but Jedi were those who trained. Which leads to there being local Force Traditions, developed in the thousands of years before (or after) Jedi contact.

Zevox

2024-07-23, 06:53 PM

but even if Luke vanished for unrelated reasons and the galaxy went to hell in his absence, that still means Luke failed.
It does not. Failure requires having attempted something to begin with. If the First Order did not exist before Luke left, then he did not fail to stop it.

Gonna note that we get a lot of establishing shots of the island with no visible transport beside the Falcon.
And yet Luke got there somehow anyway.

These are softer constraints than the stuff with Han and the First Order, I'll admit, if you really wanted to you could do that "actually this island doesn't matter, I've got a brand new temple full of students on some other island" 180 and have it not outright contradict anything (Although I doubt it'd be good, this sort of rapid course correction is hard, as TROS should demonstrate), but what the first film is strongly pushing towards is still a constraint. Changing course like that would take time.
That isn't a course change, it's establishing a course. Something that TFA did not do as far as Luke's current actions and motives go. That's the point here. TFA definitely messed up a lot as the foundation for a new trilogy - pushing the reset button as it did was quite the unforced error, no question about it. It deserves that flack. But the handling of Luke, specifically, it still left open enough that he could've been fine. TLJ is where that one fell apart.

Errorname

2024-07-23, 07:14 PM

It does not. Failure requires having attempted something to begin with. If the First Order did not exist before Luke left, then he did not fail to stop it.

Again, Kylo's fall is clearly what incited Luke to leave. Luke's disappearance does not predate things starting to go wrong.

But we're squabbling over word choice. Luke not being around to fight against the First Order is not disputable, and it's not something that can be worked around.

And yet Luke got there somehow anyway.

And the most parsimonious explanation for how he got there despite no visible transport is what the sequel presented.

That isn't a course change, it's establishing a course

I think Force Awakens ends on a very clear course for Luke, which is "weird space hermit hiding out in the middle of nowhere", so yeah, having him actually working to rebuild the Jedi order out on Ahch-To would be a course change, in the same way "actually the new republic is still around" would be a course change.

It is not outright contradictory to the events of the last film but it is absolutely not what Force Awakens is setting up.

But the handling of Luke, specifically, it still left open enough that he could've been fine. TLJ is where that one fell apart.

The thing Last Jedi could have done differently is instead of trying to work with that to create a character conflict around Luke having failed, they could have had him hunting or trying to protect some sort of macguffin . That might have gone over better with fans, presented Luke in a more heroic light, but it wouldn't fix the bad setup and I don't think it would have turned out much better in the end.

Mechalich

2024-07-23, 07:32 PM

Lucas, unfortunately, isn't a great worldbuilder, especially when it comes to things like demographic numbers (lots of creatives aren't, I'm not holding this against him or anything).

It is necessary to gate-keep Force use behind some kind of innate limitation like Force sensitivity because there are flatly evil institutions in the galaxy who will train literally everyone they can get their hands on - the Sith Empire in SWTOR does this explicitly, the Sith Inquisitor PC is part of a big pack of Force sensitive slaves who just get dumped at the academy on Korriban and are told 'become Sith or die trying' in no uncertain terms. This circle can be squared by using a threshold-based approach saying that 'everyone has the potential to use the Force' but only the sensitives have the potential to use the Force to do work (in the physics-based sense, allowing them to move objects and so on). We even sort of have examples of this in-universe, in terms of 'force-using' species like the Miraluka who are all touching the Force to see but aren't all throwing things around telekinetically.

It's certainly possible to play with the level of sensitivity. My personal go to number is 1 in 1 million, with only a fraction of those being trained. I also like the idea of significant population-based variability. Clearly, the inhabitants of Dathomir - canon population 10,000, easily several hundred Force users - are orders of magnitude more likely to be sensitive than the average. At the same time, certain populations like the Khommites, of whom Dorsk 81 was apparently the only sensitive out of 500 million individuals, are clearly much less likely.

Also, because the Force itself violates probability, it's possible for there to be a lot of variance across other axes like time. For example, the Sith periodically try to exterminate all non-Sith Force sensitives, often reducing the Jedi to quite small numbers and nearly exterminating other traditions (ex. Makutai) only for those groups to rebound astoundingly fast once the Sith threat is removed, quite possibly because the Force is goosing sensitivity rates and directing individuals with potential towards those who can train them. So, while Force sensitivity is a necessary gatekeeper is does not need to be something as non-mystical as a purely genetic trait.

Zevox

2024-07-23, 09:38 PM

Again, Kylo's fall is clearly what incited Luke to leave.
Possible but not clear. TFA doesn't even state that Kylo is the apprentice for fell and "destroyed it all" that Han was referring to, even if that's a clear, likely implication. It most certainly doesn't state or imply that's why Luke left. Correlation is not causation: that Luke felt responsible and left after that event does not mean those feelings were the reason he left. Han himself says that "those who know him best" (meaning more than just Han himself) think Luke went looking for the first Jedi Temple, which pretty strongly implies he's doing something more than just retreating out of self-pity over what happened.

Hell, even if we took the view Kylo's fall and destruction of the nascent New Jedi Order was the cause as a given, Luke "feeling responsible" as Han says he did doesn't need to mean wallowing in the sort of depression and self-pity we see in TLJ at all - it could mean he was motivated to do something about it, because he sees what happened as his fault, and thus his responsibility to find a way to fix, and that for him doing something about it involved finding something (the Jedi Temple or some other mcguffin) out on this backwater world, not just going out to fight the First Order like a warrior. He is the same man who decided to throw his weapon aside rather than take a chance to kill Darth Vader, after all, which ought to be extremely relevant given the fallen Jedi in this case is his nephew.

But we're squabbling over word choice.
Yes. Because the words we're choosing carry implications for the story and characters here.

And the most parsimonious explanation for how he got there despite no visible transport is what the sequel presented.
The point being that no visible transport in TFA =/= no transport at all. Hell, re-watching that scene again, we don't even get a good look at the full island in TFA - just a very distant aerial view of one side before Rey lands, then shots of small parts of it as she travels it and ultimately meets with Luke. Arguing that what little we see there constrained TLJ at all is just silly.

I think Force Awakens ends on a very clear course for Luke, which is "weird space hermit hiding out in the middle of nowhere",
Completely disagree, the ending of TFA provides no course for Luke. It shows Rey finding him on that island, nothing more. It neither says nor implies anything about what he's up to or why. It was yet another of Abrams' mystery boxes. Not the best way to handle Luke by any stretch, but very far yet from the disaster that followed. Rian Johnson, or whatever writer chose the route TLJ would go with Luke, just chose incredibly poorly how to develop it from there.

No it didn't. Luke's life goals have already failed catastrophically, and they've established that he abandoned the galaxy to an approaching evil to do something on a remote long abandoned island monastery in the middle of nowhere. That is all Force Awakens.
None of that is in the Force Awakens. You are imposing your interpretations (or knowledge of TLJ) upon the scant little TFA does show and tell us retroactively. What TFA does tell us is that Luke has been missing for some time for unknown reasons after his first efforts to rebuild the Jedi Order were destroyed by a fallen apprentice. It then shows us where he is. That is all. The rest is all on TLJ.

Errorname

2024-07-24, 02:35 AM

Possible but not clear. TFA doesn't even state that Kylo is the apprentice for fell and "destroyed it all" that Han was referring to, even if that's a clear, likely implication.

Completely disagree, the ending of TFA provides no course for Luke. It shows Rey finding him on that island, nothing more. It neither says nor implies anything about what he's up to or why. It was yet another of Abrams' mystery boxes. Not the best way to handle Luke by any stretch, but very far yet from the disaster that followed. Rian Johnson, or whatever writer chose the route TLJ would go with Luke, just chose incredibly poorly how to develop it from there.

None of that is in the Force Awakens. You are imposing your interpretations (or knowledge of TLJ) upon the scant little TFA does show and tell us retroactively. What TFA does tell us is that Luke has been missing for some time for unknown reasons after his first efforts to rebuild the Jedi Order were destroyed by a fallen apprentice. It then shows us where he is. That is all. The rest is all on TLJ.

Precure

2024-07-24, 06:34 AM

I don't follow. He's supposed to look for ancient Jedi information, which implies a Jedi related goal in mind, not an exile from responsibilities. Even TLJ conform to this, as he's on the planet that Jedi Order founded, not "middle of nowhere" as you claim. Yet TLJ didn't do anything with this other than Yoda appearing out of nowhere to burn it all to the ground.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-24, 06:54 AM

I think repeating this should be a litmus test for people who didn't pay attention to the movie.

None of that was burned, Rey stole it. Yoda knew that, that's why he says "she has everything she needs". You see them on the Falcon as they leave.

Mechalich

2024-07-24, 06:57 AM

TLJ even goes further in that Luke found the original sacred texts of the Jedi Order. That's a perfectly suitable McGuffin to justify his presence on Ahch-To and an acceptable solution to the mystery box. If TLJ had leaned into this it could even have gone so far as to make it so that the texts contained knowledge Luke could teach but not use himself, perhaps because he's not part of a 'Force Dyad' or something but that he'd foreseen this and left the map behind knowing it would bring the student to him when the time was right. TRoS, for what it's worth, does have Rey use some sort of ultimate technique in which she invokes the spirits of past Jedi to defeat the conglomerated spirits of the Sith taken into Palpatine, which probably was taken from those texts since it's certainly not something Leia knew how to do.

The most frustrating part about the Luke bits in TLJ is that they could be fixed almost entirely simply by shifting Luke's characterization to be well, normal Luke Skywalker. After all, he still teachers Rey in TLJ, he just mopes and gripes a lot while doing it. He tells Rey not to leave because she, like he was before her, isn't ready (and he's not wrong), and he ultimately chooses to show up and sacrifice himself for the sake of the resistance anyway, he just isn't there in person because reasons. Pretty much everything Luke does in the film is fine, it's just what he says that's awful.

Actually, that's true of a lot of TLJ overall. The movie could be massively improved simply by rewriting the dialogue completely and dubbing over the existing footage.

Errorname

2024-07-24, 07:19 AM

I don't follow. He's supposed to look for ancient Jedi information, which implies a Jedi related goal in mind, not an exile from responsibilities.

I mean specifically in the sense that it would be weird if he was actually building something and training new students, I think they could have sold "Weird Hermit in the middle of nowhere on a mission"

I think repeating this should be a litmus test for people who didn't pay attention to the movie.

I do think it indicates that the Last Jedi hits the tearing down better than the building up. Stuff like the texts burning just stick in the memory better than the insert that reveals Rey stole them. "Let the past die, kill it if you have to" is just a stronger thesis than "No one's ever really gone"

GloatingSwine

2024-07-24, 07:54 AM

Part of the problem with Luke is that he's not a protagonist in these movies.

That means that whatever he does, he can't actually be the one who resolves the plot. So the idea that he's off doing something super useful and critical to defeating the First Order is a non-starter. That would supplant the position of the protagonists as established in TFA. That's the one thing he can't possibly be doing, because it's not his role in the structure of the story.

And, frankly, there's nothing inherent to the First Order as presented that makes it even slightly plausible that some kind of Secret Jedi Knowledge is even useful to beat them, they have no special force power or protection, they've just got spaceships with guns on.

Every single "Luke is being useful, somehow" suggestion is a solution looking for a problem that wasn't defined in the first movie.

Errorname

2024-07-24, 08:45 AM

That's the one thing he can't possibly be doing, because it's not his role in the structure of the story.

Every single "Luke is being useful, somehow" suggestion is a solution looking for a problem that wasn't defined in the first movie.

It would be entirely possible for Luke to find something that he can pass down to Rey so she can solve the plot, you can have a mentor who is active in the story without it inherently undermining your actual protagonist. Obi-Wan can give Luke a lightsaber and tell him how to destroy the Death Star, you could done something like that with Luke, but the lack of an established problem to solve means you have to find a way to cram a bunch of heretofore unmentioned new concepts into the Last Jedi

Luke as bitter exile is just the natural follow-up to Force Awakens, it's the thing that makes the most sense with how that movie presents what happened and I'm shocked at how many people were seemingly caught off guard by it.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-24, 08:50 AM

It would be entirely possible for Luke to find something that he can pass down to Rey so she can solve the plot, you can have a mentor who is active in the story without it inherently undermining your actual protagonist. Obi-Wan can give Luke a lightsaber and tell him how to destroy the Death Star, you could done something like that with Luke, but the lack of an established problem to solve means you would need to establish a lot of new stuff to do so.

Yes, and that's what he did. Albeit unintentionally by being sufficiently grumpy about everything that she accepted she needed to stop looking for permission from the universe to be useful* and go and do something anyway.

*And this, really, is the true Doylist reason anyone even cared about who Rey might be descended from and why everyone was suggesting stupid ideas like it being Obi-Wan or other irrelevant nonsense, it means she has permission to be significant to the plot, and the reason that the only satisfying answer to that was "nobody", because that was an absolute smoothbrain thing to even be thinking about, and yet everyone was.

pendell

2024-07-24, 09:38 AM

Not necessarily a smoothbrain thing.

The universe Lucas gave us is very hierarchical and monarchical; the Force chooses to be strong in some people but not in others. Even if they are not Force-Sensitive, Force-powerful individuals have Destiny and have significant impact on the universe for good or evil.

Everyone else is an NPC along for the ride, set dressing.

Which is why two Skywalkers and a Palpatine decide the destiny of quadrillions of people in the GFFA. They're the main characters, 'cause the Force makes it so.

To his credit, Rian Johnson tried to push back against that. He wanted the Force to be accessible by everyone; which is why Rey, the hero, was supposed to be no one from nowhere. The point being that ANYONE can be a Jedi or a Sith, not just the chosen few. That was driven home by broom boy scene at the end of the movie.

That is both a more attractive prospect to an American audience who believes in its bones all humans are equal, that the ideal world is a meritocracy where anyone can rise to the top, but it's also a better marketing idea, allowing everyone to imagine themself a Jedi ... or it should be.

For some reason, the fact that the Jedi were a chosen elite didn't stop billions of children in the real world from fantasizing about being Jedi. They didn't worry about how the Jedi were a chosen few -- they always assumed the were among the chosen. In their imaginations , of course, they are.

Ironically, I think democratizing the Force may have made it less special. It stopped being a unique, special power that kids could imagine they had and no one else did. It meant "everyone" was special. And when everyone is special ... no one is.

At any rate, it is an intriguing idea and a major rewrite of Lucas' conception of the GFFA which might have been worth keeping. But the execution of TLJ pretty much ruined it, both good ideas and bad.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Errorname

2024-07-24, 09:49 AM

And this, really, is the true Doylist reason anyone even cared about who Rey might be descended from and why everyone was suggesting stupid ideas like it being Obi-Wan or other irrelevant nonsense, it means she has permission to be significant to the plot, and the reason that the only satisfying answer to that was "nobody", because that was an absolute smoothbrain thing to even be thinking about, and yet everyone was.

I do legitimately think "why is Rey the center of this story" was a real problem with the sequels, but mostly because her being an orphan with no existing connection to the legacy cast meant they had to spend a lot of time dragging her into the center of the conflict and establishing connections between her and the rest of the cast, and even after spending two movies doing it you still don't fully buy into it. The Sequels are not great at justifying why this story is about Rey.

That's not something a parentage reveal could have really fixed and indeed it very much did not, it's just an issue of them repeating a character intro that worked for the beginning of a story / for a character whose significance is already known to the audience for a character who might have been better served by letting her be introduced as like one of Luke's students or something.

The universe Lucas gave us is very hierarchical and monarchical

Is it? Ironically for all their talk about subverting the dynastic stuff I think the Sequels really amped up the magical dynasty stuff, the stuff about "what special ancestry does Rey have?" is a lot more dynastic thinking than anything with Anakin even if you subvert it.

Which is why two Skywalkers and a Palpatine decide the destiny of quadrillions of people in the GFFA. They're the main characters, 'cause the Force makes it so.

Do they? The actual outcome in ROTJ has very little to do with the events in the throne room, the stakes there are Luke and Vader's souls, and stuff like the guy who crashes into the Super Star Destroyer bridge are equally if not more significant to the outcome of the actual battle.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-24, 09:52 AM

Not necessarily a smoothbrain thing.

Nah, still is.

Because everyone was trying to guess at the "I am your father!" moment, forgetting that the reason that was a moment was that it was new and shocking and that Star Wars has already done that.

But because they had no balls after TLJ we got "I am your father's, brother's, nephew's, cousin's, former roommate." instead.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-24, 10:12 AM

Sounds like something a Pixar villain might say. :P

I think the Force is better off this way. Sabine being able to learn how to wield the Force despite having no apparent aptitude for it indicates that the Force itself is far less exclusive than the Jedi think it is. It also makes more sense anyway. Why would a sentient form of energy that exists around and permeates all life decide only ten thousand people at any given point in time are allowed to wield it?

It's such an arbitrary limitation and that's not even getting into reconciling that with how certain species in the galaxy are naturally born with an aptitude to wield the Force in ways unique to their biology.

It makes more sense to me, personally, that the Jedi Order limits how many children it accepts as younglings each year to ensure there are enough Jedi to teach them, especially if each youngling is expected to one day become padawans and they'd need one Jedi Knight or Master for each padawan.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-24, 11:45 AM

Thing is, until Rise of Skywalker the story isn't about Rey. She's one of the people in it, but it's not about her more than it's about Finn. (I'd say Poe as well but he kinda has the problem that he didn't do much in TFA other than look pretty and fly ships good.)

So it didn't need to "justify her being the centre of this story" because she wasn't. (Also that's just a baffling approach to story all round really, the protagonist is the protagonist because they're the one the story knocks on the door of just in time for second breakfast.)

TRoS forgot Finn was a character except when he had something to tell Rey, that he didn't tell her because Finn who? so that makes it seem like Rey was "the centre" of the story, but TRoS is an incompetent hack job which forgets that its characters want to tell each other things and does fakeout character deaths that don't matter for cheap pathos twice in a row in service for one of the stupidest macguffin hunts in all of cinema history (Seriously, if you translate the ancient forbidden script on this dagger it tells you where to stand to line it up to point to a thing that hasn't been there for more than a couple of decades and also is only like that coincidentally and the only person who could possibly have made it has no need to make it because they know where the thing *that* points to is in the first place).

Sapphire Guard

2024-07-24, 11:47 AM

Paradoxically, making the force open to everyone makes it more elitist, which is why the PT was by far the best at representation of Force users. People heard 'midichlorian count' and stopped paying attention to things like Anakin being massively defeated repeatedly.

If the Force is available to everyone with training, then that means it stays in the hands of the elites like Sabine, a princess who can afford to to take massive amounts of time to train. No more farmers become Force Users, because they have farm work to do instead.

If it is random, then you have to train that famer because you can't afford to waste powerful candidates. Slaves like Anakin can break out of their circ*mstances. If it's 'anyone with training', that doesn't happen anymore. And the force becomes a class issue, because the elites can control who gets training and who doesn't.

The best thing to have done with Rey Nobody was not to treat it like a big deal, not to make it a major plot point. Hilariously, this means in and out of universe everyone ends up completely ignoring that Finn is nobody too. Rey especially comes off as very self centred for not noticing this.

Everyone else is an NPC along for the ride, set dressing.

Nope, people like Padme, Han and Lando have massive impacts all the time.

pendell

2024-07-24, 12:18 PM

You mean the guy who was luckily shot down and just happened to be in position to ram the bridge of a flagship which just happened to have just lost its bridge deflector without any chance to compensate?

...

How lucky.

Except there's no luck in the GFFA.

What's really happening, in my opinion, is that the Force , light and dark, is in conflict. Every beat of the battle of Endor is an aspect, a symptom of this underlying conflict.

We can argue whether the events in the throne room influence the Force which guides and directs the chances of battle outside, or whether they merely reflect the currents in the Force surrounding them. Does the Force control your actions, or obey your commands? Or both?

Whichever it is, the events in the throne room exactly mirror the events outside. It may seem , that these events are entirely separated but, in the Force, it is all one seamless whole.

Time and Distance have no more meaning in the Force than size does.

I believe that if Luke had embraced the Dark Side in the throne room, the Dark Side would have been ascendant, and all the little chances, all the little coincidences, all the one-in-a-million miracles that allow an out-numbered and out-planned fleet suckered into a trap to pull off a victory ... simply wouldn't be there. If anything, the chances would have gone the other way.

Perhaps the Imperials on the moon have a flash of insight and refuse to open the bunker door.

Perhaps the Millenium Falcon is just two meters higher in the tunnel , and gets wiped out by a collision rather than just losing the sensor dish.

Perhaps the entire Imperial fleet experiences a sudden jump in efficiency as the Dark Side empowers and strengthens them while blinding and confusing the Rebels.

Perhaps the fallout is not the destruction of the Second Death Star, but a second Order 66. Which was the fallout of the last throne room confrontation.

I believe that it was the individual choices of Luke and others which shaped the Force to bring about that outcome. Thus, the Throne Room confrontation was not a sideshow but an absolutely critical part of the battle. If nothing else, it distracted the Emperor from the battle outside as he concentrated on the temptation of Luke, who was right in front of him.

The Novelization of ROTJ describes Luke's escape to the shuttle this way.

Smoke was everywhere, substantial rumblings came from all directions at once, people were running and shouting. Electrical fires, steam explosions, cabin depressurizations, disruption of chain-of-command. Added to this, the continued bombardments by Rebel cruiserssmelling fear in the enemymerely heightened the sense of hysteria that was already pervasive.

For the Emperor was dead. The central, powerful evil that had been the cohesive force to the Empire was gone; and when the dark side was this diffused, this nondirected this was simply where it led.

Confusion. Desperation. Damp fear.

In the midst of this uproar, Luke had made it, somehow, to the main docking baywhere he was trying to carry the hulking deadweight of his fathers weakening body toward an Imperial shuttle. Halfway there, his strength finally gave out, though; and he collapsed under the strain.

The Empire, in the novelization, was held together by the Emperor. When he left the scene, the Imperial Forces came apart. It's not hard to imagine them fighting at less than 100% efficiency during the time period Palpatine was focusing on Luke instead of them.

This concept would later be formalized as the force ability of Battle Meditation in the Zahn and KOTOR works, but the fundamental ideas go right back to the original trilogy.

You can choose to believe, I suppose, that this is not the case; that the battle in the throne room is entirely inconsequential. But I can't imagine Lucas taking up so much of the movie showing that scene if it wasn't consequential somehow. If anything, it is the battle in the throne room, from a movie perspective, that is the fulcrum of the story while the battle outside is mere stage dressing.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-24, 12:25 PM

It only becomes elitist because the Jedi Order is very restrictive about who they'll train, who they'll allow to train others and what both parties need to give up in order to do so. It's no real different to reading and writing. Five hundred years ago only the wealthy and the clergy were allowed to learn how to read and write yet now over 87% of the people on the planet are considered literate. Why? Simply due to the fact that the more people there are that know how to do a thing, the more people there are who can teach others to do it as well. It took humanity half a millennia to pull that off so the Jedi Order, which has existed for nigh on 25'000 years, has no excuse. For tens of thousands of years those farmers could have been teaching each other how to wield the Force. Why did the Jedi decide only they were allowed to?

If reading and writing is too "real world", then take lightningbending from Avatar the Last Airbender instead as another example. Once it was restricted to the royal family of the Fire Nation and they guarded the knowledge very closely and treated it as something too difficult for normal people to learn, but fast forward seventy years and not only is the knowledge widespread but innovations allow lightningbending to be used in new ways the Fire Nation's royal family would have never imagined. By the events of The Legend of Korra it's actually pretty easy to learn how to lightningbend and near enough everyone that can firebend is also able to lightningbend and they use this to power entire cities. People literally get paid to do this stuff. It's almost as if allowing people to teach each other is much better than demanding only you should teach anyone.

Huyang made it pretty clear that Sabine would never have been allowed to become a youngling because her m-count was practically non-existent. It took a galactic war, the wiping out of the Jedi Order and two decades of Imperial rule before someone decided to give her a shot, but how many years of training did she actually need once Ahsoka began training her? Not a whole lot. In fact, for Sabine, it was less about how much training she needed and more about the emotional support she needed, which makes sense. Wielding the Force is itself less about technical knowledge and more about your mental state, kinda like how Magneto in X-Men First Class had to find the emotional balance between serenity and rage to fully unlock his power.

Batcathat

2024-07-24, 12:57 PM

But if everyone can learn to use the Force, but not everyone has the opportunity to study, that is something that can actually be changed (at least on a smaller scale, if not the entire galaxy). If the Force is only for people deemed special enough by the universe, then that's just the way it is, forever. It can be elitist either way, but one of them doesn't have to stay that way.

Not to mention that if you're one of the one if a gazillion or so deemed fit by fate to use the Force, you might feel a lot of pressure to do so, whether you actually want to or not, while if everyone can use it, it's okay to choose not to.

Darth Credence

2024-07-24, 01:40 PM

I can get behind what Sapphire Guard is saying. I don't know that I would have said it, but I see the reasoning and kind of agree.

If everyone can become equally skilled in the Force, or at least close enough, then it becomes about other advantages. Did you have the ability to hire Jedi tutors for your children so they were using the force from a young age, or did Mom and Dad with no real skills of their own try to teach you? Was it assumed that as an elite you would wield the Force so you got training at all, as opposed to being in a family just trying to eke out a living and therefore have nothing to give for Force training? Can your parents afford to pay your way into a good Force school, or do you have to hope for a scholarship or work through school? These are all things that would need to be considered if everyone had about the same shot at using the Force, and those who do get to grow up learning the Force would be far too likely to think that they were actually special when compared to people who did not grow up learning the Force from the cradle.

Any attempts to democratize the Force so that everyone has an equal shot are going up against strong headwinds. People who could currently have extra access to the Force will have an incentive to prevent others from learning it, because it is a clear advantage in life and they don't want to dilute their advantage. Sith will try to prevent a lot of good people from learning the Force, while simultaneously opening training grounds available to anyone to come learn the Force with their special intro class, "Your Hate Makes You Powerful". We aren't talking about everyone learning to read, after all, we're talking about everyone learning how to shoot lightning from their fingertips.

Bloodlines passing it down with almost no people without the bloodline having it is as elitist, though. Then you get people breeding specifically to get Force users. Force-using families would end up running things in a lot of places, since it's much easier to gain power when you can tell someone what to do and they'll think it's their idea. And then there will be marriages between these royal families attempting to up the force capabilities of their children. I think there are plenty of books and stories out there covering this type of society, and they often are about a person without a bloodline helping a revolution to overthrow them.

The least elitist is, IMO, about what I think the GFFA represents - everyone has a random shot at being powerful, children of powerful beings have an increased but not guaranteed shot, and everyone has enough of an ability that if they worked really hard at it, they could at least function. Kind of the professional athlete model. A random person may be born with athletic gifts that allow them to become a professional athlete and gain fame and fortune. Children of professional athletes are much more likely to be athletes themselves, but some end up not being so at all, and some end up being good but not greats - you may get the Manning family (sorry for football references!) where they crank out great QBs, or you may get the Simms family where the father was a SB MVP, and the son played in college but not well enough to be drafted into the NFL. Staying with the analogy, even someone with almost no athletic ability could, with motivation and a willingness to work, be a starter on a high school team, and possibly even play in college. But they won't be able to become an NFL player, or a Jedi on par with Obi Wan.

I think that last is what the GFFA has, because it's the only way I can reconcile everything. Clearly, without question, bloodline matters. That was established when Obi Wan told Luke his father was a Jedi and so he could be one, in the first movie. Broom boy firmly establishes that anyone can get the ability at random, unless they decide to flesh out the character and establish he was actually the scion of Obi Wan and Satine. Sabine in Ahsoka establishes that anyone can learn, and also pretty clearly lays out that not everyone can rise to the heights. The only thing missing is a goodconfirmation that the strength of the parents matters but isn't determinative.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-24, 02:12 PM

I'm not entirely sure how much bloodline actually matters.

Yes Luke and Leia were exceptionally strong in the Force because of their father but their father was literally the Chosen One. He's kind of a unique case, as any progeny of his bloodline would be, so we should probably remove the Skywalkers from the discussion.

That leaves us with very few examples to draw conclusions from. Was Rey as powerful in the Force as she was because she was Palpatine's biological daughter or because she was the protagonist? How many children of Jedi do we actually know about? There's Kanan's son Jacen, who is Force sensitive, but there's also Bode's daughter Kata who may or may not be. I don't believe we ever hear about brothers or sisters joining the Order together except for twins, but if it happens it would be pretty difficult to hide that two Jedi were biologically related.

Of course the biggest issue of "Force aptitude is hereditary" is that hereditary traits spread exponentially. One person has three children and those three children have nine between them and those nine go on to have twenty seven between them and so on and so forth. Even if you considered that not all of those descendent would be born with the same aptitude, a mere ten generations later you have more people descended from that one person born with aptitude in using the Force than the entire Jedi Order put together.

Given that it's functionally impossible for the entire Jedi Order to be able to trace their genealogy back to a common ancestor that was alive ten generations ago (which is only two hundred and fifty years) either Force aptitude is not hereditary or the Jedi Order goes out of its way to avoid recruiting more than one person from a DNA pool. No brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, grandparents, etc.

Or, for a more controversial supposition, the Jedi Order intentionally removes sources of high m-count from the galactic gene pool by recruiting those born with particularly high Force aptitude and using monastic traditions to coerce them into celibacy, which allows them to artificially control and limit how many people are born each year with an aptitude in using the Force and how strong that aptitude is.

Maybe the Jedi Order is more like the Bene Gesserit than we thought, which would imply that - given the Jedi Order is portrayed as the good guys - nobody has clocked yet that the Bene Gesserit are bad guys.

Sapphire Guard

2024-07-24, 02:27 PM

Wouldn't Hutt space be full of powerful Force Users if that was true?

AMX

2024-07-24, 02:32 PM

Just FTR, Clone Wars showed a toddler, explicitly too young to start training, levitate stuff using the Force.

Not to mention Episode I implied Anakin was already using Force Precognition during podracing before he ever heard about the Force.

So it looks like some people just spontaneously manifest Force abilities.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-24, 02:41 PM

Wouldn't Hutt space be full of powerful Force Users if that was true?

It probably is, but without anyone to teach them how to use what they've got they won't be able to do much with it. Look at Ezra. Even without formal training he could subconsciously use the Force but his abilities were quite weak until he received instruction. In the span of just a few short years he went from not being able to connect with a cat to being able to connect with a whole bunch of intergalactic space whales.

Errorname

2024-07-24, 02:48 PM

Thing is, until Rise of Skywalker the story isn't about Rey. She's one of the people in it, but it's not about her more than it's about Finn.

Finn is also some random guy with no connection to any of the legacy characters, and the end result is that it takes a very long time (two whole movies!) for the sequels to get both him and Rey to the point where they actually feel invested in the story that they are supposed to be the new main characters of.

The story thinks it's doing something clever by having Rey come from extremely humble origins instead of being the chosen heir to the Skywalker lineage to become the hero, but this is not only not subversive for the franchise (Anakin was born a literal slave, the Skywalkers aren't like an ancient noble lineage or something) she still has this grand destiny because even in Last Jedi she was chosen by the Force itself to be Kylo's opposite.

The thing that makes Luke being a Skywalker dramatically useful is not because it gives Luke some great birthright, but because it gives him a reason to care about Vader and Kenobi. I buy that Luke Skywalker wants to see the good in his father and bring him back to the light, I really struggle to see that for Rey wanting to see the good in some guy who murdered that cool old dude and nearly killed her only friend.

The battle in the throne room is obviously hugely consequential! The stakes are "can Luke save his father" and "will Luke resist the pull of the Dark Side", which in a story where Luke and Vader are two of the most important characters are massively high stakes and the beating heart of the drama.

But being the most important part of the drama does not mean that it is the most important part of the Star War itself.

Darth Credence

2024-07-24, 02:48 PM

"The Force is strong in my family. My father had it, I have it, and my sister has it." Luke to his sister, Leia

Always two there are, my brother: a Master, and an apprentice. And you are the apprentice. Maul to his brother, Savage.

Stass Allie, Adi Gallia's cousin, takes her place on the council after Gallia's death.

Palpatine clones himself to create Force-sensitive descendants.

If we include video games, you get the Shan dynasty as well.

If we include Legends, it cannot all be covered here.

Bloodline matters. It isn't everything, but it matters.

pendell

2024-07-24, 02:50 PM

Just FTR, Clone Wars showed a toddler, explicitly too young to start training, levitate stuff using the Force.

Not to mention Episode I implied Anakin was already using Force Precognition during podracing before he ever heard about the Force.

So it looks like some people just spontaneously manifest Force abilities.

Not just there. Rock back to Episode IV, Death Star mission briefing. The pilot next to Luke exclaims it's "impossible, even with a computer" to hit a 2 meter target from an x-wing with a proton torpedo.

Luke shrugs this off and says he used to shoot womp-rats on Tatooine from his skyhopper "they're not much bigger than two meters".

If Qui-Gon had been standing at the room at that moment he might have said: "You must have Jedi skills to achieve that kind of marksmanship", and marked him out as potentially strong in the Force, the way he marked out Anakin as potentially Jedi-level when he was able to race pods, which most humans can't do.

So the idea of unconscious force-users goes back all the way to the first movie in the trilogy. At least, from a certain point of view.

....

Of course, if the GFFA had guided weapons similar to the modern era the entire sequence would have played out very differently. The X-wings wouldn't have to close with the Death Star at all; they could program their weapons with the specific set of coordinates and volley them from standoff range. The empire, of course, would have computer-guided point defense weaponry. So the Rebels volley hundreds or thousands of torpedoes, of which some 5 or 6 get through to impact the target. Then everyone home for cake and medals.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Errorname

2024-07-24, 03:00 PM

Always two there are, my brother: a Master, and an apprentice. And you are the apprentice. Maul to his brother, Savage.

Savage is very explicitly much less powerful than Maul and reliant on Nightsister magic to make up the difference. There's a reason his last words are "I'm not like you [Maul], I never was" as his borrowed power literally seeps out of his dying body.

If we include Legends, it cannot all be covered here.

That's a fair point, a lot of non-Lucas legends stuff went hard on the idea that force dynasties were a thing.

Which means that the Sequels spent a ton of time subverting a bunch of stuff that isn't actually within continuity anymore

Mordar

2024-07-24, 03:33 PM

I can get behind what Sapphire Guard is saying. I don't know that I would have said it, but I see the reasoning and kind of agree.

I think it would make interesting stories, but as a counterpoint in the real world (boo hiss) consider where many of the elite athletes come from relative to wealth and availability of purchasable training and academies. I grant it doesn't apply for golf, tennis and to a lesser extent hockey...but those have additional challenges.

- M

Mechalich

2024-07-24, 03:35 PM

Additionally, even when slaves or commoners get training and become powerful for whatever reason, they get co-opted into the elite class afterwards. Making the Force available to everyone produces a Force User magocracy which is, wait for it, exactly how Sith Empires are structured. The SWTOR Sith Inquisitor plotline is extremely clear on this point: the PC shows up a slave and the overseer immediately proceeds to manipulate training to have all the slaves except the one with a chosen lineage he's pre-determined is going to be the Sith from this batch, because he's a Pureblood, murdered. The PC only survivors because they're unreasonably bad*** and because Lord Zash has been manipulating the process in their favor because, unbeknownst to the player, the Inquisitor is actually a descendant of the legendary Lord Kallig and has the specific bloodline Zash needs to try and body/soul swap with the PC later on. And, of course, by the end of the plotline the Inquisitor becomes a Darth, takes a seat on the Council and serves as one of the rulers of the Empire, having played political games from the Core to the Outer Rim.

At the same time, one of the reasons the Jedi Order is so forcibly monastic is out of a deliberate rejection of magocracy. The Jedi could simply rule the Republic outright. In theory, they'd even be good at it: supernatural insight through the Force is really, really useful when it comes to things like resource disposition and rooting out corruption. In Legends (and with some hints in Disney canon) this even happened periodically - the Jedi would take control of the government at points where the democratic process broke down. However, power corrupts, and the Jedi knew they had to give up power immediate once a crisis ended or they would fall. Arguably, the position of the Order in the PT is already too close to the government.

Bloodline matters. It isn't everything, but it matters.

Bloodline is funny, in part because authors have been inconsistent and in no small part because 'I am your father' establishes at least some inheritability to the Force. However, at the same time, there's clearly a lot of variability. Legends has multiple examples of the children of powerful Force users who are not Force sensitive at all. The best example is Theron Shan, who's the son of Jedi Grandmaster Satele Shan but can't touch the Force to save his life.

The best way, in my opinion, of how bloodline works is that the Force often finds it useful to share its gift through lineage. For example, if the number of Jedi has been depleted, the Force will make their kids and relatives and friends sensitive because they are more likely to train such people and therefore this will increase numbers faster. Likewise, the obsession of Sith with producing a lineage may in fact influence the Force to make that happen. At the same time, trying to simply 'spawn in' countless Force sensitives via artificial means such as cloning violates the will of the Force and the clones almost inevitably go insane as a result.

Darth Credence

2024-07-24, 03:42 PM

Much less powerful, but still able to use the Force. The post was a response to the idea that bloodlines don't matter much, which included a statement about not seeing siblings other than twins being recruited. Maul and Savage are Force-using siblings who aren't twins from a canon source. We also have Force-using cousins from a canon source with Gallia and Allie. We don't know much about the others, so we don't know how much bloodline plays in. We know Obi Wan was from Stewjon, because Jon Stewart asked Lucas about it and that's what Lucas said. We know that he remembers his father's hands, his mother's clothes, and that he may have had a brother. We don't know if his father was a washout youngling, if his mother was a knight that left the order, if his brother was ever brought to the temple, or if he was just a random mutation. Maybe I've missed something somewhere where it says it for Obi Wan, but I am much more positive that of those we know about their backgrounds, more are part of Force bloodlines than are not. We know Luke and Leia are, we know Anakin kind of is by definition, we know Mae and Osha kind of are by definition, we know Maul and Savage are, we know Jacen Syndulla is, we know Rey and Snoke are. We think broom boy is not, because that was the intent, but the way TRoS went, he could be another baby Palpatine. And the witches are interesting because that's a clan of Force-sensitive types - when a clan all has a physical trait, it is easy to assume that that is a hereditary trait shared by the clan.

VoxRationis

2024-07-24, 04:04 PM

You've hit upon my pet theory. Force sensitivity is exceptionally dangerous and disruptive to society. We don't want the markets of the galaxy to be filled with telekinetic pickpockets, the halls of politics to be dominated by politicians who can literally control minds, or the Outer Rim to be populated with petty warlords that can Force-choke their way to significance. So we take the most sensitive people and put them in an environment where the major causes of temptation to the Dark Side (attachment, desperation, fear, lust for power) aren't relevant, give them just enough status and comfort that they will be willing to defend their position and the institution in which they are embedded against rogue Force users, and stop them from breeding. A parallel can be drawn to the Circle of Magi in Dragon Age, though that institution is more openly hostile to its inmates and therefore requires a separate arm to enforce it.

Precure

2024-07-24, 04:08 PM

I think repeating this should be a litmus test for people who didn't pay attention to the movie.

None of that was burned, Rey stole it. Yoda knew that, that's why he says "she has everything she needs". You see them on the Falcon as they leave.

I have no idea this was the case. If that's the case, it sounds contradictory with Yoda's talk about leaving the past behind, so I don't get the point of all that.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-24, 04:10 PM

If your position is that the Jedi Order intentionally prevents the widespread adoption and utilisation of the Force because they don't trust anyone outside of their group to use the Force responsibly, that's one thing. To argue that everyone in the galaxy being able to use the Force would in some way inevitably lead to the creation of a Sith Empire is a bit nihilistic, though.

Yes bad people would use the Force to do bad things but by and large the Force would be used for mundane things, improving the lives of people who care more about putting food on the table and paying bills than the cosmic balance of good and evil. That's just how life is. It's never as exciting as you think it'll be.

Plenty of worlds in Star Wars seem to be home to entire civilisations where using the Force is a mundane part of everyday life. That says to me that living in harmony with the Force is not something to be feared and that restricting access to the Force to individuals the Jedi Order authorises is antithetical to that co-existence.

I have no idea this was the case. If that's the case, it sounds contradictory with Yoda's talk about leaving the past behind.

Oh no it's totally contradictory. It was a copout. Rian Johnson wanted to make a bold statement about how Rey didn't need the traditions of the Jedi Order to establish a new one and then backtracked by the end of the movie by having Rey explicitly save those very same traditions.

Zevox

2024-07-24, 04:21 PM

I literally never saw anyone in the post-TFA Star Wars theorymaking boom try to argue for anything other than Kylo being the apprentice who fell and this happening before Luke left, and people came up with some wild nonsense theories in those days.
Indeed. I was making a point about the difference between what's stated, what's implied, and what's not there at all. Let's make that more explicit then, shall we?

Stated: Luke was training the next generation of Jedi. An apprentice turned on him and destroyed it all. He felt responsible for this, and those who knew him best believe he left to seek the first Jedi temple.
Implied: Kylo was likely the fallen apprentice, and destroying his work likely means killing the other apprentices.
Not present at all: That "feeling responsible" means he withdrew from the world out of depression and self-pity to become a hermit, or even that the destruction of his nascent NJO was the reason he left to begin with.

Basically everyone after Force Awakens assumed the next movie would be an Empire copy with Luke in the Yoda role, so I disagree, I think TFA gives a pretty strong sense of where it wants the story to go.
That's because TFA was already a New Hope copy, not because it was the only option that made sense from the setup. People also hoped that wouldn't be the case, since being a New Hope copy was pretty much the major criticism of TFA from those who were critical of it.

That his efforts to rebuild the Jedi Order were destroyed by Kylo is not ambiguous in the Force Awakens. Likewise, that the First Order is taking over the galaxy and thus the victory he and the rebellion won in Empire was completely ephemeral is established in Force Awakens.
But that those things constitute "Luke's life goals having already failed catastrophically," as you stated before, is not. That's the point here. You are reading into the film something it does not state, and indeed provides at least some contra evidence towards (the implication in the opening crawl that the First Order's rise was after he left).

Part of the problem with Luke is that he's not a protagonist in these movies.

That means that whatever he does, he can't actually be the one who resolves the plot. So the idea that he's off doing something super useful and critical to defeating the First Order is a non-starter.
Nobody wanted him to do that. He can play a supporting role in things in any number of ways, just one example being finding some mcguffin that Rey and the other new protagonists would find useful. The problem is how he was cast aside as a failure who spent years wallowing in depression and self-pity, then just dies at the end of TLJ for no reason.

Not necessarily a smoothbrain thing.

Everyone else is an NPC along for the ride, set dressing.
Nonsense. The Star Wars setting was always pretty egalitarian about this. While force sensitivity is rare, anyone could always have been born for sensitive. While it was more likely if your parents were force-sensitive, it was nonetheless fundamentally down to random chance. It was totally unremarkable to find out that Rey was force-sensitive, after all, her parentage only became a plot point because Abrams specifically threw in that weird tease about her having been abandoned on Jakku as a child, not because she was force-sensitive. Similarly, broom kid at the end of TLJ is completely unremarkable and feels like a total non-sequitur ending, as there was never anything stopping random kids from being force-sensitive. That's why that moment falls totally flat; it doesn't communicate what it's claimed to communicate at all, and that it was trying to communicate that simply betrays a completely lack of understanding of the setting.

And "Destiny" was only ever code for "this is the person the plot is about in this story."

And plenty of non-force-sensitives have nonetheless been major characters, or the main characters of their own stories. Han Solo, Lando Calrissian, Wedge Antilles, Boba Fett, etc. The setting does tend to focus on force users, because they're the most unusual part about it, but they don't have any sort of monopoly on doing important things. Hell, even in the first movie Tarkin is as much the main villain as Vader is, and Leia and Han are only slightly less important than Luke on the protagonist side of things.

Batcathat

2024-07-24, 04:42 PM

Why would that lead to a magocracy any more than "only special people get to use the Force"?

Errorname

2024-07-24, 04:48 PM

Much less powerful, but still able to use the Force.

Was he able to use the force before the Nightsisters amped him up with magic?

For all Last Jedi's ambition to present itself as deconstructing Star Wars it really lacks the courage or conviction to actually commit.

Implied: Kylo was likely the fallen apprentice, and destroying his work likely means killing the other apprentices.

Not present at all: That "feeling responsible" means he withdrew from the world out of depression and self-pity to become a hermit, or even that the destruction of his nascent NJO was the reason he left to begin with.

But that those things constitute "Luke's life goals having already failed catastrophically," as you stated before, is not.

So do you disagree that Luke had the life goal of restoring the Jedi or do you disagree that a student turning evil and destroying everything he built is a catastrophic failure?

(the implication in the opening crawl that the First Order's rise was after he left).

Kylo Ren was corrupted by the Supreme Leader of the First Order and the film is not ambiguous about that being a thing which happened before Luke vanished, so no it wasn't.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-24, 04:49 PM

Why would that lead to a magocracy any more than "only special people get to use the Force"?

That's the thing, it doesn't. Even the Jedi Order itself is a magocracy, with the most powerful Jedi having the most authority and influence as members of the Council - and they explicitly prevent anyone who doesn't play by their rules from joining that Council.

Besides, if everyone is a wizard does it really matter if wizards are in charge of the government?

Sapphire Guard

2024-07-24, 06:27 PM

Re literacy, there is much more to it than that. Paper became easier and cheaper to produce, so more jobs needed literacy, education became more important, etc, etc.

There's no technological reason that makes Force abilities easier. The thing about the Jedi oppression is that it always has to be made up, because none of it ever happens onscreen. What we get onscreen is 'Jedi discover new force tradition, and are ordered to leave it alone. Dooku is allowed to leave and start agitating against the Republic without them losing respect for him. Jedi peacefully interact with the Nightsisters. And so on, and so on. The Jedi obviously don't have the absolute power that would be necessary for this kind of oppression even if they wanted to. They don't even have the power to control things like the trade federation.

What sway they have is only over the Republic, so that would mean lots of superpowered force sensitives even in Hutt space. And even after they are exterminated and don't hold any power anymore,we don't get an increase of powerful Force sensitives.

In the New Republic era, there doesn't seem to be a notable increase in Force Sensitivity. Why not? How are the Jedi restricting knowledge decades after they are all dead?

What we have against that is the idea that the training takes such time and dedication that it's difficult for anyone to learn by themselves, but it would only take one person to spread it openly in one of the vast areas they don't have influence. It would have happened.

Ahsoka could have started a school. Instead she trains one person, who has a lot of free time. Why? Why doesn't she train other people?

We don't know, because the Ahsoka show was not interested in answering questions. Any questions. And here we come to the other problem, because you keep going back and forth between ' the force is so difficult to learnt that the Jedi are able to restrict it' and 'it's so easy that anyone can pick it up in very little time.' Gotta pick one.

In theory. In practice, the rich elites have a lot more time and opportunity. Everyone can't learn, because you need the people who are actually doing their jobs instead of studying the Force. Random chance is at least fair, because you can't claim to be better than other people, just lucky, and it allows for a degree of social mobility

Genetics appear to matter but not be decisive. There have been frequent attempts to clone force sensitives, which occasionally get lucky, but much more often go badly, either failing or having some horrible side effect. Darth Vader literally built a factory to clone starkiller, and had only two successes in thousands of test subjects. Even Palpatine's cloning projects only put him in a decaying body with a shelf life.

Palpatine cannot be from a massive Force Sensitive bloodline, because if he was the Jedi would know.

So how do those worlds exist, wouldn't the Jedi have prevented that if they were as restrictive as you claim?

Not the most powerful. If it was, Anakin would have been given a chair. Power doesn't get you a Council chair, wisdom does.

Zevox

2024-07-24, 06:38 PM

I'm going to concede this because I refuse to go trawling through a movie I hate and pre-TLJ supplemental material to win a forum argument about this, but for the record I do not remember any ambiguity or doubt about who the fallen apprentice was at the time of TFA's release.
:smallconfused: You linked (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=26048208&postcount=148) to the scene I'm referencing earlier, because I had forgotten it existed. Han says: "One boy, an apprentice, turned against him and destroyed it all." That is the totality of his explanation of that event. Given the later reveal of Kylo as Han's son, there's an obvious reason he'd be reluctant to be more specific, so we can certainly take it as implied that it was him, but it is not stated directly.

It is not ambiguous that the destruction of the NJO happened prior to his disappearance, so it would be weird if it wasn't part of the reason he left. I guess Luke could be the sort of stoic emotionless robot who could be unaffected by his own nephew turning evil and killing all his other students, but uh, that sounds worse to me.
I've given suggestions for other reasons he could have left besides going to become a hermit out of depression that don't make him out to be some kind of stoic emotionless robot. Going to look for some mcguffin, whether an object or lost knowledge. Going to establish another new Jedi Order in secret. Hiding from Snoke because there's some danger if he gets ahold of Luke specifically. And again, he can be motivated in leaving by that event without the intended action being to simply retreat from everything and become a hermit - he can "feel responsible" for it and have that move him to want to do something to fix the situation, and he believes that whatever he's up to on this world will do that, but it's taking longer than he expected, or he got stranded there after he arrived, etc. There are plenty of perfectly viable options.

So do you disagree that Luke had the life goal of restoring the Jedi or do you disagree that a student turning evil and destroying everything he built is a catastrophic failure?
The latter. That's a massive setback, but it's only a catastrophic failure if he gives up on the goal afterward. It's not like his students were all of the force-sensitives in the galaxy or anything, he can start over. And you would also fully expect him to want to do something about Kylo, especially given he's his nephew.

Kylo Ren was corrupted by the Supreme Leader of the First Order and the film is not ambiguous about that being a thing which happened before Luke vanished, so no it wasn't.
It's implied that Kylo was corrupted by Snoke before then. When Snoke became Supreme Leader of the First Order, or when the First Order's ascent to power began, are not established, and the one thing that contains any implication, the text crawl, would imply it happened after Luke went missing. Again, you are making assumptions that TFA doesn't provide any information on.

Errorname

2024-07-24, 07:21 PM

:smallconfused: You linked (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=26048208&postcount=148) to the scene I'm referencing earlier, because I had forgotten it existed.

I should probably have said "keep trawling" instead of "go trawling", but that's just me messing up my tenses.

The latter. That's a massive setback, but it's only a catastrophic failure if he gives up on the goal afterward. It's not like his students were all of the force-sensitives in the galaxy or anything, he can start over. And you would also fully expect him to want to do something about Kylo, especially given he's his nephew.

You could do that. I don't think it's the most natural follow-up to all of what's in Force Awakens, but there is room to do that.

Zevox

2024-07-24, 07:28 PM

I still call the Luke stuff a constraint because the destruction of Luke's new Jedi and him vanishing while the Empire rose again are pretty hard limits on where his story went after ROTJ, but fully agreed that there's enough blank space that they didn't have to do bitter old hermit who's given up on everything.
Thank you. That's all I've been getting at the whole time. TFA has plenty it can be blamed for without that, I don't disagree with you on that at all. It was a poor foundation for a new trilogy in a number of ways. It's just not responsible for that particular failing, the blame there falls on TLJ.

ecarden

2024-07-24, 07:36 PM

Thank you. That's all I've been getting at the whole time. TFA has plenty it can be blamed for without that, I don't disagree with you on that at all. It was a poor foundation for a new trilogy in a number of ways. It's just not responsible for that particular failing, the blame there falls on TLJ.

Errorname

2024-07-24, 08:28 PM

It's just not responsible for that particular failing, the blame there falls on TLJ.

TLJ just had more opportunity to take an alternate path then they did for stuff like Han's fate and the First Order.

You can also just do a timeskip between movies and reveal what happened through dialogue or flashbacks, although that has it's own problems.

Zevox

2024-07-24, 09:45 PM

I tend to agree. I also think, though it's a powerful image, ending the film with Rey offering Luke the lightsaber is a mistake as it forces you either into 'let's begin the same time we ended' or 'let's pull an Endgame and do an almost immediate time skip, after we set stuff up.' Neither of which is generally great (though Endgame does well with the second). At least some of the difficulty unwinds a bit if you aren't trapped in 'everything is happening at lightning speed.'
Eh, I see what you're getting at, but am not sure I agree. They were equally free to pick up shortly after Rey met Luke as to do a significant time skip, and they didn't define how long it took her to get to him, so it doesn't really create too much of a problem IMO.

I mean, I do think "Luke as a Yoda figure" is probably what JJ was expecting the next movie to do, and if that wasn't where JJ wanted things to go I think his set-up was less than ideal for a Luke that had more of a purpose
In the sense that I'm sure he expected Luke to train Rey, I'd agree. I don't see that needing the reclusive hermit element though - although I'm sure Luke being on a seemingly uninhabited world was meant to evoke that as well. And even if they did want to do that element specifically to parallel Yoda (which is not a good idea; repeating elements of the OT too much being the main criticism of TFA), I'd say it would actually be better to also use the same reason for that as Yoda had: being in hiding.

Mechalich

2024-07-24, 10:30 PM

Eh, I see what you're getting at, but am not sure I agree. They were equally free to pick up shortly after Rey met Luke as to do a significant time skip, and they didn't define how long it took her to get to him, so it doesn't really create too much of a problem IMO.

Or they could have just done a prolonged training montage during the course of the film. There's no reason why Episode VIII couldn't have unfolded over 6 months to a year. After all, Kylo's supposed to be completing his training in the same interval, Snoke literally orders this during TFA, so a movie in which time passes makes a great deal of sense.

This also makes sense because Episode VIII should show the New Republic rallying back after the destruction of Starkiller Base, only to face some sort of catastrophic defeat at the end of the film when the First Order reveals some kind of new superweapon. Such a move would wipe big fleets from the board and throw the ball back into the Resistance's court to pull some kind of new solution to the crisis in the final film.

A new superweapon is imperative by the way. Grinding out the win via fleet combat is something that can be done in novels and TV series, but movies are too compressed. A film gets exactly one big set piece battle and it needs to be decisive. At the galaxy-spanning scale of Star Wars, that means some kind of superweapon. TRoS almost gets it right: a Star Destroyer with a superlaser is perfectly appropriate, it should just be a single really big ship (like the Eclipse class from Dark Empire), not a pointlessly huge fleet.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-25, 02:28 AM

Yknow, sometimes you guys write so many singular points in a single post that we get situations like this one that are a nightmare to get through. In future it would be preferred if you actually wrote paragraphs with an actual point rather than going through a post and trying to dismantle it sentence by sentence, because otherwise we just end up with this and this sucks:

Re literacy, there is much more to it than that. Paper became easier and cheaper to produce, so more jobs needed literacy, education became more important, etc, etc.

You can bury your head in the sand all you like. For tens of thousands of years you havent been allowed to learn how to wield the Force without becoming a Jedi first. Where are all these Force traditions the Jedi Order apparently peacefully co-exists with? There were none in the original trilogy or the prequels or the sequels. There were the Nightsisters in The Clone Wars but they and the Jedi did not get on at all. The Jedi dont even intervene when they see slavery being practiced right in front of their eyes so its not so surprising they left the Nightsisters alone on Dathomir too.

Also, just for the record, the Jedi have no reason to make it easier to learn how to use the Force is a pretty terrible excuse. Knowledge exists to be shared. Anyone who withholds knowledge on the basis that they do not benefit from more people having access to it is just being greedy and selfish. If everyone can learn how to use the Force, the Jedi Order is morally obligated to spread that knowledge so that everyone is given the opportunity to.

because the knowledge of how to wield the Force is a closely guarded secret of the Jedi Order. Weve been through this already. If other Force traditions existed after the Jedi Order was wiped out, or even before it was wiped out, why werent they active in Hutt space as you say? Maybe its because even in Hutt space the Jedi show up and take children to become padawans? Or are you saying only citizens of the Republic are allowed to become Jedi? Because thats a terrible thing to suggest.

In the New Republic era, there doesn't seem to be a notable increase in Force Sensitivity. Why not? How are the Jedi restricting knowledge decades after they are all dead?

Its almost as if the sequel trilogy decided the only person allowed to train any students is Luke Skywalker and they all had to die before The Force Awakens and it was a stupid decision that only limits the narrative possibilities of the era.

It isnt difficult to learn by yourself, it is impossible. If you could be self taught then there would be people out there in the galaxy that can wield the Force quite well even without Jedi instruction but we know that nobody like that exists. Mae shows up, kills Indara, the Jedi do not doubt or question that she was trained by a Jedi. Evidently self-taught Force wielders dont exist and no other nebulous Force tradition could train someone to kill a Jedi either.

Ahsoka could have started a school. Instead she trains one person, who has a lot of free time. Why? Why doesn't she train other people?

Luke cant very well be the last Jedi if every other Jedi that survived Imperial rule took on students. You seem pretty hung up on this idea that the only reason she trained Sabine is because shes a rich and carefree princess with lots of free time. Well just forget that she was heavily involved in the Rebellion and was spending most of her time after the fall of the Empire helping Ahsoka track down Ezra. Not sure where all this free time apparently comes from.

Dont have to pick one at all. Sabine picked it up within a few years as a part-time student. Weve seen how Ahsoka trained her, it was a few hours a day at most. How long was Luke on Dagobah? A few weeks? Yet it was enough for him to learn the basics. Evidently you can pick it up pretty quickly, but you need someone willing to teach you and the Jedi have evidently limited who is allowed to teach otherwise thered be more teachers right?

So how do those worlds exist, wouldn't the Jedi have prevented that if they were as restrictive as you claim?

Notice how youre falsely conflating benign oppression with wilful oppression. The Jedi refusing to spread their teachings so that regular people can take those teachings, streamline them and improve upon them and spread them further so that one day even farmers can teach each other how to wield the Force without the Jedi being involved at all is a form of benign oppression. Its wrong for the Jedi to do this because it limits the potential of others but it doesnt hurt anyone so it is benign. It does not mean the Jedi go around and kill anyone who doesnt follow the belief system of the Jedi, it just means that they protect their belief system and the secret knowledge it provides and they have laws that mean they have a monopoly on who gets to teach others how to wield the Force.

Not the most powerful. If it was, Anakin would have been given a chair. Power doesn't get you a Council chair, wisdom does.

What part of they explicitly prevent anyone who doesn't play by their rules from joining that Council is difficult to understand? You literally quoted me saying this. Dooku should have been on the Council but he was refused a seat because he was a considered to be a maverick. This is the same reason Qui-Gon was refused a seat on the Council too, because he trusted his own judgement over the will of the Council. Obi-Wan even tells him that if he played ball with the Council hed already be on it. Anakin was refused a seat on the Council for the exact same reason, because throughout the Clone Wars he had a tendency to ignore or outright disobey orders from the Council and he frequently made them look bad because, as the protagonist, he was usually right to do so.

Dragonus45

2024-07-25, 05:29 AM

Mostly because this really is easier when replying to a large post, it helps organize the response and avoid situations where you are trying to comment or reply to a specific portion of it but the response is read as being a reply to some other portion and then everything gets confused. That way just works. Still in deferance to your preference.

This simply is not true though, the relationship with other force using religions and traditions was always left as a borderline total blank. In the original occasionally mentioning other groups existed and weren't being stopped from existing, and in the new canon it simply hadn't been brought up as much. Since the core story has generally always been about the Jedi, their relationship with the Republic as it's failed protectors, and their efforts to defeat the Sith Empire and restore balance to the Force and the galaxy at large through the lens of the Skywalker family there wouldn't be any reason or space to talk about it.

Interestingly, when they did decide to start elucidating on it they explicitly confirmed that the Jedi existing as one of many groups and even were willing participants in the Convocation of the Force, which incidentally included and re canonized a couple of the EU groups mentioned like the Matukai who existed all the way back in the EU as force users who weren't Jedi and were respected by them and allowed to exist when they said they didn't want to assimilate with the Jedi.

I get that it's easy to fill in the blanks with the idea the Jedi were somehow restricting access to the force, Ahsoka opened up that can of worms in the worst way possible with it's ill thought out bs, but there are actually way less blank space than one would think in the corners of the setting. Heck considering there is literally an entire Church of the Force that was in many ways the non force sensitive branch of the Jedi despite being technically separate organizations I have to wonder why non of them pulled a Sabine after lifetimes of meditation and oneness with the force. Almost like Sabine is the odd one out here and not the standard we should judge the entire rest of the setting by. They had the easiest excuse in the world to just say that since she was raised Mandalorian no one had ever checked to see if she was potentially force sensitive or not and that would have been nice and easy, but the entire plot point feels like someone deciding to pick a fight with literally the entire rest of the canon.

Like if it was possible to just pull force powers out with some part time training how did Lor San Tekka not pull it off. It isn't like the Church didn't have access to the teachings, and it's also not like you needed an actual person involved to teach you either. Being force sensitive and having some recordings was enough at least once in the EU and I am dead certain it will happen again if it already hasn't and I just missed it in the new stuff. Wait actually Rey basically did exactly that in Force Awakens didn't she only she didn't even really have recordings? Luke was already powerful in the force and had been using it for years, that's exactly what he did when he shot up womprats around the homestead and then nailed that exhaust port without using any telemetry assistance. What he needed was help to figure out how to use it more actively and externally. Same for Anakin with pod racing despite having supposedly only human reflexes.

:Edit: I have been told by an even larger nerd than I that I forgot another Original Canon example the Zeison Sha, who hated the Jedi with a deep burning passion and told them to go for a suit-less space walk when they tried to ask them to integrate and who's philosophy was almost the exact opposite of the Jedi's and were left alone. They weren't brought in at the same time as the Matukai were yet in the new canon but given their isolationist nature they also wouldn't be showing up to the Convocation regardless. Likely it waits for them to decide what they are really doing with the Old Republic canon.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-25, 05:56 AM

Nobody wanted him to do that. He can play a supporting role in things in any number of ways, just one example being finding some mcguffin that Rey and the other new protagonists would find useful. The problem is how he was cast aside as a failure who spent years wallowing in depression and self-pity, then just dies at the end of TLJ for no reason.

The plot hasn't established any kind of need for macguffins though. The First Order's demonstrated advantage is that they have more guns and spaceships than anyone else. That's it. That's not a setup that leaves room for whatever Force doohickey Luke might have accidentally uncovered.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-25, 06:23 AM

I think the problem stems from the fact that when Star Wars finally gives us answers to questions that have been asked for a long time, some folks just don't like the answers they get because those answers mean the Jedi Order isn't as perfect as they thought.

For decades people wondered if Force sensitivity was something you inherited and, despite the fact the Jedi Order was ten thousand strong and only one of them was a Skywalker, there were quite a lot of debates about Star Wars itself being about family dynasties. How it wasn't good versus evil or even Jedi vs Sith, but Skywalkers vs Palpatines. I never really understood that myself because, again, the Jedi Order had ten thousand Jedi and none of them were related to Anakin.

So in Ahsoka we get a definitive answer. We are told that anyone can learn to wield the Force and, more importantly, that a lot of people that could wield the Force are either rejected or would have been rejected by the Jedi Order for not possessing enough innate aptitude. Suddenly we have a wrinkle. If the Force doesn't choose people to wield it, it means the Jedi Order does.

It means the Jedi Order has criteria and that is inherently less benevolent than them saying "the Force chose you to wield it and guided us to you so that we might teach you how", which is evidently how some people would prefer the Jedi Order acted.

Yet that isn't the only question we have about how the Jedi Order functions. As you say, the relationship between the Jedi and other Force religions is something that hasn't been particularly explored. We only really know of their mutual animosity with the Sith, who are the bad guys and thus the Jedi are well within their right to want to destroy. We know the Jedi and the Nightsisters don't like each other either but, as far as we can tell, the Nightsisters keep to themselves and don't hurt anyone so as long as they continue to behave themselves the Jedi leave them alone.

So then along comes The Acolyte and it gives us an answer, or at least it heavily implies one without truly committing to it. The implication in question is that there are laws that strictly forbid anyone but the Jedi Order from teaching children how to use the Force. This is an uncomfortable truth and not something some people are keen to accept, because it's another wrinkle. A law like that would only exist because the Jedi Order wants it to, for it benefits no one but themselves.

It doesn't mean the Jedi are intentionally suppressing other religions or traditions but it does mean that those religions and traditions have to adhere to the rules the Jedi set. When you're at the top, dictating the rules everyone has to play by and those rules benefit you more than anyone else, that's oppression. Even if it comes from noble intentions, it's still bad. Yes the Jedi Order made a lot of changes during the Ruusan Reformations and yes a big part of that was a tighter grip on education and that's presumably where the law stating only the Jedi Order may train children to wield the Force comes from, but that would obviously affect other cultures and groups.

The problem with this Convocation is we know basically nothing about it. Yes it was established in 382 BBY, but how long did it last? Even if we assume it's a canon thing, clearly it is no longer around in 119 BBY because that's roughly when The Acolyte is set and I find it somewhat difficult to believe a show that references cortosis and vergences would somehow forget to mention the Convocation if it still existed. The question therefore becomes "when did the Convocation cease to exist and what happened to all these religious groups that do not appear to exist any more either?"

GloatingSwine

2024-07-25, 06:43 AM

It does benefit the Jedi but it also benefits the Senate, because this is happening in the period where the Jedi are deeply enmeshed into the Republic and act in many ways as enforcers for the Senate. A law like this gives the Senate of the Republic a monopoly on force capable agents and operatives.

(If we saw much of the senate in this period we'd probably see the early signs of what would become the corrupt body Palpatine was able to manipulate and seize. Augustus became emperor in 27BC but the Gracchi were around a century before that whipping up the mob for position and power.)

Sapphire Guard

2024-07-25, 07:18 AM

Whatever the law states, it cannot be that the Jedi strictly forbid anyone from teaching children to use the Force, because if it did, as soon as the coven were known to teach children to use the force, the conversation would be over as they would clearly be in breach of it, the Jedi would just say ' you are violating this law, these are the consequences. But that doesn't happen. Instead they say 'we will test the children, and if they want to come with us we'll talk about it.'

The only thing we can know is that "Republic Law states" something, becasue the writers craftily cut off Indara before she can explain. We don't know what that is.

Dragonus45

2024-07-25, 07:22 AM

The other problem stems from the fact that from all the way back in The Last Jedi we have been seeing the new incarnation of EU rot, of writers with a bone to pick making up how they think it should work and damn the rest of the canon or writers. Hence you get Ahsoka. It's not overwriting some blank space, it's actively contradicting everything else, so it goes to the airlock. Excising the stupid from the good and moving on with life was an important talent to enjoying Star Wars pre Disney and it's still important now. And force sensitivity is absolutely inheritable and always has been, it's just not the only way be born force sensitive and also never has been. It's not something anyone was "wondering". They tried to answer a question no one asked and had already been answered anyways.

Also the Jedi order didn't make the changes in the Ruusan Reformations, the Republic did and it was 100% stripping the Jedi of a ton of power institutionally while also giving power to the senate to rule instead of the chancellor post war. The thing about them now having to find and train all the children they could was itself something everyone decided on to try and stop another Sith empire from forming and yet all of these other groups still exist at the time of the High Republic line to form the Convocation so clearly they were still training folks. And yes, we don't know a lot about the Convocation because it's new in the sense it was just introduced as part of the new High Republic line, but it establishes that at the least there are numerous other Force using/worshiping/attuned organizations existing outside the Jedi to be able to form it in the first place and if it hasn't explicitly confirmed the full history of the few that existing in the original canon they still used their names which comes with implications (More of the Sorceress particularly would be nice it would be useful to finally get some large scale non dark side alchemy or sorcery on screen). They didn't all just pop out of the ground and build a nifty new space station to hang out on, they have their own history. On the writing end they aren't sure how all that ends up either and just didn't want to Acolyte to say anything about it one way or the other but given that one of the big antagonistic forces of the High Republic is a group of radical anti anyone using the force for anything ever nutters I imagine it's going to end badly and most of the groups go off their own way again. Or they do know and don't want the Acolyte to say anything that would give it away.

If the Acolyte did say anything about it that would be something, but they chose not to let that one really important sentence finish so no it has jack to say at all. The Convocation doesn't really matter much to the story itself, since all of Darth Bortles whinging about wanting to be free to be himself mostly equals out to wanting to be free to use the Dark Side and not be thrown into the sun for it. Sure it could matter if they wanted it to, as could literally any of the groups that formed it or even if it's gone, or heck the supposedly former dark side people who's name escapes me that wanted to try and join could be relevant if they wanted them too. Literally just rattle off a list of potential other powers able to murder a Jedi even if they are supposedly in the worst case scenario all dead or integrated by force. They didn't.

One last note on the Sabine thing, there is so much wiggle room they could have given themselves between "not sensitive enough to be worth taking away and trained for everyone's safety" and "literally anyone anywhere could be a Jedi with this 6 part nights and weekends class".

The Jedi were more or less the military itself at that point, it was arguably a real necessity to strip the titles and separate those institutions. The lack of any real military institution to replace them leaving them in the position of being galactic peacekeepers anyways is it's own weird mistake but various incarnations of the Republic just deciding not to have a proper military is just a recurring bout of mass stupidity in universe at this point.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-25, 07:41 AM

The only thing we can know is that "Republic Law states" something, becasue the writers craftily cut off Indara before she can explain. We don't know what that is.

Which would be a fair point if the Jedi actually knew the girls were being trained. Sol didn't tell Indara that he saw Aniseya training Osha and Mae, but even if he did it's not like Indara could say "a Jedi did this illegal thing and saw you do that illegal thing so now you're in trouble". You can try to spin the scene so it sounds like Indara is about to say something else, but the implication seemed pretty clear. Indara was concerned the witches were training children to use the Force and Republic law has something to say about that and what could it say beyond "you're not allowed to"? It's not like Indara asked Aniseya to see her Force Training permit.

Plus we don't actually know what the consequences are or if the Jedi even have jurisdiction on Brendok. If a law exists that explicitly forbids anyone but the Jedi Order teaching children how to wield the Force, what would be an appropriate punishment for breaking that law and is it enforceable on planets that are not part of the Republic?

Sapphire Guard

2024-07-25, 08:58 AM

"We are concerned that you are training children" certainly sounds like she was aware they were training children to use the force, unless she's enforcing strict rules against training children to play the banjo. But 'we are concerned' indicates something other than 'this is illegal, here are the consequences', it's more like 'there is a possibility of wrongdoing, but there is a possibility everything is fine'. So the one thing it can't be is a blanket prohibition.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-25, 09:45 AM

Maybe it's just a cultural difference at play here but, where I'm from, if someone in a position of authority goes to someone and says "we are concerned you are doing this thing", it usually means "you are doing something you shouldn't be doing so stop doing it". Otherwise they wouldn't be showing up at all.

But sure, whatever... clearly you'd rather go on about banjos instead of actually discussing any of the points being raised so we can just stop here.

Zevox

2024-07-25, 10:26 AM

He can't provide the secret special key to defeating Supreme Leader Snoke because the plot hasn't established that anyone needs one (and as a previously unknown functionary of the old evil regime Snoke has mid-boss written all over him anyway), he can't provide the secret special key to redeeming Kylo Ren because Star Wars has established that redemption comes from within. Nothing he was going there to do can help, because there isn't an established space in the plot for it to fit into, so the only thing he can be doing there is not helping on purpose.
Of course the plot hadn't established a need for a mcguffin, because one wasn't needed within TFA. As far as movies after that goes, all it had established about the plot is who the heroes and villains were, that both were after Luke, and the heroes found him first. Whether a mcguffin is useful in future movies was for those movies' plots to define. Especially given we ended TFA knowing next to nothing abouy Snoke in particular, who had clearly stepped into the Palpatine role.

And he can't take that lightsabre and return to swinging it around to save the galaxy because he's not the protagonist of these movies. (Important to remember that, the only outcome of that final scene of TFA is "Luke rejects the lightsabre". Anything else is symbolic of reinserting him as the protagonist to supplant the new ones).
Ah yes, because only the main protagonist Jedi is allowed to haer and use a lightsaber. ...wait, no, that wasn't ever true in any prior movie, even Obi-Wan used his in A New Hope.

Complete nonsense argument, that. Luke's role in the films isn't defined by whether he takes that lightsaber or not. And hell, he could reject it simply because he still has his (you know, the one from RotJ) and thus figures Rey has more use for the old one than him anyway.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-25, 10:38 AM

Of course the plot hadn't established a need for a mcguffin, because one wasn't needed within TFA. As far as movies after that goes, all it had established about the plot is who the heroes and villains were, that both were after Luke, and the heroes found him first. Whether a mcguffin is useful in future movies was for those movies' plots to define. Especially given we ended TFA knowing next to nothing abouy Snoke in particular, who had clearly stepped into the Palpatine role.

Ah yes, because only the main protagonist Jedi is allowed to haer and use a lightsaber. ...wait, no, that wasn't ever true in any prior movie, even Obi-Wan used his in A New Hope.

LibraryOgre

2024-07-25, 10:41 AM

I have no idea this was the case. If that's the case, it sounds contradictory with Yoda's talk about leaving the past behind, so I don't get the point of all that.

So, here's my personal view of TLJ... you have three stories, and they examine past, present, and future.

Luke/Rey/Kylo is about three reactions to the past. Luke is running from the legacy of the Jedi; he has seen the destruction it can cause, and he is trying to stop it from happening again. Rey is looking to that past for inspiration, but from a perspective of service. She sees the Jedi as these mythical heroes, saviors of people like her, and wants to emulate that service. She doesn't seek power for power's sake, but because it will let her help the galaxy. Kylo looks to the past, but sees the legacy of the Jedi (specifically, Anakin/Vader) as one of POWER. His obsession with that past leads him to recreate it... and recreate its mistakes. Luke cannot let go of the past; Rey wants to use it as inspiration to create something new. She's something of a Utopian, like younger Luke was, but that's something that's useful in a visionary (re-)founder.

Leia/Poe/Holdo is about the present. Poe fundamentally refuses to engage with a present beyond his own self-perception. He sees himself as the swashbuckling pilot hero, and he acts like it. Leia knows that they have a responsibility to think about the entire Resistance, and tries to make him understand that, which results in her demoting him... and he cannot accept that. When Holdo takes over, Poe also doesn't accept that... he's still the swashbuckling pilot hero, who is she to tell him no or keep secrets? But, despite being the protagonist of the story, he's not the protagonist of the galaxy... the galaxy isn't conspiring to write the story he wants it to. When he accepts that, when he loses the ego, he's able to move past the present he sees and into the one that is.

Finn/Rose/Codebreaker are about the future. Finn's view of the future in the beginning is very narrow... it is him and Rey, and that's all he cares about. The Codebreaker is similar, but it's just him. Rose is Finn's guide to looking for a better future for everyone... until he comes to the point where he's not just out for him and Rey, but willing to die for the Resistance. And Rose comes in again, with the correction: She isn't going to die to destroy what she hates, but to save what she loves. She's not in this to avenge her sister, but to save everyone else.

All three are about creating a future... what you learn from the past, how you deal with the present, and how you build a future. In a way, it is the Star Wars fandom... learn from the past, but be willing to let things go. Deal with the present as it as, rather than as you want it to be. And don't fight to destroy what you hate, but save what you love.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-25, 10:42 AM

Rey spends most of Episode VII looking for Luke because he's gone missing and nobody really knows why. It really wouldn't be that difficult for the next movie to say, as an example...

- Snoke first appeared shortly after the fall of the Empire;
- He tried to convince Luke he was a Jedi but it didn't work;
- In truth Snoke just wanted to use Luke to get an apprentice;
- Snoke showed way too much interest in Luke's nephew and daughter;
- Luke sends Rey and Ben far away, just as he and Leia were;
- Luke fights Snoke, Snoke is badly defeated and seemingly dies;
- A few years later Ben finds his way back to Luke;
- At first Luke is angry but he soon relents and trains Ben;
- Fastforward twenty years, Snoke is somehow back;
- Luke confronts him again, this time with Ben at his side;
- Luke realises he can't kill Snoke and has no choice but to flee;
- Ben is left behind by accident, Luke never forgives himself;
- The Knights of Ren, led by Ben, wipe out Luke's Jedi Order;
- Luke thinks Ben is possessed or mind controlled and needs to find a way to free him;
- Luke also needs to find a way to kill Snoke for good;
- He doesn't want Rey to find him because of what happened to Ben;

Zevox

2024-07-25, 10:50 AM

Not really, because Luke had already disappeared at the start of TFA (from the crawl before the First Order even really got rolling). He can't be off looking for a macguffin that nobody knows anyone's going to need, so it would just have to be something he totally coincidentally found that the galaxy turns out to super need. Which is Rise of Skywalker level macguffin handling. (If he had a force vision about it then why the heck not tell anyone, even his sister "I had a vision of a thing we're really gonna need but I have to hide where I'm going, you'll find me when you need me", but that didn't happen, he told nobody where he was going even his actual family who we know he trusts and is close to.)
That's why I brought up Snoke. The one thing we do know had occurred before Luke left is Kylo's fall. If Luke learned about Snoke as a result of that, he could absolutely be looking for something related to him. Or hiding from him, if there was some special danger to Snoke getting his hands on Luke. Or he could have been doing something related to reestablishing the Jedi Order in the wake of what happened with Kylo - establishing a new one in secret somewhere he didn't believe Snoke would find him (conveniently also explaining why he didn't tell his friends where he went, since it helps ensure Snoke can't find his new training ground), or seeking lost Jedi knowledge that would help as a teacher, which he can then use in teaching Rey.

Again, plenty of other options here.

Obi-Wan brought his with him, he wasn't handed it in a moment of high significance after an entire movie of looking for him to specifically do that. I'm sure you recognise that those communicate two totally different meanings.
Rey wasn't looking for him in order to hand him the saber, that was incidental because she happened to get his old lightsaber along the way. She was looking for him because the Resistance wanted his help. Something he could absolutely have done without taking over as main character - just like Obi-Wan was able to help Leia without being the main character.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-25, 10:53 AM

Rey spends most of Episode VII looking for Luke because he's gone missing and nobody really knows why. It really wouldn't be that difficult for the next movie to say, as an example...

Point of order: Why would the way to kill Snoke not be "Orbital bombardment"?

"Man this guy's so hard we need a macguffin to kill him where we didn't with Vader or the Emperor, what? giant continent melting spaceship guns? No we can't use those it wouldn't be honourable."

Also, "A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defence, never for attack". Going and looking for Special Force Stuff to kill Snoke wouldn't be a very Jedi thing to do.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-25, 11:06 AM

Point of order: Why would the way to kill Snoke not be "Orbital bombardment"?

"Man this guy's so hard we need a macguffin to kill him where we didn't with Vader or the Emperor, what? giant continent melting spaceship guns? No we can't use those it wouldn't be honourable."

Also, "A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defence, never for attack". Going and looking for Special Force Stuff to kill Snoke wouldn't be a very Jedi thing to do.

Ignoring that orbital bombardment is never really an option for the good guys in Star Wars, in the words of one Darth Vader, "the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force". Or, to use internet parlance, Snoke would just possess "hax" - a power or ability that cannot be overcome by simply damaging him enough.

Personally I'd have tied it to Rey and Ben. Keep the Force Dyad stuff in, say Snoke is feeding off the bond between the cousins and cannot die as long as that bond remains. Ben learns this and believes one of them, Rey or himself, has to die otherwise Snoke never will. Luke's real goal, then, isn't to destroy Snoke but to safely break the Dyad without harming Rey or Ben.

Errorname

2024-07-25, 11:12 AM

Of course the plot hadn't established a need for a mcguffin, because one wasn't needed within TFA. As far as movies after that goes, all it had established about the plot is who the heroes and villains were, that both were after Luke, and the heroes found him first. Whether a mcguffin is useful in future movies was for those movies' plots to define. Especially given we ended TFA knowing next to nothing about Snoke in particular, who had clearly stepped into the Palpatine role.

Dragonus45

2024-07-25, 11:15 AM

Infernally Clay

2024-07-25, 11:28 AM

Turning it into a gag was totally the wrong thing to do. Given how far Luke went to save his dad the idea that he couldn't care less about his dad's lightsaber is kinda nutty. The Last Jedi definitely suffers from inappropriately timed humour. I'm not sure I'll ever forgive the movie for cutting out the scene where Luke processes Han's death in favour of "haha Jedi drinking funny blue milk".

Mordar

2024-07-25, 02:10 PM

You know, I really like(d) the MCU. To bad they didn't have any Mexican restaurants (or even Mexico) in them. I guess there must not be Mexican food in the MCU. Similarly, I once heard a story about a Togruta Jedi aspirant that got unfairly kicked out of the Jedi, but since it wasn't in the 9 movies not only is there no such character, there is no Shili, the mythical homeworld of the Togruta. Too bad, could have made a good story.

The focus of the movies, while seeming to be Galaxy-spanning, is really pretty tight. We see maybe 20-30 worlds? We see a few hundred Rebels. We see a few thousand Empire troops. There is no reason to think that is all there is...and no reason to think that a story focused on the Skywalker line would have time and space to explore the Idej Monks of Klandathu and their Force traditions.

Interesting take on what knowledge was meant to do. Generally agree. Glad that more people don't know how to make superweapons, though. Maybe some controls on some knowledge is a good thing. Force probably isn't one of them...but knowledge does not carry with it a dictate to share it, and learning something does not mandate it must be spread. I personally disregard any such demand on the freedom of the learner. That is not moral, it is oppressive.

Re: Impossible to learn by yourself? How then, did the Jedi order begin? You say "we know" with such confidence. I am compelled to say "Absence of proof is not proof of absence, particularly when limiting the sample size to 9 feature films". Again, that is like saying Australia doesn't exist because it isn't shown in the Lethal Weapon movies. And really, using any writing in the Acolyte to support a broader SW argument (argument not used in derisive manner) suffers.

ETA:

So in agreement. Had I 250 bijillion dollars I would pay Steven Spielberg to do a curb-stomp "deconstruction" of Rian Johnson's entire portfolio, "making it his own". And it isn't humor, it is condescension and mocking because Rian Johnson believed his own hype and failed to recognize he is an underpowered hack. And I liked Knives Out and Glass Onion well enough, even though they are pale Christie carbons.

- M

Infernally Clay

2024-07-25, 03:33 PM

I mean, unless you want to argue that Watto can build a Death Star using the scrap he has lying around in his shop I don't think him knowing the schematics for it would really be that much of an issue.

I'm not even sure I really buy the argument that just because we haven't seen something it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You can't assume that because something existed in a comic or a novel it must exist in the mainstream Star Wars galaxy. This Convocation only exists because it was a plot point in a novel. That doesn't mean it has to exist or that the shows and movies released after it have to work off the assumption it does or ever did, nor is it a plot hole if they don't.

Like I said before, The Acolyte freely references super obscure stuff like vergences that first showed up in a sourcebook for a tabletop roleplaying game that came out sixteen years ago. If they wanted to acknowledge the existence of the Convocation, they would have done so. It seems to have been an intentional omission.

And really, using any writing in the Acolyte to support a broader SW argument (argument not used in derisive manner) suffers.

Our personal opinions of the show are irrelevant. The Acolyte is a nine figure, four hour, very canon, entry into the Star Wars universe. We can't just ignore it. It's the first live action foray into the High Republic era and for most people it's their first exposure to "real Jedi". What the show says, we must acknowledge and accept as fact. This isn't just some random fanfiction we found online, after all, and we can't even single one person out as screwing it up because a lot of people, including Pablo Hidalgo, was heavily involved in the development of the show.

The Acolyte is, strictly speaking, how Lucasfilm wants us to see the High Republic Jedi. Who are we to argue with that?

Errorname

2024-07-25, 04:07 PM

We actually do have a sense of how the Jedi feel about alternative force disciplines from the Clone Wars arc about Jar Jar's girlfriend, because they were somehow still doing Jar Jar episodes even in their sixth season.

A species called the Bardottans maintain their own Force discipline, the Dagoyan Order, and aggressively resisted efforts by the Jedi to recruit their children, a grudge they held up until the last days of the Jedi order. There's a lot of bad blood there, but the Dagoyans still exist hundreds of years after coming into conflict with the Jedi.

We can't just ignore it.

I mean, we can if we want to, we don't have to talk about it.

Dragonus45

2024-07-25, 04:08 PM

The Acolyte is, strictly speaking, how Lucasfilm wants us to see the High Republic Jedi. Who are we to argue with that?

It's canon till it's not, just like the EU was canon till it wasn't, just like whatever comes next eventually will be canon until it isn't and eventually everything goes the way of Steamboat Mickey and Winne the Pooh. Star Wars is a wide sprawling story touched by the hands of so many writers and such a core part of modern culture for so long that I say Lucasfilm only gets to own it the most technical of terms. It's all fanfiction, or haterfiction, some people just get paid to write theirs. Ignore what you don't like, ignore what's stupid, ignore what contradicts itself, be at peace with the headcanon and especially ignore what's stupid.

- M

He is the right person for some jobs but not the right director for every job. I still say the Brick is one of the most perfect movies ever made, and that he would have been an amazing director for Rogue One but never a mainline Star Wars.

Darth Credence

2024-07-25, 04:11 PM

Yeah, that super obscure bit of knowledge that came from an RPG sourcebook 16 years ago. IIRC, they may have gotten that idea from somewhere else, 25 years ago in 1999. Let me check...

Ah, here it is. 13 seconds in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct9KsYH4vIc

Infernally Clay

2024-07-25, 04:26 PM

I mean, we can if we want to, we don't have to talk about it.

Well when you put it that way I guess we can just ignore anything we don't like. It just means discussing Star Wars is a waste of time because, at any point, we can just say "that didn't happen" and the entire discussion has to be reorientated around one person's decision to consider only the Holiday Special as canon.

Zevox

2024-07-25, 04:30 PM

Point of order: Why would the way to kill Snoke not be "Orbital bombardment"?
A number of reasons, but the most important being that "just kill them with big guns" has never been the answer to Sith/dark siders in Star Wars, and it wasn't going to start to be in the sequel trilogy.

"Man this guy's so hard we need a macguffin to kill him where we didn't with Vader or the Emperor, what? giant continent melting spaceship guns? No we can't use those it wouldn't be honourable."

Also, "A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defence, never for attack". Going and looking for Special Force Stuff to kill Snoke wouldn't be a very Jedi thing to do.
This feels like quite a lack of imagination, if you see "mcguffin" and immediately interpret it as "special weapon to kill the bad guy with." Things like a Lich's phylactery are also mcguffins. Or knowledge of how to protect yourself from an enemy's special abilities, or mystic items that allow you to locate a hidden enemy, or a secret method for sealing an enemy's powers, etc etc.

I think if you wanted Luke to be looking for or protecting something, it would have been useful to tease it. Both to ease the expository burden on the next movie but also to raise the stakes on the hunt for Luke Skywalker and to raise the threat level for the villains. Like the First Order do not feel like such threatening villains that you need a special ancient macguffin to take them down.
They did tease it, by having Han say that those who know him best believe he went looking for the first Jedi Temple. That's literally him going looking for something. We don't know why he's looking for it, and they leave open the possibility that Han's wrong about that, but the indication is there anyway.

For me it's less about that he rejected it than it is about how he rejected it. It took the moment and threw it off a cliff into the ocean and I can't even stop myself from giggling a little every time I see the last scene of TFA now, which was as deliberate as it was wrong headed.
That scene doesn't bother me personally as much as it does others - it presages the parts that do bother me by showing how little Luke cares at that point, but him not being particularly attached to his old lightsaber in itself could certainly be fine in another context. But yeah, despite my feelings there it was not the right way to play that scene, for sure. Taking a scene that TFA was clearly trying to play as a meaningful, important moment fans should be excited to see, when the original protagonist and the new protagonist meet, then turning it into a gag was quite ill-advised. It was a tone-setter of the worst kind.

I'm not sure I'll ever forgive the movie for cutting out the scene where Luke processes Han's death in favour of "haha Jedi drinking funny blue milk".
Oh gods yes, that scene should've been the first one on the cutting room floor, even if they didn't have something way more important like him processing Han's death to keep in. Even in the context of Luke being in the state he's in, I cannot fathom what they were thinking that with godawful blue milk scene.

Mordar

2024-07-25, 04:33 PM

What we can do is contemplate the quality overall and use that to help determine what is actually intentional and when applying intent might be giving them too much credit, though. And even in good productions, strange things end up on the cutting room floor for lots of reasons. Just reinforces the Absence of Proof thing, IMO.

But you're right in that we are compelled to accept what *is* put in place, at least until something ret-cons or refutes it. My point was more one of speculative conclusions or connections based on what we think we see or hear in that work, but yes, I was also being too dismissive of the "truth" of the work because of my opinion of the "quality" of the work.

Oh gods yes, that scene should've been the first one on the cutting room floor, even if they didn't have something way more important like him processing Han's death to keep in. Even in the context of Luke being in the state he's in, I cannot fathom what they were thinking that with godawful blue milk scene.

"Look at how artistic and clever I am with my deconstruction of the erstwhile hero character. Aren't I just the MOST?" Rian Johnson, dislocating two elbows patting himself on the back.

- M

Dragonus45

2024-07-25, 04:43 PM

That scene doesn't bother me personally as much as it does others - it presages the parts that do bother me by showing how little Luke cares at that point, but him not being particularly attached to his old lightsaber in itself could certainly be fine in another context. But yeah, despite my feelings there it was not the right way to play that scene, for sure. Taking a scene that TFA was clearly trying to play as a meaningful, important moment fans should be excited to see, when the original protagonist and the new protagonist meet, then turning it into a gag was quite ill-advised. It was a tone-setter of the worst kind.

Sure in a vacuum it can make sense, but as a continuation of the final shot of The Force Awakens it's unconscionably horrid. It takes what was one of that movies high points and the big emotional capstone people spent years thinking about and actually literally throws it off a cliff. Much like the last episode of the Acolyte it's the kind of bad that radiates back in time to ruin what lead up to it.

- M

Yea, as the number of hands touching the setting grows the cohesiveness of everything will continue to get shakier and shakier and when two things blatantly contradict one another just ignoring the bad stuff works as well as any other way of squaring that circle.

Darth Credence

2024-07-25, 05:00 PM

That could have worked if it tested Rey in the way that Yoda tested Luke by pretending to be something other than who he was. It would have fed directly into the idea that this was an ESB remake, but it could have worked. It did not as an actual reaction to being handed the saber.

Wasn't the milk green in TLJ? I'm color-blind enough that you can convince me it was anything, but I'd always heard green.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-25, 05:04 PM

Right, we can only work with what we know even if we don't particularly like what we have to work with. Isn't that largely why Star Wars is in the state it's in anyway? When you make wide, sweeping narrative decisions like "all the Jedi are dead at the start of this trilogy" people have no choice but to work within those parameters and they end up doing silly things like "Ahsoka isn't really a Jedi any more, Kanan is dead by the events of that movie and Ezra is in another galaxy, so Yoda totally didn't lie".

It's entirely possible that, in the next season of The Acolyte, the Convocation of the Force will be introduced, we'll be shown that the Jedi have no problems at all allowing anyone to teach their children what they want and it'll be clarified that Republic law merely states you need permission from the government to teach children how to wield the Force and there really is a permit for that.

It's totally possible, but it isn't what the first season implies and that's all we have to go on for now. If it means we mistakenly believe the Jedi Order isn't quite as benevolent as they make themselves out to be, it'll be rectified in a few years.

Errorname

2024-07-25, 05:05 PM

They did tease it, by having Han say that those who know him best believe he went looking for the first Jedi Temple. That's literally him going looking for something. We don't know why he's looking for it, and they leave open the possibility that Han's wrong about that, but the indication is there anyway.

That gives you nothing to work with in terms of what he was hoping to find or what he was hoping to use it for. It's absent

"Look at how artistic and clever I am with my deconstruction of the erstwhile hero character. Aren't I just the MOST?" Rian Johnson, dislocating two elbows patting himself on the back.

The Blue Milk scene isn't deconstructing anything, it's a mentor figure being weird and offputting to their mentee. It is a slightly weirder than normal execution on a genre staple.

LibraryOgre

2024-07-25, 05:22 PM

It's canon till it's not, just like the EU was canon till it wasn't,

Point of order: EU was never canon. It was popular, but not canon. In some ways, it's only canon now that it's been, as it were, canonized by being in a Disney-produced show. Thrawn did not exist in canon until Rebels. He was part of the "quasi-canon", as defined by Lucas, which became "Legends" after the acquisition.

I think testing Rey in exactly Yoda's way would have failed, because Luke likely has pictures throughout the New Republic. "And this is the guy who blew up the first Death Star and killed Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine." But I also think that Luke's testing method is a fairly traditional one... be so unpleasant that only the truly dedicated student will stick with it. He just might have not been faking it.

Darth Credence

2024-07-25, 06:28 PM

By "something other than what he was" I didn't mean not Luke. She knew it was Luke. I meant like pretending to be an angry old hermit to get her to show who she really was and how she reacted to the situation, like Yoda checked to see how Luke would treat this funny little creature that wasn't catering to him.

Mordar

2024-07-25, 06:52 PM

The Blue Milk scene isn't deconstructing anything, it's a mentor figure being weird and offputting to their mentee. It is a slightly weirder than normal execution on a genre staple.

I, Luke Skywalker, last of the Jedi, Hero of the Rebellion, staunch friend and indomitable ally, always the source of optimism and hope (as in A New Hope)...have now abandoned everything I held dear, am not terribly concerned with the death of my brother, in both arms and law, choose to toss aside the physical manifestation of all that I was, and since I don't have a handy bar or liquor store available to drink myself to death like another hero being torn down who looks an awful lot like my brother-in-law will do in the relatively near future, I'll do this jarring space-cow milking scene and drink the resultant straight.

But I'm not being deconstructed.

The milk alone isn't a deconstruction, but it is part of the whole...and at least it calls back to the blue milky beverage he drank when first we met him...but no part of this reads "inscrutable mentor" to me. It reads "If I had a bottle I'd seek solace therein". Of course YMMV.

- M

Errorname

2024-07-25, 08:33 PM

Yeah, my mileage varies a lot here. There are better substitutes for alcohol they could have gone for, and the vibe in that sequence is very much not "drinking your sorrows away".

It feels like Luke is on a grocery run more than anything. He stops by the weird seal monsters to pick up some milk, and he goes to the cliff with the big spear to go catch a fish. It's showing him as having become very comfortable with the gross and dangerous parts of living on this remote island, and it shows him trying to go about his daily routine while Rey annoys him to try to make him come back with her. It's all pretty standard reluctant mentor stuff, it's this movie's version of Yoda pretending to be some random not-Yoda gremlin, it's not subverting anything.

Mordar

2024-07-25, 10:24 PM

Yeah, my mileage varies a lot here. There are better substitutes for alcohol they could have gone for, and the vibe in that sequence is very much not "drinking your sorrows away".

I think it screams "checked out". Rey knows who he is, and told him about Han...and he's got no response. He's got no avenue to misrepresent himself. Maybe I should rewatch to confirm my recollection. The things I do for this board!

- M

Saintheart

2024-07-26, 12:45 AM

I should probably have said "keep trawling" instead of "go trawling", but that's just me messing up my tenses.

You could do that. I don't think it's the most natural follow-up to all of what's in Force Awakens, but there is room to do that.

I know I'm bombing into this conversation presumably after pages and pages of discussion (and, unashamedly by me, TL;DR), but the problem with TFA and TLJ I think mainly comes from Return of the Jedi.

And that, in turn, because dead Jedi over the course of the OT steadily change from figurative presences to literal.

Ben Kenobi's the clearest example of this. ANH and ESB handle him right. In the third act of ANH, Ben's an occasional prompting in Luke's ear. In the first act of ESB, he's visible to Luke only when (one might say because) Luke's in extremis, about to freeze to death.* By the time Luke leaves Dagobah, he can outright see Ben, although Ben's still basically a ghost. It seems implied Ben can manifest more clearly because of Yoda's presence (notice how Ben is only audible or visible while Yoda is also there). In turn, it's implied that greater mastery of the Force allows greater contact with those who have passed into it, i.e. you're more tied into your ancestors or your traditions because you're trained in that tradition and you literally know what to listen for, you know how to see the world. Ben goes from an all-but-hallucination to a guiding force that Luke can access, at least while he's still under Yoda's direct guidance. And once Luke leaves Dagobah, neither Ben nor Yoda's guidance are available, implying that he's not ready because he hasn't internalised what they taught him.

I personally love this as a narrative device or implication, but it's easy to get wrong. And it starts going wrong in Return of the Jedi by two bits of the film, one line, and one shot. The one line is "Yoda will always be with you," and the one shot is the final image of the film. Ben himself is mishandled right from that one line onward. Where previously he was a near-hallucination or voice in Luke's head, he's shuffles on in a coat of blue glow paint, shoulders a vine aside and sits his non-corporeal butt down on a wooden log. And he also goes on to provide 23AndMe plot details, whereas his lines and input were much more abstract in ESB. The problem being that this implied Ben - and Yoda and even Anakin by the end of the movie - would be around in future to give specific, useful advice to Luke.

On one hand it was a natural progression of Luke's throughline - he's a mature Jedi, he's more connected to his tradition and the Force, so therefore he should be able to see Ben et. al. with greater clarity and more reliably - but it also immediately introduced one hell of a narrative challenge for anyone who wanted to write a story following ROTJ, because that writer would have to find a challenge that wasn't just beyond Luke, but beyond Luke and the combined forces of Ben, Yoda, Anakin, and possibly 800-more-years-of- combined Jedi experience in dealing with the problem.

You can see writers across the proto-EU and the early EU struggling with how to deal with it. The Marvel comics series bypassed it by having Luke lolnope training new Jedi and only seeing Yoda et. al. in dreams. Timothy Zahn very smartly grasped the bull by the horns up front in Heir to the Empire and had Ben do a sayonara to Luke in the first 20 pages, admittedly giving it some mythic paint by suggesting it was time for Ben to move on.

When we get to TFA, the sense I had was that JJ Abrams didn't have a handle on it and didn't know how to confront the problem squarely either. He papered over it by basically having Luke offscreen the whole film, combining it with the suggestion of despair on Luke's part due to rebellion by Kylo Ren, but he also left the suggestion that there was still more to the story since Luke went looking for the first Jedi Temple, i.e. suggesting that Luke would do at least the semi-obvious and try to learn from his ancestors how to teach others. It still wasn't great, it still didn't squarely ask "But why didn't Luke just ask Yoda and the guys for help?" -- but it was enough to tide us over for 120 minutes while we got bored waiting for Poe, Rey, and Finn to actually turn into real characters.

In short, JJ threw one hell of a hospital handpass to Rian Johnson. Even a good writer who fully understood mythic stories, who understood what the audience was craving, would've had trouble writing his way out of that canyon. Rian Johnson just was not up to that challenge, as well as - I believe - overwhelmed with a budget and scope of story to tell that he had never come close to tackling before.** Leaving aside the abovementioned story problems, the Last Jedi is the sort of script that demonstrates it's a hell of a lot easier to rip up something than it is to build something better on its bones. It flat-out tries to lie to its audience about certain events in the PT, it cheerily does stuff with established canon that has massive implications back through every other film (Hyperspace Ramming, Yoda Blows Up Trees But Not Sith Lords, Turbolaser Bolts Arc In Space, I could go on, and on, and on), it wants to make social commentary that has not a lot to do with the actual story, it has Benicio Del Toro in stunt casting that goes nowhere, and it makes its villains less of a threat than they were to start with.

* My headcanon for ESB is that Ben intervenes to indirectly save Luke's life, in that had Luke not reached out toward Ben as Kenobi faded away, Han on the Tauntaun might not have seen Luke moving and ridden right past him.

** I mean, on top of that lack of preparation, Johnson just kicked own goal after own goal leading up to the film and right after it. I defy anyone with even a modicum of PR nous to think it's a good idea, as the director of a blockbuster Star Wars film that's to be released shortly, to photograph yourself next to a sign that says "Your Snoke Theory Sucks" and put that out to a fanbase that gets at least half its jollies speculating on what developments might be coming in the next film. These are audiences that wanted to get excited about the next movie, who wanted to come up with wild questions about what Snoke was or was not and then have the director surprise them with his answer. Let alone his response after the film was released.

Infernally Clay

2024-07-26, 04:57 AM

Force Ghosts are just a weird and poorly defined thing and I still maintain it is antithetical to the core principle Jedi have of "letting go of attachments" for a Jedi to choose not to become one with the Force, especially given how much importance they place upon others becoming one with it.

I'm still not sure why Luke couldn't leave Ahch-To (what happened to "see ya around, kid"? I thought Luke was gonna spend Episode IX trolling his nephew) yet Anakin can hop between galaxies.

Precure

2024-07-26, 06:55 AM

I always believe that RotJ should be the end of Star Wars saga and every other story should take place before that. Lucas's original plan, EU and ST are inherently bad moves. People criticize "somehow Palpatine returned" for making Anakin's sacrifice meaningless, but same could be said every other sequel since they're all at a basic level just "somehow the Empire returned" and "somehow Sith returned".

Errorname

2024-07-26, 08:05 AM

If I remember the sequence of events right, this scene happens before the scene where he reunites with Chewbacca and finds out Rey brought the Falcon, that's when he asks (with clear alarm) where Han is and the very next sequence is him sadly wandering the halls of the Falcon.

but it also immediately introduced one hell of a narrative challenge for anyone who wanted to write a story following ROTJ, because that writer would have to find a challenge that wasn't just beyond Luke, but beyond Luke and the combined forces of Ben, Yoda, Anakin, and possibly 800-more-years-of- combined Jedi experience in dealing with the problem.

In terms of balance destroying superpowers I don't think being able to phone a dead guy for advice ranks that highly, especially with the post-Prequels canon being that most Jedi do not become proper force ghosts. Luke gets to commune with the spirits for advice and guidance, but it's entirely possible for him to either get bad advice (all his ghost mentors were deeply flawed people who made some very bad calls in life) or to be dealing with problems where good advice isn't enough to solve the problem.

People criticize "somehow Palpatine returned" for making Anakin's sacrifice meaningless, but same could be said every other sequel since they're all at a basic level just "somehow the Empire returned" and "somehow Sith returned".

I think you can still have conflict in the setting, even conflict that continues along Empire/Sith lines, without making the events of the OT into insignificant wheel spinning. The status quo needs to be meaningfully different in the sequels, it needs to feel like a new Era of the conflict instead of just doing the OT again but worse. I actually think you can mostly keep the old villains of Imperial Remnants and Sith Lords so long as it feels like the good guys have meaningfully evolved. Having a new Jedi Order and having our heroes be part of whatever State the Rebellion ended up building.

Trafalgar

2024-07-26, 08:33 AM

- M

Mark Hamill on Luke's reaction to Han's death getting cut out from TLJ. (https://youtu.be/QunVCik21Ws?si=q3pKTBsGyqtHpJe_)

GloatingSwine

2024-07-26, 08:51 AM

Yeah, fundamentally the problem with the sequels was trying to recapitulate rebel underdogs vs evil empire. That required the destruction of everything that had been worked for in the originals, because preserving it would have made the heroes part of the establishment.

The best thing to do would have been the opposite of what they did, instead of taking all of the stupidest ideas from the old EU harvest all of its good ideas instead. That would mean a set of sequels that are not totally dissimilar to Heir to the Empire.

The way I would have done it is to centre it on a brilliant military strategist like Thrawn but not actually Thrawn. Make him a Republic admiral instead, who was too young to fight the Empire but joined as one of the first wave of officers of the New Republic, was a hero of the conflicts with the Imperial Remnant but has become jaded as the Republic fell into politicking and old powers like the corporate sector and hutts reestablished themselves as powers not subject to it.

Give him an old Kaminoan cloning unit, like Heir, that gives him loyal troops but also he's taking samples from the new Jedi academy Luke is running and cloning them as well. As we know because we've read Heir to the Empire a cloned Jedi goes insane, but that's actually the point. He's making berserker weapons with force powers and using them in terrorist attacks which both frighten ordinary people and seem to discredit the Jedi.

That's the setup, a Republic admiral going Napoleon, a means of attack that seems to strike at both the government and the Jedi and leads to an adventure mystery and threat to the Republic without making it weak and stupid enough to blow up with one press of a button.

Darth Credence

2024-07-26, 08:53 AM

The EU showed us plenty of ways for the events of RotJ to not be meaningless while still having conflict after the movie - some of it great, some of it really bad, but it was there.

The Hutts deciding to attack the Republic, now that there isn't a Jedi Order to stop them or an Empire with superweapons willing to blow them up, would work if one was looking for something not explored much by the EU. (You could get really stupid and adapt Darksaber, but I'd hope not.) It would allow for intrigue and political maneuvering, underworld stories, and some straight-up battles. It could even show a reason why, during the Republic days, there was such a thing as Hutt space - they may have a counter to the Jedi, enough to keep the Jedi from simply enforcing Republic rule but not enough for them to deal with thousands of Jedi. The impetus for the war could be the rising of the new Jedi, and the Hutts realizing it is now or never to prevent them from becoming a force again.

Now, I'm not saying that would be a good movie (I'd watch it, but I've watched everything Star Wars except Acolyte, and I'm sure I'll eventually get over the bad taste the first episode left and watch it). I'm just saying that it is not at all difficult to come up with a scenario that allows for stories to be told while still having the fall of the Empire be meaningful.

ETA - I like Gloating Swine's idea.

Dragonus45

2024-07-26, 09:37 AM

This is one of the reasons why having the Imperial Remnant was such an important part of the original canon's status quo. It showed that the events of the OT meaningfully moved the needle but also that empire doesn't disappear over night and Thrawn as the introductory villain was excellent for showing that there are a lot of talented, capable, dangerous people out there still who will oppose the heroes in ways other than the Palpatine and the Sith did, but then they also cleared him off the board which helped avoid that conflict becoming too static or stale. Replacing the idea by instead having the entire Empire be neatly cleaned up by the ST but also replaced by a nearly identical group of *******s was a massive **** up.

GloatingSwine

2024-07-26, 09:46 AM

Yeah, the old EU was also only a single digit number of years beyond the OT though. Go far enough and the Imperial Remnant turns into MASH, lasting longer than the empire it is a remnant of.

I'd still set it the same number of IRL years after, and have the OT characters/actors as background presences whose job is to deal with the galactic political consequences of the events that the new protagonists are going through. Leaders and statespeople giving advice, instructions, and off-the-books support rather than running around waving blasters and laser swords.

Beelzebub1111

2024-07-26, 09:52 AM

I recently finished I, Jedi. I have some gripes about the later chapters but the entire plot with Luke's academy on Yavin is gold. there's lots of stuff implying a greater story going on, but focused on the perspective of one man at the academy is really cool. I think that part of the book is a template for a great Star Wars show or movie.

We need more depictions of what it FEELS like to be in tune with the force, guided by it, and also what it means to try and bend it to your own will.

Darth Credence

2024-07-26, 10:23 AM

Have you read The Jedi Academy Trilogy? That happens at the same time, was written before I, Jedi, and contains all that stuff going on that you don't get there. Not horrible books, but it's where Kyp Durron came from and he's a touch problematic for me - he's like Vader survived and Luke went around saying to ignore everything he did because he's been redeemed.