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A valid criticism. Coming from the mouth of something trying to replace it with something worse. A classic villain move.
I did enjoy the old EU Luke being a more reformist and grounded iteration of Jedi teachings. He started by rejecting Yoda’s warnings not to try and save his friends. He put friends over the high minded ideals of Jedi enlightenment right there in Empire Strikes Back. Then in ROTJ he spent the entire movie rejecting the obvious approach of simply killing Vader, instead trying to reach Anakin. Over and over Luke put people he cared about over esoteric codes.
(Remember when the original trilogy and much of the EU establishing Luke was written, the prequels and Clone Wars hadn’t been fleshed out, and Jedi were implied to be even more high minded and classical than they were shown in the prequels).
Removed by mod
Every fucking thread
Lol that’s Lemmy for ya
Yeah, change the fucking record already, right?
What’s weird is that I have never interacted or read the comments to thus sub. So idk, whatever, I’m a cliche. But its evidently a common take, so feels super random that people got so weird about it, I went to sleep with this comment +10 and sorta suprsied that it got flagged for deleting because of downvotes.
Same, I’m not a massive nerd on Star Wars, but it’s a very common take on Youtube videos that get a little bit deep into Star Wars lore.
little bit deep into Star Wars lore.
Oh sure, that makes sense. I guess this is an perspective thing and you’re welcome to call me a huge dork. But idk, just feel like basic media literacy if you watch the whole series. 😂
I’m convinced that Count Dooku was a character quickly shoehorned in as a villain when the filmmakers got pushback from execs for having Jar Jar Binks as the actual Sith Lord (with Palpatine merely being the Apprentice).
What execs? The Prequels are basically the highest budget indie film project ever. Lucas had total financial and creative control.
Not execs, read the OP. The theory is GL got scared of fan reactions to jarjar so he didn’t want to make jarjar that central.
Don’t quote the old magic to me @hyperhopper, I was there when it was written.
It’s a fun fan theory, up there with Chewie/R2 being secret leaders of the rebellion and pre-prequel theories about “what actually are the clone wars”, but it relies on George Lucas being incredibly subtle in a trilogy where every other metaphor is written on giant billboards with spotlights on them. I mean the whole thing is a setup to “Jar Jar is Snoke”.
There were similar rumors that Lucas had the entire sequel/prequel trilogies planned out at the end of RotJ from the mid 80s until the prequels came out. Down to the EU books/comics (which he famously doesn’t care about) being Lucas’ plan all along. It was just “the man” keeping him from making the movies. That the man didn’t stop him making the original Star Wars before he was an extremely famous extremely wealthy movie maker was handwaved away.
It’s the fun logic hoop fan version of “No Trump/Musk is actually playing 7D chess! What he actually meant was…”
I did a rewatch of the prequels just to show a friend all the Darth Jar Jar evidence that never comes to fruition. We were robbed of a better experience.
Man, I really wish that all went somewhere.
Sexy padme and sexy Obi-Wan
Somewhat redeeming
To me, the scene that most defined what the Jedi order had become and why it needed to end was at the big fight scene at the end of Attack of the Clones where Yoda and Dooku were dueling. When Dooku pulled a pillar down with the Force and then Yoda used the Force to catch it to prevent it from falling on to Obi-wan. He then made a spectacle of it by spinning it around before throwing it back at Dooku. What he should have done was just use the Force to move Obi-wan and Anakin to a safe position and continued to pursue Dooku. That scene just demonstrated how full of himself Yoda had become. And it took until his duel with Palpatine before he realized that he was a large part of what had gone wrong with the Jedi order. I also always felt that he intentionally withheld a lot of information about the Jedi order from Luke in order to prevent him from rebuilding a similar system.
I have a really hard time separating a character’s decisions and the director/cinematographer decisions
Like, did Yoda do that or did someone decide he would do that because test audiences thought it looked cooler (or something like that). I hope I conveyed that properly
I think you conveyed it excellently - not solely because it was the exact thought I had. I would have used more clumsy wording though.
Aren’t the director’s decisions basically the same as the character’s? I mean, they’re fictional so the only insight into their character is what we’re shown by the media (i.e. the director’s choices).
Sure, but it’s one thing to think “Yoda was full of himself” and another to think “director wanted a cool looking fight”. They’re basically saying you shouldn’t analyze the thing too much because there wasn’t THAT much thought put into it. Not every move had the character’s thoughts and feelings taken into consideration.
You mean to say that fantasy characters don’t have a fully fleshed out character like real life people do?
I’m shocked I say
High acceleration has… undesirable effects, let’s say, on a sack of meat and bones. “Space magic”, sure, but I’d argue that in a high-stress situation like the middle of a fight it’d be a lot less risky to move the pillar. If you fuck up calculating how much force (lol) to use, you might end up with Obi-Was instead.
I don’t remember the scene exactly. But it might be that the pillar was falling fast enough that he couldn’t move them (or it would be risky). Moving the pillar was way safer.
Regardless, he takes it and starts spinning it around before throwing it which was entirely unnecessary and only for show. He could’ve just as easily deflected it to a safer location.
“You know what would be really interesting to do? Don’t denounce me as a Stalinist but, for example – it’s my old temptation – to rewrote Star Wars… presenting Palpatine and Darth Vader as good progressive egalitarian centralist fighting reactionary feudalist, all the Jedi bullshit. It would tell a completely different story, from the others point. What do they [Jedi] stand for? All that, ‘Republic’, what strange of Republic is when you have a Princess Leila, knights, kings and so on? No, Palpatine the Emperor and Darth Vader, they are - my god - progressive Bonapartist revolutionaries trying to get rid of the old world.”
From: Žižek on Reshooting Star Wars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_DroaGggbc
But tbh I think that if we take the original trilogy, the Rebels are cleary fighting a reactionary imperialist power, ie. an analogy to the Vietnam war
As ive grown older i find myself disagreeing more and more with the jedi whom as a child i idolised as paragons of good. But palpatine, vader, and the empire are so many things before being “poor good revolutionaries” trying to take down the status quo simply from the good of their golden hearts. Theres always more than 2 choices people :)
Andor did a good job of not giving a shit about the Jedi and also showing how terrible the fascist empire was. The whole prison episodes were really amazing.
Tap for spoiler
And all those prisoners for some hinges in the Death Star cannon.
But tbh I think that if we take the original trilogy, the Rebels are cleary fighting a reactionary imperialist power, ie. an analogy to the Vietnam war
Lucas was very explicit that this was always the intent. It’s not reallt subtle honestly, asymmetric jungle freedom fighters fighting wealthy imperialist?
I don’t want more crazy political views
Agreed but I did sometimes wonder what the ideal galaxy would look like to the rebels? Obviously it’s a fictional world, and they wouldn’t all hypothetically agree anyway, but would it be regressive or progressive?
Disclaimer: I don’t know a lot about Star wars
I think the pre-sequel shows have done a great job of showing the New Republic as a feckless liberal state too afraid to make any actual change. They are too distracted with trying to distance themselves from the Empire with incomprehensible amounts of bureaucracy and trying to reform Imperial Agents. The New Republic is so wrapped up with appearing to be the good guys that they neglect the citizens of the galaxy amd just let everything rot.
Man that guy has done a lot of cocaine in his life.
The Sith and the Empire didn’t help anyone either though, they made existence considerably worse for everyone other than a select few. They weren’t saviours or good guys, they were evil despots who sought to use lies to overthrow the existing power structure so they could fill the void with their totalitarianism.
What this meme is pointing out though is that they didn’t just use lies to overthrow the existing power structure, they also used truths.
Any complex truth can be twisted when it is overly simplified and points are selectively chosen to support the bigger lie.
Yeah the Sith here are the type of fascist regime to rise to power on the backs of a frustrated population. Pointing out all the flaws of the current system to garner support with no intention of actually making it better.
You use truths to make lies seem more believable
This is why Dooku made a shitty Sith. His underlying reasons were just, but didn’t stop to think about who he was hooking up with. He’s ultimately a tragic figure of someone who meant well and fucked it up.
Sith ethos doesn’t work like that. It’s a self-centered philosophy; you gain power for the sake of doing what you please. Palatine was never going to have Dooku as an apprentice long term.
Anakin’s reasons were selfish. His relationship with Padme was always toxic, immature, and selfish. Him wanting to save her was fundamentally selfish. It wasn’t for her sake as a person apart from Anakin. That’s exactly the kind of behavior the Sith philosophy encourages.
He’s more of a Gray Jedi
The Council needed age limits and term limits.
Yoda’s husband Paul was investigated for insider trading because of some extremely well timed trades just prior to battles with the empire.
Damn that’s some crooked lore.
Tales of the Jedi did a really good job fleshing Dooku out. many star wars villains are unambigiously evil- that’s what happens when dark wizardry is very real and a viable career path i guess- but Dooku really thought he was doing the right thing at first, like a more selfless Anakin. a lot of Star Wars media does a great job illustrating that the Republic and the Jedi were deeply flawed, but don’t make the jump to saying that many if not most planets joined the CIS in good faith for that reason- i guess because the new non-droids we see in the CIS are all asshats or aforementioned evil wizards, but still! the fight against the republic and the rebellion against the empire were essentially the same conflict from a certain point of view…
This is a big reason why I personally like episodes 1-3 more than 4-6. It’s just more interesting because neither side is 100% good or 100% bad, and there’s a couple times where you’re like “wait, the bad guy actually has a point”, or “are the good guys really doing the right thing here?”. That sort of conflict makes for much better storytelling and more interesting characters, especially when compared to the run-of-the-mill hero’s journey story and characters in 4-6.
There’s a really good moment in “The Solitary Clone” in the Bad Batch where Cody and his squad reassure a separatist child that they’re here to help before the child’s mother pulls him inside and shuts the door. To me it really illustrates how to the average separatist the republic was always a kind of oppressive empire.
I am just coming from a thread discussing voting for Biden or not is okay under the current circumstances. Reality meets fiction.
Putting the right guy in power never worked historically since power corrupts. The power structure is the problem. That’s one of the core ideas of anarchism
I mean, it has worked historically, just extremely rarely. Singapore was one such recent example.
The issue is that people die and the next person usually fucks everything up again.
Anarchy has similar issues.
The real problem is just us; humans.
That’s the next core idea: power structures attract the wrong people. Take Stalin who was worse than Lenin. Lenin had benevolent ideas but got corrupted, Stalin took that position with bad intentions from the start.
Fatalism only serves the status quo.
It’s not fatalism, but fact. Humans are the real issue. We weren’t biologically evolved to deal with such large groups, along with certain other DNA quirks.
That said, with technology and/or time such a flaw could be fixed so that we either are able to overcome our biological shortcomings, and/or technology allows us to achieve structure without hierarchy while also preventing hierarchy from springing up as well.
I don’t even know where to start. At least understand that this is beyond the realm of facts. And there is a reason, anarchists try to keep things on low levels, in small groups, as far as possible and build “communities of communities” bottom up. I don’t understand how technology is supposed to help there but there are structures that prevent hierarchies already.
It helps with self sustainability, communication, lowering costs of needs, efficiency, etc.
Renewables for example decrease the reliance on government significantly for example.
Wasn’t a big part of the Jedis’ problem their standoffishness?
Far from wielding power, they played at peacemaker and diplomat long after open war had erupted, resorted to questionably sourced mercenaries to do their dirty work, and relied enormously on prophecy to save them without properly understanding what it implied.
“Too Little, Too Late” might as well have been the motto of the late Jedi Order.
The power structure is the problem.
The lack of structure was a recurring problem for The Old Republic and the Jedi Order. The Trade Federation’s greed went unchecked early on, because the Jedi-as-space-cops presented no material threat. The Senate routinely dithered in the face of adversity, as it was easily subverted by staling tactics and backstabbing. No standing military meant a reliance on an assortment of killer robots, mercenaries, clones, and bureaucrats-turned-shock-troops, none of whom proved to be particularly reliable.
Far from “power corrupts” as the theme of the Prequels, I might argue the real moral was “power abhors a vacuum”. If you’re not willing to occupy the center of political gravity, someone else will.
It’s also one of the main ideas behind the American constitution but we try to regulate power with checks and balances but because it’s kinda hard to understand having multiple leaders that rule over different parts of the government and make sure no one gets corrupt people over time seem to have only given a shit about who is in charge of the military and now we have presidents that can effect normal citizens by enacting laws and are unanimously considered our leader
Too bad the person he’s talking to is far more corrupt than Yoda.
I read the text before even looking at the bottom picture and then realized I was making literally the exact same face lol perfect
One set of assholes talking trash about another set of assholes. Neither completely evil or completely good.
I never noticed but, is he pouring wine over ice?
There are a some type of wines that you can enjoy on ice during summer in France. So nothing too alarming here. But don’t do that with a Pomerol or I’ll chop your head myself.
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Could be sangria.
I thought the old lore said light/dark had to be in balance, or bad shit starts going down
Lucas had an uninituative meaning of “balance”. It wasn’t light and dark being equal, but dark side users being eliminated.
A better word would have been “tranquility”. If the force is naturally a calm lake, then dark side users are making waves I suppose is a clearer analogy.
Nono… There was no mistake there.
Before the Clone Wars, there were lots of Jedi everywhere in the Galaxy, and only a couple of Sith.
Anakin did bring balance.
Nope, Lucas meant the dark side being wiped out.
Lucas’ intention was that Anakin brought balance, eventually, by killing Palpatine and then himself rejecting the dark side. Thus wiping out the Sith.
George can let us take it from here. He’s done enough damage.
But then Disney said “hey! We’d rather make an endless river of money!” and pulled a new empire and sith lord out of thin air to make another movie.
What he intended and what he showed us are two different things. By the end of ROTJ, there were no more Sith and no real Jedi left. Luke called himself a Jedi, but didn’t really follow the strict rules and didn’t completely shun the dark side. He simply used it without anger. At that point, balance was truly restored.
The idea of the prophecy and balance with Anakin as the chosen one hadn’t been thought of when ROTJ was made.
By the time Lucas had come up with the prophecy, the EU had established Luke in the post-ROTJ as unquestionably a Jedi. Luke rejected the dogmatic aspects of the old Jedi order as early as Empire Strikes back, and as more EU material was written he continued that trend, building a new Jedi order in the model of his ideas. However rejecting specific old organizational dogma can be seen as stripping away the excess bloat of a system and finding the “true” core of it. Think of Luke as a religious reformist in a way, rejecting the institutions of a religion while not rejecting the religion itself. He was Martin Luther with a lightsaber.
Think of Luke as a religious reformist in a way, rejecting the institutions of a religion while not rejecting the religion itself. He was Martin Luther with a lightsaber.
So he’s a splitter…
But seriously, we all know that Lucas was flying by the seat of his pants writing the sequels and that his wife is the real hero of Star Wars. Everything that came afterwards was created by someone else. In the end Lucas’s story, Luke still used dark side powers. He called himself “Jedi”, but he was simply a Force user with wild ideas about the past. There were no strictly light side users or dark side users anymore. There was simply the Force. If you want to take extended canon into account, Yoda even stated this when he destroyed the last of the Jedi archives. He understood that balance could only be truly restored by letting go of the past.
Oops. Forgot to add /s at the end.
Still, thanks for the link. An interesting read.
My mistake. I have seen quite often the thinking that wiping out mass numbers of Jedi brought the Sith-Jedi balance closer.
After the Jedi were wiped, and both were replaced by people that didn’t give a shit about philosophical purity and just tried to help people directly.
Lucas doesn’t actually have any inclination as to what “balance” means and just leaves it to the fans to decide. It’s what made Star Wars resonate so well since fans can just project their own opinion onto the narrative. The Jedi/Republic had good intentions, but were corrupt beyond fixing, while the Sith/CIS/Empire were comically evil at times, they were also the only path that could actually root out the problems of the Republic.
And that’s exactly what happened. Jedi tried to eliminate the Sith, the balance was lost, the Sith created the Choose One to bring back balance to the force, a whole lot of death and destruction ensued, and balance was restored.
This is why I will always argue that world-building-wise, the prequels and BBY are generally more interesting, because they create a more nuanced view of the politics of the Galactic Republic.
The actual plots of episodes 1,2&3 leave much to be desired, but to me, there’s a reason why Andor is so compelling compared to the Mandalorian, it’s the politics.
Anyone who thinks politics don’t belong in a Star Wars movie isn’t really into fantasy, which Star Wars most certainly is.
Nek Minit they’ll say game of thrones, lord of the rings, the expanse, Avatar the Last Airbender etc (in my opinion some of the greatest fantasy/sci-fi of all time) shouldn’t have so much politics.
Like… that’s what fantasy is. Politics, human relationships and how people live and struggle against each other for their interests, in a fictional world with different rules/physics/history.
The Star Wars Sequels are trash because they neither have a good plot, nor good world building.
The Jedi were complicit in the corruption and injustice of the Galactic Republic, no doubt, and is great world-building, if you ask me.