ST Who's The Baddie?

2 all day. 3 might work somehow. I'd like to see a Mother Talzin/nightsisters and Darth Plagueis combo. The mad scientist and the witch teaming up to rebuild the sith order. Rebuild the sith academy on Korriban while the jedi order is rebuilt. The new trilogy could revolve around a sort of resetting of the two orders back to the size of old republic days. If 3 happens I'd still like to see the rebuilding of the sith order but Lucas better pull something off other than Darth Maul surviving somehow.

 

If you only new the power of my mommy...

 

That could be interesting.

 

Fixed. Cast a rapper in the lead role.

 

Fett 300

 

kickstarter time.

 

Male/female whatever? Just make them original and make them believable. No mystic, psuedo crap.

 

Agreed. Whoever the villain is has to have a plausible origin. They should be unique and hopefully have an angle that we have not encountered in Star Wars before. In fact, I would love to have a villain that actually has a cause that on the surface seems noble or laudable, but their methods are questionable. (Think Magneto in the X-men comics). I personally doubt we will see a female villain, because I suspect that the main protagonist will be female. Not to say we cannot have a female villain and heroine, it is just unlikely.

 

I just think this bears repeating. Screw the villain up, and there's not much to watch, and while George apparently has a vision, we're all clueless when it comes to the threat that is going to move the story forward. From where I sit, I'm more excited about discovering who/what the evil is than anything else in this next trilogy.

 

That doesn't work. Any good character starts from a "template". The difference between good and bad characters is only whether that template is changed and expanded upon.

 

Those templates get made by everyone who has an active imagination. I can even give you a list:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage

Every single one of the SW movie chars is based on one or more templates. Take Anakin Skywalker for instance. He is easily categorized as "troubled hero".

Templates are important because it makes it easy for an audience to recognize and understand the core personality of a character. Of course, on top of that you can build so much more. You can invent contradictions, idiosyncrasies and so on. But you still start with a "template" or "archetype".

Note that even "boring standard hero" is a template.

 

Because whatever you invent will most likely already exist in one form or other. We subconsciously follow certain templates. And it would be pretty stupid to not write a say "troubled hero" or "compassionate doctor" or "nice granny" just because that kind of thing has been written before. You can still give your character a very personal spin. I would say Han Solo and Anakin Skywalker are both troubled heroes for instance but they are notably very different persons.

Give me an example of any fictional character and I will be able to tell you on what it is based.

You are a fan of Anakin Skywalker. Guess what? He is also based on tropes and templates.

 

A female villian decked out in armor who is not revealed to be a female until the end? They could use early concept art of General Grievous as an example. (Could someone find me a picture?)

 

Usually new templates are invented through changing around other templates.

There's only so many different variations of human base personality traits (example extraversion-introversion).

Huh? Do you try to misunderstand me on purpose? When you invent a character, you start with an outline, a "template". Then you start developing your character and that's hard (but fun) work.

Say your starting point is "evil granny".
Then you ask yourself questions:
Why is she evil?
How is she evil?
What happened in her life to make her evil?
What inner conflicts does she have?
And so on. The more you work on your granny (and the more interested you are in her), the more interesting she will become.

Wow. Now I am insulted. You obviously don't know jack **** about the creative process yet you yap around.

I say it again: Name me some fictional character. It doesn't matter who you name, I can give you a category for him/her/it.

 

I think Darth_Pevra does have a point. You might think that you have made an original character archetype, but you can be almost 100% certain that archetype has existed in some form or template when you strip it down to its bare bones. It's simply human nature to create characters that are in some way relatable or else evoke some other sort of emotional response. Tvtropes pretty much contains an exhaustive list detailing all the kinds of character archetypes that exist in any work of fiction. Any character from any work of fiction can be classified into at least one of these types, even if they possess vastly different personality traits from others in that classification.

On the subject of villains, you can probably classify the villain as either Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, or Chaotic Evil, unless you have a more Neutral anti-hero/villain-type character. The villain can range anywhere from a Well-Intentioned Extremist or Knight Templar who believes that s/he has good intentions to a completely unrelatable Eldritch Abomination who strikes terror into the heart of any sentient being.

 

And I was talking about "base personality", not all the idiosyncrasies and whatnot. What do you think the term "outline" means?

Well, seeing as how I am a professional writer I don't take it well if anyone implies I'm not inventive. I work damn hard on my characters and I love them dearly.

 

No, but I didn't get the impression you were trying to understand what I was saying.

Plus it isn't a matter of taste. From my point of view it is simply fact that every character follows one or more templates. I think I tried to explain why this is so, in fact, why it must be so, but so far you mostly ignored the reasons I've given.

 

Because there are some universal likes and dislikes throughout humanity. Archetypes have been around for thousands of years for a reason........they work and people like them.

Doesn't mean you can't put some original twists or turns on them but every villain and their "type" has already been written. We've merely been rebooting the greek classics since.

George Lucas talked about this once in Wired magazine. He was a big researcher of emotional intelligence. He found that our emotional connection to these ancient stories was so strong that they haven't changed fundamentally in thousands of years. They've simply been retold and tweaked since their inception.
And he also found that our emotional needs haven't changed much over those millennia. That's why those stories still persist. They fill a want.

That's why a movie like Avatar, a film with hardly an original story, can still make a billion bucks. We can't get enough of those classic stories.