site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   4050 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I wonder if there is anything particular and common in the Star Wars and Marvel cinematic universes that made them such an easy prey of the woke vanguard. It's sort of fascinating in a bizarre way how easily both were captured.

Ownership by Disney? Lucasfilm was acquired in 2012. Marvel was acquired in 2009. I tend to like the theory that Iger then tried to use Disney to springboard into a political career by hiring politically active people. If the sole owner wants to do something with a property it's pretty hard for outside pressure to resist it.

When Lucas sold off SW to Disney, he famously compared it to selling off a daughter to white slavers. He obviously had to walk back that comment publicly but I expect he was simply speaking his honest view at the time. On the other hand he has voiced considerable support for Bob Iger.

If your point here is that Iger is looking for political clout points I am not sure I agree, but then I also don't see this kind of businessman as an ideologue. Lucas says "no one knows Disney better" than Iger, whatever that is supposed to mean (I bet I know at least three Japanese young women who know Disney better than Lucas or Iger, but probably not in the way Lucas meant).

I can't speak to @Botond173 's query on the wokeification of Marvel properties but I think one of the tides that has risen all media boats has been the regulatory decision to promote DEI in filmmaking. Disney was recently outed by Musk but Warner, Paramount, Netflix, Sony Universal, etc. have all to the best of my knowledge (which is admittedly far from firsthand) implemented similar policies. I am surprised to discover it was only five years ago that the actress Frances McDormand chastened Hollywood with the cryptic term inclusion rider.

What happens then is what I'll call a Procrustean approach to storytelling, where whatever one starts with has to be hacked up to fit a particular standard. This is not always bad, mind you, and talented artists can often do their best work under restrictions. Robert Frost, according to my poetry teacher long ago, likened free verse to playing tennis without a net. Unfortunately when no one has any historical perspective nor gives a rat's ass about anything but current progressive epiphanies, bizarrely tone deaf films like The Eternals get made. If there is any test of Time I don't expect that film to pass it. Of course I've been wrong before.

On a side note, the cancellation of The Acolyte SE2 and the licking of collective chops at this kind of ironically makes me want to go back and watch it now. My very red tribe buddy back home, who watched it and found it benignly viewable, asked me to watch it and explain what the anger is all about.

edit typos

My very red tribe buddy back home, who watched it and found it benignly viewable, asked me to watch it and explain what the anger is all about.

If you just watch it, absent any knowledge of the context or milieu it's bad - just mostly bad in the way that most popular entertainment is bad. Inoffensively and boringly so.

Someone who is truly red tribe is unlikely to hit the common fail states. Someone from that background is probably used to just passively consuming TV (and is therefore unlikely to not notice or care about bad/inconsistent writing, poor cinematography and so on*). They also probably don't know that Star Wars has a rule about having no white male primary protagonists. They don't know about the interviews ranting about Star Wars fans, men, red tribers, etc.

It's entirely possible to watch a season of Star Trek Discovery and not notice that their were no straight white men with a speaking role who weren't fascists but once you start noticing its hard to go back.

Your friend probably hasn't gone through that process, and if he's a real red triber he's probably in a supportive environment. Grey tribe and questioning blue tribe people feel like they are in a hostile environment and are far more likely to notice and get upset about these kinds of things.

Lastly: given the way that Disney cancels projects, especially ones with political correlates like this one (typically they just.....keep saying they are working on it until everyone forgets) the fact that they actually cancelled it tells you how bad it must have been in a watch-metrics sense.

*Compare: some people watched The Last Jedi and walked out of the theater when Admiral Purple Hair turned her ship into a KKV because it fundamentally invalidates decades of writing and world building. Lots of people went "oooooh pretty." The latter isn't invalid but a lot of Star Wars fans were the former type of person.

Edit: let me give a plot example. Here's the season summary: the Jedi were evil AND incompetent, and lesbian space witches were the true power of the force. You can see why this may upset someone with investment in the rest of Star Wars.

Have you actually seen it? Your post here offers a compelling view but I have read similar though probably intentionally vague critiques online, particularly the scathing Forbes reviews. I passed on reading all of them because it's too easy to let reviewers chisel pre-formed opinions before one watches.

You seem to be (though I could me misconstruing) making a lot of assumptions about what I would suggest are considerably varied backgrounds and environments of red tribe folks, but to clarify he's a 56-year-old welder, former cop, who grew up as I did on Star Wars and hasn't really enjoyed any of the shows since ESB, though like me he is a fan of both Rogue One and Andor. White guy. Republican voter. Probably more rightwing than he lets on to me--he would consider me relatively left of himself. No stranger to what you and others have termed "noticing," but, similar to myself, doesn't let himself get sidetracked if the story is good Usually only really annoyed when the plot points veer too far from the understandings we all had of the *lore when coming up. (C3P0 as Anakin's droid for example, does not sit welI.) I once asked him, as an ex-cop, if he got annoyed when women were presented as martially capable, physical badasses. He said it didn't bother him; he knew plenty of good female cops (and has always been a fan of Gina Carano.)

Anyway thanks for the response, throwaway number 5.

*I could discuss at length the Holdo Maneuver, as it was eventually called. I would suggest that that scene didn't undue any previously established canonical point. Many other parts of the sequels did really irk me but that wasn't one of them.

*I could discuss at length the Holdo Maneuver, as it was eventually called. I would suggest that that scene didn't undue any previously established canonical point. Many other parts of the sequels did really irk me but that wasn't one of them.

I'll bite. When I saw that scene in theatres, I grinned like an idiot at the visual for roughly ten seconds, and then immediately thought "this breaks every other Star Wars movie forever," and by the time I walked out of the theatre I'd already decided I was done with Star Wars as a franchise. There were a lot of things I didn't like about the plot and writing of TLJ, but that part in particular really stood head and shoulders above the rest as being completely, egregiously incompatible with the entire setting before and since.

Why didn't they use hyperspace ramming against the Death Star, or against the imperial fleet at Hoth? Why aren't hyperspace-ram missiles the standard anti-ship weapon for every faction in the setting? It can't possibly be a matter of expense or scarcity; hyperdrive-equipped fighters and light transports are ubiquitous throughout the setting. There doesn't appear to be a countermeasure, and she didn't appear to be unusually lucky in her execution. In every subsequent viewing of a space battle, as soon as the situation becomes tense, I'm going to be asking "why aren't they solving this problem with a hyperspace ram missile?" And why shouldn't I?

I'll bite. When I saw that scene in theatres, I grinned like an idiot at the visual for roughly ten seconds, and then immediately thought "this breaks every other Star Wars movie forever," and by the time I walked out of the theatre I'd already decided I was done with Star Wars as a franchise. There were a lot of things I didn't like about the plot and writing of TLJ, but that part in particular really stood head and shoulders above the rest as being completely, egregiously incompatible with the entire setting before and since.

Yeah, me too, and I was genuinely baffled that other SW fans didn't see the problem.

"But... but... the Death Star?"

It was clearly a goshcoolwow moment that looked awesome on screen and gave Admiral Purple Hair an epic swan song and is the reason literary SF > cinematic SF, because an author writing a series would not fuck his own universe over like that (and if he did, his fans would absolutely drag him).

From my view, the annoying part is that a good writer -- and while I don't think you need to be Zahn-level good, coincidentally Zahn did offer his services free of charge -- could have pretty easily pulled it off in a way that made it much more impactful. Even if you don't care about the broader universe or milSF concepts, we never get an idea of why this was heroic and the other suicidal efforts weren't, why it happened now and not earlier or later, and some hints that it was even possible beforehand so people could want it.

Those breadcrumbs don't have to be as explicit in film contexts as in written works, but they still matter there. Instead :

  • With the opening bombing run, have it seem more like an unabashed victory at first. You can still have Rose's sister do her heroic charge, here, but most of the non-bombers survive. Instead, after all they've taken out the dreadnaught, Hux warps in with his megaship right on top of them, just as they're about to leave. They give a panicked order to retreat through hyperspace, but the ship is too close; most of the fighters either ping off Imperial shields like bugs against a windshield, or slap against the hull, and barely mar the paint in the process. The only survivors are those that 'miss' the Imperial ship that was right on top of them, because hyperspace is so twisted, and even that was as much luck as anything else -- really rub in the survivor's guilt. Establish, early, that hyperspace impacts can happen, but that it isn't a useful trick in most cases. ((This also more clearly separate the failure bit here; it makes Holdo's complaints a lot more reasonable if the lives lost weren't necessary to take down that dreadnaught. And if you make it a surprise to the heroes that Hux's megaship can even do that, it explains why the rest of the Rebels can't flee.))
  • If you're going to keep the fuel plot, talk up how small ships can use hyperspace easily, but it takes massively more energy for a bigger ship to enter or exit hyperspace. Establish that the power (and thus energy) for a big ship isn't just a little more, or even 'just' a few orders of magnitude more, but astronomically greater.
  • On the Canto Bight trip, make some point where the heroes are trying to get into a space under a shield generator. Have one of them propose a repeat of the 'warp under the shield' from The Force Awakens, and spell out that it wouldn't work: they don't have a ship fast enough, or the shield's frequency, so they'd just bounce off, they'd have to start the hyperspace jump inside the planet's atmosphere to actually hit the facility, and it wouldn't even damage the facility they're trying to break into. Again, repeat that trying to blast through shields with a hyperdrive is a lost cause.
  • ((Maybe switch the Canto Bight field trip from searching for a slicer to mumble mumble something, instead they're trying to destroy a hyperspace tracker on Canto Bight. The whole DJ arc can have him be a Plan C, where rather than the team blowing up the tracker, he claims to throw a bug into the system that gives random wrong answers and will damage the whole system.))
  • Have a ship (maybe the medical ship during the chase deal?) try to make a hyperspace jump after already being damaged, as a last-ditch attempt to distract some Imperials or to escape, and have it not work. The hyperdrive motivator's down, the hyperspace engine's too damaged, whatever, and instead of getting away or blowing someone else up, it just spreads itself into a sorry streak of interstellar debris, less impressive than just self-destructing or ramming. Establish that hyperdrives, especially big ones, are fragile, so you can't just rely on trying to get close to a target without shielding and armoring yourself, and even that might not be enough.
  • Each time someone goes onto the Imperial megaship, have a scene where their ship or shuttle just rumbles. The first time, have someone (DJ?) explain that it's because they're passing through such incredibly oversized shields, so that even when 'down' to allow something to pass in, they still have tremendous power available. Establish that the Rebels can't hope to break through them from the outside with simple force.

Now, you've established that hyperspace kill vehicles only work when a) targeting someone without shields in the way, b) that you're incredibly close to c) with a big expensive ship with a ton of power, d) targeting a big ship so you can even try to hit it, e) while that big enemy hasn't blown up some vital part of the hyperdrive while disabling the rest of your weapons and engine systems, f) you got really lucky on top of all that to actually hit. What kind of tactical or strategic moron would even risk the slightest possibility of that risk?

Flashfoward to Hux going full 'retreat, at our moment of victory?' He's exactly the sort of moron that would leave a disabled ship in his grasp just to make its commander suffer while he swats down unarmed and unshielded transport vessels. ((That this means DJ's betrayal inadvertently gives Holdo a chance at the cost of countless lives helps.)) Hell, he might try to capture them alive, just to torture them for the fun of it give Snoke a Rebel leader's brain to sift through. Have Holdo spell out, while she's desperately trying to come up with some way to distract the Imperials, to save just one life, that every possible system is down -- weapons, engines, shields, scanners, escape pods, life support -- while the Imperial megaship is taking up more and more of the view from the viewscreens. Have the Imperials give a sensor readout: the Rebel flagship is completely dead in the water, with a scattering of life signs.

Except the hyperdrive system. And then we hear the distinct heavy rumble of Holdo's ship being scooped in through the megaship's shields, and the viewscreens are no longer a sign of dread; they're a target. It's still a hopeless cause: Holdo doesn't have maneuvering thrusters to aim, or time to calculate a good hyperspace solution, no time to even guess that their damaged ship is big enough to damage the Imperial megacruiser, and they're leaking enough fuel that they might not even be able to enter hyperspace once.

Then the scene.

I recently watched so that’s why they cut all her scenes from the movie from CinemaStix about how different the movie Constantine was before being recut, as well as when the editor has to fix it in post about Ferris Buler's Day Off. Amazing how different those movies could have been without big changes by the editing room. As an outsider, all those changes seem like things a competent reader would have been able to tell from the script.

Your post reminds me of the old What if Star Wars Episode I Was Good, and II and III by Belated Media. These sorts of plot fixing recommendations just sound like common sense; what is wrong with the production process that produces this billion-dollar nonsense?

More comments

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats