star wars 9 spoilers and postmortem shit talk

or when an ewok dies

or when luke's aunt and uncle are reduced to charbroiled skeletons

this isn't like a death in battle but there's even grief when the fuckin rancor dies

I think I'd put as much weight on the response to the horror as I would the depictions themselves. I can't really recall seeing any SW characters in shock because of the psychic weight of the war they're waging.

Harry Potter the deaths are big moments, and aren't as gruesome imo. Star Wars you get plenty of cock pit views of a pilot that you just saw cracking wise a few scenes ago helplessly burning to death at the beginning of being exploded.

Lord of the Rings was certainly popular with a lot of kids but Star Wars has so much more kid focused content and targeting and merchandise... it's just on another level. You might imagine this would encourage even more scrutiny from executives worried about parents opinions about exposing this violence, but the cockpit view of pilot screaming and dying in an explosion or a light saber slices someone in half are all just as much borrowed from the original trilogy as the rest of the fan service, so it gets a pass! People just accept it because it's a familiar Star Wars element.

xposts

Luke prodded Owen with a stick a few times and asked him why he was just lying around

whoops, cockpit* ha

xxpost It isn't, like, messy though. Dude in an x-wing dies screaming in an explosion and it's like, aw man that sucks, welp here's some more 'pew pew'.

I mean in battle you can't pull your X-Wing into a breakdown lane and start sobbing

Maybe u can't but let me show u how it's done

I think I'd put as much weight on the response to the horror as I would the depictions themselves. I can't really recall seeing any SW characters in shock because of the psychic weight of the war they're waging.

― Pizza is Really Yummy for Me (Old Lunch), Monday, January 13, 2020 12:05 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah for real isn't the last scene in Star Wars 8 the like 30 survivors standing around chatting casually as if they didn't just watch almost everyone they know die in a chase in which they themselves barely escaped?

I mean consider this: every shot/lightsaber slice in these movies is either a clean kill (like exceptionally clean, very little blood and certainly no viscera) or a survivable injury. At worst, you have the members of the Skywalker clan getting dismembered. And even a charbroiled Anakin gets safely sealed up in his fetish suit where no one has to look at or openly acknowledge what happened to him.

TLJ is the only one I can think of where there was a genuine sense of 'oh shit, these guys might be fucked rn'.

https://i.makeagif.com/media/1-20-2014/R4dNiC.gif

kid focused content and targeting and merchandise

oh, so once again the mega-corporate merchandizing/cultural saturation is the real issue

I know you don't see the rebel's flesh melting or anything but it's still much more brutally upfront than anything else that targets young demos. But again, it's just a fascinating lack of shyness on that front. In the actual SW universe it still makes zero sense that living soldiers fight in battles.

xposts

this may come as a surprise to you but nothing touches Star Wars as a franchise in terms of scale/marketing, so yr using a metric that by its nature excludes any other property or text

much more brutally upfront than anything else that targets young demos

but if *this* (ie, the level of brutality) is yr metric I don't think this is accurate at all, kids are inundated with depictions of violence

Lord of the Rings was certainly popular with a lot of kids

For over sixty years, and sold lots of merchandise on dead trees

kid focused content and targeting and merchandise

oh, so once again the mega-corporate merchandizing/cultural saturation is the real issue

― Οὖτις, Monday, January 13, 2020 12:25 PM (fifty-five seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

eh just using that stuff to emphasize how interesting it is to me that the depictions of war are not watered down.

but if *this* (ie, the level of brutality) is yr metric I don't think this is accurate at all, kids are inundated with depictions of violence

― Οὖτις, Monday, January 13, 2020 12:28 PM (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

If you mean cartoon violence these movies don't really count; if you mean from media or content made for adults also not the same

Yeah, sorry, 'depictions of violence in SW = not watered down' is just not in any way a stance I can hang my hat on.

Can you clarify cause maybe I understand " not something I can hang my hat on" differently here

hanging my hat is where i’m a viking

If you mean cartoon violence these movies don't really count; if you mean from media or content made for adults also not the same

SW isn't marketed specifically to children, it's marketed to over-grown children

Top of your game

I think if you're saying that the SW films demonstrate in a somewhat abstract sense that there's a cost to war, that the outcomes are uncertain, that sacrifice is sometimes required, etc., I can get onboard with that.

If, otoh, you're saying that the SW films offer any kind of realistic depiction of the horror of war, like in terms of the psychic and emotional and physical toll on those involved, I have to mos def call shenanigans.

nah I'm just talking about the literal depictions of the deaths, not the peripheral stuff; the shots of characters blowing up and getting cut in half and all that.

I agreed with you upthread about the weird emotional disconnect btw

agreed with Old Lunch - we do get death being bad, more than in most PG-13 death-fests (Aquaman, e.g., depicts the deaths of tens of thousands of undersea folk basically in the background), but apart from the original trilogy, SW doesn't really linger on death or trauma as things that have emotional impacts on the survivors. Harry Potter is MUCH more interested in this, from Harry's origin story to the major deaths in 4 and 5, and the general grimness of the final film's battle for Hogwarts - not a scene of thrills but of people we love dying in the gray dust.

lots of one-off kids' movies from E.T. to Coco are also about different emotional aspects of death and mourning, though not usually in a "war" setting.

Finally saw this over the weekend. Weeks of rotten reviews made me go in with a shrug and I came out thinking it was better than the reviews had let on. It was, like most of these things now, too long and also rushed. They breezed past every location so quickly I never felt like I knew where the team was. Disappointed that Rose got erased, probably could have left Leia out altogether and opened with her funeral or something.

I liked all the new cast and was sorry to see them go, especially Finn, but at the same time it sure seemed like they were leaving spin-offs set up all over the place. Lando practically looked right at the camera: "Let's go find find your parents... this November, only on Disney +!"

It has become quite a bit muddled over time, but I think technology vs nature was a big part of the subtext at the beginning of the saga. The Stormtroopers and Darth Vader and the Imperial Pilots are kinda inhumane, like robots, while all the Rebels are living beings. Luke has to turn off the computer and shoot with the force! At the end of the early trilogy, the teddy bears save the day! In TPM, it's the trade federation that uses battle droids, against the gungans. The idea that the films are critiquing the Vietnam War is a bit overplayed, but there is a sense that relying on technology and droids won't make for more humane warfare, it'll just mean that the ones with the most resources will win. Human heroism is much better.

Of course, this has gotten muddied. Turns out all the inhumane imperial stuff is just armor. And the Jedi thing makes it a bit awkward as well, because they claim to fight nobly and more civilized, but... They are still a fighter elite killing people. Obviously based on Samurai, and those people could uphold a civilized way of warfare, because they upheld a ruthless dictatorship that disarmed the citizens and meant they could kill everyone with their trusted sword.

So to me, that is kinda why the wars aren't fought with droids, and why the series is full of humans screaming as their spaceships explode around them. It's important to show that human sacrifice beats the military industrial complex. Like the viet cong did.

I just feel like it was an intuitive translation of the human vs. computer relationship from a 1970s outlook. Everything needed "human" operation- even the droids had very limited mobility or functions, despite their cartoony ability to emote. When the prequels provided much more updated perspectives on technology, it made no sense chronologically at the very least and the idea of manned space fighters or actual ground troops nonsensical at the most. Oh well.

I don't even remember -- when the original came out in 77 did we know the stormtroopers were dudes in suits and not droids?

Aren't you a little short for etc.

Also the copious arterial spray when they got hit with a blaster.

conversation between two stormtroopers on the death star about "the new models" of something-- of a piece w all the car culture stuff around the spaceships-- marks them not just as people but as different people (in contrast to later modified versions, in which both voices are jango fett)

the clones tho-- manufactured specifically+solely for war, denied even childhoods, cut off from all forms of relationship beyond martial camaraderie, unaware there is anything in the universe more important than the war you-the-viewer know is actually a kind of enormous prank, churned out by rainswept factories on what surely must be the most evil world in the galaxy (korriban is a theme park), the only place they think of as home-- are a breathtaking concept+image tbh

Yes. It's a large part of the reason why I'm enjoying the Clone Wars program atm (plus the effort they made to actually present the clones as identifiable individual personalities despite there being just shades of difference between most of them).

when I was a kid I thought stormtroopers / tie pilots were droids (despite han and luke putting on suits) and all the death was totally abstract, despite the destruction of alderaan and the millions of voices crying out in terror, lars and beru's smoldering corpses, incinerating x-wings, etc.

the idea of death and the scale of it never really hit me until i read a novelization of ROTJ a year or two after it came out (so I'd have been 10/11) and it described luke looking out the window of death star II during the battle of endor and picturing all the frozen dismembered bodies floating in space.

I can't really recall seeing any SW characters in shock because of the psychic weight of the war they're waging.

https://i.giphy.com/media/3oeSB2MkXOkelcFtKg/giphy.webp
https://i.giphy.com/media/l1ugsXCJdQvzJYYnK/giphy.webp
https://i.giphy.com/media/3ornkd1yQFrDGrTDCU/giphy.webp

last GIF looks like someone dealing with the aftermath of shitting themselves

In Psychological Effects of Combat, a 2008 paper included in the book Stress of War, Conflict and Disaster, Dave Grossman and Bruce K. Siddle wrote that in surveys of soldiers during World War II, “a quarter of combat veterans admitted that they urinated in their pants in combat, and a quarter admitted that they defecated in their pants in combat.”

in contrast to later modified versions, in which both voices are jango fett)

They're not tho. But Boba's voice is.

oh sry yr right. maclunky!

in the future we will all be jango fett for 15 minutes

every day another person's voice is replaced w jango fett's

Is Star Wars still really popular with children tho? I guess the merchandise would say yes but mine (and nearly all their mates) are way more into Marvel than Star Wars these days

Marvel - Galactus literally eats planets and its the Silver Surfer's job to warn people before he gets there so they can evacuate, right? Sort of.

Also Marvel released a couple of films relatively recently wherein literally half the population of the universe gets turned to space dust, the biggest act of murder in cinematic history.

Also the Beyonder years and years ago.

Star Wars violence is like the violence in The Dark Knight - no blood, no gore, no visible injuries most of the time. Batman duffs Joker's head in mercilessly in the interrogation room and all that happens is that some of his make-up comes off. I'd say that's as without consequence as anonymous Storm Troopers being offed with blasters.

Is Star Wars for kids? Yeah, it's for everyone. It took me until my 20s to realise the abject horror of the burnt out corpses of Luke's aunt and uncle. Didn't even notice it when I was 5.

Marvel - Galactus literally eats planets and its the Silver Surfer's job to warn people before he gets there so they can evacuate, right? Sort of.

This hasn't been the status quo for SS in decades. Also, a while ago Al Ewing (aka former ILC poster Vic Fluro) completely inverted Galactus, so that he started seeding dead planets with life instead of consuming them. Tho, sadly, this was such a cool new approach to the character that of course Marvel reverted him back a couple of years later.

Also Marvel released a couple of films relatively recently wherein literally half the population of the universe gets turned to space dust, the biggest act of murder in cinematic history.

Also the Beyonder years and years ago.

IIRC the original Beyonder of the 1980s Secret Wars didn't really kill anyone, did he? But in the 2015 Secret Wars and the Avengers comics that preceded it, the Beyonders (other member of the original Beyonder's race) annihilated the entire multiverse (save for one Earth), making them the biggest mass murdeders ever in Marvel comics, far surpassing Thanos, who only killed half the life of one paltry universe.

Tho of course the 2015 SW was pretty much just a Marvel version of DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths, where the Anti-Monitor also destroyed the entire multiverse (save for one universe). They currently adapted this story for the DC "Arrowverse" TV series, but I haven't seen it, so I dunno if the TV Anti-Monitor has surpassed Thanos as the largest live-action mass murderer.

can we not openly doxx former posters pls