Lit The Alliance

That would be funny if it had happened:

"Did you hear? Hosnian Prime just got creamed."
"Creamed?"
"Yep, the entire planet is free-floating freeze-dried yogurt."
"Made up of people and places?"
"Got it in one."
"Just when I thought I'd seen it all....."

 

You had communists fighting for Britain against Germany during the second world war; if, as was stated, Palpatine's machinations weren't known to them then the old adage about enemies of enemies being friends, politics making for strange bedfellows, etc.

 

I knew watching Ep7 the first time round that it wasn't Coruscant that was destroyed. It didn't look like it because we've never seen oceans on Coruscant and I definitely saw water in that seen. I bought that Visual Dictionary straight afterwards that more then confirmed it for me.

 

Understood. But neither you nor I were the people meant to draw any conclusions of that sort. Of COURSE we know it wasn't Coruscant. WE'RE FANS. We read up on the franchise to the point where we probably knew it wasn't Coruscant BEFORE we saw the movie.

Casual viewers don't read up. They don't buy the Visual Dictionary, assuming that they even know it exists. They have their own lives and affairs to be concerned about, and interests in things other than Star Wars. They're in the theater to have a good time for two hours and then go home, and that's all. Ask any casual viewer if they know or care that Coruscant has no bodies of water, and they'll probably say no to both.

And if we're going to be honest with ourselves, we need to concede that this question only makes a difference to US - it can't POSSIBLY make a difference to John Q. Popcorn. He doesn't care if the planet has water on it; he doesn't really care what the planet's name is (seriously, outside our circles, who the hell knows what a Coruscant is, or needs to in order to get through their day?); if it has a big city on it, he'll make the connection that it must be that Big City Planet he half-remembered seeing in some of those other Star Wars movies years ago. All he would really care about (and to be fair, the only thing he would NEED to care about in order to follow the story at hand for the two hours he's sitting in the theater watching TFA) is that the Big City Planet, where all the characters go to talk and talk, has been destroyed. He'd probably even counter your point with a "who says there's no bodies of water on the Big City Planet?" - and in fact, the old Legends-era Black Fleet Trilogy said that there were indeed bodies of water on Coruscant.

We need to abandon the notion that the casual viewer and the dedicated fan have the same interests and concerns - they don't.

 

I don't remember were i first heard that it wasn't Coruscant. I thought it was at first.

Again I personally am not against the concept of them destroying Coruscant but i'm glad it wasn't Coruscant in Ep7. If Coruscant were to get destroyed I would want it to go out in the most over the top dramatic OMG they blew up Coruscant time for the good guys to put on the big boy pants way.

 

While I agree with the general premise of "the planet was meant to be Coruscant but LFL got cold feet," I don't think the motive for the scene was to dismiss political scenes. I think it was a very quick way to both establish the First Order as a galactic threat and defang the legitimate galactic government to the point where it's believable that the FO has the upper hand going forward. When you combine that with the way TFA was attempting to raise the stakes over it's spiritual forebears in A New Hope ("The superweapon isn't just the size of a moon, it IS a whole planet; it doesn't just blow up planets, it blows up whole star systems; it doesn't just blow up an important planet, it blows up the capital"), obliterating the New Republic capital world seems to be the natural choice.

 

tbh I hoped it was Coruscant. Equally for the symbolism against the prequels, and because Jello.

//waives a Rebel flag at Jello

 

I heard that in the very beginning planning stages for Rogue One they were going to show them leaving Dantooine and setting up base at Yavin. Of course that idea likely got axed before any filming took place so no deleted scenes would exist of that. Possibly the reason for scrapping Dantooine in the movie would be that it wouldn't line up with the dialogue from ANH where they said the base had been abandoned for some time. Unless they originally didn't have the movie ending right before Ep. IV.

 

It probably got axed just because it didn't really add anything to the story they were trying to tell. I don't think there's anything in canon that states they went directly from Dantooine to Yavin; there's no reason Leia couldn't have been giving Tarkin the location of the base-before-last.

 

I created a thread awhile back about this very topic, maybe we could merge the two threads? If nothing else, the link contains stuff connected to this very discussion.

http://boards.theforce.net/threads/...ce-discussion-thread-spoilers.50041833/page-4

--Adm. Nick

 

According to John Knoll, they axed Dantooine due to budgetary constraints.