Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

The_Real_Chris wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
It’s almost as if Poe got a lot of pilots and crew killed.

Yeah but any cost/benefit analysis would accept losing a bunch of, I assume, antique bombers in return for a major cap ship. That is the whole point of carrier aviation - losing small amounts of men and material to cause far greater loses from sinking enemy battleships.

Even better cost/benefit when the exposition which clunks down to us says that said capitol ship is a fleet killer, which is about to fire on your... fleet! (also WW2 bombers in space were dumb).

Can't complain too much about dumb tech in star wars, it isn't exactly internally consistent at the best of times. Instead go watch Expanse for well thought through or BSG for on the surface looking great...

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
It’s the lives. Yes taking out the Dreadnought denied the First Order a strategic asset. But at significant cost in Resistance lives.

At that point, the plan appeared to be “right, we’ve wrecked Starkiller Base, but now they know where we are. Let’s skedaddle before they get here”. I’m not persuaded Poe’s attack preserved the majority of the fleet.

Not sure why that particular sequence is worth arguing about. Captain (or was it Commander?) Poe orders the bombers to attack and Leia stands by and lets it happen. Later on she's super unhappy that he did that. The issue? Captain/Commander Poe doesn't order gak if an admiral or the frigging leader of the Resistance disagrees with him. The whole thing is complete bs before you even get to the question of how Leia should reasonably act in that situation and how that relates to what she does in Ahsoka.

So yeah. Right back to trying to fix movies with massive script problems with supplemental material that can't change anything about those massive script problems. It's not helping, Let the sequels die. Kill them if you have to.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:
For example Leia overruling the council and letting Hera off the hook for her unsanctioned action which got two pilots killed, but in the sequel trilogy slapping Poe for his unsanctioned action which saved the whole Rebellion...

It’s almost as if Poe got a lot of pilots and crew killed.

It’s almost as if a person can mature and shift their opinion over time.

Or it's just three gak movies...

 Geifer wrote:


However, good reason does not automatically lead to good execution. You have to be mindful of how you do things, not just why.

That's the crux of it for me. MDG seems very keen to criticise people for not thinking through the reasons why something may have been done. Ignoring for a moment that often that seems to involve bending over backwards to be generous to some pretty bad writing, it also completely ignores the fact that execution is the main determining factor in whether something is successful.

A lot of the recent SW shows have had pacing issues caused by similar approaches. Entire episodes are sometimes given over to things that don't seem important at the time and turn out to not actually be all that important to the show they're in (the Coruscant episode in Mando is a good example). Or we have significant time taken out of Ahsoka to deal with the New Republic stuff that ultimately doesn't go anywhere. Maybe it will eventually, but it's the time spent on it versus the payoff in the show I'm watching that's important. You can set things up for the future while still making the events that do so relevant and interesting in the context of the show they appear in. I think SW shows have consistently failed with that when they've tried it.

It wouldn't be so bad if MDG took off the stan blinders for a bit and agreed to disagree rather than trying to justify every bit of bad writing or plot hole that exists in recent SW offerings, or trying to deny it behind the smug veneer of "media literacy" that he appears to be solely blessed with.

I swear Disney could poop out a Star Wars special with nothing but Ewoks twisting their nips for two hours and he would probably still say it was a cinematic masterpiece. I think the only thing that might turn him off is if it was a Rick and Morty crossover episode with Star Wars but even then I think his fanboyism would win over.

"it wouldnt be so bad if you took off the hater blinders for a bit and agreed to disagree..."

I think thats kind of an unfair thing to ask of someone and isn't approaching the discussion or the individual in good faith.

chaos0xomega wrote:
"it wouldnt be so bad if you took off the hater blinders for a bit and agreed to disagree..."

I think thats kind of an unfair thing to ask of someone and isn't approaching the discussion or the individual in good faith.

Someone who calls people who disagree with their opinions 'Internet weirdos' is also not approaching the discussion in good faith.

Tit for tat.

ehh, you gotta point there...

Then again, MDG likes rocky horror, so hes a weirdo too. I rule his weirdo accusation above board, play may continue.

It's fair for people who like a thing to like a thing. Even if it's bad. People should like what they like and like it to whatever extent they like it.

But also it's fair to call out a thing for all it's problems. Especially if those problems are less opinion and more technical. Pacing, camera work, plot that goes nowhere. Filler episodes. All fair critiques.

SW does not have a great track record. Anywhere. Movies or D+. Before Disney acquired it or after. It has always been more bad than good.

Even during the release of the Orig Trilogy you had the x mas special, Droids and Ewok cartoons and movies like Caravan of Courage (I LIKE Caravan of Courage, but I would be hard pressed to call it good).

The innocent in me wants to believe that the seeding of bits and bobs for one show into another is an attempt to create a more connected feel to the stories.

My cynical side sees it as a way to force people into watching all of the shows. (Which seems pointless for a couple of reasons.)

 Souleater wrote:

My cynical side sees it as a way to force people into watching all of the shows. (Which seems pointless for a couple of reasons.)

I can see a logic to it. Back in the old "4 channels only" you had to fight for the best time slots of the day and week with other shows. Once you were in your slot you'd either seek to improve it or fight to keep it as a regular time slot.

Today there are no time slots, as soon as your show is live on streaming the viewer can watch it any day; any time. So instead of the limit being the time in the day for 4 channels; its purely now the time in the day of your viewing market. So if you want your franchise to do well and your franchise shows to do well; one tactic for a bigger studio is to simply smother the market. Instead of 1 at a time do 3 or 4. If you can pump out that many Starwars shows, another sci-fi series is going to have a hard time penetrating the streaming market. If everyone is watching X in their weekly free time then there's less time or no time for Y and Z.

Esp when you consider that the executives on top who approve shows for more budgets will be looking at launch day and early viewing numbers. It doesn't matter if you get big numbers in 4 years; you need them in the days/weeks after you go live

 Lance845 wrote:


SW does not have a great track record. Anywhere. Movies or D+. Before Disney acquired it or after. It has always been more bad than good.

That's a massive understatement.

We went from not knowing how much of Vader was cybernetic to the guy being a quadriplegic.
Qui-Gonn Jinn got stabbed and died. Sabine got stabbed and lived.
Maul was cut in half and somehow returned, stronger than before.
Fett survived the Sarlacc and became a friendly mob mobss, which is even worse than EU Fett surviving the Sarlacc and becoming Mandalore.
Luke ovexerted himself and died.
Midichlorians exist.
The Clone Wars makes no sense as a name.

trexmeyer wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:


SW does not have a great track record. Anywhere. Movies or D+. Before Disney acquired it or after. It has always been more bad than good.

That's a massive understatement.

Qui-Gonn Jinn got stabbed and died. Sabine got stabbed and lived.

And? Apparently Jinn got stabbed somewhere really vital/ran out of HP. Sabine did not. Also remember that the needs of the plot dictates wether a character lives/dies.

Of course someone specifically defends the Sabine stabbing and only that. You're definitely not remotely biased about anything.

Getting stabbed by a lightsaber almost anywhere in the torso, especially the stomach, should be fatal. They cauterize flesh. Sabine was stabbed where her liver or intensines should be located at. At the very least she should have needed a prolonged dive in a bacta tank and possibly a few new organs or colonoscopy bag. It's not just bad writing, it's almost intentionally awful to the point where I wonder if it is intended to be ragebait. There is no defense for it beyond being a mindless consumer of garbage. You might take offense to that, it might be a bit harsh, but Shin could've won that fight in dozens, hundreds, thousands of different ways perhaps, but instead the writers chose a course of action so mindnumbingly stupid I struggle to understand how it was ever given the green light.

FWIW, I feel exactly the same way about Maul surviving being cleaved in two, Palpatine returning from wherever he was chilling, and Fett's survival so you can miss me with the incoming accusations of sexism.

Edit: Aside from the stabbing I thought the Shin-Sabine duel had excellent choreography that was as good as anything we've seen in Star Wars.

It’s definitely an unforced error, one of dozens in Ahsoka.


There’s a whole subplot about the NR that makes everyone involved stupid that could have simply been avoided with one line of dialogue: “we can’t spare any capital ships while Moff Gluppo’s attacking Bumfooine. Best I can give you is a shuttle and a squad of X-Wings.” The problem is the writers/execs/Disney want certain kinds of drama, certain set ups for the sequel trilogy, and possibly certain scenes for the trailer (dramatic stabbing?) that just don’t add up to a good story.

And then Sabine almost blows up the hospital with an exploding droid head, and everyone is just cool with it.

trexmeyer wrote:
Of course someone specifically defends the Sabine stabbing and only that. You're definitely not remotely biased about anything.

Sure, there's things I'm biased about. I'm just not biased about this. Why? Because I know that plot dictates who dies from being stabbed/shot/blown-up/or worse/etc. And I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen it happen in movies, TV shows, comics.... It's just how this stuff works. This time? This time it was done with a lightsaber (shrugs).

trexmeyer wrote:
Getting stabbed by a lightsaber almost anywhere in the torso, especially the stomach, should be fatal. They cauterize flesh. Sabine was stabbed where her liver or intensines should be located at. At the very least she should have needed a prolonged dive in a bacta tank and possibly a few new organs or colonoscopy bag. It's not just bad writing, it's almost intentionally awful to the point where I wonder if it is intended to be ragebait. There is no defense for it beyond being a mindless consumer of garbage. You might take offense to that, it might be a bit harsh, but Shin could've won that fight in dozens, hundreds, thousands of different ways perhaps, but instead the writers chose a course of action so mindnumbingly stupid I struggle to understand how it was ever given the green light.

Well, if it was rage-bait? Then it seems to have worked as you seem pretty enraged.

I’m just gonna think of Last Action Hero and Arnold being shot.

ccs wrote:

trexmeyer wrote:
Of course someone specifically defends the Sabine stabbing and only that. You're definitely not remotely biased about anything.

Sure, there's things I'm biased about. I'm just not biased about this. Why? Because I know that plot dictates who dies from being stabbed/shot/blown-up/or worse/etc. And I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen it happen in movies, TV shows, comics.... It's just how this stuff works. This time? This time it was done with a lightsaber (shrugs).

Which is fine. Yet again, it's the execution that's the problem, not the basic idea. There are any number of ways the writers could have had Shin win that fight and achieve the character goals they wanted and they went with what feels like the worst possible option. Sabine could have been stabbed in the shoulder, or had her arms or legs heavily injured, for example (something that might even then have shown Shin to be cruel and vindictive, in contrast to her master, which may itself have been an interesting character moment for her). But they went with this obvious fake-out, purely for shock value, then ended up in this weird situation where they had to play up the end of the fight as potentially fatal yet three scenes later she's up in bed, laughing and joking.

It undermines the villain, treats the audience like idiots and makes no logical sense. It's like a holy trinity of bad writing.

 Lance845 wrote:
.

Even during the release of the Orig Trilogy you had the x mas special, Droids and Ewok cartoons and movies like Caravan of Courage (I LIKE Caravan of Courage, but I would be hard pressed to call it good).

Yup, it's always been kids' shows and movies through and through. The original trilogy had things going for it, sure, but it also was wildly inconsistent, had cardboard characters, terrible dialogue (bar a few popculture approved oneliners) and absolutely cringy attempted humour most fans pretend doesn't exist ("bwahaha, a clumsy droid fell from the stairs, somebody stop me!").

Andor and in some parts a few video games tried to develop it into a different direction successfully but I think it was despite what the setting is in general, not thanks to it.

ccs wrote:

trexmeyer wrote:


Qui-Gonn Jinn got stabbed and died. Sabine got stabbed and lived.

And?

And it's bad for Star Wars as a brand when internal consistency is discarded. Lightsaber impalement has been established as a lethal blow in the setting, and was true until it wasn't.

It’s not as inconsistent as made out.

First, the areas stabbed aren’t identical. Qui-Gonn is pretty central on the torso, with the blade emerging from his back, having likely penetrated his spine. Sabine? Lower right hand side. Not quite sure if it went through or just under the rib cage.

Second, Maul’s blade appears to have been lodged in Qui-Gonn for a longer period. Referring back to the movies opening scenes, we see that whilst a Lightsaber will cook whatever it’s slotted into, it’s not a flash fry, for want of a better term.

That placement and timing matters. From what we see, at worst Sabine took the blade to a lung. A serious, but not automatically fatal wound. With Shin’s blade not being held there, we can easily extrapolate it didn’t have the time to cook surrounding tissue. So Sabine is critically injured, but the wound itself is cauterised. Qui-Gonn? Multiple organs likely penetrated, spinal cord possibly cut, and surrounding cooking of tissue from the longer time the blade was in him.

Given we’ve seen Vader rebuilt from the crispiest nugget the Galaxy has ever seen, we can reasonably say medical tech is sufficiently advanced that, applied in good time, you can survive a lot in Star Wars.

One could also argue that a Force user might have the capacity to save themselves with the power of the force; however it seems that its likely a rare skill/hard to master or something that no one really knows how to master. So sometimes panic and the Force lets it work and sometimes it fails.

You could even argue that Anakin, Maul and the Emperor all show greater capacity to take injury and thus potentially the "Dark Side" makes it easier to preserve your body instead of passing on. Thus allowing them to overcome wounds that "Light Side" Force users are more likely to die from

It’s also like claiming that just because Stab Victim A died from their wounds, Stab Victim B is doomed - regardless of exactly where they were stabbed.

Mess up the heart or the liver, and your chances of survival are just gonna be lower than someone who was stabbed in the gut or kidneys.

But of course, by pointing out the injuries in question aren’t identical, I’m just being a “Stan” and a “fanboy”, no?

Slipspace wrote:


A lot of the recent SW shows have had pacing issues caused by similar approaches. Entire episodes are sometimes given over to things that don't seem important at the time and turn out to not actually be all that important to the show they're in (the Coruscant episode in Mando is a good example). Or we have significant time taken out of Ahsoka to deal with the New Republic stuff that ultimately doesn't go anywhere. Maybe it will eventually, but it's the time spent on it versus the payoff in the show I'm watching that's important. You can set things up for the future while still making the events that do so relevant and interesting in the context of the show they appear in. I think SW shows have consistently failed with that when they've tried it.

I think they mastered this in Book of Boba. Whatever was going on in the Ringworld they cut to for the Mando episodes was 100x more interesting than the rest of the show.
In that particular case, they undermined the finale of the show and the titular character. Which is arguably worse than the filler segments of Mando3 and Ahsoka, as hamfisted and uninteresting as they are.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
It’s also like claiming that just because Stab Victim A died from their wounds, Stab Victim B is doomed - regardless of exactly where they were stabbed.

Mess up the heart or the liver, and your chances of survival are just gonna be lower than someone who was stabbed in the gut or kidneys.

But of course, by pointing out the injuries in question aren’t identical, I’m just being a “Stan” and a “fanboy”, no?

We've now had 3 separate situations in recent SW shows where a character is impaled by a lightsaber and lived (Grand Inquisitor and uh, whatever the female Inquisitor is called in Obi Wan, and Sabine in Ahsoka). In better written shows that might actually mean the chances of survival are quite high in these cases. The problem is in each of the 3 cases there's no reason why the victim should survive or be allowed to survive. In all 3 cases the attack was delivered by a trained attacker and supposed to be lethal, but it isn't for...reasons. Better writers would have realised this and come up with different scenarios with more logical, consistent explanations. That's the problem.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

With Shin’s blade not being held there, we can easily extrapolate it didn’t have the time to cook surrounding tissue.
Second, Maul’s blade appears to have been lodged in Qui-Gonn for a longer period.
But of course, by pointing out the injuries in question aren’t identical, I’m just being a “Stan” and a “fanboy”, no?

Darth Maul stabbing in spoiler.






I have absolutely no idea why would you lie about something as basic as "Shin's blade not being held there."
Edit: It's also easy enough to see that in both instances the blade was held internally for nearly the same duration.

Fair point when viewed back to back.

But you’ve still not addressed the injuries aren’t in the same location.

Qui-Gonn clearly gets it through the spine. Sabine? Either through a lung, or a gut shot just beneath the ribcage.

Those are very different wounds when it comes to survival, no?

Slipspace wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
It’s also like claiming that just because Stab Victim A died from their wounds, Stab Victim B is doomed - regardless of exactly where they were stabbed.

Mess up the heart or the liver, and your chances of survival are just gonna be lower than someone who was stabbed in the gut or kidneys.

But of course, by pointing out the injuries in question aren’t identical, I’m just being a “Stan” and a “fanboy”, no?

We've now had 3 separate situations in recent SW shows where a character is impaled by a lightsaber and lived (Grand Inquisitor and uh, whatever the female Inquisitor is called in Obi Wan, and Sabine in Ahsoka). In better written shows that might actually mean the chances of survival are quite high in these cases. The problem is in each of the 3 cases there's no reason why the victim should survive or be allowed to survive. In all 3 cases the attack was delivered by a trained attacker and supposed to be lethal, but it isn't for...reasons. Better writers would have realised this and come up with different scenarios with more logical, consistent explanations. That's the problem.

On the one hand, yes to all of that.

On the other hand, Qui-Gon probably just lost the will to live. There's no cure for that, as we all know.

Also, Third Sister's name is Third Sister, so you don't have to remember her actual name. Which I don't.