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Star Wars has plenty of conversation, but it's about politics.
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Jan 17, 2024 09:14
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I think audiences are willing to accept leaps of logic as long as they are feasible. Star Trek does this (or at least used to) by applying technobabble to the various situations they needed to write themselves out of, and by continually reusing core, familiar constructs like shields, phasers, transporters, warp drives etc. Most of the science is absolutely bullshit, but they do enough to suspend disbelief. Star Wars, on the other hand doesn't really care as much about this sort of thing. We get planet sized spaceships, giant, dark rooms with lots of glowy lights that serve no obvious purpose, and control panels that are suspended above a giant pit behind columns with zero safety railings. It's more interested in the aesthetics, and we're happy to accept the characters simply saying 'we need to destroy this bit' as part of the science fantasy constructs. When Star trek tries to do this sort of thing (aforementioned black hole turbolift world) it just seems so ridiculous and immersion killing.
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Jan 17, 2024 09:30
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Both of them quietly have a consistency to their treatment of technology that gives a grounding and stakes to it. It's been said that Star Wars basically has the least efficient possible implementation of pretty much all its sci-fi technologies (like pretty much everything with droids) and Star Trek arguably does something similar, being almost Luddite with the restraint applied to its utilisation of what's clearly widely available. (and pretty inconsistent on topics like AI, weirdly enough getting MORE jarring when it pays more attention to that) It's like Toy Story; we are assured there are rules, and the characters know them, but we don't. And there are, but they are more like an understanding of aesthetics, themes and stakes, and pushing things just far enough to be interesting without making people go 'hey wait a minute'. But once you do, often because of writers who don't understand the setting and its tone and themes, you break the spell, and while it's not impossible to walk that back you really need to work at it. And writers usually aren't actively taught this, is the problem. I think it's similar to how westerners struggle to comprehend the idea of magical realism, even though they'd understand it immediately if you put it as 'Toy Story logic', for example. Writing theory is all based around Serious Literature with genre fiction mostly relegated to a vague waving towards The Hero With A Thousand Faces (which, frankly, has its own problems) and has absolutely no preparation to write a sci-fi or fantasy story. Ursula Le Guin had it absolutely right.
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Jan 17, 2024 10:15
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Isometric Bacon posted:We really don't need another trilogy of space wars between evil empires and resistance fighters. And star wars dont really needs to be that The PT is not "rebels vs empire", and is also not a simple "good side vs bad side" story, though it looks like at first Elias_Maluco fucked around with this message at 12:40 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 12:38
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One of the numerous foundational problems with the ST is, frankly, they had no real idea what it was meant to be about beyond cargo-culting the pop culture ideas of the OT.
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Jan 17, 2024 12:54
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Ghost Leviathan posted:One of the numerous foundational problems with the ST is, frankly, they had no real idea what it was meant to be about beyond cargo-culting the pop culture ideas of the OT. it's about believing in Star Wars again
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Jan 17, 2024 12:56
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Ghost Leviathan posted:One of the numerous foundational problems with the ST is, frankly, they had no real idea what it was meant to be about beyond cargo-culting the pop culture ideas of the OT. I don’t believe that is the case; I’ve spent so much time on the redemptive interpretation of the ST - going into all the weird little details, and how they add up to a rather unique and interesting setting - because they are remnants of interesting concepts that weren’t fully retconned out. The First Order being Vaderist “tankies” is baked into Force Awakens, even as they tried to retcon them into being Palpatine’s Neo-Empire via a videogame. Same with Jakku’s original concept of a seemingly post-apocalyptic Tatooine serving as the New Republic’s junkyard, and Rey being evil. That stuff remains in the films. Johnson did his best to scrub the trilogy of these kinds of new concepts and rehash the Rebel vs. Empire thing, but the presumably-unintentional result was to make Vaderism overwhelmingly popular in the setting (and to make the Resistance’s rebranding as the Alliance To Restore The Republic appear absolutely deluded). For all the issues with Episode 9, Abrams and Terrio were able to fully resolve any contradiction and thread the needle by explaining that there was a Neo-Imperial conspiracy within the First Order that was deliberately manipulating Rey (and the Resistance as a whole) into becoming more and more regressive so that they would lay the groundwork for the Empire’s resurgence. So the problem wasn’t one of ambition, really. The ST actually has a decent basic concept that got pushed aside to focus on how Kylo is ‘toxic’ because he yells a lot, whereas the heroes are all smiling and hugging and telling eachother how great they are. Lobotomized ‘power of friendship’ stuff. “Never underestimate a droid!” SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 16:25
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:whereas the heroes are all smiling and hugging and telling eachother how great they are. Lobotomized ‘power of friendship’ stuff. “Never underestimate a droid!” Or how the power of love can destroy a death star super laser. Well yes, it did do that in the OT, but there were a loving bunch of steps in-between!
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Jan 17, 2024 17:13
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VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE posted:Or how the power of love can destroy a death star super laser. Well yes, it did do that in the OT, but there were a loving bunch of steps in-between! i think that was the power of incredible violence
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Jan 17, 2024 17:25
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I'm bewildered at the notion that Star Trek is more scientific than Star Wars in any way. It's certainly more "sciencey" in that some of the characters (particularly on Discovery) act like online "I loving Love Science" guys, which is less about science and more about a vague sense of adherence to liberal values.
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Jan 17, 2024 17:39
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Yeah, Star Trek has gods and Star Wars has energy fields that are easily quantifiable through blood tests
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Jan 17, 2024 17:40
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The way I see it, neither Star Wars or Trek are really science fiction Star Wars is a fantasy setting that happens to be on space Star Trek I dont know too well but seems to be about the same except a bunch of techno pseudo-scientific babble on top Elias_Maluco fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 17:45
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That's something I wanted to add to the distinction between Star Wars and Star Trek: Star Trek has more gods than the Forgotten Realms, especially in the original series, and there are multiple episodes that revolve around someone developing psychic powers that grow until they transcend mortality. It's not surprising for a franchise that coincided with the Human Potential Movement and related ideas becoming very popular in California. Leonard Nimoy once played the Synanon Game. If Star Trek and Star Wars don't qualify as science fiction, I don't know what does, outside of a small fraction of accepted sci-fi where the author does their physics homework and then makes you read it. It seems pointless to classify over 90% of science fiction as Not Really Science Fiction.
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Jan 17, 2024 17:47
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Planetary romance vs. scientism-based fantasy.
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Jan 17, 2024 17:48
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm bewildered at the notion that Star Trek is more scientific than Star Wars in any way. It's certainly more "sciencey" in that some of the characters (particularly on Discovery) act like online "I loving Love Science" guys, which is less about science and more about a vague sense of adherence to liberal values. Star Trek starts from a place of science - interstellar starships need deflectors to protect them from interstellar matter, bussard ramscoops to gather hydrogen, 'warp' drive which is the most vaguely plausible FTL, antimatter annihilation to meet its huge power requirements. Then uses that to tell stories about Big Spock and angry gods and flute magic. Star Wars is where the Empire built a mobile battle station the size of a planet, then stuck space flak 88s on top of it to shoot through portholes.
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Jan 17, 2024 17:55
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Trek and wars have overlapping but not identical source genres but I think Lucas is way way way more cynical than Roddenberry about humanity.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:01
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Star Wars starships also consume fuel which is mined from gas giants, achieve FTL by shortcutting through a magically different type of space, and protect themselves with energy fields. Star Trek also has space stations big enough to be mistaken for a small moon, if they were spherical. That's where they build starships. There's at least one in Earth's orbit. The only difference here is that in Star Trek, aiming the guns always involves a computer in ways that are never elaborated on. If you want to get "realistic," this just raises questions about why Starfleet e.g. actually sends people down to planets to take out a little doohickey and say "This dirt is radioactive, but this other dirt isn't" instead of sending a drone. Speaking of which, Star Trek has teleporters. They works using the same technology that can 3D print anything, including people, sometimes pretending that the printed objects are "holograms." They deal with the implications of this when they feel like it, which they usually don't.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:02
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Halloween Jack posted:The only difference here is that in Star Trek, aiming the guns always involves a computer in ways that are never elaborated on. If you want to get "realistic," this just raises questions about why Starfleet e.g. actually sends people down to planets to take out a little doohickey and say "This dirt is radioactive, but this other dirt isn't" instead of sending a drone. It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space or on some alien world. Men can live and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:14
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After thinking about it a minute i think the debate between science fiction and fantasy is a bit wrongheaded. Fantasy isn't defined as a genre where the rules don't matter and consistency is the enemy, nor is the opposite true for science fiction. After all, the granddaddy of Fantasy is Tolkien, who'd rather be caught dead than in an inconsistency. Rather, recent iterations of both Star Wars and Star Trek have had people in charge to whom 'world building' seems to be a bad word and who care little for consistency in their own material, let alone consistency with the source material. While there is something to be said in not letting yourself be straightjacketed by a list of rules and minutiae, stuff like hyperspace skipping or the turbolift void shoots past that and straight into Calvinball.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:17
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:Big Spock Spoock
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Jan 17, 2024 18:19
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Hardly the first person to point this out but I wouldn't call Star Trek "hard sci fi." It's... idk, utopian science fantasy that lets us tell parables and silly character studies and such. It has the potential to be incredible or terrible, both of which it often is.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:38
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I think one big difference is Star Trek ( when Roddenberry way around at least) had a morality-play backbone. Star Wars has never had any morality play features afaict
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Jan 17, 2024 18:42
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euphronius posted:Star Wars has never had any morality play features afaict 
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Jan 17, 2024 18:48
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Han and Luke don’t battle an allegory for racism and then at the end of the episode talk about what they have learned
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Jan 17, 2024 18:53
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No, I see the point. You've got a moral dilemma presented dialectically and resolved by the protagonist's decision on the one hand, and a tragedy encompassing characters with good or evil motivations on the other.
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Jan 17, 2024 18:56
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The entirety of Star Wars is about good vs evil…
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Jan 17, 2024 18:56
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I thought it's about incest
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Jan 17, 2024 18:57
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From good ol wiki about morality plays “the temptation, fall and redemption of the protagonist" Lol
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Jan 17, 2024 18:58
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There is moral issues in Star Wars but it is not of the morality play genre That’s like saying Dune is a western Becuase it has sand
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Jan 17, 2024 18:59
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Lol what the
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Jan 17, 2024 19:00
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You could call all of Star Wars a morality play where everyone gets fooled by the Devil again and again. But SW doesn't generally do self-contained TV episodes where whatever problem they're dealing with is a venue to make some abstract point about understanding foreign cultures or whatever. For example, Star Wars would never do a story asking if C3PO is sentient, or why he's sentient. It takes for granted that he's a person and it sucks that he's a slave.
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Jan 17, 2024 19:03
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Maybe the Star Wars cartoon did that but I never watched it
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Jan 17, 2024 19:04
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euphronius posted:Maybe the Star Wars cartoon did that but I never watched it There is a full Clone Wars episode of droids wandering the void and questioning their own existence. It's one of Lucas' favorites.
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Jan 17, 2024 19:20
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I think we should really table this back and forth until we agree on a meaning of morality play
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Jan 17, 2024 20:06
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I assume we're not talking about medieval religious drama.
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Jan 17, 2024 20:07
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:After thinking about it a minute i think the debate between science fiction and fantasy is a bit wrongheaded. Fantasy isn't defined as a genre where the rules don't matter and consistency is the enemy, nor is the opposite true for science fiction. After all, the granddaddy of Fantasy is Tolkien, who'd rather be caught dead than in an inconsistency. Whenever we write about genre, we're never directly writing about set qualities of an artwork. A given story must be read as science fiction in order to become science fiction, which is something that happens sporadically and on an individual level. Likewise, fantasy is effectively where we read a story without concern for the material reality because we and/or the characters are fantasizing. We can also fantasize about science and/or understand fantasy in scientific terms (via psychoanalysis or whatever). So, in this way, literally any narrative can be sci-fi, or fantasy, or fluctuate between the two modes while a single reader works through the text. However, once we've gone through that understanding, we can nonetheless say that some narratives are more conducive to being read a certain ways than others. That is what we actually mean when treating genre as an actual thing. So, going back to Star Wars, Star Wars is more materialistic. There's an economy where the Lars family collects and sells moisture (presumably water, but possibly other liquid resources) for 'credits', which is money that can be exchanged for goods and services. Luke Lars sells his car and uses the money to buy his way onto Han's ship. We have a slave trade where Owen Lars uses his money to purchase chattel slaves, which is why there is discrimination against droids in that society. So we have a sci-fi story about the treatment of robots. In Star Trek, characters just say that they don't use currency, but actively refuse to ever illustrate or even exposit about what the alternate system is - if this even is an alternate system. This leaves it up to the viewer to either speculate about how the Federation economy must function (based on the extremely limited information across thousands of hours of media), or - more likely - to just fantasize that all socioeconomic problems are magically gone except for the ones that keep constantly popping up for our entertainment. So we get to the famous, classic, and (imo) absolutely idiotic episode where they hold a kangaroo court to determine if a droid deserves rights because he doesn't want to be enslaved... by the navy??? Any socioeconomic context is obliterated, racism just appears as a form of rudeness and is resolved through empathy, and the sciencey lesson is "idk, I guess there's simply no way to ever distinguish people from objects so let's err on the side of caution". You absolutely can read Measure Of A Man as sci-fi, but doing so means actively working against the text - and makes the Federation look really fuckin' bad. Otherwise, it's a fantasy. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 21:10
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I don't know which I like better: the episode where they have to decide if an android has rights, or the episode where the captain gets spittin' mad at that same android for not letting an entire civilization fall into a volcano.
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Jan 17, 2024 21:21
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:So, going back to Star Wars, Star Wars is more materialistic. There's an economy where the Lars family collects and sells moisture (presumably water, but possibly other liquid resources) for 'credits', which is money that can be exchanged for goods and services. Luke Lars sells his car and uses the money to buy his way onto Han's ship. We have a slave trade where Owen Lars uses his money to purchase chattel slaves, which is why there is discrimination against droids in that society. So we have a sci-fi story about the treatment of robots. That I don’t think I agree. The story is not about that, it glosses over that. Is not something anyone cares about, not even the droids themselves seem to question or mind it. They are sometimes things and sometimes full fledged persons, depending on the droid and/or the scene. And all in all, it just don’t matter, the story is not about that. They are more like humanized objects on some disney cartoon: they talk and sing and do goofy things and act like people and may help our princess but don’t you stop to think too much about what would mean if our cups and chairs were sentient beings
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Jan 17, 2024 21:27
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"We must be made to suffer! It seems to be our lot in life." Yeah, you're definitely not meant to think about it at all. Do you work for Disney, by any chance?
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Jan 17, 2024 21:31
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Captain Kirk would think about it. Luke does not. Again I apologize for not including the Star Wars cartoons which were apparently more like Star Trek
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Jan 17, 2024 21:35
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