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Anakin, the boy kept in slavery by means of a remote brain detonator, wins a great battle against a slave army by remotely detonating their brains.
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Jan 15, 2018 16:40
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Is not a remotely detonating brain though merely an analog to the omnipresent angst that we all feel at not knowing the time of our own death, which can come like a thief in the night? We all live with remotely detonated bombs in our brains, our own mortality, and are we not slaves to this bomb?
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Jan 15, 2018 17:01
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Star Wars is a series of films. It's weird reading a post in which you pretend to not know what a metaphor is.
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Jan 15, 2018 17:23
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Friendly Factory posted:Not that this tired discussion isn't annoying, but it has reminded me that I would like to see a force using droid at some point Grievous, arguably
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Jan 15, 2018 17:30
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Framing Rey as a Star Wars fan is an obnoxious way of saying that a preoccupation of the Sequel Trilogy is the reinterpretation of previous history/myth/legend catalysing new histories/myths/legends. I'm not saying it's completely wrong, it's just part of an annoying tendency in modern criticism which is to diagnose metafictionality in stuff when it's not necessary to bring that into the conversation at all. For example when the new Twin Peaks series was airing, people were quick to say David Lynch was 'trolling' his audience instead of merely saying he was frustrating their expectations.
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Jan 15, 2018 17:47
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Friendly Factory posted:Not that this tired discussion isn't annoying, but it has reminded me that I would like to see a force using droid at some point 
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Jan 15, 2018 17:48
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That's from an Infinities Story.
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Jan 15, 2018 17:51
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Bleck posted:Grievous, arguably He's a more like Vader, a living being with mechanical replacements
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Jan 15, 2018 17:52
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CelticPredator posted:Deep down, I think you want to prove how dumb you think Yaws is. I always hate these kind of posts. What makes you think Yaws answering the question in earnest would end up with Bongo Bill thinking it's "dumb"? Weird thoughts, OP
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Jan 15, 2018 17:59
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A brief intermission from our regularly scheduled humans vs. droids debate to bring you the following short film featuring Bruce Lee in a lightsaber fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQC29joihwU
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Jan 15, 2018 18:24
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Jewmanji posted:A brief intermission from our regularly scheduled humans vs. droids debate to bring you the following short film featuring Bruce Lee in a lightsaber fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQC29joihwU They make those light nunchucks work pretty well, considering.
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Jan 15, 2018 18:32
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*bounces laser nunchunk against back of arm, severing it completely*
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Jan 15, 2018 20:14
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quote:Exactly, the point of that line is we're supposed to be laughing at what a drama queen Threepio is being. Threepio is a robot-butler who just wants to perform his function but Artoo keeps getting him involved in Space Adventures, that's the joke. He's also correct, suffering is the entire reason he exists.
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Jan 15, 2018 20:25
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Hodgepodge posted:It's weird reading a post in which you pretend to not know what a metaphor is. The issue is that the metaphor doesn’t work. Like in the It Follows thread, it was argued that the monster is a metaphor for AIDS, and then the kid protagonists cure... AIDS...? By not believing in it? What you are proposing is a full-scale allegory about media consumption, where lack of access to the Star Wars franchise films is equated with homelessness/drought/starvation. Whatever, sure. Let’s set aside, for the moment, that you’ve immediately reduced the stakes of the conflict to ‘ability to buy merch’ and infantilized yourself. Even in this view, Rey is a Star Wars fan who is intimately familiar with Han Solo’s EU adventures - and with, I guess, technical manuals about Star Destroyers - and yet, inexplicably, she still hasn’t seen the movies. She’s barely heard of Luke Skywalker or ‘the Force’ - “I thought he was a myth”. Rey must be an extremely rare individual who is a hardcore Star Wars fan but only a fan of, like, hyperdrive specs and the fictional mechanics of spice smuggling. She is not characterized by her fandom but by her ignorance. Like she’s only obsessively re-read the story where Han Solo punches the giant weasel queen. Perhaps this is why she knows everything about the millennium falcon except what it looks like. To repeat: Rey doesn’t know what Han Solo looks like, but she’s intimately familiar with the Kessel Run. And things just get weirder from there.
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Jan 15, 2018 21:02
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Waffles Inc. posted:What makes you think Yaws answering the question in earnest would end up with Bongo Bill thinking it's "dumb"? Weird thoughts, OP His answer would be “dumb” Hence the trap.
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Jan 15, 2018 21:03
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The issue is that the metaphor doesn’t work. It's a metaphor for sex as a passage into adulthood and with it the knowledge that you are mortal and will eventually die. You can run from it, you can keep moving forward and hope that's enough, but you can never really stop it.
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Jan 15, 2018 21:06
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Rian said that the milk is green on NPR btw
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Jan 15, 2018 21:06
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CelticPredator posted:His answer would be “dumb” ....how do you know that? 
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Jan 15, 2018 21:07
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So is the Han Solo trailer meant to be out today or not? I know nobody really cares about the Solo movie but I have to admit I'm fascinated to see something of it just because of how much of a mess its been production-wise.
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Jan 15, 2018 21:26
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Wheat Loaf posted:So is the Han Solo trailer meant to be out today or not? I know nobody really cares about the Solo movie but I have to admit I'm fascinated to see something of it just because of how much of a mess its been production-wise. It's supposed to be out some point today, but they're being cagey on when. edit: Take this with a grain of salt, though. It was also rumored to come out on the 12th, and that obviously didn't happen. thrawn527 fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Jan 15, 2018 |
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Jan 15, 2018 21:33
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Maxwell Lord posted:It's a metaphor for sex as a passage into adulthood and with it the knowledge that you are mortal and will eventually die. You can run from it, you can keep moving forward and hope that's enough, but you can never really stop it. Right. Misreading like the AIDS metaphor happen when the film fails in some way. In that case, people see the characters as apsychological rational actors facing off against an outside scientific-objective threat. “We just need to cure mortality.” People say Force Awakens is about fandom and cosplay because the film likewise fails. Characters are understood in terms of their demographic and media consumption - movie likes and dislikes - rather than their actions or their socioeconomic status. Rey is a girl and she likes Han Solo. That is all that matters to people, because she doesn’t actually do anything in the film. And the fact that she is abjectly poor, on the verge of starving to death, is completely unimportant. This happens when the film fails to establish any sort of psychological or sociopolitical reality. People see the film as a LARP because the film fails as a film. Like, in Hodgepodge’s view, the opening massacre of the village essentially represents an online flame war between people on an online Star Wars message board. That’s a damning indictment. Rey is living in a scrapheap of decommissioned military hardware, eating slime, and Hodgepodge’s stance is that this is represents the 30+ years of depression that middle-class nerds have spent waiting for someone to make an Episode 7. I mean, come on. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Jan 15, 2018 |
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Jan 15, 2018 21:45
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Right. Misreading like the AIDS metaphor happen when the film fails in some way. People see the characters as apsychological rational actors facing off against an outside scientific-objective threat. Depression? No, but sitting in the literal shadow of an AT-AT (which is from what the fandom considers to be the best Star Wars movie) while wearing a Rebel fighter pilot helmet shows that she's living in the shadows of the past movies. She gets doe-eyed at the mere mention of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, or the Falcon. She's a fan, but is afraid to move on from her safe space. But by the end, she has moved into a larger world to try and actually engage with these shadows of the past. "She doesn't actually do anything in the film" is just false. For most of the movie, she's reacting, trying to survive, but also trying to do what's right (get BB-8 back to the Resistance). By the end of the movie, she should want to go back to Jakku to wait for her parents. But she doesn't, she steps further into the galaxy to find a teacher, and a new hope for the Resistance. The fact that she is abjectly poor isn't "completelyunimportant", it's to show that heroes in this galaxy can come from nothing. This is the same sort of story we get from Luke in Star Wars (though he was far less poor, he was still a farmer in a shithole planet), until the sequel retconned him the son of Darth Vader. Contrast this with Kylo Ren, who dresses somewhat like Darth Vader, not because he needs to (like Vader did), but because he wants to look like Darth Vader. The movie makes this explicitly (probably too explicitly) clear. He's a fan, wants to be Vader, only better, and is struggling with the fact that it's not working out that way. He's constructed his own lightsaber, but, like some of us who built them when we were kids, his is a shittier imitation (though obviously his is better than the stick I found in my backyard). It's like this for the whole First Order. They are not the Empire, but they want to be. Only better. (This is all from TFA, btw. TLJ is about something different, which is fine, it's a different movie.) This isn't exactly new, JJ Abrams likes making movies about the franchise they're in, or the genre, or the fandom. Star Trek '09 has a lot of this, with modern, dark, ugly sci-fi going back in time and battling with bright, optimistic, literal "ship of lights" sci-fi, and getting swallowed into nothingness.
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Jan 15, 2018 22:01
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The issue is that the metaphor doesn’t work. In the literal sense, she has heard legends which tell the same story as the film, and grew up scavenging the ruins of a battle between the rebellion and the Empire. The connection between stories originally told through oral history and those told through film is one of the central thematic premises of Star Wars. However, she has never experienced any of this firsthand; the analogy being between things you've only heard of as myth and the culturally predigested experience of watching the previous trilogies as a young audience. Your analysis here counts as 'weird thoughts' if anything does. You hear that she knows Luke Skywalker as a myth and is amazed and inspired by the Jedi being real- and conclude that she doesn't know anything about these subjects. You have difficulty imagining any form of knowledge which does not involve a screen. You cannot seem to grasp that Han Solo showing up and telling Star Wars fan that the Force is real would provoke the same reaction. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Jan 15, 2018 |
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Jan 15, 2018 22:05
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thrawn527 posted:Depression? No, but sitting in the literal shadow of an AT-AT (which is from what the fandom considers to be the best Star Wars movie) while wearing a Rebel fighter pilot helmet shows that she's living in the shadows of the past movies. You are badly mixing your metaphors. “Living in the shadow of Empire Strikes Back” would mean that Rey is not a Star Wars fan but a Star Wars character who is unsure of how to accomplish anything noteworthy in the Star Wars universe. And then, there is absolutely no reason to be ‘meta’ here. We can eliminate all the meta reference to Star Wars as a franchise and lose nothing: Rey is a character who is unsure of how to accomplish anything noteworthy in the universe. (And of course, it’s because the war is ostensibly over and her life isn’t any better. She could escape Jakku at any time, but she has nowhere to go. The Republic failed her. But, oops, now we’re getting political.) See? The problem is, again, that people don’t perceive Rey as a character. They perceive her as a consumer demographic interacting with the narrative from outside, like a person playing a videogame.
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Jan 15, 2018 22:57
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:You are badly mixing your metaphors. You are now amazed at the idea of people drawing a connection between the audience and a protagonist. You also deny any reason to get 'meta' but cannot go a paragraph without having to stop because your analysis has become 'political,' the difference being that one is a posited potential reading you disdain, the other the way you would normally read a film but stop yourself from doing in this case. Each reading is actually both 'meta' and 'political.'
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Jan 15, 2018 23:11
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:See? The problem is, again, that people don’t perceive Rey as a character. Which people? 
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Jan 15, 2018 23:14
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There was a guy in the last Star Wars thread who argued for like 5 straight pages that TFA is an allegory for millennials in the workplace and it was so lol dumb SMG riffs on it two years later
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Jan 15, 2018 23:22
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Wheat Loaf posted:Which people? The first few weeks of TFA chat were people clamoring to say “this is millennial Star Wars!!” much like how lots of folks continue to insist that the First Order are somehow the alt right
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Jan 15, 2018 23:35
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Must be an SA thing.
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Jan 15, 2018 23:40
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Wheat Loaf posted:Which people [don’t perceive Rey as a character]? Those who say that she - a homeless woman living in a broken-down tank in space-Somalia - is really more like a child living in the suburbs, with a pile of star wars toys but no DVD player with which to fully contextualize them. Her makeshift hovel represents not only decontextualized pop-cultural ephemera but, uh, critical praise for the movies she hasn't seen. Rey wants for nothing except entertainment, because she is not a character. And then, in a second-order way, Rey's status as an ignorant child represents the desire of adult nerds to 'relive their childhoods'. This is the mechanism through which Rey can be both ignorant of basic Star Wars facts ("Luke Skywalker is a star wars character? I thought he was diegetically like bigfoot or something.") and the avatar of its fandom. This all actively ignores, of course, that war actually happened in the film. The guys who piloted that tank presumably died in combat. The guy who wore the helmet was also shot dead. Billions of people died in Galactic War II. Rey is a character - a scavenger. She lives in a mass grave.
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Jan 15, 2018 23:49
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Those who say that she - a homeless woman living in a broken-down tank in space-Somalia - is really more like a child living in the suburbs, with a pile of star wars toys but no DVD player with which to fully contextualize them. Her makeshift hovel represents not only decontextualized pop-cultural ephemera but, uh, critical praise for the movies she hasn't seen. Rey wants for nothing except entertainment, because she is not a character. This hypothetical child in Somalia is capable of hearing stories, and being told that they are real. Those stories might, for example, be about Christ.
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Jan 15, 2018 23:57
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Star Wars is Christ, you see.
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Jan 15, 2018 23:58
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Well, I don't know about any of that. It seems too sophisticated for me. 
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Jan 15, 2018 23:58
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Star Wars is Christ, you see. No, no. Darth Vader is Christ. Once you're done watching some Star Wars you should read SMG's posts about it.
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Jan 16, 2018 00:04
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Hodgepodge posted:This hypothetical child in Somalia is capable of hearing stories, and being told that they are real. Those stories might, for example, be about Christ. You were talking about something specific: Star Wars fandom. Not 'people who hear stories and are told that they are real'. Don't be deceitful. Remember, you are reacting against this post: SuperMechagodzilla posted:Star Wars is a series of films.
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Jan 16, 2018 00:14
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:You were talking about something specific: Star Wars fandom. Not 'people who hear stories and are told that they are real'. Don't be deceitful. Hodgepodge posted:In the literal sense, she has heard legends which tell the same story as the film, and grew up scavenging the ruins of a battle between the rebellion and the Empire. The connection between stories originally told through oral history and those told through film is one of the central thematic premises of Star Wars. There is an audience for which Star Wars films beyond "fandom," the assumption that the audience is automatically a "fandom" is entirely your own. e: to clarify a bit further, you're deceiving yourself in a similar manner to those who dismiss Lucas as incapable of writing films equal to the sophistication to your analysis. The difference is instead of using the imaginary figure of the author as an excuse to avoid reading the films, you are using the putative audience instead. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Jan 16, 2018 |
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Jan 16, 2018 00:17
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Hodgepodge posted:There is an audience for which Star Wars films beyond "fandom," the assumption that the audience is automatically a "fandom" is entirely your own. Your though processes are all disorganized. I wrote that Rey is not a metaphorical Star Wars fan; she is a metaphorical person who finds religion. You wrote that this was wrong. Now you agree: Rey is not a metaphorical Star Wars fan; she is a metaphorical person who finds religion. You also now insist that Star Wars movies and historical legends are both types of story, which I don't think anyone would disagree with. But you add the weird conclusion that Rey, having heard a story about past events, was technically an audience. And, therefore, she is like the audience for blockbuster films, and therefore she is like a Star Wars fan.
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Jan 16, 2018 00:49
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Your though processes are all disorganized. You have not, in this discussion, advanced the idea that Rey "finds religion." You have posited many interpretations here, but that is not one of them. If my thought process seems confused, perhaps it is because you are assuming that I am reacting to posts you did not make. A fundamental difference between our positions which you seem to be avoiding is that I am talking about "a young audience" who encounter the previous films as a "culturally predigested experience," whereas you insist that I am talking about "middle-class nerds" experiencing "30+ years of depression...waiting for someone to make an Episode 7." The thing is, you are the only one preoccupied with those nerds. A child- whose class background is not necessarily middle class- is able to see that Rey lives in poverty and empathize with that, and also recognize that although Star Wars is a collection of stories, legends, and rumors rather than a series of films to her, they both encounter it as the experience of a previous generation that nevertheless constantly informs their own. Like, my son watches Lego videos on YouTube and frequently asks me about Darth Vader. He mixes up Vader and Ren and so forth, but it would take a lot of intentional effort to allow him to watch the films without already having encountered them as a cultural, commercial, etc, phenomenon. He's younger than the audience I have in mind, but age is not likely to diminish this effect. All this cultural ephemera are the ruins Rey is scavenging in; whatever value those stories have reach the subject as scraps which might be mined for a meager contribution to survival in a bleak Capitalist environment. These middle class nerds you care about so much aren't relevant at to my analysis. Hodgepodge fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Jan 16, 2018 |
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Jan 16, 2018 01:19
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Star Wars is Christ, you see. IIRC Holdo uses the word "godspeed" at some point so we've got some tiny hint that god is or was a concept in the star wars universe now.
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Jan 16, 2018 02:56
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Hodgepodge posted:although Star Wars is a collection of stories, legends, and rumors rather than a series of films to her, they both encounter it Ok, now we can see where you're getting confused. Your argument is based around the notion that 'Star Wars' is a thing - an "it" - that transcends media. Now, I would have expected that you are a referring to the plot content of Star Wars, as Star Wars' plot is roughly the same across novelizations, radio plays, wikipedia articles, and whatever. But you are actually talking more abstractly a 'universal' experience of... not being old. Hodgepodge posted:I am talking about "a young audience" who encounter ... a "culturally predigested experience." Your argument is that Rey and children (in the abstract) are younger than old people, and old people have experienced things that young people have not experienced. Of course, people who fought in wars had extremely different experiences from people who saw Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of The Clones in theaters. You do acknowledge these sorts of differences, but gloss over them. They are unimportant, because they the point is that all people experience things. The experience of experiencing is universal. Now the question here is, again, why you have gone meta - why Star Wars as a franchise factors into this at all. And that's where things get mixed up between the plot of Star Wars and the tautology that experience is experienced. I've merely stated that Star Wars is a series of films in which Rey is a character who collects holy relics. You are saying that Star Wars is the abstract experience of being aware of the plot of Star Wars, and since Rey is aware of historical events in the Star Wars universe she has fundamentally the same experience as a dude who edits wookieepedia or a child who sees a movie trailer.
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Jan 16, 2018 02:56
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