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Y'all need to be burned in a tire fire. Just sayin'.
 
Troops is canon. How does this make the world anything but a better place?
Fair, Troops is the shit. Other than that we can make with the auto de fey. BURN CIBOLA!
 
The whole Star Wars “stormtroopers can’t hit anything lol” is as tiresome as “Star Trek red shirts, amirite?” and “why didn’t they just fly into Mordor with the giant eagles?”.

Basically Simpsons, Robot Chicken and Family Guy created viral memes that have permeated pop culture like myths that even non geeks enjoy. Like the dude that we all know who’s never watched an episode of Star Trek in his life making smarmy Kirk jokes.

I just tune it out because if you react, even calmly with an “well, actually...” you look like a pedantic wet towel.

Whatever, let people have their fun, I guess.
 

Similarily, if people actually watch the original Star Trek series, they'll be confronted with a Captain Kirk who isn't at all like Futurama's Kirk-caricature Zapp Brannigan.

Anyway, back to Star Wars, people often forget how effective bad guy mooks are against normal lvl 0 NPCs. Jedi and veteran mercenaries (or, really, named protagonists in any form of action media) will cut through them like butter.
 
“why didn’t they just fly into Mordor with the giant eagles?”.
....
I just tune it out because if you react, even calmly with an “well, actually...” you look like a pedantic wet towel.
No! If somebody says "why not use the eagles" you must respond with an extended unbroken aggressive monologue about the restrictions of the Valar under Illuvatar. Begin with "And so it was in the days before ...."
 
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No! If somebody says "why not use the eagles" you must respond with an extended unbroken aggressive monologue about the restrictions of the Valar under Illuvatar. Begin with "And so it was in the days before ...."

Sauron can control the weather - It was actually in the books.
 
Sauron can control the weather - It was actually in the books.
Ah like joking aside there's several reasons they wouldn't do it. Sauron would have seen them and struck at them magically, the Eagles are near Maia in majesty (so like Galadriel) and there would have been the same danger of being tempted by the ring. Also they are directly agents of Manwë and the Valar taking action in the mortal realm was becoming forbidden at this point, which is the whole reason the Istari were sent instead of the Valar just crushing Sauron.
 
This Middle Earth tangent was my fault. I’m just worried that this new type of borderline 4th wall breaking thing that we’re seeing in some media will become the norm. Like I’m worried that in the new Aragorn series we’ll get a character outright ask “why don’t we just ask the Eagles to fly us there?” before turning and winking at the camera and some elf lady says “lol” before doing the latest stupid meme dance move like dabbing or whatever and we get legions of ironic YouTubers going “best. Show. Evar, (I know right?)” and then we cue a video of cosplay ringwraiths dancing to Ariane Grande and Justin Trudeau retweets it and some Late Night talk show personality finds a way to use that clip to make some kind of political joke that every Instagram babe buys and shows off their overpriced tshirt of it along with Baby Yoda cartoons and... and...

fuck
 
The great James Earl Jones turned 90 today. A moment to reflect on his fantastic career. Besides his work as Darth Vader, one of my favorite roles of his was playing author Terence Mann in Field of Dreams.

“They will come, Ray. They will most definitely come.”6E55F662-751D-4F90-8675-80EF1E1F9EB5.png
 
Not sure who the artist is but i like it. There’s no Waldo but you can see Lando in the background.View attachment 25729


Ricean Vlad is the name of the artist. A fellow from Romania whose done quite a few Star Wars paintings:

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His style reminds me a bit of David Doorman, but more naturalistic
 
I don’t have a problem with midichlorians like some people do. The Force itself is still mysterious. The midichlorians are just how the body connects to the Force. I view it the same way as I view how people try and explain the supernatural like ghosts. It can be totally rationally explained and even based in science and still be Ooooooooooh.
 
I don’t have a problem with midichlorians like some people do. The Force itself is still mysterious. The midichlorians are just how the body connects to the Force. I view it the same way as I view how people try and explain the supernatural like ghosts. It can be totally rationally explained and even based in science and still be Ooooooooooh.
I've kind of gone full circle there. At first, I was one of the ones railing against the very concept of the Force as an STD. As they said at the time. Now, I kind of like it. It's a symbiote. And they seem to be addressing the idea in The Mandalorian, with clones and blood from Baby Yoda. Even if it doesn't go there, it seems to be pointing towards Snoke. And that's good enough for me.

The whole imply a world without explaining it thing is, to me, a big part of what made Star Wars so important back in the day. Now, it's all laid out and spoon fed to people who want that sort of thing. Me, I'm not too worried about it. Enjoy the good bits. Don't sweat the bad stuff. A lifetime as a Doctor Who fan has it's advantages.
 
I don’t have a problem with midichlorians like some people do. The Force itself is still mysterious. The midichlorians are just how the body connects to the Force. I view it the same way as I view how people try and explain the supernatural like ghosts. It can be totally rationally explained and even based in science and still be Ooooooooooh.

Yeah, I was never able to come to terms with midichlorians. It just clashes far too much with how I grew up thinking about The Force. I even visibly cringed when watching The Mandalorian and they mentioned "M-count".

I think the best way I can describe the mental block for me is referencing a quote by Neal Stephenson from the cyberpunk novel Snowcrash:

"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Columbian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime."

I think this is one of the most generally True statements ever put pen to paper in the twentieth century.

Now replace "Batman" with Jedi. This is how I felt about Jedi growing up. The Force was an energy that permeated the universe, and flowed through all living things - it's not a concpt isolated to Star Wars. Call it Chi, Orgone, Karma, Willpower, Faith, Xiigong, Arete, Mana, Dynamis, etc. It is the Universe Soul, that all of us and everything are a part of, and connects everyone and everything...

6 year old me to that 300 year old tree in the woods behind my childhood home to that raven that would eat from our birdfeeder during the winter to the moon to the sun to great heroes in the past to people in a galaxy far, far away...

Yeah, it's new-agey, and fanciful, and childish and naive and any other curmudgeonly "mature" and cynical dismissal, but it's also soothing, elating, and about as close to any sort of religious feeling I've ever indulged.

I guess what I'm saying, in my usual incredibly long-winded and tangential way is that once upon a time, anyone could be a Jedi. Just like anyone could travel into the mountains of Tibet and find a long lost Shaolin temple and learn secrets from martial arts masters.

Then....midichlorians.

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Being a Jedi was suddenly quantified. It was restricted, and it was exclusive.

Instead of a Batman story, suddenly it was a Superman story.

(and holy crap am I tempted now to go on another tangent about Superman as a Jesus metaphor and Anakin getting saddled with a "virgin birth" narrative that essentially makes his story that of the Antichrist....)

Anyways, this all probably comes off as kinda dramatic, like I have, deep, strong feelings on this issue. And...I do and I don't. As I've mentioned many times before, by the time the prequels came out I'd already distanced myself emotionally from Star Wars. But that part of me, that younger me that grew up a Star Wars fan, the one who had those trading cards from Burger King, and those toys, and the first movie he ever saw was Star Wars, who played that 1st edition Star Wars RPG, who would tuck his pajama bttoms into his socks and swing around cardboard tubes imagining himself as Skywalker...that person still exists somewhere deep in my DNA. And I can, from time to time, feel his heart breaking. And I can brush that off as a cuynical, sarcastic adult whose heart was years ago swallowed by the black cancer of growing up, and I can make my peace with Star Wars being ultimately nothing but the product of other people, other storytellers. But I don't have to like it.
 
I understand those feelings. I think midichorians is just quantifying the term “Force sensitive” that appeared in things like those WEG books. Now you could say that anyone could be Force sensitive, similar to Neo seeing behind the veil of the Matrix but I think even A New Hope shows that certain people like Han Solo just wouldn’t be able to harness that kind of power. Even somebody like Luke Skywalker isn’t really a good example of somebody plucked from obscurity to be a Force user. He was a special kid to the point that his Aunt Beru told Uncle Owen that he’s too much like his father.

I think it’s better to think that the Force can work through anyone, although not everyone can control it. If the Force wills for somebody to do a task they will finish that task and nothing will stop them. I use Chirrut from Rogue One as an example. That scene near the climax where he walks out in front of all those death troopers and they cannot shoot him, even though he’s an easy target. He flips the switch on the panel and as soon as that happens, he’s dead a few seconds later.

I’m rambling a bit but that’s what I think of the Force and how it’s applied.
 
Well, in ESB, it was decided Luke would be Vader's son, and if he couldn't do it there was another one; that could mean one of at least two things. The first is only someone of that heritage can become strong enough to beat Vader.

However, the second one could be that the affinity with the force is irrelevant, but Anakin's driving force was family. That only a child of Anakin would be able to put a wedge between Vader and the Emperor, but that child would have to be trained enough to withstand the lure of the dark side long enough.

But then, I've also been looking at ep. 4-6 as "what happened", while ep. 1-3 is "Obi-Wan's version of what happened, and it's true from a certain point of view." :tongue:
 
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