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I have just watched an Episode of The Clone Wars where Padme picks up Anakin's lightsaber and comments that it's heavier than she expected.

Regarding Asoka's fighting style - it's different at different points in the episode. When up against the Goons outside the wall, she's a running, jumping, slicing machine. Against the Mando, she's pretty much a whirling dervish until he gets a word in edgeways and persuades her to stop. Then it's back to running over rooftops, backfliping behind people - all Prequel era looking stuff.

But then the fight that actually matters - the one where it isn't a nameless goon - it all slows RIGHT down. We're back in Original Trilogy swordfighting, where the expressions on the faces mean a lot more than the swishy-ness of the swords.

Very well done. Picked the right styles for the time within the episode.

 Manchu wrote:
The producers seem very much aware of the yawning gap between Prequels-era dance fighting and OT-era naturalism. Ahsoka, like Bo-Katan and her goons, fight much more in the former style. Everyone else, much more in the latter. But on the whole, this series prefers the latter for everyone.

I wonder how much of that is a conscious asthetic choice and how much of that boils down to budget. Alot of the prequel scenes were filmed entirely on green screen and later fully CGI'ed around the actors/stuntmen whereas alot of the Mandalorian is being done on their circumferential giant OLED screen physical set. There are limits to the amount of double flip bounce of the wall twist while sliding in between giant moving parts that you can do on the latter given the phsyical limitations and lower budget. I'm not saying that asthetics don't factor into the decision but they may be necessitated in most scenes by the other factors.

Considering how they handled the lightsaber fights in the sequel movies, I'd say this is a conscious choice on the part of the producers to let flashier lightsaber duels be a halmark of the prequel era.

Ahsoka's choreography has the unenviable task of having to bridge prequel-inspired whimsy and the sheer superhuman feats of the cartoon characters with the more weighty style of the OT and Sequel lightsaber battles.

insaniak wrote:They were supposed to be really heavy. It's hard to say now if that was the original idea or the result of having to tone down the fighting style... George is rather unreliable when it comes to which ideas came when, or what his original intentions were.

Graphite wrote:I have just watched an Episode of The Clone Wars where Padme picks up Anakin's lightsaber and comments that it's heavier than she expected.

If you've ever held a spinning gyroscope I like to think an ignited lightsaber feels something like that: a strange, almost counterintuitive resisting force that acts against you whenever you try to rotate it or change its position. It's something you can brute force your way through and wield more like a cudgel or a bat, but with enough time and refinement you can use that resisting force to your advantage and incorporate it into your style (hence, flashy spinning dance moves)

That's probably how I'll describe it if my players ever find a lightsaber... god help me.

It was also mentioned in rebels (i think) that the blades have a polarizing force from their energy field. The blades attract each other. Light saber fighting isnt as simple as swinging an edge. You are trying to control this thing that wants to pull and push in other directions.

Oh.....my!



Show just keeps getting better and better!

Welp just caught the latest episode. didn't expect to find something that was exciting and revealationy as last epiosde. I WAS WRONG!

Hol-lee-gak. That was somethin'!

 Manchu wrote:
The producers seem very much aware of the yawning gap between Prequels-era dance fighting and OT-era naturalism.

I've never quite understood the pining for "naturalism" like the OT.

We saw an old man, a cripple, and a scarcely trained boy fighting in the OT. They were not representative of Jedi sabre fighting. That's what the PT is.

What were those Imperial ships, sardine cans with engines strapped to the sides? Flying clown cars? They were about the same size as the Razor Crest but the troopers just kept coming!

They're drop ships. So yes, just a box with engines.

While The Mandalorian is good (enough) and fun, the writing isn't any better than the best of the EU so far. The Thrawn Trilogy remains a superior story to me and the way the two storylines portray the Imperial Remnant is night and day. Thrawn suffered some from being an OtT villain and the trilogy had some other shortcomings as well (Luuuuuuke), but his Imperial forces were at least competent and an actual threat. Gideon's forces are a threat only because they're facing off against a single, naive Mandalorian and his revolving door of 1-3 episodic allies. The New Republic (even without Luke) should curb stomp what we've seen of Gideon's forces.

My one sentence criticism would be: Incompetent cannon fodder can work when you have overwhelming numbers and the Imperial Remnant under Gideon shouldn't have numbers they can just throw away.

Concerning Luke Skywalker:

That was great!

So yeah.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I've never quite understood the pining for "naturalism" like the OT.

We saw an old man, a cripple, and a scarcely trained boy fighting in the OT. They were not representative of Jedi sabre fighting. That's what the PT is.

That's all well and good, but it looks fake. Distractingly so.

Episode 1's duels were relatively conservative with it and could probably have been the standard the PT could follow, but Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith kept trying to one-up it to the point where you had Anakin and Obi Wan were twirling their lightsabers around themselves, completely open, not hitting each other. And for all the rationalizations it gets it still look so fake.

trexmeyer wrote:

Spoiler:

Stormtroopers are idiots and apparently every SW truly hates them.

I think I posted this earlier but I think it bears repeating.

trexmeyer wrote:While The Mandalorian is good (enough) and fun, the writing isn't any better than the best of the EU so far. The Thrawn Trilogy remains a superior story to me and the way the two storylines portray the Imperial Remnant is night and day. Thrawn suffered some from being an OtT villain and the trilogy had some other shortcomings as well (Luuuuuuke), but his Imperial forces were at least competent and an actual threat. Gideon's forces are a threat only because they're facing off against a single, naive Mandalorian and his revolving door of 1-3 episodic allies. The New Republic (even without Luke) should curb stomp what we've seen of Gideon's forces.

For what it's worth (and this is speaking as someone who doesn't like Thrawn so much) I think if you're looking for the kinds of levels of competence you saw only saw in certain Star Wars books you probably aren't likely to see them outside of certain Star Wars books. There's this sort of mean standard for how threatening the Empire is allowed to be in any given media, and the further you get from the screen (or old-school screen canon) the further they're allowed to vary from the norm.

trexmeyer wrote:Concerning Luke Skywalker:

Spoiler:

The show is now including a character that knows about Luke Skywalker. Vader discussed him with Fett and Fett saw him in action during RotJ. How do the writers keep pretending that Luke doesn't exist, especially if Fett witnesses Mando working with the New Republic?

It's like...dude...they have a Jedi...just ask about him.

I see a lot of griping on the internet claiming that Disney is trying to 'diminish' Luke's importance to the setting, it's mostly just clickbait, taking a passage from Alphabet Squadron where a character claims Jyn Erso was more responsible for the Death Star's destruction but excluding other instances in the same book where he's referred to with awe; but I do think there's a kernal of truth to it: every major conflict in the old EU required Luke, Han, and/or Leia to intervene (even in Legacy, where Luke's ghost had to pop in and talk the talk a century after his death) and Lucasfilm is clearly very gun shy about falling into the same trap.

Ref Luke.

Who and how many actually knew he was a Jedi?

Boba only ever saw him slinging a Lightsaber around, and failing to mind trick Jabba. Given he was there for the first battle of Geonosis, Luke’s showing probably wasn’t all that impressive.

The rest of Luke’s stuff? Well, in Jedi, to the outside observer, it was Han (leading the commando strike) and Lando/Wedge taking out the Deathstar. Who actually knew, or particularly cared, that Vader turned on his master to save his son?

I don’t think anyone actually saw Luke do anything even vaguely Force related outside of Ben, Yoda, Vader and Palpatine (spin off new canon not withstanding, as I’ve not read much set in the original trilogy)

I've never quite understood the pining for "naturalism" like the OT.

We saw an old man, a cripple, and a scarcely trained boy fighting in the OT. They were not representative of Jedi sabre fighting. That's what the PT is.

For me, it's that the prequels and such went very Wuxia and I've never liked Wuxia action. It's kind of over the top but in an obviously fake way. Speeding it up so that they're not obviously guys and gals on strings doesn't change how silly it looks to me. Every fight was over choreographed, and more like a dance routine than a fight. I think the sequels actually struck a decent balance in their limited saber fights. They were good, but not over the top with flips and spins that didn't make a lick of sense. In the prequels fights just felt so fake, which didn't help the general sense of fakeness throughout the entire prequel trilogy.

The OT was very much the kind of quick precise fighting you'd see in a Japanese samurai film and that's definitely more my preference.

Going by Alphabet Squadron again (set a few years before Mandalorian) we know that word has at least gotten amongst the New Republic military that General Skywalker is a Jedi ("and inheritor of some grand destiny" if I remember the quote) but among them exactly what the Jedi were (or are) seems to have been seriously muddied.

There's basically a generational gap in understanding the Jedi by the time we see this era, in the core systems you have old people who claim the Jedi led armies and tried to assassinate the chancellor leading to the empire's formation middle agers who know the Jedi were a small cult that never had any real power that conspired with the separatists, and younger people who were told the Jedi never existed.

But we do know that Luke's Jedi ties are known well enough that new and esoteric force cults are starting to crop up all over the galaxy.

I don't know about 'diminishing Lukes importance' but it's also, like... A *BIG* galaxy out there.

And you've got a Moff running around with a Light Cruiser.

Sure it's a problem and a problem that's going to need to be dealt with.

But is it a "Drag one guy out of the trillions and trillions and trillions of people from one end of the galaxy to the other, in the Outer Rim, problem?"

I definitely do not buy that Gideon has just a single Arquitens. Like, at all. At all at all.

Rather I suspect it’s a deliberate thing, something to hide the true extent of his forces.

Sure, he may not have ships any bigger, but I reckon we’ll at least see Imperial Raiders, maybe even some Carrack class.

Why no Imperial type/size Star Destroyers? Jakku and the otherwise thorough job done post-Endor. But second line/mothballed classes, almost certainly.

Hey, maybe even Quasar class carriers.

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if the Arc Hammer shows up now...

However, just going by what the Republic can conceivably know right now, there's not really any real reason for anyone more influential than Ahsoka (who is, we shouldn't forget, is already a REAL BIG DEAL) to show up.

Like, worst case scenario, from everything seen so far, it's like, "ok, we'll send a Task Force to deal with it, being made up of a half dozen capital ships."

Republic might know more than we think. We know the one pilot has been asking around about what Mando’s been up to. Who knows what he’s dug up off screen and reported back to the higher ups.

 AduroT wrote:
Republic might know more than we think. We know the one pilot has been asking around about what Mando’s been up to. Who knows what he’s dug up off screen and reported back to the higher ups.

That’s true. With Cars being back on the roster, reinforcements could be easier to rustle up...

 AduroT wrote:
Republic might know more than we think. We know the one pilot has been asking around about what Mando’s been up to. Who knows what he’s dug up off screen and reported back to the higher ups.

It does sort of feel like they're setting up for one of those 'Heros are in a bind, The Imperials have overwhelming numbers, they're all doomed... Oh, look! A wild Republic Fleet appears!' sort of moments somewhere down the line.

I think they’ll play it different.

Cunning Boarding action of the Aquitens in a Magnificent Seven stylee.

Goes reasonably well (I mean, whomever tags along, they’ve got mad skills), until the rest of Gideon’s fleet arrives, requiring a withdrawal and a whistle blow?

"The Arrival of the Cavalry" is a classic Western trope.

I just don't think it'll be, like, The Entire New Republic Fleet with Luke Skywalker and Wedge Antilles at the helm.

It'll just be like, the Star Wars equivalent of a cavalry squadron. Yay, heroic, and yay good enough to have an impact and provide stuff going forward, but nothing overly showy.

After the previous couple of episodes, I thought that they might take it easy for the episode prior to the obvious big two finale episodes - it's the kind of pacing that's been ingrained into TV shows, but nope! Balls out mentalness!

This stuff is playing out like a long-term fan's wet dream; if someone had said halfway through season one, "Ooh, I wonder if Luke is going to show up", I'd have laughed at them. Now, I'm not going to discount anything.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Ref Luke.

Who and how many actually knew he was a Jedi?

Boba only ever saw him slinging a Lightsaber around, and failing to mind trick Jabba. Given he was there for the first battle of Geonosis, Luke’s showing probably wasn’t all that impressive.

The rest of Luke’s stuff? Well, in Jedi, to the outside observer, it was Han (leading the commando strike) and Lando/Wedge taking out the Deathstar. Who actually knew, or particularly cared, that Vader turned on his master to save his son?

I don’t think anyone actually saw Luke do anything even vaguely Force related outside of Ben, Yoda, Vader and Palpatine (spin off new canon not withstanding, as I’ve not read much set in the original trilogy)

In Ep 8 the kids are telling stories about Luke Skywalker and his role in defeating the Empire and then the first order. Rey also knows about him as a hero of the rebellion. Whether or not people have first hand knowledge of Luke as a Jedi or not is beside the point. The STORIES of Luke are being told and retold around the galaxy and probably inflated with every telling.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Ref Luke.

Who and how many actually knew he was a Jedi?

Boba only ever saw him slinging a Lightsaber around, and failing to mind trick Jabba. Given he was there for the first battle of Geonosis, Luke’s showing probably wasn’t all that impressive.

He did announce to a room full of criminals that he was a Jedi Knight, in the heart of Jabba's criminal empire, and if Jabba didn't cooperate, he'd regret it. Jabba then ends up dead.
That kind of thing would get around.

The rest of Luke’s stuff? Well, in Jedi, to the outside observer, it was Han (leading the commando strike) and Lando/Wedge taking out the Deathstar. Who actually knew, or particularly cared, that Vader turned on his master to save his son?

I don’t think anyone actually saw Luke do anything even vaguely Force related outside of Ben, Yoda, Vader and Palpatine (spin off new canon not withstanding, as I’ve not read much set in the original trilogy)

Stuff set during the OT was very generous with the idea that the galaxy knew he was a Jedi.

In the new trilogy, no one is confused about the idea of Jedi. Or Luke Skywalker being a Jedi.
Admittedly no one is puzzled or surprised by the New Order either, which makes the Republic indifference and the need for a Resistance very, very confusing in The Force Awakens.

The OT to PT has some severe consistency issues and the ST just makes it exponentially worse.

 trexmeyer wrote:
The OT to PT has some severe consistency issues and the ST just makes it exponentially worse.

But what about the TPS reports?

 AduroT wrote:

 trexmeyer wrote:
The OT to PT has some severe consistency issues and the ST just makes it exponentially worse.

But what about the TPS reports?

I don't know about TPS reports, but I can talk to you about our Lord and Savior, AGILE.