Remove ads

Star Wars General Discussion Thread

Reader mode
Finally saw a clip of combat in The Acolyte and oh yes, this looks like my sort of thing. Though I feel like there are lots of little things in the way it's shot which will feel un-Star Wars to a lot of people (that brief bit of slow-mo for one), so we have that discourse to look forward to again.
 
Ok I bit the bullet and watched the Morgan and Barriss anthology. Morgan's has some good bits but major pacing problems and after the first episode lacks depth with Morgan most tellingly just vocalising her motivations in the second episode in lieu of subtext or themes or more episodes to convey her changing perspective.

Barriss', I ended up really enjoying the third episode, but the first two can go straight to hell. To the boiler room of hell. All the way down.

I think I will need to organise my thoughts on exactly why for a day or so.
 
He's at Cannes? Doesn't he usually skip this? *checks* Oh, he's receiving the Honorary Palme d'Or award this year.
variety.com

George Lucas Rejects ‘Star Wars’ Critics Who Think the First Six Films Are ‘All White Men’: ‘Most of the People Are Aliens!’

George Lucas got candid about criticism of the "Star Wars" films during a conversation at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday.
variety.com variety.com
"They would say, 'It's all white men,'" Lucas said of the films' critics. "Most of the people are aliens! The idea is you're supposed to accept people for what they are, whether they're big and furry or whether they're green or whatever. The idea is all people are equal."

Lucas went on to say that the only beings in the "Star Wars" universe who were discriminated against were the robots.

...

Lucas also responded to criticism about the depiction of women in the "Star Wars" films, saying: "Who do you think the heroes are in these stories? What do you think Princess Leia was? She's the head of the rebellion. She's the one that's taking this young kid who doesn't know anything and this boisterous, I-know-everything guy who can't do anything and trying to save the rebellion with these clowns … And it's the same thing with Queen Amidala."
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
 
Ok so broadly speaking I like his sentiment but:

Lucas went on to say that the only beings in the "Star Wars" universe who were discriminated against were the robots.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I'm sorry but do we need to replay the bit where the imperials react to Chewie in ep4?
 
Also while I like the sentiment I don't think depicting 'no discrimination diverse world' but happening to only cast white people among the many humans works well, and I'm pretty sure Lando's actually the only exception in the OT. I mean, we are talking films made over 40 years ago there so it's not surprising, but pushing back on the observation seems like a mistake. (There are slightly more visible women.)
The Englanderish said:
Ok so broadly speaking I like his sentiment but:



I'm sorry but do we need to replay the bit where the imperials react to Chewie in ep4?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Or so very much EU material on the same point, yes.
 
First reviews for the Acolyte are in, skimming social media it sounds like a lot of the early screening audience was turbofans (makes sense lol), but I've seen pretty positive reactions from some more legit critics so I'm cautiously optimistic.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
First reviews for the Acolyte are in, skimming social media it sounds like a lot of the early screening audience was turbofans (makes sense lol), but I've seen pretty positive reactions from some more legit critics so I'm cautiously optimistic.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Like, I haven't been following in super detail, but a brand new era on screen without many blorbos to point to means that the story has to stand on its own, and it seems it has, so yeah, cautious positivity on my part.
 
I mean Star Wars has kind of always had diversity problems, twice over. Out of universe you really didn't have that many non-white actors across the OT and PT in major roles, even if the PT was better in that regard. In-universe a large amount of not just heroes but main villains and antagonists were not just human but people you could consider 'White' even in most of the Legends/EU stuff give or take just outright evil alien invader races.
 
Honestly I think one of the big things that's still giving me pause about the Acolyte (and really the High Republic stuff in general) is the aesthetic - it's meant to be hundreds of years before the PT, but from just a production and costume design standpoint it looks... basically identical to the PT-era? Like maybe the Jedi's robes are a little more layered but other than that it doesn't scream "A More Civilized Age".

I'm all for pumping up the fantasy part of the sci-fi fantasy equation and I know "it's not what I wanted so it sucks!" is less than worthless as a criticism, but I still long for the Edgar Rice Burrough's planetary romance vibe of the OG Tales of the Jedi comics. Give me battery powered lightsabers, Jedi Knights in actual factual shining armor, dark Sith magick, castles (possibly in space), the works.
 
Arthur Frayn said:
Honestly I think one of the big things that's still giving me pause about the Acolyte (and really the High Republic stuff in general) is the aesthetic - it's meant to be hundreds of years before the PT, but from just a production and costume design standpoint it looks... basically identical to the PT-era? Like maybe the Jedi's robes are a little more layered but other than that it doesn't scream "A More Civilized Age".

I'm all for pumping up the fantasy part of the sci-fi fantasy equation and I know "it's not what I wanted so it sucks!" is less than worthless as a criticism, but I still long for the Edgar Rice Burrough's planetary romance vibe of the OG Tales of the Jedi comics. Give me battery powered lightsabers, Jedi Knights in actual factual shining armor, dark Sith magick, castles (possibly in space), the works.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I mean 200-400 years is a whole different scale to 4k years. It's within living memory of several Jedi council members.
 
I mean SWTOR basically went all-in on "the Prequels with more pointless fiddly bits on armor/clothes" back in the day, so I'm not terribly surprised. Then again, talking about a thousand generations of the Jedi Order protecting the Galactic Republic, I wouldn't be shocked if that longevity has even a thousand years be more or less a decade to our perspective in terms of societal and fashion changes (or the lack thereof).
 
bluntblade said:
Finally saw a clip of combat in The Acolyte and oh yes, this looks like my sort of thing. Though I feel like there are lots of little things in the way it's shot which will feel un-Star Wars to a lot of people (that brief bit of slow-mo for one), so we have that discourse to look forward to again.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

They already started doing slow-mo in TFA (not counting the choppy ESB cave vision of course), and then ep9 even directly homaged the Morpheus car scene, however if this example now involved C-A and metal blade knives etc. then I guess that'd just make it more Mx than SW at this point?

Either way prb gonna watch later
 
The Englanderish said:
Barriss', I ended up really enjoying the third episode, but the first two can go straight to hell. To the boiler room of hell. All the way down.

I think I will need to organise my thoughts on exactly why for a day or so.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Right so, I'm necessarily going to have to cover spoilers, so ye be warned - heavy intense spoilers ahead.


Barriss' first episode covers the Inquisitor training period, and suffers from severe issues with the runtime compressing it, and it misses all opportunity to explore its characters.

Thanks to the blisteringly short duration, the almost entirely new cast don't get much time for us to get to know them or connect to how Barriss knows them. It also makes for a very short training. Barriss goes right from her first lesson to The Final Test!!!!1! most jarringly.

When you add this to Barriss's motivations not being particularly explored, the result is a shallow but pretty mess. There's no real sense of why Barriss, nominally someone who made a principled stand about the Jedi having lost their way, might throw her lot in with the Empire, nor much really going into her original motivations. The original temple bombing arc pulled "The Jedi have lost their way!" out of its arse at the eleventh hour as her motivation in contrast to the mildly cackling malevolence when fighting Anakin, so something that really should be explored here is that motivation.

What does it mean for the Jedi to have lost their way in her eyes? How does she feel about things now? How does that compare to the Empire? At what point are her principles bending and breaking? What does it mean to join the Empire? These are all questions that are just not being explored - at least Morgan settled for just vocalising her motivations when lacking time for something more proper.

Barriss' second episode is infuriating and rates lower for me. It's set at some indeterminate point into Barriss' Inquisitor career with her teamed up for a mission with another Inquisitor from the first episode. I think she's new for the anthology, definitely wasn't in Rebels. They're both on the trail of a Jedi, and Barriss is...

Laughably oblivious. Literally the Did Nothing Wrong Inquisitor. She naively doesn't understand why the empire is being so cruel to this distant rim colony, is completely shocked by the other inquisitor massacring the place after Barriss coaxes out from a child where the Jedi is hiding, and is basically a Jedi in terms of how she engages with the world but is for some reason playing on the imperial team. And I'm just like, Barriss, you are a literal inquisitor. You are not some bottom rank grunt from the middle of nowhere allured by propaganda and the promises of a better life who hasn't engaged with the imperial way.

So we have immediately implied questions like how did you get into the field? How does your companion and the Inquisition at large just brush off you near total lack of malevolence? How have you spent any time as an Inquisitor unaware of what it involves? Do you actually know what your job is? What even are your motives for being here?

The episode is not interested in answering any of these. At first I thought it was going to have her be deludedly nice even while chopping up villagers but nope. Instead we get Barry the friendliest Gestapo officer who is standing around aghast and horrified while the purges are happening, after wondering aloud why Mr. Hitler is being so mean to Poland, it'll only turn them more against Germany!

It's well voice-acted, it's well animated, it's well scored, well paced, and the writing completely sucks arse.

Even when fighting the Jedi, she spends the entire fight pleading with them to surrender and when finally talking them down Barriss is Shocked and Horrified when her companion uses the opportunity to merk 'em in the back. Ater a bit of a verbal sparring with her companion, and realising the Jedi is still alive she throws her companion off a cliff and saves the Jedi and where even is the moral conflict if Barriss never did anything wrong?

What even was the point of the temple bombing arc if Barriss was going to be the clean wehrmacht? I don't understand why this was worth returning to after ten years.

The animation is stellar, but the writing.

At this point all my bitterness and spite from 2013/14 has been rekindled and made manifest again, leaving me unsure why I even bother checking in with the Filoniverse occasionally, and all I have is hate.

So it was very much to my surprise that the third episode fucking slapped. I'm really glad I bothered to watch it because I was considering if I had the stamina to get through another episode like the first two.

I don't really want to give away why, because I think you should watch it for yourself. Filoni's team can do it.

As a little appetite whetter, thematically the Filoni team does a little Dark Rendez-vous.

Really enjoyed it, probably works fine as a standalone too. Just a comfortable A-tier SW story and I really needed it.
 
Last edited:
The Englanderish said:
I'm sorry but do we need to replay the bit where the imperials react to Chewie in ep4?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
i mean, in fairness, that just means treatment of common slaves are fairly similar

can't blame lucas for getting the droids mixed up with the 'ganics, really, dude's getting old

Though yeah, in setting in particular that's like... actively blinkered. Prejudice against common slave groups, the hutt, droids, probably other crap I'm forgetting are all quite noticeable.

There's a pretty substantial amount of discrimination in star wars, not just against the manufactured slaves.
 
It's the same issue as with Trek, which shows a utopian future where all the human racisms have been resolved,
and even uses the 2 opposite "half-black-half-white-faces" factions who think that "our counterpart with the mirror-faces just happens to have an inherently different character in correlation with their mirror face colors" but in fact turn out to be wrong about this and just prejudiced,

but then there's still Klingons and Vulcans and Romulans and Nausicans etc. and all those others that do have different personalities and morals due to inherent differences with humans - and then sometimes they're used as direct stand-ins for specific non-American nations, like Klingons and Russians.

The "half black half white faces prejudice is unfounded, let's use that as an illustration of how inter-human prejudices are unjustified" approach wasn't consistently applied across the board here, with all the humanoid alien species.
If some would consider this to be an example of the show not being progressive enough or even (unconsciously?) doing some kinda racialism next to its anti-racialism, then maybe that's what this show and IP is like?


So it's like, same here with Wookiees, are they supposed to really be these inherently feral creatures as Han describes them (and Chewie is proud of), a mixture of ape, hound and lion, or are all these comments by Han, Leia and that prison room Imperial guy supposed to be "speciyism"?
Don't think there's clear answers for that here, so who knows whatever

Point is, using that line as proof that specifically the Empire is "speciest / human supremacist" as later done in the old EU, isn't quite as clear-cut because everyone else seems to have comparable (though non-hostile/contemptuous) views about Wookiees.
 
Last edited:
I've encountered the whole "actually, the authoritarian empire hates/exploits everyone equally" thing a few times- among other things, Fallout pre-war US comes to mind- and it always makes my eyes roll.

Authoritarian regimes invariably require a hierarchical society in which there is a stringent divide between rulers and ruled. They typically also lean into existing fissures to maintain their authority.

The Empire of the original trilogy, IIRC, only has two on-screen aliens- the bounty hunter(s) in ESB and the spy in Mos Eisley in ANH; spies and mercenaries, broadly speaking, tend not to be within "polite" society. The Rebellion meanwhile has Chewie, Nien Numb (?) With lando in RotJ, and the Ewoks, the first two being pretty clearly within the formal military, and likely as officers.

The later canon that Palpatine was exploiting core world prejudice makes a great deal of sense to me.
 
Last edited:
Wreckage Hothead said:
It's the same issue as with Trek, which shows a utopian future where all the human racisms have been resolved,
and even uses the 2 opposite "half-black-half-white-faces" factions who think that "our counterpart with the mirror-faces just happens to have an inherently different character in correlation with their mirror face colors" but in fact turn out to be wrong about this and just prejudiced,

but then there's still Klingons and Vulcans and Romulans and Nausicans etc. and all those others that do have different personalities and morals due to inherent differences with humans - and then sometimes they're used as direct stand-ins for specific non-American nations, like Klingons and Russians.

The "half black half white faces prejudice is unfounded, let's use that as an illustration of how inter-human prejudices are unjustified" approach wasn't consistently applied across the board here, with all the humanoid alien species.
If some would consider this to be an example of the show not being progressive enough or even (unconsciously?) doing some kinda racialism next to its anti-racialism, then maybe that's what this show and IP is like?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

If your talking TOS, then do take in mind not all of Star Trek which has had several series and movies since the late 60's is going to be consistent. Mind you Trek also took measures to show species as not being entirely one note either. We never get any clear cut limits on specism, or droid discrimination, but they do exist in the films

Wreckage Hothead said:
So it's like, same here with Wookiees, are they supposed to really be these inherently feral creatures as Han describes them (and Chewie is proud of), or are all these comments by Han, Leia and that prison room Imperial guy supposed to be "speciyism"?
Don't think there's clear answers for that here, so who knows whatever
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Except it's not. It's clearly stated in other materials that Wookies are sentient, and we get a better show just speciest the Empire is in
the EU, and the new canon basically has them commit several genocides, most notably the Geonosians.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top