Saturday, September 16, 2023

Links - 16th September 2023 (1 - Star Wars)

Meme - "when you leave the cinema and realise JJ Abrams ended the entire Skywalker Saga on Palpatine successfully using love to manipulate, corrupt, hurt or kill every single Skywalker across three generations, ultimately resulting in the total eradication of the Skywalker, Solo and Amidala bloodlines, whilst Palpatine's heir lives on and claims the Skywalker name and legacy"
"You son of a bitch"

Meme - "Types of Palpatine
Lawful Good: A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.
Neutral Good: And you, young Skywalker. We will watch your career with great interest.
Chaotic Good: ...the power to save Padmé. Smiles menacingly.
Lawful Neutral: I AM the Senate.
True Neutral: Ironic. He could save others from death, but not himself.
Chaotic Neutral: Dewit.
Lawful Evil: Commander Cody. The time has come. Execute Order 66.
Neutral Evil: This attempt on my life has left me scarred and deformed.
Chaotic Evil: Unlimited... POWER!!!"

Meme - "The evolution of Ahsoka Tano - From Snips to Fulcrum"

Stephen L. Miller on Twitter - "When Princess Leia became Mary Poppins in The Last Jedi."
"I mean this really pretty much tops it all. They saw Indiana Jones in a refrigerator nuke and thought "we can beat that"
There are a lot of bad moments about that movie but you knew these people had no idea what they were doing when it wasn't Leia nuking the fleet at warp speed. If she does that, it's a Top 3 all time Star Wars moment. Instead it's the DEI instructor who does it.
Not a single person stood up and staid "Shouldn't that be Leia doing that instead? How cool would that be" They all just nodded along."
Brian Jacobson on Twitter - "It was profoundly strange, especially when Carrie was already dead. They could have gracefully and tragically kill her in perfect sync with the story, but they had to save her to dress her corpse up in movie 3 as if there was some sort of diversity quota for dead women."

You can die simply by giving up the will to live, suggests new research - "Can you die simply by giving up the will to live? Yes, concludes a new study, led by Dr. John Leach from the University of Portsmouth in the UK.  The first-of-its-kind study looked at the phenomenon of “give-up-itis” — a word used for what is medically known as “psychogenic death.”"
Sorry, Padme

Meme - "Now go, my son"
"Is there anything else you need to tell me"
"Oh yeah, Lmao. Palpatine has clone bodies and he's currently building a fleet of planet killing Star destroyers on a secret Sith planet called Exegol that you can only get to with using a Sith Wayfinder"
"I meant like a final goodbye, or like a "I Love Yeu' or something like that but thanks I guess"

Rey and the sad devolution of the female character - YouTube - "when i was eight years old i saw the movie aliens in the theater...  makes that whole movie work in fact is that you entirely buy into the character of Ripley. She feels as real, relatable and as human as the person sitting next to you in the theater...  the movie hasn't presented her like some type of superhero. Rather it's portrayed her as pretty much an average woman who finds herself in the craziest of predicaments who ultimately does the bravest thing I've ever seen in a movie. Or perhaps i should say it's the greatest yet most believable act of courage i've ever seen in a movie...  There have been plenty of great female characters in Star Wars already. Especially for those who have followed the expanded universe. Never once have i heard anyone complain about any of those female characters because more often than not, they ended up being great well-written characters that fans loved. Which is all people wanted out of Rey...  they wanted to make her a symbol, an icon for women. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, don't get me wrong, but it's still something you have to earn...  the more you tell people ahead of time what you want her to be or represent outside of the story, the more you ruin the illusion of that story when you finally watch it, the more you can see the creators behind the curtain pulling the strings of the character having her do exactly what they want her to do to fit the real-life narrative and not to fit the narrative of the story...  how self-defense against thugs translates into besting the elite guards of the most powerful being in the galaxy just a week later is beyond me... the one weakness Rey seems to have which is a strong desire for belonging...  I'm far from the only guy out there that thinks that Ripley is one of the greatest characters anywhere ever, and she's only one example of a great many strong female characters that men absolutely love"

Meme - "What Star Wars Fans want vs what Disney thinks Star Wars fans want:
*Battle of Coruscant*
*Lizzo and Jack Black*"

Meme - "Anakin flirting in Clone Wars: I look upon the magnificence of Your Highness, whose beauty would make the brightest star seem dull by comparison
Anakin flirting in Attack of the Clones:
I don't like sand."

Meme - Chancellor Palpatine: "Leave him or we'll never make it"
Anakin Skywalker: "His fate will be the same as ours..."
*Obi-Wan Kenobi* DIES ON DEATH STAR
*Darth Vader* DIES ON DEATH STAR
*Emperor Palpatine* DIES ON DEATH STAR

Girl Dressed As Jyn Erso Gives Out Death Star Plans At 'Star Wars' Event - "Harley and her dad, Dino Ignacio, attended the Star Wars Celebration event in Orlando, Florida. During the event (which included plenty of cosplayers), Harley dressed as Jyn Erso, the main character from “Rogue One” who helps deliver the Death Star plans to Princess Leia. Just like Jyn, little Harley delivered her own Death Star plans to every Leia she saw in Orlando. Ignacio told HuffPost that his daughter has seen “Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope” (which begins with Leia receiving the plans) and most of “Rogue One.”  “We watched it up until it goes dark,” he said... Harley met about 20 different people dressed as Leia, who were all “happy to play along.” She handed out about 80 Death Star plans, but her last data card went to the most important princess (and general) of all.  The event included the original Princess Leia dress worn by Carrie Fisher in “A New Hope,” and Harley left her last card by the exhibit."

Meme - Miss Piggy: "Where are the boys? Are they safe? Are they alright?"
*Worried Kermit*

Meme - "The great Jedi purge according to:
Legends: A devastating event for the Order that massacred its ranks down to the few exceptional masters that managed to survive. The surviving members were so few that they could be counted on single hand or two, making Luke's existence even more significant.
"Canon": it's single handedly the most tragic event of all time, while simultaneously inconsequential since we just pull dozens of random, unheard of Jedi out of our asses on a daily basis whenever it's convenient. everyone loved the Jedi (but not really) and everyone saw it as a tragedy (also not really) idk we can't really seem to decide"

Meme - Luke to Rey: "It's not about lifting rocks." *Rey, Yoda, Kenobi and Vader lifting rocks*

Meme - "Bo-Katan Kryze and Fennec Shand
Bo-Katan Kryze and Fennec Shane 28 years later
And here is Boba Fett after 29 years..."
Meme - "Bo-Katan Kryze and Fennec Shand
Bo-Katan Kryze and Fennec Shand 28 years later
And then there's Obi-Wan after 20 years..."

What I want from the Kenobi series? : StarWars - "In the Ahsoka book (spoilers). “He stood up, his knees creaking in a rather alarming fashion. Surely he wasn’t that old yet. It must be the desert climate that affected him strangely.”"

Ross Burt on Twitter - "Hi @pablohidalgo -my 10yr old just asked-'how come ObiWan is old in Rebels, but BoKatan looks 2 weeks older since Clone Wars?' #RebelsRecon"
Star Wars on Twitter - ""The sun(s) doin' murder to meesa skin." -Jar Jar Binks on Tatooine in The Phantom Menace."

Meme - "You killed Younglings"
"You didn't care when I butchered the tuskens. I can't believe I was in love with a racist"

technology - Why there is so little technological progress between times of Old Republic and Star Wars? - "It is quite characteristic for fantasy worlds to have little technological progress because magic (since magic works better than technology, we don't need to develop it) and/or longevity of one of the dominant species (longevity means slow reproduction rate which leads to slow "I want to do things different than my parents" type of progress).  In SF technological stagnation is usually explained by some great catastrophe that created new Dark Ages (i.e. Canticle for Leibovitz) or we have something that actively prevents innovation (like risk of Chaos possession actively discourages too bold innovations in Wh40k universe or risk of re-creating Thinking Machines in Dune).  In the Star Wars we do see progress between episodes with the Death Star as a best example (there are other mentioned in linked question: change to space fighters, upgrade to the bionical replaced limbs - compare Anakin's and Luke's hand), but when you look back and notice that technology from the Old Republic (i.e. in the KoTOR games) is not that much different than one in the movies, yet there are separated by few thousand years."
"While there are debates about the shape of the curve which best describes technological change over time, no one thinks that it's linear.  Most academics agree that it's increasing at a decreasing rate, with periodic spikes of innovation (like the Renaissance and the rise of microcomputers) which get smaller and more frequent at each occurrence...
Since the Star Wars galaxy both is extremely high tech and has been extremely high tech for an extremely long time relatively modest innovation and slow, incremental technological improvements are to be expected. It would be like observing them at the beginning and end of the last segment of the trend line above."
"Basically speaking, it's due to the general devastation of the New Sith Wars, which were a series of conflicts stretched out over the better part of a millennium (the Draggulch period, roughly 2000-1000 years before A New Hope, though the major fighting was 1500-1100 BBY) and involved not just the Republic and Sith but a large number of other combatants, most of them opportunistically supporting both sides at various times.  As a result of the wars, the Republic was pretty well crippled - communications outside the Core were cut off, the government nearly collapsed, there were plagues, the whole nine yards."

Meme - "This is my friend TJ, wearing a costume she made for Halloween, 1977. She was 16 at the time. Now, keep in mind: there was no internet to search for images, She could not have rented and paused the movie, because it wasn't released on video until 1982. No, TJ just went to the movie a bunch of times, took notes with a flashlight, drew bunch of sketches, and put this together. In 19-fucking-77. So let's bury this bullshit about how women didn't grow up on Star Wars."
Straw man. I've never seen anyone claiming this. The original source seems to be tumblr, and is just a disingenuous counter when someone points out that there're a lot more males crazy about Star Wars than females (clearly Obama being President for two terms refutes the claim that blacks face racism in the US). I've also seen it used as a bad faith argument to counter criticism of bad female characters
Keywords: Women have always been into Star Wars, women have always been Star Wars fans, women have always liked Star Wars

When Good Shows Go Bad — The Mandalorian - YouTube - "The Mandalorian has lost its magic. In this video essay, I break down why season 3 was a disappointment, and why so many fans had a hard time caring about its characters."

Meme - "Disney Star Wars remake be like:
*Fat stormtroopers chasing Gorlock the Destroyer as Rey*"

The Star Wars Ring Theory Explained #StarWarsDay - "The kernel of the idea is Lucas’ likening of the Star Wars saga to poetry; as he famously said during the production of Episode I, “It’s like poetry, they rhyme. Every stanza kinda rhymes with the last one.” There he was talking about how each prequel movie echoes its corresponding original trilogy counterpart - Anakin destroys the droid control ship the same way Luke does the Death Star – with the core distinction being that in Episodes I-III we see the temptation of the Dark Side win out. There are a lot of shared elements and imagery between the movies, ranging from the granular (Obi-Wan and Han both evade destruction by attaching to a space body) to the galactic (Anakin's showdown with Dooku in Episode III and Luke's final fight with Vader). Beyond just poetic-esque storytelling, this allows the series to comment on generations and the ills of parents. Klimo takes that and runs at hyperspeed with it, extending the narrative structure by saying the rhyming isn’t just sequential (ABC, A’B’C’), but also palindromic (ABC, C’B’A’). This is the basis of Ring Theory; essentially (and this is simplifying a fair bit), the narrative is a loop that doubles back on itself structurally. Traditionally this is done in literature and conveyed with key words, but the theory suggests Lucas did it using broader story structure and cinematic language"

Admiral Ackbar actor was "in tears" after his death scene - Ackbar puppeteer disappointed with his role - "one of the franchise’s longest-running performers – 62-year-old actor and puppeteer Tim Rose, who has played the “body” of squid-like Rebel Admiral Ackbar since 1983’s Return of the Jedi alongside voice actors Erik Bauersfeld and Tom Kane – was also pretty unhappy, revealing he was “in tears” over what he perceived as a disrespectful attitude to his character. “After The Force Awakens - for whatever reason, length of picture, whatever, it all got cut out,” Rose told Jamie Stangroom in a lengthy YouTube interview.  “So after waiting 30 years to reprise Ackbar I was a little disappointed with Ackbar's role in that picture. In The Last Jedi I was quite looking forward to them maybe giving him something more juicy.”  Unfortunately, what they had planned was Ackbar’s death instead, and Rose was less than happy with the character’s lack of presence."
Clearly a bigot who hates diversity

Dataracer on Twitter - "Bioware has hired Sam Maggs to re-write Knights of the Old Republic. Maggs is a SJW activist that hates male Star Wars fans & constantly mocks the fanbase telling them to "die mad about." She was was asked about her favorite SW game in 2019 and said "Not KOTOR.""

Meme - "Writer of the Knight of the Old Republic remake totally mocking the core of the Skywalker saga. Totally unacceptable. But so typical of modern Lucasfilm! Like anyone who understands the material even a bit wouldn't be saying this."
Sam Maggs @SamMaggs: "snotty angry baby boy: "Rey hardly needed any training at all me, strong in the force: "do you not remember that anakin was auto-born Strongest Jedi because of an arbitrary and intensely stupid high microorganism count or""

Meme - Star Wars Holocron @sw_ho...: "Did you know? The Sith Eternal fleet seen in #StarWars: #TheRiseofSkywalker was created by Sith cultists on Exegol, who indoctrinated Exegol's population with Sith values and raised and trained their children to become officers, mechanics and soldiers for the Final Order"
Elijah Wood @elijahwood: "no. how could we have known?"

Murphy Barrett's answer to Why is the 'Holdo Maneuver' from The Last Jedi so controversial? - Quora - "It broke the rules.  There is a common mistake made when writing science fiction or fantasy that if it’s okay to break one rule, then it’s okay to break all the rules. It’s just fiction, after all!  Not so.  The more rules you break the more carefully you must consider each next rule you break, and doubly so for any rule you establish in writing. Otherwise the narrative structure falls apart as our suspension of disbelief breaks.  Magic exists. To perform magic you must say funny words, wave your hands about, and use special ingredients to make spells work. That’s the rule you set. So you cannot then later have a wizard cast a spell with no words, no gestures, and no ingredients, unless you have a goddamn good explanation for why you’re breaking your own rule. If suddenly you can cast spells with nothing, then why does everyone else need all the mumbo jumbo? Better to write a wizard who has practice his spells so much that he can murmur them with barely a sound and gesture with barely a twitch, but with great difficulty and long practice he may appear to cast spells from nothing.  In the case of the Holdo Mneuver, it literally breaks the entire framework of military doctrine and FTL travel in the series. Holdo quite clearly knows that this should work. You don’t turn to face your enemy and jump to lightspeed to run away, she’d just run from where she was. The maneuver was expected to be injurious to the enemy. Which raises the logical question, instead of building giant Death Stars, why don’t people in Star Wars just strap hyperdrives to asteroids, plug an astromech droid in, and FTL-bomb planets?  Every attempt to explain it away ends up just being special pleading. It’s just bad writing.  That’s the lesson. When you create a rule in fiction, you must follow it or you’ll destroy suspension of disbelief. You can work around a rule, expand on a rule, but you cannot break your own rules."

Meme - Hector Navarro @imhectornavarro: "I need Lucasfilm to understand. Not everyone grows up to be a miserable old man with a failed personal life. Please find other conflicts for our beloved characters.
*Indiana Jones, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker*"

Meme - Captain America: "Big man in a suit armor, take that away and what are you?"
Darth Vader: "Ace pilot, former Jedi, Sith Lord. But mostly dead, I would be dead."

Meme - Luke Skywalker: "YOU TOLD ME VADER MURDERED MY FATHER."
Obi-Wan Kenobi Force Ghost: "IT'S LITERALLY WHAT HE TOLD ME."

Meme - @TheUnaButters: "I'm an Order 66 denier now"
John A. Douglas @J0hnADouglas: "First time was a joke but this is getting stupid. did any Jedi actually die in Order 66? Or did they all just duck behind a rock or something ?"
Screen Rant: "Aayla Secura and Shaak Ti are back, as Luke Skywalker discovers the Clone Wars Jedi alive and well, beginning a huge Star Wars twist.
Star Wars Just Brought Two Iconic Jedi Back From The Dead"

Meme - "The best parts about Star Wars is that there is no good and evil."
"Here's what just a few DARK SIDE characters are called: . . Sidious Plagueis Maul Tyranus Savage Opress Vitiate Ravage Mortis Thanaton Vengean"

Star Wars 9: How Colin Trevorrow’s alleged draft fixes Rise of Skywalker’s biggest problems - "Focusing on another of Palpatine’s grand plans, Duel of the Fates sees Kylo Ren – haunted by Luke Skywalker – discover an old holographic message from the Emperor instructing Darth Vader to seek out Tor Valum, the Sith who taught Palpatine the ways of the Dark Side. Kylo takes Anakin’s place and heads to the Sith master for further training. Meanwhile, The Resistance are hard at work trying to defeat the First Order by using a beacon – housed on the now-ravaged planet of Coruscant – to call on allies for help. Rey continues her Jedi training, mainly in solitude, and Rose has a bigger role.  What’s clear from the “leaked” draft (reportedly verified by The AV Club) is how Trevorrow’s Episode 9 embraces the past, whereas The Rise of Skywalker is suffocated by it – a point that’s best demonstrated by Abrams’ treatment of Emperor Palpatine. “The dead speak!” begins the opening crawl. How? Check Fortnite. Why? It doesn’t really matter. Palpatine’s back and there will be no further questions. He’s the Big Bad – then, now, and forever. Duel of the Fates changes that entirely.  In the alternate version, Palpatine’s poised as an ethereal threat, the former Emperor corrupting Kylo with words rather than being bafflingly resurrected. A villain pulling the strings from beyond the grave is far scarier than one coming back from the dead to play puppet-master; a shade of subtlety that is sorely lacking from The Rise of Skywalker. More importantly, the sequel trilogy’s new characters get room to forge their own paths in Duel of Fates instead of having to endlessly deal with what came before. Kylo ignores Force Ghost Luke’s cries to return to the Light, and Ben Solo finally embraces his own mantra from The Last Jedi: “Let the past die, kill it if you have to.” In contrast, Palpatine becomes all-consuming in The Rise of Skywalker, and various secondary plots and characters melt away as the Emperor becomes the focus. Even the sequel trilogy’s big mystery – the identity of Rey’s parents – becoming inexplicably tied to the Sith Lord. Kylo’s tragic descent into becoming Duel of Fates’ Big Bad – without being redeemed along the way – feels far more earned and in keeping with the character. The new revelation that he was the one who killed Rey’s parents (under Snoke’s orders) is more fitting than the kiss-and-make up conclusion of The Rise of Skywalker. Let’s just gently hand-wave away the genocide of millions across the galaxy, shall we?  The structure also feels vastly improved. Gone is the Sith planet of Exegol, sign-posted as the finale’s destination 10 minutes into Rise of Skywalker. In its place, a series of classic Star Wars set-pieces, including BB-8 hijacking a Star Destroyer and Chewie riding an X-Wing. A series of daring escapades and suicide missions feels far more exciting than the paint-by-numbers MacGuffin chase we did get."

Strong Female Characters: A Comparison Between Mulan and Rey - "Now that you’re up to date on both of these stories, let’s examine them. For Mulan, I want to take a look at a specific scene in the movie. Disney with the animated movies they do, has a good way of showing time passing through songs. A man and woman can fall in love in the time of a song, and in Mulan’s case, she trained. Even if you ignore how catchy the song itself was and just examine the montage, it’s fantastic. She starts of sucking at everything that she does; she’s clumsy, picked on by the other men (which makes us root for her more), she can’t catch fish, or carry sacks, or run as fast, or shoot a bow and arrow, and she like all the other men, can’t climb a giant post. As the song progresses, she and the other men gradually get better until she can run faster than any of them, shoot better, and she’s the only one out of the entire army to climb the giant post. Just when the general told her to leave, she was determined to win and finish this. So she climbed it. There was sweat on her brow, and she struggled for every movement as she climbed. She was intelligent and figured out a technique that none of the other recruits (all men), knew and she was the first and only one up it.  Not only did this make us root for her and care about her, but it showed us that she worked for everything she had...  Rey, on the other hand, didn’t believe in the Force or Jedi and suddenly, days later, she’s able to best an evil Sith Lord who’s trained his whole life in a Jedi mind trick. She’s able to use the Force to steal a lightsaber from him. He kills a good man in front of her and days later, she’s running off to help him. She fights these highly trained guards that are supposed to be protectors of Snoke – the evil “main” bad guy and fights them better than the trained Sith Lord does. She never once trained. Being a Jedi is something that according to Star Wars canon, has to be trained. Jedi Knights spend their entire lives training with the Force, learning how to use and harness it. Even Jedi Masters still have things they need to learn. They never stop growing. It takes time to be able to pull a lightsaber out of the snow and it certainly would be far more difficult to best a trained Sith Lord, even with him being injured as he was. Even if she was able to download his memories and use that to learn how to do the Jedi Mind Tricks – as it mentioned in the books – either 1) that needed to be showed and explained further in the movie and 2) Even with that, it doesn’t make sense. Watching and learning it and then applying it are totally separate things.  Even training with Luke for a little while would have showed that she grew naturally rather than Rey’s a perfect character because she’s a female that we’ve placed a political agenda onto. Instead of trying to 1) tell a good story 2) be true to Star Wars 3) honor Star Wars canon. Even doing a short, three-minute montage or less like Mulan did, where Rey tried and failed, then tried again, put in effort, struggled, and overcame would have showed us how strong she was. Like Mulan, we would have rooted for her and cared about her. We would have been cheering her on and wanted her to win. Like Mulan, we would have gone on a journey with her which means that we would be more interested to where that journey ended...
People make mistakes. What we need to be teaching young girls is how to own up to their mistakes and how to learn from them. That’s life. Mistakes teach us how to be better, how to grow stronger
We all love watching a character whether male or female overcome obstacles. We want to see them fail so that when they struggle and try again, it’s that much more powerful when they succeed.
Who wants to watch a character who always wins and beats everyone around them? No one. Yes, we may want a happy ending – like how Mulan saved China – but that would have been less enjoyable had she never been found out to be a woman, had she not been forced to struggle to get the men to believe her when they saw her as weaker. Proving herself to be stronger wouldn’t have meant anything had the men not rejected her when they learned the truth. Then, when they all agreed to help her, it meant so much more because Mulan did that, she overcame that.
Purposefully making all the male characters around a female character weak just to try to show the female character as strong DOESN’T WORK. It only proves to us that you can’t write or show a strong female lead on your own without making everyone around her weak. Look at Mulan. She’s the strongest, best-developed character in the movie Mulan and Shang is a strong character. So are the other men in the army. They grow and develop – they’re hilarious – but they all have their strengths and their determination to be soldiers no matter what makes them strong. Yet Mulan naturally outshines them because of her determination and how she overcomes so many obstacles and how well loved she is."

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