|
Jizz-wailing doesn't sound like something I want to participate in, but I'm not here to judge. Star Trek could also just invent made-up names for artists or musicians or whatever and NOT include Chopin, but it's clearly a conscious choice to contextualize these implied geniuses into some sort of Western canon. If Worf just said, "gently caress yeah, Dorrgh's OG poo poo is the illest," you could probably gleam he was talking about some sort of musician or something. But obviously, in this enlightened future, high-brow markers of affluent Eurocentric whiteness remain of central cultural importance. Hodgepodge posted:Sisko also lost his ship and his wife at the Federation's major battle against the Borg and was haunted by PTSD of Captain Picard as Locutus of Borg. As immortalized through this glorious painting: The Death of Jennifer Sisko and the Destruction of the U.S.S. Saratoga at Wolf 359 The DS9 approach to Bajor as a kind of Space Israel was one of the more interesting components of that show. Xealot fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Jan 11, 2017 |
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 01:14
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 22, 2024 09:57 |
|
|
Xealot posted:As immortalized through this glorious painting: The Death of Jennifer Sisko and the Destruction of the U.S.S. Saratoga at Wolf 359 More people should do Renaissance style paintings of moments from pop culture.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 01:18
|
|
|
Serf posted:When I ran a Star Wars tabletop campaign the first thing the players had to do was pick their way through the wreckage of the Death Star that landed on the moon. This would have been a badass map in Battlefront.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 02:13
|
|
|
Phi230 posted:Also something interesting to consider is how the Federation has no new media. Everything is from the 1940s at best. Hey, in that one episode everyone sits around and watches the pilot. So 1960s at the very least.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 05:11
|
|
|
I like this thread better when it's talking about Star Trek.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 07:52
|
|
|
I watched The Doomsday Machine (TOS S2Ew/e) today b/c we were talking about it. Man that "we'll fly inside it and blow it up!!" climax musta seemed wild in 1968
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 07:57
|
|
|
Xealot posted:Jizz-wailing doesn't sound like something I want to participate in, but I'm not here to judge. Agreed, rewatching it today it's so blatantly written assuming that Palestine became its own nation, and the way Bajorans are written draws parallels between groups resisting Nazis during WWII and Palestinians is so strong I don't think it could even be made today, especially some of the later TNG episodes that focused on Ro leaving the federation. Speaking of I finally saw Beyond and that movie is so much fun. By the end I was kind of hoping Idris Elba's character wouldn't die. They created a cool villain whose very existence means Starfleet failed in a way. And I appreciated that they used a ton of aspects of human culture he had cast away and forgotten to defeat him. His massive army was blown away by his own century+ old mixtape, that owned. Jayla was awesome also so I hope they don't forget about the character whenever they make another one of these. The "problem solving" stuff in it was cool too and hit a perfect middle ground between TOS and TNG.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 09:06
|
|
|
Neo Rasa posted:Agreed, rewatching it today it's so blatantly written assuming that Palestine became its own nation, and the way Bajorans are written draws parallels between groups resisting Nazis during WWII and Palestinians is so strong I don't think it could even be made today, especially some of the later TNG episodes that focused on Ro leaving the federation. I don't remember those well, so I brushed up on the plot summary. Wow, yeah, a sympathetic character who has conflicted loyalties with the space-terrorists would not be an easy sell these days. Although we had BSG make humanity into the Taliban and that was years ago. Maybe we're ready again.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 10:47
|
|
|
Hodgepodge posted:I don't remember those well, so I brushed up on the plot summary. Wow, yeah, a sympathetic character who has conflicted loyalties with the space-terrorists would not be an easy sell these days. Although we had BSG make humanity into the Taliban and that was years ago. Maybe we're ready again. We also had spunky attractive white kids made into the Vietcong in the motion picture Star Wars.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 15:11
|
|
|
Danger posted:We also had spunky attractive white kids made into the Vietcong in the motion picture Star Wars. Honestly, I feel like it was fairly mainstream in film to admit that America was the bad guy to some extent in Vietnam by 1977. Casting the photogenic white people and making all but one of the minorities into robots and aliens just let them be very didactic with the moral conflict. Like we're only two years off Apocalypse Now depicting literal Vietnam as a spiritual journey deep into the dark side. Although Darth Vader as a traumatized and horribly disfigured WWII veteran who is still in service is basically SMG's reading. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Jan 11, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 15:20
|
|
|
I remember an old documentary about the making of Star Wars that noted most of the films of the 70s were pretty downbeat and cynical, reflecting a lack of trust in American leadership at the time. Movies like Chinatown weren't exactly inspiring. Part of what made Star Wars take off was that it was genuine good fun with a happy ending, which stood in sharp contrast to the gritty realism of popular pictures in the day.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 15:35
|
|
|
Sure if you call millions of people dying in the Death Star a good ending.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 15:40
|
|
|
And an awards ceremony deliberately reminiscent of Hitler's speech from Triumph of the Will. But I get what you're saying, though. I certainly didn't know about fascism or think about casualties on the Death Star when I saw A New Hope for the first time. But I was three years old at the time.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 15:44
|
|
|
euphronius posted:Sure if you call millions of people dying in the Death Star a good ending. Its a happy ending to like 99.9999% of the people who watch it, so lets just go with the majority on this one instead of having the old "how many innocent janitors died on the Death Star" argument again.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 15:44
|
|
|
Something I just remembered from Final Fantasy 7 chat: the ending is carefully ambiguous as to whether humanity survives. Cloud and Tifa speak of "joining her in the Promised Land" after a vision from Tifa. We are then showing Holy destroying Meteor, followed by Red XIII and a previously impossible cub over the ruins of Midgard. If I recall correctly, there was some uncertainty as to whether humanity would survive the casting of Holy since it literally purifies the Planet of anything deemed a threat to its survival. So this could be taken as an assurance that humanity would experience a second life as part of reuniting with the Lifestream in the event of our being judged unworthy. We are only reassured that the most inhuman member of the cast and his culture flourish and the symbol of the capitalist order is overgrown with ruins. To tie this back to Star Wars, what if Final Fantasy 4, 6, and 7 are actually the best Star Wars games?
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 15:50
|
|
|
Mass Effect is the best series of Star Wars video games. It's about a society that needs external threats and obsession with multicultural cooperation to distract from the fact that all its leaders abet or politely ignore a capitalist dystopia. Meanwhile, the actual external threat is ignored because it's the root of the existing social hierarchy.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 15:54
|
|
|
Basebf555 posted:Its a happy ending to like 99.9999% of the people who watch it, so lets just go with the majority on this one instead of having the old "how many innocent janitors died on the Death Star" argument again. It was a joke jfc.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 15:54
|
|
|
euphronius posted:It was a joke jfc. I swear I can't even tell anymore. Maybe I never could. I'll see myself out.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 15:57
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:Mass Effect is the best series of Star Wars video games. It's about a society that needs external threats and obsession with multicultural cooperation to distract from the fact that all its leaders abet or politely ignore a capitalist dystopia. Meanwhile, the actual external threat is ignored because it's the root of the existing social hierarchy. Also being a space racist or space liberal is ultimately a matter of window dressing compared to facing the actual threat. However, still is an external threat that secretly corrupts our society from its foundations.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 16:01
|
|
|
Basebf555 posted:I swear I can't even tell anymore. Maybe I never could. I'll see myself out. No matter how dry I may sound, when my posts start to reach the 90% "just an excuse to talk about Final Fantasy" threshold I assure you I am no longer being 100% serious. e: also for the one goon who hasn't played it, I left out that the ending is interrupted by a brief lightsaber duel with the spirit of Sephiroth. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Jan 11, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 16:03
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:Mass Effect is the best series of Star Wars video games. It's about a society that needs external threats and obsession with multicultural cooperation to distract from the fact that all its leaders abet or politely ignore a capitalist dystopia. Meanwhile, the actual external threat is ignored because it's the root of the existing social hierarchy. Nah. Metal Gear Solid is the best series of Star Wars video games. Clones, shocking father reveals, chopped off arms, psychic mutants, robots, and told in a strange order.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 17:10
|
|
|
I think you'll find District 9, Chappie and Elysium are the best Star Wars trilogy, featuring Jar Jar Binks, C-3PO with a battle droid head, and Luke Skywalker as their protagonists, respectively
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 17:14
|
|
|
quote:Mass Effect is the best series of Star Wars video games. It's about a society that needs external threats and obsession with multicultural cooperation to distract from the fact that all its leaders abet or politely ignore a capitalist dystopia. Meanwhile, the actual external threat is ignored because it's the root of the existing social hierarchy. I'm Commander Shepard and this is my favorite store in the Citadel. A ringing endorsement for every store on the Citadel. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 17:16
|
|
|
Detective No. 27 posted:Nah. Metal Gear Solid is the best series of Star Wars video games. Clones, shocking father reveals, chopped off arms, psychic mutants, robots, and told in a strange order. Also Vagrant Story where there's just "the Dark" and the supposed villain Sydney is the leader of a terrorist cult who is accurately reported to have magical powers over the heart and mind. This is because he is the holder of the key to its power of the Dark, a brand of suffering called the "blood rood," which is literally just a stylized inverted cross. Sydney grooms the protagonist Ashley to become a superhuman version himself who can safeguard its power against the fascist Guildenstern. Sydney is also immortal due to the blood rood, but wishes to die because his magical immortality has been the only thing keeping him alive since childhood. In the middle of the fight, Ashley is given a vision of forgiveness from what is depicted as simultaneously his failure to save his family from being murdered and his murder of an identical innocent family in the line of duty as basically an elite secret police agent. The conflict is resolved by stating that it is the forgiveness from the spirits of the family which matters rather which role he played in their death. At the end it clarifies that this is intended as the beginning of his story as a "vagrant." I think Matsuno is kind of better when he tells a tight focused story and just lets all his background ideas inform it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 17:42
|
|
|
Family guy was right! 
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 19:09
|
|
|
Know this is really late to the party, but goddamn I loved Rogue One. The highlight for me has to be it's handling of belief and love. Like Cassian falling hard for Jyn - with it's obvious thematic connotations to Jyn's mother and father. Their exchange after her impassioned plea to the Rebel council - that was met with classist disdain - was great because he's coming to terms with the shock of this traumatic fall. Cassian Andor:"They were never gonna believe you" Jyn Erso:“I appreciate the support.” Cassian Andor:"But I do, I believe you. We’d like to volunteer. Some of us, well, most of us, we’ve all done terrible things on the behalf of the rebellion. Spies. Saboteurs. Assassins. Everything I did, I did for the Rebellion. Every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget, I told myself it was for a cause that I believed in. A cause that was worth it. Without that, we’re lost.” [...] K-2SO:“Jyn, I’ll be there for you. Cassian said I had to.” Even the formal structure of the movie itself in relation to the other episodes feels like it lends to this. With love as a traumatic "event that retroactively creates it own causes." The cinematography was also gorgeous, but that's no surprise from Edwards.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 20:59
|
|
|
Does anyone have a gif of the rebel fleet trying to hyperdrive away and a few of them plaster themselves across a Star Destroyer that just hyperdrove(?) in? I think that was my favorite bit of the battle.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 21:15
|
|
|
Hodgepodge posted:While it makes some good points, there is one weak point in the author's knowledge and imagination: Chinese is logographic not pictographic. A few characters have pictographic origins that are still sort of visible if you squint. You can't read Chinese by looking at the characters and comparing them to similar objects, they require literacy. Phi230 posted:I especially like your line regarding the prime directive being the assimilation of those deemed advanced enough: Right. It's wrong to give a 1000 person population with Neolithic technology in the Amazon cell phones and air conditioners because it poisons their culture and they're not ready for it. But it's okay to ship those goods to India because they're ready somehow and can assimilate that technology harmlessly (?). It's paternalist, racist, and a mask for the fact that those Amazonians don't have sufficient consumptive and productive power to be worth selling to.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 21:54
|
|
|
I'm reminded of an "experiment" done on East African children where they were given Android tablets. They had no previous encounter with "modern tech" and they hacked the OS and were writing apps for them within 30 days
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 22:26
|
|
|
I'm not seeing how that aspect of the Federation/Starfleet is a new special "reading" of Star Trek when that's explicitly the plot of like half the episodes in the franchise and gets brought up in the movies a lot. Like wow I perceived the dialogue happening during seasons three through six of DS9, such well thought out analysis.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 00:28
|
|
|
Freakazoid_ posted:I like this thread better when it's talking about Star Trek. Because Star Wars fans don't actually like Star Wars.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 01:03
|
|
|
DeimosRising posted:Chinese is logographic not pictographic. A few characters have pictographic origins that are still sort of visible if you squint. You can't read Chinese by looking at the characters and comparing them to similar objects, they require literacy. Your correction is welcome, but I think I can salvage my point: we see a symbolic language on screen and can't tell if it represents literacy or illiteracy despite the fact that there are thriving languages which are structured to encourage the symbolic literacy we struggle with.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 01:28
|
|
|
gohmak posted:Because Star Wars fans don't actually like Star Wars. Tbf it's also that some of us just want to nerd out on a generally Star Wars theme since actual news is awhile off, and its kind of more chill when you can talk about that stuff indirectly in some ways.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 01:34
|
|
|
Phi230 posted:SMG I wanna read your full leftist reading of Rogue One that shits good and I need it The opening scene of Rogue One is a Gojira reference. Galen Erso is confronted with the choice between torture and suicide, as Serizawa was in the original Gojira film: Serizawa: "If the oxygen destroyer is used even once, politicians from around the world will see it. Of course, they'll want to use it as a weapon. Bombs versus bombs, missiles versus missiles, and now a new superweapon to throw upon us all! As a scientist - no, as a human being - I can't allow that to happen! [...] Until I die, how can I be sure I won't be forced by someone to make the device again?" Edwards takes things further by showing - as we've seen with the dozens of Godzilla sequels - that suicide (repressing the discovery) is only a temporary solution. As with the challenge posed by the Ewoks, the fundamental question with this new discovery is; what kind of system can we trust with this incredible power source? It's obviously not the Empire - but it's not the Alliance To Restore The Republic either. If they were to simply sell - or even give away - 'clean' energy, in a universe of droid slavery and other exploitation, they would be no different from notable supervillain Tony Stark. Free energy isn't actually free. It comes from somewhere. And there are always byproducts. It's important to stress that science, in the abstract, is not to blame, and that ignorance is not a solution. "Maybe the problem is not [the scientific discovery] itself, but rather the context of power relations within which it functions." The only way to truly stop the Death Star is not necessarily to blow it up, but to pay careful attention to its antagonistic socioeconomic context. The emergence of the Death Star, however awful, is just a symptom of the actual problem. In other words, we should embrace Galen's incredible new power source as a point of contention, a shocking disruption of the status quo - an encapsulation of the fact that we were never free in the first place, even/especially in the Republic. So, as Zizek says: "precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to." This is exactly what Rogue One is about. Jyn and the others work with the Rebels, but never for them - always maintaining a distance. And it's important that, in the context of this particular standalone film, the Death Star isn't destroyed. We simply end with the traces of Vader's future revolution quashed, and Princess Leia being handed the keys to the proverbial kingdom. Those Death Star plans implicitly contain the design for Galen's incredible reactor. So, once again, Alderann and the Death Star are linked. The black-and-white imagery at the start of A New Hope is given fresh nuance. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Jan 12, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 01:56
|
|
|
I rewatched A New Hope for the first time in years yesterday. It's kinda shocking on reflection how I can easily identify C3-PO and R2-D2 as people, then immediately start caring about Luke wanting to go to Toshi Station to pick up some 'power converters' more than actual literal slavery right there on the screen. I'd just sort of mentally blanked over the entire scene inside the sandcrawler, but there's an whole community in there, and it's shot with the same sort of unnerving intimacy as the cantina (where they "don't serve their kind"). Also Vader talks a lot and is surprisingly casual by Star Wars standards in his speech patterns. He's threatening, but he honestly doesn't come off as that scary. Hell, he even delivers "I find your lack of faith disturbing" surprisingly similarly to his line in Rogue One to Krennic.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 02:10
|
|
|
SuperMechagodzilla posted:The opening scene of Rogue One is a Gojira reference. Galen Erso is confronted with the choice between torture and suicide, as Serizawa was in the original Gojira film: So what you're saying is that the Death Star is Trump and that he has a weakness built into his exhaust port? Huzanko fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Jan 12, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 02:33
|
|
|
Neo Rasa posted:I'm not seeing how that aspect of the Federation/Starfleet is a new special "reading" of Star Trek when that's explicitly the plot of like half the episodes in the franchise and gets brought up in the movies a lot. The endlessly-serial nature of Star Trek means that it trades in 'moral ambiguity', rather than ethics. (The medium is the message.) The ethical response to Star Trek is that the Federation are the bad guys, but the actual series merely expresses a gradualist philosophy of addressing each secondary malfunction as it pops up. It's soporific. Anticapitalism is truly alien to the Trek universe, while the literal aliens are just incredibly boring humans. Huzanko posted:So what you're saying is that the Death Star is Trump and that he has a weakness built into his exhaust port? People keep trying to elevate Trump into the ultimate evil, when he's really just a Nute Gunray idiot clown sort of character. Liberals think America is reliving the plot of The Force Awakens, and they're all Poe Damerons - cruising through cyberspace, sniping neonazis on twitter. "Where there's light there's hope!" It's like no, sorry; America's reliving the plot of The Phantom Menace, and you're Sio Bibble. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Jan 12, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 02:56
|
|
|
Re: Trump, this might not be a bad time to just watch Spaceballs.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 05:58
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 07:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 22, 2024 09:57 |
|
|
Han Solo, protagonist of 'the Star Wars', who notably decides to come back and fight for a cause greater than his own self-interest, in the first film he appears in
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 08:25
|
|