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Psyren

2024-05-28, 02:31 PM

There's a couple of Doctor Who episodes that fit this for me:

Girl In The Fireplace: It's often considered one of the best in season 2, but all I see when I watch it is the Doctor being really creepy towards a little girl who eventually becomes an adult, a notable historical figure no less so there's bound to be all kinds of fixed points surrounding her life, and all-but-abandoning his current companion slash quasi-love-interest on a derelict spaceship to be with her. I consider it Moffat's weakest episode before becoming showrunner by far.

Human Nature/Family of Blood: This two-parter where the Doctor becomes human is widely hailed for its premise and Tennant's performance as John Smith, but all I think about is how unfair and cruel it is for him to put his second companion Martha Jones in a position like that, as a woman of color essentially trapped in the past. There are way worse places he could have stranded her besides pre-WW1 Britain but I still found it immensely irresponsible.

Journey to the Center of the TARDIS: This is the rare opposite case, an episode I love that the wider fandom seems to dislike. Actually, I enjoy pretty much every episode in the pretty underrated Series 7B (Okay, Crimson Horror really is that bad, but even that one has Olenna Tyrell!) I get the complaints about the Van Balen brothers but I absolutely adore getting to see more of the TARDIS like the library and the swimming pool, as well as the growing conflict between 11 and the seemingly impossible girl that he's practically losing his mind trying to figure out. And the Time Zombies are a crazy fun premise.

Trafalgar

2024-05-28, 02:35 PM

86 named. Every thread here is a Star Wars thread!

- M

I forget who coined it but someone here once posted that:

Every GitP thread eventually becomes a Star Wars thread and every Star Wars thread eventually becomes a Last Jedi thread.

Errorname

2024-05-28, 03:31 PM

Again, in the face of the full list for her and the closest analogues in terms of profile, I find that a very baffling conclusion.

I really don't?

Now admittedly, I take a much harsher view on a lot of Daenerys's suitors than you do. She grows to love Drogo but that is far from an uncomplicated relationship, her own Brother has a creepy incest crush on her, her bodyguard tries to groom her (and the show has the audacity to be more sympathetic to his pain from her rejecting him than her for being betrayed by someone she trusted), for political reasons she marries an ex-slaver who she hates*, she has a fling with a mercenary and she falls in love with a man who turns out to be her own nephew and who also murders her.

These are not exactly idealized relationships.

Disagreed, although their Touched by Daenerys bits really do get stupid. (I consider the scene where the Reach and Dorne decide to ally with her and explain their rationale for that actively worse than nearly anything in the last seasons.)

4 is the last remotely good season and even that one has some questionable choices. Honestly 5 might be the worst of the lot, 7 and 8 are stupid but by that point they're already over the event horizon on this turning out good so you might as well turn your brain off and look at the pretty war crimes.

And yet, the "conflict between former slaves" thing comes up once and is never mentioned again, the "dragons are eating people" thing just quietly solves itself and Um That leaves the "reactionary terrorists" thing which is a bunch of strawmen with eminently questionable tactics scoring a total of two S7/8 style victories that don't make much sense and achieve even less in the grand scheme of things. Oh, and there's the siege thing resolved in, like, two minutes, I guess. (Admittedly, the book gave that one more love.)

The reason they try to speed through all those very serious problems is so they do not get completely stuck in Meereen. Martin committing Daenerys to attempt the reconstruction of a foreign city whose problems are completely divorced from the rest of the story is one of the weirder decisions in the books.

The show cuts a bunch of characters and changes the sequence a bunch and generally makes a botch of a plotline that was already messy and renders it completely nonsensical, but these are general writing failures and similar problems are in evidence in other plotlines.

With the implication that Danerys renaming the place and burning a few more people (mostly save soldiers, for an extra bit of funny) was a ringing victory that solved the problem. Rising orchestral tune, sail into the sunset triumphant.

Genuinely I think a non-zero part of the reason they played that triumphant is "we're finally out of Meereen and taking these characters to where the stories people actually care about are happening!". But yes, I would agree that they treat her actions weirdly, Game of Thrones has a skewed sense of morality that comes up in a lot of places.

Again, I'm not disagreeing that there are problems with this show, as mentioned I think season 5-8 are all pretty badly written, I just dispute that it's just a Daenerys thing.

I have a harder time seeing the differences between Luke and Rey in terms of aptitude and ability...understood the hate the character received, but never the basis of the explanation for it, if you will.

Oh, every trait that would make Rey a "sue" is shared with Luke, the argument is garbage. But I see how someone gets to it. Rey is clearly the hero of the story and many of the traits that make up a "sue" are stock protagonist things in this sort of story. I wouldn't call it reasonable but I see how it happens.

I can't see that for Game of Thrones, especially after the last season made it clear what their endgoal was for the character. I'd have an easier time seeing someone argue for Arya or Tyrion, which I wouldn't agree with either but would at least make sense to me.

Rynjin

2024-05-28, 04:08 PM

Now, that, on the other hand, is where my surprise over being in the minority comes in: Wizard's First Rule is probably the worst of the lot. Worse even than Soul of Fire or Naked Empire, and that's a feat. It's the book that introduces such mainstays as Confessors, Mord-Sith, villains cartoonishly bad enough to sacrifice children in overeroticised ways, and randomly outlaw fire just so that the Toxic Masculinity Good Guy Savages have a good excuse for Morally Justified Cannibalism In terms of tossing things aside, it has the highest ratio of random wordbuilding elements forgotten by Goodkind five pages after he introduced them of all books. It's entire second half is one prolonged non-consensual BDSM session I still don't know how or why I soldiered through. Even the freaking prose is more purple in it. No, it's not the almost charming only readable installment. It's the low point.

The first book is just generic fantasy schlock, which I've always been a sucker for. Also to 13-or-14-year-old-me whose only access to titillating material was romance novels and the like, a prolonged BDSM session was a selling point, not a detractor.

The follow-up books are generic fantasy schlock with an agenda, which is automatically worse than schlock on its own.

Gnoman

2024-05-28, 04:14 PM

The Sword of Truth books have sold ~25 million copies, putting the series roughly on par with the Outlander novels and ahead of well known stuff like Redwall, Shannara, and Percy Jackson, and easily in the top 20 of fantasy series/novels all time.

If that's 25 million copies for the series, it is heavily skewed by there being 21 of the things. Shanarra has 8, Percy Jackson has 7, and Redwall is a talking animal series that thus isn't every fantasy reader's cup of tea. The Sword of Truth also debuted during a huge fantasy boom fueled by The Wheel of Time and the various D&D novels, giving it a boost that doesn't necessarily translate into a fanbase.

Mechalich

2024-05-28, 04:59 PM

Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire has its morality skewed by an existential threat, something revealed in the very first scene. The ice zombies are coming for everyone and the audience is aware of this the entire time. Additionally, the audience is aware - and the story makes very clear - that certain events are absolutely essential to preventing the 'ice zombies, everyone dies' ending. For example, Jon Snow is essential to saving the world, which is why the fans didn't believe in his death even in a story in which supposedly no character was safe. Similarly, Daenerys has to take her dragons to Westeros in order to save the world. There is essentially no price that is too high to make that happen. Meereen descends into horrific chaos? Kings Landing gets burned to the ground? So what? Dany still saved the world from ice zombies!

This ice-zombie-centered morality is compounded by the fact that the world of ASOIAF contains essentially no decent moral actors. All of its societies are miserable piles of suckage, it's just that the specific variations differ and the prospects of enacting positive change appear equally impossible in functionally all cases (the show, for what it's worth, ultimately chose an ending in which the society became worse overall by reducing the stability of a hereditary monarchy to an elected one that almost guaranteed fragmentation). Heck, even trying to do better is generally portrayed as simply doomed to make things worse, since the inciting impetus behind all the violence in the books is Varys' desire to place 'good king' on the throne.

It's actually 25 million copies as of 2008, apparently, when only the first 12 books had been published. And I'm not saying the numbers aren't inflated, a lot of people, including me, read at least some of the books because of the Wheel of Time, but even 1 million fans is a big fanbase by the standards of fantasy series. Also, the, um, movement, behind the novels politics has significant number of highly motivated members, which makes the fandom rather vocal. The popularity of the Sword of Truth is one of those things we might wish wasn't true about fantasy publishing in the US, but it's not something whose existence can be denied.

SerTabris

2024-05-28, 05:09 PM

Positive: Since somebody mentioned the Sword of Truth books, I'll throw in The Legend of the Seeker tv series, which even as someone who had read the books at that point I thought was better. The only good book in that entire series is the first one, and The Seeker captures those fun elements and then runs with them instead of tossing them aside for Gary Stu-protagonism turned to 11 and hamfisted political rants I recognized as being awkward and forced even as a young teen.

People seemed to dislike the show for some reason? I dunno how those books ever got a fanbase big enough to care that the series got the hatchet treatment.

I remember that show! It wasn't great, but I remember it being a pretty fun fantasy show to watch.

Which reminds me of the Shannara Chronicles; I'm not sure what the prevailing opinion on it was (though it was cancelled, so can't have been that positive), but I also thought it was pretty fun, and having read the first Shannara book I think their decision to just skip it and start with the second one is pretty reasonable. And making the love triangle an actual triangle with three sides, that was fun. (Straight-only "love triangles", when you draw them out, are just angles.)

MinimanMidget

2024-05-28, 05:23 PM

I agree with your general argument, but there are actually 30 Shannara books now. Apparently Brooks just...didn't stop writing them.

Saph

2024-05-28, 05:44 PM

(Apologies for this, but . . . it does actually fit the topic. Sorry.)

So most of the time, when I don't like a thing but other people do, or when I like a thing but other people don't, I can understand why. But every now and then, I run into a big exception to that. And probably the biggest one is Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens.

I first watched it back in 2020, as part of a big Star Wars watchthrough that I was doing on this forum. And the main thing I knew going in was that on RT, it had a 90%+ critic score and an 80%+ audience score. So I figured there was a chance it was at least reasonably good.

It wasn't. For anyone who cares, I wrote down my thoughts as I was watching it here (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24338868&postcount=77) and here (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24339501&postcount=86), but the TLDR is: it was awful. The protagonists are flat, the villains are unthreatening, the plotline is a bad rip-off of A New Hope, the dialogue is cringeworthy, the internal logic is nonexistent, there's no sense of scale, the action sequences are boring, and there's zero dramatic tension. It wasn't even bad in a fun way. You'd have to pay me to make me watch the thing again.

Later on The Last Jedi came out, and people started to turn against the sequels in a big way. But for my money, the writing was on the wall back with the previous movie. Now that Disney Star Wars has turned into a dumpster fire I think people are starting to go back and be a lot more critical of Episode VII, but I still think it gets a much, much easier ride than it deserves.

Errorname

2024-05-28, 05:47 PM

Meereen descends into horrific chaos?

I don't even know what they want us to assume happens in Meereen. Frankly I assumed the Harpies came back and threw Daario in a ditch the second Daenerys left. Baffling that they did the "random mercenary becomes ruler of major territory because they're a character you know" twice, but at least with Daario they needed to write him out somehow and they cut the character who is most likely to end up ruling Meereen in the books. I think they just wanted the audience to not worry about it. Daario can handle it, it's fine.

It would have been a lot better if they did imply that Meereen becomes another Astapor after Daenerys leaves, but saying "Daenerys leaves brutal destruction and ruin in her wake" would make their final big twist less shocking so I guess we can't do that.

Now that Disney Star Wars has turned into a dumpster fire I think people are starting to go back and be a lot more critical of Episode VII, but I still think it gets a much, much easier ride than it deserves.

It's the worst of the three and I don't think it's close. Last Jedi has some actual ambition, it wants to be an actual movie, while Rise of Skywalker is brutally insecure and pulling itself in a dozen directions at once. I wouldn't call either good movies, but they're interesting movies.

Meanwhile the Force Awakens is a cynical corporate exercise and not much else. There's nothing of value there.

ecarden

2024-05-28, 06:26 PM

I mostly agree, but I think that there's a significant difference in consequences which they suffer, which is a, probably unavoidable problem of the setup they gave her, nothing inherent in her character or how they treated her. But when you cast Ben Solo as her antagonist/maybe love interest, you've got a real problem. He can't cut off her hand (to choose an example entirely at random) for the same reason he can't actually just, like, punch her in their fight scenes and it has to be Force attacks or lightsaber attacks which don't hit.

Because if he does, a big man (Driver is 6'2") beating on a small (well, not that small, she 5'7") woman and that really won't work if he's either meant to be redeemed in the end, or be her love interest in the end. Does it make any sense that trying to cut off her head is fine, but punching her in the face isn't? Not really logically, but it does matter. And since Kylo's basically the only physical threat to her in that series, no mistake can have too many physical consequences. Like, for a trilogy so in love with mirroring what came earlier, it is moderately shocking that Rey didn't lose a hand the way every other Force wielding protagonist did.

Some people play this as Rey being perfect, or better than Luke or something, but I think it's pretty clearly just a catch-22 of their other writing choices, choices I think were mostly bad, but that's a different problem. Rey makes quite a few mistakes, she just suffers less for them then either Anakin or Luke...but that's because the enemy she faces is far less capable than either Vader or Dooku, so it's fine.

On the general topic, I tend to agree with the folks saying Mary Sue mostly works as a fanfic trope. For all the many, many definitions that TvTropes tries to make, I think it boils down to 'self-inserting (or just inserting) a new protagonist into the canon for your fanfic.' All the stuff about Mary Sue definitions is either just standard protagonist stuff, or unfortunately common protagonist centered morality.

gbaji

2024-05-28, 08:08 PM

The end result is that professional movie critics tend to be more excited by something new, something different than the average person. An average person, seeing a somewhat-clichéd-but-well-done bit, might say that it's well done. The professional critic, on the other hand, has seen that cliché over and over and over and over and is so sick of it that they only see how clichéd it is. So a movie that finally does something different or just doesn't fall into the same-old-tropes is going to automatically get bonus points from many critics just because they don't have that "oh, God, this again" reaction.

I'd buy this, except for the absurd consistency with which professional critics seem to apply (and reward!) the same formulaic set of "this is good"/"this is bad" rules to their critiques. If they were actually interested in something new, they would give positive reviews to new ideas and whatnot. But they overwhelmingly cheer the most formulaic "checks the boxes" garbage possible.

Don't get me wrong. A really bad film will be outted as really bad by critics and will, in fact, be really bad. And really good films, will *usually* be recognized as such as well. It's the vast majority that sits somewhere in the middle where I pretty consistently find that all the stuff the critics tell me is bad about a film turn out to be the exact things that I liked, while the stuff they gush over is the garbage that I have no interest in at all (or find fomulaic, cheap, dumb, etc).

Could just be me though. Probably. Maybe...

I don't think this breakdown works at all. The "experts/critics" from establishment media outlets are known much more for being borderline marketing agents for major corporate franchises than the "film snobs" they used to be, while Youtube critics (who are probably far more influential at this point) are generally more in line with "casual fan" opinion.

Meanwhile, reviews from the general public are always going to be dominated by people who have a strong opinion, because people are more motivated to talk about things they loved or hated than things that were "okay", but this doesn't mean that those people are from any one general category of fan. Someone may be 'meh' on most of the MCU, but really like and really hate a few MCU movies.

The old "snotty pretentious critics vs. dumb slob mass audiences" dynamic, to whatever degree it existed, died when the internet stripped professional film critics of their monopoly of public discussion of films.

Ah. I may have been a bit unclear in my earlier post. When I said "rate", I did not mean "review". I'm talking about the difference between critics publishing reviews (online or in magazines/papers/whatever), and fans writing their opinions on various online sites, versus me actually talking to people I know and asking them about the film. The latter are the "real people" I'm talking about. In both of the first two categories, overwhelmingly you are getting a small and (usually) biased segment of those who saw the film. Either the most vocal (fans) or the most connected (critics). And yes, I'm including us (and me) in that "fans" category.

"reviews from the general public", if it's not people I'm talking to directly still gets filtered through the "loudest voices wins" process that the internet tends to promote. Which, everything else being equal, tends towards fans. And yeah, I tend to not place a lot of weight on reviews of something based on "I have a fan theory that I love, and this film didn't fulfill that fantasy in my head that I've been holding onto, so I hate it and it's terrible and blah blah blah" (or, "this film contained some elements that matched my fan theories so it's great!") that so fills fan sites.

I tend to find that the best judge of a film is me talking to someone who is not a fan of the source material at all, and is just telling me whether they liked the story/characters/whatever. If that person enjoyed the film, it's a reasonable bet that the basic quality is good. Doesn't mean I wont find things that I like/dislike on my own and for my own reasons, but it's probably a good start.

The one thing I would agree with is that a lot of Daenerys's supporting cast is thinly sketched. That is fair, but I think "they're strawmen who exist to oppose or salivate after Daenerys" is a misdiagnosis, it comes down to fundamental issues with how Martin approaches Essos in general rather than specifically a Daenerys problem. Notably I think you start seeing the same problems when ADWD brings other PoVs to Essos, Tyrion and Quentyn meet a few standouts but a lot of the Essosi are thinly characterized and not memorable, and it does make Daenerys's chapters harder for me than her closest counterpart, Jon, who has a much more robust supporting cast.

Part of the problem is that GRRM was specifically writing a story about Westeros and events occuring there. The entire Essos bits were only supposed to provide background for Dany when she shows up in Westeros with her dragons. But then he got mired in the politics and the bloat of his Westereos characters and situations, so had to keep filling in more things in Essos to maintain some bits of balance, which resulted in a boatload of basic surface level filler (with admittedly some interesting bits). And yeah, it's somewhat jarring going from the incredibly detailed and deep characters and plots and schemes in the West, to the much more "skipping the surface" approach in the East.

Can't blame an author for falling in love with a project and really wanting to breathe life into it. But.... yeah. The consequence is that the parts he wasn't as interested in became really really obvious.

The specific criticism of the way it played out in the series was that there's also no internal logic to why she decides to go full Mad Queen. There's no clear answer to why Daenerys thought it was a good idea in that moment to burn a lot of **** down. And that's what you need to even approach what they were going for. A cohesive internal world that shows why the character does what they do, rather than just "plot needs this to happen so everyone can point and say "Dragon Lady Bad".

It's funny, because I encounter this a lot. And I'm always confused by it. Did folks just not watch the same series that I did (assuming we're talking about the series here)? There are massive amounts of foreshadowing of this, through the entire series. Every single time she's presented with a problem to solve "light it/them on fire" is pretty much her first impulse. For all her talk about changing the world, breaking the cycle/wheel/chains/whatever, the fact is that she's just as much a "might makes right" problem as what she's fighting against. And she's constantly driven by her anger, often only being kept in check by her advisors.

So yeah. It was not surprising at all to me. Doubly so given GRRM's earlier trope-aversions on "heroic characters". I think that the series audience got kinda lulled into a false sense of security that it wouldn't happen, because the series had gone into a very stock/standard "heroic fantasy where the good guys win" mode for the last couple seasons. I remember commenting on it to several of my friends. When Jon "dies", everyone knew and expected that he would come back. And he did. And I remember pointing that out and warning my friends that "I would not count on that continuing". So yeah... when the moment came I knew which direction it would go. There was no need for the character anymore, so it was the perfect point for a "shocking turn/twist". Would have been happy either way, but wasn't at all surprised.

If you think about it (and just cause a SW reference is needed here), Dany's story is basically "Luke Skywalker does join the Emperor at the end". We're told it's a risk the whole time. It's a danger. You can turn to the dark side. But we trust that he wont because this is not that kind of story (but obviously the PT was, so... duh again!). So of course Luke rejects the dark side.

Why on earth did anyone assume Dany would do the same? It's GRRM. Of course the hero, who we've been told all along has a dark destiny and is constantly at risk of turning evil, but has been resisting it through the whole series (well, most of the time), would give in to it at the end. Because this *is* that kind of story.

Daenarys turning into a villain didn't come as a shock to me - it seemed like a logical conclusion to the strain she'd been under for a very long time, and in line with her previous acts when not given "proper respect", such as burning of all the Dothraki leaders.

Yup. Again. There was so much foreshadowing of this that it's absurd that anyone was surprised (I'm making a distinction between "shock" and "surprise" here). I think that most of us have been trained (cause it's a common trope) to assume that the hero character will always turn away from evil in this sort of crisis point (cause it's what always happens). So to me it was incredibly refreshing to see someone say "hey. Why not have the hero not reject their evil impulses?".

The events and timeline are both completely at odds with what is implied in episode 4, to the point that the exchange between Leia and Vader at the start of ANH becomes almost farcical if viewed in the context of Rogue One.

The attempt to claim some kind of diplomatic status made perfect sense. Didn't work, but in the context of the setting, it made sense to at least try. At that point in time, we basically had a Senate pretending that it still had power, and an Empire pretending to listen to said Senate and bide their time until they could just dissolve it (which they do in ANH anyway). Everyone was faking it, and everyone knew that's what they were doing. That was the whole point. But at that point, Leia could still at least try it and see if it gets her something.

The movie is riddled with bizarre diabolus ex machina.

Not sure what you're talking about here. Maybe an example?

It was tonally different from the rest of the movies.

Which was the point. And was appreciated.

The plans weren't smuggled out on a tape drive.

That's a pretty strange semantic criticism IMO. Was it the word "smuggled" or the phrase "tape drive" that is the problem here?

And everything that they say about the designing and construction of the Death Star is a needless retcon

It's not a retcon of anything. And it's not needless either. It's probably one of the oldest fan questions/critics about the Death Star: How on earth did it have a vulnerability such that a single shot from a small fighter could cause it to explode? I mean, that's the mother of all freaking design flaws, right? Folks have been asking that question and theorizing about the answer for 40+ years now.

This film answers that question. And it does so very very well. It wasn't a mistake. It wasn't shoddy construction. It was a delibrate vulerability built into it by the guy who actually designed the weapon itself. And the plans including the vulnerability wasn't discovered by accident or by a network of spies, but the same guy taking a great risk to provide the information to the Rebellion so they could find exactly where he had hidden it. It was a very clever bit of story telling IMO.

I liked the film. It was definitely dark. But obviously and intentionally so, which is fine by me. It shows us just how much was sacrificed to get us to the events in ANH in the first place. To me, it was a perfect bit of info filling that the SW universe absolutely benefits by having.

Errorname

2024-05-28, 08:39 PM

I'm inclined to say this is due to Martin's real world blindspots. ASOIAF is primarily based on Martin's knowledge of fantasy fiction and medieval history, and I'm certain that both of those are very eurocentric. That's not a moral judgement, but it does mean he's just far more in his element in Westeros, where his Essosi stuff feels a lot less natural.

And she's constantly driven by her anger, often only being kept in check by her advisors.

The thing is that, ultimately, it's difficult to tell with Game of Thrones. These are the "themes are for eighth grade book reports" guys. Is a character brutally executing their enemies a disturbing red flag or is it an epic moment of revenge?

Honestly I don't think it's the specific "Daenerys turning evil" that was so maddening, it's that across the entire show none of the characters felt like actual human beings anymore and nothing felt like it was happening for logical reasons anymore. The Dragon Queen getting a little too into the burninating should not have been a difficult character turn to sell, and yet they made a botch of it.

Not sure what you're talking about here. Maybe an example?

It's like a Deus Ex Machina except instead of saving the protagonist it damns them

Talakeal

2024-05-28, 10:10 PM

IMO actual Mary Sues are pretty rare in professional works, but not nonexistent. Alice in the Resident Evil Films, Cole in the new Mortal Kombat, and maybe Michael in Star Trek Discovery; characters who are thrust into an existing story and warp the narrative around how awesome they are.

I dont get that from Rey or Daenerys.

Peelee

2024-05-28, 10:17 PM

(Apologies for this, but . . . it does actually fit the topic. Sorry.)

Meanwhile the Force Awakens is a cynical corporate exercise and not much else. There's nothing of value there.
Imean, TRoS is easily the worst for me, since a crappy remake of a good movie is still better than the mess that was. But it's definitely the most insulting.

I dont get that from Rey or Daenerys.
No way is Rey a Mary Sue. She is just badly written, which is amusingly consistent since all the characters in the sequel trilogy are badly written.

Mechalich

2024-05-28, 10:40 PM

They show up more often than that, but you have to read the wrong class of work (ex. low-quality YA fiction) to encounter them with great frequency. Most of the time an original work that is bad enough to allow a true Mary Sue to take shape, that work is just generally awful overall and readers who aren't a specific kind of teenager stop long before the Sue has been around for more than a chapter or two. That's why they're more commonly encountered in franchise fiction and fanfiction.

No way is Rey a Mary Sue. She is just badly written, which is amusingly consistent since all the characters in the sequel trilogy are badly written.

Rey is unreasonably OP at a few points: notably flying the Falcon like a savant when all evidence is she's never so much as been in a co*ckpit before and escaping via Mind Trick when all evidence is she has no idea that's possible are the big ones. That's one of the criteria for being a Mary Sue, though far from enough on its own.

Peelee

2024-05-28, 10:49 PM

Bohandas

2024-05-28, 11:51 PM

Justify it how you will, Leia was clearly undercover in ANH

Not sure what you're talking about here. Maybe an example?

Well, for one thing there's the matter of the last two protagonists dying because Tarkin decided to blow up his own base (at the time when it made the least possible strategic sense no less; if the rebels hadn't transmitted yet, or if they had taken over the base then it would have made some sense, but as is it made none)

That's a pretty strange semantic criticism IMO. Was it the word "smuggled" or the phrase "tape drive" that is the problem here?
Both. The tape part because it's one of the most iconic scenes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnNSnJbjdws&t=86s

And the physically smuggled part because if they could transmit it that easy then why didn't every ship in the battle have a copy? Even if the transmitter from the base was highly directional the Tantive should have started rebroadcasting it to the other ships as soon as they got it

It's not a retcon of anything.

They moved the development project from the Kessel Sector to the Bheriz Sector. Although I must cede to you that I had thought these areas were much farther from each other than they turned out to be after I looked it up.

Nonetheless it still makes a difference because they get in and out without having to contend with the Maw

And it's not needless either. It's probably one of the oldest fan questions/critics about the Death Star: How on earth did it have a vulnerability such that a single shot from a small fighter could cause it to explode? I mean, that's the mother of all freaking design flaws, right? Folks have been asking that question and theorizing about the answer for 40+ years now.

Disagree. People criticized Solo for going far out of the way to explain things that required no explanation I feel that Rogue One is even worse in that regard

Yeah - like i said, badly written. :smallwink:

Badly written doesn't preclude mary sue. In general they rather go together.

Zevox

2024-05-29, 12:12 AM

Re: The Force Awakens - Hey, I guess my opinion of that one falls into the minority, albeit an unsurprising one: I feel basically totally ambivalent about it. I actually have a very stark memory of when I first saw it in the theater, reaching the point near the end where Rey is climbing a wall in Starkiller Base, realizing that the movie had to be nearing its end, and thinking to myself "so why am I still not sure whether I like it or not?" And that feeling pretty much never went away; settled into some mild disappointment with how much of a rehash it was, but otherwise, the movie never evoked a strong reaction from me one way or the other.

Oh, intellectually, as the foundation for a new trilogy of movies set after Return of the Jedi, it's obviously quite poor. Pressing a giant reset button and then rehashing A New Hope was just an awful way to handle that. But the overall product was competent enough not to upset me - and it felt, at least, like it could still be salvaged into something better, if not necessarily something great. Not things I can say about its sequel, to say the least. Even now it's the only sequel film I'd rewatch if a friend wanted to do so; though to be fair I haven't watched Rise of Skywalker once, so I'm only really comparing it to TLJ there. But there's no comparison, I will never rewatch TLJ, whereas I have watched TFA twice and wouldn't object to doing so again with the right company, even I wouldn't get much out of it either.

Eh, sorry for my assumptions. You mentioned X-2 and Tactics Advance, so it seemed like you had an interest. Also, in the classic FF games (1-6), the odd numbered entries are the plot-light dungeon crawlers while the even entries are more linear cinematic stories. FF5 has more plot than 1 or 3, but it's still largely an excuse for you to go from dungeon to dungeon. If you like defined playstyles, though, 6 is pretty good there. Aside from being able to give your characters any spells you want, they all have unique abilities - though the usefulness of some is questionable.
To be fair, I can certainly enjoy class systems as well, it's just not specifically a selling point for me, and if given the choice for a JRPG I would favor unique playstyles per character over it.

And the funny thing about the dungeon crawler vs story-driven element is that's another area where while I can enjoy both, I'd generally prefer the latter. Story-driven games are pretty much my favorite kind, and that's part of why RPGs (and JRPGs in particular) are one of my favorite genres. It's just that in Final Fantasy's specific case, I generally have not been impressed by their stories, and often had significant things I disliked about them, at least prior to 7R and 16 (and even 16's goes downhill in the last third or so). So my feeling was FF1 either was better off for not having much story (compared to games like 13 where I thought the story was crap), or at worst wasn't missing out on much (compared to games like 4 where I thought the story was just okay).

Peelee

2024-05-29, 12:22 AM

It is 100% needless. That question is answered in the movie that introduces it. It's an issue with the design, where an explosion in the exhaust port can cause a chain reaction that leads to the main reactor. The exhaust port is so small that some pilots believe it's an impossible shot. It's also defended by numerous turbolaser turrets and towers, not to mention TIE fighters. And it's even shielded!

Honestly, having it be intentional sabotage is unbelievably stupid. Literally *unbelievably*. I struggle to believe it. A weakness is built in as sabotage, and it only requires an absolute perfect shot, a dead-on bullseye, with a torpedo instead of lasers, while juking countless laser cannons. And even then, somehow, this sabotage is something the Empire is aware of, because again, it's shielded! And even then, getting the specific knowledge of this plan relies on a random pilot detecting, nor getting caught, and somehow finding the saboteurs daughter, who could be literally anywhere in the galaxy, if she's even still alive.

This is the dumbest sabotage I've ever heard of. It's like something a child came up with, to explain something that was already explained in the first movie!

And I like Rogue One! It's a pretty solid movie, easily the best of the Disney movies, it's fun, I'm a fan, but goddamn was that sabotage subplot not only entirely unnecessary but also really ****ing stupid.

Gnoman

2024-05-29, 02:06 AM

Martin's "knowledge" of medieval history is quite shallow. Actual nobility that acted as callously as the Westerosi nobles do would have been eaten.

This is the dumbest sabotage I've ever heard of. It's like something a child came up with, to explain something that was already explained in the first movie!

Not only is there no real need to explain the existence of the thermal exhaust port, it was already explained (and explained far better) in the novel Death Star. There, it was an excessive redundancy that was noted as a flaw, but the super-efficient construction crew completed that part of the station before the person who spotted it could revise the plans. So they just tried to defend it.

Mechalich

2024-05-29, 03:16 AM

Martin's "knowledge" of medieval history is quite shallow. Actual nobility that acted as callously as the Westerosi nobles do would have been eaten.

I don't think the problem is exactly that GRR Martin's knowledge of medieval history (or rather medieval English history since ASOIAF is explicitly based around the Wars of the Roses and does not generalize outside of the specifically English context) is shallow, though it is, but rather that Martin is engaged in a rather deliberate deconstruction of the traditional epic fantasy narrative, specifically of the Tolkien-by-way-of-Star Wars-by-way-of-Robert Jordan massive struggle between clearly defined good and evil that was especially dominant in the fantasy space when he was cutting his teeth as an author in the late 1970s and 1980s that tended to either pretend away or hide many of the grimmy details of everyday life in the Medieval period. The problem is that Martin swung the pendulum way too far, and ended up with a fantasy world that is, depending on how you interpret the theological underpinnings either borderline or definitely grimdark. Now, credit where credit is do, Martin was very successful at this and the legacy of ASOIAF is a horde of genuinely grimdark fantasy universes slamming onto the bestseller list, things like The First Law, The Greatcoats, and literally everything ever written by Mark Lawrence. The problem is that until many of his successors, Martin is either unable to recognize or unwilling to acknowledge how broken of a world he's created and, more importantly, how divorced from the reality of the historical record it actually is. He has proclaimed, repeatedly, that his work gets closer to historical truth than many other authors, and he's very, very wrong about that.

There's also the issue that Martin, like many authors, has no sense of scale. This is very obvious in that he slapped numbers on how high the Wall was supposed to be and then was completely shocked when the show people for Game of Thrones built what the books said because it was many times larger than what he'd imagined. The simple reality is that the Wars of the Roses, a conflict that took place in a small, underdeveloped state (Medieval England had one of Europe's lowest population densities) cannot be scaled up to a continent-spanning conflict and still make sense. Martin, for the most part, simply doesn't, and if you ignore the numbers he puts out for things like army size and distances it is in fact possible to pretend that Westeros is just England+Ireland as the map implies and things still work. However, once the Essos stuff is brought in that illusion falls apart.

Scale is hard, especially because the most obvious scale desirable for an epic narrative: save the world! Slams hard into the truly immense size of planets when dealing with pre-industrial logistical capabilities. Ways to cheat scale do exist: Tolkien very carefully arranged his map to serve his conflict; Jordan just decided to allow mass teleportation; Bandon Sanderson makes sure his power suites include rapid movement capabilities for important characters; and so forth. However, gritty realism, which Martin at least thought he was trying to deliver, slams hard into scale barriers. Note that the show, which was forced to confront this in order to finish the saga, decided to allow Euron's fleet to teleport and Dany's dragons to achieve supersonic speeds. Everyone saw through the cheat, and scale uppercut the series in the face.

Saph

2024-05-29, 03:46 AM

I don't know whether this one's a minority opinion, but I'm coming around to the belief that the more that a fantasy series is advertised as grimdark/gritty/realistic, the less recognisable or helpful it seems to get. Which is kind of funny given that those authors, like GRRM, so often insist that their take on it is closer to the truth.

I've read maybe a dozen books by Joe Abercrombie and Mark Lawrence, and they're pretty well written, but I can't think of a single scene or storyline from a single one of those books which I've ever felt was particularly useful/insightful. When I try, all I can remember is mostly a long montage of horrible people doing horrible things to other horrible people and it's all just . . . kind of forgettable. Whereas pretty much every time I go back and re-read something by Tolkien or Jordan, I find something that makes me appreciate some aspect of our own world more.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-29, 05:23 AM

I think the issue you're encountering is that other people actually did watch the series. The "foreshadowing" only counts as such if you take it in the absolute blandest and broadest sense possible, placing almost all the weight on things Daenerys says and ignoring every detail of what she does more complicated than "she killed some people sometimes".

In all previous instances Daenerys' use of violence is specific, it is invariably aimed at the top of power structures and she attempts to minimise its spread outside those power structures.

That is not useful foreshadowing of burning a city to the ground because a bell rang.

More to the point, Daenerys is not in this scene encountering a problem. She has, in fact, just won the final battle with trivial ease as the supposed Lannister resistance was no stiffer than mist. She decides to do this after she has won, for no reason established within her character because in every previous case she has directed her power with precise specificity at the heads of power structures.

And really, no appeal to GRRM's ideas works here because he hadn't been involved in the show since season 4, they had left his work behind and even if they wanted to end it in the place he thought he was going to at the time the path they took there is wholly incompatible with the way he would have done it as they involve different characters on different paths through the world. You can't assume that Daenerys was doomed to a "dark path" and skip to that destination, the show has to actually show the steps of that path and it failed to do so comprehensively.

Liffguard

2024-05-29, 05:30 AM

It was needless because it's a technical retcon that undermines the original movie's primary theme. The Empire is powerful, arrogant, and complacent. It puts its faith in an overwhelming superiority of violence and force, and so cannot recognise the potential of a plucky young farmboy with a good heart and destiny on his side. Paraphrasing the movie itself, they were too proud of the technological terror they constructed which was insignificant next to the power of the force (i.e. the interconnected power of people, the power of life itself). In the final battle, one the officers even warns about the danger they're in, and Tarkin, in his arrogance, dismisses it. There's no retcon needed to explain this.

Edit: this is really just rehashing my problem with fan demands in general and with Star Wars in particular. It's okay for things to be ambiguous. Not everything requires a step-by-step explanation that covers every possible objection and nitpick from joyless pedants. It's generally bad to give fans what they think they want.

Divayth Fyr

2024-05-29, 06:32 AM

This is the dumbest sabotage I've ever heard of. It's like something a child came up with, to explain something that was already explained in the first movie!.
I guess it makes more sense as a plan to sabotage the Rebellion - you hope to get some people killed when they get the plans, and a bunch more if they're dumb/desperate enough to plan an attack based on the intel. After all, if none of the pilots happen to be force-sensitive, the attack would likely be a completely lost cause ;)

Sapphire Guard

2024-05-29, 06:38 AM

Funny how' realistic' is always interpreted to mean 'grim', isn't it? No one is ever 'realistically, this character had a happy childhood'

I don't think making claims about GRRM's real world knowledge or knowledge of fantasy is worth much, since that's just blind speculation.

Tolkien was far more 'realistic' than he was given credit for. He understood scale and how traveling works and things.

The thing about Mark Lawrence and Joe Abercrombie is that they lean towards 'follow the template and then subvert it at the end', which is much easier to write as most of the template is laid out for you and you don't have to come up with it yourself.

Jorg Ancrath in particular comes up against 'My opponent will assume I follow literary tropes, whereas I will subvert that. Problem is, if his opponents are real people, there's no reason they should follow literary tropes in the first place.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-29, 06:44 AM

I don't think making claims about GRRM's real world knowledge or knowledge of fantasy is worth much, since that's just blind speculation.

It's not all blind speculation. There are obvious cases where he says his cultures are based on specific real-world analogues and they're so hilariously wrong that the only conclusion is that he knew nothing beyond outdated pop culture versions of those cultures (The Dothraki are the most obvious, they are completely and utterly unlike any plains nomads that have ever been real).

Peelee

2024-05-29, 06:51 AM

Funny how' realistic' is always interpreted to mean 'grim', isn't it? No one is ever 'realistically, this character had a happy childhood'

The most realistic legal movie is My Cousin Vinny. :smalltongue:

Sapphire Guard

2024-05-29, 07:05 AM

Now I honestly want to look up that film.

Did he say they were direct analogues? Or just 'very loosely based on' The Dothraki horde is absurd and would all starve to death, but... so would most of the rest of Westeros, because all the numbers are way too big.

Westeros is pretty obviously very very loosely based on the War of the Roses, but also significant liberties were taken (historically, dragons were relatively rare, etc).

Batcathat

2024-05-29, 07:17 AM

Someone should really kidnap all the sci-fi and fantasy authors of the world (maybe from other genres too, but it does feel way more common in speculative fiction) and make them write "Bigger numbers doesn't make things better" on a blackboard. For extra fun, let them vote among themselves on how many times they should write it. :smallamused:

Metastachydium

2024-05-29, 07:23 AM

I really don't?

These are not exactly idealized relationships.

Now, that one's a very odd way to approach it, in that it mixes book-exclusive content with show-exclusive content and flip-flopping between the two versions as convenient (with Jorah (regarding whom I'll semi-seriously forward the theory that the showrunners just found the Ser Friendzone meme funny and ran with it)).

I'm not sure why you'd say that.

I'll grant that it was a bad idea in the first place, but it's still rather egregious.

Again, I'm not disagreeing that there are problems with this show, as mentioned I think season 5-8 are all pretty badly written, I just dispute that it's just a Daenerys thing.

Again, that's certainly true, and I'll even add that the Daenerys arcs are on something of a back foot compared to all else because of how consistently the Magic Is Returning thing is escalating itself into the "poorly handled" terrirtory, hitting Daenerys harder than most anyone, but her arcs and anything contaminated by them still end up below par.

"Unattractive alcoholiuc chronic underachiever who never gets a break" is a very novel thing to fit under the umbrella of even such a term as Mary Sue, I have to say.

Yeah, but Soul of the Fire is the one with the murder-suicide STD*, and Stone of Tears has "sex this demon and it's barbed junk to death" scene that is permanently burned into my brain.

Don't even remind me! But at least, one of those is "tell, not show (and even then, briefly)", and the other is done and gone fast. The Denna half of Wizard's First Rule just never seems to end!

We must also pour one out for Naked Empire and how to overthrow Evil Fantasy Communism with statues.

Hey, it's only one statue and you forgot the power of Black Market Labour! Also, that's Faith of the Fallen. Naked Empire is the pacifists who learn that killing people feels so nice and warm.

Pillars of Creation should also be duly remembered, what with the protagonist switch o a person so annoying it made going back to Richard an actual relief.

Another controversial opinion of mine, it would seem: it deserves all the flak, but I must disagree in one regard: the break from Richard Stu and the Dark Harem? Totally worth all the suffering.

And who can forget Temple of the Winds and its classic ending where Kahlen is prophesied to betray Richard "in her blood" so she cheats on Richard by having sex with Richard, but then it actually doesn't count because she was thinking about Richard while cheating on Richard by having sex Richard while still fulfilling the prophesy because was on her period so the answer was period sex the whole time this is 100% normal thing to have a prophesy about what are you looking at.

Ah, yes, and she thinks she's cheating him with Evil Blond Not-Richard, the serial killer whose stuffing used underwear into a prostitute's mouth to make sure she doesn't vocalize much while he cuts her spine we are treated to, in detail! The healer who thinks the best way to tell if someone's being mindraped by the Evil Emperor is to reach into her private parts looking for ambient moisture! How could I forget?

*Everyone always goes on about the chicken that is not a chicken from this one because the concept of a pure evil chicken is hilarious and dumb, but in SoT terms the chicken that is not a chicken is wholesome and good because nobody does any weird sex things with it or even tortures it to death because moral clarity.

Hey, that one was actually funny, for a change! I appreciated the "go home, you're drunk" the Wise Old Toxic Masculinity Good Guy Cannibal got for his part in it too.

I don't know. It's very long and very cringe. When Richard Stu finally impales Denna with the Power of Love (no, I'm not even kidding) and she dies, how stupid that was barely registered given the relief of it finally being over.

The follow-up books are generic fantasy schlock with an agenda, which is automatically worse than schlock on its own.

I mean, the Agenda-Powered Villains don't even show up until the third one, and it's really only the fifth and sixth where the soapboxing really begins. Hence why if I had to pick my excrement of choice, I'd say Blood of the Fold and Temple of the Wind are the closest to a high point in the series.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-29, 07:23 AM

He's said they're "an amalgam of steppe and plains cultures". But they aren't like any steppe or plains culture that has ever existed. In any way, not just in numbers. They share absolutely zero traits with any real nomad cultures beyond "ride horses sometimes".

GRRM just didn't do any research about any plains nomad culture other than maybe watching Stagecoach.

BloodSquirrel

2024-05-29, 07:32 AM

As an actual engineer who works with industrial systems, the idea that a first-of-its-kind moon-sized space station would be designed and constructed without a single major design flaw would be, by far, the most unrealistic thing in Star Wars.

Also, to defend GRRM a little (but not too much), Westeros is literally coming apart at the seems. It's not a story about a typical period in medieval history, it's a story about a system that was destabilized by having a raving mad king start burning his nobles, followed by a rebellion, followed by a succession crisis because the new king was wildly irresponsible and let some really bad people get ahold of the levers of power. That kind of thing does happen every hundred years or so, which is part of why we had a very interesting 20th century.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-29, 07:33 AM

I'll spoiler this so you don't have an aneurysm:

It was also on time, under budget, and kept secret.

Keltest

2024-05-29, 07:57 AM

This is the dumbest sabotage I've ever heard of. It's like something a child came up with, to explain something that was already explained in the first movie!

The exhaust port wasnt the sabotage, it was how delicate and prone to the chain reaction all the internal structures were. The exhaust port was just the Alliance's chosen means of access, if they had snuck a bomb in somehow it would have worked just as well, except for the bit about Yavin blowing up before they could do so.

Peelee

2024-05-29, 08:17 AM

That makes it worse. Because then, not only do they still need to make a nigh-impossible shot, now they don't even know how to trigger the damn thing! The only way they were even able to exploit that sabotage was by getting a full, detailed copy of the entire Death Star plans and hope like hell they would be lucky enough to analyze it in time, and also hope like hell that there would even be a way to trigger it. If the exhaust port isn't part of the sabotage, then the sabotage is even dumber, because he didn't even leave a way for them to trigger it! Sure, they were able to, but the saboteur had no reasonable way of knowing they'd be able to do that.

Keltest

2024-05-29, 08:31 AM

Well if he had left a big red button in it labeled "self destruct" they probably would have made him take it out.

Peelee

2024-05-29, 08:46 AM

Well if he had left a big red button in it labeled "self destruct" they probably would have made him take it out.

You're right, the entire sabotage subplot is both unnecessary and stupid! If only some devilishly handsome person had started out with that.

Keltest

2024-05-29, 08:52 AM

You're right, the entire sabotage subplot is both unnecessary and stupid! If only some devilishly handsome person had started out with that.

It wasn't necessary, but it wasn't stupid either. It takes the question of why they built the Death Star out of a bomb and gives a reasonable answer.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-29, 08:56 AM

It wasn't necessary, but it wasn't stupid either. It takes the question of why they built the Death Star out of a bomb and gives a reasonable answer.

"A generator that produces enough power to blow up a planet also blows up pretty good itself" is a perfectly reasonable answer already though.

Absolutely nobody had spent the intervening 39 years wondering why Death Stars are just so dang explosive.

Seppl

2024-05-29, 09:02 AM

GRRM just didn't do any research about any plains nomad culture other than maybe watching Stagecoach.To be fair, the story would not work if he used a realistic portrayal of nomad steppe cultures. And he is in no way obligated to do so, it is not a historic tale, after all. The Dothraki need to be an unstoppable warrior horde, to fill their role as a credible threat to the western kingdoms. They also need to be aggressively chauvinistic and have strange customs as obstacles for Daenerys to overcome and learn from. These cultural customs are intentionally designed to be shocking and disgusting to the (primarily modern American and European) audience, to make them understand how Daenerys feels.

Peelee

2024-05-29, 09:10 AM

It wasn't necessary, but it wasn't stupid either. It takes the question of why they built the Death Star out of a bomb and gives a reasonable answer.

What question? It's a moon-sized space station of unimaginable power. Han literally says "It'd take a thousand ships with more firepower than I've ever-". It'd be like having a movie with a nuclear reactor and then saying "Well, there's the question of why a nuclear reactor blowing up would be so catastrophic". It's a bad question because it's trivially answered, and pretty expected. "Big energy make big boom" isn't exactly university physics.

ETA: Also, as already demonstrated, it's not even a reasonable answer. "I built a weakness into it that's nearly impossible to access, and access itself requires the access to the plans for the station, which are highly classified military secrets." That's not reasonable! That's stupid.

BloodSquirrel

2024-05-29, 09:11 AM

"A generator that produces enough power to blow up a planet also blows up pretty good itself" is a perfectly reasonable answer already though.

Fun fact: Real-life generators connected to the power grid can explode too if they get unstable because of power swings. And transformers tend to explode as well.

Any system that has enough power flowing through it to industrial-scale work has enough power flowing through it to explode if something breaks and that power is no longer going where it's supposed to, and a great deal of building those systems is stopping that from happening by putting in protection systems and other preventative measures.

Industrial explosions are a thing that happen on a regular basis, even without anyone using space magic to shoot torpedoes at stuff.

Errorname

2024-05-29, 09:23 AM

Martin's "knowledge" of medieval history is quite shallow. Actual nobility that acted as callously as the Westerosi nobles do would have been eaten.

I am not claiming that Martin is a great medievalist or anything, I'd actually say his main interest is clearly stories about medieval history rather than actual medieval history, but that's enough of a grounding that he can write Westeros as a compelling setting.

That's all based on the show with the exception of Jorah, and I think the ways his character was changed are kind of important to factor in, the show is much more sympathetic to him than the books are and I think making him more idealized is for his benefit far more than Daenerys.

I'm not sure why you'd say that.

5 is adapting books I really like badly, so I find it a lot more insulting than the seasons that have run out of book and are clearly fumbling around in the dark. 7 and 8 are still quite bad but they don't make me angry, they just make me laugh.

"Unattractive alcoholiuc chronic underachiever who never gets a break" is a very novel thing to fit under the umbrella of even such a term as Mary Sue, I have to say.

As mentioned I don't use Mary Sue, I don't think it's particularly useful, but I have seen people throw it about for Game of Thrones characters before and I can at least understand it for late stage Tyrion. He spends the entire back-half of the show making extremely stupid decisions while everyone bends over to tell him what a genius he is and all his major significant character flaws are largely forgotten by the narrative.

It wasn't necessary, but it wasn't stupid either. It takes the question of why they built the Death Star out of a bomb and gives a reasonable answer.

Considering the power needs of a moon-sized planet killer, it would be a lot weirder if an energy source with enough output to power it couldn't turn into a bomb under the right circ*mstances.

To be fair, the story would not work if he used a realistic portrayal of nomad steppe cultures. And he is in no way obligated to do so, it is not a historic tale, after all. The Dothraki need to be an unstoppable warrior horde, to fill their role as a credible threat to the western kingdoms.

A realistic portrayal of steppe nomads would feel a lot more credible as a threat that could conquer a vast amount of territory. The Dothraki don't come across as particularly smart or clever or adaptable in the ways they would need to be in order to take and hold actual territory. They're barely credible as hit and run raiders.

I can see the argument to building their worldbuilding around making Daenerys feel like an outsider, but I don't think it works. They end up feeling distinctly less interesting than the rest of the setting and despite how many of them appear in the story none of them really feel memorable as individual characters.

Keltest

2024-05-29, 09:32 AM

Not to belabor the point, but people who design power generators and the like usually go pretty far out of their way to make sure they do not turn into bombs.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-29, 09:42 AM

Not to belabor the point, but people who design power generators and the like usually go pretty far out of their way to make sure they do not turn into bombs.

Meanwhile the Death Star doesn't even have guardrails over bottomless pits. The Empire clearly does not take health and safety at work seriously.

Peelee

2024-05-29, 09:43 AM

Not to belabor the point, but people who design power generators and the like usually go pretty far out of their way to make sure they do not turn into bombs.

Even putting aside the whole "it ain't that kind of movie" bit, or the idea that things in films are overwhelmingly manufactured out of Explodium and somehow it's never an issue for any other movie that it needs a sabotage subplot in a prequel to "explain" it, if you really want to go into that fine detail, then ok, let's play that game. This is the same space station where the controls to a tractor beam were on the far side of a pylon on a near-bottomless pit with only a small ledge to stand on. Pretty sure that the people who designed this thing didn't go out of their way for anything other than "make planets go boom". And, ya know what, turns out they did go out of their way to not turn it into a bomb! Because, again, the only way for the rebels to turn it into a bomb were to shoot a next-to-impossible shot in a heavily guarded spot covered with guns, and shielded!

Straight up here, the only people refusing to accept this without thinking it's a plot hole are simply rejecting the premise that all movies ever present, which is that the things in the movie will work as presented. It's not seeing a plot hole, it's being needlessly pedantic for an unearned sense of superiority.

And, not to belabor the point, but people who sabotage systems usually go pretty far out of their way to make sure the sabotage is actually going to have a reasonable chance of actually working.

runeghost

2024-05-29, 09:43 AM

I haven't seen Rogue One in a while, but I recall my thought being that Tarkin was obviously using the (not-completely-baseless) "our top-secret facility is full of Rebels!" excuse to put an end to potential rival Krennic and his power-base. I.e. "I want no more secret super-weapons, now that I've got mine." I.e. it's a massively callous political move, that Tarkin can get away with because he can claim he didn't want the Rebels to do what they ended up doing... but stopping the Rebels is just the excuse. That may just be my brain filling in reasons for something that otherwise didn't quite make sense, though.

Bohandas

2024-05-29, 09:44 AM

Seconded

Also, as already demonstrated, it's not even a reasonable answer. "I built a weakness into it that's nearly impossible to access, and access itself requires the access to the plans for the station, which are highly classified military secrets." That's not reasonable! That's stupid.

Agreed. That falls at best into the category of "purposely doing your job badly because you're disgruntled" not "military grade sabotage"

On top of all the normal evidence that coukd be brought against him, His boss and his boss's flunky who he has to work with are both psychics as well as notoriously unforgiving. It seems like he took an insane risk and it seems even more insabe that he got away with it

Keltest

2024-05-29, 09:47 AM

And, not to belabor the point, but people who sabotage systems usually go pretty far out of their way to make sure the sabotage is actually going to have a reasonable chance of actually working.

Literally nobody here has called it a plot hole Peelee. Its just an interesting thing that had potential to be expanded on. Not every piece of media needs to be released to "correct" a prior piece of media, somebody can just look at it and think "wow, theres room for an interesting story there!"

Peelee

2024-05-29, 09:50 AM

Except, as multiple people have told you multiple times in the last 24 hours alone, it didn't need to be expanded on, and as I have shown several times, it was expanded upon badly because it was stupid! Even with all your (poor, IMO) attempts at justifying why it exists, nothing you've said at any point justifies why it was so badly done. The logic behind the sabotage is ridiculous and he has no reason whatsoever to expect it to pay off.

Anything can have room for an interesting story for a writer who is interested in it. That's an empty argument.

ETA: Although you haven't used the specific words "plot hole", you've constantly argued that it's silly for the Death Star to be "built out of a bomb". You are arguing it's a plot hole, and your attempts to claim otherwise don't persuade me at all. And this isn't the first time you've used bad arguments either, since you also presented the idea that the only other form of sabotage would be a big red button, because surely there's no middle ground there even if you think sabotage must be used to explain why a giant reactor has a giant explosion when it's shot with a missile.

Keltest

2024-05-29, 09:56 AM

Anything can have room for an interesting story for a writer who is interested in it. That's an empty argument.

No story "needs" to be written. If thats your standard, every piece of media that isnt a literal instruction booklet on how to survive some local hazard has failed.

And yes, it is kind of silly. They don't even build actual bombs to explode like that! Its not implausibly silly, as the engineers have mentioned, but it is silly. There is a very long history of power stations being damaged and even exploding, and the worst ones are, invariably, the result of human action taking something built to be safe and making it unsafe.

ETA: Given that you havent actually presented any alternative forms of sabotage he could have done yourself, I stand by my big red self destruct button sarcasm. I think its a ridiculous criticism that making the thing super fragile is somehow "bad" sabotage.

Peelee

2024-05-29, 09:59 AM

No story "needs" to be written.
Sure, but the entire reason you're arguing that the sabotage line is good is because it "explains" the Death Star exploding, which means you're the one arguing it "needed" to be written.

And yes, it is kind of silly. They don't even build actual bombs to explode like that!
You're absolutely right! Let's go together and complain about why nuclear reactors are built to meltdown if they explode, because clearly that's silly when some actual bombs aren't even build to melt down like that!

Or, and bear with me here, BIG ENERGY GO BOOM IS NOT A COMPLICATED ****ING THOUGHT PROCESS.

Its not implausibly silly, as the engineers have mentioned, but it is silly.
No, it's not. See big letters above.

Keltest

2024-05-29, 10:05 AM

Sure, but the entire reason you're arguing that the sabotage line is good is because it "explains" the Death Star exploding, which means you're the one arguing it "needed" to be written.

You're absolutely right! Let's go together and complain about why nuclear reactors are built to meltdown if they explode, because clearly that's silly when some actual bombs aren't even build to melt down like that!

Or, and bear with me here, BIG ENERGY GO BOOM IS NOT A COMPLICATED ****ING THOUGHT PROCESS.

No, it's not. See big letters above.

Define "meltdown" here please, because you clearly arent using it to mean "explode"

Unless youre trying to say that nuclear reactors don't explode when they explode in which case... I can't even begin to touch that one, even accounting for the implicit "when theyre shot by a bomb" part.

And yes, BIG ENERGY GO BOOM is wrong. Power stations are not bombs. We go pretty far out of our way to make them not bombs.

Peelee

2024-05-29, 10:09 AM

Define "meltdown" here please, because you clearly arent using it to mean "explode"

Dude, since we don't have moon-sized space stations capable of destroying planets with a single laser shot, nuclear reactor is the best analogy I could come up with. But you know what, fine, let's abandon that. Let's go with one single final argument. You can even have the last word, this will be my last argument.

If you are willing to accept, in a film, laser swords that deflect laser shots and magic powers and moon-sized space stations that can destroy planets, but you are not willing to accept that said moon-sized space station will blow up with it is shot with an explosive, especially where we are told point-blank that the explosive sets off a chain reaction of explosives, then you are not engaging with the film. You are pedantically looking for flaws and inventing them where you can.

Keltest

2024-05-29, 10:15 AM

What I'm not willing to accept is you apparently deciding what I do and do not like for me. I'm having none of that. My response has never been "its literally impossible for it to work like that", it has always been "it is weird that they would make it work like that" because, as the ending of the movie shows, theres a really big freaking problem with doing it that way, which is why people don't do it that way. Its sufficiently weird that somebody going "the engineer actively wanted it to fail" is met with "ah, yeah, that makes sense."

Bohandas

2024-05-29, 10:18 AM

We go pretty far out of our way to make them not bombs.

Which in and of itself implies that they could explode. We don't go far out of our way to make bicycles not bombs. Or to make baseball dugouts not bombs. We only put in that thought when there's a chance something could explode.

Keltest

2024-05-29, 10:27 AM

For a certain definition of "could" maybe. Power stations that explode are not doing their job of being power stations.

But yes, that was hyperbolic. Most power stations, even nuclear power stations aren't a danger to much more than themselves even when something does go wrong, in terms of physical destruction. Making bombs is actually pretty hard. Even nuclear stations usually have contaminated water and radiation as the danger, not a big dumb explosion.

Mordar

2024-05-29, 10:55 AM

It isn't the fact that there is a heel turn, and it isn't the fact that we could see it coming from like S1 E3 even if we hadn't read the books. It is, for me, that it involved too much idiot ball, other characters servicing her drama in the alley, and the sudden movement in psychocrazyometer from like a 7 to 4,638 PCUs in a short period of time. Almost like a final season that should have been 20 episodes was reduced to 7 or something.

It wasn't that impressive of a flight, IMO. It isn't like she flew a completely unfamiliar ship in a combat mission against a massive dreadnought and literally the greatest dogfighter the galaxy has ever known with the added complexity of having to zip through a turbo-laser saturated trench with no room to maneuver for several [units of distance] and launch a missile from a weapons system that she'd ever seen before in the most precision shot even contemplated by the experienced pilots she was flying with, all with the pressure of knowing an entire moon was going to be destroyed along with all hope of freedom if you don't make that shot RIGHT FREAKING NOW! See, *that* would be OP. But I guess 10 words in a throwaway line makes that okay.

Now, I do agree that "homework" and things not presented on screen are an issue...but Rey's familiarity is addressed in the book that came out with the movie.

Badly written doesn't preclude mary sue. In general they rather go together.

Hrm...is it fair to say all Mary Sue characters are badly written, but not all badly written characters are Mary Sues?

Not sure...sometimes I think there is value in the fun Sues.

I really like the bit in Galaxy Quest "...and then straight on through the smashers" when Gwen simply says [paraphrase] "No, they are silly and don't serve any reasonable purpose so I'm not going to jump through them and risk getting smushed". Sometimes things are built the way they are built for DRAHMA!

Have you looked in the Rockies' dugout lately? Or even worse, the White Sox? Best revise your otherwise valid quote.

- M

BloodSquirrel

2024-05-29, 10:57 AM

Not to belabor the point, but people who design power generators and the like usually go pretty far out of their way to make sure they do not turn into bombs.

Yes, they do. Because they have to, because the natural state of things that generate that much power is not to direct it safety into useful work.

They also, occasionally, fail. And, again, this is without people explicitly attempting to make things explode by shooting weapons at them.

That's because real-life power stations generate orders of magnitude less power than is needed to, oh right, blow up a planet.

Even nuclear power plants are only generating in the GW power range (per reactor). Even if you directly channeled that power into a laser, it wouldn't be enough to match a 1000lb high-explosive bomb.

Define "meltdown" here please, because you clearly arent using it to mean "explode"

A meltdown is not an explosion- it's just the core melting. Three Mile Island and f*ckushima had both been shut down well before the meltdown occurred, but they lost cooling and the decay heat from the fuel melted the reactor. f*ckushima had a small explosion, but it was from hydrogen gas igniting.

Chernobyl was a bit different, since the core seems to have gone prompt critical which flash-steamed all of the water in the reactor and did cause a significant explosion.

Of course, if we're going to talk about how unrealistic it is for a power reactor to have a design flaw, we could talk about how the control rods at Chernobyl actually increased reactivity when first inserted because of a known design flaw which they were warned about and didn't fix.

Peelee

2024-05-29, 10:59 AM

I never cared for Rogue One...actually liked most of Solo much more. This might be some part of it...so much of it was needless, or EMBIGGENING things that should have stayed small and under the radar.- M
Amusingly, that was my biggest issue with Solo. So much needless, embiggening things that should have stayed small and under the radar. Just do the train heist in Star Wars! It was a great concept!

Also, they absolutely butchered The Maw.

Ionathus

2024-05-29, 11:04 AM

There's a couple of Doctor Who episodes that fit this for me:

I liked the first two you mentioned (no surprise), but I feel like there might be a "see what they were going for, still didn't work for me" thing going on for you. In both cases, you mention the Doctor being thoughtless about abandoning his companion -- I think that's intentional in both cases. The Doctor, especially Tennant's doctor, is a rogue and a flirt. He leaves his companions behind all the time. To the point where Martha's whole character growth is realizing she deserves better. Again, you can still dislike how they handled it. But I do think the things you're complaining about are intentional choices.

Journey to the Center of the TARDIS was fine for me -- I didn't realize it was disliked in general. No strong feelings one way or the other but I enjoyed it enough.

This is the dumbest sabotage I've ever heard of. It's like something a child came up with, to explain something that was already explained in the first movie!

Honestly it would make a lot more sense and be better storytelling if Mads Mikkelsen's character just...was the source of the stolen plans. Make it so he didn't build the flaw intentionally, but he turned traitor and wants to make amends for his actions, so he makes it possible for the Rebel Alliance to find and steal the plans. It would take very little adjustment to go from "I invented the flaw, go to XYZ to find it" to "I discovered a flaw, go to XYZ to find it".

My biggest pet peeve is when it's years. I feel like I see "ten thousand years" thrown around a lot when the writers actually mean "one thousand" or even "two hundred" years. Like, okay, sure, your glorious empire has been around for ten thousand years, fine, whatever. But humans in the real world had barely started farming ten thousand years ago. Unless there's an obvious and explicit source of technological stagnancy/consistency in this setting, I struggle to imagine your empire existing in roughly the same shape as it does now for a tenth or even, usually, a hundredth of that long.

Absolutely nobody had spent the intervening 39 years wondering why Death Stars are just so dang explosive.

I feel like somebody made this point upthread also, but I know for a fact it's an observation in an OSP video (the "noodle incidents" one I think): the Disney SW movies seem so fixated on "answering" questions that never needed to be answered. It makes sense as a marketing/storytelling maneuver: you want to win over established fans so you appeal to the memorable lines or moments. People speculate vaguely about the Kessel Run and why Han used the word "parsecs"? Seems like a fun story to tell!

But usually, those moments were memorable on their own strengths, and trying to "explain" them cheapens them. Another great example is in the Avatar: The Last Airbender followup graphic novel "The Search", which I got a chance to read recently. Spoiler-free version: we basically get to see the moment where Ozai says "your sister was born lucky. You were lucky to be born."

It's supposed to be cool, of course, because it was basically the quintessential line to encapsulate the Ozai-Azula-Zuko father-children dynamic. But when you actually see it coming from Zuko's father's mouth, it's too direct, too obviously horrible. It's so much more effective as a throwaway line that Ozai said once, offhand, barely caring whether Zuko heard him or not, and now Zuko repeats it to himself because his father's approval matters the world to him, whereas Ozai couldn't care less about his "failure" child.

This is a bigger problem I had with The Search: it turns Ozai's hatred of Zuko into a way of hurting his wife Ursa. He all but says outright "I will now be terrible to Zuko because I know it makes you sad, bwa ha ha ha, I twirl my moustache now."

Which cheapens the original idea, that Ozai discarded Zuko flippantly for being weak. It undermines Zuko's goal of regaining his father's approval, only for him to learn that it wasn't worth having because it will never be who he truly is. Yet another "fill in the details" that misses the power of the original thing.

BloodSquirrel

2024-05-29, 11:09 AM

Amusingly, that was my biggest issue with Solo. So much needless, embiggening things that should have stayed small and under the radar. Just do the train heist in Star Wars! It was a great concept!

I think I already pointed out on this thread that it feels very artificial to force an origin story for every aspect of an established character into one prequel. Han meeting Chewy? That's fine as a movie on his own. Han getting the Falcon? Also fine. Han becoming a smuggler? The Kessel Run? All workable movie ideas. Doing everything in one movie plus needed to explain why his last name is "Solo"? Completely unnecessary and puts the artifice of the concept too front and center.

I still like Solo better than Rogue One, though, since it was otherwise a serviceable movie.

Peelee

2024-05-29, 11:17 AM

I still like Solo better than Rogue One, though, since it was otherwise a serviceable movie.

Not to nitpick, but one of my biggest issues with Solo from a story perspective is that it actually does have a plot hole - Han tries to bluff and bluster Lando in a card game by betting a ship he doesn't actually have, and loses. Han then presses him into another job. But Lando already knows at this point that Han lies and doesn't actually back up what he says, so why does he join in? And even then, in the end, Han plays again and Lando bets the Falcon again, which Han wins. Except, Han still owes Lando a ship! Why does Lando need to pay up when Han doesn't? Each of them "winning" a ship from the other in cards and then the winner not actually getting the ship makes them even!

It's a very minor plot hole, as plot holes go, but it gets to me. Probably because (like my distaste at The Force Awakens being a cheap rehash of the original) it's something I noticed in theaters while watching it.

Batcathat

2024-05-29, 11:17 AM

Yeah, that's a big one for me too. I could sort of understand it if the plot required things to have happened two thousand years ago and the author just didn't bother adjusting the technology level and everything else accordingly, but most of the time there seems to be literally zero reasons for it beyond wanting big numbers.

On the topic of Rogue One, I like it for sort of indirectly leading to Andor (which is my favorite Star Wars property by a decent margin), but I dislike it for being a bit of a let down to watch after Andor (which is what I did, though I'm likely a minority on that one).

Mordar

2024-05-29, 11:31 AM

Amusingly, that was my biggest issue with Solo. So much needless, embiggening things that should have stayed small and under the radar. Just do the train heist in Star Wars! It was a great concept!

Also, they absolutely butchered The Maw.

I still like Solo better than Rogue One, though, since it was otherwise a serviceable movie.

Concur on both. Train heist was great. Betrayals within betrayals wrapped in betrayals also good. Overloaded fan service (and *BAD* fan service...themal detonator cheapens Leia, isn't an homage, Solo name beyond dumb) robot freedom fighter whiner, and Maw (and even Kessel) issues, not. But Solo felt like Star Wars fun to me, and Rogue One felt like a mediocre espionage movie with some weird steampunk elements and a Space Wars third party license at times.

I needed more on Chewbacca...it was like a video game where you just walk into Scene 2, click on a gadget and get the biggest weapon in the game. Too many distractions to relegate the most important dyad (suck it, Palpatine!) in the SW universe to a few minutes of random chance in a trench war.

- M

Is it "an homage" or "a homage"? Seeing the first doesn't look right, saying the second doesn't sound right...

Peelee

2024-05-29, 11:41 AM

- M

Is it "an homage" or "a homage"? Seeing the first doesn't look right, saying the second doesn't sound right...

An. English is weird, it's all about how it sounds. So "a house" and "an hour". "History" is a bit strange, because many people (Brits especially, I've noticed) use "an" for it despite noticeably pronouncing the H. But with "homage", the H is silent, so "an homage" is the prescribed form.

Bohandas

2024-05-29, 11:41 AM

I still like Solo better than Rogue One, though, since it was otherwise a serviceable movie.

Agreed. Those should have all been seperate stories, if done at all. Maybe do it as a TV show or a series of movies. But one movie? no. Still better than Rogue One though

To be fair, ancient Egypt lasted for three thousand. It's still less than a third, but at least it's in the same ballpark

Ionathus

2024-05-29, 12:02 PM

This is a sort-of plot point in The Locked Tomb sci-fantasy series, which I am otherwise a massive fan of, but I struggle with how the world has been basically the same for the last "ten thousand years." And that's not hyperbole.

There is a justification for it, both logistically and thematically, and it works, but the number still bothers me.

The Nine Houses are ruled by a person who is stuck on what happened in the distant past (he and his demigod buddies are effectively immortal), and he seems to be artificially stagnating the empire's technology level because he's incapable of letting go. So in context it's almost so over the top that it works, but even then I struggle to truly imagine "ten thousand years" and things staying exactly as they are. A human who stayed alive that long should be an almost alien consciousness in comparison, and the immortals in this setting just come out slightly erratic and set in their ways.

To be fair, ancient Egypt lasted for three thousand. It's still less than a third, but at least it's in the same ballpark

Fair point that Egypt was incredibly stable compared to basically every other civilization (except maybe China & India). I struggle less with that because of how low-tech it was. Like, hominid technological progress is pretty exponential: a long, long, long time as hunter-gatherers, and then a few thousand years as agrarian societies, and then an absolute explosion of progress with the Industrial Revolution.

I can believe that Ancient Egypt stayed relatively stable for a few millennia given their low-tech environment, but three thousand years of Renaissance Italy with no tech or social evolution? Victorian England? Space Age America? Interstellar Sci-Fi societies? No chance. Things are moving way too quick for anything to stay the same like that anymore.

It makes more sense in fantasy worlds like D&D, both for game reasons and also because you can argue magic would make people content and not have them pursue advancement, or that there's some God of Stagnancy out there holding things back. But in settings that don't acknowledge that evolution and just want me to believe we've been in 1400s Britain for four thousand years, with a single unbroken line of succession? Have you seen the British history of succession from 1066 to modern day? "Stable" it ain't, that's for sure.

Batcathat

2024-05-29, 12:16 PM

On a related note, I'm kinda annoyed by how rarely magic seems to evolve over time. Yes, people might occasionally invent a new spell or two, but in general very little seems to change. If anything, magic is usually more likely to have been better in the past (can we be done with the "long extinct empire with superior magic" trope in fantasy, please?).

BloodSquirrel

2024-05-29, 12:21 PM

To be fair, ancient Egypt lasted for three thousand. It's still less than a third, but at least it's in the same ballpark

This is because "ancient Egypt" is an extremely low-resolution representation of three thousand years of Egyptian civilization. They did not, for example, spend 3000 years building pyramids. By Cleopatra's time they were an ancient wonder.

This isn't something you can generalize as being true, though. The Industrial Revolution was something that only happened once, and spread throughout the entire world once it did. Medieval Europe was a civilizational backwater compared to China, India, The Roman Empire before it, and may other ancient societies that spent a long time being more sophisticated and economically developed than it was. Then... it suddenly wasn't.

Historians still don't have a clear-cut reason why late Medieval Europe, in particular, hit that singularity point, but it's not some inevitable law of history that civilizations advance along the tech curve at some similar rate until things explode.

The real problem here is that "technological stasis" does not mean that nothing is happening. Empires rise and fall. There's never just nothing happening for 10,000 years, even if the net gain in civilizational advancement is non-existent.

warty goblin

2024-05-29, 12:25 PM

I don't read fantasy for the realistic history, I read actual history for that. I read fantasy for fun fantasy nonsense, i.e. what actual history cannot provide. So 10,000 year long empires with no notable technological innovation? Sure, whatever, I'm not gonna bat an eye.

I sometimes get the impression that people want some version of fantasy that's perfectly realistic and has consistent fake physics and real world economics and sociology and geology and everything but also dragons and wizards and super cool mega heroes who can stop entire armies and the occasional god by believing in themselves or being really good friends. I don't think this exists, and the pursuit of the former often impedes the realization of the latter, which is what fantasy is uniquely good at as a genre. There is no version of Diablo 2 that makes realistic sense. This is not a criticism of Diablo 2.

Realism is an aesthetic for fantasy, and not a necessary or inherently superior one. As with any aesthetic it has strengths and weaknesses, as with any broad aesthetic it comes and goes in favor as audiences change and get bored of the same old stuff. A Song of Ice and Fire is in no way realistic, but it deploys realism as an effective style, and was a pretty sharp contrast to a lot of the extremely self indulgent and blatantly protagonist-favoring fantasy of the nineties - I dare you to read through, say, Sarah Douglass' Axis series and not drown in the giant pool of saliva from how much the text drools all over the protagonists.

Batcathat

2024-05-29, 12:39 PM

Sure, nonsense can be fun and obviously complaining about some things being unrealistic while accepting others is always going to be at least a little hypocritical, but I still find it weird that so many authors seems to feel the need to say that the Legendary Hero lived 10 000 years ago or that the space empire has a million inhabited worlds, when saying 200 years or two dozen planets would fit the story just as well and create less implied problems.

Keltest

2024-05-29, 12:45 PM

10k years is long enough that anybody even possibly involved has forgotten anything and everything about the time period. Legends pass into myth, etc... You could get the same with 2000 probably, but really at that point, go big or go home.

Sapphire Guard

2024-05-29, 12:47 PM

What did you read where this happened?

warty goblin

2024-05-29, 01:39 PM

My definition of fantasy nonsense is both expansive and non-perjorative. All the fantastic stuff is nonsense and that's fine.

Realism and "implied problems" are just a critical lense. I find it's a particularly poor one for most fantasy because, well, it's fantasy. No I'm not arguing that a character should be immune dragon fire and incinerate by the same dragon a dozen pages later for no clear reason, that's just sloppy writing. I am arguing that the failures of worldbuilding to live up to whatever arbitrarily strict definition of realism is being employed against them doesn't really tell us anything interesting about the work in question in terms of what it means, why it evokes particular responses in the audience, or anything else. To be frank I think it's mostly a performance bit so the author of the critique can look smart for noticing that the dragon book might not obey real world evolutionary biology or whatever. As a bit I find it done to death and very dull.

Metastachydium

2024-05-29, 01:40 PM

Wait, she maried Hizdar (or whatever that puddle of slime randomly murdered by his own terrorist buddies was even called) in the show?

Okay, that's fair. I still don't agree as such, but that's a reason I can more than respect.

Huh? Until about S7, the stuff that he does is sometimes hideously dumb, but he's more likely to be punched, kidnapped, get eye rolls or **** his pants than get congratulated on, even when it works out fine in the end. And in the last two He's just braindead throughout, yes, but he's sniped at by Daenerys nonstop for his incompetence and inaction, is foiled the one time he comes up with something that could be clever if it didn't require a teleporting fleet (I'm referring to Casterly Rock, of course) and Daenerys has to save his sorry ass by burning a lot of people in logic-defying ways somewhere else, is essentially laughed of as stupidly naive by Varys for telling the "secret prophecy" to literally all the people he shouldn't have told (and that despite Varys then building on the fallout of his stupid failure), mopes some both out of and in prison after the final massacre with nobody accusing him of contributing to the plot And it's only then, in the final, like, ten minutes, that people start pretending some of his stupid ideas make sense, but that's nowhere near the big issue with the Great Council/Epilogue, or even a standout.

I literally can't see that case.

Preach all that. And that's even before we consider their combat performance, which basically amounts to the ability of killing each other while drunk and bullying peasants. (As usual, S7 doubled down on that, making 10000 of them unable to break through an infanrótry formation that was, like, two men deep without help.)

Batcathat

2024-05-29, 02:22 PM

My definition of fantasy nonsense is both expansive and non-perjorative. All the fantastic stuff is nonsense and that's fine.

Fair enough, I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree on where to draw the line between acceptable nonsense and sloppy writing.

Sir_Norbert

2024-05-29, 02:37 PM

Except no. While people often give it a fake French pronunciation, "an oh-MAHZH", the prescribed form is "a HOMM-ij".

Tyndmyr

2024-05-29, 02:38 PM

Ah, a Star Wars debate has pulled me back yet again. I see the trap, but feel compelled to jump in anyways.

Luke was fairly well established as a pilot, not just by that one clip. When we first meet him, he's got a landspeeder. Not exactly a fighter aircraft, but still, it's driving a flying thing. It's at least adjacent.

His goal is quickly established to be....getting into the Imperial Academy to be a fighter pilot. Oh look, that's directly relevant. Being a good enough pilot for that indicates a base level of skill.

He's seen playing with a model of a T-16. Foreshadowing, obviously.

The garage literally has a T-16 in it. So, uh, that's his craft. A craft that both flies and has a cannon, allowing him to fight from the air. A fighter craft, obviously.

When Han asks who would fly the Millenium Falcon if he didn't, Luke volunteers, citing his skill as a pilot. This indicates that he is, in fact, a pilot.

Another one of the rebel pilots tells Red Leader that Luke is the best pilot in the area when they are gearing up for the death star attack. In fairness, this was a deleted/readded scene, because *sigh* Lucas...so you may or may not have seen it, depending on version pedantry. Still, it supports that Luke is in fact a really good pilot.

Luke previously fights TIE fighters from the millenium falcon, demonstrating hands on experience at space combat.

Now, I do agree that "homework" and things not presented on screen are an issue...but Rey's familiarity is addressed in the book that came out with the movie.

Oh man, do I have to go through the radio special to cite Luke's other skills? That sounds like work, and I'm not going to do that. The movie is what the movie is. I don't care about justifications bolted on in Fortnite or whatever else.

In the movies, Luke is pretty clearly presented as a good pilot.

What did you read where this happened?

Oh, this comes up all the time. Just to narrow it down, it was the main plot of Bright. Every 10,000 years the dark lord rises or some such typical nonsense.

It doesn't come up in good fantasy. Tolkein does not dwell on neat round numbers, even though his plots are large in scope.

It also appears in sci-fi. For instance, the Foundation series was about the aeons old empire avoiding falling into a dark age that "would last 30,000 years" which is an insane amount of time for a dark age, and not really justified anywhere.

In literature, the Neil Stevenson book Seveneves has a timeskip of, uh, 5,000 years about two thirds of the way through the book. Neil's been getting into this weird area of seeing just how much of a book's cast he can murder off, and if you think "ALL of them" is a bit much, he has since moved on to conceits that permit a 300% murder rate. The ridiculous span of time is an unreasonable schtick to enable, well, the rest of his little thought experiment, and basically destroys continuity of the tale.

Darth Credence

2024-05-29, 03:04 PM

Except no. While people often give it a fake French pronunciation, "an oh-MAHZH", the prescribed form is "a HOMM-ij".

Except yes. While people tend to think their pronunciation of a word must be the correct one, many words have several acceptable pronunciations. Homage is one such, and dictionaries will list both of those you have (plus one more, like your prescribed one without the initial H), and none of it has anything to do with fake French.

Errorname

2024-05-29, 03:11 PM

Wait, she maried Hizdar (or whatever that puddle of slime randomly murdered by his own terrorist buddies was even called) in the show?

I think so? She at least makes a betrothal.

Mordar

2024-05-29, 03:20 PM

Except no. While people often give it a fake French pronunciation, "an oh-MAHZH", the prescribed form is "a HOMM-ij".

An interesting split. Cambridge concurs with you exclusively, while Dictionary.com provides three acceptable pronunciations (Homm-, Oh- and Ah-). American Heritage gives Homm- as primary, om- as secondary. Also interestingly, Collins and Cambridge both recognize hommage, with the silent H.

I'm curious - since hommage is the root, and French, is dropping the h really fake? Should I assume people saying "hal-ay-pain-yo" are using a fake Spanish pronunciation?

- M

ecarden

2024-05-29, 03:26 PM

So to connect this back to the original topic, I actually think Solo's naming idea was pretty interesting. Just poorly executed.

Given what they set up, I'd have had the gang he was part of be more explicitly fa*ginesque and them more explicitly orphans, who are all given the surname Solo, as they lack family connections to give them any other. Maybe even with a misdirect about it being the Solo Gang.

But then, I also would have kept the plot entirely on Correllia, until the very end, when he walks into a game of sabacc, desperate to get himself out of trouble, gives a broad smile and it pans from him and the antagonist to the rest of the table, which includes Lando and end film...

Mordar

2024-05-29, 04:04 PM

Ah, a Star Wars debate has pulled me back yet again. I see the trap, but feel compelled to jump in anyways.

He's seen playing with a model of a T-16. Foreshadowing, obviously.

The garage literally has a T-16 in it. So, uh, that's his craft. A craft that both flies and has a cannon, allowing him to fight from the air. A fighter craft, obviously.

When Han asks who would fly the Millenium Falcon if he didn't, Luke volunteers, citing his skill as a pilot. This indicates that he is, in fact, a pilot.

Luke previously fights TIE fighters from the millenium falcon, demonstrating hands on experience at space combat.

In the movies, Luke is pretty clearly presented as a good pilot.

Fight! Fight! Fight! (Oh wait, that's for the outsiders to chant...)

Disclaimers: I like Luke. I like Rey better. I think they are both the heroes of their respective stories and heck yeah they should have skills.

Counterpoints:

Landspeeder: That's a car, not a plane. A jawa could drive it because he doesn't even need to reach the peddles!
Academy: I know a gross of guys that wanted to go to the Naval Academy or Colorado Springs after watching Top Gun. Does that suggest they had skills?
T16 model: Yeah, me too. I guess I've been foreshadowed! Rey wears an X-wing helmet sometimes. Foreshadowed!
T16 in the garage: Yeah, good point. And it sort of has a gun, but I think calling it a fighter craft is a stretch (at least it was *really* a stretch in 1977). Even so, it is like suggesting that since I flew a Cessna 172S I can fly an F/A-18. Well. In combat. Rey lives in a spaceship, so that should count for something too. Aside: How do poor-a$$ moisture farmers afford a recreational plane?!?
Response to Han: Have you ever asked a 16-year-old boy if they are a good driver?
Best pilot comment: A little upsell never hurts when you desperately need butts in seats!
Space combat experience: Firing a pintle-mounted gun off the side of a freighter counts just as much as assuming the door gunner on a Blackhawk is qualified to pilot an F-35 in the densest air-to-air combat engagement since [insert relevant aerial engagement that isn't a prohibited real world reference]

In the movie we're told Luke is a good pilot through potentially biased and unreliable sources. Years of related works solidify and expand on this, sometimes to the point of incredulity (moisture farmers that can't afford anything besides salvaged droids can buy a plane?!?). In the very end, we're shown he is an excellent pilot Slow in the driveway. On Sundays. We're shown Rey can fly acceptably well. Contemporaneous works provide the background for how and why, and spell out her specific experience with the exact spacecraft she flies. And she doesn't have to reach Luke-level skill.

- M

Peelee

2024-05-29, 04:27 PM

Except no. While people often give it a fake French pronunciation, "an oh-MAHZH", the prescribed form is "a HOMM-ij".

Counterpoint: some words can have more than one accepted pronunciation, and English grammar rules apply depending on the pronunciation. Oh you say "oh-mahj" then "an". If you say "hom-uj", then "a". Also, it's not fake French pronunciation, it's English pronunciation of an English word. Just like the English word rendezvous, or beef, or art.

Bohandas

2024-05-29, 04:30 PM

It kind of works for Dune and Warhammer 40000 since their societies seem to be crypto-luddite cargo cults

Rynjin

2024-05-29, 04:31 PM

No story "needs" to be written. If thats your standard, every piece of media that isnt a literal instruction booklet on how to survive some local hazard has failed.

This argument is always so tiresome, {scrubbed}. "Need" here is not a literal "need". It's the product-driven form of "need" that means "desire".

Nobody desired a prequel explaining any of this stuff. That goes for MOST prequels, in fact. I have very rarely seen a prequel that would not have been better off using its resources to produce just about anything else. Yakuza 0 is one of the few I can always pull off the top, as it provides an even better entry point into the series than the actual first game, and was intended to introduce it to new audiences. And along the way it simply focused on telling one of, if not the best plots the series had ever had and not focus too much on explaining things that didn't need to be explained.

Prequels really only work if they take that approach. "Good plot set in the interesting past of the main story with stakes that make sense".

Rogue One doesn't really fit any of those bills. It's not good, and the part of the story it takes place in is explicitly just a waiting room for the protagonist to show up and save everyone. We know nothing can matter, because it already didn't.

Hrm...is it fair to say all Mary Sue characters are badly written, but not all badly written characters are Mary Sues?

Not sure...sometimes I think there is value in the fun Sues.

Sues work as plot device characters, not protagonists, is the issue. "The Gods Are Bastards" has Tellwyrn as an explicit Mary Sue (the author wrote her that way on purpose and describes her with those exact words), which works because she's the mentor figure, not a main character. She exists to be a convenient Deus Ex Machina when one is called for, and to provide interesting things for the actual main characters to do.

And EVEN THEN it only works because over time the author makes an effort to de-Sue-ify her; not by bringing her down in power level or anything (she's still impossibly perfect at everything she does) but by having other characters react poorly to her smug and overbearing attitude as the stakes of the story increase instead of fawning over her for being "The Great Tellwyrn".

There's nothing worse than a character with horrific character flaws that never get called out by people in-universe. *cough*Korra*cough*

GloatingSwine

2024-05-29, 04:33 PM

The garage literally has a T-16 in it. So, uh, that's his craft. A craft that both flies and has a cannon, allowing him to fight from the air. A fighter craft, obviously.

And without the Force hes Randy Quaids crazy crop duster pilot from ID4 who doesnt know how the controls of his F-18 actually work and can only ram the Death Star

Psyren

2024-05-29, 05:10 PM

Journey to the Center of the TARDIS was fine for me -- I didn't realize it was disliked in general. No strong feelings one way or the other but I enjoyed it enough.

10 is roguish but he still retains a sizeable chunk of the Doctor's duty of care. Gridlock (which not coincidentally is one of my favorite Martha episodes) shows how far he's willing to go to rescue any companion he got into a jam, her included. And I don't think I have to explain why abandoning Rose wouldn't make sense.

What I found particularly off-putting about HN/FoB is how contrived the scenario was - we have to hide from the Family, I have a machine that can go anywhere in time and space but they can follow us anywhere in time and space too - okay, bit of a reach but I can buy that, some aliens can follow a TARDIS anywhere/anywhen as we saw with 12 and Bill... therefore the one place/time that's viable for me to hide in is a time period that will be close to a living hell for my modern-day POC companion.

...Uh, what? It just felt like they went "hey, we didn't get enough discrimination towards Martha in the Shakespeare Code - come up with another reason to stick her in the past, stat!" And the cherry on top of it all is that the entire reason the Doctor was hiding from them was to be kind, because he wasn't actually in any danger, and had no problem one-shotting all of them once he revealed himself. Seriously? Maybe be kind to Martha then? Ugh.

Regarding the last one - people seem to despise Series 7 in general and 7b in particular (when Clara took over from the Ponds.) But I think most of that was just lingering resentment over how unceremoniously Amy and Rory exited the show. And there's a bit of indulgence in that episode in particular since Clara learns the Doctor's real name and the TARDIS treats her like she's special, all of which is a red herring for Name of the Doctor later.

gbaji

2024-05-29, 06:44 PM

Justify it how you will, Leia was clearly undercover in ANH

Uh... What? She was certainly hiding from the Stormtroopers. But she was also clearly on the same style of ship (possibly even the very same one) that her family had used for diplomatic purposes through all of the prequels (yes, intentional, but we're talking Rogue One, so that's historical at the time the film was made).

Claiming diplomatic immuntity (or whatever the equivalent may be in SW) is not an unreasonable thing to at least attempt in this situation. At the very least, Rogue One more clearly explains exactly why Leia might claim that privilege and why Vader would so instantly (and violently) ignore it. One must assume that her claim that this is a diplomatic mission on a consular ship is something that exists in the universe and would normally be respected. So yes. The fact that this same ship literally just fled a rebel attack, and was followed to Tatooine before being boarded does justify the violence we see in ANH far more than "we think that this ship is being used to smuggle a tape with the death star plans on it, so we're stopping, boarding, and searching it".

Um... It also better explains why these were the only plans. Yes. Handwave handwave... why couldn't they just transmit them somehow? But SW runs on that sort of thing all the way through and is incredibly inconsistent about when data can be transmitted through space and when it can't (usually for plot reasons, but whatever). But... if we accept that somehow it couldn't (except via some big gigantic transmitter I guess?), then "we transmitted it directly to one ship, where it was placed on a data device, then hand transferred to a smaller ship when that ship was boarded, then carried to Tatooine" still makes more sense (well, as much sense as possible in SW), than "we had this data. We presumably made a copy of it, were able to get it to Leia's ship somehow (but not anyone else), and could have just as easily made 50 more copies, but just made that one, and the one ship we handed that one copy to just happened to be detected somehow (how?) and was followed by Vader's ship and then boarded over Tatooine".

You do get that literally every single potential plot hole in the method detailed in Rogue One regarding the data exists and is 100x worse if we *don't* assume something like what happened in Rogue One. One of only a small number of rationales for why this would be the one and only copy is if there was one and only one transmission of the data to one ship, which was itself being jammed (let's assume), but made one and only one hard copy, and while being boarded, managed to get that one copy onto another smaller ship and launch it to try to escape. But that ship was followed (and presumably continued to be jammed so they couldn't transmit the data) all the way to Tatooine, and then we reach where we start in ANH.

If this was the result of normal espionage, without the whole dramatic battle going on, and without being in constant battle contact with enemy ship(s) the entire time from initial transmission to being boarded over Tatooine, then there would actually have been no reason not to have made multiple copies, and sent them to the rebellion via multiple means. Rogue Ones explanation at least "works", while most others just plain do not.

IIRC (and I just re-watched the film recently), the transmission had not yet been sent when Tarkin ordered the base destroyed.

Both. The tape part because it's one of the most iconic scenes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnNSnJbjdws&t=86s

Ok. And? Is it the word "tape" that is causing you trouble? This was released in 1977. Calling any form of data storage a "data tape" is like calling any sort of copy of something a Xerox. It was just using common terms the folks watching the film would understand.

That's a pretty incredible bit of semantic nit-picking. At the point in question, they were definitely looking for the "tape" that was handed to the crew of the ship before it escaped. So.... I'm confused why you have an issue with this.

Touched on that above. Could they transmit it so easily? Again. This is SW being SW. The idea that you need a transmitter with a freaking building sized antenna to transmit data to a ship in orbit is already absurd (yet we see stuff like this in SW all the time). But this is what you choose to focus on?

How about instead of searching for ways this doesn't make sense, we search for ways it does. Let's assume that this is a secure facility with broad spectrum jamming of all non-official frequencies (somehow). Let's assume that, because of this, the only way to transmit anything from the surface (or at least from the secure building) to anywhere is via a tight band directional antenna. Let's even assume that this requires some sort of source/destination handshake to ensure that only the target ship/location can possibly receive the data being transmitted cause we don't want spies listening in, right? This is a secure place were we store large quantities of government secrets, so much so that we've put a freaking planet wide shield around it. So they direct the antenna to transmit to one rebel ship. That's why that ship and only that ship recieves the data. Let's also assume that it's standard proceedure for Imperial forces, upon engaging enemies, to jam transmissions to prevent them from sending out calls for help or whatever. Alternatively, we can assume that the planet itself's broad jamming features just plain prevents any transmissions even from orbit or near the planet from being sent out of the system (or even ship to ship, though maybe the right imperial encoding might still work). In any case, let's assume (cause it's the only way any of this makes sense) that for <reasons> they can't retransmit the data (let's assume they aren't actually idiots, and try this and it fails before thinking "let's make a hard copy and move it somewhere else").

Alternatively, we could also assume that the rebels don't actually want the bad guys to know exactly what they stole. They know that the designer of the weapon built in a flaw that could be exploited. At that point, they don't know what it is, or how easily it might be addressed if the empire has an arrow pointing right to it. Let's not forget that even though they knew the rebels had stolen the plans to the Death Star, it was not until they analyzed the rebels attack pattern that they figured out what they were trying to hit, and then figured out that this was a weakness which could cause the whole thing to blow up. Had the rebels transmitted the plans on open frequencies and allowed the empire to know exactly what they had, the empire might have figured it out and closed the weakness.

And in any case. As I said above, every single complaint in the direction of "why didn't they transmit it through space to other bases/ships/people" already existed prior to this point. If this was actually secretly smuggled out via espionage and not immediately detected, then why weren't multiple copies made, and handed off via multiple means to multiple people? You may not like Rogue One's explanation but it is at least an explanation for this.

And... this falls squarely in the "my fan canon that I like was not repeated in real canon" category. Seriously? I get the draw of being the gnostic fan, but really?

It's the "causes a chain reaction" that somehow travels all the way to the core (which is, according to sources, like 70km away from the surface) that is the flaw. What other surface defenses may be present aren't really relevant here. Most people would not expect that blowing up a 2m wide exhaust port on the surface of a 150km diameter base station would result in the whole thing blowing up. How hard the shot is, is literally the least problematic thing here. That it's possible at all is what makes this a huge problem.

Again though, a vulnerability that makes it possible to blow the base up by hitting any point on the surface, no matter how small, is what would normally be unbelievable *unless* it was intentionally put there. That was the hole that Rogue One was filling. And yes, I'm well aware of design problems and flaws and whatnot. But... flaws don't normally allow for violations of the laws of physics. An explosion on or near the surface of something that large, simply cannot "cause a chain reaction" that will travel that far, unless someone literally intentionaly built a series of points that are designed to blow up (or whatever is actually chain reacting here) if the one next to it did, and then lined them up from the surface to the core, and then placed the first <whatever> just inside some point that could be hit by a torpedo from outside the base via said port.

If your argument was that the sabotage could have been easier to exploit than making such a difficult shot through an exhaust port, that's not necessarily true. Making this kind of vulnerability while also making it not obvious is not easy. Obviously, we could get into the weeds here since none of us know anything about engineering or design in the SW universe, but... why not assume that this is the case, rather than that it is not? If we literally have no reason or ability to know this, it seems kinda silly to stamp our feet and declare "but he could have made it easier to activate the chain reaction!". Well... Let's assume that he actually is a genius (so much so that they went to absurd lengths to force him to complete the design for them), and that maybe he actually knows better than random internet folks like us what is and isn't possible in terms of hiding a vulnerability like this into the Death Star.

And even then, somehow, this sabotage is something the Empire is aware of, because again, it's shielded! And even then, getting the specific knowledge of this plan relies on a random pilot detecting, nor getting caught, and somehow finding the saboteurs daughter, who could be literally anywhere in the galaxy, if she's even still alive.

No. They are not aware of it. Whatever shielding is on the exhaust port is presumably on every other port or access point on the station as well. Where did you get the idea that they knew this was a vulnerability and then covered for it buy putting shielding over it? Not in any of the films or other actual canon sources. If they knew about it, then why the line in ANH where the officer informs Tarkin that they have analyzed the rebel attack pattern and discovered a vulnerability? Sounds like someone came up with another explanation in the past (cause they did), wrote it in a book (cause they did), and we're all just supposed to assume that this was "the truth". So we accept the idea that they knew about this, but instead of, you know, putting some kind of physical barrier or cover over the thing that could be raised in case of just this sort of attack, they just put some shielding on it? And shielding that didn't actually protect it from the very type of attack that would cause the chain reaction to occur?

And it wasn't a "random pilot". It was a guy that Galen entrusted with the message to his daughter. Who was sent specifically to the rebel leader Galen arranged to care for his daughter. Remember that Galen was hiding from the Empire during a time well before the "rebel alliance" was created. Saw was one of the first folks to form a resistance to the empire, and would have been literally the only person he knew about to send the message to, and who would know where his daughter was (he has been kept in secret working for the empire for like 15+ years now, with presumably no outside contact). Yes. We could question why he needed his daughter in the first place. He could have just sent the message to Saw directly. But hey. We could also question why R2 was sent specifically to Kenobi and not just with instruction to "get to a comm terminal and use one of the rebel frequencies/whatever we use to call for a pick up". I mean. This is a rebellion right? They've got spies all over the galaxy, and the ability and resources to build a decent sized fleet and hidden bases. But Leia sends the droid with the one copy of the death star plans to go find someone she has no reason to know is even still alive and on Tatooine in the first place?

That's just SW being SW.

This is the dumbest sabotage I've ever heard of. It's like something a child came up with, to explain something that was already explained in the first movie!

They explained how Leia got her hands on the plans. There was a rebel attack, during which the plans were stolen, and Leia was running away on her ship with said plans. What was not explained in ANH was why they knew to steal these plans in the first place, or why there just happened to be a flaw that they could exploit.

Rogue one both details the actual events briefly described in the ANH crawl *and* clarifies how the flaw came to be and why the rebels attacked and stole the plans in the first place. And sure, maybe some folks don't care about that, but I thought it was a good thing to detail. I mean, we had an entire trilogy showing us the details of things they "explained" in the original trilogy, right? By that logic, no prequel film or story can ever be made, because the outcome of the thing the film is about is already known. For me, it's about the details and the people that I find interesting. It's just strange for someone who has stated he loves Andor to take this position. So.... we don't need to see the details about how the empire treats people and drives them to rebellion (cause that was already explained to us in one line from Leia in ANH). And in this case, it's the backstory for a character that you only even care about at all because he was in the backstory for ANH (ie: Rogue One). Otherwise, Andor is just some random guy who joined the rebellion.

Could Rogue One have been better? Sure. There are lots of things that I could nitpick about the film. But honestly, the whole "the flaw was placed there intentionally" was not one of them, and was IMO the smartest and most interesting "reveal" in the film. It was a far far better explanation for how that flaw came to be than any previous one.

And the novel Death Star is canon how? It's not. It's a fan theory written by an author into a book that said author was given permission to write. If it's not in a film or one of the approved series, then it's not canon. It's "fan fiction written by a professional author" (and honestly poor fiction as well).

Um... And that also makes zero sense anyway. See above for a 5 cent solution to the problem that was apparently too complicated for them to implement. Let's assume they shielded it against energy weapons, but left it vulnerable to torpedoes (which still require a direct hit that actually enters the port). Um... Raisable metal shield works here. Plenty of warning before sufficiently small ships can get into position for an attack run. Done. Alternatively, using technology that folks who actually build exhaust ports (or flues for that matter) have had for like thousands of years, you put a freaking turn at the end of the port (or a hood over it). Same tech that prevents rain from getting into your fireplace will magically prevent a torpedo from entering your exhaust pipe. Now the "port" faces a different direction, and hitting it (even "perfectly") just blows up the exterior of the port and does not cause a chain reaction explosion.

No. If they knew the exact nature of the flaw, there existed too many simple ways to fix it to allow for what happened in ANH. If I were to pick between the Rogue One explanation and the Death Star one, I pick Rogue One. The fact that this was possible at all only makes sense if the folks building it and operating it simply never knew the problem existed in the first place. Any explanation that includes "they knew about this, but somehow failed to address it" falls well into the "totally ridiculous" category.

What she says is what informs us of her thought process that leads to her actions. And she was pretty darn consistent with her "all must bow down and submit to me, and those who don't will burn".

In all previous instances Daenerys' use of violence is specific, it is invariably aimed at the top of power structures and she attempts to minimise its spread outside those power structures.

In most of the previous instances, she had the luxury that it was usually only the top of power structures that failed to bow down and submit to her. Well, and their armies. It's not like she surgically aimed just at the leaders of the militaries, killed them and then demanded the surrender of the rank and file folks. Every single person who refused to follow her leadership she killed. She killed every single soldier who didn't bow to her. Heck. She made a point of this in her first battle in Westeros. The rank and file folks bowed so they were spared. The leaders did not, so they were killed.

She also very much used the "kill these people as an example to the rest" methodology. Arranging the leaders bodies for display outside the city, for one. Making a huge point of executing people with dragon fire, in front of an assembly of people (multiple times IIRC), is another.

That is not useful foreshadowing of burning a city to the ground because a bell rang.

Because you are assuming that what drove her was winning the battle. You assume some kind of surgical precision here, but we could also assume that, over time that became less important to her then "show everyone that I'm the power here". And she did that by burning people. The bell ringing robbed her of the opportunity to do that. She needed to send a message to all of the people in Westeros what happens if you resist her.

This was foreshadowed. She sent message ahead that she was coming and expected "the people" to rise up and greet her. Now, to be fair, she didn't know that the Lanisters literally locked the people inside the walls, but her expecation was that by giving them that warning, everyone who was not aligned with the Lanisters had plenty of time to leave. Thus they were enemies. Thus they were legitimate targets. By killing them, then the next time she marches on a city, the people will rebel against their leaders and side with her.

Crazy thinking? Yes. But that's the point. It's a progression of insanity. The same progression that her father showed. We can choose to start with the assumption that she was sane the entire time, and thus this was uncaracteristic of her. Or we can assume that she was not sane, and was struggling with these urges the entire time, and then finally gave in to them. Both theories fit the previous facts. One of them explains her actions.

There were ample steps taken along the way. Also, you are incorrect as to where the divergence occurs. Season 5 is the last season directly based on events contained in a GRRM novel. Not sure how relevant that is, but whatever.

I was not specifically speaking of GRRM's treatment of Dany, but of the trend of creating anti-hero characters in general (or having good people have to make impossible choices, make terrible mistakes, etc). But we definitely see the seeds of this in her treatment and dealing with people in Slaver's Bay during this time period. Yes, this gets more pronounced over the last three seasons, but that's kind of the point. The series writers choose to take that character in a specific direction, and that direction very clearly set up the end point she arrived at. To then see the final point and say "that's so uncharacteristic" when literally everything in the previous several seasons of the show pointed directly to it, is kind of strange.

To me, it was obvious that they were setting her up to this crisis point. She would be put in a position where she would be tempted (via anger at some perceived slight to her right to rule) to go "full Targaryen". And yeah, the whole time I kinda put it at a 50/50 as to which direction she would go when she got there. And yes, a part of me actually assumed they would go in the direction they chose, specifically because it would (at least from the series writers pov) be more like "what GRRM would do". Not sure if that's actually what he would have done with the character, but it's definitly what they saw as being in his writing style. Set up the classic trope situation, then do the opposite of what the audience expects. We assume that the hero will be saved from execution, but... nope. He dies. We assume that the hero, tempted by power (dark side), will rise above it, choose the path of good, and reject the temptation. Happens all the time. So... trope aversion is to have her do exactly what she did.

And that sort of trope aversion is pretty rampant in the series as written by GRRM, so....

It makes sense in the context of Episode IV. Less so with Rogue One, where the ship claiming diplomatic status had just escape a battle between rebels and the Empire. And was followed from said battle.

As I wrote above. It makes more sense why diplomatic status was ignored if they had just been followed from a battle between the rebels and the empire. The fact that the concept of some sort of diplomatic status existed at all, suggests at least some sort of political consequences for violating it. So providing a strong reason for doing so makes perfect sense. And yeah, also makes more sense as to why they had no opportunity to do anything else with the data. The ANH crawl doesn't specifically say that Leia's ship was at the battle when the plans were stolen, but (also as detailed previously) it actually makes a heck of a lot more sense if it was. If the rebels stole the plans, and then took them to their base (which is presumably where they returned to after the attack), why on earth then put them on Leia's ship, to go <somewhere?>, only to be stopped in orbit of Tatooine, and have to quickly stash the plans on a droid, have the droid find Kenobi, and have Kenobi take the droid with the plans to Alderaan, to meet with her father who will then help get the droid to the rebel base....

Um... They would have already had the plans at the very rebel base that it otherwise took the entire film to get them to. So yeah... Having Leia's ship be at the battle and then flee with the plans actually makes more sense than any other explanation we could have. I'm just struggling to come up with any other means by which the one and only copy of the plans would be on Leia's ship with Vader in hot pursuit.

I guess it makes more sense as a plan to sabotage the Rebellion - you hope to get some people killed when they get the plans, and a bunch more if they're dumb/desperate enough to plan an attack based on the intel. After all, if none of the pilots happen to be force-sensitive, the attack would likely be a completely lost cause ;)

There is every indication that a non-force sensitive pilot could have made the shot. Not without their targetting computer on, but they clearly could have.

And I guess it does bring up the question: What is the alternative? Having some means to destroy it, even if very difficult, is infinitely better than no means at all.

I'm not sure what point you are arguing here. Seems like you are saying that it actually only makes sense if someone like Galen intentionally designed the weakness into the Death Star, and intentionally hid a copy of the plans that detailed the exact nature of that designed flaw, and then arranged to tell the rebellion where to find that copy of the plans. You know. Like the entire plot of Rogue One.

The idea that the flaw "just happened" to occur, and some random spies "just happened" to get a copy of the death star plans (but had no idea that there was a flaw, much less where to look for it), and the rebels "just happened" to stumble upon the flaw in the short time they had, is clearly a more logical explanation. Oh wait. It's not.

What's strange to me about this discussion is that this was one of the earliest critiques of the original film. And yes, I'm aware that various explanations have risen up over the decades since. But IMPO, the one given in Rogue One is by far the most logical and reasonable. I never liked the previous one(s), and was quite happy when they rejected them and went with the "it was built in intentionally" one in Rogue One.

Was there a sequence of unlikely events in terms of the actions and events in the film? Of course! Was it overly character driven when things might have made more sense for it not to be? Of course! Is that not true of every freaking SW film ever made? Yeah. So I'm not going to bash it for those reasons. I'm willing to put that kind of stuff into the "suspension of disbelief" category when it's a SW film (cause it's fantasy set in space and not actual sci-fi).

Rynjin

2024-05-29, 07:09 PM

At the point people are exchanging 5k+ word articles on a single sub-topic it sounds like it's time for that sub-topic to grow up and walk away to start its own thread IMO.

DaedalusMkV

2024-05-29, 08:52 PM

It's worth pointing out that saying "Ancient Egypt was a single kingdom that lasted 3000 years" is at best a massive oversimplification and at worst just not true at all. During that period power transitioned between ruling dynasties more than 30 times, the territory claimed by the Egyptian kingdom fluctuated wildly, the ruling Capitol changed at least seven times, and probably a lot more than that, and the ethnic mix of the population changed radically. It was effectively conquered by outside sources more than four times, and something closely approximating every population centre in the region was founded, destroyed, abandoned and refounded again at least once. By Cleopatra's time the Pyramid builders would have been far more alien culturally to those Egyptians than the Romans were, for example, and Egyptians in the later Dynasties knew far less about their predecessors from 1000 years previous than we do today. Egyptologists divide its history into three kingdoms for a reason, and even that is massively simplifying a very complex series of political changes and upheavals.

The longest continuous empire that I am aware of is the Eastern Roman Empire, which maintained a single line of succession and functional continuation of governance from around 325 to 1453, ruling from the same capitol the entire time. So an empire lasting 1000 years is not only plausible, but a confirmed historic fact.

10,000 years represents roughly the entirety of the human historical record. An empire lasting that long is... Conceivably possible, but would probably require conditions we have never experienced on Earth. I definitely agree Fantasy authors have a bad habit of overly inflating the passage of time - you don't need 10,000 years to have passed for everyone to have forgotten something, historically speaking most countries were fundamentally totally ignorant of the past only five or six generations before their own time. 300 or 400 years is plenty for the facts to have faded into myth. Add a period of societal collapse and you can get those numbers down to a handful of decades.

Mechalich

2024-05-29, 09:36 PM

The key is the difference between political, societal, and technological change. Political change can be rapid and immense while inducing very little societal change - meaning change in how people go on living their lives. Sure, people may move around, which causes linguistic and cultural practices to differ from place to place, but overall life is much the same as it was before regardless. Really substantial societal changes tend to depend on technological change, because that allows how people live their lives to differ from one generation to the next. The most stable societies are the ones in which technological change is minimized even though they may be politically extremely vulnerable. Polynesia provides a useful example here: because of some extremely harsh limitations on technology those societies were very stable over time even though warfare was nearly constant and political turnover regular.

Prolonged periods of societal stability are therefore possible in fantasy if there is some reason why technologies are broadly static. This is actually one thing Xianxia/Cultivator settings do comparatively well: since the tiny cultivator elite is absorbing essentially all surplus towards feeding their cultivation, which doesn't feed back into society at all because the cultivators either ascend or die, broader society is generally unable to advance. Additionally the presence of absurdly long-lived individuals means the political past can remain relevant in a way that it would not otherwise do so (though only for a tiny elite minority).

Errorname

2024-05-29, 10:15 PM

The actual mechanics are that the exhaust chute is a direct straight shot to the core from the vent and the torpedoes can travel the entire 70km journey directly to the core. That is kind of implausible, but also the kind of stupid that you handle by not acknowledging it. Let it be a fun bit of pedantic nitpicking for folks who enjoy that sort of thing and just let it be because there is no level of lampshading that can make it make sense.

What she says is what informs us of her thought process that leads to her actions. And she was pretty darn consistent with her "all must bow down and submit to me, and those who don't will burn".

The problem is that it isn't, not fully. The Daenerys who burned everyone in King's Landing is not a Daenerys who would have diverted course on a crusade of emancipation. There has to be a shift in the character, and while I fully believe (and expect the books to show) a change of that sort could happen, the show doesn't really sell it and by the time it happens the show has burned so much trust that nobody's going to try to read between the lines.

We all saw Euron teleport into frame and score 3 back to back impossible air-to-air shots against a dragon, if you try to think about late-stage Game of Thrones logically it will punish you!

Season 5 (and parts of 6) are ostensibly adapting Books 4 and 5, but it is (at best) a very loose adaptation that mangled the books it was adapting pretty much beyond the point of recognition. Season 4 was the last season Martin was directly involved with in a writing capacity and also the last one that could be reasonably argued as 'on-book'

It is, in fact, entirely reasonable for a project the size and scale to have an exploitable weakpoint, for spies to try to obtain the plans to a key military asset and for people to find the flaw quickly under time pressure. There's no reason to assume the Empire is unaware that there are weaknesses in the Death Star, the trench is clearly more intensively defended than the rest of the station.

The exact specifics are kind of dubious, but the general premise holds up without needing to introduce the idea of it being deliberate sabotage and more importantly the dubious elements aren't really fixed by it being a deliberate problem.

Bohandas

2024-05-29, 10:39 PM

I forget the exact dialog so I might be wrong here, but if it's described as a "chain reaction" then that means that the torpedo probably isn't intended to hit the core directly. There probably is a bend in the port and the torpedo is meant to explode whatever is behind it, which in turn explodes something else and so on and so on until eventually it reaches the core and lights the whole thing up

Rockphed

2024-05-29, 11:17 PM

Aside: How do poor moisture farmers afford a recreational plane?!?

What makes you think Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru are poor? Owen was obviously inventing reasons why Luke couldn't leave, not actually struggling to make ends meet.
Also, considering that Luke talks about "bulls-eyeing womp rats" with that T16, why do you think the plane is recreational? I imagine keeping womp rats away from the vaporators was a common part of Luke's chores.

Bohandas

2024-05-30, 12:27 AM

It's my understanding that apparently a lot of people didn't like Batman Forever but I did. And the movie works on even more levels in retrospect because the Riddler's plan was basically Google

Mechalich

2024-05-30, 12:32 AM

Agreed. It's important to recognize that while Owen, Beru, and Luke are the only organic people on the farmstead, there's also a dozen-plus droids working there full time, and Owen commands basically the entirety of their output. He's likely to be fairly prosperous, by the standards of Tatooine and was able to purchase two droids, however used, at once.

Errorname

2024-05-30, 01:03 AM

I was going to dispute this, because I think stuff like droids and flying vehicles are pretty basic by Star Wars standards and it's clear that Owen isn't exactly buying the premium stuff, but then I remembered that his father had enough cash on hand to buy a slave to marry, which implies a lot of stuff but relevant to this discussion is that slaves generally aren't cheap.

I don't know if I'd go so far as prosperous, but they're not peasants, they had enough income to make serious investments into their farming set-up and I suspect they own the land they work.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-30, 06:04 AM

What she says is what informs us of her thought process that leads to her actions. And she was pretty darn consistent with her "all must bow down and submit to me, and those who don't will burn".

Right, and then at the end she burns people who have literally just submitted, she knows they have just submitted and in 100% of previous instances when people submit she does not burninate them.

The Masters of Mereen were crucified in an exact mirror of what they had done to try and dissuade her. Once again, she's precise in hitting the leadership and those who specifically declare an intent to resist her conquest. Which is hilariously restrained for absolutely anyone else in the world she lives in.

We know that the conquest of King's Landing was her primary goal, because it was the entire reason for her to come to Westeros and she'd spent like two seasons trying to get on with it in the face of her advisors, all of whom apparently lost their brains somewhere in the sea on the way over. And once again, she showed people that she was in charge by giving them the opportunity to submit and then killing the people who openly declared their intent to oppose her. Which is how you do rulership in Westeros if you hadn't noticed. This is what absolutely everyone expects from a ruler.

And you want us to believe that this is useful foreshadowing for her burninating all the peasants and their thatched roof cottages who were in the process of submitting. The exact opposite of what she has done in every single previous instance because "she's mad now, you see!". That's the problem, all the foreshadowing you're claiming does not foreshadow what happened without you confabulating a reason for her to just do the opposite because the plot requires her to be Dragon Hitler now.

"She's a Targaryen, they're mad you know" also retreats from the argument that there was any foreshadowing at all. If she just did it because she's a genetic timebomb who could have snapped at any time that's absolutely no different from saying "she did it because of plot", nothing could possibly be regarded as foreshadowing it because it is no longer required to logically follow from previous actions.

Eldan

2024-05-30, 07:25 AM

I wouldn't necessarily compare uncle Owen commanding a dozen droids to having hired a dozen people, I think a better comparison is probably a farmer owning a dozen pieces of good farm equipment. SUre, not poor, those things cost a lot, but a farmer with a tractor, a truck, a harvester and a handful of other vehicles isn't exactly rich, either.

Batcathat

2024-05-30, 07:58 AM

Yeah, having interviewed quite a few farmers (I was a reporter in a rural area for a few years), the general impression I got was definitely that it was an occupation that required fairly large investments while not generating very large profits, which is an unfortunate combination. I imagine living in a desert on a planet mostly controlled by criminals wouldn't exactly make the situation easier. :smalltongue:

Mechalich

2024-05-30, 08:23 AM

Indeed, and it's doubly annoying because the show actually does have a means available to justify Daenerys going mad in the finale: following Euron's completely ridiculous bolt-murder of dragon #2 she essentially stops eating due to being overwhelmed by grief, and starvation can induce some profound mental instability under the right circ*mstances. Her burning King's Landing because she's lost the ability to differentiate between the Red Keep, which does in fact contain her enemies, and the rest of the city, which does not, would be a plausible symptom and response scenario. That outcome would even be a tragedy very much in keeping with one of the overall themes of ASOIAF: that unintended consequences follow the deeds of the powerful to the point of often overwhelming the original intent entirely.

Of course even then it doesn't really matter, because the entire sub-arc of Dany's turn to madness happens after the Night King's death. The world will survive, and who gets to sit (or not) on the Iron Throne is a distinctly secondary concern compared to the 'we're not all going to be turned into ice zombies!' victory they won a couple of episodes earlier. Heck, utterly mad Dany is only a marginal downgrade from substantially unhinged and can't govern her way out of a paper bag Cersei (actually it might be an upgrade, since Dany at least has Dothraki that might be able to put down some inevitable rebellions and hold the Seven Kingdoms together). Now, maybe if Book Bran, because he's a Kwisatz Haderach, might be able to genuinely alter Westerosi society for the better (or at least the greener) by becoming king, but Show Bran is just a tall teenager in a wheelchair who sometimes talks to birds. The show even makes it clear that's he's basically letting Tyrion run the continent and while Tyrion is a talented politician, he's a completely human one and it simply is not humanly possible to hold the Seven (or actually Six seeing as Sansa gets to be Queen in the North) kingdoms together from where the show ends. In the long run, fragmentation probably causes more violence and death as the various kingdoms fight each other across generations than it would result from the tyranny of Daenerys the Mad (especially if she quickly got herself killed trying to conquer Volantis or some such 'break the wheel' insanity).

Ultimately the showrunners didn't understand the Seven Kingdoms well enough to figure out what a good outcome for those kingdoms would even be, resulting in them presenting a bad ending as a good one. GRR Martin seems to have been in the same boat himself, not quite figuring it out until he went and wrote Fire & Blood.

It really depends. In modern industrial economies like the US, where production levels are high and farms are engaged in a period of prolonged consolidation, even successful farmers tend to be asset rich but cash poor (commonly a successful farming operation will plow everything into more land or machinery). On the other hand, if those assets mature, farmers can in fact be quite rich. A farm that owns its land free and clear - something that's often the case on long running European operations like vineyards - is quite literally sitting atop a pile of money that they could in theory cash out at any time. The Lars' finances are opaque, so we really don't know the circ*mstances.

The desert planet bit though, that actually works in their favor. Scarcity increases price, and since demand for food can't exactly go down unless the population does (evidence suggests its going up because Jabba), the farmers have a lot of leverage. And sure, corruption takes out a chunk, but that chunk might well be smaller than the taxation demands on a properly imperial world because of the needs to pay for the massive imperial security apparatus. Ultimately we really don't know, which is especially frustrating because the Lars farm is probably the Star Wars business for which the most information exists. The economics of, for example, the Mos Eisley cantina are several times more opaque.

Ionathus

2024-05-30, 08:57 AM

There's a difference to me between physical protection and emotional protection. Ten protects his companions pretty viciously whenever he can, but he often puts them through the wringer emotionally. Like I said, that's part of Martha's arc in her season: realizing that The Doctor is going to keep jerking her around emotionally because that's who he is as a person, and she needs to grow beyond it.

Regarding the Madame de Pompadour episode -- Rose and Mickey never really struck me as being actually in danger on that spaceship. Sure, the robots turn up and capture Rose and are about to dissect her or whatever. But she doesn't really seem all that in danger even then, and The Doctor defends her even if he was putting on a blase facade about it.

I mean, yeah. Again, that's the point of that two-episode arc. What does his love interest teacher point out at the end of the episode when he invites her to come with? "If the Doctor had never chosen this time and place, on a whim, would any of these people died?" And Ten has to slink away, because he knows she's right. He takes all this stuff way too lightly. Of course he would put Martha through the wringer because he's too focused on the fun kooky experience.

Yeah, he could have just turned around and beaten The Family right off the bat. (Maybe. We're told that from The Family's perspective after all. Possible they oversell his abilities.) But he didn't, he overcomplicated it because he had a "clever" idea, and people died, and other people got hurt emotionally. That's a recurring criticism leveled at The Doctor by the characters surrounding them, and I think it was part of the story they wanted to tell in that two-parter.

Obviously if it still doesn't work for you then it doesn't work. But I do think everything you're criticizing was intentional.

Really? Well, shoot, now I feel silly for saying "Ancient Egypt was a single kingdom that lasted 3000 years." Yep, that's definitely a thing I said verbatim.

I'm aware they still had political upheaval, regime changes, and conquering. I kept using the words "compared to" or "relatively" because my point was more about how they were probably the most stable, and that stability was an outlier.

Grim Portent

2024-05-30, 11:19 AM

I don't know if I'd go so far as prosperous, but they're not peasants, they had enough income to make serious investments into their farming set-up and I suspect they own the land they work.

Pricing in star wars is all over the place. A freshly made B1, admittedly a terrible droid for most purposes but actually pretty good for menial labour, costs 1200 Republic Credits in the sources that bother to give numbers. A used speeder costs a little over that. You can buy a mechanical person for less than a used car.

Peelee

2024-05-30, 11:27 AM

Watto meanwhile considered a high class but small passenger space ship with an off the line price of over a million credits to not be of equal or greater value than a young woman and a child. Which implies slaves cost a whole hell of a lot, and also that Watto is an *******.
To move the car analogy from landspeeders to ships, Qui-Gonn had a Rolls Royce without an engine, Watto had a Rolls Royce engine, surely Qui-Gonn could have traded the Rolls to Watto for a Honda. Even if Watto didn't have a Honda, he could get one if it meant swapping for a Rolls he could easily make intact.

Mordar

2024-05-30, 12:16 PM

He could be lying to try and keep Luke on the farm, but "...we'll make enough on the harvest and I'll be able to hire some more hands..." doesn't suggest properity. The austere nature of the housing and dress could be choice, but also seems to suggest modest means. Buying used droids as well. Having grown up around dozens of family farms, being tangentially descended from the same, and having a lot of classmates/friends that were family farm kids, this is very much what it feels like to me. Maybe that is bias, but the Lars farm doesn't feel like a plantation...and while it isn't hardscrabble they don't seem to be rolling in wealth.

Plus, and most importantly, the "Farmhand Turned Hero" practically requires that they not be wealthy.

Aside: The womp rats were mostly in Beggars Canyon, not on the ridgeline with the vaporators...though they may have occasionally been more dangerous.

I don't know if I'd go so far as prosperous, but they're not peasants, they had enough income to make serious investments into their farming set-up and I suspect they own the land they work.

Wouldn't expect the cost to be too high on Shmi all things considered...but that suggests some means. Even if they own the land it doesn't look like it would carry much value, and we don't see many other farms or structures during the landspeeder rides in the wastes. Guessing the net worth of the farm is all in the equipment.

...and likely heavily leveraged.

I see the Lars moisture farm as analogous to wheat or corn as opposed to lucrative luxury crops like wine grapes. The land value here seems pretty limited and only another moisture farmer would want to buy. No agribusiness is going to come along and give them piles of cash.

To move the car analogy from landspeeders to ships, Qui-Gonn had a Rolls Royce without an engine, Watto had a Rolls Royce engine, surely Qui-Gonn could have traded the Rolls to Watto for a Honda. Even if Watto didn't have a Honda, he could get one if it meant swapping for a Rolls he could easily make intact.

Don't forget that Watto had so very much more. He had leverage. That is why he wouldn't offload both Shmi and Anakin...not because they were more valuable than the luxury space yacht, but because he didn't have too. Granted, there also may be some issue with him finding a secondary buyer (hard to move a McLaren at reasonable pricing in the middle of Iowa, for instance)...but it is Tatooine, so I suspect that wouldn't be a big problem given all the...interesting traffic...seen at the spaceports.

- M

Psyren

2024-05-30, 12:44 PM

At the point people are exchanging 5k+ word articles on a single sub-topic it sounds like it's time for that sub-topic to grow up and walk away to start its own thread IMO.

I'm inclined to agree, the thread seems to be 80% Star Wars now if not more.

Obviously if it still doesn't work for you then it doesn't work. But I do think everything you're criticizing was intentional.

I know what RTD did was intentional; I don't understand how that's a defense. I can fart in an elevator intentionally, but I and everyone around me are still stuck with the smell :smalltongue:

Grim Portent

2024-05-30, 12:45 PM

Thing with Watto is that I don't think he's meant to be all that good at business anyway. He's the equivalent of a sleazy used car salesman, or scrap/used goods salesman in this case, not an entrepreneur. His actions make sense for him, and are important to the narrative, but boy do they make him seem stupid.

He could probably have sold that engine and Anakin and Shmi for more than their paper worth in Republic Credits, then had those credits changed into locally viable currency, probably at a bad rate admittedly, then spent that money on more slaves and more scrap to sell. Money in hand is better than stock in a warehouse, even if it's not as much money as you might have wanted. As is, he had three items of value to his customers, and they got two of them for free because of his gambling addiction, leaving him entirely out of pocket and his customers unsatisfied.

To step away from the increasing Star Wars overrun, I'm going to say Looney Tunes: Back in Action. My understanding is it's generally poorly thought of, but I have a soft spot for it. Lot of it is bias from having seen it as a kid, but I do think that it's quite an enjoyable film.

Lord Raziere

2024-05-30, 12:52 PM

I actually enjoyed it to, though I was also a kid at a time. I enjoy simply for being a modern thing with Bugs bunny and Daffy Duck in it, I think it might be the movie that let me know they even exist, and thus introduce me to Looney Tunes in general.

gbaji

2024-05-30, 01:01 PM

It's a 70km long exhaust. Let's agree that whatever the chain reaction is, it is initiated via an explosion occuring inside the port itself, close enough to the entrance that a torpedo can enter, explode, and initiate the chain.

With that kind of size scale going on, you could add a building sized front piece to the port, with multiple turns in it, specifically to prevent any sort of torpedo shot into the new port actually reaching the initial point in the chain and starting the sequence. Lots of possible solutions here, all relatively easy given the existing construction present. But requiring that you know about this weakness and choose to do something about it.

Right, and then at the end she burns people who have literally just submitted, she knows they have just submitted and in 100% of previous instances when people submit she does not burninate them.

It's a progression. She moves from killing people who fail to submit after she defeats them, to killing people who failed to submit to her prior to her having to defeat them. There's a first time in which someone takes a step like this. This was that first time.

It's also of note that she had an extremely unrealistic expectation of her greeting by the people of Westeros to her return. This goes all the way back to season 1 (and book 1 IIRC, but it's been a *really* long time since I read that). Jorah doesn't specifically reject her assumptions about how loved she will be when she returns, but merely cautions her and then changes the subject. It's clear though the entire thing that she has lived a very sheltered life, and doesn't understand "regular people" at all. Doesn't help that her brother fueled these ridiculous expectations as well.

This was the first battle in Westeros in which there were "common people" in the area. So yeah. It's not unreasonable that the mere absence of them falling over themselves to open the city to her, and throw off the evil rule of anyone other than her, was seen as a betrayal. Let's also not forget that she had just started moving from killing enemies who oppose her and/or refuse to submit, to killing allies who have betrayed her in some way. It's quite clear at that point in the story that she's not stable at all, and everyone around her knows this.

It's not as shocking a move as you might think at first. People who believe it's ok for them to unilaterally execute people for failing to <do one thing the want> will tend to progress to increasingly harsh penalties for increasingly minor offenses.

It's not the "exact opposite". It's the next step in a progression. The people weren't submitting. The enemy soldiers her military just defeated did. That's not the same thing. As I mentioned before, this was her first real interaction with "the common people" in Westeros. She just came to the shocking rejection of everything she had believed about how "the people" would react to her. So yeah.... not surprising to me at all that this was her reaction.

You're making a decent argument if we were talking about a normal person with a normal upbringing and way of thinking. That's not her.

A depreciated used car! Ever since the XP-38 came out they're just not in demand!

Yeah. SW and science is barely remotely logical. Don't even start on SW and economics. I think I posted something about this in another thread, but for me the absolutel weakest part of TCW was the whole banking series. It was... well... laughable.

DaedalusMkV

2024-05-30, 01:12 PM

Really? Well, shoot, now I feel silly for saying "Ancient Egypt was a single kingdom that lasted 3000 years." Yep, that's definitely a thing I said verbatim.

Ah, I see. I apologize for misrepresenting the point you were attempting to make. I would still disagree with that assertion, though Egypt is a solid example of what does make for the most consistent presence of civilization in human history: Fertile river valleys. The Yellow River, Yangtze, Indus, Tigris and Euphrates and Nile all consistently have large, successful and generally complex civilizations operating in the area for the entire span of recorded human history. If you're going to farm (and farming is what leads to 'people staying in the same place' and 'people writing things down' in the long run), there are no better places to do it than a big river valley which provides both some degree of natural fortification and a functionally unlimited supply of clean(ish) water. Ideally somewhere around the Tropic of Cancer for climate reasons. Egypt is really no different from China in this regard - both centre their civilization in roughly the same places over immense periods of time, and while individual kingdoms rise and fall a recognizable culture persists. I'd actually argue that China is the real outlier - Egypt sees considerably larger changes in culture and governance than China, and also loses its written record far more often. Pick a random time in the last ten thousand years and China probably has the largest and most sophisticated civilization in the world at that time, and will probably still be recognizably 'Chinese'. And there are still centuries-long chunks about that history we're... Kind of hazy on at best, just like Egypt. But even China isn't a single cultural or political entity stretching back ten thousand years - only the most hardcore Chinese nationalists would dare to claim something like that.

Anyways, I've kind of said my piece on 'Fantasy writers have no sense of time'. The point I was really trying to make was the one regarding the Byzantine/Eastern Roman Empire and the timescale of ancient history. Because yeah, they do tend to artificially inflate time numbers for no reason at all. An empire lasting a thousand years? Can happen, for sure. Did happen in human history. But that would be an outlier, not common. I've seen some fantasy stories that set events 100,000 years prior to the story, which is just patently ludicrous. In that sort of time frame evolutionary pressure starts to be a major force, much less piddling details like 'major climate change'. And it's totally unnecessary. For all but the most complex civilizations, four to six generations is all you need for the 'facts' to have become 'legends of dubious historical accuracy'. Even if we're talking about Elves or something, a thousand years is plenty to be 'so far in the past nobody really has any idea what really happened'.

It looks like you were probably more interested in the weird technological stasis that's so popular in Fantasy as well, and on that front I'm not going to argue with you at all.

Peelee

2024-05-30, 01:30 PM

I'm inclined to agree, the thread seems to be 80% Star Wars now if not more.

So you're saying it's about due to be a Lord of the Rings thread? :smallamused:

Ramza00

2024-05-30, 01:43 PM

So you're saying it's about due to be a Lord of the Rings thread? :smallamused:

Spock is the superior saxophone player, over Ensign Harry Kim

Mordar

2024-05-30, 01:56 PM

So you're saying it's about due to be a Lord of the Rings thread? :smallamused:

Are any of the following minority opinons?

Frodo should have gone into the lava at the end with Gollum (wait, did I spoil the ending?);
Faramir would be a better match with Arwen than Aragorn. Faramir would be a better match with Aragorn than Arwen;
The coolest effect in the entire trilogy was the charge of the water horses;
Cutting Tom Bombadil made the movie much better (though I still would have liked the barrow wights)

If not, then I have failed to make this a LotR thread.

Spock is the superior saxophone player, over Ensign Harry Kim

Spock is the superior everything to everyone in Voyager. Yes, he is the superior sex symbol, annoying alien, hologram, fake resistance fighter and heartthrob, all at the same time.

But of course that isn't a minority opinion.

Oh, here's one: From Dusk Till Dawn is Tarantino's best film.

- M

GloatingSwine

2024-05-30, 01:59 PM

The rebel briefing scene clearly shows the torpedoes travelling down the exhaust shaft to detonate near the reactor. (I don't know why you think 70km is a long way for a super space torpedo to go, a modern Spearfish has an official range of 54km, never mind any unofficial "don't tell the Russians" range and that has to go through water not vacuum).

Killing people before they've surrendered to you is called "having a battle". This is not the first time Daenerys has done that.

You're making a decent argument if we were talking about a normal person with a normal upbringing and way of thinking. That's not her.

When the same thing happens over and over again and then something different happens, that's not the "next step in a progression", that's something different happening. You could be arguing that she had a Pavlovian response to bells for all the text supports this being a soundly established progression of a character.

In order for this to be the next step in a progression of events the events before it would have had to have progressed in that direction instead of being the same thing over and over again.

Mordar

2024-05-30, 02:08 PM

Killing people before they've surrendered to you is called "having a battle". This is not the first time Daenerys has done that.

Not quite - killing soldiers on the opposite side from you before they've surrendered is called "having a battle". Killing a non-combatant intentionally is called "murder". Killing a whole lot of them in a particularly horrific way is called "a crime against humanity". Also a "Targaryen Tuesday".

- M

Peelee

2024-05-30, 02:12 PM

Spock is the superior saxophone player, over Ensign Harry Kim

I don't think "Harry Kim is the worst" is a minority opinion.

Trafalgar

2024-05-30, 02:43 PM

In previous seasons she was advised by Tyrion to not rely that the commoners will support her. She also had to deal with the whole "Sons of the Harpy" plotline in Meereen so she knows that even if many support her, not all will. She also has had experience with Westerosi commoners in Winterfell. She had to earn their respect.

I assume you mean this was the first battle Daenerys fought in Westeros where there were commoners in the area. Because I can think of other battles in Westerosi history with nearby commoners. But even that's not correct because there were "common people" in Winterfell during the long night, one episode before this one.

"She has lived a very sheltered life". You seem to be trying to paint Daenerys as some naïve princess but did you not watch seasons 1 - 7? I would call nothing about her life sheltered after her brother sold her to Khal Drogo. She has dealt with common Dothraki, common in Astapor, common in Meereen, common in Winterfell. And sometimes, those commoners have tried to kill her.

Her madness is not established before she roasts King's Landing. That's because of bad writing and because they decided to give season 8 only 5 episodes. They needed a way to end the series quickly and came up with a bad way to do it. Its a crappy ending to a great TV show.

Ramza00

2024-05-30, 02:52 PM

I don't think "Harry Kim is the worst" is a minority opinion.

But has Spock ever used a Sax like Riker or Kim?

Trafalgar

2024-05-30, 02:56 PM

But has Spock ever used a Sax like Riker or Kim?

Riker could play Sax? I thought he played the one and only instrument in band camp that is less cool than a sax.

Errorname

2024-05-30, 02:58 PM

I do not actually think that going from executing captured enemy leaders to the indiscriminate slaughter of the civilians that you mean to rule is a clear progression.

It's also of note that she had an extremely unrealistic expectation of her greeting by the people of Westeros to her return. This goes all the way back to season 1 (and book 1 IIRC, but it's been a *really* long time since I read that). It's clear though the entire thing that she has lived a very sheltered life, and doesn't understand "regular people" at all. Doesn't help that her brother fueled these ridiculous expectations as well.

I can agree that she started in an echo chamber, but then an entire epic fantasy story happens and forces her to adapt or die. Daenerys is not her brother, and she grows beyond his delusions very quickly. By the time she arrives in Westeros she is a seasoned conqueror with many westerosi advisors who should have more realistic expectations, and even if she somehow does not, almost two seasons of television happen between her landing on Westeros and acclaiming herself Queen and her attack on King's Landing. So no I don't find this a particularly credible explanation.

Even if you do accept the explanation for the character choices, the context surrounding it is still ridiculous. If you accept "Daenerys resenting that the common folk chose Cersei over her" as the trigger, you still have to do deal with it being baffling that Cersei somehow has any political support at all. If you accept "Well, Daenerys is really angry about her Dragon and Best Friend getting killed" you have to deal with how absurd the chain of events there is.

Jorah doesn't specifically reject her assumptions about how loved she will be when she returns, but merely cautions her and then changes the subject.

"The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends. It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace." is the exact Jorah line, which isn't a hard rejection but is still a rejection of the idea.

Yeah this, you can make it make sense if you just ignore the parts of the show that contradict it. Like how it kind of makes sense that the bells mean surrender if you ignore that the last time King's Landing was besieged a character literally says "I've never known Bells to mean surrender"

Peelee

2024-05-30, 03:02 PM

But has Spock ever used a Sax like Riker or Kim?
I never once saw Kim or Riker play sax better than Spock.

Riker could play Sax? I thought he played the one and only instrument in band camp that is less cool than a sax.
Note to self, Trafalgar has never heard Baker Street.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-30, 03:10 PM

The writers "kinda forgot" that, because it's established in that episode that opening the gates and ringing the bells will be the sign of surrender.

Bohandas

2024-05-30, 03:10 PM

I loved the scene where they're saved from dying of thirst by product placement. "It sure was nice of Walmart to give us these Walmart beverages in exchange for saying Walmart a bunch of times"

Sapphire Guard

2024-05-30, 05:41 PM

Anyone who can afford to buy the personal transport of the Queen of Naboo on Tattooine is rich enough to hire bounty hunters to seize it instead. Watto's probably just going to strip it for parts, if he tries to actually sell it Jabba's henchmen will knock on the door in short order and say ' nice ship. We'll be taking that.'

Grim Portent

2024-05-30, 06:19 PM

I would assume Watto pays protection to the ruling Hutt on Tattooine (at the time of the Phantom Menace I think that's Gardulla the Hutt or something, Jabba hadn't taken over yet IIRC,) and is thus nominally protected from such things.

Besides, it's not actually all that much money in the grand scheme of things. It's a little over 1000 B1 droids fresh out the shipyard, and in this case it's far from new. For someone like a Hutt, the ruler of Tattooine* in particular, it's basically nothing.

Which does make Watto's refusal to gamble two slaves on it more reasonable come to think of it, vehicles depreciate fast, and the naboo royal transport has done a not insignificant amount of travel and run a blockade, so the value is probably vastly decreased. He wasn't being offered a gamble of a 1.3 million credit ship against two slaves and an engine, he was being offered a ship with a resale value considerably lower than 1.3 million credits.

*For some reason the planet is important to the Hutts, but especially Jabba. Must be on a good hyperspace route or something, because I don't think it has many natural resources to extract .

Tyndmyr

2024-05-30, 06:24 PM

Yeah, that's pretty accurate. Lots of farmers are rich in land and machinery, but generally light on free cash. Food simply has low profit margins, and requires a lot of stuff to produce it efficiently. That's probably a decent model for moisture farmers. Not actually poor, but...a working sort of having resources.

I admit my eyes kind of glazed over at some of the longer star wars posts before this, so I may have missed a little context, but I don't think its any sort of plot hole to consider Luke's family as effectively upper middle class in wealth, but not overly fancy.

Peelee

2024-05-30, 07:09 PM

A good way to get everyone to stop paying you for protection and band together and pay your rival is to just openly start wantonly stealing whatever the hell you want from the people who pay you protection. Even the bounty hunters wouldn't trust that "crime lord" after that - why not just stiff them on the bill and have another bounty hunter kill them, after all? Cleary the "crime lord" is bad at this whole crime business.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-05-30, 07:55 PM

To chime on the issue of fantasy authors having no sense of time, I particularly like how Frieren did it.

Frieren, a nigh-immortal elf mage travelling with her human apprentice, returns to a town where she sealed a demon sorcerer 80 years prior. The demon was renowned for inventing one of the deadliest spells the world had ever seen, powerful enough to pierce all defenses and kill instantly. She spends about half the episode talking about his history, how powerful he was, and the trouble he gave the party. So much so, that they weren't even able to kill him. They had to settle for sealing him away.

They finally get to the town and right before unsealing the demon, Frieren says it's the apprentice's job to defend them while she prepares. Obviously, the apprentice freaks out at the prospect of defending against something so powerful. The unsealing happens and the demon predictably postures before launching his overpowered murder spell... and the apprentice easily blocks it. For a moment there's the thought that maybe he's just warming up, but then it's made clear how puzzled she is that he's only using "basic offensive magic."

Frieren then explains that after his sealing, every mage on the continent researched and picked apart his murder spell. It became the basis for a whole new generation of offensive and defensive spells. The apprentice, having been born decades later, only knows it as the most basic offensive tool because it's so elementary now.

Even though their world is a static medieval fantasyland in many ways, I definitely appreciated the idea that there's progress in some fields, at least.

Sapphire Guard

2024-05-30, 08:50 PM

Everyone is very confident that they know exactly what Owen and Beru's financial situation is, and what the going rate is for slaves/starships/droids is. We don't have anywhere near enough economic information on Tattooine to start jumping to these conclusions.

'Farmer' is a ridiculously broad category, thye could be anywhere from barely scratching out a living to very prosperous.

'Slave' prices also would vary a massive amount, some would be a lot more valuable than others.

How do you know any of this? Does Watto pay protection to the Hutts? I don't think we know that.

And she didn't explain all that before the fight why? Dramatic effect?

Peelee

2024-05-30, 08:53 PM

How do you know any of this? Does Watto pay protection to the Hutts? I don't think we know that.

We do - Book of Boba Fett firmly establishes this, as he takes over collecting from everyone after he takes over.

Errorname

2024-05-30, 08:54 PM

The writers "kinda forgot" that, because it's established in that episode that opening the gates and ringing the bells will be the sign of surrender.

I unironically kind of love those late season 'Behind the Episodes' featurettes. Extremely funny to confirm immediately after airing the episode that the dumbest possible explanation for why events happened was what you intended.

Yeah, if you want a setting that is static and stable you can justify that diagetically. You don't even have to say the gods did it necessarily, if you change the material conditions and underlying physics of the world to a point where technical innovations you don't want to deal with aren't really feasible.

'Farmer' is a ridiculously broad category, thye could be anywhere from barely scratching out a living to very prosperous.

'Slave' prices also would vary a massive amount, some would be a lot more valuable than others.

That they could buy a slave implies they're not absolute bottom rung. They're probably not doing great, I think it's likely that most of their equipment like droids and skyhoppers are bought second-hand, but still we can make some guesses.

Sapphire Guard

2024-05-30, 09:00 PM

We do - Book of Boba Fett firmly establishes this, as he takes over collecting from everyone after he takes over.

Boba Fett establishs that Jabba takes tribute from some people, we only see a couple of the bigger businesses. That doesn't mean everyone on the planet does.

Keltest

2024-05-30, 09:36 PM

Boba Fett establishs that Jabba takes tribute from some people, we only see a couple of the bigger businesses. That doesn't mean everyone on the planet does.

Watto gambled with Hutts on the podracing, which implies that he is at least a medium sized name in Mos Espa, with a tolerable amount of collateral. If he doesn't pay tribute directly, its probably to one of his immediate lieutenants.

Peelee

2024-05-30, 09:48 PM

Boba Fett establishs that Jabba takes tribute from some people, we only see a couple of the bigger businesses. That doesn't mean everyone on the planet does.

Everyone on the planet? No. Businesses Mos Espa? Yes. What, were you wanting an exhaustive scene with every conceivable business, or an in-depth look at ledgers? We only even see the size of two of the payers, we don't know how big or small the others were, and we certainly weren't shown an all-inclusive list. Unless you're requesting the show to spoon-feed you, then it's hardly unwarranted to make reasonable assumptions based on information given.

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-05-30, 10:15 PM

And she didn't explain all that before the fight why? Dramatic effect?

Her apprentice is a teenage girl that was raised mostly in isolation by a priest (who happened to be a former party member of Frieren's). One of her major issues at that point in the story is feeling inferior, partially because it took her a bit of time to pick up magic but especially because she's traveling with a 1000 year-old elf who happens to be the former mage of the party who defeated the Demon King and saved the world. The ultimate point is that Frieren knew she was powerful enough to handle it and put her in the situation so she'd realize how capable she was even without relying on her much stronger mentor. I suppose there's a bit of dramatic effect in there, too. The elf isn't the typical wise and doting mentor figure - one of the topics explored is how a person with such a long life span can even relate to humans.

The show has an interesting premise, essentially "What happens after the legendary heroes are done being heroes?" Deals a lot with how society progresses, the legacy you leave behind, and how to make way for the next generation. It's certainly the best recent anime I've watched and has a significantly higher standard of writing most of the time.

ecarden

2024-05-30, 10:40 PM

Yeah, we even see him go out to deal with a situation. He deals with it...badly, but he's told about a local gang robbing one of the merchants paying him protection, who flat out says that didn't happen under the previous leadership and he goes out to deal with the problem. Now, he 'deals' with it by recruiting them and paying the merchant less than half of what was stolen and insists he lower his prices. But the clear intent of the show is that this is how Boba's different from the other crime bosses, who likely would have killed the gang, or sold them (and presumably repaid the merchant, though that's less clear, but certainly prevented future thefts).

The expectations of someone who came up in Mos Eisley are that the criminal leadership can, and will, maintain order sufficiently to allow them to do business and can, and will, resolve crimes being committed against those who pay protection.

Lemmy

2024-05-30, 10:59 PM

I wasn't really surprised to be a minority... But if it's only about having an unpopular opinion:

While I acknowledge its historical and cultural significance, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure isn't nearly as good as people say.

Jotaro Kujo is the worst Jojo and the worst part of his own story... And Dio really isn't very interesting beyond his meme potential.

Sapphire Guard

2024-05-31, 07:11 AM

No, I was expecting some side material or other to mention that Watto paid protection money, not 'someone entirely different paid protection money thirty years later'

Watto is not a big name, he's a 'smaller dealer'. He won two slaves from Gardula once, but it really depends how that works, maybe she just gambles a lot, or he won them at a casino she ran.

The Naboo transport is a very high end ship, they have to park it in the desert not the spaceport because that ship in itself would otherwise attract attention. Watto winning the ship has a very valuable asset and no ability to protect it, making him very vulnerable to theft or extortion. Even if he does pay protection, that doesn't mean the racketeers won't abuse their authority if the reward is good enough.

That they could buy a slave implies they're not absolute bottom rung.

Depends. In one version they buy her with a one off valuable artifact, and Cliegg Lars might have made a bad financial decision for love.

There are so many variables we can't possibly know.

Peelee

2024-05-31, 07:52 AM

No, I was expecting some side material or other to mention that Watto paid protection money

So you want it spoon-fed, gotcha.

Keltest

2024-05-31, 07:59 AM

Im with Peelee here. The Hutts legitimately rule Tattoine. The fact that they do so by means considered illegal in the Republic is irrelevant to that. If Watto doesn't pay protection money, its only because they call it "taxes" instead.

Trafalgar

2024-05-31, 08:02 AM

Note to self, Trafalgar has never heard Baker Street.

You might have a point. Saxophone as played by Baker Street is less cool than Riker playing trombone.

Ionathus

2024-05-31, 09:15 AM

Trixie_One

2024-05-31, 11:56 AM

On the theme of being annoyed at fantasy authors using too big numbers recently I've noticed an annoying trend from the new wave of 40k fandom of people complaining the numbers are too small and that you should add some extra 0's to the end of any stated number.

A common one is usually when they find out that Space Marine chapters have just 1,000 Marines (yes I know the exceptions like the Black Templars, don't @ me), and complain that so few can supposedly take a whole planet. That's just stupid. Planets are like big and stuff.

What they fail to get is how marines are described to actually take planets and that's via surgical strikes. That's dropping right on top of the planetary ruler's palace in drop pods, kicking the door down, use their bolters to shoot everyone in the imediate vicinity, and then pull out and let the Imperial Guard who do turn up in the tens or even hundreds of thousands to actually pacify the rest of the planet now the problematic rebellious leadership has been sorted out. They're shock troops. Anytime they end up involved in a protracted war of attrition it means something has gone badly wrong that can take chapters centuries or even longer to fully recover their losses from.

They're also incredibly rare in setting. The roughly one marine for every populated planet in the Imperium is not a typo but an intended one to show they're the elite of the elite with a truly impossible task. That I also put down on GW as they're such poster boys where it seems like they're the majority force everywhere all of the time but in reality of the setting most fights the Imperiums take part in there is not going to be a chapter involved or if there is it'll be just a single company of a hundred marines with support staff and vehicles called into execute a very specific objective.

JNAProductions

2024-05-31, 11:59 AM

The issue with Marine numbers is that, relative to Xenos and Chaos... A single Marine isn't that big a deal.

A Marine isn't even a match for a Tyranid Warrior one-to-one. But you can see a million Warriors in a single invasion.
Likewise, a Necron Immortal is about on par with a Marine. Maybe a little less, but when a single tombworld can have hundreds of thousands of them... Suddenly a thousand Marines in a chapter feels pretty lacking.

Aedilred

2024-05-31, 12:04 PM

Obvious caveats that GW writers don't always get the numbers right either, and some of their novel writers don't even get the heights of things like titans correct when they'd previously been very consistent in how big they should be. This is me just being annoyed at people with a very shallow understanding based on what they've heard from youtubers complaining about something that's not actually a problem, or at least I don't think it's one. YMMV as always.
The extreme rarity of Space Marines in the fluff has always been at odds with their overrepresentation in the media and on the tabletop. When I first got into 40K many moons ago, the Imperial Guard were virtually nowhere to be seen on the tabletop: their main model lines were out of production, they didn't have a codex, and none of their tanks had been released. Somehow though the "intro background" that you used to get on the flyers and at the front of rulebooks and so on did a good job of foregrounding that no, even though the marines are cool and they're what people play with because they're cool, they are a rare and precious resource and the Guard are the backbone of the Imperial fighting forces. and that was a concept that I don't recall struggling with (or anyone else struggling with). I wonder if the media has become so sprawling (and with SMs becoming arguably even more overrepresented proportionally in the rules than they once were) that this point gets lost, leading to a "huh?" moment for newcomers.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-31, 12:12 PM

The issue with Marine numbers is that, relative to Xenos and Chaos... A single Marine isn't that big a deal.

Spess Mehreens in 40k are like elves in Warhammer Fantasy. There are always as many or as few as the plot requires.

There's a similar numbers issue in Star Wars, because all threads are Star Wars threads, people assessing the size of military forces of the GFFA forget to account for how fast Hyperdrive is* and that they have realtime pangalactic communications. As long as most Star Destroyers are at ordinary patrol readiness most of the time, the Galactic Empire can concentrate basically as much force as it needs anywhere in the galaxy within a few hours at most.

*Coruscant to Mustafar, ~50,000LY in less time than it took for a man with no arms or legs to burn to death 2' from a river of lava...

Darth Credence

2024-05-31, 12:41 PM

Spess Mehreens in 40k are like elves in Warhammer Fantasy. There are always as many or as few as the plot requires.

*Coruscant to Mustafar, ~50,000LY in less time than it took for a man with no arms or legs to burn to death 2' from a river of lava...

That's bad, but nothing even close to what The Force Awakens and Rise of Skywalker did with it. A person can time coming out of lightspeed by hand perfectly to be inside a shield? X-Wings can just kind of hang out in hyperspace until it's time to exit? I'm not even sure what they were going for with the hyperspace skipping in the last one.

GloatingSwine

2024-05-31, 12:43 PM

The last one was dumb (they probably did it because Guardians of the Galaxy did it and it was a cool visual sequence JJ wanted to copy), but the first is just the Force doing Force stuff and the second is what the Rebel fleet does in Return of the Jedi.

Darth Credence

2024-05-31, 12:49 PM

The last one was dumb, but the first is just the Force doing Force stuff and the second is what the Rebel fleet does in Return of the Jedi.

That's not how the force works! (Had to use the line.) If it had been a force-sensitive person at the controls, then sure. But it was Han. If we say that it was the hand of the force working through Han to put an end to Starkiller Base, then we are in the position of asking why the force would do that and not, say, arrange for Starkiller Base to not blow up Hosnian Prime.

In Jedi, the fleet did not hang out in hyperspace - they waited for a while after the heroes left, and went straight there. In TFA, they were in hyperspace waiting for word to come out - if they were doing that in Jedi, they would have remained in hyperspace until the heroes contacted them. Instead, they came out at the time the plan said the shield should be down, and were surprised by the trap.

Trafalgar

2024-05-31, 12:55 PM

But it gets worse. In TFA, Starkiller Base has a shield that is impervious to anything except a ship in hyperspace. In TLJ, we learn that a capital ship in hyperspace can be used as a weapon. So why didn't they use a capital ship to destroy Starkiller base in TFA? It wouldn't even need to be a war ship. An ore carrier would probably work really well.

Keltest

2024-05-31, 01:29 PM

Well a ship coming OUT of hyperspace would presumably just crash into the planet and just explode like normal, even if it could fit under the shield.

Trixie_One

2024-05-31, 01:52 PM

A Marine isn't even a match for a Tyranid Warrior one-to-one. But you can see a million Warriors in a single invasion..

I feel like that's the point I was making. A whole chapter isn't beating a million warriors by itself, that's what those big guns that never tire are for and the as mentioned imperial guard who are there to do the attritional grunt work, instead they're aiming to land 30-100 marines right on top of a Hive Tyrant or whatever high value synapse beastie needs killing and then bugging out via Thunderhawk so they don't have to fight a million or even close to that many warriors. Just however there might be in the immediate vicinity of the target.

Somehow though the "intro background" that you used to get on the flyers and at the front of rulebooks and so on did a good job of foregrounding that no, even though the marines are cool and they're what people play with because they're cool, they are a rare and precious resource and the Guard are the backbone of the Imperial fighting forces. and that was a concept that I don't recall struggling with (or anyone else struggling with).

The issue is that these days people aren't being introduced via the firsthand texts but second or even thirdhand from people who have maybe read the wiki or listened to someone else read a wiki if you're lucky, people exaggerating stuff based on memes if you're reasonably fortunate, and basically fanfic that people have made up cause it wasn't grimdark enough for them already if you're unlucky. Add the chinese whispers effect onto that, and it's no wonder there's so many misconceptions out there currently.

Price of popularity I guess :smallbiggrin:

Mordar

2024-05-31, 02:31 PM

Price of popularity I guess :smallbiggrin:

Also byproduct of both the economics and rules of the game. Back in the day (2nd Ed 40k, 3rd ed FB) it was just *SO* much cheaper to play an "elites" army as compared to a "grunts" army. Even though I most wanted to play Goblins, the cost was so much higher I had to take my second choice (Dark Elves) because 90-110 models was so much cheaper than 300. The idea of a huge army of infantry backed by cool tanks appeals, but when I can field 35 troops plus maybe 3 characters instead of at least triple that...and I don't have a grown up income yet? Slam dunk. Add to that the sadness of removing dozens of casualties from the table before they get to do anything (other than absorb bolter fire) when they represent dollars and hours of painting...rules favored the elites such that I have seen multiple battles where the grunt army lost more than 25% of their forces before they even got their first turn!

Minority opinion? - The brighter, cleaner* painting style of the Mike McVey days did a better job presenting the models than does the even more highly skilled and detailed style used today. Even if you could never attain the level of skill, you (the novice/intermediate painter) could more reasonably achieve the style than the versions we see today.

* - meaning less dirt/weathering/battle damage on the models, not a crisper style.

- M

ArmyOfOptimists

2024-05-31, 02:32 PM

I don't know if it's official, but my own headcanon is that the hyperspace ram only worked because there's a brief period when you activate the hyperdrive where the ship is being pulled into alternate space at incredible speed. If you aren't extremely close to your target as the ships were in TLJ, you fall into hyperspace too early and cease to have any effect on normal space. It's the only way the maneuver doesn't completely wreck the Star Wars battle theater, explains why there's no issues in the greater universe with ships colliding while hyperdriving all over the place, and holds up against what we see in TFA (They dive the Falcon at hyperspeed into Starkiller Base intending to pop out behind the shield. The concern is that they'll come out at the wrong time, not that they'll hit the planet during the hyperspace jump.) and TROS (Poe's offhand remark that the Holdo Maneuver was a one-in-a-million shot.)

It still raises the question of why the most popular weapon in Star Wars isn't a wide dispersal of proximity activated hyperspace missiles that cruise to their target and activate their hyperdrives once in range, but a lot of the weapons in Star Wars don't make sense. Blasters are slower than arrows, for example.

Grim Portent

2024-05-31, 03:23 PM

The issue with 40k numbers is more a guardsman thing, where a planet's worth of infantry is roughly the same as the total armed forces of the real world United Kingdom, because that's what the writers are familiar with. Like an entire crusade intended to conquer dozens of planets having less than a million soldiers in it.

Or stuff like the Siege of Vraks taking 17 years despite being smaller in scale than WW1 in both manpower and size of battlefront.

It's not hard to buy that 100 marines in the right place at the right time can be hugely impactful, they're special forces who kill enemy leaders or blow up important war machines. Cool fine, makes sense, especially when you add in the stormtroopers and similar forces who can be taking out slightly lower priority targets at the same time, making the marines super-special forces supplementing the regular special forces.

Darth Credence

2024-05-31, 03:40 PM

There has never been an official explanation that I have found as to why that worked and was a one-in-a-million shot. It has spawned many, many arguments.

My personal headcanon is close to yours, and I wouldn't consider it headcanon as much as the logical presumption based on what was shown. What we saw was the FO ceasing to pay attention to the Raddus when they noted the fleeing shuttles. Admiral Holdo saw this, then turned the ship around and moved into position. As she neared her position, someone on the Supremacy noticed it. The command crew on the Supremacy's bridge immediately noted it and freaked out, turning all guns on it in a desperate attempt to destroy it. She made the jump, crashing into the ship and killing herself but also wiping out a lot of the enemy. I also add in here that in Rogue One, we see the order to jump to hyperspace given, and a number of ships start to leave. Vader's ship jumps in right in their path, and none of them end up destroying Vader, they swerve to get out of the way and one hits the Star Destroyer and blows itself up.

So, that is what we have seen to that point in relation to ships colliding while beginning a jump. From that, I conclude that it is known that a ship hitting another ship as it enters hyperspace will do massive damage - otherwise, why did Hux and crew freak out when they saw Holdo lining up? Knowing that this is known but never brought up at any other time, I conclude that it only works in certain conditions, namely that the ship to jump is the correct distance from what they are going to hit. Obviously, you have to be fairly close, because we see ships jumping around other ships all the time without blowing up. What makes sense to me is that the little dart forward we see of ships before they enter hyperspace is a fixed distance for at least a given ship, probably based on mass. If you can arrange it so that the enemy ship is at the end of that fixed distance when you make the jump, you hit them while accelerating from cruising speed to nearly lightspeed before entering hyperspace, and thus deliver the massive damage seen. But if you were farther away, you'd just jump, and if you were closer, you'd hit before having the speed. Other ships know this, and don't let ships get into that position. Hux and company were so focused on the shuttles the missed Holdo getting lined up and paid the price. Try to line that shot up mid battle and you probably end up directly under their guns and get chewed apart before you can succeed - especially since this would only make sense as a smaller ship doing this to a bigger, more powerful one.

As to why missiles made that way are not the weapon of choice, I have several possible answers. First, they wouldn't have the mass to do this to a capital ship. Yes, with our physics, it would work just as well with a missile-sized mass, but we know that their physics are not the same as ours. The Raddus was still a capital ship, so it would be easy enough to say only a capital ship has the mass to rip through another capital ship. Other possibilities are that in order to put on a hyperdrive, it ends up being as large as an x-wing and hence able to be easily targeted by turbolasers, or perhaps that a dumb missile would be far too easy to evade. And yes, they have dumb missiles - if it is better to have a regular pilot actually pull the trigger in the Death Star run rather than have the computer fire it automatically when the point is reached, then they clearly do not have smart weapons.

Blasters are slower than arrows because they want you to see the blasters. In universe, a blaster should be able to punch through armor better than an arrow can. What really gets me about it is why everyone doesn't use stun beams all the time - seems like no matter where you get hit, you're down for the count, and it has a much wider beam than a blaster shot. Stun everyone and kill them at your leisure, if you are morally opposed to stunning.

Peelee

2024-05-31, 04:09 PM

Well a ship coming OUT of hyperspace would presumably just crash into the planet and just explode like normal, even if it could fit under the shield.

"Most things in here don't react well to bullets capital ships at lightspeed." - Captain Marko Ramius.

gbaji

2024-05-31, 07:08 PM

What you are remembering as the torpedo traveling down the shaft is the chain reaction (though, admittedly, the graphic shown on the screen isn't terribly clear, so I can see why you might think otherwise). Listen to the dialogue being spoken at the time. It clearly states, while speaking of the target (the exhaust port), that "A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should destroy the station. Only a precise hit will set up a chain reaction".

If the torpedo itself travels all the way down the shaft, then that's not a chain reaction. That's just firing a torpedo down a long tube and hitting something on the other side and making it explode. Hitting something just inside the port, making it explode/overload/whatever, which then makes the next thing explode/overload/whatever, then the next and the next, all the way down to the center of the station, which finally makes the reactor explode *is* a chain reaction. I suppose one could interpret this as a "precise hit" on the raeactor itself ("target" and "exhaust port" anticedents aside), which has to be made by somehow firing a torpedo perfectly down a long shaft to hit it, and that somehow hitting the reactor with the torpedo will cause a "chain reaction" in the reactor itself, but that seems like an odd way to phrase things. You'd say you need to line up your shot perfectly on the port, so that the torpedo can travel all the way through the shaft to the other end and hit the reactor. But in the film, they always talk about precisely hitting *the port", and not "the reactor".

At least, this is how I and everyone else I've ever spoken to about SW has assumed about how this worked.

In order for this to be the next step in a progression of events the events before it would have had to have progressed in that direction instead of being the same thing over and over again.

There was a progression though. I certainly noticed it, and well before the final couple seasons. As she suffered setbacks, each time she became increasingly angry, not just at the specific people, but at "the system" itself. And yeah. In a feudal(ish) society, "the system" eventually boils down to "the people". She went from "I kill people who try to hurt me", to "I kill the leaders of people who don't surrender to me", to "I kill people who aren't leaders, but still oppose me", to "I kill people who surrender, but who don't swear loyalty to me", and then to "I kill people for failing to swear loyalty to me even before the battle, whether they were leaders or not".

The progression was that she kept moving who deserved to die, and why. And eventually it arrived at "if the people don't rise up, throw off the shackles of their current rulers and join me, then they're the enemy too".

I don't think "Harry Kim is the worst" is a minority opinion.

I liked Harry Kim. He was the best Ensign in the Fleet! Actually, not totally kidding here. I kinda have this headcanon about his Starfleet career after they returned. Like, the guy's got more space experience (and command experience) than most Commanders by that point. I'm kinda assuming they skipped JG, and promoted him to full Lt right away. Then maybe put him on a 6mo tour, promoted him to Lt Cmdr, then another transfer and tour, then put him as exec on a ship right after that. Then, yeah.... a few years to Captain Kim.

Now yeah. If he can just figure out how to not be a "strange things" magnet, he'd have a great career.

I do not actually think that going from executing captured enemy leaders to the indiscriminate slaughter of the civilians that you mean to rule is a clear progression.

Slaughter of civilians who did not rise up and support her, nor leave the city ahead of the battle. In her mind, they were providing aid and support to the enemy and therefore had made the decision to oppose her. Heck. If nothing else, they were making it harder for her to use her dragon against the enemy, right? If only those pesky civilians weren't there, she could have burned Kings Landing to the ground back when Cersei was first holding Missandei hostage and then killed her like she originally wanted to. In her mind, everyone who didn't leave the city made the decision to be human sheilds for the Lannister soldiers. And, also in her insane mind, despite wanting to burn the city then, she held back and gave those civilians time to leave.

So it was all their choice, and therefore their fault. You know. From an insane person's pov. It would have been vastly easier for her forces to get to the Red Keep and capture it if the civilians had either risen up and killed the Lannisters for her, or at least opened the gates for her, or even just left the city so she could burn the Lannister troops in the city, and then march straight to the keep. Instead, her forces got bogged down in a street to street battle. Which, you kmow, made it the civilian's fault.

There was a clear progression from "use my dragons to win battles" to "use my dragons to punish those who opposed me". This was just a next step in that progression.

It's a bit of both. But a large part of it is that she lives in a world of absolutes. There is no middle ground between "I'm the destined ruler and all bow down and follow me" and "you are a sworn enemy and must be destroyed". She exhibits this kind of thinking through the whole thing (well, first book excepted perhaps). And strangely, events play out to fulfill this "I'm destined to win/rule" fantasy, over and over for her. She continuously acts as though what she's doing is "the right thing", and projects this assumption on everyone else around her.

In a mind like that, it simply doesn't occur to her that the common people who work their normal daily lives don't actually care about the politics, and aren't choosing to support Cersei at all (they're just living there, and she happens to be in charge at the moment). In her mind, everyone picks a side. And you either pick her side, or you are on the other side. It's that simple. It's that black and white. At least to her.

And the fact that he had to tell her this indicates where her default mindset is at. She really just doesn't get this to her core. Jorah can tell her this, but it never really sinks in. This is what I meant by her "living a sheltered life". Even before getting her dragons, she was part of a royal familiy and was told her entire life that they were destined to return and rule. After that, every step along the way was her saying "I'm destined to rule", and frankly doing really dumb things most of the time, but through sheer determination, a fair bit of luck, and having dragons on her side, she succeeds (mostly) anyway. Events always keep conspiring to allow her to succeed. And she never once really sees or understands what the "common people" are like. She's always sitting on a throne. Even when they were starving in the desert, she was in charge, and people were willing to die for her at her command. She was surrounded by loyal people who would do anything to help her suceeed. She was isolated from anything that would help her actually understand what Jorah was saying.

The one and only setback she had along the way (that wasn't a combat bit) was her decision to chain her dragons because they had killed a civilian. The lesson she learned was that doing that weakened her, and allowed the Harpy's to succeed, and nearly got her killed. It was her dragons who saved her, and allowed her to rise back to power. So... right there she learned that civilian lives are less important than the power of her dragons. Prior to that point, she could have gone in a different direction. But after that point, she had made a commitment that nothing would stand between her and using her dragons to exert power, not even civilian lives. Yes. It was one life, and the circ*mstances were different, but IMO that was a key turning point in her development. She was no longer held back with her dragons after that point.

So yeah. While it was shocking, it was not actually surprising to me. I saw the writing on the wall well before that point in the series. And yes. I'm sure they set it up so that they/she could go either way, but it (and a few other points) were set up to show this aspect of her character.

Yeah. The bells thing was odd, since that would normally be some kind of alarm or call to arms type signal. Honestly though, what other signal were they going to be able to use? The real flaw was setting the story up to have some kind of "we'll set up a signal to show that they've surrendered" in the first place. I mean. Realistically, you'd have your army march up to the gates, and either a formal surrender of the city occurs right there, or you fight. And having decided to fight, then it's more or less game on. The whole set up they did was just... odd.

Well. Also, the fact that the Lannisters were using a ruse didn't help. They drew her forces in and then attacked. Which is yet another reason for her thinking that the entire city was against her, and thus the entire city deserved to literally die in a fire. I agree that it wasn't really set up or written well, but her deciding that Kings Landing was in need of a good cleansing totally didn't surprise me at all when it happened.

Yup. Despite the broader criminal aspects, the Hutts were the actual legitimate rulers of Tatooine. Which makes those concepts pretty much identical. And I also agree that we don't need to have a full blown detail of the heirarchy of the system in order to understand the broader aspects of it. Hutts are an interstellar crime syndicate. They control Tatooine. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume there are layers of power/control under that point, but we really don't need the details. And yeah, whether called protection money, or taxes, or fees, or whatever, it's all the same thing in terms of "money that flows to the Hutts".

Peelee

2024-05-31, 07:30 PM

I like to dunk on Harry Kim, though I honestly don't mind him much at all. Tom Paris i do actively dislike, because he's an arrogant, smarmy ass, but Kim actually tries. That being said, I so think you're wildly overstaying his command experience here. He certainly has more than most Starfleet officers who aren't commanders, but once that's your full-time job, you're probably not going to be outclassed by a temp.

Gnoman

2024-05-31, 07:39 PM

At least, this is how I and everyone else I've ever spoken to about SW has assumed about how this worked.

The briefing simulation shows a fighter releasing a bright glowing orb. That bright glowing orb flies down the shaft and creates an explosion effect on the reactor. Dialogue emphasizes that the shaft is a straight shot to the main reactor. When the actual strike is made, it shows the torpedoes making a sharp turn and flying down the shaft with no explosion until the entire station explodes. That's clear as crystal that the actual torpedo is flying down the shaft and detonating directly on the reactor. Just like the attack on the Death Star II involved firing warheads directly at the main reactor to almost identical effect (albeit in that case by flying an actual ship in instead of using an unguarded straight shaft.

Your assertion that this "isn't a chain reaction" makes no sense. Shifting to historical comparisons here, the hit that sank HMS Hood was almost certainly a chain reaction - a 15" shell detonated a secondary magazine, which overwhelmed an armored bulkhead and detonated the main magazine. "Chain reaction" here means that the initial explosive isn't enough to do the job, but it sets other forces in motion that do it.

Rynjin

2024-05-31, 07:48 PM

The difference is that any time Harry Kim tries to help, he actively makes the situation WORSE.

Tom Paris is difficult to actively dislike because he's so unbelievably hypercompetent at everything he puts his hands on that his smugness is justified. He has zero reason to like any of the people he's serving with, and all of them hate him as well, but they can't do anything without him.

Peelee

2024-05-31, 07:51 PM

The difference is that any time Harry Kim tries to help, he actively makes the situation WORSE.

I agree, it is much easier to dunk on Kim!:smalltongue:

ETA: Also, the unbelievable hypercompetence at everything makes it easier easier to dislike him, not harder, but cause he's not even really a character, he's a caricature. I realize that lobbing "bad writing" at Voyager is kind of like target shooting a barn, but it's still impressive that Paris manages to make it even worse.

Rockphed

2024-05-31, 07:58 PM

I remember liking Voyager, which probably makes me in the minority. That said, I only watched a couple dozen episodes over the course of the half-dozen seasons, so I probably have a very uninformed opinion.

Peelee

2024-05-31, 08:04 PM

I didn't like it at first but i like it now. It's not good, but it is pretty fun, which i was too elitest to really appreciate when i was younger.

Ramza00

2024-05-31, 09:04 PM

The difference is that any time Harry Kim tries to help, he actively makes the situation WORSE.

I like the concept of Tom Paris, but Lower Decks Beckett Mariner just does the same thing, and does it better

edit: and Bradward "Brad" Boimler is better Harry Kim

Peelee

2024-05-31, 09:09 PM

I like the concept of Tom Paris, but Lower Decks Beckett Mariner just does the same thing, and does it better

edit: and Bradward "Brad" Boimler is better Harry Kim

Mariner does it better because she's not hyper-competent at everything, just a lot of things, and she knows to not try the stuff she's not great at.

Also, agreed on both counts.

Rynjin

2024-05-31, 09:09 PM

I agree, it is much easier to dunk on Kim!:smalltongue:

In any other show I'd be right there with you, but I hate most of the other cast of Voyager so much that him annoying all of them makes him way better lol.

Lemmy

2024-05-31, 09:16 PM

Voyager was... Meh. It had some fun episodes, but also had some absolutely terrible ones.

Still better than anything Star Trek-related made in the last 10 years or so.

Peelee

2024-05-31, 09:23 PM

Voyager was... Meh. It had some fun episodes, but also had some absolutely terrible ones.

Still better than anything Star Trek-related made in the last 10 years or so.

Because the last ten were so different than the last 19?

Errorname

2024-05-31, 09:56 PM

This is quite consistent for a lot of franchises about star wars, the actual principles of interplanetary warfare are currently untested and we are unlikely to learn them in our lifetimes. This is good because I don't particularly want to get invaded by aliens, but bad because it means our entire understanding of how to write cool space operas relies on having to imagine what interplanetary warfare is like based on speculation and existing forms of warfare, and writers can struggle to get good numbers for wars based on documented earthbound forms of warfare.

I don't see an explosion but I do see two torpedoes going directly down the shaft (https://youtu.be/caEGuJA7SJ0?t=46). Sort of assumed the chain reaction would happen after the core itself was impacted by the torpedoes.

I would like specific examples. Because the most recent executions prior to the burninating were Varys (who tried to assassinate her (uncharacteristically incompetently, I might add) to put her nephew on the throne) and the Tarlys (who had multiple opportunities to plead for clemency and refused them all). Those are not exactly kind things to do, but they are also pretty justifiable.

I would note that Jon Snow has a child hanged, Sansa has someone eaten alive by dogs and executes a man begging for mercy, and Arya poisons an entire family to death, and none of these are seen as damning signs that these characters might be willing to wholesale massacre civilians. You could argue that all their victims had it coming, but I think you could also make that argument for the vast majority of Daenerys's executions.

I also don't know if this interpretation even holds up to what little dialogue we get from her justifying her actions, and it doesn't really match what I remember of the authorial comments on the matter. She wasn't saying "actually those children deserved it" she says "[Cersei] used their innocence as a weapon against me". She tries to justify it as acceptable collateral.

I'd also note that she completely dismantles the City's defenses in less than ten minutes. You couldn't ask for an easier victory.

And the fact that he had to tell her this indicates where her default mindset is at. She really just doesn't get this to her core. Jorah can tell her this, but it never really sinks in.

It indicates that her main sources of information early on were either delusional like her brother or dishonest like Illyrio, but no I do not think it indicates that she is fundamentally incapable of grasping that statement.

But after that point, she had made a commitment that nothing would stand between her and using her dragons to exert power, not even civilian lives. Yes. It was one life, and the circ*mstances were different, but IMO that was a key turning point in her development. She was no longer held back with her dragons after that point.

Naturally, she then spends two seasons not attacking King's Landing in order to prevent civilian casualties when she has three dragons and could take the city effortlessly.

It's just more poor construction typical to late stage Game of Thrones. They have a 'big moment' and don't care how stupid and forced the context is so long as they get there.

Keltest

2024-05-31, 10:02 PM

I'm not sure why blowing up the core is considered a chain reaction here. Thats just a reaction. A chain reaction needs, well, a chain.

DaedalusMkV

2024-05-31, 10:27 PM

I mean, it depends on the setting. A fantasy setting with conditions other than earth doesn't especially have to follow the conditions as they are set on earth, especially when you have immortal entities in your setting who personally remember events.
Oh, of course. You can set up a fantasy setting to do all sorts of things. Personally I don't rate immortals that highly as a source of stasis unless they both have immense political power (usually as a result of immense personal power, in the vein of 'do what I say or I will personally kill people until you give up and do what I say') and some sort of memory-enhancing superpower they will actually probably not be significantly different from verbal history and collective memory - which is to say pretty much totally unreliable once you get 200 odd years past the actual events in question. But if you have active gods or something then they can easily maintain a status quo for extremely extended periods of time, and if omniscient or semi-omniscient beings are doling out history lessons then the historical record is going to last far longer than it would in real life.

With that said, I largely discount the idea of a static society outside of a situation where deific figures are intentionally colluding to ensure technological and social stasis. Even in something like a Cultivation setting, where development of machines might suffer as the focus lies on the demi-gods gobbling up resources to enhance their personal power, you will still almost certainly see development in areas like Cultivation techniques, or means to exploit resources that empower Cultivators. The specifics are different, but technology (yes, in a setting with magic, advancing your magical abilities is a form of technology) always marches on.

Thanks. Fair point on China -- it's probably more recognizable across more of history than Egypt. Egypt probably gets the spotlight because it's so close to Europe and is instantly recognizable -- desert civ with pyramids? Egypt.
Oh, absolutely. There's also the simple truth that Egypt is something Western civilization understood better and knew more about for a very long time. Egyptologists really started getting some good work done by the mid 19th century, and Ancient Egypt was firmly planted in our cultural imagination long before anyone posting on this board was born. Egypt was close to and accessible by the people who wrote most of the really influential textbooks for modern media. By comparison, China was something of an enigma even into the late 20th century, and it's only fairly recently that we've been able to really expand our understanding of ancient China. Hell, 20 years ago people probably would have gotten mad at me for listing the Yangtze among the Cradle of Civilization rivers, even though modern historians almost universally agree that it was every bit as important as the rest.

Or stuff like the Siege of Vraks taking 17 years despite being smaller in scale than WW1 in both manpower and size of battlefront.

What is harder to buy is that a force the size of a medieval army can credibly hold ground on a continent wide battlefront. Lot of imperial guard stuff sticks with the idea of regiments being 1000 strong, but then only has 4-5 regiments on a planet to fend off an invasion force so they can fit into the narrative more easily.
I was about to post basically exactly this, but you beat me to it. Space Marines are, used correctly, precise special forces units. They excel at rapid decapitation strikes, destruction of crucial infrastructure and capturing vital intelligence or assets. You don't need a lot of top-tier special forces troops to make a huge impact; two or three squads of Marines dropping into a central command center and wiping out the leaders of a rebel group can easily turn the tide of a war. The problem with 40k's numbers is that there usually aren't enough of anything else. Here's a quote from my old, old Imperial Guard codex:
"I have at my command an entire battle group of the Imperial Guard. Fifty regiments, including specialized drop troops, stealthers, mechanized formations, armoured companies, combat engineers and mobile artillery. Over half a million fighting men and thirty thousand tanks and artillery pieces are mine to command. Emperor show mercy to the fool that stands against me, for I shall not." -Warmaster Demetrius
Those numbers might sound impressive to someone with no grasp at all of modern military history, but on the scale that 40k is supposed to be operating on... That sort of force would be little more than a joke, entirely incapable of doing anything. The Normandy invasion in 1944 involved more than two million Allied soldiers, with the goal of conquering somewhere in the realm of half a continent on a single planet, and managed to do so over the course of roughly a year. With significant aid from local Partisan forces almost everywhere they went. And another five million Soviet soldiers hitting the same opposition from the opposite side at the same time. Demetrius' half million soldiers would be an absolute drop in the bucket on a planetary scale, much less in a battlefront that was supposed to include dozens of planets. A very pessimistic estimate on the size of the Imperium suggests it should have somewhere in the realm of a quadrillion citizens (a million worlds, with an average of a billion people per world, in a setting where Hive Worlds canonically sometimes reach 100 billion people individually), operating on a constant wartime footing. The imperium should have more than ten trillion soldiers, and even if only one in a thousand of those qualifies for service in the planet-hopping Imperial Guard while the rest stay in Planetary Defense Forces that still means the Imperium should have somewhere in the vicinity of ten billion mobile soldiers, with major military operations involving tens of millions of troops at minimum (which would be enough to potentially conquer planets in realistic time frames, especially if you allow for the Guard to be relatively elite and able to win handily with small numerical disadvantages against local opponents). So yeah, when it comes to the Guard, you generally need to add a couple of zeroes for the numbers to make sense.

Mechalich

2024-05-31, 10:28 PM

Naturally, she then spends two seasons not attacking King's Landing in order to prevent civilian casualties when she has three dragons and could take the city effortlessly.

Quite. Fundamentally, there's a huge problem with Seasons 7+8 of Game of Thrones in that the show hands Danaerys the victory at the end of Season 6, full stop. In the final montage that has her setting sail, she has the backing of: the Dothraki, House Tyrell (representing by far the largest population and army in Westeros), House Martell (representing a small but entirely untouched force in Dorne), a legion of Unsullied, the Iron Islands (representing the largest naval force in Westeros) and three dragons.

Against this Cersei has: the massively depleted forces of the Westerlands (the Lannister Army, the one that went several rounds with Robb Stark and lost all of them), the massively depleted forces of the Riverlands (which are additionally divided because no one wants to fight for the traitorous Freys), and the depleted forces of the Crownlands, which took significant casualties during Stannis' attack on King's Landing (note that the show outright says this, when Jamie mentions how they control three of the seven kingdoms at best).

The forces of the Vale and the massively depleted forces of the North are by this time under Jon Snow and even if they were inclined to oppose Danaerys, which they aren't, their position is such that they are completely incapable of opposing any move she makes on King's Landing without marching for months. The forces of the Stormlands, the final group, are also massively depleted due to fighting for Stannis, but those that remain appear to be sitting at home making no moves.

Dany can, upon arriving in Westeros, set up on Dragonstone and immediately lay siege to King's Landing by both land and sea. Since the city is incapable of feeding itself without extensive imports - something the show established in earlier seasons. It will starve and fall in a matter of weeks even if there's not someone sufficiently disloyal to open the gates and/or Varys chooses not to lead her forces in by secret paths to storm the Red Keep, both of which are likely. Ultimately, with the Young Griff plot dropped and no real Westerosi-origin force in a position to oppose her. It. Was. Over.

And that, by the way, would have been fine. Dany could have rolled in, taken King's Landing, executed Cersei, and the show could have spent the next two seasons fighting an epic fantasy war against ice zombies. However, because the showrunners seem to have been viscerally repulsed by the idea of having the fantasy matter in the most popular fantasy series of all time for some reason, they spotted Cersei a brand new Lannister army, a magical teleporting fleet of unreasonable size and power, a second brand new army from across the sea all the while removing the Reach and Dorne from Dany's side of the equation in addition to two whole dragons. Yet, even after doing all that, it still wasn't close!

Fundamentally, Game of Thrones reached a point, probably somewhere in season five, where not only had they run out of books to adapt, but also where the story had changed from the kind of story the showrunners wanted and knew how to tell, into a fairly straightforward fantasy epic that their neither had any interesting in focusing on and (to be fair, neither does GRR Martin, which is why he hasn't written any of it in a decade), in those few moments where they did, were terrible at: even at its worst Game of Thrones was able to do at least some good character moments (knighting Brienne for example), but the only good moment involving the ice zombie threat in the entire series is Hardhome. Making the series work would have requires a massive change in direction in the middle, which probably would have demanded firing Benioff and Weiss and replacing them with someone far more interested in slamming armies together. Obviously this was never going to happen, and so the whole endeavor was doomed.

Well, excepting that, because something like cultivation techniques are totally arbitrary, the author can cause development to plateau at any level they want. Technological development in the real world will, eventually, almost certainly plateau at some point, based on fundamental physical or computational or energy limits. There are even many sci-fi series that are set at such a hypothetical plateau, like the Culture Universe in which all the major 'involved' civilizations are functionally as powerful as it is possible to be. The trick is that technological progress seems to be pretty uninhibited in the real world, excepting only the speed of light (which is the one rule authors are least likely to respect), making any act of introducing a plateau an act of negotiation between author and audience to justify why their universe works the way it does. The works of authors like Alastair Reynolds and Adrian Tchaikovsky are full of this kind of subtext. In a cultivation setting, or an iseaki world-as-game setting, or a various other settings where the author is also very openly filling the role of almighty world-designer, this is much less abstract. Most cultivation settings, for what it's worth, generally assume their settings are actually post-apocalyptic and everyone is trying to acquire the lost knowledge of the ancient civs that hit the plateau thousands of years in the past.

Lemmy

2024-05-31, 10:59 PM

Because the last ten were so different than the last 19?
My post originally said "20 years", but... Well... There were a few movies, games and comics that came out after 2004 that I consider superior to Voyager.

Errorname

2024-05-31, 11:51 PM

Yet, even after doing all that, it still wasn't close!

For what it's worth, it's clearly meant to be a steamroll. It's not an accident that the Golden Company get annihilated in seconds, it's a deliberate anticlimax. It's not good, it makes Season 7 in particular feel like the story is bending everything so that the most overthrowable monarch in the entire series doesn't get overthrown until the epilogue, but it's clearly deliberate.

Ultimately, with the Young Griff plot dropped and no real Westerosi-origin force in a position to oppose her. It. Was. Over.

Season 5 is kind of maddening because they're adapting two books that massively expanded the cast (to replace all the characters who are now dead) and trying to cut as many new characters as possible, but then all the subsequent seasons reinforced how necessary all those characters were.

Maybe there was a reason George introduced a claimant to the throne who would be able to deny Daenerys obvious allies like Dorne and the Tyrells, would be able to believably take and hold King's Landing with massive popular support, and whose existence would push every single one of Daenerys' buttons to the point that it might make her murderously angry.

Maybe you kind of needed Euron to have enough magical mojo that he was a credible threat to an army with three dragons, and it turns out in a fantasy story weird creepy magic plays a lot better than unexplained teleportation and flawless Surface-to-Air missile shots with a catapult.

The only good moment involving the ice zombie threat in the entire series is Hardhome.

Even Hardhome is kind of bad. It feels like them doing the Fist of the First Men battle several seasons too late.

It is baffling that they didn't construct a big battle scene where the Others actually win against a proper army. I've been assuming for years that would be Stannis's ultimate fate, it's way more resonant for him to burn his daughter against the actual apocalyptic threat and for the fake chosen one to be defeated by the actual existential threat, and Stannis is a credible enough military badass for his defeat to mean something.

Most cultivation settings, for what it's worth, generally assume their settings are actually post-apocalyptic and everyone is trying to acquire the lost knowledge of the ancient civs that hit the plateau thousands of years in the past.

Something I haven't seen done but could very easily be done is a setting where the precursor society reached a height because of a non-renewable resource that is now exhausted.

Like I've seen people speculate that in a realistic post-apocalyptic setting a lack of access to fossil fuels might prohibit repeating the industrial revolution without a deep well of coal and oil to power it. I don't know how well that holds up, chemistry and fuel logistics isn't something I've ever seriously studied, but the idea is compelling to me.

My post originally said "20 years", but... Well... There were a few movies, games and comics that came out after 2004 that I consider superior to Voyager.

Star Trek: Beyond was last ten years and I think that's handily better than any of the other last twenty years movies.

Grey_Wolf_c

2024-06-01, 12:44 AM

Something I haven't seen done but could very easily be done is a setting where the precursor society reached a height because of a non-renewable resource that is now exhausted.

FWIW, Pale Lights (https://palelights.com) seems to be going in that direction - the antediluvian civilization manipulated "aether", which still exists but seems very rare in the setting. It is also NOT an enforced medieval fantasy - they are in age of sail, and technological development is progressing apace; somewhat hobbled by the existence of ancient super-tech, but still, progress is being made (development of a technique for mass-producing bored rifles is a minor plot point, for example).

Rynjin

2024-06-01, 12:50 AM

The worldbuilding for Pale Lights in general is fascinating. I'm assuming by the end of the series we'll get some answers, but I'm constantly wondering WTF happened to the sun, or if there ever even was one. At first I thought this was like an underground "hollow Earth" dealy but it doesn't seem like that's the case as time goes on.

Lemmy

2024-06-01, 01:36 AM

Star Trek: Beyond was last ten years and I think that's handily better than any of the other last twenty years movies.
Meh... It's a decent film, but it doesn't feel very "Star Trekky" to me... It feels like a generic sci-fi adventure movie with characters named after ST characters.

Precure

2024-06-01, 04:45 AM

Calling Ancient Egypt as one civilization would be like calling European history since 8th century BC as Roman civilization.

Oh, of course, I largely discount the idea of a static society outside of a situation where deific figures are intentionally colluding to ensure technological and social stasis. Even in something like a Cultivation setting, where development of machines might suffer as the focus lies on the demi-gods gobbling up resources to enhance their personal power, you will still almost certainly see development in areas like Cultivation techniques, or means to exploit resources that empower Cultivators. The specifics are different, but technology (yes, in a setting with magic, advancing your magical abilities is a form of technology) always marches on.

Or, just assume that rules of physics are different.

Metastachydium

2024-06-01, 08:51 AM

It's actually far worse than that, which is why I keep saying the Tyrells/"Dorne" talks scene late in S6 is way dumber than most anything in the last two seasons. Their joining a Targaeryan claimant would make abundant sense without much explanation beyond a few reminders: they were the literal last two loyalist houses before Robert won, and that wasn't that far back in the past. The late Mace was leading the Tyrell forces besieging Storm's End! Doran/Oberyn's sister was Rhaegar's literal wife!

But no, they already want to build Cersei up as the Final Boss, common sense and logic be damned. So (now quite officially) one of three most intelligent and canny political leaders still in Westeros, Olenna sits down with the bastard ex-mistress of a dead Martell whose only claim to the Princely functions is having had two dudes assasinated (becauses that's how things work, apparently), and they begin crying on each other's shoulder that they must side with Daenerys or they will have no chance against Cersei. Say what? Like you said, we are talking, on the one hand, about the largest army in Westeros (twice the size of anything the Lannisters could field before they bled out hard), sitting on the last breadbasket region of the continent. If somehow (though that's absurd) they lose hard enough on the field, Olenna's daughter-in-law was a Hightower and she's herself a Redwyne. She can just retreat to Oldtown or the Arbour and the Lannisters have no manpower the take the former, not to mention the latter (the royal navy, mind, has defected to Stannis, been destroyed or both, whereas the Redwyne Fleet is going strong and we're talking a big island), so the Lannisters are still bound to lose.

On the other hand, we have the single hardest ground in the Seven Kingdoms. Dorne's armies suffered single digit losses so far (Jaime, Bronn and the Snakes killed, like, half a dozen of them), and they are freaking experts in irregular asymmetrical warfare. Should the Lannisters, again, somehow conquer Dorne, they'll be picked off one by one and still lose in short order. The Targaeryans themselves tried to pull a conquest on that place, with dragons. And they suffered a uniquely humiliating defeat still.

Cersei, as you noted, having a half-bled out army stretched incredibly thin, running on empty coffers and no supplies to even feed themselves on the long run cannot take one of them if they focused all their strength in one place (which they cannot do). Even with a massive fluke, they'd end up weakened so much any other enemy they have (and they have a lot of those) would just need to blow on them after and they'd crumble. WHAT THE HECK, WRITERS?

So much that. Game of Thrones has always been two stories: one about pseudo-medieval political machinations, and one about dragons, ice zombies and people seeing the future or whatever. The latter was always going to be less interesting, and they increasingly doubled down on mopping up all intelligent players and focusing on those instead regardless as the series progressed. Yeah, they were always going to fail.

Yep, basically castrating Euron's storyline to make him a loudmouthed buffoon with some plot armour instead of a mysterious player with crazy powerful tools (the Horn, chiefly) that could make the whole thing with the dragons more sporting (and also throwing out all his supporting cast in the process, to replace them with Cersei and a bunch of faceless mooks) was a major contributor to the big trainwreck, and worst of all, they could have avoided it by juist sticking with the source material.

I also kinda hate how everything abut Stannis other than "religious fanatic with no manners" is reduced to an informed attribute throughout the series. He's hyped up as a military genius (which, based on his resumé, should be true), but all he ever does is rush headlong into fights against larger armies with little in the way of discernible tactics and (usually) lose.

Ramza00

2024-06-01, 11:40 AM

M. Night Shyamalan, The Last Airbender could have been so much worse! All Considered.

( just learned that the billionaire activist investor who has been plaguing disney for the last year, and he stopped this week since he sold his shares. Well his daughter played Katara in that movie. Also did a Transformers. )

Ramza00

2024-06-01, 12:39 PM

Game of Thrones was worth it, despite all the heart ache and misery

merely for the episode that aired 10 years ago today

He never heard his father speak the words that condemned him. Perhaps no words were necessary. I put my life in the Red Viper's hands, and he dropped it. When he remembered, too late, that snakes had no hands, Tyrion began to laugh hysterically.

Grey_Wolf_c

2024-06-01, 04:18 PM

I mean, it's all (in-universe) ancient history, so it could be lies or myths distorted by time, but the current peoples do tell of a time when they had a sun (and moon, and seasons, and the concept of solstice) so it definitely suggests at one point they had a moving sun. Given the references to a mass deluge, my guess is that they used to live on the surface, and there was an underground civilization, and whatever caused the planet to stop spinning also broke the surface, drained an ocean into the cavern system, and without water the surface people had to flee to the underground. But as you say, given EE's previous series, I too assume we will get more details down the line (unlike the "what's with the weird seasons of GoT", which became clear would never be explained in any meaningful way).

Grey Wolf

Errorname

2024-06-01, 05:01 PM

It's really staggering how, for a show about politics and power, Game of Thrones conception of "how power works" ultimately came down "if you crump the big guy, you get all his stuff".

Neither Cersei or Ellaria should be as uncontested in their power as they are shown to be in the show. Frankly considering the extent of their crimes it is baffling that either is able to survive a day, let alone months without their subjects going into open rebellion.

Say what? Like you said, we are talking, on the one hand, about the largest army in Westeros (twice the size of anything the Lannisters could field before they bled out hard), sitting on the last breadbasket region of the continent.

But you see, they have a flower for their symbol, which means they're weak and feminine and are no match for the army with a lion for a symbol. That's how warfare works!

It would have been so easy to introduce the idea that murdering Doran outraged his supporters and so Lord Ironwood or whatever is going to align with Cersei and take over Dorne. You don't even need to cast them, you can just have Cersei talk about them in dialogue.

I don't know if I agree with that. I think in the hands of someone with a keen understanding of fantasy fiction who was writing with a sense of thematic and narrative purpose it could be pretty cool.

D&D very blatantly were not the sort of writers who could pull that.

The thing is that ultimately, Pilou wasn't playing Euron. Pilou got one Euron scene at the start and from the Kingsmoot on is playing Victarion. And I liked Victarion a lot more when he was a loudmouthed buffoon who was very obviously being played by everyone around him and going to get himself killed doing something incredibly stupid, not the endgame villain of the entire story. The Kingsmoot honestly makes me angry. It's a nigh perfect scene in the books, and what made it to the show is such a shell of what it was. They replaced speeches that felt cinematic on the page and which spoke to the themes of the series with a glorified **** measuring contest between two characters who have no real ideological conflict.

Show!Stannis feels like D&D are writing him knowing that his story ends with him sacrificing his daughter to the flames, but seemingly unable to grasp how Martin was building to that.

Ramza00

2024-06-01, 05:34 PM

It's really staggering how, for a show about politics and power, Game of Thrones conception of "how power works" ultimately came down "if you crump the big guy, you get all his stuff".

for better or worse A Song of Ice and Fire operates on the mirror for princes genre, like the famous one the prince by Machiavelli. Machiavelli the man was more complicated than this, but with that genre you often have people who think like Joffrey with an Omnipotence of Thought, I am king make it so, and you can often teach them only 1 level of divergence from their first thought, like showing them a mirror or narcissus with his water pool.

Trying to introduce 3 levels of separation from the first thought is beyond this type of storytelling that feels cause and effect, 3 levels of separation (for a total of 4) is when the gods / deus ex machina step in (per greek tragedy and comedy rules, formal rules that are a tradition but often only apply to some stories not all stories.)

=====

This is one of the reasons why some people consider Shakespeare with his firm of tragedy, the mourning play / Trauerspiels to be a different type of tragedy than greek stuff (and the arisotle poetics was available but not at english till after shakespeare by a decade or two)

Note the Fire and Blood history (which is now the hbo fire and blood) has more of this stuff, where players you did not think of, like the people they can do riots and such out of food or the lost of a cultural symbol. It is not all game of thrones princely soverign violence games.

Errorname

2024-06-01, 06:33 PM

Literally all of that happens in the main series. The King's Landing plotline in Book 2, for instance has both a food riot and an pro-Stannis conspiracy among the merchant classes, and in Book 4 the desecration of major holy sites is part of the impetus for a populist religious movement that amasses a great deal of political power.

Part of the appeal of ASOIAF is the truly staggering amount of players on the board, and very frequently players you did not think of turn out to be very important going forward.

Ramza00

2024-06-01, 09:54 PM

Part of the appeal of ASOIAF is the truly staggering amount of players on the board, and very frequently players you did not think of turn out to be very important going forward.

I agree Book 4 and 5 have that and it is why I am fine of those two and why others dislike them for the same reason I love them. I appreciate how we finally got that in the later books.

The Food Riot in Book 2 is literally mirror for princes genre, including Tyrion slapping Joffrey and Tyrion reminds him no god or kingsguard is going to smite the hand of the king for a slap when he is not yet of age.

runeghost

2024-06-01, 11:28 PM

My wildly speculative guess is that, if it's not a giant cavern, it's some sort of physical planetary-shield gone-wrong.

Ruck

2024-06-02, 01:55 AM

Did you happen to mention how you knew people exactly like Chuck and that rubbed you the wrong way? I see that a lot, and that's a blatant appeal to feelings.

No more than you did the same with how you knew people exactly like Jimmy.

My morality considers how one treats people important, and I consider people's motivations important-- beyond what someone is willing to do, why someone does what they do tells us a lot about them and their moral priorities.

On the first point: Chuck uses and manipulates people. (See the end of season 2 / beginning of season 3 story.) He's dishonest with them and uses them to bear the brunt of the consequences of his actions. (See season 1 with Jimmy and Howard.) I find that abhorrent. (He's also incredibly arrogant, which I find off-putting, but isn't nearly as damning a trait if you actually treat people fairly and decency. Chuck does not.)

On the second point: For any protests otherwise, Chuck's tantrum on the stand in "Chicanery" gives away the game for me. Fundamentally, he resents Jimmy because people like Jimmy more, and his coping mechanism is to always have something he can hold over Jimmy. It's not a reason borne of any ideal; it's borne of Chuck's massive ego. Jimmy being a crooked and shady lawyer gives Chuck the means to take him down, but it is not the reason he tries to take him down.

(And it's the culmination of a plot that began when Chuck decided to fight for Mesa Verde simply because he learns Kim was sharing office space with Jimmy. Sure, he's within his rights to fight for clients for his firm. But "just good business" is not the reason he does it. In both of these cases, I refuse to dismiss Chuck's actual motivations, and what they say about his character, simply because his actions can be justified another way.)

Nothing he is or could be right about will change the fact that Chuck treats people as things for petty reasons to satisfy his ego. I find that unacceptable and I'm not going to be talked out of it.

(We can put a pin in this, though, because I feel like we've just been going in circles for a while. I just wanted to make it clear why I find him a person of poor character, and that it has to do entirely with his own actions and how he chooses to deal with people and situations, regardless of Jimmy.)

A.) Weren't This Is Spinal Tap and My Cousin Vinny wildly popular with critics, just to name two?
Probably, and the most recent example of those being 32 years ago kinda reinforces my point. (And that's without getting into people being convinced that Marisa Tomei was mistakenly given the Oscar, because an Academy Award for a comedy performance?)

2.) Man, I do not get the love for The Bear. Like, even if its crazy accurate, why would I want to watch more of it? It's just people being stressed and crappy to each other. I tried for two or three episodes and just could not see the appeal.

I haven't tried it yet, and tense and stressful doesn't bother me if it's done well-- I thought Uncut Gems was great and did not particularly feel stressed by watching it-- but I am also like... being really funny is hard, and I wish doing that got more respect.

Jimmy's got charisma out the wazoo.

Also, Jimmy is both book-smart when he applies himself (he is clearly a very capable legal mind) and street smart. Walter is street brain-dead. Dude jumps into bed with the first person available every single time. Jimmy was successful because of who he was, Walter was successful in spite of who he was.

No disagreement there.

On the Skyler question, I think the show suffered in two ways: First, playing up in the pilot that Skyler doesn't really respect Walt so we'd sympathize with him more, which is a tough ask of a first impression to walk back. Second, not being able to settle on whether her goal was to get away from Walt or to help him and protect him, which makes it tough for her to be compelling from a dramatic standpoint, and frustrating to watch because we don't necessarily know what she wants in a given scene or storyline. Contrast The Shield, where Corrine's goal starting around the end of season 1 is to extricate herself from Vic, and it's a slow and difficult process, but it is a clear goal and her actions move in one clear direction in that regard.

The most realistic legal movie is My Cousin Vinny. :smalltongue:

Just like the most realistic police show (at least at the time) was Barney Miller.

I wonder if this is a product of time and place, and musical rivalries. I have definitely changed opinion about music (and books and movies) from less formative eras - 60s, 70s, and earlier - so perhaps those were less emotively built than those of my formative years.

Personally, I just thought Kurt Cobain had rare gifts for melody and for being able to tap into something primal in his songwriting and performance.

Oh yeah, Final Fantasy as a series in general would qualify for me too, albeit for quite different reasons. I was a fan of JRPGs as a genre long before I played my first Final Fantasy, with the GBC remakes of Dragon Quest 1-3 possibly being my first RPGs period, and Tales of Symphonia holding the crown as my favorite game of all time for a little while in the aughts. But aside from a couple of spin-offs I don't really count (Crystal Chronicles and Tactics Advance), I didn't play any Final Fantasy games until much later, when I picked up a PS2 in 2008 (my family had bought mostly Nintendo consoles while I was young, aside from going with a Sega Genesis instead of a SNES). You'd think with FF being the most popular JRPG series out there I'd have quickly become a fan - it's certainly what I expected - but not so much.

Heh, I don't know if my age is showing, but I've never played one past 6, but I enjoyed those first six. (I actually have been playing through the pixel remaster versions this year-- first time I finally finished 3 and 5, and first time I'd ever played 2.) I'm also old enough for Dragon Warrior to have been my first JRPG, though.

6 is generally regarded as a masterpiece, if you're interested.

The "[x] Sue" is such a useless lens for looking at fiction that I generally hate to use it. Daenerys is written as special, as a sort of stock fantasy protagonist and a messiah figure, and I don't think that's inherently a bad thing.

Yeah, that kinda says what I couldn't figure out how to say. I think the term comes from fan fiction where the author has written barely-veiled self-inserts about a unique and special person everyone seems to go crazy for despite displaying no appreciable personality traits. I don't think that really fits Daenerys at all.

(Also agreed with your follow-ups)

Speaking of the original topic, I am of the apparent minority of viewers who didn't dislike ending of Game of Thrones. Yes the last seasons were weaker than earlier ones, but not to a degree I found particularly appalling. Daenarys going mad and Jon Snow having to stab her in the back, I found perfectly logical and fitting in context. The Great Council afterword was weak, but acceptable.

I thought the character ending points all made sense but they were all developed in the stupidest and/or laziest way possible. The best thing I can say about the final season is that it gave me more respect for the actors, who did tremendous work in trying to make their characters' poorly developed motivations believable.

The most memorable moment of the final season for me wasn't in the episode proper, but one of those featurettes: "Dany kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet."

Here's what I wrote about that moment at the time:

The best thing you can say about season 8 of Game of Thrones is that the performances combined with the plot points let you construct a plausible narrative of character motivations for their decisions. Of course, the writing is supposed to do that work, and season 8 was a damning indictment of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as storytellers. While the last few seasons, though often compelling, had moments where the writing clearly suffered from not having George R.R. Martin's text to draw from anymore, they were usually moments of dialogue ("You want a good girl but you need the bad [censored]" is probably the leader for "unintentionally hilarious line of the decade"). This, though, was something else; Benioff and Weiss showed they had seemingly no idea how to construct a narrative, instead just making sure the final season checked off the narrative boxes they were told to.

Their lack of care and their disinterest was made even more clear by the "inside the episode" segments, where they offered no analysis or insight, often just repeating to the viewer what they had just seen on screen. The chosen moment is from a rare time where they tried to explain how a plot event happened; fittingly, their explanation is the lamest and most implausible one possible: the story's great conqueror simply forgot about an entire fleet of ships mobilized against them. You couldn't sum up the laziness Benioff and Weiss brought toward the series end better if you tried.

Fittingly, they'd go to compound their mistakes by talking at a panel how they essentially learned on the job how to run a $1 billion TV show, which almost immediately lost them their deal to write a Star Wars series. (The euphemism "scheduling conflict" has never been so transparent.) It's hard to come up with a bigger indictment of Benioff and Weiss' abilities than that they were in charge of what was arguably the most anticipated final season of television of the 21st century, and they bungled it so badly that the entire show has become an afterthought.

All that said: House of the Dragon season 1 was quite good and I'm looking forward to season 2-- kicking off in just two weeks!

I'm a little disappointed no one followed up on Pulp Fiction. I think beneath all the style in the characters, the dialogue, the chronology, there's a great story about grace and redemption.

(Also, one of my favorite details in the movie that never gets commented on is that Vincent screws up literally every task assigned to him.)

Errorname

2024-06-02, 03:10 AM

The most memorable moment of the final season for me wasn't in the episode proper, but one of those featurettes: "Dany kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet."

I get how it happens, doing a quick little soundbite that feels like trenchant behind the scenes insight is actually quite difficult and I'm pretty sure these weren't scripted, in that scenario I suspect it's extremely easy to end up having nothing of substance to say. But the Iron Fleet one is just such a perfect unforced error, doubling down and amplifying the reaction to what was always going to be a controversial sequence.

Even if a defender could come up with a credible explanation for how the Iron Fleet snuck up on them and then scored three impossible shots in a row (no small feat in itself), any critic can just point to the creator's own words about what happened there.

All that said: House of the Dragon season 1 was quite good and I'm looking forward to season 2-- kicking off in just two weeks!

HOTD S1 was a reminder of why I liked the thing in the first place. It felt like all the talented artists bringing the scripts to life had been unshackled and given some actual meat to chew on. Characters who feel like they have actual interiority, scripts that have actual coherent themes and drama, costumes that are allowed to not just be monochrome black, it was such a joy to see a Game of Thrones show with a late-season budget on early season caliber scripts.

Eagerly awaiting what a nightmare the discourse for the second season is going to be. It was already bad during the first season and the war crimes hadn't even really got going yet.

Ruck

2024-06-02, 03:48 AM

Yeah, exactly. I'll also add that the willingness to skip forward in time really helped; I felt the ASOIAF books really got bogged down after the initial trilogy in terms of being unable to move the overall story forward. Here, if nothing of story importance is going to happen for a while (even years), we just skip past it to the relevant events. It is a story, after all, not a detailed history, and that decision gives the story a really effective sense of forward motion.

Eagerly awaiting what a nightmare the discourse for the second season is going to be. It was already bad during the first season and the war crimes hadn't even really got going yet.

Well, I somehow missed all of that discourse, but these days that's not terribly surprising.

Peelee

2024-06-02, 04:22 AM

No more than you did the same with how you knew people exactly like Jimmy.
Actually, yes, more than i do the same, because if you ever go back and notice, i only ever do that in direct response to the other party saying that about people like Chuck. Sort of a "cool, that works both ways" type rebuttal.

Fun fact: nobody, including you, has ever actually come up with answers to "how did Chuck 'keep Jimmy down'?" (by far the most common specific phrasing I've heard regarding people's hatred of Chuck - even if the specific phrase isn't used, it's virtually always still the same mentality). Because, spoiler alert, he didn't. Jimmy kept himself down. And, like Kim said, Jimmy's always down.

On the first point: Chuck uses and manipulates people.
Sure, let's pretend that's true. So does Jimmy, much more often, much more callously, and with much more devastating effects. And yet everyone, including you (eg in this post I'm quoting) ever seem to take issue with Chuck having that trait. How shocking.

On the second point: For any protests otherwise, Chuck's tantrum on the stand in "Chicanery" gives away the game for me. Fundamentally, he resents Jimmy because people like Jimmy more, and his coping mechanism is to always have something he can hold over Jimmy.
Chuck doesn't like Jimmy. Great. The point, though, is who gives a ****? Chuck doesn't "hold anything over" Jimmy! Chuck does a grand total of two things to Jimmy - he doesn't hire Jimmy into his law firm, and he exposes Jimmy's several felonies that Jimmy committed as a lawyer* which directly affected Chuck, Chuck's business, and Chuck's reputation. Oh no, the consequences of Jimmy's actions!

Chuck resent Jimmy. So ****ing what? At the end of the day, Chuck rubs you the wrong way, and Jimmy doesn't, and that's what all the justifications against Chuck always come down to.

Here's a question. You just said Chuck always wants something to hold over Jimmy. Jimmy, at one point, gets offered fast-track to partnership at Davis & Main. What, at this point, does Chuck "hold over Jimmy"? Best i can think of is when Chuck quite civilly tells Jimmy he's going to be late for work when Jimmy decided to go to Chuck's house one morning. Let me grab my clutchin' pearls.

Nothing he is or could be right about will change the fact that Chuck treats people as things for petty reasons to satisfy his ego. I find that unacceptable and I'm not going to be talked out of it.
Sure, except for the fact that Chuck doesn't do this nearly as often as people claim. Again, unsurprisingly, all claims like this somehow always go back to other people making their own choices and then consequences coming for them. Quick example, Chuck knew what choice Ernie would make and relies on that for his plan. That's not using Ernie, since Ernie could simply choose to not do that. Jimmy, conversely, knows Irene is going to listen to her lawyers and so he engineers her friends to alienate her so that she is adrift with only him to latch onto to make her more amenable to making the choice he specifically engineers her into making. Which, of course, results in "how could Chuck do that?"

You want to put a pin in it, that's fine. You don't like how it keeps going in circle? Then stop appealing to emotion because of how Chuck rubs you the wrong way and embrace the actual facts. As ve said countless times to countless people, the show is probably the best example of why one should never be one's own attorney - being emotional and attached can color perception and make it harder to stick to cold, detached facts.

*And not even all of the felonies that Jimmy commuted as a lawyer! Sure, he may bribe court officials and try to fraudulently make people believe that they are in legal jeopardy in order to get them to retain his services, but he's a lovable scamp, so all is forgiven, apparently!

ETA: I could have probably just noted that, as always in debates about Chuck, nothing is said about things Chuck actually does against Jimmy, just about what kind of person the other guy thinks Chuck is. Because, spoiler, Chuck doesn't actually do much of anything against Jimmy. Doesn't save him from grand proclamations that he does, of course. Because resent or something.

Ruck

2024-06-02, 05:04 AM

Quick example, Chuck knew what choice Ernie would make and relies on that for his plan. That's not using Ernie, since Ernie could simply choose to not do that.

You want to put a pin in it, that's fine. You don't like how it keeps going in circle? Then stop appealing to emotion because of how Chuck rubs you the wrong way and embrace the actual facts.

But we can't even agree on an interpretation of the facts. Like, you think Chuck's behavior toward Ernie isn't manipulative, and I do. You think it's acceptable, I don't. Of course we don't see eye-to-eye on this, because we don't even agree on what constitutes using or manipulating people, and possibly not on whether doing so is acceptable. Like, yeah, if someone does something I have a problem with and you don't, we're probably going to form differing opinions on what kind of person they are.

That as much as anything is why I want to put a pin in this, because we're now at the point where we're arguing not the TV show but a much broader scope of morality and human behavior, and that's not an argument I'm particularly inclined to have. (Not least of which is because I do not see myself as the kind of moral authority who should go around trying to convince people that my view on right and wrong is the correct one.)

Peelee

2024-06-02, 05:40 AM

But we can't even agree on an interpretation of the facts. Like, you think Chuck's behavior toward Ernie isn't manipulative, and I do. You think it's acceptable, I don't.

Sure, because it's not manipulative and you think it is because you're predisposed against Chuck. Note your you never say how Chuck manipulates Ernie, just that he does (as a counter to this, note your i explain exactly how Jimmy manipulates Irene). Chuck has Ernie listen to a recording. He acts like this was an accident. That's all the manipulation involved. He explicitly tells Ernie to not let anyone know what he heard, and also explicitly tells Ernie he is legally bound by confidentiality. Ernie then blabs anyway. This isn't manipulation. This is giving Ernie enough rope to hang himself. Sure, Chuck knew Ernie would do it, but that doesn't matter, because if Chuck wanted to manipulate Ernie, he could have simply not claimed Ernie was legally bound to seal his lips. Easy peasy. Chuck offers the opportunity, and Ernie does it. That's not manipulation. If I ask if you want to rob a bank and you say yes, I didn't manipulate you into doing it. You chose yourself.

Also note how you never blast Jimmy for being manipulative except maybe after having it pointed out, and even then it's just handwaved away. Jimmy, who hired scam artists to stage a fall in order to induce panic into a woman so that he could swoop on and "clear it up" for her so that he could sign her as a client. Jimmy, who lied to Irene's friends so they sound alienate her leaving him as her sole remaining "friend" and then suggestive she should settle her suit against her lawyers' advice, which he will financially benefit from. There's another quote from the show that works here. "Not our Jimmy! Couldn't be Jimmy!"

Note how even you didn't say we can't agree on the facts. You said we can't agree on interpretation of the facts. Because you can't distort that Jimmy manipulates people constantly and Chuck doesn't, so you interpret that he does. Because you start out from a position of disliking Chuck and then extrapolate from there.

Keltest

2024-06-02, 07:14 AM

I haven't seen Better Call Saul so I don't really have a horse in this race, but Peelee, your defense of how Chuck hadn't manipulated anybody was to describe how he manipulated somebody. Like, almost textbook manipulation. Even the "just enough rope" phrase is used specifically in the context of being fairly certain you know how somebody will act in a given circ*mstance.

Peelee

2024-06-02, 08:49 AM

No, it's not (and likewise, "just enough rope" is used when you know someone will act a certain way, not for manipulation). Like, let's say i started talking about something i know you love to discuss, but can get very political. I bring it up, and then say "now let's absolutely not get into politics here" in fancy red text. And you respond talking going deeply into politics. I didn't manipulate you into doing that. It may have been crappy of me to do if i knew you loved to discuss that and if i figured you'd dive straight into political discussion, but there's plenty of ways to be crappy without being manipulative, and anyway the explicity warning of "DO NOT DO THIS" really does a lot of heavy lifting there to boot. But it's not manipulation. If you want a more stark explanation why it's not, Chuck manufactured the opportunity there but does nothing to push Ernie into a choice, while Jimmy manufactures opportunities and then actively pushed the person into the desired choice.

But hey, let's say it is manipulation. Even then, it's the only time Chuck manipulates anybody. Chuck is a coward, sure. But he never does anything to "keep Jimmy down" or does anything because he "resents" Jimmy, as claimed. Ruck also brought up Mesa Verde, a credit union that secured new legal representation. It's a giant account, very lucrative, and great business. Chuck is also highly versed in banking regulations and is the founding partner of his law firm. Kim, a lawyer in said firm, obtains Mesa Verde as a client, and then not much later decides to leave the firm for solo practice, and hopes to take that client with her. What Ruck sees as "Chuck finding out she was sharing an office with Jimmy so he steals Mesa Verde" was Howard (another, different named partner in the firm) calling Mesa Verde to retain them as a client immediately after Kim leaving, and then shortly later Howard asking Chuck to help convince them to stay with their firm instead of gong with Kim, who they greatly liked. Ruck apparently chooses to see "use your expansive and specifically relevant knowledge to help retain a high-value client in your own business" as being petty Kim shared an office with Jimmy (also, it requires us to ignore that not only was it only sharing an office - she was adamant that they were maintained being two solo practitioner, not partners - but also that Chuck didn't know about any of this).

Meanwhile, Jimmy manipulates people left right and center for purely selfish reasons that only enrich himself or people he likes, and tellingly, Chuck haters never say boo. Even if you want to call Chuck manipulative, then in ever single way - reasoning, scale, frequency, aftermath, etc - Jimmy is significantly worse. But Chuck is deeply unlikeable while Jimmy is exceedingly likeable, so all hate passes right over Jimmy and lands on Chuck.

Also, i highly recommend the show.

Keltest

2024-06-02, 09:09 AM

...Yes, thats totally manipulation Peelee. Manufacturing opportunities based on how you know people will react to them is practically quintessential manipulation. What youre describing Jimmy doing is coercion, where he is actively attempting to force people to make the choices he wants them to. YMMV on whether that's worse or just a lateral move (I lean towards lateral personally).

Can't comment on the rest due to, as I said, having not actually seen the show.

Trafalgar

2024-06-02, 09:14 AM

On the whole Chuck vs Jimmy thing: I actually agree that Chuck was right to make HHM not hire Jimmy. Chuck knows, better than anyone, that Jimmy has a weak moral and ethical compass.

What I don't like is how Chuck hides these decisions behind Howard so Jimmy continues to support Chuck through his medical issues.

Batcathat

2024-06-02, 09:22 AM

Assuming someone will act a certain way of their own volition is as bad as forcing them to act a certain way? Seems like a controversial take.

Metastachydium

2024-06-02, 09:25 AM

It's really staggering how, for a show about politics and power, Game of Thrones conception of "how power works" ultimately came down "if you crump the big guy, you get all his stuff".

Precisely. And going against someone smarter who's also better entrenched into their positions bothe economically and politically (like Cersei attacking the Tyrells)? That should only make it happen faster.

But you see, they have a flower for their symbol, which means they're weak and feminine and are no match for the army with a lion for a symbol. That's how warfare works!

they have a flower for their symbol, which means they're weak

[Begins entering murderous rampage mode to go after the showrunners.]

And the funniest thing, it wouldn't have changed anything in terms of plot either, except for making Cersei marginally more credible as a threat (I mean, Dorne is the only anti-Dragon measure that is not "also Dragons, but more of them" available readily on the map).

I don't know if I agree with that. I think in the hands of someone with a keen understanding of fantasy fiction who was writing with a sense of thematic and narrative purpose it could be pretty cool.

D&D very blatantly were not the sort of writers who could pull that.

Fair, but the whole "you are only smart until a dragon or ice zombie eats you (and you can't have those; only these two characters have those, and one of them is barely a character)" thing kinda makes it tough to let the actually interesting characters be more than a temporary diversion.

Huh. I never thought about it like that, but it makes an awful lot of sense. (Emphasis on awful. It ended up awful.)

Keltest

2024-06-02, 09:29 AM

Assuming someone will act a certain way of their own volition is as bad as forcing them to act a certain way? Seems like a controversial take.

Sure, if youre using it to get them to do things they shouldnt be doing, and that you know they shouldn't be doing. Its a question of subtlety to me, not severity.

Peelee

2024-06-02, 09:31 AM

Can't comment on the rest due to, as I said, having not actually seen the show.
No, manufacturing opportunities is not manipulation. And Jimmy's actions are not coercion (or, well, not the actions I described). Like, you may think they're those things, but they're not. That's not how manipulation or coercion work. You're basically elevating each to the next level.

On the whole Chuck vs Jimmy thing: I actually agree that Chuck was right to make HHM not hire Jimmy. Chuck knows, better than anyone, that Jimmy has a weak moral and ethical compass.

What I don't like is how Chuck hides these decisions behind Howard so Jimmy continues to support Chuck through his medical issues.

Oh I fully agree. One of Chuck's worst qualities was that he waa just a straight-up coward. This also cuts towards Jimmy supporting him - I'm sure Chuck tried his best to dissuade Jimmy from doing it, but the whole "he's a damned coward" thing prevented him form actively setting his foot down on it.

His pride is also off the charts. If he has just accepted his mental illness, then the hearing against Jimmy would have gone exactly as he hoped. Kim's plan would be deflated before it even started and even if they tried to make it an issue, Chuck could have steered into the skid. Both brothers were off the charts full of themselves.

Assuming someone will act a certain way of their own volition is as bad as forcing them to act a certain way? Seems like a controversial take.

Strongly agree, because it's wrong. For example, my saying this (and what i said above) is not in any way manipulating Keltest into answering, though I strongly suspect he will.

Keltest

2024-06-02, 09:34 AM

No, manufacturing opportunities is not manipulation. And Jimmy's actions are not coercion (or, well, not the actions I described). Like, you may think they're those things, but they're not. That's not how manipulation or coercion work. You're basically elevating each to the next level.

Not sure what else to say here except that you are mistaken. If I'm getting somebody to do what I want them to do by altering circ*mstances around them until they make the decisions I want them to make, that's manipulating them. It's really good, subtle manipulation because its hard to catch even.

Saph

2024-06-02, 09:45 AM

Something I think Better Call Saul does really well is to present Chuck as an a-hole, make you really hate Chuck, make you cheer for Jimmy when he scores points against Chuck, and generally make him Chuck one of the primary antagonists of the series . . . while all the time, showing that the nasty things that Chuck says about Jimmy are, for the most part, absolutely true.

I hated Chuck in the early seasons. It was only after he left, and you get to see what Jimmy is like on his own, that it started to occur to me "wait, Chuck was actually right about his brother all along, wasn't he?"

Batcathat

2024-06-02, 10:10 AM

Sure, if youre using it to get them to do things they shouldnt be doing, and that you know they shouldn't be doing. Its a question of subtlety to me, not severity.

So if I get someone to do something, it doesn't matter if I do it by exploiting my knowledge about them, giving them a million dollars or threatening to kill them? Personally, I think the method I'm using matters quite a lot and "letting them choose by themselves, knowing their choice will benefit me" is definitely one of the mildest possible methods.

Keltest

2024-06-02, 10:14 AM

Why? Just because its harder to prove the connection?

Batcathat

2024-06-02, 10:27 AM

Why? Just because its harder to prove the connection?

No, because I think threatening to kill someone to get my way is worse than bribing them to get my way which in turn is worse than just letting them do what they want. It's basically the difference between me leaving my wallet seemingly unattended knowing you are likely to try stealing it and me framing you for trying to steal my wallet. The outcome is the same you getting arrested for stealing my wallet but in one case it's because you choose to do it and in the other you had no choice at all.

Trafalgar

2024-06-02, 11:10 AM

I think one thing to remember about Chuck is that he has a legitimate mental illness. Where does the mental illness end and his personality start? If you have ever had a mentally ill loved one, you realize that they are often not themselves and can do and say all sorts of messed up things.

One thing that is obvious in the series is that Chuck has never gotten any sort of treatment for his illness. Who knows what would have happened if he had? Perhaps medication could have treated much of the problem. And does this mean that Jimmy and Howard are actually enabling Chuck instead of doing the right thing and really helping him.

This ambiguity is why I like Vince Gilligan's writing. Does Jimmy turn into Saul because of his brother? Is Walter White just doing it because of the cancer? I can talk about this for hours.

Peelee

2024-06-02, 12:14 PM

Imean, this is confusing, because now you're agreeing with what I said and disagreeing with what you said. Chuck played a tape for Ernie. That's it. That's all. Chuck did not alter anything, and again, he explcitly told Ernie to not tell anyone, and that he was legally bound to not tell anyone. Both personal and professional warnings. Ernie did it in spite of this. That is not manipulating.

Consider: i take a sack of cash and put it on the ground. I tell you, hey, don't take that sack of cash, that's mine, it's illegal to steal. You take it. I set you up, sure, but i did jack all to manipulate you. Your own greed was the sole reason you took the sack.

Conversely, with Irene, Jimmy constantly alters circ*mstances until Irene makes the decision Jimmy wants. Which you claimed was coercion, not manipulation, but you now describe exactly as manipulation. Like....I'm glad we agree, even if you present it as not?

ETA: Also, again, wholeheartedly recommend the show. It's easily one of the best shows I've ever seen.

This ambiguity is why I like Vince Gilligan's writing. Does Jimmy turn into Saul because of his brother? Is Walter White just doing it because of the cancer? I can talk about this for hours.

It's pretty easy to see where Chuck's mental illness stops and his personality begins, IMO. Hell, I've worked with (among others) a person with encephalitis before who was also a petty jerk, and after a few weeks to months at most you could easily tell what things she did or said that were due to her condition and what things she did or said that were due to her having a poor personalty. And Chuck's condition is significantly more acute than that. The only reason it was even as big a problem as it was for him was because of his colossal pride such that he refused to believe he might need mental health help.

Also, he does get treatment. We see him do it in the show, after he is forced to come to grips that it's mental, and we see him improve.

Frankly, Chuck's biggest mistake was getting Jimmy off those charges in Illinois (the ones where Jimmy called his mom crying to get her to guilt Chuck into helping him). Letting Jimmy actually face the consequences of his actions would have helped.

ETA: Apropos of very little, one thing i might have not in common with the vast majority of BCS audience was i went in without having seen any of Breaking Bad. I vaguely knew who Saul was, a friend had shown me the clip of him begging in the desert saying "Lalo didn't send you? No Lalo?", but that's about it. Close to 100% of my impression was from BCS until i caught up on it (middle of season 3 or 4). Once that season ended, i jumped straight into Breaking Bad because BCS was so damned good. I don't know how or why that would color my perception, and i dont think it did, but I'm not against the possibility that it may have without me realizing.

Keltest

2024-06-02, 02:25 PM

As far as Jimmy goes, I'm just going off what people have said. Someone mentioned he was using more forceful methods like blackmail, so I rolled with that.

As far as the cash bag example goes, yes it's manipulation if you did it with the expectation that the person would take it. Telling him not to doesn't really change that.

Peelee

2024-06-02, 02:37 PM

As far as Jimmy goes, I'm just going off what people have said. Someone mentioned he was using more forceful methods like blackmail, so I rolled with that.

As far as the cash bag example goes, yes it's manipulation if you did it with the expectation that the person would take it. Telling him not to doesn't really change that.

For Jimmy, you're conflating things because of your unfamiliarity with the material. Jimmys does blackmail, but not Irene. He just alienates her from her friends in the assisted living facility she's in so he's her only support structure anymore, and then all but tells her to settle a case he has a massive financial stake in. It not blackmail, it's just manipulation. Exactly as you described.

For the sack of money, sure, maybe you consider that manipulation. I don't, and will never share that belief, because that grossly dilutes what manipulation is. At that point, hey, I've manipulated you into responding to me just all the time on here. And others. I'm a master manipulator, as are a bunch of other users. This whole board is chock full of manipulation.

Again, if you want to have manipulation be so diluted to cover that example or Chick's actions, i cant change your mind. But i refuse to accept such a massively-encompassing definition.

Errorname

2024-06-02, 02:39 PM

[Begins entering murderous rampage mode to go after the showrunners.]

It'd be dumb on it's own even if it wasn't being adapted from books where two of the best fighters in the series are Tyrells. Like Loras and Garlan not-appearing-in-this-picture are both described as extremely skilled fighters.

Rynjin

2024-06-02, 04:12 PM

Peelee I feel like you're getting real defensive over the manipulation discussion because you both are conflating manipulation = bad.

And it's not. All human interactions are a form of manipulation. If you arrange to put somebody in a situation where they will "act according to their nature", you have manipulated them and the situation to your benefit.

This can be good, and it can be bad. It's a ****ty thing for Chuck to do, because his motives are "unpure".

But in the grand scheme of things, Jimmy is an irredeemable piece of garbage, like most protagonists in the Breaking Bad Extended Universe and anything anyone does to him can be considered karmic retribution for his past acts. Who cares if he got manipulated? That's just him getting served his own medicine.

Peelee

2024-06-02, 05:02 PM

Peelee I feel like you're getting real defensive over the manipulation discussion because you both are conflating manipulation = bad.

This can be good, and it can be bad.
Sure, but in the context we're discussing it in, it's bad.

It's a ****ty thing for Chuck to do, because his motives are "unpure".
I'm not going to argue about "purity" of his motives, but i will argue his motives weren't the ever-given "envious of Jimmy" or "wanting to hold something over him". His motives were "Jimmy forged legal documents with the specific goal of professionally embarrassing me, committing a litany of felonies in doing so, so he doesn't deserve to have a law license". As i always bring up, if Chuck just wanted to sabotage Jimmy, he had prime opportunity to do so when Jimmy waa picked up by Davis & Main. Despite Chuck's fear of electricity, we've seen he is perfectly capable of picking up a phone and making a call if he thinks it's important enough, and even without that, he could write a letter. Chuck is portrayed as incredibly highly respected in the NM legal community, and could torpedo Jimmy's career at D&M easily. He doesn't, because until Jimmy does the copy shop shenanigans, Chuck just doesn't want Jimmy in his firm, and was perfectly happy leaving it at that. He let Jimmy torch his own career on his own with other firms. But once Jimmy started interfering with Chuck's business and career regardless, it's hardly out of hand to want it stopped. And even then, Chuck goes out of his way to work with the prosecution to work out a sweetheart plea deal which carries no jail time, nothing on his record, and only his license to practice law. That's a hell of a favorable offer for several felonies committed by a former con artist with an extensive record who, as an officer of the court, not only knows everything he did was wrong but also agreed to be held to a higher standard! I don't consider how "pure" Chuck's motives were, but he bent over backwards to get Jimmy as lenient an outcome as possible.

Though i will readily admit he manipulates Jimmy into (truthfully, of course) confessing all this on tape, but as you point out, not all manipulation is bad, and somehow this is either never brought up by the "Chuck is manipulative" crowd, or is somehow supposed to be bad.

Also, Jimmy is absolutely redeemable. That was the purpose of the ending. He's effectively an addict, who will neve commit to rehab until he hits rock bottom. As it turns out, Kim's self-flagellation life was his rock bottom. If Jimmy's unredeemable, the show is pointless. He could choose to stop any time. What makes Jimmy so tragic (and so horrible) is that he never chooses to. Chuck or no Chuck, Jimmy would not choose to be better until he hit rock bottom. And nothing regarding Chuck would be rock bottom.

Rynjin

2024-06-02, 05:08 PM

Chuck's motives always seemed pretty simple to me. "Jimmy's an ******* and I hate him, and if he insists on getting in my way I'm going to remove him from it". Understandable, but a far cry from nobility, which would have been something more like "Jimmy is a criminal, I'm gonna get him caught because it's the right thing to do".

But a character doesn't have to be noble to be in the right.

Peelee

2024-06-02, 05:20 PM

But a character doesn't have to be noble to be in the right.

Again, Chuck never cared about Jimmy being "in his way". He cared about Jimmy not being a lawyer in his firm, and that was it. Until Jimmy actively interfered in his work, at which point it turned to "shed light on the multiple felonies Jimmy did, which is literally incompatible with being an officer of the court". And, again, dude bent over backwards to spare Jimmy any repurcussions except his law license. I agree it was never because "it was the right thing to do". It was because Jimmy with a law degree was actively detrimental to Chuck. If someone os throwing rocks at you, you don't need "it is morally wrong to throw rocks at people and that's why i want him stopped" as your justification. Nobody will fault you for "he hit me with rocks!" being your reasoning. And yet, for Chuck, it far too often gets represented as "Jimmy was in my way".

If you want to say Chuck did it because Jimmy was in his way, then do what nobody else ever actually does - explain how Jimmy was in his way. Because "he was throwing the metaphorical rocks at me" seems like it really shouldn't be covered under that.

Rynjin

2024-06-02, 05:42 PM

I don't see the material difference between "Jimmy was in his way" and "Jimmy with a law degree was actively detrimental to Chuck".

Someone's presence being actively detrimental to you/your career is the general usage of the phrase "in your way". "Underfoot" perhaps. A pain in the ass, a thorn in the side, it's all the same thing.

You're getting way too caught up in the semantics of the matter like what "manipulation" means or how "in your way" is used when I can see no real difference between our opinions here.

Peelee

2024-06-02, 05:50 PM

I don't see the material difference between "Jimmy was in his way" and "Jimmy with a law degree was actively detrimental to Chuck".

You're getting way too caught up in the semantics of the matter like what "manipulation" means or how "in your way" is used when I can see no real difference between our opinions here.

I see "in his way" as being more or less innocently in the path of someone who won't deviate. Not an active antagonist who is choosing to harm the other. If you want an example, then let's take the film The Foreigner. At no point is Jackie Chan in Pierce Brosnan's way. Pierce Brosnan is going about his business and Jackie Chan is disrupting that. That's not "Jackie Chan is in Pierce Brosnan's way". That is "Jackie Chan is gunning for Pierce Brosnan".

You may see it as semantics. I see it as a wild misreading of what that phrase means. Take that as you will.

Rynjin

2024-06-02, 06:20 PM

So when a villain or something says "I will crush all who stand in my way" you take that as a general "I'm going to kill a bunch of innocent people" instead of a direct threat to the people quite literally standing in his way that he will crush them if they won't move?

Or if someone or something is "in the way of your goals" you take that as always pure happenstance? And stating so means that the issue is you won't deviate, not that there's an obstacle? Like, if someone is holding up the line at the supermarket arguing over random nonsense with the cashier, being in the way of you moving on with your day, the fault lies with you (who wants to move), not with the obstacle?

Or somebody parks a card behind you, and it's in your way, the fault lies with you? Etc., etc.

That's an...odd interpretation of the phrase, and one I have never heard anybody else on this Earth hold.

Peelee

2024-06-02, 06:43 PM

Or somebody parks a card behind you, and it's in your way, the fault lies with you? Etc., etc.

That's an...odd interpretation of the phrase, and one I have never heard anybody else on this Earth hold.

The heroes opposing the world-conquering supervillain are in the way since they want to completely stop the supervillain. Much as the car parked behind you is in your way since it completely stops you. However, Jimmy throwing a wrench in the gears of one hearing for one client is not in Chuck's way, much as Jackie Chan wasn't completely paralyzing Pierce Brosnan in the Foreigner. In both cases, the other could still do their jobs pretty much unfettered (Foreigner breaks the analog a bit here with Jackie Chan bombing offices, but he's only disrupting until he gets the names, at which point even his antagonism, which is not "I must stop him", ends).

If you want to see any and every inconvenience as someone being in your way, that seems massively melodramatic to me, but that might also explain why you haven't heard of anyone else on earth disagreeing with your interpretation. You probably have, but disregarded because they were in your way.

Zevox

2024-06-02, 07:04 PM

To toss in my 2 cents as someone who has no skin the main conversation here (I have never watched so much as an episode of the show(s) being discussed), I'm with Rynjin on the phrase "being in someone's way." If someone is impeding a person from doing what they're trying to do, that qualifies as being in their way, whether they're doing it intentionally or not. I have never seen any other sort of interpretation of the phrase, and the one Pelee is proposing seems quite strange to me.

Rynjin

2024-06-02, 07:06 PM

Eh, you can keep interpreting this as an all or nothing deal if you want, I guess. Misunderstanding common phrases and then arguing about it on the internet isn't fun to me, but if it is to you, more power to ya I guess. I'm not really interested enough in this discussion to keep getting drug deeper into the mire of semantic bull****tery because I had the gall to try and agree with you on something but didn't phrase it exactly how you wanted.

Feel free to write everyone's posts for them so they don't use words/phrases in a way you don't like I guess?

BloodSquirrel

2024-06-03, 08:12 AM

...lot of silliness going on here.

2) On that point, the idea that action and inaction are equivalent is deeply flawed and leads to pushing fat people off of bridges. "Giving someone enough rope" isn't really manipulation unless you actually do something to enable their behavior. If you're just no intervening when they're making mistakes, you're not manipulating them, any more than you're currently manipulating your local drug acting into taking heroine because you're not actively stopping him.

3) Coercion is more than just manipulation and involves the direct threat of negative consequences.

4) "I will crush all who stand in my way" is not the kind of thing that a non-villain should say, precisely because it pretty directly leads to harming innocent people. I have very little patience for people who use that kind of absolutist language and then insist that you interpret it in a ridiculously generous way ("well, I obviously don't mean *all* people, even though I literally used that word") in order pretend that they're not deranged psychopath.

5) Yes, people minorly inconveniencing you is them being "in your way". In fact, that's what the phrase is used for 99% of the time. If you're at a party and someone is standing in front of the ice chest they're in your way. That's why non-psychopaths ask them to move for a second instead of vowing violent retribution.

Peelee

2024-06-03, 09:03 AM

...lot of silliness going on here.

1) Manipulation, broadly enough defined, can cover just about anything. It really just means "doing X to try to make someone else do Y", which can range from lying to take advantage of someone's emotional reaction to get them to do something very harmful to themselves to offering to give someone a good tip if they give you fast service. The only real things it requires are A) intentionality (you want them to do X, and it wasn't just a side effect of doing X because you wanted to do X for its own sake) and deliberate action.
Sure, but few, if any, people mean that broad a take when they say someone is manipulative. The label being tossed around pejoratively typically requires a pattern, while we've had one example being picked apart and dissected.

5) Yes, people minorly inconveniencing you is them being "in your way". In fact, that's what the phrase is used for 99% of the time.
That's because 99% of the time people are physically in the way. Like, the other example used was "blocking in your car with their car". By this argument, Jimmy never physically obstructed Chuck's movement, so i hardly think it's out of line to can toss out that 99%. But if anyone really wants to define virtually any inconvenience as "being in my way", I no longer really care.

Trafalgar

2024-06-03, 09:04 AM

Let's try to get back to an earlier, more civil discussion.

"I will crush all who stand in my way" is a statement I can imagine either Cersei or Daenerys saying, even before the bells. Does this mean both Daenerys and Cersei are villains? Cersei definitely but Daenerys never has had a problem with burning her enemies. Is she a Villain?

I guess another problem I have with the final 2 seasons of GoT is that so many people in Westeros prefer Cersei over Daenerys after Cersei burns down the Sept of Balor. I mean Aegon burned his victims alive using wildfire but obviously Daenerys had nothing to due with that. And I don't think Aegon ever burnt a sept down with a prominent noble family, the high sparrow, and the Queen in it. Imagine if, in the middle ages, someone burnt down the Sistine Chapel with the pope in it. And then King Tommen commits suicide but there would likely be rumors that Cersei killed her own son. But Randyll Tarly and the other nobles are like, let's forget about our oath to the Tyrells, we would rather be with Cersei.

I don't remember the destruction of the Sept of Balor even being mentioned after Season 6.

BloodSquirrel

2024-06-03, 10:46 AM

Let's try to get back to an earlier, more civil discussion.

Gonna have to give a hard 'yes' to that one. Being a bit eager to burn people to death makes you a villain.

Sure, but few, if any, people mean that broad a take when they say someone is manipulative. The label being tossed around pejoratively typically requires a pattern, while we've had one example being picked apart and dissected.

That's the same as only calling someone a glutton when they eat much more than your average person. There are lots of things that everyone does that only get pointed out if you do them in excess.

That's because 99% of the time people are physically in the way. Like, the other example used was "blocking in your car with their car". By this argument, Jimmy never physically obstructed Chuck's movement, so i hardly think it's out of line to can toss out that 99%. But if anyone really wants to define virtually any inconvenience as "being in my way", I no longer really care.

Being physically in the way is just the easiest way to obstruct someone passively, which is why it's a common example. But your overall semantic hair-splitting here makes no sense. The phrase "in the way" is commonly used both figuratively and literally, for both major and minor offenses, and for intentional and unintentional occurrences. It can describe both someone being in the way of an ice chest that I want to get a drink from and a political leader refusing to step down and letting his protege take over.

tomandtish

2024-06-03, 11:05 AM

I didn't like it at first but i like it now. It's not good, but it is pretty fun, which i was too elitest to really appreciate when i was younger.

Agreed. See below for more.

Voyager was... Meh. It had some fun episodes, but also had some absolutely terrible ones.

Still better than anything Star Trek-related made in the last 10 years or so.

Very much this. Voyager is probably the most uneven Star Trek show ever. You can have episodes worthy of being on a top 10 list of ALL Star Trek shows, followed by one that is a contender for worst ever.

Meh... It's a decent film, but it doesn't feel very "Star Trekky" to me... It feels like a generic sci-fi adventure movie with characters named after ST characters.

Yeah, that's the biggest problem with the 2009 reboot. Those are perfectly fine Sci-fi action films. They are horrible Star Trek films.

pita

2024-06-03, 11:17 AM

I feel like a moratorium could be declared on both BCS and Game of Thrones at this point and it would help the thread.

Backseat modding aside, I recently rewatched a few Star Wars movies, and honestly, A New Hope is probably the best of the original trilogy. Empire Strikes Back does not hold up anywhere near as well, imo. A lot of that movie is just dramatically inert. It's got its big moments, but overall? Good grief. Fully disagree with the popular opinion that it's the best one.

Saph

2024-06-03, 11:47 AM

I think the first third of so of ESB is very good, and the battle sequences on and around Hoth are excellent they're some of the best sci-fi land battle scenes ever put to film. But after that, yeah, I agree it slows down a lot, and I've never quite understood why so many people rate it as the best ever Star Wars movie. In the top 3? Sure. Top 1? Not so sure.

Peelee

2024-06-03, 12:23 PM

That's the same as only calling someone a glutton when they eat much more than your average person. There are lots of things that everyone does that only get pointed out if you do them in excess.
Yes, I fully agree. We see Chuck metaphorically overeating once. He is then fairly regularly branded as a glutton. My whole point is that the majority of complaints i hear about Chuck by and large unfairly ascribe unfavorable traits to him. Jimmy manipulates people constantly. Chuck doesn't. But note how even in this thread, Chuck was called out negatively for being manipulative.

Between Peter Gould and Michale McKean, Chuck might be one of the most real characters in TV, and definitely one of the best presented. The problem is that he is not a good person and is thoroughly unlikable, while Jimmy is immensely likeable (and has the benefit of being the "hero" of the story), and so it's shocking to me how deeply people are willing to try to justify their dislike by villifying Chuck.

But your overall semantic hair-splitting here makes no sense.... It can describe both someone being in the way of an ice chest that I want to get a drink from and a political leader refusing to step down and letting his protege take over.
I agree, it totally can! And note how when given free reign to make up your own example, you go with something like a leader refusing to step-down and let protege take over. Which is massively different from what Jimmy does. Even metaphorically, you present it as keeping someone from moving forward. Because that makes perfect sense. Chuck was at no point prevented from moving forward. He easy tricked into presenting an incorrect number, a plausible mistake that anyone could conceivably make (albeit not a good look professionally). I don't think I'm splitting hairs saying that's not being in the way, i think claiming that's being in the way is torturing the expression to force it to fit a scenario that it does not apply to.

I feel like a moratorium could be declared on both BCS and Game of Thrones at this point and it would help the thread.
Fair. The last I'll say on BCS is that this whole argument aside, it's amazing and i think all y'all should watch it if you haven't already. Incredibly enjoyable.

I recently rewatched a few Star Wars movies, and honestly, A New Hope is probably the best of the original trilogy.
Agree, with the addendum that I also think it's the best of all the Star Wars films.

Tyndmyr

2024-06-03, 12:34 PM

Let's try to get back to an earlier, more civil discussion.

I don't remember the destruction of the Sept of Balor even being mentioned after Season 6.

Yes, Daenerys is a villain. Oh, we see her origin story, so she's a bit more sympathetic than she otherwise would be, and it happens to be a cast absolutely thick with villains, so she doesn't get contrasted quite so much, but she does kill kind of a lot of people before then, and often does not govern well.

Look at her killing of Mossador. The guy was loyal to her, and his only mistake was misinterpreting her command, and killing a straight up murderer without bringing him to trial. She, then offs him with a great deal of spectacle. This is kind of falling into the villain trope of killing your underlings for even slight errors. It was also a terrible decision politically, but even morally, it's...kind of harsh.

The problem with the end of GOT isn't that Dany is shown going crazy, that actually fits pretty well. It's just portrayed badly, with poor motivation and kind of rushed. Why is Dany randomly attacking people instead of flying straight to the Red Keep if her motivation is to kill Cersei? Don't know. She didn't become a villain in the last episode, then. She didn't even become a villain when she burned the surrendered army, though that was also a villainous act. She became a villain much earlier, in a slide into solving problems with a great deal of violence.

I also note that likeability plays a large part in how we see actions. Crush a co*ckroach and you're a hero. Crush a butterfly, and you're a villain. Morality has beauty standards.

Batcathat

2024-06-03, 12:38 PM

While I'm not familiar with the example in question (yes, I know I should watch it, I haven't even watched Breaking Bad yet), I have noticed that some people (not aimed at anyone in the thread, just a general observation) seems to see some inherent connection between liking a character and thinking that they're morally right, whether that takes the form of wanting a character they like to be "better" than they are or complaining about the lack of "good" people in a work.

Nothing necessarily wrong with either, of course, I just find it odd.

Ramza00

2024-06-03, 01:36 PM

Let's try to get back to an earlier, more civil discussion.

I don't remember the destruction of the Sept of Balor even being mentioned after Season 6.

"I will crush all who stand in my way"

Danys whole arc is tied to the concept of sacrifice how creation and destruction are linked like the concept of fire, like the concept of blood magic. We are introduced to Blood Magic via Danys chapters, the orient not just as the east but the stranger in orientalism via Danys encounter with the Mirri Maz Duur, the magi. Mirri Maz Duur then sacrifices Danys unborn child and uses it to repair but not repair Danys husband.

But Mirri Maz Duur is not just an orientalist encounter, after the event we have Mirri Maz Duur account for herself. We learn she was born a shepherded and her mother was the role that 40 year old Mirri Maz Duur will later take up. But in the in between stage when she was a teen and young women Mirri Maz Duur will travel the world (much like foreshadow Daenerys) and learn 4 crafts and the first one was blood magic. So Mirri Maz Duur is a blood magician but she is also so much more than that, she was a godswife whose job is to heal people and to bring new life into the world via midwifery.

Then Dany performs her ritual of blood magic with the eggs and sacrificing Khal Drogo on the funeral pyre.

Then we see other uses of blood magic via other characters, many red priests, but not all. People like Melisandre and we learn more of what the lore is.

=====

Dany will sacrifice what she thinks is necessary to create what she thinks is a good world. Yet she does not ask questions until too late, likewise in an army you can not control other peoples wills. There is no oaths or promises with fire, onlu the new which consumes the old.

=====

Jon Snow is kind of the opposite of that, but that is a thread for another day. He is the bastard and thus his originating trauma makes him obsessed with the concept of loyalty and keeping ones word and being true to others.

I don't remember the destruction of the Sept of Balor even being mentioned after Season 6.

not going to talk about all the fire and blood lore with Aegon and his two sisters, and his half brother.

Nor their kids, people like Maegor the Cruel, nor the Dance of Dragons. Martin likes horror and what is more gothic than a mad king in a castle. And Martin does pull things from real world history, and fiction, but also you are doing a sampling bias Martin (and he is okay with that.)

Metastachydium

2024-06-03, 01:40 PM

Like I said upthread, surprising as that might be coming from me in particular, I still think the Mossador thing is the exact opposite of what's mostly happening around Daenerys. You see, guy was a violent moron and murdered a valuable prisoner, denying her government any intel that could be gleaned from or through the Son, escalating preexisting tensions even further and that last bit by way of making the Son a literal martyr for the disaffected upper-class young radicals.

Mossador is an idiot criminal and had it coming, both legally and from a practical standpoint, and for once, instead of doing something excessively violent and getting cheered on for it, Daenerys tries to publically demonstrate that the laws are laws and apply to everyone, including her worshippers if they are idiot criminals and gets almost lynched for it. Naturally, the whole thing has zero mid- or long-term consequence, so the usual pattern reasserts itself in due time, but it's there, and she is, for a change, absolutely right.

Martin likes horror and what is more gothic than a mad king in a castle.

A madwoman in the attic, but I don't think he ever uses one of those. (This is not unfortunate, if you ask me.)

Tyndmyr

2024-06-03, 02:01 PM

The man grew up under a very different system. One in which people did absolutely have each other killed via wink and nod. He believed she wanted that, and did it. A loyal servant, albeit one who failed to read the room. He killed a murderer. That's...pretty normal in this world, and not even all that evil. Plenty of people offed murderers without waiting for a trial.

Worse, he was loved by the only faction of people that liked Dany. Offing him would do little to make her haters love her, but absolutely would alienate those who supported her.

Worst, Dany decides to make a spectacle of it. She's not satisfied with a just outcome, she needs to make a bloody, public spectacle out of the execution. This....is not heroic, and most definitely is a way of showing her slide into evil. She's showing lack of foresight, lack of mercy, desire for revenge....oh, it may be dressed up with other justifications, but what she's doing here is definitely both evil and dumb.

Mordar

2024-06-03, 02:05 PM

While I cannot ever put aside the magic of seeing Star Wars the first 20+ times in a theater (I was in the perfect age group, lived within walking distance of the theater in my small town, it had great matinee pricing *and* snack prices), I think that for me ESB was a much more "serious" film with a roller coaster of emotions and beats, with much of the same wonder as SW. I never felt it slow down...the escape of the Falcon, the glimpse of Vader's scarred head, the giant space worm, the scary bounty hunters, the amazing city in the clouds, and the entire Degobah set/scenes.

SW was like Randy on Christmas Day...everything was incredibly wonderful and oh so amazing and represented so much potential, but the magic was based on what I did and thought and played and read *outside* the theater. ESB was serious and edgy (for a 10/11 year old) and scary and exciting and awesome, but now felt like part of something even bigger, and *still* launched a million out-of-the-theater games and play and conversations about "what ifs" and "who did he means". It is the BB gun...the gift that sticks.

I understand that the technical merits and such are better in ESB, but that ins't why I rank it higher. I rank it above SW because of how I felt watching it, and strangely, that I dislike the revised edition less than the revised SW.

- M

Metastachydium

2024-06-03, 02:14 PM

Worse, he was loved by the only faction of people that liked Dany. Offing him would do little to make her haters love her, but absolutely would alienate those who supported her.

1. Again, he committed a politically/strategically very uncomfortable crime solely on account of being dumb enough not to know better and thinking he'll get away with it.

2. "Criminals should get special treatment based on loyalty" is an odd argument, especially if approached from an ethical/moral angle, and while killing Mossador didn't have a realistic chance of making the Masters like Daenerys more, letting him walk with maybe a slap on the wrist after murdering someone detained for assassinating "hard targets" (members of an occupying military force) would have added one count of an excuse for escalation to the one count of a martyr the Sons/supporters got.

3. It's easily one of her least bloody killings. It doesn't involve (dragon)fire, "kneel or I'll exterminate your whole family", crucifixion or slitting the throats of diplomatic envoys during a parley you know, her usual fare.

Tyndmyr

2024-06-03, 02:46 PM

Surely you must realize that #3 is evidence in favor of my "Dany's a villain all along" yes?

I mean, I'll definitely agree that she has a laundry list of more graphic executions, but that...is not a usual trait of the good guys.

warty goblin

2024-06-03, 03:30 PM

About the best thing you can say for Dany is that until the end she only does awful things to people the audience doesn't like and probably think deserve it. But I think thinking that makes her a hero is not really understanding Martin as an author, he's far too morally even handed, existentialist, and skeptical of violence as a positive force to come up with a plot outline that boils down to all the world needs is the right person committing the atrocities. Dany's arc ends badly because, in the end, she's just a mildly more sympathetic person using the same awful and destructive power structures as the various jerks who have spent multiple novels turning Westeros into an open air graveyard.

Hence I also think Bran rules is probably the intended ending. It's just going to be a much weirder, more psychic, and less individually human Bran than in the show. Merging into the eternal hivemind is generally the good outcome in Martin's sci-fi after all, and vast sections of ASoIaF are elaborations of ideas from his Thousand Worlds material from the seventies. Explicit callbacks to the Corpse Handler stuff has, thankfully, not made the cut because nobody wants a 400 page expansion of Meathouse Man.

Ramza00

2024-06-03, 03:40 PM

Surely you must realize that #3 is evidence in favor of my "Dany's a villain all along" yes?

I mean, I'll definitely agree that she has a laundry list of more graphic executions, but that...is not a usual trait of the good guys.

underlines how Martin uses imagery from other peoples point of views, their chapters, to build on themes.

How Bran the Broken and Ned Starks first introduction is him doing the execution of the deserter from the prologue. You only get one first chapter / first words and one last chapter / words per modernist literary theory.

Was Neds execution in book 1 the end of this Bran point of view first chapter, or was it the yet to be end of the series?

Mordar

2024-06-03, 03:46 PM

Surely you must realize that #3 is evidence in favor of my "Dany's a villain all along" yes?

I mean, I'll definitely agree that she has a laundry list of more graphic executions, but that...is not a usual trait of the good guys.

So would you put Ned on the list? Beheading a poor and unarmed man in front of Ned's children? Pretty brutal and bloody.

I hate the Daenerys character more than any other in the books or show...but the *only* way she should execute someone is publicly and painfully. Particularly if it is one of "her own". Otherwise it should be the oubliette.

- M

tomandtish

2024-06-03, 03:51 PM

- M

I am perfectly in agreement with you. Empire may be a technically better film but I prefer the original.

Of course, I saw it over 100 times on original release. This was back in the days where the theater in our area didn't care if you sat in the same theater on one ticket. So Mom would drop me off at her lunch and Dad would pick me up on the way home. 3 full showings 3 times a week all summer.

Mechalich

2024-06-03, 04:06 PM

I think this is probably correct, especially given that Bran's powers at least theoretically allow him to manipulate the mechanisms of monarchy in a superior fashion to that of a ruler who isn't all-seeing. I mean, Bran's abilities allow him to reach across time and space considering the whole Hodor mess, so he could halt threats to his reign before they happen. However, since the show completely failed to establish Bran as doing anything with his abilities (and also failed to establish any reason why he doesn't get shanked within weeks of taking the throne) this whole structure just...isn't there.

Instead, Dany, with Drogon, is the only person left with the supernatural abilities to empower rulership. I mean, it is possible to argue, demographically, that Jon killing Dany causes more deaths than it prevents, because of the massive civil war and famine that is almost sure to follow as the Seven Kingdoms fall apart will result in far more deaths than Dany smashing castles and killing lords in the name of breaking the wheel or whatever her post-King's Landing plans were.

Errorname

2024-06-03, 05:54 PM

Robb Stark does something very similar, and while I think it's portrayed as pragmatically questionable, I don't think there's any question that within the fiction it is understood as the honourable and just thing to do.

warty goblin

2024-06-03, 06:41 PM

Having dragons or other supernatural forms of might isn't the key to good governance though, the Targaryans were no better than any other batch of rulers you care to name, and frequently worse. Even if we grant that Dany is better than the alternatives, there's zero reason to think her offspring won't revert to the mean, and the mean is really terrible. Dany can't break the wheel because she is the wheel. A post-individual psychic hivemind breaks the wheel, but that doesn't look even slightly like satisfying character arcs, and isn't the sort of ending I'd expect from a contemporary big budget TV series. It's the sort of ending I'd expect from the man who wrote A Song for Lya though, probably with a remnant of the cast unwilling to join the communal mind, and left alone on a darkling plain forever, trapped by their individuality.

Peelee

2024-06-03, 07:06 PM

Having dragons.... isn't the key to good governance though

Bite your tongue.

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