A/V STAR WARS REBELS (show's over, spoilers allowed)

Fair enough. I was born in 1983, and when I started getting into Star Wars as a kid in 1991 with Heir to the Empire, there was already a set of rules in place from West End Games. (Zahn was even asked to incorporate the West End RPG into his books). These rules more or less carried on throughout the EU's heyday, and the prequels adhered to them even (Kenobi used Force speed in TPM, Force push which came from the Jedi Knight games, whose Force powers took inspiration from the RPG etc.)

With the reboot, this is the first time I'm heading to a Star Wars without any rules. Force projection is suddenly lethal now, without explanation why. So perhaps I'm having trouble with the transition, but I'd sort of like to see that they are building a new framework of rules, and that's just not clear to me right now. Maybe someone will build a framework in the future.

 

I have no doubt someone will. The West End RPG is one of the biggest influences for the new canon. They probably don't want to hammer down a bunch of universal laws right now because they're still in the first few years of creating this new canon. It would limit the creativity of directors and authors as much as it would ground the GFFA to a more logical state of affairs.

 

Right, so neither those series nor Rebels have full time travel to the past, considering the "justifications don't matter" about what type of time travel it is.

 

You guys are so bent out of shape over the time travel and the purgills that you completely forgot about the teleportation!! That also happened in the last set of Rebels episodes, a couple times in fact. How many non-existent laws of Star Wars physics does that break? Please add to your list of outrages asap.

 

I actually forgot about that. Wolf teleportation through the sheer power of the Force.

The Keeper's World in the old EU at least put together a Star Trek transporter for their teleportation.

 

Yeah, I don't know where Filoni gets off thinking those things have any basis in the franchise. Not unless you can alter time to speed up the harvest or teleport me off this rock.

 

But the rules in West End Games were retroactive. The films were not written to the rules, the rules were written to the movies. And the prequels broke those rules all the time, from hyperspeed times to the history of the Sith to the mechanics of cloning and the nature of the Clone Wars. Because the "rules" were never rules, they were retcons, they were an erroneous attempt to lay science fiction onto what was always a fantasy setting.

And Brandon Sanderson can say whatever he wants about magic, he is one writer deciding the rules for his writing. A brief foray into the most successful fantasy books and movies shows he might be the minority in his assertion; surely if there are rules to the magic of Harry Potter, as one example, they aren't self-evident.

 

This Thrawn business is leading up to only one thing...

Kylo: Now that I have access to the World Between Worlds, I will rule everything, all universes, and all timelines!

Rey (using a containment suit) steps in with a yellow lizard.

Kylo: Ysalamiri???

Because the World Between Worlds was not designed to sustain human life pressure wise, temperature wise, or even oxygen wise, Kylo loses his Force power ensuring his survival in WBW and decompresses in a violent scene.

You might be right that Sanderson is in the minority. I was thinking of Lord of the Rings, and the rules for the Ring are not even very clearly defined. For instance, the Ring supposedly amplifies the power of a very powerful person (that's why Frodo can't really use its full power, he's just a weak hobbit, while Gandalf fears to take it because he's afraid of the corruption and what his amplified powers will do).

But Isildur, a very powerful King of Numenorean blood, cannot even use the Ring to command the Orcs to stop attacking him at the Gladden fields. And no one ever asks Boromir, in his claims that he can use the Ring to stop Mordor, how he expects to do this when Isildur, one of the most powerful Numenorean men who ever lived, couldn't even use the Ring to tell a bunch of Orcs to stop shooting him with arrows.

Somehow LOTR is the most successful fantasy franchise even though there are actually surprisingly few rules how the Ring works. Sam uses it in Mordor for instance...

 

That would be because in the final equation the "rules" aren't nearly as important as the story.

 

Actually, I feel Lord of the Rings was groundbreaking because no one had ever seen this kind of fantasy before. It was a hit because of its time. The work, based heavily on Tolkien's beliefs, has divine intervention save the day (Gollum conveniently falling into lava) because Frodo did the right thing by not killing him when he had the chance. A nice concept, but nothing that is relatable to reality.

If it came out today after other fantasy works had been around, I'm not sure it would have been the same.

There is also a convenient ship to take Frodo to heal, when in reality he would have been a broken, mentally unstable, ill wreck after his journey (and that's why had to take the ship to Valinor). We don't have any Valinor to help people who do the right thing and suffer for it here in the real world, alas.

The Silmarillion and particularly Children of Hurin is probably closer to a more realistic work. Hurin at the end is closer to what happens to heroes. But publishers wanted more hobbits and a sequel to the Hobbit, so we got Lord of the Rings which was more marketable.

 

Showing mercy and compassion? Star Wars kinda trades in that too, y'know.

And Star Wars was also something audiences hadn't seen before, and was a hit because of its time. But both were also hits for plenty of other reasons, including the quality of their storytelling.

Besides all that, I'm not sure why you're trying to wedge the square peg of "realism" into the round hole of "fantasy" in both cases.

 

I'm not against mercy, compassion and doing the right thing. That's what we all strive for! But we have to be realistic about what happens, that's all. There's no ship to Valinor at the end of the journey, is all I'm saying.

People do the right thing because it's the right thing. You're not going to get a reward at the end. If you are willing to defy the bad guys and do the right thing, and suffer all that Hurin suffered in Children of Hurin, that's a true hero. That's closer to the fantasy that shows what life is all about. That's how fantasy gets its message across without some "ship to Valinor" thing at the end.

 

If the ship is a metaphor for dying and venturing to heaven, and heaven itself is a metaphor for ending your life with fulfilment at having lived as a good person (with peace and purpose, if you will), then there is a reward at the end. It's just typical for stories to present that sense of fulfilment as a literal reward -- a ship to the Undying Lands, a shiny medal, the freedom to live, what-have-you. Stories are metaphors, so you have to expect metaphorical elements to supersede realism.

 

Again, that's how one kind of fantasy gets its message across, and a very recent version of the genre as well. The fact that modern fantasy writers think they all need to be A Song of Ice and Fire doesn't undo the fact that fantasy has its roots in thousands of years of faerie tales using "the ship to Valinor" to literalize the morality they are trying to teach.

If Star Wars were written to your rules, Luke would die after throwing away his weapon and declaring himself a Jedi. Sorry kid, we know you did the right thing, but you're dead anyway, say hi to Ned Stark for us. And then the children watching the story will learn "Do the right thing and you will just die, stay home and be a moisture farmer, it's safer that way."

 

Hold on, let me take off my Star Wars hat and put on my LoTR Hat.

Okay, here we go.

When Isildur held the One Ring in TA 2, it was still laden with Sauron's malice and evil will, from being in his possession for the better part of two millennia. Isildur couldn't even touch it without feeling pain. But by the time of TA 3019 and the War of the Ring, the One had been immersed in water for 2 and a half thousand years and then in the possession of Gollum and later Bilbo and Frodo. By then, any influence of Sauron's was gone. The Ring still retained it's own power but could be more easily bent to the will of it's owner. As we saw Sam do in Cirith Ungol.

 

I think by my rules, dying would probably be too easy for Luke in this scenario. As the Grand Inquisitor in Rebels said, “There are some things far more frightening than death.” And Palpatine would haul Luke off to permanently endure those "frightening things" for the rest of his life.

The Children of Hurin was actually written before the Lord of the Rings. So its tone is not part of the "modern" trend inspired by Game of Thrones, but predates it by decades.

"Do the right thing and you will just die, stay home and be a moisture farmer, it's safer that way."--Unfortunately we all know this might actually be sound advice, particularly in certain parts of the world. It's hard to make that judgment call on when to play it safe and when to take risks--that's why they're called risks, and even then when we applaud risktakers as a society it's those who succeed, not so much those who fail (and they are also risktakers with courage).

 

That's quite a neat summary of Poe and Leia's story in TLJ.

 

It's interesting because I was watching Star Trek Discovery at the same time around TLJ! Michael Burnham got court martialed with a life sentence for her mutiny. And I'm watching TLJ and thinking, wow, Poe is getting off way too easy...

 

Given your reaction to this one possible instance of time travel in Star Wars, frankly I can't imagine how you're even able to watch Trek.

 

Picard: This Finalizer and its captain, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, along with their First Order organization threaten the entire Federation. Data, we need a plan on how to stop them.

Data: Intriguing. My observations of the Finalizer and its captain note remarkable similarities to the series of Earth movies known as 'Star Wars' that featured prominently in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.

Picard: Yes, I noted that as well. How odd... I loved those old movies as a kid in France.

Data: If we make the assumption that these movies do indeed parallel our opponent in all respects, I will now run a quick analysis of all references to the Star Wars franchise on the Enterprise entertainment computer. Sir, I found something that may be of note. A First Order ship known as the Supremacy was destroyed by another ship jumping into hyperspace, a fictional form of subspace, directly into the Supremacy in the movie Star Wars: The Last Jedi. This form of attack may prove useful against the Finalizer, provided we use an unmanned shuttlecraft and jump into warp against it.

Picard: Make it so.

Kylo (sees Enterprise shuttlecraft approaching the Finalizer): Fire every weapon you have on that ship.

Hux: Too late!

(Enterprise shuttle warps into Finalizer and Kylo, Hux and the crew are killed).

 

I am not sidv88 of course but I share similar misgivings. And I happen to also like Star Trek (yes, I am a fan of both franchises). The difference to me is that in Star Trek time travel, mirror universes etc. have been used many times with a veneer of explanations. So if they go on another "let's visit London in 1900" trip I don't bat an eyelid - it is familiar and fits.

This is not the case for me in Star Wars. That is not to say that it is wrong, just that I personally do not like it as it does not fit into my personal reference frame for the saga. And I had a similar thought about the wolves and the Purgill extraction in the series finale. But each their own.

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(edited for spelling)

 

I never had any issue with the Wolves or Purgill....and weirdly enough it's because of something that Filoni said doesn't fit his and Lucas particular view of Star Wars, that being of course, the Ysalamiri. Between them and the Vornskrs I've had a long time to be accustomed to the notion of Force-sensitive or otherwise "mystical" creatures being a thing in this franchise.

 

Once again, I'd like to point out that, IRL (for those who believe in it), magic has rules. It is internally coherent. Just using "that's magic" as a standard handwaving technique is lazy.

 

That’s the problem, there is no coherent logic to Dave’s stuff, we are just expected to except it and move on, no matter how ridiculous it is

 

Chaos magic would like a word with you.