Lit MACLUNKY -- The Lit Forum Maclunky Thread, v3

Because I'm Gamiel:
Star Wars 80s High School by DenisM79 on DeviantArt

 

So basically She-Ra ;p

 

Don't get it

 

Cuz She-Ra is essentially what happens when you have a Star Wars esquire mythical setting but give the tone of a high school dramady

 

Watching press interviews of Ewan and Hayden. First of all, Hayden's hair is the perfect length for early TCW Anakin, and his voice is deeper and sounds closer to Lanter's Anakin.

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I know it's scary he sounds so much like Matt Lanter now in real life....It's ...It's interesting.

Also on a sadder but happy news....Amphibia ...Is over.

 

Yeah, when I watched the panel with Hayden and Ian McDiarmid at the 2017 Celebration and he spoke, I was taken aback by how much like Matt Lanter he sounded. Just goes to show how good the voice casting for the Clone Wars (both shows) was. I think I read that even Christopher Lee had commented how Corey Burton sounded a lot like him.

 

Wasn't Lee's quip to the effect of he didn't need to do his TCW Movie lines, that they'd already been done?

 

She-Ra still going strong

 

I'm honestly not sure. I remember reading the quote somewhere but can't find the source it's from for the whole context.

 

This makes me cringe at the thought of anyone adapting the Diversity Alliance storyline today. The rhetoric (both of the DA and the heroes in debating it) already felt painful back in the day, but these days...

 

Yeah I remember the age where diversity was the villain... these days they might switch it around and present a positive Diversity Alliance fighting the last remnants of former Imperial High Human Culture in its holdout pockets as exemplified by the next generation that grew up within it and sees it as the norm. Probably with the kids coming around to see their errors in the end and accept diversity. But social media debates alone would be killing it!

While slightly less awkward, but equally a trainwreck, FOTJs storyline of Jaina deciding the fate of galactic slavery when the Treaty of Vontor was revoked is likewise totally overshooting its target of ending slavery where the Chosen One forgot to do that.

Insert Owen Lars Meme:
Anakin: I am the Chosen One and brought balance, peace and harmony!
Owen Lars: Like you brought it to the slaves you forgot to free?

 

The Vanity Fair article that dropped today is so good. I'm really excited for the future of Star War a television!

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Course online fandom is already focusing on the negative.

 

Well, most of the internet is straight trash

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Yeah, been stewing on this one a couple of days. Might need to watch it again, maybe with the other two parts of the finale to see how I really feel, but as of right now after one viewing I overall thought it was a pretty good ending. It's probably one of the more bittersweet endings I've seen for a show like this, but the emphasis is on the "sweet" portion.

 

Great video I just found on acting with masks. I spoilered it cause it has some spoilers for the new Halo show, but I felt it was appropriate here because it makes some interesting points about Star Wars' long history of this particular form of acting. I have to admit, as much as I praised Mando's masked acting, I hadn't really stopped and thought about how Vader, C3PO, Chewie and other fit into the dynamic.

Spoiler

 

That's why i like it.

It's a bit sad...but it teaches good lessons on real life ...But also...It still remains sweet.

 

When I was in college, I had the thought it was a clever take on the fact the Imperial Japanese and other groups used anti-colonialist rhetoric to justify their own takeover. Sort of like a certain group now claims to be fighting "Nazis" while invading another country. Not naming names. There's after all plenty of RL groups that claim to be fighting against the rich, for freedom, and for democracy when they are anything but. Not naming names.

Know a group by its actions not rhetoric.

It never occurred to me it was could be "Racial minorities organizing is bad! They could be as bad or worse as the majority's oppression!"

Mind you, I used to think STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS was a clever satire of the Iraq War justifications. It was actually written by a 9/11 truther.

 

Because I'm Gamiel: I'm looking for suggestions on how to make a culture feel Ancient Greek-ish. Anybody have any?

Same here

 

Don't have it be an unified goverment, instead multiple city states but that share an overall culture, maybe make them polytheistic, with some cities favoring one god/goddess more in spite of sharing a cosmovision, highlight both their differences and things in common, contrast the different city states, kind of like how in Sparta it was all about the millitary might, while Athens was where the most known philosophers came to be.

It really depends on how much you want them to be like Ancient Greece, you want simple allusions, or something that is clearly a version of Ancient Greece but in a new setting?

If it's the former, instead of the above, you can have some superficial Greek elements on a completely different political structure, for example: have their economy include the cultive of stuff similar to vine, olives and cereal, have everything payed in coins, if you want to evoke Ancient Greece in their vestiment, make them wear long tunics, here are some examples:

Make them have a normalized slave market maybe, depends if you want them to look like the good guys or not a lot of open space in the big buildings like the goverment or temples, maybe in the city have some open market fairs like this:


Those are some ideas, you can spin them or mix them in any way you want.

 

I think the later more than the former.

 

Then i think the city state idea is a good pick, especially if you accentuate the contrast between them and especially if you have one city that is more philosophical and intelectual while another is Millitary based, evoking Athens and Sparta for recognizable examples.

Hope the ideas help!

 

To bandwagon on @Irredeemable Fanboy 's suggestions (from a dweeb with a PhD in Classics), some random aids to presenting a culture that feels Greek in the mainland, Classical sense that I assume you mean. I often find popular reproductions/equivalents to be wildly out of spirit with the actual Greeks, so these are really my own pet peeves more than anything else. Mileage may vary.

1) As he says, the city-state thing is really important, not just in itself but for the set of paradoxes it creates. At the level above the individual polis, constant political disunity and conflict and frequent warfare and shifting alliances and prejudice plus a really remarkable cultural and religious unity in language and literature and practices operating through a few key pan-Hellenistic institutions (the Oracle at Delphi, the Olympics, the public reading & performance of Homer's epic poetry, religious festivals, etc).

2) Along with the former, people forget how much Classical Greece was a thoroughly militarized society. Constant warfare between city-states and sometimes with external enemies was a fact of life. Polises operated regularly in ways that we would regard as quasi-totalitarian, regulating the rights of aliens, citizenship, marriage, childbearing, etc, and mandating military service. Sparta is obviously the extreme example of this, but it just magnified a feature of all polises of the period. Athletics was also very important, but was viewed, esp in origins, as a method of training for military service and as an alternative to pitched battle btw Greeks.

3) Sea-faring and trade & colonization is another big thing that tends to get overlooked. While we often focus on mainland Greece, the Greeks were fundamentally, like the Phoenicians, a Mediterannean "sea people" that spread and colonized and raided anywhere they could and consequently ended up everywhere. The closest popular analogue for Homeric Greeks would be Viking raiders, and even with the development of the polis sea travel and trade and fishing remained essential to the Greek way of life. More than this, the practice of Greek polises of chartering colonies and sending them out here, there, and everywhere was a central political and social institution. There were Greek colonies, organized politically as polises and generally acting as political and military and trade allies of their "mother city," all over the Mediterannean and beyond, even in the most unlikely places. "The Greeks" were not just the inhabitants of one particular place; they were the bearers of a particular cultural and religious and political and linguistic identity, and they were everywhere.

4) The Greeks had a very insular and practically unique view of their own superiority to all other types of persons. While many cultures are xenophobic, the Greeks tended to assume as a matter of course that their language and culture and social structure and way of life and politics and religion and thought were just outright better than all equivalents. The pejorative term "barbarian" for anyone incapable of speaking Greek encapsulates this nicely. While some Greeks were very cosmopolitan (especially towards Egypt, which they viewed with a combination of admiration, wonder, disgust, insecurity, and jealousy), views that made of all barbarians intellectual and moral inferiors on par with children or animals were very common. In practice, however, relations with barbarians tended to vary widely based on how close they were to the Greek social-political-cultural ideal--and also changed a lot with the Hellenistic period as Greek culture became much more widespread among different peoples, who were thus often able to adopt "Greek" status and superiority even while retaining their own cultures and identities.

5) The Greeks were extremely misogynistic and mildly gerontophobic. While precise regulations varied, citizen women in most polises were highly segregated from men, highly regulated in dress and behavior, viewed as morally and intellectual suspect, and barred from weilding political, social, familial, or economic power. We often tend to assume such misogyny on the part of all ancient societies, but in fact all this made the Greeks rather unusual and was seen by them as a cultural distinctive of which they were generally proud. That being said, such social practices were way more extreme in urban areas than the countryside, in mainland Greece than elsewhere, and in the upper classes than the lower classes. In Athens, which was perhaps the Greek extreme of misogyny, the public ideology was that women were supposed to have nothing to do with any public space or affair or institution; "respectable" citizen women were thus not supposed to leave the house or be seen by people outside the family or even be referred to by name in public (as a general rule, if a woman's name is given in public Athenian oratory, she's either a foreigner, a prostitute, or an upper-class woman who the speaker is intending to insult by treating her as a foreigner or prostitute).

6) Greek society, esp in the polises, was highly communal and social and public. Key institutions across all polises included the agora or outdoor market and social gathering space, as well as the symposium, or drinking party, and the outdoor public assembly for political or religious-festival purposes. Because of this, Greeks were highly verbal, leading to poetry, drama, rhetoric and rhetorical education looming large.

7) Not all Greek polises were democratic, but all or practically all (Sparta being the big exception) shared some basic political characteristics and institutions. These included the instutition of citizenship as a privilege with concomittant rights and responsibilities (almost always including military service), the institution of the popular assembly or demos where citizens gathered in one place for some purpose, some system of public offices (often decided by lot) and public priesthoods held by individuals, some set of core oligarchic families exercising political power and influence, and liturgies by which private wealthy individuals were required by the state to furnish essential infrastructure or services at their own expense. The differences between polises tended to focus on which political institution weilded the most power, how power and office was assigned, and what laws were in place to regulate what part of life.

8) Slavery was a really big deal. Slavery was generally a side-effect of warfare in the ancient world, and the Greeks (see above) were very warlike, and also had a very ingrained idea of their own superiority. Some effects of slavery on Greek society were to create an ideal of leisure and beauty in the oligarchic classes, as well as to create a very wide field for the breaking of otherwise strictly-enforced cultural rules. While Greek citizen women were expected to be segregated from male spaces, female slaves were ubiquitous as entertainers, prostitutes, servants, etc.

9) Greek religion is a huge topic, but one thing ppl often get wrong is that as a general rule there was no established, separate "priesthood" or religious authority. The polis directly regulated and controlled religious activity and practice, often to extreme degrees, while in Classical Greece the city of Delphi weilded a special sort of religious power on a Pan-Greek level. Unlike in Egypt, where a strong hereditary priesthood existed, practically all priesthoods existed in the form of public offices assigned just like other public offices, and almost always held by the same political elites who ruled the city otherwise. The primary duty of priesthoods was the performing of public animal sacrifices.

As all the above shows, the Greeks differed a lot among themselves and over time, so you have a lot of space to kind of play with the concepts and develop variants.