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Avenging Dentist posted:Here's a solution: kill all the loving Jedi. The best part is that's actually the plot of the prequels. The purpose of the prequels was to provide the B in the A to C of the old republic was a great thing, the jedi used to be numerous then all died, and explain what the clone wars are. Of those, look at how little effort Lucas put into them, EXCEPT To Sell Toys. The doom of the Jedi was basically a footnote, it didn't even really happen because of the clone wars, it just sort of farted afterward. I did appreciate how the brain numb Jedi couldn't figure out that when they outnumber the Sith 1000000 to 1 that maybe "bring balance to the force" isn't something they want, though. Lucas did succeed in making me believe all the jedi were brain damaged at least. Some of the writing was very believable.
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Jan 8, 2016 21:52
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Most of that is problems with the writing (in your opinon anyways), not with the concept of Magic Space Knights. And if you think Han Solo is more interesting there are plenty of sci-fi universes full of Han Solos. How many have Magic Space Knights? Vader's a great villain, despite being a magic space knight. But he works because he's the bad guy. The only truly competent force-users in the original trilogy are bad guys, and that means that as an audience member, I'm wondering, "how can these idiots kill a loving robot wizard man?" That adds more tension, and gives the writers an opportunity to have the heroes do something really clever. Luke in Jedi is borderline for me, since he's not all-powerful, but he's strong enough to beat Vader's rear end (at the risk of turning to the Dark Side). It's a great scene; the best in Jedi by far, not that that takes a whole lot. The worst is when Luke is up against non-force users, especially Stormtroopers. It's just not a fair fight, and so it's not particularly interesting to me to watch. The only saving grace on Tatooine is that Luke does some dumb poo poo and lands himself in big trouble, so at least there's some tension. But when the laser sword comes out, it's all over man.
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Jan 8, 2016 21:57
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Holy poo poo you loving nerds
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Jan 8, 2016 21:59
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Luke beats Vader only by getting angry. He's using the dark side. That's why the emperor wins. Luke lets go of his anger and chucks away his weapon, because he doesn't want to be on the dark side, but he's basically giving up and accepting his death, along with the deaths of all of his friends, who he has no plan to save. Vader is the one who has the apotheosis and decides he doesn't want his son to die, Luke is a loser. 
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Jan 8, 2016 22:00
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A thread about how a company that makes little plastic fightdollies is bad... containing nerds???? 
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Jan 8, 2016 22:00
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Look at these nerds calling Daisy Ridley a "twink". https://www.instagram.com/p/6puNsxFE1e/
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Jan 8, 2016 22:01
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Soulfucker posted:Holy poo poo you loving nerds Said Something Awful dot com forums poster Soulfucker
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Jan 8, 2016 22:02
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Soulfucker posted:Holy poo poo you loving nerds Harsh, but fair.
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Jan 8, 2016 22:02
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Pyrolocutus posted:Look at these nerds calling Daisy Ridley a "twink". No, see, if a woman doesn't have huge boobs, she's basically a boy. (But it's only Lingcod who thinks that, nobody else agrees with him.)
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Jan 8, 2016 22:03
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Icon Of Sin posted:This is why I like Wedge. He's not a magical space-wizard, just a drat good normal pilot that aced imperial pilots left and right across both Death Stars. a pity the actor was too important to come back for TFA can you imagine if wedge was in the movie as poe's mentor actually, cut out rey and all the jedi poo poo Let's just have a film about Porkins . 2, Hello Nasty. Poe & Finn and Wedge. Fighting lots of those guys with stun batons.
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Jan 8, 2016 22:06
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grassy gnoll posted:Have you never gone swimming in a quarry or a lake? People dump all kinds of weird poo poo into the water, and kids play on it without major consequence all the time. People die swimming in quarries because of all the weird junk dumped in it.
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Jan 8, 2016 22:10
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NTRabbit posted:JJ Abrams just wasn't the right director, he hasn't ever made anything good JJ Abrams's job is to keep intellectual property on life support by recycling previously used plot points until the property is no longer profitable. No one is expecting originality out the Star Trek or Star Wars franchises. So if Games Workshop is ever in the market for a director... ...they'd funnel the money to an executive's family member. JJ would respect the nepotism though.
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Jan 8, 2016 22:13
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WAR FOOT posted:a pity the actor was too important to come back for TFA I would be totally ok if the next movie is just Finn and Poe fighting a series of weird specialty troopers to complement Flametroopers and Batontroopers. Like maybe there will troopers with jetpacks or that dual-wield chain blasters. Troopers with vibro-scythes and electro-whips and mortars that fire thermal detonators. Storm troopers with windmills on their chests!
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Jan 8, 2016 22:13
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JJ Abrams isn't doing the next two movies.
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Jan 8, 2016 22:14
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I already died on this hill, but gently caress it! I think "Mary Sue" is a really nebulous term that has no concrete meaning, and the last time I got into this I was accused vehemently of "moving the goalposts" whenever I rebutted someone's argument, so to be plain: "Mary Sue" means, to me, a character that is shown favor by the narrative to the detriment of the work. Any time you, the audience, have the feeling that a character is liked or disliked by the author, it's typically because the narrative bent itself in some way that broke your suspension of disbelief. Maintaining suspension of disbelief is about consistency and immersion. If you fail to be consistent, it breaks. If you pull your audience out of the story while they go "Wait, what???" then it breaks. Obviously, both qualifiers are subject to some interpretation, and I don't feel as comfortable as Broken Loose does in categorically saying "Rey is a Mary Sue and if you disagree you're wrong," but Rey's (extremely ardent) defenders seem to miss the point of the arguments about Rey, which are as much about the metanarrative as they are about the contents of the story. Rey can use the Force proficiently with zero apparent training This is frequently rebutted with "So could Luke!" and is a favored argument of people who try to prop up the fallacy that Luke and Rey have interchangeable qualities and that TFA Rey is ANH Luke. Some of this is because TFA is obviously a soft-remake/reboot of ANH; some of this is because of facile similarities; some of this is just wanting that to be true. The fact is that Rey, in the first movie, performs a plethora of tricks that are presented in the original trilogy as requiring training, or at the very least awareness, to perform. Even if we allow for Rey having gleaned a knowledge that the Force can be used to manipulate minds during her interrogation at the hands of Kylo Ren, she pulls the saber to herself while Kylo Ren was attempting the same trick, before she knows that is even a thing you can do. Messing with someone's mind is one thing; even freezing them in place is a thing that she has experienced, and could try. But all of that is actually sort of irrelevant, because the particulars of "why" are less important than what they mean for narrative goals. Very often, people get caught up in justifying, with depicted evidence from canon material, why a character can do a thing or fly a ship or win a fight. This is inherently flawed. Star Wars is a story, not historical record of factual events. Everything is at the service of the narrative as written by the author. If you make the argument that there is a justification for a thing happening or a character performing an action or winning a fight or whatever, you can be technically right while still missing the entire loving point. Even if every single defense of Rey's sudden proficiency in piloting, the Force, or whatever is correct, she can still be a badly-written character who breaks immersion and is shown favor by the narrative. These two things are not mutually exclusive. I don't care if you want to say Rey, in the brief moment where she and Kylo had their mind-meld moment, abruptly gained knowledge of all of her Force powers and how to use them. I don't care if we can "justify" that Rey won her fight with Kylo Ren because he was wounded by Chewbacca and Finn. Those justifications were written in by the author, and did not have to exist in the first place. Star Wars is not a recounting of events that actually happened. In service to the story, some of those elements could have been, and in the opinion of some, should have been, omitted. But Rey is totally just Luke Again, I don't give a flying gently caress about whether we get the cinematic equivalent of lip service for explaining why a character can do a thing. So "but the movie showed--!" arguments hold zero water with me, for reasons I've already explained. With that out of the way, here's Luke from A New Hope: - Discovers his special destiny after Stormtroopers destroy his old life, prompting his escape aboard the Millennium Falcon with an elderly mentor - Is told that the Force is real, and begins cursory lessons in its use - Stages a daring rescue on a planetary weapon, suffering hardships borne both from without (Stormtroopers, trash-chute monsters) and within (his recklessness and semi-incompetence), and sees his mentor killed - Participates in a massed and pitched battle, emerging victorious after trusting in the lessons he was being taught earlier in the film, and being guided by his deceased mentor from beyond the grave Those are the main story beats of Luke. We are told from the start that he is sort of an unlearned and rural kid, but that he's a talented pilot with aims on the Imperial Academy in casual dialogue way, way before it ever actually becomes relevant. Luke's insistence that he can pilot is brought up several times before he does it, and even then he isn't a flawless combatant - he is still reckless in his first attack pass on the surface of the Death Star ("I got a little cooked, but I'm okay!"), and it isn't until he lets go of his recklessness and trusts in his mentor that he can accomplish his goal. Even then he needs a lot of help from the rest of the film's characters to achieve things - Obi-Wan to teach him about the Force and guide him even after his death, Han Solo to provide the flight to Alderaan and to save him during the climactic trench run, Leia aboard the Death Star when they're pinned down in the prison sector, and all of his wingmen during the Battle of Yavin. The movie is not afraid to put him in very mortal danger, and have him survive both under his own power and with the help of others. Luke does not always save himself; he frequently needs to be rescued, despite being the trilogy's main protagonist. Rey in TFA: - Discovers her special destiny after Stormtroopers destroy (part of?) her old life, prompting her escape aboard the Millennium Falcon - Is told that the old stories and legends of the Force, Luke Skywalker, and the Rebellion are real - Is captured by the movie's primary antagonist, and stages a daring rescue of herself using newfound powers - Overcomes the primary antagonist in single combat The "flaws" we are told Rey has - that she hit the wrong fuses aboard Han's freighter (confusing "flaw" for "mistake made"?), that she refuses to accept that she has been abandoned on Jakku (this is like saying your "flaw" is that you "are too good at most things, so people consequently dislike you") - are either not really flaws or not really detracting; she shares none of Luke's hot-shot arrogance, and a result never has her flaws come calling her to task because she doesn't really have any. Luke's attitude gets him into trouble in A New Hope several times, and so it feels rewarding when, during the last trench run, rather than letting his ego get in the way - which he has been doing the entire movie! - he trusts in a power greater than himself, has a little help from his friends, and succeeds as a result. Rey has no personality flaws to overcome, so she remains essentially static throughout the film, so there's no way to create a good payoff during the Kylo Ren fight while still having her win. This is the main problem that I, and some of the people I've spoken with, have with Rey. It has absolutely nothing to do with what the film tries to justify, and nothing to do with Rey being a woman (this is 2015, and if you don't like Rey and Finn because they're female and black respectively, you have no place at the table). The clearest illustration to make is within The Force Awakens itself - compare Finn's character arc to Rey's. Finn gets beat up; he loses fights, straight off; he relies on other characters to save him; he overcomes his character flaw (cowardice) to achieve a much more emotionally satisfying conclusion than Rey does, even though Kylo Ren wins their fight. Myself, and the audience when I saw TFA at release, were almost audibly rooting for Finn during his fight with Kylo Ren. We were doing this because he actually has a character arc. Rey doesn't. She begins the film as hyper-competent, then wins every fight she is in and passes every test. There is absolutely zero narrative tension whenever Rey is involved in doing anything, because she will always win and every other character is basically extraneous to her success. Chased by the First Order? No problem, I'll fly a two-person freighter by myself in expert fashion, even compensating for a neophyte companion (Finn's complaint about the Falcon's turret controls and setup) in spectacular fashion (the stall). Captured and taken to the Starkiller Base? I'll just use the Force to resist another Force-user's intrusion attempts, turn it back on him, then get a new ability from the narrative itself to aid in my escape, which I effectively accomplish alone. Dueling a trained combatant? I'll just out-Force him and defeat him, despite my inferior training. Hell, if Han, Chewie, and Finn didn't even go to the Starkiller Base to "save" her there's a good chance she would have gotten away on her own, since she can apparently fly anything and already evaded capture while developing her budding magical powers. It makes her teammates feel utterly unnecessary. What's more, the film seems to keep trying to insist that these are Cool Moments with a Strong Character - the sweep of the score, the cinematography - but there's nothing there. Rey never really needs help, except from the author, and it detracts from the story. This is still sort of about sexism, though My pet theory - and this is probably dumb I guess - is that JJ Abrams was worried about the politics of his new protagonist being a woman. Star Wars fans, myself included, can be tremendous geeks and idiots, and have a reputation for being insular and eccentric and male. Popular psychology would suggest that most ~nerd boys~ are at least mildly misogynistic, a depiction I have no data to either refute or uphold, but anecdotally I can agree with it. What's more, Star Wars attracts a lot of in-depth analysis that it doesn't really deserve (lmao at this post) most of the time, and so there may have been an awareness of what the stereotypical "tumblr crowd" might take away from the movie. So we wound up with a "strong female protagonist" who is actually just sort of a shallow and flat non-character with no vulnerabilities to humanize her and no way to root for her at all, because it seems like a foregone conclusion throughout the movie that she will always win and will never be in any real danger. Because she's hyper-competent she appeases the potential media vultures waiting to scream "SEXIST!~" if she hadn't been "appropriately competent," whatever that may mean or not mean. Because she never loses she gets to avoid the potential nerd argument about why we have to put up with a ~girl Jedi knight~ when ~a boy would have done so much better~ or whatever. I think JJ Abrams was in a place where he had to be concerned about sexists in his fanbase and also hyper-aware of people ready to call him a sexist, so - much like the rest of the film - the safest possible choice was made. Rey is "badass." She is very popular amongst the general populace. She avoids any of the tickboxes of either competing group. She's also probably the least interesting character in The Force Awakens as a result.
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Jan 8, 2016 22:20
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Source your quotes man, that stuff is golden.
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Jan 8, 2016 22:22
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Source your quotes man, that stuff is golden. From I Am A loving Idiot, 2016©, by me, published by Random House
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Jan 8, 2016 22:29
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tbh Obi-Wan's death was more moving than Han's. Much like the destruction of an entire star system, nobody gave a poo poo. e: I hope Luke is flagellating himself at the start of the next film. "Man, if I wasn't such an emo recluse, my best friend wouldn't have been killed!"
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Jan 8, 2016 22:33
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if they had blown kylo ren's hand off do you think people would get he's wounded and exhausted what if he was actually on fire, like, the entire time head lit up like loving ghost rider and just screaming the entire time OH GOD THIS loving HURTS DARTH loving VADER SAVE ME
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Jan 8, 2016 22:33
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WAR FOOT posted:tbh Obi-Wan's death was more moving than Han's. Much like the destruction of an entire star system, nobody gave a poo poo. pfft what. Han dying was basically my childhood spent watching ANH/ESB on VHS getting stabbed by Adam from Girls (in all seriousness when I first saw TFA (which I loved???) I got a little choked up when Han died, the last thing he does is touch his son's face)
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Jan 8, 2016 22:34
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Spiderdrake posted:if they had blown kylo ren's hand off do you think people would get he's wounded and exhausted If he was on fire it would open up some kind of Ong-Bak scenario.
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Jan 8, 2016 22:36
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Spiderdrake posted:if they had blown kylo ren's hand off do you think people would get he's wounded and exhausted Kylo Ren's exhaustion isn't really well portrayed. He flings Rey like a rag-doll about a minute before they fight, before he dunks on Finn. Then forgets how to? Or runs out of Force Juice? Also, if Chewwie's bowcaster had hit him the way it hit everyone else, he would've been a red mist. Also also, the planet splitting right between them was the worst thing, apart from maybe Pharasma.
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Jan 8, 2016 22:36
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3b-zG9tVgk Just replace Lando with Rey tbh e: Rey is the spiritual liege of the Blood Ravens
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Jan 8, 2016 22:38
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WAR FOOT posted:a pity the actor was too important to come back for TFA George Miller for Star Wars director make it happen Lucas.
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Jan 8, 2016 22:41
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WAR FOOT posted:Also also, the planet splitting right between them was the worst thing, apart from maybe Pharasma. also like, exhaustion tends to come as you do things? The 'he did one thing, then he's a little tired, then he bleeds on the ground, then he does another thing and he's more tired, wtf?' argument is not very good
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Jan 8, 2016 22:41
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WAR FOOT posted:Kylo Ren's exhaustion isn't really well portrayed. He flings Rey like a rag-doll about a minute before they fight, before he dunks on Finn. Then forgets how to? Or runs out of Force Juice? He's getting weaker over time because he's running around with a serious untreated injury! and he survives chewie's shot because of some combination of the force/better armour/range I guess
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Jan 8, 2016 22:42
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hey remember the entire point that whatever in-film justification you use for why kylo lost is, you know, not really relevant in terms of the metanarrative no? okay
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Jan 8, 2016 22:44
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:
Because he's an important character. Same reason Leia isn't fried in Jedi. Twas but a flesh wound. remusclaw fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 22:45
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZEdDMQZaCU
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Jan 8, 2016 22:47
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thespaceinvader posted:gently caress yes I was mega disappointed that Rogue One turned out not to be a movie about Rogue Squadron. I would totally watch a 2-hour pitched space battle with some plot and character development a la Mad Max. Rogue One isn't about Rogue Squadron? What the fuckkkkkkkkkkkkk
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Jan 8, 2016 22:49
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Rey is a complete Mary Sue and I don't see how you could view the film and not come to that conclusion. This is not a thing that makes me angry, it is just a fact.
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Jan 8, 2016 23:03
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guts and bolts posted:From I Am A loving Idiot, 2016©, by me, published by Random House Man, I had no idea Max Landis posted here.
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Jan 8, 2016 23:05
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WAR FOOT posted:Rogue One isn't about Rogue Squadron? I'm still hoping it's going to have spaceship battles, but the plot summary screams HEIST MOVIE. thespaceinvader fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Jan 8, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 23:05
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Leperflesh posted:No, see, if a woman doesn't have huge boobs, she's basically a boy. Just because I'm right once on accident doesn't mean I believe anything I type. (Personally I thought it was kinda nice that she was in an outfit that I could see someone actually adventuring in as opposed to the usual crap female leads wear in adventure flims).
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Jan 8, 2016 23:12
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Broken Loose posted:Whether or not you liked Rey has nothing to do with her being a Mary Sue. What's your loving problem? Are you retarded? I was making a joke about how similar Rey is to Amuro Ray. 
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Jan 8, 2016 23:15
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guts and bolts posted:hey remember the entire point that whatever in-film justification you use for why kylo lost is, you know, not really relevant in terms of the metanarrative Just stop, they're going to ignore all legitimate points you make and then either accuse you of being crazy or angry, or they'll try to play Goon Chicken until they've established they care less about the argument they're in and obviously win by default.
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Jan 8, 2016 23:17
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NTRabbit posted:JJ Abrams just wasn't the right director, he hasn't ever made anything good I liked Cloverfield. But I've got a weakness for found footage horror movies, so my judgment might be impaired there.
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Jan 8, 2016 23:17
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Broken Loose posted:Just stop, they're going to ignore all legitimate points you make and then either accuse you of being crazy or angry, or they'll try to play Goon Chicken until they've established they care less about the argument they're in and obviously win by default. I am legitimately disappointed that you and Leperflesh didn't post-duel to mutual exhaustion and then make out. 
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Jan 8, 2016 23:19
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Ashcans posted:I am legitimately disappointed that you and Leperflesh didn't post-duel to mutual exhaustion and then make out. In my head-canon they did.
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Jan 8, 2016 23:21
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thespaceinvader posted:gently caress yes I was mega disappointed that Rogue One turned out not to be a movie about Rogue Squadron. I would totally watch a 2-hour pitched space battle with some plot and character development a la Mad Max. The Battle of Midway in space
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Jan 8, 2016 23:23
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