@evan I don’t like the idea of weaponizing space, but I’m impressed how the Reagan administration managed to pull the wool over the eyes of the Soviets and convince them that we could intercept their ICBMs from orbit. So I guess I’m a qualified yes.
I watch the movies and the TV shows. They're some of the best TV around.
I dislike the complicity of the heroes on-screen with slavery, both of humans and of human-equivalent AI. They don't question their unjust surroundings. Exception: droid uprising in "Solo".
I also don't like the model of history: two secret mystical societies locked in galaxy-wide battle for thousands of years, veering wildly from decadence and hypocrisy to fascism and back. It is so bleak.
I used to dislike that the SW universe was so messy. Now, I'm kind of into it.
I like the big world.
I love in the Mandalorian where Din Djarin has to explain to someone what a Jedi is, and they're like, oh, whatever. Uneven distribution of information is very interesting.
I think the variety of aliens is cool. I don't like that every language is like "oota boota schmoota".
I like that the music is called jizz and that they doubled down on it.
@evan I’ve been a SW fan since I was little and I think two of the things that attracted me to it is how for a sci fi world it felt lived in instead of sleak. I love people banging on the side of starships to make them work. And also the implied scale of the universe. It just let my little imagination run wild
@evan This is an interesting question: are they human-equivalent, or are they limited-purpose devices with LLM interfaces that mimic casual human-equivalent speech?
@evan (I can tell you from the RPG rules, they are extremely limited in their skill/attribute point total & in how it can be allocated. That's from the D6, which predates the EU and is known about mainly by those cooler than cool.)
@evan Yeah; I went on a bit of a deep-dive about it during late-lockdown (after finding my old books). I think the super-early, before-Marketing-figured-out-what-they-wanted-to-do-with-the-franchise period is really interesting, and the D6 material incorporates a lot of that....
@evan The original movie? Yes! THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK? Emphatic absolutely! The Ewok movie? Sure, for nostalgia reasons. Everything after that was bad and just got worse and worse.
If you have said Star Wars, that film from 1977, I would have voted «Qualified yes». As I think you mean that merchandising machine also known with the same name, of course no.
@evan There is exactly one #StarWars movie that -- despite several flaws -- made me Feel Things and I immediately wanted to rewatch when I'd finished it -- and of course it's #TheLastJedi. That last scene alone gets me every single time.
@gaurav I wish that Force Ghost Yoda had been a little more explicit. "We keep training monsters! Every generation, the most talented people we train become mass murderers. And then we have huge wars to fight them, killing even more people. Whatever good we do is vastly outweighed by the evil we cause. The Jedi are a broken institution and we should have disbanded 8000 years ago the first or second time this happened, instead of the 275th time. Burn it all down; Jedi magic is mind poison."
@evan Yoda lay down and died so he wouldn't have to deal with Luke's questions about Vader, Anakin and Leia in ROTJ. Giving detailed advice is not his jam (and, based on Obi-Wan in the original trilogy, just generally not a Jedi thing). I love that scene anyway, because Frank Oz is awesome, muppet Yoda is great, giggling Yoda is better, and "We are what they grow beyond" is easily the most profound thing anybody has said in any of the SW movies I've seen (1-8).
@evan I remember the total magic when I saw the first one when I was a kid (it was my first exposure AT ALL to scifi) and now I feel like it's a sprawling franchise but that's okay, just not for me anymore. I performed a wedding for nerds on May 4th and got to end it with "May the 4th always be with you" and that always gives me a warm feeling.
@evan I loved Star Wars as a 13-year-old kid in 1977 - and The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. By the time the 3rd (6th?) episode came out, I was less than impressed with the bait and switch of Luke and Leia being siblings, and the Rebel Alliance being saved by cuddly tribal teddy bears. I've watched maybe half of the remaining episodes and a season or two of the Mandalorian, but nothing brings back the excitement that young me had about the space opera of the original movie.
@evan I went qualified yes as I like it a fair amount but haven’t kept up with every bit of things. My kids have watched and read more Star Wars in the last three years than I have in the last 45.
@evan Qualified yes: I really love the stories in the universe I choose to acknowledge. I hate the movies etc. that I choose to ignore, so I can continue loving the parts I love.
For all of its flaws (inconsistent quality), I really miss the old Expanded Universe books, at least before the Yuuzhan Vong show up. It produced some real stinkers, and it was entirely too obsessed with Death Star copies and analogues, but the same is true of the movies. At its best, it ruled.
OTOH I REALLY liked Andor (& Rogue One before it, for overlapping reasons). & (sacrilege!) I also really enjoyed Chuck Wendig's Star Wars IP trilogy, Aftermath. & (more sacrilege!) liked Last Jedi best of the core-mythos films by a fairly wide margin. (& Rise of Skywalker the least.)
@evan I'm going strong yes, but it's borderline qualified yes. I very much dig the aesthetics of the universe. I think some of the stories are great but a lot are mediocre and carried by the halo of the great ones and/or the aesthetics.
@evan It was a sort of culture interview session, and the format was a bunch of "A or B?!" questions in quick succession, presumably to test your ability to make "tough" decisions with no context on a moment's notice.
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