ST Andy Serkis (Supreme Leader Snoke) in the ST

Rey, Kylo....Some sort of planet sacrifice.

vncredleader This s kind of stuff that leads to big force rituals.

 

so what was calling to the emperor? what was attacking baby ben? snoke or 'the source'?

if 'the source' was attacking baby ben, when did snoke begin his own um psychic interference, or how are the two connected?

i'm just wondering what you think. or really what anyone thinks on this matter.

 

What if...

 

vader's head servant is really freaky to me and just not snoke... he's an obsequious toad... the mystery to me is how vader can tolerate him. apparently he is everything a sith worshipper needs to be. and i guess he'll feel honored if vader kills him one day since he's fully devoted himself to vader?

anyway i saw him as like a butler and the least threatening presence to vader possible.

 

Good questions. I can only speculate. Probably Snoke -- made powerful from his contact with the source, which we might as well call the darkside itself, he's able to begin influencing his future apprentice through psychic manipulation.

But then again, we have to admit that although the Force is often depersonalized, not called a God, there are times where it is personified: the Will of the Force, most notably.

It would follow that the darkside of the Force would also have its own sort of will, and perhaps in the unknown regions, this will is made manifest through a darker version of reality.

Snoke might have his own individual personality and history, but like any darksider, he serves the will of the darkside.

 

Yeah, nah.

 

This obsession with the Mustafar butler is so funny to me. He's not an important character and there's zero chance he becomes Snoke or anyone else of importance either.

 

Outdated speculation.

 

I appreciate this response.

you're right, that actually could work thematically. my only problem is that make things "too big" to the point that everything in the force awakens feels small by comparison. but if integrated well into the existing story something like this could work. I mean, actual fascists believe some weird things.

my vision of snoke might actually be too watered down for many.

 

I've been re-reading Life Debt today and something caught my eye. When Sloane is at the Liberation Day parade she is annoyed by Chancellor Mothma's speech and thought to herself "...never once acknowledging that the greatest threat the galaxy faces is not from Imperial order, but from its absence."

Now this could refer to it being just a political thought, but I started thinking. In the Legends, Palpatine created the Empire and Death Star as a means to prepare for the Vong Invasion force. What if in this new canon that because the Empire is gone the galaxy can be overrun. So what if Snoke is a new telling of the Vong, not as bio-tech savages, but as a group of mystic beings who are destroying the galaxy a different way. Perhaps Snoke is the seed that they planted, he takes the First Order, destroyed the New Republic and now the main force can invade.

 

He does not look like a well grown plant, does he?

 

I'm not personally a fan of trying to justify any of the Imperials or First Order's actions. I'm glad that detail from Legends has been decanonized. Trying to make Palaptine seem like a protector of any kind is wrong and suggests fascism/totalitarianism has a good heart underneath all that genocide.

 

It's narcissistic--it effectively reveals that the author's desire for attention outweighed whatever appreciation he/she had for Star Wars. It's totally incongruous with all that came before it.

Furthermore, it's smoking gun evidence that the writer felt the need to include some contrived revisionist twist due to a lack of confidence in their ability to write a compelling story free of such gimmickry.

With rare exceptions, Lucasfilm CFOs seem to have been so stingy when allocating toward the literature budget over the years that they've only been able to afford dilettantes.

 

My guess now is no source was calling to Palpatine. It was Snoke putting his long range plan into place from the unkown regions.

 

That would seem to retroactively undermine Palpatine's "brilliance," would it not?

 

Most commercial fiction is written by hacks. It's very rare to find a commercial genre writer who writes anything approaching literature. And that's not going to change. Those kinds of writers are in it for the money, not the art.

But the reason Legends used to have glitches like that is because they had no Story Group to rein the hacks in. If the SG were to approve a story that justified Palpatine in any way, then they should all be canned.

 

That makes sense, and taking contract gigs to write throwaway fiction would likely reflect unfavorably on a budding/struggling Eggers-ish artiste.

Still, I'm led to wonder if capable writers with an eye toward meaningful work wouldn't consider writing the occasional Panaka: From Conscript to Captain under a pseudonym just to pay the bills. Perhaps the contracts Wendig and his ilk agree to typically include company-friendly considerations that prohibit this sort of thing.

 

Most literary writers don't cross into the world of commercial genre fiction. There are notable exceptions, like my favorite writer Brian Evenson, who has written Dead Space and Alien novels under the pseudonym B. K. Evenson.

One reason is that literary writers aren't interested in writing the way commercial genre fiction demands they write. Genre novels demand following formulas strictly, and this kind of writing by the numbers is exactly the opposite of what interests artists about writing. In other words, it's boring for them to try to write it, and large publishing companies probably aren't very interested in hiring artists because they know they aren't inspired by formula -- commercial writers are. Genre novels are also anti-subtext and anti-ambiguity because general audiences who buy commercial fiction don't read it for those aspects, which are the domain of real literature.

So while there are writers like Evenson and Stephen Graham Jones who write what I call "literary genre," that stuff still isn't published by the large publishers, and it's not going to be because the audience for commercial fiction doesn't want to read anything too difficult or experimental.

I've been having this same conversation with my freshman writers all semester long. One of the first challenges I have with them is to explain the difference between art and commercial fiction. Suffice to say, most of them respond with denial to the idea that their favorite commercial fiction isn't great literature. But after I fail them for writing a cliche zombie or vampire story, they begin to open their minds.

So criticizing writers like Wendig for their prose style is sort of unfair/too easy: readers buy SW novels for clear writing that doesn't challenge them. That's just an element of the genre those writers write in.

 

Understood. But if you judge him within the genre (and specifically, the SW genre) his prose is still relatively bad. Especially compared to much more competent genre writers like Claudia Gray. Yes, it's all just commercial fiction, and pretty thin stuff. But Wendig, IMO, is uniquely bad.

 

Dra--

you are a top ten user of this site. can i take your classes? or can you critique my work?

surely that's more productive than arguing about star wars.

 

Maybe. I'd have to see some large samples of their writing side by side to judge it properly. From what I've seen of his prose, his syntax seems to be a bit simple and his voice sounds a bit colloquial, almost as if Wendig just writes in his own voice, unlike the typical SW author that tries to sound like a voice from the GFFA. I actually find that difference kind of interesting. But I haven't read enough of him to speak about it with any authority. To criticize a commercial writer for clarity and simplicity seems to assume something that isn't true about commercial fiction.

And Claudia Gray may be competent, but that doesn't mean she's a great writer. There are no great writers in this kind of fiction. To prefer one over another is like preferring Wendy's over Jack in the Box.

carlcockatoo

Once I've finished my PhD, I might start my editing company back up. It depends on whether I find a full-time job teaching. If you want a list of the books/essays I have my students read, just PM me.

A Chorus of Disapproval

Bringing this back to Snoke -- I truly hope that the Story Group refrains from trying to turn Palpatine or Snoke into anti heroes trying their best to save the GFFA from an evil even worse than them. They are villains; that's all.

Anakin and Kylo may be different stories.

 

In a few hours Empires End releases.

Without spoiling anything... yes, you will have more of a firm idea of who or what Snoke is by novels end.

Pa I can't believe the source of the dark side is an actual thing now considering that was a Supershadow plot back in the day

 

Seems like TOTAL BS to me. Why hire the ''Mo-cap God'' Andy Serkis to then use a puppet? No way.

 

I believe it's to be a mix of digital with puppet.