I thought Luke was about not being an asshole? I haven’t seen this SW, but it seems unlikely to be improved by mining the roots of neo-Nazi bigotry 
.
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We all know women can’t drive, therefore, this idea that ladiez can drive the ships is ABSURD! amirite?
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The first movie was relatively free of that kind of thing. Luke was not originally supposed to be anybody special, and Leia was, at the time, an inversion of everybody’s expectations for a damsel in distress.
“I am your father” was good for shock value but it wasn’t part of the original plan.
Making everybody related to everybody else was a terrible idea. I don’t really understand why people are still interested in Star Wars now. It’s just the same shit over and over again.
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Sigh. Some Star Wars fans.
The very first lines of the very first title crawl establish the story is happening long, long ago in a galaxy far far away.
So not just Chewie and Greedo, but Leia and Han and all the rest – they’re aliens. They’re not humans at all.
Which means including more diversity in the human actors who don’t happen to be wearing prosthetics changes not one damn thing story-wise. But it does mean the production has a higher chance of hiring quality talent for all the speaking parts by widening the pool of possible casting choices, and makes it easier to sell worldwide because it’ll appeal to a greater number of people.
(And that’s not even getting to the effing obvious social justice parts.)
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Well, women can tolerate higher g, or at least in Heinlein’s imagination, so they have great careers in space opera so long as they know they’ll be showering nekkid with the jarheads for the greater glory of bug-splatting.
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I’ve never been convinced of that. That’s Luke’s father’s light sabre Obi Wan gives him – he is most definitely not the son of a nobody.
And my Dutch mum spoilered what “Vader” means in Dutch on the way home from seeing the first film. Our family had been debating who Vader was the father of for three years when Empire came out. Luke wasn’t the only one we were considering, but it was in the betting pool so to speak.
I know, Lucas claims otherwise – but I don’t believe him.
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This is why I prefer the “daughter of nobody” interpretation of Rey. I hope the new movies don’t trash it.
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Luke was the son of a samurai, but not any particular samurai. Just another guy who fought Vader and lost.
Obi-Wan was the special one. The others were all connected together by their proximity to him.
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Still an elite. Not exactly moisture farming.
ETA: And, as we find out later, the only good reason for Obi Wan to be on that specific planet was Luke.
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Amen.
I’ve never had such an odd feeling about a film sequel as for Episode IX: This Would Have Been About Leia. So many things set right in Episode 8, so much potential for JJ Abrams to screw it up in predictable ways, ways that we can see coming years ahead of the fact.
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I stopped with Episode 1. That universe just no longer interested me.
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The Royal Navy believed this right up until it didn’t any more, some years ago. Now they win Stonewall awards for LGBT inclusiveness. Things can change but people have to want them to.
Ah, but [pilpul hat on] you don’t know where the narrator is supposed to be. It might be someone in the distant future and a far away galaxy talking about an era a few thousand years after our own time, which would explain why (a) they look so human and (b) seem to have inherited the most idiotic of our political systems. It’s all relative.[remove pilpul hat].*
*It never ceases to fascinate me how so many Western science fiction writers basically write about feudal or imperial societies, even (in a Pournelle book whose title I forget) saying this is because imperialism is the system that works. Asimov was an honourable exception. Didn’t some colonials fight a war to get away from imperial rule?
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That gets back to the theory one of my high school history teachers told us about, that revolutions wind up petrifying the very institutions they’re supposed to be revolting against. Certainly I found it easier as a Canadian teenager to really understand how the American government works (not how it’s supposed to work, how it does work) once I learned more about 18th century British royalty.
ETA: that helps explain the incredible resistance to a woman president, too. Yeah, Canada only had Kim Campbell, but we’ve had enough women provincial premiers I don’t think that many people are truly opposed to the idea.
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I have … issues with Torch of Freedom, but Eric Flint challenges a lot of the neofeudal tropes in his works. And of course Ken Macleod does too.
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You just hit a big fucking nail on the head; they’re not human and neither is Superman… yet they damn sure still resemble White Americans who are mostly male in every way that counts.
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The only good thing about the “hello they’re aliens” thing is that it might possibly explain why there are so so few women, even in the newer films. Maybe we have seen many women from that galaxy, but to us they present as men.
ETA: not that that would make the right-wing fanboys happier at all.
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I’m totally shipping Luke and Biggs now.
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Flint is a great world-builder, terrible at romance. (1632 is a great example) Fortunately his partner in crime - Mercedes Lackey - is fantastic all around. She’s really underrated as a science fantasy author.
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This stupid whining about how the new XYZ movie is all of a sudden left wing SJW politics is indeed a slap in the face to anyone who grew up
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It is, but on the other hand I’ve noticed that Storm Trooper and Darth Vader costumes are way more popular than they used to be. Used to be everyone wanted to dress up as Leia, Luke, Obi Wan, or Han – all of whom are way more comfortable and way less hassle to cosplay as.
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