Are the people in the Star Wars movies humans?

but from whose point of view?

Are there any sci-fi movies that would not feature humans at all? I guess it's easier to do in books.

So Star Wars actually happens in our future, but the movie was made as a sci-fi historical document. Kinda like what-if our heirs find this movie? meta-geeky.

exactly!

I think so, for at least reasons:

1) less special EFX costs, and
2) having no human protagonists at all would probably be more alienating in movie, because the visual distance from humans would make it more difficult to relate to the characters. This is why even the non-human protagonists are usually humanoids or at least antropomoprphic. In books I guess it's a bit easier to relate robots, beings of energy, etc.

crosspost

Exactly...so maybe Han Solo is Star Wars's lone Judeo-Christian!

I saw a thing on NOVA or some other PBS show about 15 yrs ago that was basically a really awesome 45 minute Mousetrap-style cause-and-effect contraptions setting each other off type of thing. Sometimes you could see a human adjusting something or mulling about, but the ACTION was all pulleys and gases.

Having said that, are there any live-action films that wouldn't feature humans? Nature documentaries excluded.

-- Tuomas (lixnix...), April 17th, 2006.

milo and otis!

-- latebloomer's jazz oddysey brought to you by kellog's corn flakes (posercore24...), April 17th, 2006.

x-post

Every Human in Star Wars is Really a Humanoid Bee
Max Gladstone

There are no humans in Star Wars.

This should be obvious from the title card. We’re a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Human beings evolved on this planet, Sol 3, over the last sixty million years or so depending on how you count. If we don’t want to go all “Chariots of the Gods?” we have to throw out the notion that the people represented by human actors in Star Wars movies are in fact human. They’re something else.

Why represent them as human? Let’s assume that the Star Wars movies are dramatizations of real history: that Luke, Leia, Han et. al. actually existed in a galaxy long, long ago (etc.), and that George Lucas accessed this history via the Force and wanted to represent it on film. Star Wars tells the story of a dominant-species empire arising from a pluralistic society, then being overthrown by courageous rebels and warrior monks. Lucas had to cast this drama with human actors, and the obvious choice was to use unmodified humans to represent the most common species.

While convenient, this approach does present one problem: watching the Original Trilogy, we assume that the ‘humans’ of the GFFA (Galaxy Far Far Away) are biologically and sociologically identical to Sol 3 humans. When obviously they’re not! In fact, I think a few important context clues present a very different picture of the dominant race of the Original Trilogy.

Gender is the most important clue. The Original Trilogy has a shortage of women when considered by the standards of a two-sexed mammalian species. Leia is the most prominent female, and the only one to feature in all three movies. Aunt Beru and Mon Mothma also have named speaking roles. Aside from these three, I can’t think of another definitely-female, definitely-‘human’ character in the series. In RotJ Leia describes her mother, who is obviously a queen. These females all possess at least local political and social authority.

Family is a second important clue—or, rather, the absence of family. With one notable exception, people in the series don’t talk much about parentage. No non-Force sensitive male ever describes his family, if I recall correctly. Han, Lando, Wedge, Biggs, Tarkin, Dodonna, and so forth, all might as well have sprung from the brows of their ships. In six+ hours of film about war, I would expect to see someone to drop at least a single reference to parents of some sort. The lack of strong family ties suggests that parenting relationships are much less close for most GFFA ‘humans’ than for Sol 3 humans—which in turn suggests large brood sizes, short gestation periods, young ages of maturity, or all of the above.

So we’re looking for an organism with large brood sizes, young ages of maturity, short gestation periods, and relatively few fertile females who naturally assume positions of social and organizational authority.

Here is my modest theory: the GFFA’s ‘humans’ are in fact sentient hive insects, organized around a single queen, a handful of fertile males, and a horde of infertile female soldiers. For parsimony’s sake, let’s assume that Force sensitivity in this species is possessed by fertile males and females, and that male actors used to represent non-Force sensitive characters are actually representing infertile females.

This explains a few things:

* The Emperor’s Reproductive and Political Strategy. The Emperor, a fertile male, has replaced the old Queen, substituting the use of clone warriors for ‘normal’ biological reproduction.

* The Horror of the Clone Wars. The true horror of the Clone Wars thus becomes clear. They’re not just wars in which cloning technology is used. They’re wars in which the fundamental structure of the ‘human’ species is inverted: wars in which queens are killed, hives consolidated, and clones take the place of biological reproduction. Wars about the use of clones instead of queens.

* The Deal with Jabba’s Humanoid Slaves. Doesn’t it seem weird that a presumably hermaphroditic gastropod should be so fascinated by displaying captive females of another phylum in bikinis? The Hive Insect theory makes this habit a clear and calculated display of dominance, communicating to ‘human’ visitors that Jabba is to ‘human’ queens as queens are to drones and soldiers. (This also suggests that Jabba’s interested in twi’lek girls because they look like ‘humans,’ but may be easier to come by—giving his character a bit of extra complexity, since he wants to communicate dominance to his followers in this way but isn’t able to do more than pretend until Leia comes along.)

* Why Kill the Jedi? I mean, sure, kill the old ones, but wouldn’t it be easier to convert younglings than wipe them out? Well, drones in the absence of a queen naturally rear fertilized eggs into new queens. If Palpatine is trying to destroy queen-dom, he cannot permit the existence of any drones who are not perfectly loyal to his New Order. Conversion is apparently a brutal process. Vader survived it; Luke might survive it. Perhaps no one else did.

* What’s with all the Death Stars? It isn’t hard to annihilate all life on a planet from orbit. If you’re in orbit, you’ve already done the hard part—just tractor some rocks into the surface. Obviously a superweapon is nice to have, but why not build just the weapon and the shielding system? That would be cheaper, certainly. It seems that the superweapon is only part of the purpose of the Death Star—the Star is in fact an artificial hive, built as the perfect environment for the Emperor’s new clone-based society.

Admittedly, this doesn’t explain what’s going on between Leia and Han. It’s possible that Han is in fact a drone and doesn’t know it—he is phenomenally lucky, after all, which suggests Force sensitivity. On the other hand, it seems reasonable, given the importance of queens, that some sort of queen-soldier pairbonding could occur. This may even be the sort of relationship that the Emperor is intending to replicate with Vader.

So that’s a theory. I mean, what’s more likely—a Galaxy Far Far Away full of psychic alien super-bees, or one in which you can cross thirty solar systems and run into three women with speaking parts?

duh

JEWS COME FROM SPACE

― Washable School Paste (sexyDancer), Monday, April 17, 2006

is this true? i'm jewish, and i've never heard anyone say this at the meetings.

http://i62.tinypic.com/oho00l.png

QED

All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

ftr lucas just declared ALL the videogames non-canon.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Human

god it's like you people haven't even heard of a little thing called wookieepedia.

QED

― Mordy, 5. toukokuuta 2014 2:46

Oh, sorry, I forgoto to copy+paste the disclaimer in that article:

DISCLAIMER: I love Star Wars. It rocks. And precisely because of this, it’s fun to tweak. Obviously, the above argument only refers to the OT; the EU features a much broader range of characters and situations, and I don’t want to be responsible for creating a consistent interpretation of the prequel trilogies. (Though just off the top of my head, Naboo-’humans’ do seem to fit with Hive Insect theory.)

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Human

god it's like you people haven't even heard of a little thing called wookieepedia.

I'm not sure this proves anything, though. Sure, the word "human" is used to describe one of the species in the SW universe, but that's only because SW works have been translated into English, and "human" was considered as the best English translation of whatever the actual word is that the Star Wars "humans" use for their race. (This makes the text of SW works more fluid, because they then can use common English words of like "humanity", instead of inserting the original name of the SW "humans" into those words, which would be jarring.) However, it's still obvious that the SW "humans" can't be the same as Earth humans, because of two reasons:

1) The story of the original movies takes place "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away". There is no canon evidence for the theory (mentioned upthread) that the SW movies are actually from the distant future, and their "long time ago" would actually be our future. As far as the canon is concerned, SW takes place in our past.

2) SW "humans" have some traits that Earth humans don't, the most obvious one being that inside their bodies exists microscopic life-forms called midi-chlorians. (And according to Wookieepedia, midi-chlorians are "isomorphic on every planet that supports life", and they are "necessary for life to exist", which means they couldn't have just been inserted into our system sometime in the future.) SW "humans" are also able, via the midi-chlorians, to connect to an energy field known as the Force, something which Earth humans obviously can't do.

God that page is weird; "A yellow-skinned Human female displaying characteristic curves and hairless face".

ftr lucas just declared ALL the videogames non-canon.

― it definitely wasn't designed to be a pants pocket player (stevie), Monday, May 5, 2014 3:23 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

L. Ron Lucas

(does lucas have pope-like authority and infallibility in these matters, even after having sold the intellectual property to disney?)

i'm not sure, tbh. what is his involvement with Star Wars 7?

zero

really? not even story?

now imagining George Lucas like season 7 Don Draper

Vader all too human

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/the-empire-strikes-out-nobody-first-pitches-veer-off-course-050414

bees?

bees.

BEES!

bwahaha wtf

for a long time i thought the ewok movies involved a human family from earth who crash landed on endor.

Apparently the new movie features characters with names like "Finn", "Rey", and "Poe Dameron"... These sound suspiciously like English names to me, though with a letter or two in the wrong place. Similarly, the humans in "Star Wars Rebels" animated series have actual Biblical names: "Ezra" and "Kanan". So maybe we're supposed to think the SW humans eventually landed on Earth in prehistorical times and actually founded the human civilization (a la Battlestar Galactica), and their names were passed down along the generations?

They're played by human actors who come from a planet called earth.
Seems to be a constant thing with sci fi creations, they are centred on the planet they're made by. or at least filtered through the viewpoint of people from here.
The doctor is a big friend to the human raceand the planet Earth because the series is made here.

Otherwise you are likely to constantly be falling prey to the filtering system that has its finest example in pictures of the New World being made in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries where everything that is outside of European culture is being redrawn by people inside it so is morplhed into something that is a bit different to its actuality.

actual biblical names like luke skywalker

So maybe we're supposed to think the SW humans eventually landed on Earth in prehistorical times and actually founded the human civilization (a la Battlestar Galactica), and their names were passed down along the generations?

this would be worse than Jar Jar

They're played by human actors who come from a planet called earth.
Seems to be a constant thing with sci fi creations, they are centred on the planet they're made by. or at least filtered through the viewpoint of people from here.
The doctor is a big friend to the human raceand the planet Earth because the series is made here.

Yeah, but the difference is that most movies/shows at least try to justify their human-centricity somehow (the Doctor loves Earth and it's inhabitants, that's why he's always hanging here), whereas the SW movies don't... They take place in our past, and Earth is never seen or mentioned in the whole franchise, yet somehow these folks are just like us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution

Fuck me.

I think human actors were easier to cast, feed, tailor and manage in the 70's otherwise who knows how it may have turned out, I believe it was studio/production that made the call in the end.

NOt another source of income for illegal aliens since though is it? Come to the USA and get work in the movies and disguise yourself as CGI

how do you know they take place in our past? maybe the pov of the opening titles is our future. making the action of the movies our present. maybe the movies are actually human history, remembered in distorted, compressed, and mythologized form by the humans of the extreme future, for whom an existence bound to a single planet is unimaginable and unrelateable, but who do have access to a lot of vintage '40s First Motion Picture Unit footage preserved on celluloid in airless satellites. would that clear it up for you.

Uh, Tuomas?

perhaps Star Wars, like Tuomas questions, are a question of cyclical history and what happened in a galaxy a long time ago will happen again

Haha, I'd forgotten I'd thought about this stuff before... But back then I hadn't seen Rebels though, which I think gives some new support to the "SW humans as ancient astronauts" theory with its Bible names. (Though confusingly enough Rebels also has two characters named "Sabine" and "Hera" who, despite their familiar-sounding names, are not humans.)

how do you know they take place in our past? maybe the pov of the opening titles is our future. making the action of the movies our present. maybe the movies are actually human history, remembered in distorted, compressed, and mythologized form by the humans of the extreme future, for whom an existence bound to a single planet is unimaginable and unrelateable, but who do have access to a lot of vintage '40s First Motion Picture Unit footage preserved on celluloid in airless satellites. would that clear it up for you.

This theory has been brought up before, see my rebuttal of it here.

http://c.fastcompany.net/multisite_files/fastcompany/imagecache/slideshow_large/slideshow/2015/09/3051411-slide-s-11-the-making-of-star-wars.jpg

(Though confusingly enough Rebels also has two characters named "Sabine" and "Hera" who, despite their familiar-sounding names, are not humans.)

Ahem: http://www.starwars.com/databank/sabine-wren

GENDER
Female
SPECIES
Human

Ah, okay. The series just said she's "Mandalorian", I thought that meant another species, but I guess humans live on Mandalore then? Hera is definitely not human though.

I find Stevolende's analogy very helpful for eliminating many of these problems and paradoxes.

Otherwise you are likely to constantly be falling prey to the filtering system that has its finest example in pictures of the New World being made in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries where everything that is outside of European culture is being redrawn by people inside it so is morplhed into something that is a bit different to its actuality.

Another useful comparison might be Shakespeare's famously anachronistic clock and chimneys in Julius Caesar. While ancient Romans would have had neither clocks nor chimneys, the AUDIENCE would understand those things. Hence because the original SW audience was 1970s/80s Earthian-American human moviegoers, you get recognizable humans, "hell," etc.

The Bee Theory is tantalizing - made even moreso by the totally ridiculous "Jupiter Ascending" universe in which we are expected to take it straight up that Sean BEEan is part-bee.

So slutsky's theory (posited upthread) that Luke resembles a pile of silly string who communicates by odors can neither be ruled out nor ruled in. Viewed from the perspective of the angels it's no more or less plausible than Jesus or Santa Claus, so I say we're free to go with it.

Next up: the whole franchise is an allegory for the Russian Revolution. It was originally supposed to be called TSAR WARS, but an early version of spell check set it on another course and the rest, as they say, is teleology.

is the name "Poe Dameron" a nod to the character Nicolas Cage played in Con Air named "Cameron Poe"

I was thinking mainly of the images sent back by Hakluyt from the New World that were set up for engraving for further printing by artists in Europe who had never seen the original images so changed several details
like
https://www.google.ie/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.answers.com%2FQ%2FWhy_did_Richard_Hakluyt_urge_England_to_start_colonies_in_the_Americas&psig=AFQjCNFoOQEulLjcCPDoLCYVPkFF04qMBw&ust=1443881029294085

becoming
https://strangewayes.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/de-bry-from-hakluyt.jpg

and so on. Probably not the greatest example but you can see that the figure as drawn by Hakluyt has become more idealised european than its origin.

no you can't

I live in Virginia; I can personally attest that the natives look nothing like that.

Ah, okay. The series just said she's "Mandalorian", I thought that meant another species, but I guess humans live on Mandalore then?

This was finally cleared (to me, though it could've been explained in later seasons of Rebels too, I haven't watched them) in The Mandalorian: the Mandalorians are more like a religion or ideology, and anyonen can become one of them, so Sabine is both human and Mandalorian.

They're both a planet of people and an ideology. The guess is that the Mandalorians that show up on the show are part of a splinter group that's grown its numbers by recruiting outsiders to their culture.

But yeah, planet of humans.

Why do so many of the planets have planet-wide mono-eco-systems and yet breathable atmospheres? Here's a desert planet / here's an ice planet / here's a carbon dioxide planet where Star Destroyers grow spontaneously under the ocean. Surely they must all have temperate and forrested areas to produce enough breathable air for humans etc to survive, so just build your spaceports there, rather than on the desert bits / inaccessible ice mountain ranges?

It's as if all this stuff was made-up on the hoof with no science advisor.

Werner Herzog delivered the line I keep thinking of from recent Star Wars stuff, when he asks Mando why the Mandalorians resisted the Empire.

"The Empire improves every system it touches. By any metric: safety, prosperity, peace. Compare imperial rule to what is happening now. Is the world more peaceful than the revolution?"

https://www.cbr.com/the-mandalorian-makes-a-case-for-the-empire/

what if its us* that isn't human

*(ilx)

Werner Herzog delivered the line I keep thinking of from recent Star Wars stuff, when he asks Mando why the Mandalorians resisted the Empire.

"The Empire improves every system it touches. By any metric: safety, prosperity, peace. Compare imperial rule to what is happening now. Is the world more peaceful than the revolution?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIZdjT1472Y

just something to think abt