Star Wars Star Wars Discussion Thread - LET THE PAST D-! Oh, wait, nevermind

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Skallagrim said:
He's from a rich family, so his worst acts got brushed right under the carpet to begin with.
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We hear that Sheev was expelled from several elite private schools outside Naboo for misbehaviour.
Skallagrim said:
And then he became the protegé of Magister Hego Damask (a.k.a. Darth Plagueis), who not only taught him to avoid foolish short-term gratification in favour of greater triumphs later, but also provided him with social patronage that discouraged potential adversaries from picking a hopeless fight.

As far as the public at large knew, the worst things about Palpatine were basically that he'd acted like a rich frat bro when he was a kid. Such things get forgiven as "just boys being boys" and "look, after all, what he's made of himself. That young man is going places." And then his parents and siblings died in that tragic accident (as far as the public knew), and the fucker could actually get sympathy points out of having murdered his own family out of pure spite.

Look around at the world. When you look at people like Epstein, and more particularly his "guests"; at people like Schwab and Soros; at figures like Harvey Weinstein (or, across the pond, Jimmy Saville) and countless other predators who got away with it for ages....
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But were Epstein, Weinstein or Savile in trouble before? In repeated trouble?
Sheev was expelled from elite private school while other rich frat bros were not. Several times.
Skallagrim said:
The world is full of powerful people who -- at least for a long time, and at least for the broad public -- manage to put on a mask of decency or even benevolence; of success and wealth and perhaps charisma. But underneath, there is a rotten perversion; a thirst for sick power over others; and capacity for limitless cruelty and abuse; and a total lack of empathy for other people.

Palpatine is that, taken to its logical extreme.
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The world is full of powerful people who correctly identify social norms and identify safe (if not formally legal) targets to bully, abuse, discriminate and rape. And have complied with the social norms and got away with it for decades. Some of them were caught by ex post facto changes of social norms.
Sheev as a teen stood out for his INability to comply with social norms that applied to rich frat boys of his class - as evidenced by his getting expelled from several elite private schools, while most of his schoolmates were not expelled.
After 17, Sheev benefited from training by Magister Hego Damask, yes.
But as he pursued his political career in and out of Naboo, he would have met the boys who had been with him in the elite schools, who knew him, who had NOT been expelled and who knew him for his expulsion and for the troubles he had been expelled for. THEY could look down on him and distrust him - he had been expelled, they had not.
How did he persuade them that he was good now, and that they should trust and support him now as their better?
 
Skallagrim said:
The world is full of powerful people who -- at least for a long time, and at least for the broad public -- manage to put on a mask of decency or even benevolence; of success and wealth and perhaps charisma. But underneath, there is a rotten perversion; a thirst for sick power over others; and capacity for limitless cruelty and abuse; and a total lack of empathy for other people.

Palpatine is that, taken to its logical extreme.
Click to expand...
“Full” is not quite the right word. Even among those circles the unironic Caligulas of the world are quite rare. Thankfully very few thrive on human suffering quite like that.

Palpatine is, to my mind, the codifier of what I like to call the "Caligula" tyrant archetype (at least, in terms of fiction, not so much history). Probably one of the most popular tyrant archetypes in fiction, the Caligula rules for his own gratification and thrives off the suffering of others. Compare and contrast to the rarer "John Lackland" and "Louis XIV" archetypes: a sliding scale of competence and pettiness for tyrants whose neural chemistry is in somewhat working order.
 
chornedsnorkack said:
How did Sheev establish himself as gone straight, between ages 17 and 52, for the people who knew him before 17?
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1) he was a minor, those records tend to get sealed

2) it’s unlikely that his school peers, pre-Plagius, knew exactly why he got expelled. Rumors? Absolutely. The full truth? Unlikely

3) finally, his family was “slaughtered by palpa- ahem, pirates” when he was 17. Anyone after that who still had suspicions could most likely be convinced by a lack of visible evil, a story of the trauma forcing him to grow up, and the idea that the rumors of his expulsion getting reinforced by, again, his seemingly genuine turn to the good side
 
Watching this inspiring speech from Episode Two of Andor reminds me of when I have to have an NPC make an inspiring speech in a Dungeons and Dragons session and I haven't prepared anything to say ahead of time.



Same reaction too.

Inspiring...
 
Buba said:
Are the fatsos among the ... soldioers? some weird DEI?
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Corporate Police. So some sort of low level security force. They weren't particularly well motivated or regarded. Noticed on rewatch they had one Blaster Rifle per fire team and it was a high demand weapon when the action unexpectedly started.
 
Remember, tomorrow is an important holiday. I expect happy, cheerful memories and loreful observances, not perpetual whining and bitching about Rodent Wars. Proper manners and best(ish) behavior! May the Fourth Be With You.
 
They gave Trump a red lightsaber... 😭



In Other News the Iron Lady keeps on blessing us long after she passed...

GqGAupQXcAAeG6p




GqHiGEqaMAAhpu0


GqH_9rKXcAAsA7F
 
Bacle's post reminds me....

To further celebrate both Star Wars and more importantly myself...

Husky_Khan said:
In honor of the release of the new Star Wars movie Final Trailer (in which we see at least one of these spacecraft)... let us celebrate the debut of the much beloved Resistance Bomber...

starwars.fandom.com

MG-100 StarFortress SF-17

The MG-100 StarFortress SF-17, also known as the B/SF-17 heavy bomber, was a model of heavy bomber manufactured by Slayn & Korpil for use by the New Republic during the late stages of the Galactic Civil War. Following the Galactic Concordance and New Republic disarmament, the ship was primarily...
starwars.fandom.com starwars.fandom.com

The MG-100 Star Fortress was apparently designed by a company known as Slayn & Korpil which made the second best bomber in the Star Wars canon, B-Wing. It is also known as the B/SF-17 Heavy Bomber... get it?

Now in a direct comparison to the B-Wing we can see how much better the Star Fortress actually is.

Payload:
The B-Wing can only deploy an anemic 12 proton torpedos
The MG-100 can deploy over ONE THOUSAND proton bombs

That's all you really need to know... With over a hundred times the destructive firepower of the much vaunted B-Wing, it is no surprise that the Resistance adopted an entire fleet of Heavy Bombers instead of B-Wings... or Y-Wings... or those Legendsdary K-Wings.

There are only some minor drawbacks to the MG-100 Star Fortress. Unlike the B-Wing which only requires a single pilot, the MG-100 requires a minimum of three crewmembers plus an extra two if you want to man the defensive laser cannons. Oh yeah... that's right... the B-Wing has almost the same armament level as the MG-100 but with the ability to be equipped simultaneously with a variety of ion cannons, laser cannons, blaster cannons and proton torpedo launchers the B-Wing is infinitely more versatile.

Also the B-Wing possesses a long range phased tachyon array complimented by a short range targeting grid, a targeting computer, holographic imaging, and a flight control and avionics system originally designed for small capital ships thus allowing it to engage enemy starships at range.

However the B-Wing does have some notable weaknesses. It is a very poor dogfighter and despite possessing a strong hull compared to Y-Wing's and a shield comparable if not superior to X-Wings, often requires an escort on its attack runs. It was also very expensive to manufacture.

Thankfully the MG-100 covered all of those weaknesses. By eschewing most of the avionics and targeting systems, the MG-100 merely has to fly over a target and using a simple bomb sights, dead drop a thousand proton bombs upon its target on a flyover, simplifying the process and no doubt reducing cost and flight crew training.

Also while the B-Wing has a powerful four thruster engine designed for a light freighter, the Star Fortress added two more thrusters which unfortunately only allow it a much slower acceleration and combat speed and very limited maneuverability. Also its shields and hull design leave it extremely vulnerable to enemy turrets and starfighters as an errant burst of laser cannons can detonate the proton payload.

However this can all be mitigated by simply flying in a box formation... or as seen in The Last Jedi a loose staggered line formation and escorted by a random swarm of X-Wing starfighters and far faster A-Wing interceptors. In this "box" formation the laser cannons combined with the escort fighters will protect the bombers during their slow linear bombing run which will take them directly over a vulnerable sweet spot on the enemy target.

GGWP enemies of the #resistance
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Just repost my indepth analysis of why the sequel trilogy MG-100 Star Fortress is vastly superior to the B-Wing of classic Star Wars.

Most absurd weapons in scifi

In honor of the release of the new Star Wars movie Final Trailer (in which we see at least one of these spacecraft)... let us celebrate the debut of the much beloved Resistance Bomber... https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/MG-100_StarFortress_SF-17 The MG-100 Star Fortress was apparently designed...
www.the-sietch.com
 
I thought that the Jedi Order storyline in the Prequel Trilogy was a pretty entertaining depiction of basic failures in people skills and planning.



What the Jedi Order did wrong: apathy, unrealistic expectations, and neglect. Failure to plan.

1. The Jedi Order’s preferred method of recruitment is to take extremely young children and to raise them in the Order’s controlled environment, with a silver spoon in their mouth and isolated from the world. This makes it easy for them to mold people into the same template. The Order recruited a boy/young man who had already seen the disappointments of life and formulated his own opinions. The Order should have known from the get go that their usual script would not work and that Anakin would require special attention. The Order seems to have just left Anakin in Obi-Wan’s care and did not monitor the situation.

This neglect and apathy continues for over a decade. Time and again, the Order is frustrated that Anakin is not becoming like them. No one seems to stop and think why that is, what is going wrong and what they could be doing differently.


2. Personal apathy. Even if the Order could not get Anakin to regurgitate their ideological mantras and toe the party line, as a group of people/knightley brotherhood they did not welcome their brother and engender his personal loyalty. You can have different political/religious opinions but still be friends with someone. Qui-gon retained his individuality but was still liked. It seems - aside from Obi-Wan - no one wants anything to do with Anakin as a person. No one waves him over to a table to eat, invites him over to hang out, wants to go on missions with him, or just wants to take a walk and talk to him. Palpatine lending a smile and kind ear to Anakin did not require any special skill or planning. Anyone was capable of that, and yet the Jedi failed this basic task for over a decade. Note that they hadn’t been awful to Anakin, and he was still open to them right until Mace Windu was about to kill Palpatine. At that point Anakin has to make a spur of the moment valuation in which he weighs Palpatine’s years of friendship higher than the Jedi’s years of coldness towards him (including a few other factors such as Palpatine’s offer of power).


Extra:

As an addendum to the Jedi Order’s personal apathy, the Council publicly humiliates and insults Anakin when they told him he gets a seat on the Council, but that it doesn’t really count and that it was not because of merit but because they are using him to get at some other guy, and that Anakin will have the ignominy of being the first man in the Council who is not a master. Mace Windu also tells him to shut up. I can’t imagine them doing this to any other Jedi. This could have been tactfully delivered in a private conversation. Yoda and Mace Windu also appear to just have Obi-wan deliver their orders rather than talk to him themselves.

Mace Windu panics and fears he can’t detain Palpatine alone, and decides to do “the logical thing” and follow the path of least resistance and kill him, the inversion of Luke’s choice in Palpatine’s future seat of power where he decided to put his life on the line and die doing “the right thing”. Had Mace risked his life continuing to arrest Palpatine and do things “the right way”, Anakin may have been inspired by Mace’s courage and followed him, just like how he followed Luke years later.

Also, not a social skills thing but a poor risk assessment: in movie 2# the Jedi discover that one of their own had seemingly ordered a huge secret army specifically for the Jedi to command, but no one can get a hold of master Syfo Dyas and ask him to explain. The movies gloss over the Jedi Order just accepting this, but this is insane. The secret army could have been handed over to general Republic military officers. Why the Jedi specifically? No one asks what the exit plan is. When the war ends, will the Jedi hand off the army to Republic officers (if so, then why not have the Republic military in charge from the getgo?), or continue commanding them? So Syfo Dyas has made the Jedi military officers forever? Ofcourse, hindsight is 20/20 here that this was really a distribution and tracking system to kill them all in a highly coordinated operation.



What Anakin did wrong:

Unrealistic expectations. Anakin’s first introduction to the Jedi is through Qui-gon Jinn, who doesn’t toe the party line and exists on the periphery of the organization. Respected and has access to the Order’s resources, but not a star or a Council member. Anakin should have kept this in mind. A decade passes, and Anakin wants to both be a political outsider who doesn’t regurgitate the mantras and have a secret wife on the side, but also be a central star and a Council member. If Anakin wanted to remain independent as he was, then he should have accepted that he wouldn’t attain a central star status and to content himself as a respected Jedi. Or he should have considered leaving the Order to become an agent or officer for a local planet’s government (ie, Naboo). There, he could have a star role and be married.

Failure to ask Palpatine for confirmation/evidence of his claim to be able to save his wife. While Palpatine’s personal friendship is a huge motivator in Anakin’s willingness to protect him, Anakin takes a huge risk trying to save a man who might not be able to do the extraordinary thing he claims.



What Obi-Wan did wrong

He knew that Anakin was independent and thirsted for glory, but did not care about him enough to warn him that he can’t be both a high profile star in the Order and independently minded.



Am I missing anything?
 
Skallagrim said:
An interesting consideration. We might note that in the real world, those of us who believe in the soul do generally recognise that the biochemistry of the brain determines certain things; it doesn't remove free will as it were, but it does stack the deck. In a sense, that makes Palpatine a tragic figure. Theoretically, even he could deliberately choose to do no evil things. But he has zero inclination to opt for that path; his brain's wiring sees to that. And because spiritually, SW runs on the Aristotelian thesis that "we are what we repeatedly do", his spirit/soul becomes more fixed in its evil ways because he constantly does evil shit.

A psychopath is very much a case of "born wrong". You can argue endlessly about culpability when it comes to what is basically an innate mental illness-- but the fact remains that such a creature is dangerous to others.

I suppose that if you got to infant Palpatine, and performed some miracle treatment to cure his psychopathy from the start, his essence as a person would have an opportunity to naturally develop in a more "normal" direction, and then he'd be realistically able to become a good person.

But essence tranfer, it seems, offers such no opportunity. That's an advanced technique that no infant could achieve. So only adult Palpatine, whose essence is fully developed in his original body, could do that. And his immaterial essence, by that point, has fully developed... into evil. And it's well-established that when a Sith spirit possesses another body, this spirit is wholly unaffected by the biochemistry of that body. It's an inherently unnatural thing, after all. Mind and body don't become one: the spirit puppeteers the body it has hijacked. This would suggest that if Palpatine's immaterial spirit were to possess another's body, he'd be just as evil as he ever was. The stolen body would be nothing but a disposable tool to the depraved wraith.
Click to expand...

Honestly this does kind of go into an alternate what if I had for Rey going on in my head. What if Rey wasin't related to Palpatine...what if she WAS palpatine. Like what if as Palpatine died on the second Death Star he did a last impromptu eseesnce transfer but because the ritual doesin't work like that rather than end up in the body of one of his clones, his soul is scattered and ends up in the body of a stillborn infant girl who "In some mircle" is restored to life, but because the ritual was botched he's got no memory of his past self.

Now it makes sense as to how she's so powerful despite only learning about the force Yesterday. Palpatine DOES have years and years of knowlege of the force. but it's buried behind muscle memory. It also kind of adds weight to her story. Imagine if a Jew started getting nightmares about giving lectures and speeches, sending his friends and neighbors to thier deaths, attempting to wipe out all traces of judaism. He finds out he was hitler and a past life and he was persented with a choice. Embrace his past idenity and "Bring germany back to glory" at the cost of betraying everything in his current life. or Deny his past selfs evil and embrace who he is in the present and live that life.


I mean what was the central them of The Last Jedi? "Let the past die. Kill it if you have to." Things would be even better on this front if Snoke was Plagues.
 
Val the Moofia Boss said:
I thought that the Jedi Order storyline in the Prequel Trilogy was a pretty entertaining depiction of basic failures in people skills and planning.

What the Jedi Order did wrong: apathy, unrealistic expectations, and neglect. Failure to plan.

1. The Jedi Order’s preferred method of recruitment is to take extremely young children and to raise them in the Order’s controlled environment, with a silver spoon in their mouth and isolated from the world. This makes it easy for them to mold people into the same template. The Order recruited a boy/young man who had already seen the disappointments of life and formulated his own opinions. The Order should have known from the get go that their usual script would not work and that Anakin would require special attention. The Order seems to have just left Anakin in Obi-Wan’s care and did not monitor the situation.

This neglect and apathy continues for over a decade. Time and again, the Order is frustrated that Anakin is not becoming like them. No one seems to stop and think why that is, what is going wrong and what they could be doing differently.

2. Personal apathy. Even if the Order could not get Anakin to regurgitate their ideological mantras and toe the party line, as a group of people/knightley brotherhood they did not welcome their brother and engender his personal loyalty. You can have different political/religious opinions but still be friends with someone. Qui-gon retained his individuality but was still liked. It seems - aside from Obi-Wan - no one wants anything to do with Anakin as a person. No one waves him over to a table to eat, invites him over to hang out, wants to go on missions with him, or just wants to take a walk and talk to him. Palpatine lending a smile and kind ear to Anakin did not require any special skill or planning. Anyone was capable of that, and yet the Jedi failed this basic task for over a decade. Note that they hadn’t been awful to Anakin, and he was still open to them right until Mace Windu was about to kill Palpatine. At that point Anakin has to make a spur of the moment valuation in which he weighs Palpatine’s years of friendship higher than the Jedi’s years of coldness towards him (including a few other factors such as Palpatine’s offer of power).

Extra:

As an addendum to the Jedi Order’s personal apathy, the Council publicly humiliates and insults Anakin when they told him he gets a seat on the Council, but that it doesn’t really count and that it was not because of merit but because they are using him to get at some other guy, and that Anakin will have the ignominy of being the first man in the Council who is not a master. Mace Windu also tells him to shut up. I can’t imagine them doing this to any other Jedi. This could have been tactfully delivered in a private conversation. Yoda and Mace Windu also appear to just have Obi-wan deliver their orders rather than talk to him themselves.

Mace Windu panics and fears he can’t detain Palpatine alone, and decides to do “the logical thing” and follow the path of least resistance and kill him, the inversion of Luke’s choice in Palpatine’s future seat of power where he decided to put his life on the line and die doing “the right thing”. Had Mace risked his life continuing to arrest Palpatine and do things “the right way”, Anakin may have been inspired by Mace’s courage and followed him, just like how he followed Luke years later.

Also, not a social skills thing but a poor risk assessment: in movie 2# the Jedi discover that one of their own had seemingly ordered a huge secret army specifically for the Jedi to command, but no one can get a hold of master Syfo Dyas and ask him to explain. The movies gloss over the Jedi Order just accepting this, but this is insane. The secret army could have been handed over to general Republic military officers. Why the Jedi specifically? No one asks what the exit plan is. When the war ends, will the Jedi hand off the army to Republic officers (if so, then why not have the Republic military in charge from the getgo?), or continue commanding them? So Syfo Dyas has made the Jedi military officers forever? Ofcourse, hindsight is 20/20 here that this was really a distribution and tracking system to kill them all in a highly coordinated operation.

What Anakin did wrong:

Unrealistic expectations. Anakin’s first introduction to the Jedi is through Qui-gon Jinn, who doesn’t toe the party line and exists on the periphery of the organization. Respected and has access to the Order’s resources, but not a star or a Council member. Anakin should have kept this in mind. A decade passes, and Anakin wants to both be a political outsider who doesn’t regurgitate the mantras and have a secret wife on the side, but also be a central star and a Council member. If Anakin wanted to remain independent as he was, then he should have accepted that he wouldn’t attain a central star status and to content himself as a respected Jedi. Or he should have considered leaving the Order to become an agent or officer for a local planet’s government (ie, Naboo). There, he could have a star role and be married.

Failure to ask Palpatine for confirmation/evidence of his claim to be able to save his wife. While Palpatine’s personal friendship is a huge motivator in Anakin’s willingness to protect him, Anakin takes a huge risk trying to save a man who might not be able to do the extraordinary thing he claims.

What Obi-Wan did wrong

He knew that Anakin was independent and thirsted for glory, but did not care about him enough to warn him that he can’t be both a high profile star in the Order and independently minded.

Am I missing anything?
Click to expand...

I never watched much of The Clone Wars but I'm assuming Anakin did form professional relationships with other Jedi and likely ones of varying points of view, just perhaps not those of the Master/Council level which is likely what helped fuel his grievances when it came to what he felt were his deserved recognition to be a Master or on the Council.
 
If you add in some stuff from the EU, the Coruscant Jedi had a minor schism at least once per generation, splintering off heterodox Jedi sects such as the Iron Knights, Teepo paladins, etc. Rather than seeing these constant schisms as a sign of something being wrong the the Jedi doctrine, the longer lived Jedi masters simply allowed any reformists to be lost to splinter sects. At least one factor in this is that these Schisms were rarely ever lead by a Jedi master, mostly knights. The Jedi council was able to excuse the matter as junior members of the order overreaching.


As for Anakin, I think a major factor was his sometimes willful ignorance making him see the Jedi as far more monolithic than they are. If he were more aware of the internal politics and controversy in the Jedi order, he would be far less worried about the opinions and Judgement of the Jedi Council- one of the major contributing factors in his downfall.
 
There's also Yoda.

900 years old. That guy watched entire generations of Jedi, from youngling to grave.

No shit, he wanted limits to attachment. To watch all those you care about, work with and lead, knowing you are going to watch every one of them die, while you continue on?

That's got to suck. And, the closer you get to any of them, the more you suffer.


I don't even blame him. He's been an old man for a hundred years, at the end.
 
Simonbob said:
There's also Yoda.

900 years old. That guy watched entire generations of Jedi, from youngling to grave.

No shit, he wanted limits to attachment. To watch all those you care about, work with and lead, knowing you are going to watch every one of them die, while you continue on?

That's got to suck. And, the closer you get to any of them, the more you suffer.


I don't even blame him. He's been an old man for a hundred years, at the end.
Click to expand...
The hidden curse of long life/immortality.
 
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