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I think The Force worked better as undefined as possible, and the compounded problem of SW is that while it remained vaguely undefined, it got expanded way too much. I know I'm not the first or tenth or thousandth person mentioning it but also it got way too much videogame'd, probably by videogames not to poo poo on the prequels since they were using stuff that already existed. We get a vague sense in ANH that The Force is sort of "everything" and that works. Obi shows it in a very mystical sense, and this is my favorite aspect of the reveal with the Emperor at the end. Obi-Wan makes weird noises, he then mind controls stormtroopers, he then shows how you can vaguely sense things and predict the future, feels people's death from light years away, pulls off a 007, mind controls some people some more, does a stealth mission, dies and talks to Luke after death. Obi-Wan is also entirely in control the whole time, something that I miss from other interpretations from his character both in the prequels and the recent show. In contrast, Vader - who's also using The Force like some palm reading to go "yes that's the rebel base that's it let's go to hoth" uses The Force physically but barely, and the notion of using it to control actual physical things is shown like some enormous mastery of the Force. Vader mostly uses it to suffocate people. Luke spends an entire movie sucking really hard at lifting rocks and has an easier time having visions of the present and future than doing very basic telekinesis. At no point in the first movies are we led to believe that Vader or Luke or Obi-Wan can storm through armies deflecting everything, and not only is that shown to us in the prequels as Order 66 (which feels kinda weird after seeing the Jedi doing inane stuff) but it's one of the opening lines in ANH about how Vader's mythical but real powers haven't done poo poo - his visions can't tell him where or who the enemies are, he fails to interrogate someone, and really he is just using it to frighten people. The two biggest wizards we see are about as hosed as if they were actual charlatans - Obi lives a lovely life in the desert as a hermit and uses his incredible magical powers to trick people, and Vader literally can't live without machines. I always thought that's a detail that goes sort of ignored. Vader is the evil Wizard, but his magic doesn't really help him the basic task of breathing. He mocks the Death Star for not being as powerful as the Force while being on permanent life support. He is taunted by his peers for his magic not accomplishing anything meaningful. If you just take the original trilogy for what it is, I think it's fairly conceivable that Han Solo shouldn't believe in fairy tales either. I like that the real twist of the Emperor is that he just casually tosses lightning from his fingers and that's something that Luke wasn't expecting because at no point he had reason to believe people would use the Force like that. He had already accepted his death and suicide mission, maybe the Emperor would toss some stuff at him, not torture him to death. I like when Mike Stoklasa said he saw this scene as just "a thing the Emperor could do" and that was sort of my read. I didn't interpret lightning as the ultimate evil spell, just that the Emperor could conjure a Firebolt, break his neck, or do whatever the gently caress he wanted because he was it, he was the real deal, this is what happens when someone who can actually do real magic exists - he kills everyone and becomes emperor of the universe. And even that didn't prevent him from being yeeted out to death by just a guy holding him. I know this is a huge effortpost but like, the Force in those 3 movies is an interesting self-contained story of a believable mystic power that really is undermined by the very high-tech society it finds itself in. You know from the start the entire cult of practitioners got killed, you know one of the guys responsible for killing them can't even move without cybernetics, you know that politicians openly mock him for the powers they know he has because they're loving useless. The Force's ultimate power really is just that it's a stand-in for destiny, and the characters are guided by it. But even then it is an unreliable power, the Emperor, Yoda and Luke have ~seen things~ and none of them come to pass. Luke defies Yoda's advice to save his friends and it works out just fine. The Emperor believes in the things he has foreseen and then dies. Luke wins by being a terrible Force user and just throwing his weapon on the ground and pulling a Luigi wins by doing nothing. Every subsequent version of the force feels more and more inconsistent because it doesn't make sense in the context it exists. Though I guess the final message of "if you try to use the force as anything more than plot armor you'll die" still applies, just in a horrible, power crept way.
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Dec 3, 2022 08:45
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What a loving nerdy page snipe.
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Dec 3, 2022 08:45
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Elentor posted:Luke wins by being a terrible Force user and just throwing his weapon on the ground and pulling a Luigi wins by doing nothing. Luke specifically wins by being a great Force user by just demonstrating faith that his instincts are not deceiving him no matter what his father says (thus listening to the Force over his own hearing). Which I think fits better into your overall point about the nature of Force shown in the original trilogy, in that its a act of faith (Emperor's line emphasizing "your faith in your friends" which includes Vader) but not like a video game spell.
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Dec 3, 2022 08:58
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I mean what he's standing tall in the face of is a loving space gremlin casting lightning bolt at him, so it's also kind of a video game. And then everyone gets to be ghosts around the campfire at the end. It was was always stupid bullshit that did whatever the plot required, and the more freedom Lucas got to express his vision of the Force the more obvious that became. e: I mean ultimately the Nightsisters in particular owe their survival into canon explicitly to a video game. They were EU stuff a studio threw into one of the games, George Lucas saw it and went "Yeah we can use that", and now they are Part Of The Lore. That's it. That's all it's ever been. Mulva fucked around with this message at 09:04 on Dec 3, 2022 |
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Dec 3, 2022 09:00
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karmicknight posted:Luke specifically wins by being a great Force user by just demonstrating faith that his instincts are not deceiving him no matter what his father says (thus listening to the Force over his own hearing). Which I think fits better into your overall point about the nature of Force shown in the original trilogy, in that its a act of faith (Emperor's line emphasizing "your faith in your friends" which includes Vader) but not like a video game spell. Yeah I'm being facetious about it. Like I said, the way the Force is used in the original trilogy and how Luke wins through it is coherent and self consistent. It also helps that in the OT the Force user fights were all shams, all of them, so Luke breaking the circle works on a lot of thematic levels. Mulva posted:I mean what he's standing tall in the face of is a loving space gremlin casting lightning bolt at him, so it's also kind of a video game. And then everyone gets to be ghosts around the campfire at the end. It was was always stupid bullshit that did whatever the plot required, and the more freedom Lucas got to express his vision of the Force the more obvious that became. I don't like to call everything that's fantasy a video game, a wizard using lightning bolt is just fantasy. There's no duels going on for hours and people with infinite stamina and HP bars tanking damage that should have killed them. The ending is the Emperor torturing Luke, Luke is shown in visceral pain as a plot point to show whether his father will help him or not. The lightning bolt could be car batteries. It's different from a lightning bolt being just another spell in a 5 minutes long fight that has no plot point and where the people in it should have died 20 seconds into it. Elentor fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Dec 3, 2022 |
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Dec 3, 2022 09:01
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Mulva posted:e: I mean ultimately the Nightsisters in particular owe their survival into canon explicitly to a video game. They were EU stuff a studio threw into one of the games, George Lucas saw it and went "Yeah we can use that", and now they are Part Of The Lore. That's it. That's all it's ever been. They didn't even migrate the loving GOOD bits of lore from the EU into the stupid cartoon and then into a video game. The original depiction in a very dumb novel had the nightsisters as outsiders from a larger society who were exiled for being dark and destructive idiots. Also their leader broke Han Solo's every bone one at a time because it's a Star Wars novel and poo poo is always wild. Elentor posted:I don't like to call everything that's fantasy a video game, a wizard using lightning bolt is just fantasy. There's no duels going on for hours and people with infinite stamina and HP bars tanking damage that should have killed them. The ending is the Emperor torturing Luke, Luke is shown in visceral pain as a plot point to show whether his father will help him or not. The lightning bolt could be car batteries. Yeah, I deffo agree that the Emperor blasting lighting at Luke is an earned moment of "well how could anyone know he could do that" and fits very well into his character's archetype without specifically being a video game power.
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Dec 3, 2022 09:11
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404notfound posted:I finally went back and finished Fallen Order to scratch that Star Wars itch after Andor ended, and yeah, the Nightsisters seem... really out of place. At least compared to all the live action stuff. Maybe it gets more crazy in the animated series? It's entirely in line with their animated portrayal, unfortunately. One of the worst episodes is about Jar Jar and Mace Windu going on an adventure together to stop Darth Maul's mother from resurrecting herself.
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Dec 3, 2022 09:43
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karmicknight posted:Yeah, I deffo agree that the Emperor blasting lighting at Luke is an earned moment of "well how could anyone know he could do that" and fits very well into his character's archetype without specifically being a video game power. It also really highlights, among many other things, how Luke's action was correct. He never had any chance whatsoever. The whole "you must accept killing Vader" and his training to deal with the emperor was doomed from the start.
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Dec 3, 2022 10:06
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StashAugustine posted:I will never forgive Foundation for this
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Dec 3, 2022 10:28
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karmicknight posted:They didn't even migrate the loving GOOD bits of lore from the EU into the stupid cartoon and then into a video game. The original depiction in a very dumb novel had the nightsisters as outsiders from a larger society who were exiled for being dark and destructive idiots. Also their leader broke Han Solo's every bone one at a time because it's a Star Wars novel and poo poo is always wild. Is it really a Harrison Ford appearance if he doesn't break a bone or two
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Dec 3, 2022 11:03
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karmicknight posted:Yeah, I deffo agree that the Emperor blasting lighting at Luke is an earned moment of "well how could anyone know he could do that" and fits very well into his character's archetype without specifically being a video game power. At least until the prequels retroactively turned Yoda into a massive prick. “Do not underestimate the power of the Emperor.” Maybe you could have told Luke about the specific things Sheev did to you when you fought, Yoda? Perhaps explained by the conversation in TLJ, which presents ghost Yoda as a light-side goblin who enjoys watching Luke screw up and seems very much to be of the “he’ll learn to swim when I abandon him at sea” school of teaching. He even outright lies to Luke in “a certain point of view” ways about Rey and the ancient Jedi texts. But at the time, yes, it was very much unexpected. This, BTW, is why I love the end of the Luke arc in TLJ. The movie presents the audience as well as Ren with a video game Force power fantasy: Luke is going to solo this whole army with the force unless Ren can counter him. And the movie establishes both that Ren’s understanding of the Force is very video game “killing power” in scope, and that he’s far more afraid of Luke than Snoke. But then Luke repudiates that: the true power of the Force isn’t giving you the ability to kill those you hate, but to save those you love. And that gets coupled with Luke’s shift away from the old Jedi understanding which Snoke repeats, that what’s really important in these Star Wars isn’t the regular people or the politics, it’s which side of the Force wins. Ren thinks Luke is the final boss. Luke knows that his life doesn’t matter, that his sacrifice to preserve the core of the Resistance will inspire thousands or millions of people to rise up, because the Force is about more than Jedi and Sith. And then JJ and RoS said “gently caress that” and wrote the most power fantasy video gamey PoS ending imaginable. Sheev lives! He has thousand of Death Star lasers! He can fight a whole fleet himself with his massive Force powers! No number of ordinary people can stop him, only other Force users! And you can’t be a powerful Force user without being either a Skywalker or a Palpatine! People are only important because they have built-in power, and that comes only through the conditions of your birth, not through training and being connected to other living things.
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Dec 3, 2022 17:03
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Arc Hammer posted:I don't mind it but it still feels odd how star wars flips between Jedi being a myth and knowledge being commonplace. It depends on where you are in the galaxy, sure but it confuses the issue of how thorough the Empire was in scrubbing away the Jedi order. My headcannon after seeing Obi-Wan is that the Inquisitors (and remaining Jedi) are so incompetent that anywhere Inquisitors go the general takeaway is that they're just some really well armed imperial heavies who are also religious nutcases and that the force itself is just some horseshit. Hell even Vader, look at the game he talks about the force in A New Hope compared to what he actually accomplishes. It's easy to see why people with Han's outlook are a thing. LOL Imagine how torn to pieces any of the Inquisitors in Obi-Wan would be if they tried to pull any of that poo poo on Ferrix they'd get owned so hard.
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Dec 3, 2022 18:25
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If the ability to destroy a planet or even a system were insignificant next to the power of the force, the emperor wouldn't have ordered the dang thing built
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Dec 3, 2022 18:28
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Neo Rasa posted:My headcannon after seeing Obi-Wan is that the Inquisitors (and remaining Jedi) are so incompetent that anywhere Inquisitors go the general takeaway is that they're just some really well armed imperial heavies who are also religious nutcases and that the force itself is just some horseshit. Inquisitors are mine canaries. They're meant to go after half-baked youngling/padawan survivors, washed up, out of touch Jedi, and emergent force latents who don't have any training and either kill them or capture them to become another inquisitor. If they run into a Real Deal Jedi and get themselves killed, that is a signal that Darth Vader needs to get off his prosthetic butt and look into the matter personally. Maybe. See Also: (Tales of the Jedi spoilers) Ahsoka, unarmed, killing that crow/plaguedoctor-masked Inquisitor in about 10 seconds
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Dec 3, 2022 18:35
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There are people here on Earth who are propagandized into believing wonderous and terrible things of global import and significance that happened within or just outside living memory (hell, even current events) are fake, overstated, fictionalized, exaggerated, etc.
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Dec 3, 2022 18:49
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Han never struck me as a '9/11 hoax' kinda guy
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Dec 3, 2022 19:29
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John Wick of Dogs posted:If the ability to destroy a planet or even a system were insignificant next to the power of the force, the emperor wouldn't have ordered the dang thing built Vader was just complaining about job security.
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Dec 3, 2022 19:32
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What would the regular person ever see a Jedi actually do, though? Even when they're fighting, 99% of the time Jedi are just a person with a laser sword, they barely ever actually use the force visibly
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Dec 3, 2022 19:47
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John Wick of Dogs posted:If the ability to destroy a planet or even a system were insignificant next to the power of the force, the emperor wouldn't have ordered the dang thing built aha, but it was the power of the force that allowed sheev to be in the position to have it built in the first place checkmate force deniers 
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Dec 3, 2022 20:11
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Vagabong posted:Han never struck me as a '9/11 hoax' kinda guy "The towers fell in 3.2 parsecs..."
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Dec 3, 2022 21:24
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Piell posted:What would the regular person ever see a Jedi actually do, though? Even when they're fighting, 99% of the time Jedi are just a person with a laser sword, they barely ever actually use the force visibly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eKThHkYFJw Ahsoka does this a few times in hiding. Obi-Wan show had that one good line about the jedi code being like an itch.
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Dec 3, 2022 21:36
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teagone posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eKThHkYFJw It kind of annoyed me that that line is a bunch of weirdos just doing exposition to a hamburger shop. Hey, random diner full of people, let me puff up the legend of the guys we're hunting down to damnatio memoriae for you a little bit. If I were a Jedi in hiding I would spec for being able to do the force without somatic components. Save people from dangling off poo poo or getting crushed by falling debris without making obvious magic gestures.
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Dec 3, 2022 21:44
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Owlbear Camus posted:It kind of annoyed me that that line is a bunch of weirdos just doing exposition to a hamburger shop. Hey, random diner full of people, let me puff up the legend of the guys we're hunting down to damnatio memoriae for you a little bit. Yeah, same lol. It worked great in the trailer, but then in the show the context of that line delivery is very 
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Dec 3, 2022 21:48
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Calling it now, and forgive me if someone else has already guessed this. Mothma's family is going to be killed somehow and it's Chandrilan custom to cut their hair while mourning or to signify grief.
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Dec 3, 2022 21:59
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Vagabong posted:Han never struck me as a '9/11 hoax' kinda guy I mean, he's a truck driver who deals in stolen/illegal goods, they ain't usually the most knowledgable guys in existence. SyRauk posted:Calling it now, and forgive me if someone else has already guessed this. More likely it's harder to get a good stylist when you're roughing it in ancient temples and rickety spaceships at the rear end end of space.
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Dec 3, 2022 22:10
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SyRauk posted:Calling it now, and forgive me if someone else has already guessed this. Lol
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Dec 3, 2022 22:25
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I'm watching a YouTube video on why Andor good and in it it has clips of Star Wars content creators who didn't like it and its the most infuriating poo poo Including that amazing bit with the guy who seriously suggests a General Grievous show as being a great idea and then later says what he wants to see are more stories about characters we already know How drooling morons like that scrape together the brain cells to speak idk, I hope their comments sections are full of people asking them similar questions
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Dec 3, 2022 22:34
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Besides everyone knows that the Star Wara character who most deserves a show is Gragra
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Dec 3, 2022 22:39
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Butterfly Valley posted:I'm watching a YouTube video on why Andor good and in it it has clips of Star Wars content creators who didn't like it and its the most infuriating poo poo Have you got to the bit where that guy complains that Andor has too many bricks and screws to be Star Wars?
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Dec 3, 2022 23:01
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Owlbear Camus posted:It kind of annoyed me that that line is a bunch of weirdos just doing exposition to a hamburger shop. Hey, random diner full of people, let me puff up the legend of the guys we're hunting down to damnatio memoriae for you a little bit. Iirc the Safdie they were chasing was also in the room. So the randos weren't the ones being exposited to.
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Dec 3, 2022 23:23
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zoux posted:And the story of Star Wars filmmaking is pushing the absolute envelope of what is possible in visual effects. Turns out physical effects age much better than early 2000s CGI, which has aged more poorly than anything else in the history of time. I expect we'll look back at the current Volume/deepfake stuff with similar mockery in 10 years or so. Stop-motion looks like total poo poo compared to what's possible now, but we go with it anyway when revisiting something from that era. Owlbear Camus posted:There are people here on Earth who are propagandized into believing wonderous and terrible things of global import and significance that happened within or just outside living memory (hell, even current events) are fake, overstated, fictionalized, exaggerated, etc.
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Dec 3, 2022 23:26
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Butterfly Valley posted:I'm watching a YouTube video on why Andor good and in it it has clips of Star Wars content creators who didn't like it and its the most infuriating poo poo Can you post the link?
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Dec 3, 2022 23:37
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Narsham posted:And then JJ and RoS said “gently caress that” and wrote the most power fantasy video gamey PoS ending imaginable. Sheev lives! He has thousand of Death Star lasers! He can fight a whole fleet himself with his massive Force powers! No number of ordinary people can stop him, only other Force users! And you can’t be a powerful Force user without being either a Skywalker or a Palpatine! People are only important because they have built-in power, and that comes only through the conditions of your birth, not through training and being connected to other living things. Yes. This. This is also why I intensely dislike superhero media that isn't a deconstruction of the superhero genre. The Boys, OG (non-Snyder) Watchmen, NEXTWAVE, and Venture Bros yes. Actual Supermen and X-Men, no, absolutely not. (Well, Deadpool is alright.)
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Dec 3, 2022 23:49
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LividLiquid posted:While this is true, if you wait another few years for the people who grew up with it to age up, it becomes charming and retro. 1. I grew up with 90s/early 00s CGI and have no retro attachment to it, it looks poo poo 2. The AT-AT assault in Empire looks better than any of the poo poo from the prequel trilogy theflyingexecutive posted:Can you post the link? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im0rqLhSPEE 3:30 in Butterfly Valley fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Dec 3, 2022 |
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Dec 3, 2022 23:53
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Butterfly Valley posted:1. I grew up with 90s/early 00s CGI and have no retro attachment to it, it looks poo poo My reaction growing up in the 90s was "why is every movie coming out now looking worse than the stuff I see on the TV from the 80s". Now that my life has gone full circle and textures I made based on original Star Wars physical models are used in SW CGI I feel more or less at peace with having achieved my goal when I first started learning CGI, which was feeling complete and utter contempt for how bad it was as a kid.
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Dec 4, 2022 00:01
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Butterfly Valley posted:1. I grew up with 90s/early 00s CGI and have no retro attachment to it, it looks poo poo
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Dec 4, 2022 00:08
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Rey had built-in power either way, her bloodline had nothing to do with it
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Dec 4, 2022 00:21
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Kesper North posted:OG (non-Snyder) Watchmen Lindelof's Watchmen series is also very good. It's got some wonderfully insane ideas at play and some interesting answers to "okay, what next" from the OG. It's also a hammer and nail pounding "America is astonishingly more racist than you thought" directly into your brain. The drat thing starts with the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, A sizeable portion of the audience had their minds loving blown when they found out that that wasn't made up for the show.
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Dec 4, 2022 00:30
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Mourning? They get offed, Mon lets herself have a worm in her drink that night, as a treat. We also don't need the secret lore reason behind her haircut~
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Dec 4, 2022 00:49
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LividLiquid posted:And? What does your personal taste have to do with anything? There are an awful lot of people out there who aren't you or me. I think they look like poo poo too, but we're not who I was talking about. Nostalgia and thinking things are charming and retro is not purely a function of time elapsed, there's still quality judgments attached. SNES/megadrive era was the best for 2D sprite art which is why there's a lot more attachment and nostalgia over them than NES games or early 3D games, which tend to get remade or remastered now rather than being released or played as they originally were. I think your argument is nonsensical, I know no-one who fondly looks back on poo poo CGI because it's nostalgic, and I can't see anyone changing their minds on early deepfakes/actor replacement.
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Dec 4, 2022 00:50
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