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My issue with The Child eating the eggs:

1) They are the eggs of a self-aware lifeform. It's not quite on par with say, eating a human's eggs, because you'd have to do some 'surgery' to get at those, but it's still clearly immoral.
2) It's played for laughs.
3) Someone came up with the idea, pitched it, the idea was accepted, filmed, and no one had a problem with it. How does that happen? What does this add to the story?

Kowakian monkey lizards get eaten in SW.
They are at least self aware.
Eating sentients isn't something "forbidden" in that setting.
Slavery is immoral, yet it happens, too.
It was also "illegal" inside the bounds of the old republic, but rarely acted upon even then.

What is "immoral" for you, may not be for something not even of your species, let alone religious ideology. Terran human "morality" is more or less irrelevant in this setting.

FWIW, this wouldn't be the worst thing done in that vane. There was a Dark Times comic where a rich nobleman treated himself to a special lizard delicacy once a year. In that issue, it was revealed that this particularly heinous foodie's last treat was the missing daughter of one of the main characters.

 chromedog wrote:


What is "immoral" for you, may not be for something not even of your species, let alone religious ideology. Terran human "morality" is more or less irrelevant in this setting.

Edit: To clarify. Can you identify a moral position that occurs in the Star Wars films that both deviates from modern Western morality AND is at least implicitly condoned by the protagonists?

 warboss wrote:

 gorgon wrote:
Chickens aren't sentient? They can't feel pain or emotion?

I wasn't aware of the dictionary distinction between a sentient and thinking/reasoning being. From being a lifelong scifi fan and the colloquial use of the word in that genre, I assumed incorrectly that the words were interchangeable. Thanks and good to know!

Lots of Sci fi writers use sentient and sapient interchangeably, so I got what you meant.

And while the child is just a baby, the Ana do is not: after the first one, he couldn’t be bothered to lean forward and take the other eggs away from the baby before they were eaten? He didn’t even try. Even from a “life is cheap” angle, I would expect him to protect the eggs just so his passenger wouldn’t have a good reason to shiv the kid while Mando is sleeping.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
As for the monkey lizards...cooking one would play differently if we spent time getting to know it or it’s parents before seeing it roasting on a spit.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

Lots of Sci fi writers use sentient and sapient interchangeably, so I got what you meant.

And while the child is just a baby, the Ana do is not: after the first one, he couldn’t be bothered to lean forward and take the other eggs away from the baby before they were eaten? He didn’t even try. Even from a “life is cheap” angle, I would expect him to protect the eggs just so his passenger wouldn’t have a good reason to shiv the kid while Mando is sleeping.

I see your autocorrect is as strong as mine! Earlier today it changed "farseer and warboss" to "career and waffles" on me.

TBH, I'm basing my previous post on generalities as I haven't seen the show (only some short youtube videos) so don't know how the Mando responded. I would also expect him to be stricter with Baby Yoda given the trouble it causes when he doesn't pay attention. Not necessarily actually care about the eggs (regardless of whether they're actually fertilized or not) but rather just the mission/goal.


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 AduroT wrote:

 warboss wrote:
He likely just sees them as yet another tasty snack similar to a human baby

*Snip*

Lol, that definitely wouldn't be Disney+ friendly!

 trexmeyer wrote:
Someone came up with the idea, pitched it, the idea was accepted, filmed, and no one had a problem with it. How does that happen?

Pretty much like that?

 trexmeyer wrote:
What does this add to the story?

-A dark joke they can use to keep interest during the luls in the journey and break tension during the survival scenes
-Foreshadowing for how the threat in the cave is revealed
-An opportunity to show the Mandalorian learn what kids will do when left unattended for any length of time (and the stages of shock, horror, frantic correcting, and despairing acceptance all new parents learn)
-Shows the audience that, marketing hype aside, the Child is not a Muppet Baby version of Yoda - it's a living creature with traits and behaviour we don't fully understand, not a pet, or plush toy.

Also, and I'm not sure if it was intentional or not - I think it shows that Jon Favreau has creative control of his work, and isn't necessarily beholden to a table full of gunshy suits like a lot of the nay sayers have suggested during the lead-up to Season 2.

 trexmeyer wrote:

 chromedog wrote:
What is "immoral" for you, may not be for something not even of your species, let alone religious ideology. Terran human "morality" is more or less irrelevant in this setting.

Edit: To clarify. Can you identify a moral position that occurs in the Star Wars films that both deviates from modern Western morality AND is at least implicitly condoned by the protagonists?

Droids are slaves.

Droids are slaves who get frequently mind wiped and sacrificed.

 trexmeyer wrote:
My issue with The Child eating the eggs:

1) They are the eggs of a self-aware lifeform. It's not quite on par with say, eating a human's eggs, because you'd have to do some 'surgery' to get at those, but it's still clearly immoral.
2) It's played for laughs.
3) Someone came up with the idea, pitched it, the idea was accepted, filmed, and no one had a problem with it. How does that happen? What does this add to the story?

Well, its partly played for laughs. Even in season 1 they were playing up the Dark Side tendencies of this brat. It does straight up try to kill people.

As for #3, you can't really be serious. There is a lot of reality-based moral squickiness accepted and filmed with zero problems (the list of that kind of thing is possibly endless). Even many ostensibly children's shows sail right past the moral event horizon if you spend even a few minutes thinking about it.
Space fantasy alien eats another alien's eggs? I can completely understand why people thinking about it would find it repugnant; but I also can easily see why it would be filmed with no questions asked for the type of show this is. [Space opera with several layers of gritty and a more than a touch of grim dark]

----
As for SW moral issues protagonists don't object to:
Droids. Pretty much the whole kit-and-kaboodle.
Human slavery. Its an issue for the protagonists only because they want something, not because they find it particularly objectionable. [I'm not even sure that the prequel Jedi characters even did find it objectional. They just treated it as a state that people came in, and potentially thought it was useful for separating extraneous family members]
Deadly force/heinous maiming first. Maybe with a warning that they know won't be taken seriously.

Voss wrote:

As for SW moral issues protagonists don't object to:
Droids. Pretty much the whole kit-and-kaboodle.
Human slavery. Its an issue for the protagonists only because they want something, not because they find it particularly objectionable. [I'm not even sure that the prequel Jedi characters even did find it objectional. They just treated it as a state that people came in, and potentially thought it was useful for separating extraneous family members]
Deadly force/heinous maiming first. Maybe with a warning that they know won't be taken seriously.

Also:

Chosen One: "I slaughtered an entire tribe of people because some of them killed my mother!"

Most Ethical Person in the Senate: "Oh, you poor thing. Give me a cuddle..."

Those things can also bother people. Some people can be bothered by more than one thing in a franchise and still enjoy the franchise as a whole.

PS: you forgot how torture was played for laughs in ROTJ.

1) Droid Slaves.

Debatable. I wouldn't call Anakin or Luke's relationship with R2 that of Master/Slave. It's more like Master/Servant. It's also not the best example because there really isn't a coherent agreement in western society as to whether or not AI is sentient/sapient.

2) Human Slavery.

I wouldn't say the Jedi condone it at all based on the films. It's more of we can't fix everything at once.

3) Deadly Force/Maiming

Honestly, there is a large segment of the population that thinks this okay if in self-defense.

4) Anakin slaughtering the Sand-People

Padme was visibly disturbed by this revelation and the way that plot point was handled is one of the most criticized aspects of the PT.

Honestly, I think the Republic's treatment of the Clones is a better example than what you guys provided.


Edit: And Voss, I am completely serious. Especially after the DT. I expect better from Disney.

Regarding Qui Gonn and slavery on Tattooine.

1. The direction and/or exposition could’ve been handled better in Episode 1. But

2. The Jedi Order were peace keepers. They were not galactic enforcers. They are not a government agency. They don’t have a free hand (at least at that point) to simply intercede. So the Jedi Order simply didn’t have the agency or authority to shake down slavery rings of their own volition.

3. This is reflected in the Senate’s sheer weight of Bureaucracy and corruption. For anything to do truly done, the Senate would have to vote for it. That they do nothing suggests a lack of general will at best, or active support in certain, influential corners, at worst.

Remember. At that point, the Republic had no centralised military. Indeed that’s the whole plot of Episode 2.

So say the Senate did vote to do something about outer rim slavery rings. How do you smash it, without going to war against the Hutts? And how do you maintain that new status quo should you win?

I’d argue it’s those very injustices that start to lead Anakin down his dark side path, at least in terms of things for Palpatine to exploit.

Also, they are her eggs, but they are not yet fertilised.
This is why she was taking them to her mate.
Sentient species or not, an unfertilised egg is not self-aware.
BY was just eating them like we eat chicken eggs.


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 trexmeyer wrote:


Edit: To clarify. Can you identify a moral position that occurs in the Star Wars films that both deviates from modern Western morality AND is at least implicitly condoned by the protagonists?

No, because "morality" is not objective.

Also, as it's been covered already.
Droids are slaves.
The gonk in ROTJ gets tortured and SCREAMS. Thus, droids feel pain. It's played for laughs.

Droids are tools. Manufactured. Devices to do or help do the work of others. They are pulled apart and reassembled with no consequence (C-3PO) and even jettison their own internal parts (R5-D4). The tortured power droid is seemly a one-off. They are programmed and reprogrammed and they have no problem with that, like your desktop computer or smart speaker. Their personality is an illusion, to make them easier to work with. Like K9, this doesn't stop being cute or good for comic relief.

Star Wars is a space fantasy action adventure movie. Nominally for kids, it's not the right medium for exploring the moral arguments of the rights as citizens of artificial beings. That's more the territory of Blade Runner or Human.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

 Graphite wrote:

Spoiler:

Well, The Child eating a sentient creature's offspring being played for laughs certainly is horrifying

My wife and I both had problems with this. It pretty much ruined the episode for us.

It's pretty irredemable. And so unneeded. Like the sub light comment which in the end had nothing to do with the plot, the scene could just have easily had Baby Yoda lick his lips and Mando yell no! Same laugh without crossing the red line of .

MarkNorfolk wrote:
Droids are tools. Manufactured. Devices to do or help do the work of others. They are pulled apart and reassembled with no consequence (C-3PO) and even jettison their own internal parts (R5-D4). The tortured power droid is seemly a one-off. They are programmed and reprogrammed and they have no problem with that, like your desktop computer or smart speaker. Their personality is an illusion, to make them easier to work with. Like K9, this doesn't stop being cute or good for comic relief.

Star Wars is a space fantasy action adventure movie. Nominally for kids, it's not the right medium for exploring the moral arguments of the rights as citizens of artificial beings. That's more the territory of Blade Runner or Human.

Don't think about it, it's not for that?

Sorry, that doesn't work for any kind of media. In this particular case, the two droids are presented as the point of view characters for the OT (and somewhat dragged back into the sequels). They have more a sense of personhood than most of the human beings in the film, and that carries over to the other droids in the setting.

They have thoughts, emotions, wants and desires; they aren't merely just tools, regardless of being manufactured. Star Wars is actually better at showing this than blade runner, I, robot, or a lot of 'high philosophy' media that's actually 'about' the subject.
Yet they're bought/sold, tracked, limited, discriminated against and treated like non-people in dozens of ways that would be completely pointless to show if they're merely 'supposed to be' tools rather than persons.

The other really worrying question is - who was in that stew Yoda tried to feed to Luke?

Not sure how were are feeling on spoilers here, but RE: baby Yoda and the eggs:



And yes, I am being overly technical/pedantic, that is just my MO.

I just wish someone was upset about the baby spider....

The eggs being unfertilized would be more of a saving factor if the sapient mother hadn’t said this batch represented her last chance to have children. When people have fertility issues, it can be devastating, and as anyone who’s gone through IVF can tell you, (for humans at least) you need as many eggs as you can harvest, and your odds of having children still aren’t great. Now I admit we were affected more than most people would be due to our medical history, but when a woman is struggling to conceive and her ovary (unfertilized eggs) is damaged, it’s pretty far from a laughing matter.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
The eggs being unfertilized would be more of a saving factor if the sapient mother hadn’t said this batch represented her last chance to have children. When people have fertility issues, it can be devastating, and as anyone who’s gone through IVF can tell you, (for humans at least) you need as many eggs as you can harvest, and your odds of having children still aren’t great. Now I admit we were affected more than most people would be due to our medical history, but when a woman is struggling to conceive and her ovary (unfertilized eggs) is damaged, it’s pretty far from a laughing matter.

Well, I did mention that what happened is fairly convincingly immoral and that the plot line is poorly done and likely completely unnecessary. But I really fall well short of personally being able to call it murder, or the like. Seems more like, to me, it was an attempt at a "cheap joke" which was crass and poorly done. I don't think the "unfertilized" factor "saves" it, since it still is rather uncouth, but it does lower the stakes a bit as far as I am concerned.

Yeah but there is also a difference when you have a species that has spawnings like that. Some animals only spawn once and then die (salmon). Others have a couple spawns in their life and then it's done.

The frog person saying this was her last spawn doesn't mean she has fertility issues. She is just going through her last biological chance to spawn and make a whole gak load of kids all at once.

I wouldn’t call it murder, either. It’s just something unexpectedly unpleasant in an otherwise okayish episode.*


*On another Star Wars site I check out for the analysis, the use of “sublight” rather than “slower than light” or “real space” is seen as some kind of wiggle room. Otherwise, this would be a scale blunder of JJ-Wars proportions. Or else Tattooine is part of an overfull binary system in a very dense cluster... sure, that’s gotta be it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lance845 wrote:
Yeah but there is also a difference when you have a species that has spawnings like that. Some animals only spawn once and then die (salmon). Others have a couple spawns in their life and then it's done.

The frog person saying this was her last spawn doesn't mean she has fertility issues. She is just going through her last biological chance to spawn and make a whole gak load of kids all at once.

Just because she had a lot of eggs doesn’t mean they would all end up hatching successfully. She seemed to have some K-selected mothering instincts. Her previous egg laying(s) didn’t yield any children.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

*On another Star Wars site I check out for the analysis, the use of “sublight” rather than “slower than light” or “real space” is seen as some kind of wiggle room. Otherwise, this would be a scale blunder of JJ-Wars proportions. Or else Tattooine is part of an overfull binary system in a very dense cluster... sure, that’s gotta be it.

It's been a problem ever since the Falcon limped to Bespin without a Hyperdrive.

Yeah. They really should be saying sub warp.

Sub warp means they are not going into that warp dimension that is separate from real space.

Which also means you COULD have FTL speeds in real space that are just slower than warp speeds.

At least in TESB, you could imagine Luke spent a lot of time studying with Yoda. Or that the Falcon had a weak sauce backup hyperdrive like a spare tire to get them to the nearest mechanic shop.

I'm still going with the egg-eating being deliberately disturbing & creepy for a reason that will be developed later in the series. There's too much care and attention being paid to other aspects of this series for it to be inadvertent to me.

I am prepared to be totally wrong!

 Graphite wrote:
The other really worrying question is - who was in that stew Yoda tried to feed to Luke?

It's a Yoda cajun stew. Anything you can catch goes in them.

 Graphite wrote:
The other really worrying question is - who was in that stew Yoda tried to feed to Luke?

Jettster Dexter.