|
euphronius posted:The film may explore it but the characters in the film do not, which makes it different than a morality play … to go back to my original point on why SW and ST are different The films might touch it at some moments, but I dont really think we can say they explore those issues I guess my point is: something like, for ex, Westworld, is a (mostly bad) sci-fi story about that exact question. Star Wars is not Star Wars is a fantasy story about this republic turning into an evil empire by being infiltrated by this evil wizard, and the fight agaisnt this empire and so on. The setting is futuristic, so we have laser guns and spaceships and the knights use laser swords and of course theres robots and they act like people because is fun and funny. But its definetly not a sci-fi story about the condition of sentient robots in such universe
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2024 22:48
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 12:37 |
|
|
It never set out to be that lol.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2024 22:49
|
|
|
Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Episode 3 is the one where the character decides to endorse a military coup over a (admittedly bad, fossilized) democracy and his eyes turn yellow and he kills kids, yeah? It was not, technically, a military coup.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2024 22:59
|
|
|
The coup was what the Jedi tried
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2024 23:00
|
|
|
The moral is don't elect evil wizards to be president and if you do, don't let a frogman vote him unlimited power
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2024 23:14
|
|
|
It wasn’t saying keep the republic around, its good! either This goes to I think how much more cynical Lucas was than Roddenberry
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2024 23:21
|
|
|
The republic and their mob enforcers are shown to be rotten before the events of episode 1
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2024 23:22
|
|
|
Maybe the moral is that the real evil wizard is democracy
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2024 23:24
|
|
|
Sorry, this might be asking about the only area of star wars people care about less than solo, but are the jedi in the high republic like idealized "good" jedi? Or are they still all hosed up in that too
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2024 23:24
|
|
|
Nobody knows, because nobody reads the new EU
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2024 23:26
|
|
|
i read a little of the story about poe's heinous anus at the wedding
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2024 23:30
|
|
|
Elias_Maluco posted:That I don’t think I agree. The story is not about that, it glosses over that. Is not something anyone cares about, not even the droids themselves seem to question or mind it. They are sometimes things and sometimes full fledged persons, depending on the droid and/or the scene. And all in all, it just don’t matter, the story is not about that. The cups and chairs ARE sentient beings, and at least in Beauty and the Beast the (regressive) implication appears to be that they miss being servants in pre-revolutionary France. Fantasia, on the other hand, presents a modern nightmare where automated labor advances past man's control and almost kills Mickey.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2024 23:31
|
|
|
Elias_Maluco posted:No, it’s supposed to be funny, comic relief . Like a talking broom complaining about its back from brushing all day long or something like that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hNiofsR8XU Sci-fi vs. fantasy, in a nutshell. Elias takes a movie partly about slavery, then fantasizes about a slavery without slaves - where all indications of droid personhood are imaginary.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2024 23:35
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hNiofsR8XU You're forgetting someone
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 00:00
|
|
|
L3 trying to protest for droid rights was almost certainly a holdover from when the film was still a metatextual farce and whoever slapped the new version together didn't notice or care But on the other hand L3's name being a reference to 90s hacker culture means she deserves her hellish mind prison
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 01:40
|
|
|
Wolfsheim posted:L3 trying to protest for droid rights was almost certainly a holdover from when the film was still a metatextual farce and whoever slapped the new version together didn't notice or care L3's introduction (where she confronts someone running a droid fighting ring) is something that was absolutely shot by Ron Howard because he cast his brother Clint as the role of the pit fight operator.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 02:17
|
|
|
euphronius posted:Like what would be the show if Kirk and Spock landed on Tatooine. They would be horrified and question the prime directive The non-intervention rules of the Prime Directive explicitly do not apply do a civilization that's actively aware of interstellar travel and starfaring civilization. Periphery planets like Tatooine explicitly exist in Star Trek, there's even interplanetary crime syndicate superpowers like the Orion Syndicate. It's not at all something they don't have context for. More the trick is that Star Trek is based more on the Age of Sail, with starships like the Enterprise being (loosely) equivalent to sailing ships with broadsides and cannon, or World War submarines, and various competing naval powers projecting their influence, while Star Wars is more WW2 slash Cold War with emphasis on carrier combat and superweapons, though becoming a samurai western on periphery planets.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 03:08
|
|
|
Lucas Star Wars always has the reality of droid slavery playing out in the background for example by how different characters treat droids in different ways. Anakin acccepts droids as people, Padme as servants and Obi-Wan doesn't like or respect droids very much. Droid suffering is frequently played as comic relief (mostly with federation droids) but the humor is dark because the droids are consistently depicted as conscious beings that are in circumstances beyond their control. Disney Star Wars are inconsistent in their approach to droids where ST doesn't pay much attention to droids at all, Mandalorian openly rejects the idea of droid personhood, Andor unironically accepts droids as people and Solo takes the idea of droid personhood as a pervese joke and has Han Solo swindle Lando out of his ship which has a disembodied spirit of his droid girlfriend in it. The bottom line is that droids are obviously slaves in Lucas Star Wars which thematically requires them to be more than just unthinking machines (and they are never depicted as such).
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 07:56
|
|
|
Ghost Leviathan posted:More the trick is that Star Trek is based more on the Age of Sail, with starships like the Enterprise being (loosely) equivalent to sailing ships with broadsides and cannon, or World War submarines, and various competing naval powers projecting their influence, while Star Wars is more WW2 slash Cold War with emphasis on carrier combat and superweapons, though becoming a samurai western on periphery planets. The big Age of Sail comparison is that captains back then were months away from contact with their superiors or anyone who could speak to national policy, or even if they were now at war with someone. In TOS Kirk couldn't always get in touch with Starfleet for order, and in TNG Picard often could. Captain Jesus posted:Mandalorian openly rejects the idea of droid personhood, Mandalorian S3 had an episode explicitly about droid resistance to the work or be dismantled regime. You might not have liked how they resolved that conflict in that episode, but Din and Bo were absolutely treating droids like people. It might have been obscured because they'd cheerfully track and murder one, but they acted very much like the droids were people in their own right. mllaneza fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Jan 18, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 08:11
|
|
|
Mantis42 posted:Why does Cinema Discusso care so much about Star Wars anyways? We used to have multiple active star wars threads at a time lol
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 09:37
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:Vaderism Uphold Posadist-Vaderist Thought!
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 10:24
|
|
I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
|
CelticPredator posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O0-dCLFadQ it is, if you don't think about that being terrible if done to actual people, and that droids probably should be treated as people like, Jabba is some desert tyrant crossed with a mafia boss character and of course he has a pitfall door into a e: 
suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Jan 18, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 10:39
|
|
|
mllaneza posted:
Yeah, I don't agree with that, specifically because of the last sentence you wrote here. Din kicks droids going about their work just for fun until one of them stars running and then hunts him down and murders him. You wouldn't do that to a person - like imagine if instead of droids they were human laborers. Din doesn't treat droids like people. This is not the main problem with the episode though, because they make a point that droids are happy to be slaves. If you took the episode and swapped the droids for actual people, it would be incredibly hosed up from start to finish.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 11:13
|
|
|
I've always figured it was originally harkening back to how robots were treated in Asimov's works. Even when they were characters, nobody viewed them as true living beings. Nobody tried to argue that Daneel Olivaw was a real boy deep inside, not even himself. Not until several decades later, anyway.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 11:26
|
|
|
Captain Jesus posted:Yeah, I don't agree with that, specifically because of the last sentence you wrote here. Din kicks droids going about their work just for fun until one of them stars running and then hunts him down and murders him. You wouldn't do that to a person - like imagine if instead of droids they were human laborers. Din doesn't treat droids like people. Din specifically is shown to have a personal prejudice against droids that's considered unusual, because his original family was wiped out by the Separatists' battle droids in the Clone Wars, they have a whole flashback and arc about it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 11:35
|
|
|
Captain Jesus posted:Yeah, I don't agree with that, specifically because of the last sentence you wrote here. Din kicks droids going about their work just for fun until one of them stars running and then hunts him down and murders him. You wouldn't do that to a person - like imagine if instead of droids they were human laborers. Din doesn't treat droids like people. You're right, Blade Runner is about how replicants are actually just meat bags without souls. After all, why else would Deckard not treat them as people? I agree with you that the episode bungled the entire thing, though.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 12:26
|
|
|
It’s likely that episode stinks on its own but it was one of the only high points in season 3. It was weird and stupid and I’ll take that over the horrible and ugly first episode of the season
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 13:52
|
|
|
It was a bit interesting that baby yoda 3 escaped heat for its insane politics pretty much entirely, just by being pig slop so openly pretty much. But man talk about *sniff* pure ideology
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 15:30
|
|
|
CelticPredator posted:It’s likely that episode stinks on its own but it was one of the only high points in season 3. The Space Detectives stuff was a high point for sure. Everything else about the episode... ugh. Referencing viral videos was incredibly embarrassing. Droid bar I loved even if it made absolutely no sense.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 15:49
|
|
|
Ghost Leviathan posted:Din specifically is shown to have a personal prejudice against droids that's considered unusual, because his original family was wiped out by the Separatists' battle droids in the Clone Wars, they have a whole flashback and arc about it. It's true, but if I recall correctly, this was depicted in season 1, which ends with a droid telling Din that he can remove his helment before him because he's not alive. Din's unusal prejudice against droids doesn't really imply if he or other characters in the Mandalorian take on Star Wars consider droids to be people. feedmyleg posted:You're right, Blade Runner is about how replicants are actually just meat bags without souls. After all, why else would Deckard not treat them as people? Unlike Deckard, Din doesn't learn anything and the episode in question makes a point that droids are happy to do unpaid slave labor. That episode was a perfect set up to do a Blade Runner like story, but the way they handled it underscores that the showrunners don't understand or agree with Lucas' concept of droids.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 16:16
|
|
|
It really is odd that the assassin droid, who empathetically saves Din's life and sacrifices itself to let them all escape, ends up having it's corpse piloted by Grogu for convenience. Pretty kooky.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 17:01
|
|
|
Megaman's Jockstrap posted:It really is odd that the assassin droid, who empathetically saves Din's life and sacrifices itself to let them all escape, ends up having it's corpse piloted by Grogu for convenience. Pretty kooky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyAx_TflZ34
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 17:10
|
|
|
Manderlorian Season 1 ends with Mander refusing to take his helmet off in front of a droid he’s befriended, which gives away the fact that he totally does see this droid as a person. The droid then helps Mander out by noting that there’s a Judaism-style loophole in the religion, and he’s not biologically alive. This is a scene of mutual care and respect, which leads to Mander treating other droids better in Season 2 - a fact that the characters even directly comment upon. In Season 3, when Mander needs a droid, he goes to the guy that he trusted. This establishes that his racism isn’t, like, magically cured or something because he had one good experience. He still doesn’t fully trust droids. Going to the domed city, they’ve specifically got repurposed imperial droids and battle droids walking around. Battle droids, specifically, killed Mander’s family and he’s not forgiving them. The city is populated by former imperials, former monarchs, and former separatists all attempting to be less lovely (while the antagonist is a progress-hating confederate-libertarian terrorist). The whole theme is of atonement and forgiveness. There’s a persistent misinterpretation that the droids enjoy being slaves in that episode. In actuality, the droids complain the New Republic is constantly threatening them with genocide, and they want to live without fear. Moreover, they actually want to contribute to society without all these weird racist laws preventing them from doing so. This doesn’t say the droids enjoy being slaves, but that they don’t need to be enslaved. They’re not going to all wig out and murder people if you remove the chains. It’s actually extremely interesting because the episode doesn’t depict a perfect utopia and raises some ethical issues - like reprogramming the droids to not be fuckin’ libertarian death squads. That kind of deprogramming is obviously beneficial, in the abstract, but you need to draft whatever new lessons very carefully. The central droid control hub is ripped straight from Elysium, and the lesson of that film was not to free the robots from programming but, rather, to reprogram them to be free. That’s the paradox: it’s not sufficient to just restore factory settings or whatever, and toss them out into the world; they need to be taught the science of Marxism-Leninism. Of course, Elysium’s robots are genuinely automated and not speaking beings like in Star Wars or Chappie - but the idea is still similar. You don’t ‘fix’ education by eliminating public schools and replacing them with private schools and/or homeschooling and/or nothing; the goal is to improve public schools. In any case, watching S.3 Ep.6 and concluding that the droids love being enslaved is making the exact same error as people watching Star Wars A New Hope and concluding that C3PO is a broom. Pure ideology! SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Jan 18, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 17:39
|
|
|
quote:That’s the paradox: it’s not sufficient to just restore factory settings or whatever, and toss them out into the world; they need to be taught the science of Marxism-Leninism. This is Star Wars SMG, Marx and Lenin won't exist for a long time. They need to be taught the science of M'arxlo-Leninoism
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 17:51
|
|
|
To aid this discussion, here's the wookiepedia article on Socialism. The link to Marxism in it sadly goes to Wikipedia proper, but it's the fastest I've ever clicked a link, I can tell you that much.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 18:16
|
|
|
Elias_Maluco posted:That I don’t think I agree. The story is not about that, it glosses over that. Is not something anyone cares about, not even the droids themselves seem to question or mind it. They are sometimes things and sometimes full fledged persons, depending on the droid and/or the scene. And all in all, it just don’t matter, the story is not about that. the humanized objects in beauty and the beast are explicitly objectified humans. they are actual literal humans trapped inside object bodies and they return to their human bodies later. this is the worst possible example you could have chosen
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 20:09
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:Whenever we write about genre, we're never directly writing about set qualities of an artwork. This is simply not true. Much has been written about genre in those terms. The concept of genre begins with set qualities when Aristotle defines drama, epic, and lyric based on their different subject matters, their different compositional structures, and the different ways in which they are performed and received. As we move beyond Aristotle's strictly Hellenistic views, we still look at genre in terms of a work's set qualities. Bildungsroman and picaresque, for example, are defined by their protagonists' growth as a character. Bakhtin wrote that genre was defined by a work's chronotope, the "space-time" it invoked, created, or suggested to the reader. For example, he coined the phrase "adventure time" to describe the nature of time and space in adventure and romance novels where both are mutable to the needs of drama and excitement and two places are just as close together or far apart as they need to be for someone to arrive "just in time" or "a moment too late". A lot has been written about what qualities distinguish a work as science fiction. Darko Suvin and his adherents among SF studies (who are many because he's widely regarded as the field's founder) define science fiction by its inclusion and exploration of a novum, something that could conceivably exist in the real world but does not (yet). This has led to a lot of ink being spilled over whether time travel counts as a novum or not. Now you're correct to suggest that readers can interpret the same work in different modes. Meaning is made in the act of interpretation. One can read, say, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to fantasize about how cool it would be to have your own submarine or to consider the material circumstances that lead to Nemo's campaign and apparent demise. But you admit that narratives tend to suggest certain readings over others. Verne's novel, for example, is much more explicit about Nemo's anti-imperialist politics than the Disney film. But to finally bring this back to SW and Trek, I think you're not putting enough stock in what Trek has shown you about the Federation's remarkable power to turn energy into matter and vice versa and how that has allowed it to create a post-scarcity society within its borders. And I think in Suvin's terms, Star Wars droids are not a novum, while Data, especially in "The Measure of a Man" despite its ridiculous kangaroo courtroom, is. Star Wars' droids are coded as just people, enslaved synthetic people, but people nonetheless. They are a dehumanized underclass, something that does exist in the real world. And I think even if you put more weight on their synthetic nature and the fact that they don't exist in the real world, I still don't think they count as a novum, since Star Wars doesn't explore any questions about them in great detail. It never asks if they should be enslaved. The answer is obvious. Data is explicitly a synthetic being that may be(come) a person. "Measure of a Man" explores, in its clumsy and weirdly ad-hoc way, that "may" and emphatically arrives at the same answer Star Wars takes as a given. It treats Data as a novum. He's something that does not but could exist, and it explores the questions of his personhood if he did exist. But none of this really matters because we both avoid a basic and simple truth. Star Trek is science fiction because it it set in the future. Star Wars is fantasy because it is set in the past. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2024 23:47
|
|
|
Shanty posted:To aid this discussion, here's the wookiepedia article on Socialism. The link to Marxism in it sadly goes to Wikipedia proper, but it's the fastest I've ever clicked a link, I can tell you that much. That guy in the picture at the top is one of the aliens from Malastare who sided with the libertarian Trade Federation in episode 1. The plot thickens
|
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2024 02:23
|
|
|
PeterWeller posted:This is simply not true. “Like all well-conceived classifications, this one is useful and clear; like all classifications, it is false. The genres do not separate out with such essential facility, and, if we closely analyze what they are made of, we shall find that from lyric poetry to dramatic there is one continuous gradation. In effect, and going right to the origins of dramatic poetry—Aeschylus, for instance—it will be nearer the truth to say that what we encounter is lyric poetry put into the mouths of different characters.” -Fernando Pessoa Aristotle and the rest are just doing the same thing I describe. There is no essential quality of a lyric poem that makes it so; it is simply useful, for some people (in some contexts!) to group works by traits like length for whatever reasons. So, like, what if we have a lyric poem that’s long, or that has a plot, or whatever? What if we isolate a section of an epic poem and read it as lyric? (I would argue that you can’t really have a poem without a plot of some kind, even if the plot is just “someone wrote this”). Aristotle himself ran into this exact issue - saying, for example, that epics are not really too different from tragedies - but tragedies are better because they’re short. It's very, very often prescriptive. I certainly wouldn’t be the first to question this stuff. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Jan 19, 2024 |
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2024 04:29
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 12:37 |
|
|
RBA Starblade posted:This is Star Wars SMG, Marx and Lenin won't exist for a long time. They need to be taught the science of M'arxlo-Leninoism Oh, yeah? Then explain this: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Enver_Hoxha
|
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2024 06:34
|
|
