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It's mistaking Moorcock for melodrama which is easy to do because Moorcock can be quite melodramatic. Regarding sending Sinclair back: 1) Prophecy as destiny. If they don't then we can't arrive at the present. 2) As other have said, the Shadows are bad dudes. 3) There is an argument to be made that the Vorlons have lost their way in the intervening 1000 years. In the Moorcock books with the dude with Leprosy there is an Order figure that becomes encased in Crystal (like how the Vorlons are depicted) when they lost their way because true higher order isn't stagnation and allows for change. But Vorlons have fallen into that stagnation.
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May 6, 2023 17:05
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Wasn't the original plot going to be something like Babylon 5 getting destroyed by the Shadows and Sinclair and Delenn fall in love and take Babylon 4 into the future and the series be relaunched as Babylon Prime?
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May 6, 2023 17:21
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I think it's fair to say that even if the Vorlons and the Shadows are both wrong, that doesn't mean that they are 100% morally equivalent. The Shadows' philosophy is that they need to constantly disrupt things in order for the younger races to become stronger, and that's more likely to be an unpleasant experience for the people involved. The Vorlons are in favor of stability, which is generally a lot easier to deal with until it's taken too far. It's kind of like the difference between an overprotective parent that never lets you go out on your own and a parent who blows the college fund on a trip to Vegas and tries to sell drugs to your friends. (I also believe that the fact that they called up Jack the Ripper to do that job is supposed to tell us something about the Vorlons as much as it is supposed to tell us something about Delenn and Sheridan.)
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May 6, 2023 20:56
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Nearing the end of my S5 rewatch and, well, Lennier did nothing wrong 
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May 6, 2023 21:58
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I think the main problem is that the Shadows are too evil. Their only focus seems to be starting wars, and they only help aggressive states to do that. Committing their own ships also makes it feel too much like they're just conquering the galaxy through vassals as well. If the Narn had taken their side it would have been more even handed, but I certainly wouldn't choose that over the G'Kar and Londo stuff lol. If the Centauri stuff was less "resurgent empire" it might have been interesting. Perhaps if 'restoring the glory of the republic' meant breaking Imperial authority, and the houses striking out as independent forces that the state can no longer restrain. So some band together to invade Narn, some impose hegemony on other worlds, an isolationist faction and still others that would be more friendly to our heroes etc.
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May 6, 2023 22:51
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I mean it's will to power stuff isn't it? The shadows want to foster the struggle. Would have worked better if they'd also helped some other races against the centauri, that would have made the point more clearly.
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May 6, 2023 22:59
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I thought the point with the Centauri was that the Shadows were luring them into overstretching themselves, attacking their neighbours on every border simultaneously such that even with Shadow tech, they were barely staying on top of it. Once the Shadows inevitably stopped supporting them they would collapse and there would be a chaotic power vacuum from which you’d get some survival of the fittest, which was the actual Shadow goal.
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May 6, 2023 23:07
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I always interpret the way things go down in the end as kind of a massively degenerate state of affairs. The Vorlons went crazy because they got forced into the conflict directly and weren't willing to go right at the Shadows, but that wasn't part of their plan. If the younger races just followed along then it would have been objectively better (from the standpoint of death and destruction) to work with the Vorlons than with the Shadows. You're being manipulated either way, but one side's philosophy forces them to pursue extreme violence. So Sinclair going back is a "good" thing if you assume the conditions weren't right 1000 years earlier to kick the Vorlons and Shadows out. You've only got two options, and one of them leads to a much more chaotic and violent environment than the other.
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May 6, 2023 23:21
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The Mark Twain dude at Z'ha'dum says it out pretty clearly, doesn't he? The races have to fight, in their mind, because of the will to power and survival of the fittest and so on. Shadow influence is evil in the sense that they corrupt everything they touch, with their human-consuming technology and all. Sheridan's wife was "salvaged" somehow, but she wasn't her, and Sheridan knew it. The Vorlons use people in a different way, and Lyta's story makes us know that it is also awful. The Narns don't have telepaths because of the previous Shadow war, although that crime is on them. Isn't that what the "get the Hell out of our Galaxy" thing is about? And both the Shadows and the Vorlons are deferential to Lorien, when Lorien is depicted as a not-so-powerful figure. Until the end.
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May 6, 2023 23:32
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Most races even having telepaths is due to Vorlon meddling, and there's a lot of angst over that with no real good answers like everything else about telepaths. The Drakh are also incredibly evil in a way that just backs up the Shadows being evil and yet doesn't exactly mesh with how the Shadows operated. Jade Empire I think was the piece of media that did the most with the idea of an ideological battle between chaos and order where it turns out most people wouldn't and shouldn't want to choose either.
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May 7, 2023 00:26
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SlothfulCobra posted:Most races even having telepaths is due to Vorlon meddling, and there's a lot of angst over that with no real good answers like everything else about telepaths. The Drakh are also incredibly evil in a way that just backs up the Shadows being evil and yet doesn't exactly mesh with how the Shadows operated. And it still fell flat on its face in execution for the most part. There wasn't really any way to play a Closed Fist character who isn't a puppy-kicking monster except for a very few points at plot-critical moments, or an Open Palm character who isn't a mushy do-gooder. It's like they had the idea to do something other than good or evil and then wrote most of the dialogue and choices as if they'd forgotten to write that down after getting out of the shower.
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May 7, 2023 00:50
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Thematically the Inquisitor bit works because it’s all about who you are: the rightness of the cause doesn’t matter if the person is the wrong person. That, and Kosh having to be bullied into calling a Vorlon strike against the Shadows, was an early clue that the Vorlons themselves no longer upheld and embodied their own values. In retrospect, we either needed a stronger sense of the problems with Minbari society, or a complete rethink of the Earth situation. If Earth had pretty divisive politics initially and the Vorlons helped put Clark in power to unify Earth and secure its telepaths, and the Shadows countered by infiltrating the Psi Corps, then the Corps could have opposed Clark, making him an initially more sympathetic character, and Clark would have been more bound up in the Edgars subplot in S4. Have Earthforce trying to use BOTH Vorlon and Shadow technology in their ships and make the experimental destroyers even more creepy as a result. That also creates a nice irony as an isolationist Earth secretly being run by Vorlon-associated tyrants ends up with a treaty with the Shadow-allied Centauri. Playing up the Vorlons as being for uniformity of ideas, coupled with the undemocratic Minbari governance and an increasingly tyrannical Earth, would give the Shadows at least a stronger pitch for a “marketplace of ideas” to not appear completely psychotic. It obviously creates other problems, too. But the show could sustain the Shadows, not the Vorlons, as the initial “good guy” mentors, and in today’s world the “strife and conflict as strength” message would play in interesting ways against American institutions, especially.
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May 7, 2023 01:03
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Beefeater1980 posted:I thought the point with the Centauri was that the Shadows were luring them into overstretching themselves, attacking their neighbours on every border simultaneously such that even with Shadow tech, they were barely staying on top of it. Once the Shadows inevitably stopped supporting them they would collapse and there would be a chaotic power vacuum from which you’d get some survival of the fittest, which was the actual Shadow goal. This was always my take. And what's cool about it is that the Centauri have consented to be sacrificed by working with the Shadows. The Narn and the Abbai might get their asses kicked by the Centauri but in the inevitable post-Centauri order they've got a great chance to emerge as king of poo poo Mountain. But the Shadows have made the power vacuum artificially large due to their support of the Centauri. None of the powers as they exist can fill the vacuum so they will always be forced to overreach until they get better.
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May 7, 2023 01:08
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Beefeater1980 posted:I thought the point with the Centauri was that the Shadows were luring them into overstretching themselves, attacking their neighbours on every border simultaneously such that even with Shadow tech, they were barely staying on top of it. Once the Shadows inevitably stopped supporting them they would collapse and there would be a chaotic power vacuum from which you’d get some survival of the fittest, which was the actual Shadow goal. It's this. The Shadows also may have shown Ivanova the recording she found in Voices of Authority that proved Clark was involved in Santiago's assassination because that allowed them to destabilize Earth.
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May 7, 2023 03:55
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The Jack the Ripper episode made me think "the Vorlons are hosed up and shouldn't be in charge of anything either even if the Shadows are worse"
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May 7, 2023 10:32
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mossyfisk posted:I think the main problem is that the Shadows are too evil. Their only focus seems to be starting wars, and they only help aggressive states to do that. Committing their own ships also makes it feel too much like they're just conquering the galaxy through vassals as well. If the Narn had taken their side it would have been more even handed, but I certainly wouldn't choose that over the G'Kar and Londo stuff lol. As we discovered in "Into The Fire", both the Shadows and the Vorlons had lost their way over the eons, forgetting that they were supposed to be shepherding the younger races and began using them as proxies in an ideological war. The fact that the Shadows were using the Centauri as vassals in an enormous game of Stellaris wasn't a bug, it was a feature. That makes them apparently "evil" to us because the Vorlons won the last round a thousand years ago, so they influenced the bulk of galactic society to see the Shadows and their philosophies in that negative light. Kosh1 being an especially personable and considerate Vorlon (as far as Vorlons go) also influenced the audience's view in this regard, of course. Kosh2 was supposed to be our first hint that that wasn't the case, but most people -- myself included, certainly -- seemed to take him as the outlier at first, instead of the other way around.
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May 7, 2023 14:32
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Qwertycoatl posted:The Jack the Ripper episode made me think "the Vorlons are hosed up and shouldn't be in charge of anything either even if the Shadows are worse" Yeah, that actually seemed to be kind of a turning point where the characters start to realize the Vorlons are maybe not to be trusted. Some of the characters already did not trust them anyways.
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May 8, 2023 01:18
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I feel like the presentation of the Vorlons would be something that might differ in the reimagining, if only because I think the original idea for the Vorlons as more generally weird and benign doesn't mesh neatly with what we learn in the series. Like, what do people know about the Vorlons? Very little, politically or otherwise. The Minbari might know enough to poison one, if you assume Kosh wasn't playing possum. People appear to assume they're vastly powerful and can generally do what they want, and are probably quite happy that the Vorlons keep to themselves and don't stick their nose into galactic affairs. But then you remember that the Vorlons disappear any ships that enter their space and basically go, yeah, there was an accident, big reactor leak, very unsafe, don't send more ships btw. And that's pretty terrible because it'd have to happen enough times to become that sort of commonly accepted wisdom! But what could anyone do? And people seem to have diplomatic channels to the Empire, because the Vorlons do occasionally issue statements (such as with the bombing of Narn) and I don't think anyone is that bewildered by it. And I don't know, I'm not sure B5 really captured that feeling of there being this dragon in one corner of the room that isn't sleeping so much as disinterested and/or ignoring you. And then one day one of them shows up on your space station and just kind of... hangs out, attends some of the meetings, says bizarre things if anything at all, vanishes for months at a time, and pokes their head out occasionally to do things like dropping a battleship out the jump gate to kill Space Cat Mengele. I feel like a remaining could do an interesting thing with that. More properly play up how ominous and vaguely threatening the Vorlons are. Get a little bit more into how they interact with the galaxy, if at all.
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May 8, 2023 03:45
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The Vorlons, or the Shadows, don't really make sense as civilizations. The Vorlon more-so, but we're still not shown that much of what their every-day life is like. The Shadows live on a desert world, abducting aliens and being all mysterious and not a shopping mall in sight. What does the average Shadow actually do with their lives? The Shadows and Vorlons are a big plot thing with the order and chaos and so on, but even as fictional species in your average 4X slash map painting game they don't make a lot of sense. The humans are basically humans, and we can relate. The Minbari had a vicious, near-genocidal war against humans not too long ago, but the humans are kind of shrugging their shoulders about it now, some exceptions aside, and it's also a big plot-point about the merging of souls and Sinclair and so on. The Narn and the Centauri make some kind of sense as civilizations. The Centauri royal house stuff is sort of absurd at times, but if Victorian England or Tsarist Russia had been given FTL drives, it'd be just as silly. What little we see of the Narn before all the planetary bombardment and mass murder, they come off as a civilization that is trying to industrialize and fast because it wants to go to war. So presumably they'd work long days for the glory of the cause, and we see G'Kar having, erm, fun in his spare time. Of course the show itself does tell us at times that these are not meant to represent real societies, but metaphors, and backgrounds for major characters. Which I think is fine for a television show that's mostly Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas having the time of their lives. It's not like anything about the show Stargåte makes any sense if you think about it at all, and then the show itself shows the many ways it is absolutely absurd and silly, with time travel and all.
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May 8, 2023 09:10
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Rappaport posted:The Vorlons, or the Shadows, don't really make sense as civilizations. The Vorlon more-so, but we're still not shown that much of what their every-day life is like. The Shadows live on a desert world, abducting aliens and being all mysterious and not a shopping mall in sight. What does the average Shadow actually do with their lives? They don't. The Shadows hibernate between periods of activity. They used to do more, as the city of Z'Ha'Dum suggests, but they basically outgrew the need for work or leisure or even normal society and became their cause.
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May 8, 2023 09:35
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I feel like the presentation of the Vorlons would be something that might differ in the reimagining, if only because I think the original idea for the Vorlons as more generally weird and benign doesn't mesh neatly with what we learn in the series. I don't expect them to change all that much. It's very deliberate that the Vorlons are presented as weird and benign even though pretty much from the beginning an objective look at their actions would show them as sinister.
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May 8, 2023 09:50
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Don't forget that the Vorlons and Shadows initially started as partners in shepherding the younger races after the other ancients left the galaxy. Over the eons they developed differing ideas on how to do that, schismed, and eventually both lost their way and became what is seen in the series. The fact that they didn't engage in conflict directly between them is just as much due to the memory that they were supposed to be partners as it was due to an aversion to engage in conflict with a peer. The fact that we don't see a functioning society from either of them is because neither is an actual society. They're zealots operating a mission ministering to the savages. A long time ago Valen told them "don't get it twisted" and the million years long game of phone tag turned that into "definitely get it twisted".
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May 8, 2023 11:30
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Yeah, I don't think the Shadows or Vorlons being unrecognizable as societies is an accident or a problem. Like, what are all the First Ones out there doing in their big ships that just hang around in random parts of space? Who knows! It doesn't matter, because the idea is that these are incomprehensible civilizations playing at being gods. I don't think you gain anything by making them more understandable or relatable because the whole point is that they're not. The part of the Vorlons and the Shadows that you get to see is the part that's specifically designed to interface with the younger races.
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May 8, 2023 16:44
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Do the Vorlons have trade treaties with any other race? Not sure what they'd be selling, so maybe not. Don't get me wrong, I would love just living as an energy being on a huge space-ship that is shaped like an eyeball from the 1970's, but it is at odds with what the rest of the series is saying about societies. What the Narn and the Centauri go through is important, while it is also a plot device to give Londo and G'kar major character arcs. It is important that humanity has a huge civil war. And the Minbari are still somewhat comprehensible, even though especially early on they are unreliable narrators about everything. But they all have societies. Delenn's later admission of the "reformed" Council is that the worker caste is important, presumably because they make stuff. The Centauri destruction of Narn Prime is explicitly called as "bombing them to the stone age", indicating they had a society which produced doo-dads and doo-hickeys. The Centauri society itself is portrayed as very much one that is producing things and having an economy, and Londo has a story or two about it. The Vorlons are portrayed as occupying a large chunk of space, they participate in Babylon 5 which is explicitly a diplomatic vessel for peace, but what would a junior Vorlon do in their society? It's fine that they are incomprehensible, until suddenly it's just order versus chaos and gently caress you buddy, but in-universe I feel it'd be more satisfying if they had some semblances of normal life about them. If the Shadows are just asleep all the time when they're not out and about kidnapping people, I guess OK? But new creatures are born every now and then, and there will have to be schools, helping new-comers adapt to their respective societies, and so forth. This is even an under-lined theme with the Psy-Corp, since Corp is mother and Corp is father. I may have forgotten some techno-babble about the Shadows and the Vorlons not breeding, but this won't be the first time I make an idiot of myself in this thread.
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May 8, 2023 17:06
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I feel like if we learned how to speak bee there would be a movement to create diplomatic ties and trade treaties with bees. Not that we'd have to but it would be the proper thing to do. However, our modality of being would be incomprehensible to bees. We occupy radically different umwelten.
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May 8, 2023 17:19
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Why would there have to be junior vorlons
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May 8, 2023 17:20
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Vorlings, please
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May 8, 2023 17:22
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I mean, there's the whole green vs purple thing showing that even among the younger races you aren't always going to comprehend each other's societies. Vorlon and Shadow societies don't matter at all. So why would they both trying to explain them? They're not there to be understood.
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May 8, 2023 17:23
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Rappaport posted:Do the Vorlons have trade treaties with any other race? Not sure what they'd be selling, so maybe not. Is it Lyta that says after Kosh I's death that it's been so long since any Vorlon died that they are having trouble figuring out how to deal with it? I can't imagine a species so long-lived as to be practically immortal from a human perspective that is also wholly dedicated to authoritarian order would allow for much in the way of births, since it would run the risk of disturbing their perfectly ordered stasis society. So from that perspective, the answer to the question of "What does a junior Vorlon do?" is "The same thing they've been doing for the past five millennia."
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May 8, 2023 17:26
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Ciao Wren posted:I feel like if we learned how to speak bee there would be a movement to create diplomatic ties and trade treaties with bees. Not that we'd have to but it would be the proper thing to do. However, our modality of being would be incomprehensible to bees. We occupy radically different umwelten.  Bees still understand having children, and making a nest warm and nice for them, feeding them, etc. It's more of a Dragons and Dungeons discussion whether human society succeeds at that (it is performing poorly), but that is still what we see from the younger races in the show.
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May 8, 2023 17:27
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CainFortea posted:I mean, there's the whole green vs purple thing showing that even among the younger races you aren't always going to comprehend each other's societies. Right, but were you for the hats or the woollied hats? Oh, this question is non-sensible to you? Sweden is a wild place, my friend. The Purple versus Green thing is relatable, because we have stupid arguments and stupid politics all the time. Of course before certain presidents it wasn't as all-pervasive, but that is still a thing that a human viewer can recognize as both stupid and something that we'd do on a bad day.
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May 8, 2023 17:30
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I guess the fact that the Vorlons nearly declared war when Kosh was injured might mean that putting a representative on the station might've been more Kosh's idea, and the rest of the Vorlons are less into the idea of coming into direct contact with their subjects. There's also the whole thing that doesn't really come up much where in addition to representing "chaos" and "order" and "light" and "dark" the Vorlons and Shadows also take the opposite sci-fi positions of bioengineering and inorganic technology, which is kind of nonsensical, but it pops up from time to time. I wonder what Lorian was doing hangin' out on Khazzad-Dum for all that time. He told Sheridan that the Shadows respect him, but they don't really remember why or understand him at all. Rappaport posted:Right, but were you for the hats or the wollied hats? Oh, this question is non-sensible to you? Sweden is a wild place, my friend. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/blue-versus-green-rocking-the-byzantine-empire-113325928/ Literally just a rivalry between sports teams that led to city-wide riots that messed with the entire empire that was based on that one city. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 17:33 on May 8, 2023 |
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May 8, 2023 17:30
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SlothfulCobra posted:the Vorlons and Shadows also take the opposite sci-fi positions of bioengineering and inorganic technology, which is kind of nonsensical, but it pops up from time to time. Both of them use organic tech
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May 8, 2023 17:39
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Rappaport posted:Right, but were you for the hats or the woollied hats? Oh, this question is non-sensible to you? Sweden is a wild place, my friend. It has meaning to them. Ivanova doesn't understand it. The idea that alien cultures can have things that humans don't understand is already established in the show. I can't state this point any simpler.
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May 8, 2023 17:49
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Right, but we understand on a general level those sorts of things. That makes the Drazi relatable, even if it is dumb. There is nothing relatable or understandable about the Vorlons. Other than them being custodians and so forth, but that still leaves their society incomprehensible. I am sorry if I am making GBS threads up the thread, I'll take a break.
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May 8, 2023 17:56
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Rappaport posted:but that still leaves their society incomprehensible. Yes. Their society is incomprehensible. That's my point. There doesn't need to be any comprehension of vorlon society. It's weird, and alien, and makes no sense to us. We the viewers gain no benefit from it, it would be like a good horror monster movie just showing the monster in the first give minutes. The vorlons aren't characters in the story. They are one of the forces that plays on the characters in the story.
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May 8, 2023 17:59
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Rappaport posted:I am sorry if I am making GBS threads up the thread, I'll take a break. Discussing something is not making GBS threads up the thread!
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May 8, 2023 18:00
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Rappaport posted:Do the Vorlons have trade treaties with any other race? Not sure what they'd be selling, so maybe not. To be honest, I think this is kind of a limiting world view. There don't have to be schools. The Vorlons don't need to have a society that's comprehensible or understandable, with a hierarchy that has any meaning to humans. There are a lot of potentially very intelligent animals on Earth and we can't really comprehend their social structures or the experience of being them, outside of very general terms that probably aren't even correct since we're viewing them through our own experience. Like the Founders in Deep Space 9 have a totally incomprehensible society and social structure. They go into a big loving pool where they're all one organism, maybe, except they're not. What I just typed is gibberish and it means nothing, and that's okay because the point is that the human experience may just be totally incompatible with understanding certain modalities of being.
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May 8, 2023 18:00
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SlothfulCobra posted:
To Lorien the Shadows and Vorlons are the younger races. They've passed beyond his influence just as the races of the modern galaxy are passing beyond their influence now, so he has nothing left to do. But as he says when they all go beyond the Rim, even knowing that it's time to go it's still difficult to leave. So he's waiting for his children to decide - or realise - that it's time to go with him.
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May 8, 2023 18:17
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The Vorlons in Babylon 5 are a highly advanced and enigmatic alien race who play a major role in the show's storyline. To analyze the Vorlons using the concept of umwelt theory, we need to first understand what umwelt means. Umwelt is a term coined by the biologist Jakob von Uexküll to describe the subjective sensory reality of an organism. According to umwelt theory, every organism experiences the world in its unique way based on its sensory abilities, cognitive processes, and evolutionary history. This means that different organisms can have vastly different perceptions of the same reality. With this in mind, we can begin to analyze the Vorlons and their umwelt. From what we know about the Vorlons, they are a highly advanced species with a deep understanding of the universe and its workings. They are also telepathic and seem to have some sort of precognitive abilities. Based on this, we can assume that their umwelt is vastly different from that of humans or other Earth creatures. One of the most notable aspects of the Vorlons is their use of symbolism and metaphor. They communicate in a way that is not immediately understandable to humans, often speaking in riddles or through enigmatic imagery. This suggests that their umwelt is highly symbolic and abstract, with a focus on concepts rather than concrete objects. The Vorlons also seem to have a deep understanding of the nature of reality and the universe. They see themselves as agents of order and balance, working to maintain the stability of the universe. This suggests that their umwelt is focused on understanding the larger patterns and structures of the universe, rather than individual events or objects. Finally, the Vorlons are telepathic and seem to have some sort of precognitive abilities. This suggests that their umwelt may be highly attuned to the mental and psychic dimensions of the universe, with a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of all things. In conclusion, the Vorlons in Babylon 5 can be analyzed using umwelt theory to suggest that their unique sensory reality is highly symbolic and abstract, focused on understanding the larger patterns and structures of the universe, and deeply attuned to the mental and psychic dimensions of reality.
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May 8, 2023 18:51
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