Star Wars 8 shit talk

"it's" meaning the Starkiller destruction. I have this bad habit where I write posts, remove sentences, and forget to update orphan references

the severity was also undercut by half the audience cheering enthusiastically at what they though was the destruction of Coruscant

*thought

It’s kind of funny, given all of the things people criticize the prequels for, that your suggestion for fleshing out the story of the follow-movies is to add in more political backstory.

maybe this will be one of Rian's side-trilogy films

"Hux: We Hardly Knew Ye"

hahahaahhaa

not STORY as such, just a few lines here and there. i mean the TFA crawl lays out a political backstory - it's just distractingly unclear wtf that story is and what's going on. having both a republic and a resistance is goofy. are our heroes the scrappy underdogs or are they the actual government that's in the process of being overthrown? are the villains an insurgent evil movement or an unstoppable force that has eyes and ears everywhere? did the heroes of the original trilogy accomplish anything by bringing down the empire or has everything just been completely shitty for decades on end? you can get this information across to the audience without it actually being the content of the plot itself.

well, part of how TFA opens was why I was initially disappointed with it. I was hoping we would get a different start point for the new trilogy than the OG trilogy, maybe the opening moments of the FO uprising after years of peace.

I got the impression of the FO as a fledgling terrorist uprising and then they sort of just became the New Empire rather abruptly w/ Starkiller Base.

surprised they didn't go the Thrawn angle

coming soon to PBS:

“Frontline: Empire & Rebellion - did the heroes of the original trilogy accomplish anything by bringing down the empire or has everything just been completely shitty for decades on end?”

Leia Organa was quoted today as saying "Being the resistance party was easy. Governing is hard"

Hux works because he is easily guessable. He is an angry young white man who have joined a faction where white men always were in charge. The whole First Order should have been people like him, it would make a lot of sense, especially in these alt-right times. It's Snoke I hate. Wtf was he about, why was he there, what was the point? I put all of that on Abrams, that was a typically bad Abrams 'wait for the sequel!' stupidity.

Another thing that doesn't work was the story about Rose and Paige coming from a planet mined and destroyed by the First Order. For how long has the republic allowed these idiots to build up their forces? It makes no sense.

really enjoying doc casino’s posts bc the uncertainty of what is going on with the new republic/why the first order even exists is extremely annoying in both of these movies to me. i mean, not that it really matters, but it grates extremely in tfa

xpost idk we currently have a Federal government here where a certain party is being allowed to do things w/ impunity and everybody shrugs

there's actually more backstory on the Senate's reluctance to get involved/underestimation of the rising power of the FO on Wookiepedia I think

Do not read Wookiepedia though.

xxp i guess it really grates in tfa bc that movie is 100 percent “STUFF! IS! HAPPENING! CONSTANTLY! for like no reason”

I do kind of enjoy though, the Empire/Palpatine actually went through appropriate channels to dissolve the Senate, First Order just said fuck it and blew them all up

honestly "stuff happening constantly for no reason" is kind of a thing that could describe the entire franchise. I came to embrace TFA as a character rather than a narrative piece and it was more satisfying (I didn't come around until my third viewing or so).

the whole reason the Death Star is destroyed is cos the Empire decides not to fire on what they think is an unmanned escape craft.

(did enjoy Family Guy's parody of the logic behind that)

lol as i was typing that i was like “i’m describing the entire franchise”

but a friend of mine characterized tfa in particular as a movie where every scene feels like the start of the second act, and i agree with her

I don’t want more political backstory, I just want the existing one to make more sense. Like the resistance was running the whole galaxy and in the span of a few weeks they’re reduced to 15 people hiding out on the Falcon?

I liked this for the most part with the usual complaints. Lost my shit at Poe’s “what the hell?” as his foot broke through the crappy spaceship. Liked Leia’s brief use of the force with no further explanation.

I also liked this take on it: https://bittergertrude.com/2017/12/20/this-is-not-going-to-go-the-way-you-think-the-last-jedi-is-subversive-af-and-i-am-here-for-it/

rose's backstory was a good idea and v welcome i thought, just undermined by adding to confusion abt the universe, and the fact that we just did "empire mines planet, and then blows it up" in rogue one. it would have been enough to just say that the evil rich space mining syndicates, who back the first order, continue to exploit and degrade her world. idk if they were afraid that would sound too much like the Trade Federation or if, as I first assumed, they backed off from this plot and switched to talking about arms dealers because of studio notes dictated by some corporate overlap with fossil fuel/mining money.

the Resistance wasn't really "running the Galaxy" - the Senate was. the way its generally explained is that there was a First Order uprising that the Senate considered nothing more than a few rogue terror cells and not worthy of consternation, so the Senate didn't really want to intervene much. So Leia and company formed the Resistance and Senate endorsement for it, but Leia was trying to lean on them to provide increased support, like supplying troops, funding equipment, etc....and right as she's doing that, the entire Senate is blown up so now they basically are on their own with who they have.

even in TFA their numbers seem tiny compared to like the Rebel Alliance.

xpost

I'm sorry for sharing what I told you not to read, but here goes: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Galactic_Senate_(New_Republic)

put another way it's just cartoonishly cart-before-the-horse abt the political economy of space fascism. like Cobra on GI Joe the military government seems to exist to make weapons and fight battles and therefore directs other enterprises, like space mining, solely to build more weapons. far more plausible would be a galaxy where the 1%, who own stock in the mines, demand a giant repressive military state to put down uprisings against the mining. this is a level of marxist consciousness i don't really expect or demand from star wars, but since TLJ started making gestures towards grasping this universe in a more believable way (and has gotten praise for it) i think it's fair to wish it followed through just a step further instead of veering into nonsense halfway through a line of dialogue. so it goes.

the prob with the resistance narrative is that it's impossible to square with the way the First Order is presented in TFA, where no one in the galaxy is safe from them and they have a planet-sized weapon more powerful than anything the empire ever had in the first place.

yeah and that still kind of bothers me, not to mention all of the stuff I just mentioned is nowhere in TFA (probably comic tie-ins are where all that comes from)

and to be clear again i think this can all be solved without prequel-style content-free political maneuvering. hux gives a big speech in TFA hyping up his troops - just swap in some stuff there that implicitly suggests their goals and the current status quo! tho i still like the idea of him sneering at mon mothma over the monitor - "your vaunted DEMOCRACY has only made the galaxy vulnerable! even today i've received word that the miners on planet boondock are refusing to work, disrupting critical supplies of essential materials! while your "senate" debates, WE are taking action to maintain ORDER and PROSPERITY!" (fires death laser on miners)!

The other problem with Rose's backstory is that it puts the First Order as quite powerful at least ten years ago. It just doesn't make sense. And yeah, they seem not that strong in TFA, but then TLJ takes place a few days later, and all of a sudden it's a giant army with new tech and ship after ship after ship.

xpost to self iow basically what the basic outline of the prequel political story COULD have been, if turned into dramatic high-stakes star wars terms, and if george lucas had visited planet earth sometime in the preceding twenty years. it was just so abstract and meaningless. irl an evil alliance between the chamber of commerce and the representatives of heavy industry etc to overthrow democracy should be pretty scary. they're already repeating/fixing those movies anyway (down to the republic lacking a standing army to fight off this threat) so it's not like any of this would derail the movie from what it's doing.

the tfa/tlj gap you could bandaid by saying that the bulk of the first order's forces were far away somewhere else in the last film, smashing the bulk of the resistance (though you imagine that'd be important enough to go in the movie) and drawing attention away from starkiller, which after all is supposed to be a new sneak attack weapon. it's the TFA first order that just doesn't work. not ruinous to the movie obv, since its charms are in the character stuff and a couple of the action scenes. but still dumb and easily fixable at the outline stage.

they didn’t flesh it out well, but the implication was that the republic exists again, has a stable government, but they’re once again ineffective and ignoring the remnants of the empire, who are hiding out in the middle of nowhere — they don’t even have a real base, just a giant weapon planet and a huge-ass snoke ship

the resistance is meant to be the faction that’s working outside the authorization of the government because they believe you need a military to fight an actual growing threat. you have the same plot thread as Rogue One where the politicians don’t want to act so a handful of people go rogue to spurn them into action

Leila’s there because she was always a better General than politician

I don’t think the Resistance was ever meant to be very big — they’re the people who think the Republic needs a military, and the Republic thinks a galaxy-wide army leads to corruption and a consolidation of power

again, could have been better spelled out

they "just" have an entire planet that they've converted into a superweapon, and dozens of capital ships, and supposedly agents or sympathizers on every planet everywhere, such that no one has any chance of outrunning or escaping them. i get that finn, raised as a stormtrooper, may not be objectively evaluating the odds but no one seems to contradict his evaluation of the first order as an inescapable panoptic sovereign. i think the occam's razor answer is that it was not well-thought-out, with the brainstorm session stopping at "they're like the new empire!"

lol, otm

https://m.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2015/1007/Where-did-ISIS-get-all-those-Toyotas-US-Treasury-investigates

on a different note, I thought it was a nice touch that the main slow-motion chase, of the Resistance ships staying just out of range as they buy time, borrowed well from the new era Battlestar Galactica after the original series borrowed from Star Wars

http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Flying-the-deadly-skies-Whistle-blower-thinks-2532016.php

"Since 9/11, I learned to have less contempt for the terrorists than I do for the bureaucrats and politicians who could have prevented 9/11 but didn't," he told me. "They served in very pivotal positions of influence but due to gross incompetence or the fear of actually fulfilling their oaths of office to defend this country or possibly even something a bit more sinister, they failed to take any action. After 9/11, they all scurried into their little rat holes and waited for the firestorm to burn itself out. Then they crawled out and suddenly they are experts in aviation security.
"Many of the FAA bureaucrats that actively thwarted improvements in security prior to 9/11 have been promoted by FAA or the Transportation Security Administration. I have never in my life been around more gutless, inept and outright ignorant people than I have at TSA headquarters, most of whom are in management. You combine this atmosphere with absolutely no accountability and it is a very dangerous formula for a repeat of 9/11.
"There are so many obvious holes in the system that are not being closed, it is very scary. And what's worse is that they are not being closed for the exact same reasons that they weren't closed leading up to 9/11. It's the perpetuation of the good old boys' club. Rarely do you see a bureaucrat or politician that actively encourages subordinates to give them bad news. Instead, they prefer to be surrounded by people who constantly present a rosy picture. So the only people that get promoted up the chain are the ones who play the game and don't ruffle any feathers."

^^^ this, far and away

Better vetting was clearly needed - light speed travel ban

Here’s a word I learned today that also helps explain how the Empire / FO works

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalassocracy

thalassocracies often used indigenous mercenaries for land wars, rather than citizens. 🤔

One of my favorite moments from Rogue One was the rebels getting the news that Rogue One had engaged Imperial forces. The reaction is, "Gather the council, get Admiral Raddus" -- this following the earlier scene where the council voted not to pursue the Death Star plans. It's followed by "Admiral Raddus left and jumped out five minutes ago."

The flagship of the Resistance? The Raddus.

Well yeah

And it too eats shit against impossible odds for a greater cause

I honestly can't remember, but the bad guys in Star Wars, what is the aim of their galactic domination? Resources? Ethnic cleansing? No one in these movies seems to be struggling for food or anything, as far as I can remember. Obviously the Empire is worth fighting against, because they blow up planets and things like that, but the only reason they blow up planets is in pursuit of ... a goal I don't know. Like, what would a Galaxy controlled by the Empire look like? How would it be any different?

The OG trilogy was merely a morality play so the Empire's motives were mostly "doing the opposite of what the good guys do".

First Order seems to be more of a traditional fascist regime

ONE HALF PORTION

The blowing up of planets = no different than why countries have nuclear stockpiles

The weirdest argument floating = this Luke makes no sense, a Jedi doesn't give up and go into exile for years.

Oh except for the time they literally did this for 30 years after Ep 3 you mean?

Due to his Sith philosophy, Sidious was unwilling to let anyone else inherit the Galactic Empire in the event of his death. Using a game of Shah-tezh as an illustration, Palpatine believed that the Empire's sole purpose for existence was to protect his own life and well-being. He believed that the Empire was a failure if it failed to live up to this purpose.

We never see how bad life on an Empire planet is because the Rebels stay away from those planets. But I've always imagined it to be a fairly common police state.