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The I've Seen Rogue One Thread (spoilers OBV)


captainbleh
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I've never discounted it (ROTJ) either, even though its flaws (for me) are more obvious now

 

I'm probably in a minority of one (again), but I really don't like Admiral Raddus

 

(lots of snippets of the third act being uploaded > killed by Disney > uploaded by someone else at the moment, and he just grates)

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Guest El Chalupacabra

I've never discounted it (ROTJ) either, even though its flaws (for me) are more obvious now

 

I'm probably in a minority of one (again), but I really don't like Admiral Raddus

 

(lots of snippets of the third act being uploaded > killed by Disney > uploaded by someone else at the moment, and he just grates)

It's not that I didn't like Raddus. I was OK with him, but every scene he was in I thought to myself, "Why didn't they just use Admiral Ackbar."

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It's not that I didn't like Raddus. I was OK with him, but every scene he was in I thought to myself, "Why didn't they just use Admiral Ackbar."

 

I assume because Raddus didn't escape in Rogue One. He may or may not be dead (he'll probably pop up in a comic or something), but having Admiral Ackbar's ship captured at the end of Rogue One would leave one heck of a question mark for how he managed to show up in Return of the Jedi after that.

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Yeah, was his ship the larger ship the plans were beamed to that Leia;s ship pulls out from? If so, seems like his ship was pretty well taken over by the Empire.

 

Yeah, thats what happened. His ship was the ship that was boarded. So yeah, probably didn't go well. Was probably a prisoner on the Death Star when it was blown up.

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It's funny, when the same characters show up in different films, i.e. Boba Fett being Jango's clone and Jango being the template for the army, Ponda Baba and Dr Evazan on Jedha, etc., we hear complaints about how small this makes the universe look. Now we have a different character in R1 and we are complaining that they didn't use Admiral Ackbar.

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(I don't think your description of Zahn's version is correct btw)

 

That was just the nature of the beast. Lucas wasn't intimately involved in the EU, so he left the authors to their own devices. That doesn't make it all about money. Frankly, the revenues generated from the EU were likely chump change in the grand scheme of Star Wars money. Lucas hadn't intended to ever make movies post Endor by the early-90s, so he thought he was safe letting other writers tell Luke, Han, and Leia's story. Again, the writers were told to stay away from areas in the Prequel era because Lucas had intentions of going there himself one day. There was certainly a demand for those stories, which is why they flourished. Had Lucas not sold everything to Disney, it essentially would have remained Luke's story. That's all pretty important stuff.

 

The only one that annoyed me was way they treated Karen Traviss. She specialized in the Mandalorians and lovingly put together their culture over several novels only to get rather screwed over by The Clone Wars series for no good reason, causing her to leave her series unfinished. That could have been handled better and came at a time when the EU and the films were supposed to be better integrated.

I distinctly remember a scene from one of the Heir to the Empire trilogy books where a character, which I think was Pellaeon, discovers the existence of the Spaarti cylinders and that clones were being produced, and they remember the horror of the clone wars and what they had to do to stop them. In fact, I think the scene specifically references the clones going mad, due to the effect of having two beings who are the same person existing at the same time being something of an affront to the Force, hence why the ysalamir were used by Thrawn to produce his soldier clones.

 

It was made pretty clear after the sale to Disney that Lucas did indeed have plans for episodes 7-9, plans which he showed Kathleen Kennedy and some others, so that TFA would not end up being completely different to his original vision. If those plans were indeed meant to be realised some day, why the hell did he allow people to tell stories completely different to what he had planned for his characters? It essentially turned the EU into legalised fan-fiction, and whilst I don't think it was a bad thing (there were some excellent books to come out of it, like Zahn, Allston and Traviss, there were some downright awful offerings too - I'm looking at you, Kevin J. Anderson), if he really did want to continue telling the story of the Skywalkers, he should have only allowed stories that didn't involve his characters at all, or at least addressed periods he didn't plan to do himself. Some of my favourite SW books are those very ones I've just described, like the RC books, the Wraith Squadron series, Shadows of the Empire, etc.

 

On the subject of Traviss, I'm a massive Mandalorian fan, and I love her books, but her later ones left a lot to be desired. They turned very preachy, and read like a thinly disguised treatise on Mandalorian culture with a plot attached, where she rammed it down your throat how awesome and perfect Mandalorian society was, and that bugged me. Especially her Legacy books. The last Legacy book almost made me laugh, as the whole thing about the Fett nanovirus just read like a massive "fuck you" to Traviss. It was sad that she had to leave, and I fully supported her reasons for leaving, but I'm almost glad we didn't get Imperial Commando 2, as I'm not sure I could have stomached much more of the stuff that I really disliked about her later RC books.

 

 

I sometimes feel like I'm one of the few Star Wars fans who has very little respect for Lucas. Yes, he created the universe for us, but his every action shows that he's in it for the money, and he's even explicitly explained it that way too in interviews. Thanks for giving us this universe, George, but for the love of God, stop ****ing around with it so much, quit ****ting on it so you can make more money, jeez.

I don't understand what it is you're upset with? You wanted him to stop after ANH? Cuz to truly say it was about the art, not the money, you'd have to just make ANH and then leave it alone. Or maybe after ESB and ROTJ? There should've been nothing SW related after those 3 films were made? No books, comics, nothing else ever again. Is that what you wish had happened?

 

He should have retained tighter control over what was published under the Star Wars name, so that there wouldn't be any conflict with what he had plans for, as I've said above. ESB is my favourite, no question, and I actually consider ANH to be my least favourite of the OT (though that's very much a relative thing). He did the right thing in terms of allowing books and games etc to be produced under the Star Wars name, but there should have been more control over them - not to stifle the people wanting to write SW, but enough to eliminate the conflicts we've seen.

 

It's all wishful thinking anyway, nothing I or we can do will change it. and as a whole, I like the SW universe as it is, I wouldn't be a fan otherwise. But that doesn't blind me to the fact that it could and should have been handled better by Lucas himself.

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It was made pretty clear after the sale to Disney that Lucas did indeed have plans for episodes 7-9, plans which he showed Kathleen Kennedy and some others, so that TFA would not end up being completely different to his original vision. If those plans were indeed meant to be realised some day, why the hell did he allow people to tell stories completely different to what he had planned for his characters? It essentially turned the EU into legalised fan-fiction

 

Lucas put together Episodes 7-9 shortly before selling the company to Disney in order to raise the price and have his own hand in the continuation of Star Wars. Until pretty recently, Lucas was still swearing that the Prequels would be the end of Star Wars on film.

 

Heir to the Empire came out in 1991, which essentially began the EU as a major component of Star Wars lore. This was literally the halfway point between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace. Lucas was still several years away from even committing to produce the Prequels when Lucasfilm commissioned Zahn's trilogy.

 

All you have he is Lucas essentially changing his mind 20 years later.

 

 

 

I distinctly remember a scene from one of the Heir to the Empire trilogy books where a character, which I think was Pellaeon, discovers the existence of the Spaarti cylinders and that clones were being produced, and they remember the horror of the clone wars and what they had to do to stop them. In fact, I think the scene specifically references the clones going mad, due to the effect of having two beings who are the same person existing at the same time being something of an affront to the Force, hence why the ysalamir were used by Thrawn to produce his soldier clones.

 

Pellaeon only recalls the early clones being unstable. Meaning that the Clone Wars weren't just a bunch of clones gone mad, but something more deliberate and that the clones got more stable as time went on.

 

If I recall (it's been awhile), clone madness was more a matter of how the clone was produced, the sample they were grown from and the amount of time spent growing them because of some Force business or other. Thrawn introduced the ysalamir into the process in order to speed up the production to only a few weeks instead of the more extended amount of time needed to produce a stable clone.

 

I believe it was even incorporated that into the Republic Commando series. The Kamino clones who were slowly grown and trained over a period of several years were not enough to meet the demands of the clone wars and were soon needed to be supplemented with the Spaarti cylinder clones that Thrawn later used.

 

It makes sense and covers for a bit of ridiculous sci-fi math on Lucas's part. The number of clones mentioned in Attack of the Clones was a astonishingly small, only 1.2 million. Which is a number lower than the active military in the United States alone, nevermind an army expected to fight across the galaxy. So Zahn's work ended up being useful patching up a logical hole in the Prequel trilogy.

 

 

 

On the subject of Traviss, I'm a massive Mandalorian fan, and I love her books, but her later ones left a lot to be desired. They turned very preachy, and read like a thinly disguised treatise on Mandalorian culture with a plot attached

 

Aye, she was overly enamored with her own lore towards the end.

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The mad clones things fits remarkably well with the Starkiller clones from The Force Unleashed II. (Yes, I know the game was unnecessary and the story isn't the greatest, but dammit, I thought it was a fun game and a plausible scenario.)

I wouldn't characterize the EU as "legalized fan fiction." True, Lucas had a passing oversight on it, but he did create the Holocron Community to oversee continuity and keep everything mostly coherent. If you want to see an example of "legalized fan fiction," look at the Star Trek books and comics: Paramount had no interest whatsoever in keeping those stories coherent, so what they amount to is one big free-for-all apocrypha where hardly anybody cares what other authors have written, and everyone is pretty much free to do what they want. The Star Wars EU was miles above that, and was probably the most consistent franchise at the time because of that fact. Others have come along only in recent years that have done a better job at keeping everything top-level canon-consistent. Mass Effect comes to mind at the moment.

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It's canon, it's just Legends canon. We like to discuss it because it's our Star Wars and has been for forty years. The theology comparison you make is interesting because the decanonization by Disney has always reminded me of the Great Schism of 1054.

 

I just now realized that this year will be Star Wars' fortieth anniversary. Seems like the thirtieth was just yesterday.

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No, I am a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Star Wars isn't my religion, just my passion.

As a Greek speaker and an Orthodox Christian, I am well versed in canonicity. The Greek word kanona means a list, or an ordered structure. It doesn't have to apply to religion, though it frequently does.

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It's interesting to me that I enjoyed the movie and want to see it again, but at the same time, today was the second time I thought about going to rewatch it and I just haven't felt like it. I don't know entirely why that is. I don't think it is just because it is frigid here today and I don't feel like going outside since I would barely have to be outside. Kids are also back in school, so I would likely have a pretty empty large theater, too.

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