Lucas didn't do the clones justice by treating them as nothing more than CGI cannon fodder in the prequel trilogy. An entire other team had to create more (and better) stories to explore the obvious moral dilemma of creating clone soldiers enslaved to the Republic's MIC.
Star Wars has always sucked in exactly this way, ever since the prequels. The original trilogy can get away with this stuff because the galaxy is ruled by the bad guys, but the prequels tell us that, during a reign of a thousand years/generations (they say both), slavery has not been eradicated and big crime slugs somehow control whole planets for no other reason then they are rich exactly due to that trade, or other criminal doings.
But that, somehow is still better then the newest three movies, which just instantly fall apart when you start to turn on your brain. The prequels don't make sense story-wise either, but disney, with their unlimited money, forgot to put intenral consistency into their worldbuilding to the point where nothing about the setting makes sense at all any more.
The most basic shit. I could go on about this for a long time but it's late here so here's just some tidbits off the top of my head:
Who are the first order and why are they in charge? I can get that decapitating the Empire doesn't make it vanish, but how did one splinter group of them manage to build a better super weapon then the Emperor did? I am not saying this is necessarily bad, but they literally never explain how the galaxy got from 'emperor ded' to where it is now and the order seems to have just as many resources as the empire did. How did nothing at all change? The only explanation is that they wrote it that way not because it makes sense but because they felt it was a saver bet.
Why do bombers in space exist and how do their bombs fall down in space? That's on the same level as the Wing Commander movie where they had a 'we have to be quiet so the Kilrathy don't detect us' Uboat scene. In space. I know no one wants realistic space in popcorn movies, but it's a different matter to cut in sound effects and making ignoring physics a plot point. And yes the bombers in EP8 count for that because if they didn't have to 'drop' their bombs from 'above' they could be built less stupid and then they wouldn't all get blown up.
Hyperdrive has never worked like EP8 depicts it and everything about the slow chase is stupid as fuck. If this outcome is possible at all, someone would find out how to do it and weaponize it in a heartbeat.
Literally all of the rebellion (why are they still called that?) are in one place at the same time, to be picked off? How shit a guerilla army are they? Or alternatively, how is the First Order this effective at wiping them all out at the same time and how was that not plan A if they were? But please just look at the cool effects we made and don't think about it.
The emperor basically cast a 9th level summon to get a new fleet. Okay. Who is crewing those ships? Did they get paid overtime for hanging out for a few years? Did he clone them all? Make them with his force powers? If it's not literally magic, how does he keep any of this shit hidden?
And so on and so on. It's not that the story they wrote couldn't make sense, but they took so little time to think about the implications of what they wrote that they didn't bother to try to explain anything.
The bombs "falling down' in space actually makes perfect sense. It's an airlock pointed at the Star destroyer. Explosive decompression would blow it out in whatever direction it's facing. There is no down in space, it just looks like it's falling cause of the camera angle.
That makes sense in that it is a plausible explanation for how it could be physically possible. But no explanation at all as to why you want to design a bomber to work like that, instead of like, shooting your explosive out like rockets or bullets or something. Surely they must have better ways of sending out bombs, right?
The "real" explanation is that all of the space flight in Star Wars is so heavily based on atmosphere dogfighting that it's effectively canon for SW that spaceships work like airplanes.
Yea see that's still hella stupid and I shouldn't need to explain why. I hope this is sarcasm, but since I have seen stuff like this defended before, I will explain why it#s stupid:
They clearly have ways to directly propel things in space. I mean duh, obviously. Instead of using explosive decompression, which would create a slow as fuck and also super inaccurate vector, just put an engine on the bombs and make them missiles.
If you are concerned with it being intercepted by heat seeking countermeasures, put the air you currently have in the launch bay into canisters on the bombs and let the canisters shoot the air out the back gradually, allowing for a more accurate delivery.
Next up, if these bombs have appreciable destructive power, which we see they do, they would weigh a lot. Explosive decompression would not impart that much force into them at all. Sure it would suck out a person in the bay, but the bombs would just lazily float out the hole eventually. Completely ineffective as a weapon.
Okay. Say that they did build it like that. How dumb are the rebels to toss their Y and B wings, established technology for decades at the very least, in favor of those shit-ass bombers that use a clearly inferior delivery system for their main weapon? Does that make any more sense?
It's fucking Star Wars. None of it makes sense. They thought it would look cool. Star Wars isn't smart.
The point is that if you don't care about the basic internal consistency of your setting, it makes the setting worse.
For example, I don't begrudge the Fast and Furious series doing completely dumb, physics-defying shit with cars, like jumping them between skyscrapers. That's fine, because they never tried to be realistic in the first place. But you will notice that their cars don't suddenly transform into planes and fly (they may now, I haven't seen all of these movies, but the first few I was forced to sit through did not have that at least), because the movies are about car stunts and not planes. You don't see cars just do these jumps while not going fast. Because that's how car stunts work, you go fast and jump a thing.
In the same vein, Star Wars doesn't need to be overly realistic. And it absolutely isn't. I could complain about the prequels and how their depictions of shields are entirely inconsistent and and how it's dumb that Bobba Fetts ship has blasters that explode around the ship of Obi Wan a million times and never hit anything, but I wouldn't do that because I realize those are just meant to be cool visuals in a movie. The difference between these cool visuals and planes in space is that planes in space violates the basic rules they established for their setting. You are right that Star Wars doesn't have to be smart, but they should try to adhere to their own internal consistency as it has been established over all of the previous movies, games etc. It's not like it's hard to do either. Just make them look like torpedo bombers instead, or whatever.
It's consistent in that it's stolen from WW2 movies like any space battle stuff from the OT. I think that's what they were going for. It did seem a bit off but it didn't really big me much.
Yea, I know that's where the visuals are from. They just used to care that little tiny bit to adapt it for their setting.
I don't expect a 2001 space walk scene from them, but I do need that 10% base realism.
but yea, different things bug people to different degrees. I know a lot of people are bothered about the force making no sense. Which yea, it totally doesn't, but I personally don't care there because it's their magic and magic never had to make sense anywhere.
It being a 2nd death star is actually genius and realistic if you ask me. They still have the plans. Just make a few adjustments to get rid of the now obvious vulnerabilities and you got a winner on your hands! The thing blew up a whole-ass plane,t probably more then one, it's a proven concept and there is no need to iterate on it beyond making improvements here or there.
That the emperor uses it as a trap for the rebellion and risks it all is overconfident, sure, but since it does have a shield and functioning weapon, it's not that overconfident. Even that he's there is explained because it's all a trap for Luke.
Meanwhile the EP7 weapon just works on completely different principles that seem to work differently then the rest of the setting. Like, imagine a fully powered original trilogy empire having that weapon, it would just be over.
So basically the sequel trilogy took the bad parts of the eu and made them into movies, the first order is basically the pennestar alignment and palpatine controls the dark empire mixed eith the darkspawn shit
They should just have used Thrawn, or made mention of him as the guy who rebuilt the Empire as a threat. But we can't have bad guy aliens I guess.
Hyperdrive has never worked like EP8 depicts it and everything about the slow chase is stupid as fuck. If this outcome is possible at all, someone would find out how to do it and weaponize it in a heartbeat.
This is the biggest one. This little tidbit completely invalidates ALL the technology we see in Star Wars. Why have Star Destroyers? Strap a hyperdrive to a rock. Why build a Death Star? Strap a hyperdrive to a rock. The world simply would not look like it does if that technology worked the way they showed. There would be no Navies, there would be no space fights at all, it would be stealth tech and first-strike capability, with nation states lobbing rocks at each other from light-years away. They literally broke the star wars in Star Wars. FFS why would there have been a trench run in the first movie? STRAP A FUCKING HYPERDRIVE TO A ROCK AND 9/11 THAT SHIT.
It was so bizarre that they didn't make him the main protagonist, like oh a reformed stormtrooper would be neat but nah sidelined
Rey having a pedigree was the thing that disappointed me the most out of the sequel trilogy. She was a better character when she was a nobody/anybody.
The reason that the "traitor!" guy was such a meme after the first movie was because it was one of the only parts that felt like something new was happening in Star Wars. Exploring Finn's conflict, ending with a heartfelt fight against one of his own brothers (who feels it's far too personal to end with a blaster) would have been a god-tier character arc, but Disney writes by committee and the results speak for themselves.
I think the last jedi had a scene where finn tries to get stormtroopers on his side but it got removed in the theatrical release.
After hearing about who Finn was before watching the movie, I was pumping myself up for Stormtrooper Spartacus starting a mutiny on top of a Super Star Destroyer. So yeah, I was pretty disappointed when I actually saw the film.
I thought it was kind of twisting the knife how, in the third movie, they actually gave Stormtroopers a moderate range of male and female voices as if to humanize them (as opposed to the "Generic North American White Guy" voice in the OT), but didn't do much with them aside from showing them getting blasted and stabbed. The whole half-baked introduction of other renegade stormtroopers was just adding insult to injury on "what could have been".
The whole idea of the clone wars being literal clones is so fucking stupid to begin with. It was a throw away line in ANH to do a little bit of world building and flesh out Obi Wan's character. This expanded universe bullshit where everything must be explained away and have a huge wookieepedia page pisses me off to no end.
It's never good fleshing out either.
The line "many Bothans died to get us this information" is suddenly extrapolated to mean that Bothans are actually an entire race dedicated to spying and subterfuge. It can't just be that a Bothan rebel cell discovered where the plans were and got them. Nope. The whole race are now super spies because of this one throwaway line.
It's like the Kessel Run. Probably a bullshit story made to hype up the Falcon, same as when he calls it the fastest ship in the Galaxy and stuff. Obi-Wan even rolls his eyes when Han Solo boasts about the ship. But nope. It actually is the fastest ship in the Galaxy and the Kessel Run is a super-duper dangerous space anomaly that's hard to navigate and Han Solo still managed to get through it in under 12 parsecs.
All details and fun backstory will be overexplained until they completely lost any intrigue or mysticism about them whatsoever. Nothing can be left unexplained because that would require the audience to maybe think about it.
Was anyone truly satisfied to learn that the Clone Wars were just a war where one side used clones? And the clones are just people?
Was Carbonite freezing Han and the attempt with Luke just because the facility (that the characters just happened to go to, because Han just happened to know someone, who just happened to be in charge of the place nearest to where they already were when they were looking to hide and repair) just happened to have a piece of machinery that was theoretically capable of freezing a person for transportation but even then the bad guys seemed unsure of its safety? No actually. Everyone's carbon freezing everyone. Every bounty hunter just carbon freezes people. It's basically part of the job. Fucking stupid.
Probably a bullshit story made to hype up the Falcon
I remember reading that George Lucas actually just straight up said that it's complete nonsense and Han's just trying to pull one over on them because a sleezy dirtbag who just lies and makes up bullshit for profit.
Was anyone truly satisfied to learn that the Clone Wars were just a war where one side used clones? And the clones are just people?
I remember the old EU explanation (before the prequels were released) was that the Clone Wars were a jedi civil war between the actual jedi, and literally just clones of themselves who were made to be evil or some shit. I think there was even a book with the plot "oh look there's another jedi that survived the Clone Wars, oh no plot twist they're actually the clone of that jedi and they're just evil because it's literally in their blood to be evil."
All details and fun backstory will be overexplained until they completely lost any intrigue or mysticism about them whatsoever. Nothing can be left unexplained because that would require the audience to maybe think about it.
That, and the mediocre EU writers scrabbling for inspiration or connections to the canon stories, so they can just make up whatever bullshit story they want and be like "oh hey guys look, it's like the thing they said in the movie! Remember that? Please associate me with your enjoyment of the movie!"
I liked that one as a kid. Couldn't really get into any of the others
Have you heard of Zizek Splat? He's a Jontoo freeborn from Mazdacar 346 and his job is to wipe the memories of the droids owned by Kawangus Kurtzman Jantz the bounty hunter which were used to polish, with Woodoo Hide, the Carbonite frozen body of Las"s Anya, the ancient turquoise force user from Baalton'guer who fought in the War of Anger from ABV 15% to BBC 10".
That said, if I run another star wars rpg, it's going to be about a communist droid revolution.
My favorite one is the Rodians. We have here a race with one on screen character, who happens to be trying to cash in on Han's bounty, but who sucks at it and gets fried for his trouble. This is somehow extrapolated to mean that the Rodians are a legendary species of bounty hunters and their whole society revolves around the profession, somehow.
But Star Wars being Star Wars, naturally they're not the only Legendary Bounty Hunter Aliens. There are like three races vying for the title.
Brilliantly written. This is one of the biggest problems with the Star Wars EU, and it explains why the movie "Solo" was such forgettable trash.
There's plenty of chances to tell a good story in that setting (KOTOR) but they just make such boring garbage instead.
it makes me as angry as when somebody puts vegetables on my pizza! gak! keep those fucking vegetables away from me!
why is a childrens ministry dedicating the effort to justify the enslavement of artifical beings?
they're equating sapient life with pizza and mindless machines simply cause they're "created"
i think the corollary is that it wasn't wrong for the clones to be the jedi's playthings
This sounds like it's trying to be educational but then it starts talking about souls and pizza with veggies and I'm like whaaaaat?
This doesn't seem like the healthy kind of salad tho :visible-disgust:
Anyone who thinks a cloned human is any different from a normal person is just irredeemably stupid. What causes a person to be that stupid? It's such a common belief.
Even that doesn't make any goddamn sense. There's absolutely no theology in any religion ever, that says if you don't bust a nut, the kid is fake.
I once heard someone say clones would "have no souls" across the table from two twins. Literally clones of each other.
There’s absolutely no theology in any religion ever, that says if you don’t bust a nut, the kid is fake.
Maybe not that specifically, but it would certainly be a logical extrapolation of the centuries of absurd anatomy speculation that's historically tied to theological institutions. Like the prevailing European "theories" about how reproduction biologically worked have for most of recorded history effectively boiled down to "it's a magical exchange of life essence that gives the child shape and spirit," (and for the sake of clarity these sorts of ideas pre-dated Christianity too, as well as persisting through it until more modern biology provided an actual understanding of what was happening) and that's left a lot of cultural baggage with how religious institutions view sexuality, reproduction, and reproductive rights even if it's not literally believed anymore.
Like I'm sure there's no scriptural statement that's literally "oh and, uh, if you somehow were to create a child without fucking first, it wouldn't have a soul or something, idk" but I would be willing to bet that some modern evangelical or catholic theologians have made that exact argument once the topic of cloning entered the public conscience. They may be complete cranks like young earth creationists are, but I'm sure that argument's been made, probably even made it into lectures at a conference and filtered down into sermons made by preachers, entering into the sort of informal canon that's responsible for all sorts of galaxy-brain takes that their institutions and officials accept as gospel truth despite having literally no scriptural evidence for it.
honestly i am a machine with flesh. I was just thinking about the phrase "flesh puppet" earlier when I was kinda in a bad/sad mood thinking about how ridiculous humans are and how much work we do in our lives from scraps. kinda silly to admit but sometimes I just see so much really lame shit and it makes me mad at humanity. idk why im serious responding to this post lol sorry
recalling the good old days of a sunday school crank yelling at us about clones not having souls. this was definitely a major hang up with religious conservatives around the time these movies came out, probably still today
