Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (spoilers obviously)

The question now (at least one that have) is what character is actually popular enough to get more content?

Boba Fett and Darth Maul were extremely popular enough that there was demand for more works with them in it. I wonder if there’s any demand for any of the ST characters.

The ST's heavily protagonist centered story and tendency to repeat beats from previous movies meant that - at least imo - there were far less memorable minor characters than you would usually get in this series.

Instead of having smaller scale but still recurring characters do X or Y, generally in the ST the protagonists (or primary antagonists) did everything. Phasma's really the only minor character on both sides with the kind of presence that might merit a return.

Thing too was that the sequel trilogy also made a decision to have the OT characters in prominent roles, which meant they are fighting for screentime and prevented the development of new characters. BB-8 is adorable, but didn't get half the focus or save the day moments that R2 did (they disappeared from the TFA story until Rey comes upon the junker trying to grab him), as such by TROS R2 had returned as the tech guy and BB-8 is almost invisible.

He got a number of such save-the-day moments in TLJ, notably his “coin gun” and hijacking an AT-ST.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on May 30th 2020 at 12:26:09 PM

BB-8’s probably the only ST character that is unambiguously popular.

I'd say the leads are popular too- but they're certainly much more divisive, which is what I assume is what you mean when you refer to ambiguity.

They look good and have good personalities to work with, but man did the plot mistreat them.

I like the ST cast, i don't like what the writers did to them and how their endings were handled.

Those are in comparison to how dedicated R2 was to finding Obi-Wan, shutting down the trash compactors and otherwise fixing any problem that came his way. BB-8 is just doing amusing antics on the side almost irrelevant to solving major problems, more like R2 on Dagobah than R2 on the Death Star.

I'll never stop being amazed by the fact that in Return of the Jedi, Boba Fett is eaten by a hungry predator onscreen while Palpatine falls down a pit, and yet fans will insist to the death that the first death was a completely ambiguous case of Never Found the Body but the second death was an absolutely final, impossible to survive, graphically explicit death from which there's no coming back.

The only thing ambiguous about Boba Fett's death is the fact that he was retconned back to life afterwards, and that's been the status quo for literally decades. Never Found the Body is a retroactive justification for the original retcon. People support Boba Fett being alive because it's been so enshrined in canon for so long that it's normal.

Palpatine's death was no more final than Boba Fett's, and arguably less so. But he wasn't retconned back to life immediately afterwards. His death being final has been the status quo for as long as Boba Fett's survival has. And so his narrative resurrection is rejected out of hand by the same people who will tell you over and over that Return of the Jedi DID NOT, AT ALL, IN ANY WAY OR SHAPE OR FORM, kill off Boba Fett.

Because Palpatine literally blew up. Twice.

And again, the problem with Palpatine's return was less that he cheated death, but how haphazardly it was implemented.

"Somehow, Palpatine has returned", his body looked like a rotting corpse (despite the exploding twice thing) and so forth. Oh yeah, and the fact that he was brought back at the end of a trilogy he had no actual bearings on before that.

As people have mentioned before, Dark Empire at least established how he came back and killed him off permanently as well.

Seriously, this has been discussed so many times in this and the other thread that I have to ask how one could miss this at this point.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on May 30th 2020 at 1:37:19 PM

You'd think being in the core of an exploding moon-sized space station wouldn't have left anything to work on, but here we are. Not to mention all the stuff they had surviving those big explosions.

Yeah, I mean those two aren't even close to being the same thing. Falling down a bottemless pit + 2 giant explosions + atmosphere reentry + crashing down on a planet vs being swallowed.

Edited by Forenperser on May 30th 2020 at 1:42:52 PM

I still think that if they had made Palpatine look like his pre-ROTS appearance, it would have worked better.

But "literal rotting corpse" doesn't really scream "clone body" to me, especially not based on the mechanics surrounding cloning established within the setting.

They were clearly trying emulate Voldermort if you ask me

They should've gone the Return of Cooler route and made Big Siddy just a couple scraps of flesh integrated into a mechanical monstrosity. You think Vader had it bad? Get a load of this guy.

Or go full eldritch.

They actually did. Palpy's face for most of Rise is his pre-Empire face. Then when he juices himself he goes back to his saggy face. It's just really hard to tell amidst the dark room and dramatic lightning.

Boba and Palpatine's deaths are very different in their narrative value. Boba was just some minor villain who was disposed of and promptly forgotten about in the movie. When he's back no one complains that Han or Luke's efforts are trivialized, because that's not what his death was about. Palpatine's death was not only the climax of the movie, it was part of the culmination of Luke's trust in his father and Anakin's path to doing something good again. And in the larger context it meant the Rebels could really win against the Empire.

Bringing back Boba doesn't mean anything because his death didn't mean anything. Bringing back Palpatine matters because his death was everything.

The teddy bear people and the college age rebels were celebrating after Palpatine died, while no one treated Boba Fett's fall like it was something to take note of.

Hell Jabba's death was more emphasized by the narrative because he was the crime boss and Big Bad of act 1 of ROTJ.

They brought back Palpatine partially so they could pretend TROS is the true ending and to give Rey more of Anakin and Luke's accomplishments.

Edited by RedHunter543 on May 30th 2020 at 8:55:03 AM

I'm sorry, but that's just patently not true. For one thing, as Drunken Nordman said, Palpatine blew up, on-screen. Whilst falling into an apparently miles-long pit ending in a nuclear reactor, in a space station that then also blew to smithereens minutes later. Boba Fett fell a few meters into a large outdoors pit while wearing a jetpack. Palpatine's return is more ridiculous by far than Boba Fett's. He's several more layers of super-dead by the end of ROTJ.

Besides which, if you think that the fandom is more accepting of Boba Fett's survival because it's been established for so long in EU lore, then shouldn't the fandom also be accepting of Palpatine's return, who was also revealed to have survived in the old EU? Hell, I think he and Fett were even both brought back in the same story.

That's without going into the dramatic or narrative implications of their respective survivals. Boba Fett was a minor antagonist who got seemingly killed in a pretty haphazard way. Him being still alive is just not that big a deal to the story. Palpatine, by contrast, was killed in a highly climactic way that, in and of itself, was depicted as facilitating the rebels' victory and the OT's happy ending. Bringing him back is not only doubling down hard on the ST's Happy Ending Override, it also raises the massive in-universe Plot Hole of why the Empire even fell at all — if Palpatine had a way to cheat death, why didn't he just return to his throne immediately after the battle of Endor? Why did the Rebel Alliance have even this fleeting victory before the rise of the First Order?

I'm not even really going to stick up for bringing back Boba Fett, a character that I have no particular fondness for. His survival is kinda dumb, but it's basically harmless to the story. Palpatine's return actively diminishes pretty much all of the Star Wars film franchise.

Edited by DrDougsh on May 31st 2020 at 10:08:44 AM

Regardless if one thinks Palpatine won or not in TROS, this movie made the entire saga all about Palpatine's plans and manipulations, he's the one making all the plot.

When Maul turns to Sidious in Episode I and says, "At last we will have revenge," he speaks the new great central truth of Star Wars.

All the war fleets, all the schemes, all the animated filibustering, all the comic books and video games and Rebellions and Empires and Republics — but the single thing that really worked, the thing that spanned all nine films and swung the destiny of the galaxy, is that the Sith got revenge on the Jedi.

When Maul says that line, the Jedi are in the halls of power, safe and secure. Every hand would be against the Sith if anyone knew who they really were. They were terrorists, fugitives.

Nine films later, the Jedi have a choice. They can stop existing. Or they can continue to exist only through Palpatine's heir. The story that really gets told here is that the Sith completed their takedown of the Jedi order with 100% success.

Edited by RedHunter543 on May 31st 2020 at 10:38:32 AM

It also feels like a lack of faith in their own creations if they had to bring him back as a final villain.

Snoke was a cheap Palpatine clone both as a character and literally and despite JJ's statements that Kylo Ren and Snoke aren't Sith, they pretty much are Sith.

Edited by RedHunter543 on May 31st 2020 at 10:40:44 AM

I do want to say that even though I think Snoke was a lame character concept and I was fully on board with killing him off... I actually did kind of like Snoke as a villain in The Last Jedi. Andy Serkiss did a good job playing him, the visuals used to emphasise his messed-up face looked good, the additon of the golden robe made him look believably tacky and flamboyant in the vein of many a real-life dictator, and him facilitating the Force link between Ren and Rey made him seem like a pretty clever Manipulative Bastard of an antagonist.

I guess what I'm saying is that although the base concept of Snoke is lame, he was at least fun to watch in The Last Jedi. More fun than Palpatine in Rise of Skywalker, I'd argue. All discussion of Snoke in that movie is pretty much dominated by the notion of him being casually tossed aside as a character — and whether this was a good thing or not — but I think the movie kind of did give the character his dues by portraying him as an entertaining and intelligent antagonist for two-thirds of its runtime. The fact that he gets betrayed and killed by his apprentice doesn't invalidate that.

Which makes me hate the "Snoke as a literal Palpatine clone" thing even more. It's like, Snoke can't just be a dangerous Dark Side user who, in the grand tradition of Dark Side users, got killed and usurped by his apprentice. No, the fact that he got killed by his apprentice must mean that he was a complete tool the whole time.

Edited by DrDougsh on May 31st 2020 at 11:47:16 AM