The General Star Wars Thread

I can certainly see "Heroes on both sides" as a Cryptic Background Reference meant just to convey the scope and scale of the war. It's not necessarily to say the movie was going to engage with the subtleties of the Separatist motivations. Star Wars has often tries to rely on broad good vs evil factions while allowing moral complexity on the interpersonal level.

Then he wouldn't have put the "heroes on both sides" thing in the crawl.

It very much sounds like one of these things he did want to put into the movies, but couldn't fit in there.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Jun 1st 2023 at 7:37:56 PM

Honestly it feels wonky to have slavers in a setting where droids are so cheap/have basically no rights.

Droids need maintenance.

By the force, this thread moves fast.

Plus organic slaves provide entertainment.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Jun 2nd 2023 at 1:47:38 AM

I mean, organics need way more maintenance.

And droids can scream in fear and pain too. They just lack faces.

I think you kinda underestimate how little chattel slavery values its victims.

Droids are generally treated as their own social class, not quite to the level of Futurama but certainly evocative of a labor class of citizens.

In a general sense, though, it seems that logically not all droids are created equal. Anything mass produced on a large scale tend to be very simplistic and not especially versatile, probably restricted to assembly line stuff and not on-site fabrications. It's been said many times that people are aware of the dangers of Droid autonomy, so designs like battle droids deliberately have restricted intelligence and memory wipes are common to stem off personality growth. Though Astromechs are god tier, with R2-D2 particularly exceptional even for his model.

Concerning the use of slaves. I guess the "justification" would be that dominating organics does have appeal that droids lack. Also sex slaves.

I imagine droids are more expensive than slaves in that setting.

A single throwawy line in the crawl probably wasn't more important to what Lucas' meant to put in his characterization than the actual characterization he wrote in that film, I don't think.

(Plus the bit you were responding to itself was an observation that there are more definitions to the term "hero" than just "good guy.")

The fact that he only started introducing the idea of a more nuanced side to the Confederacy years later, while staunchly keeping them two dimensionally evil in his original stuff, makes it pretty likely that he just thought of the idea afterwards and liked it enough to introduce it - that is, if it was his idea: it's also worth keeping in mind that Lucas rarely wrote for Clone Wars, he mostly just threw ideas at the writers while the writers developed what we got, but a lot of what we got there was a group effort.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jun 2nd 2023 at 12:34:31 PM

[1]

The ST EU's issue is they went off half cocked so the built this whole Cold War style conflict with the NR falling apart and wanting a return to the Imperial days 'you can tell Wendig did not take 2016 well'

its only after Awakens that The STEU tries to correct granted you have the guys who double down on the original narrative while stuff like Resistance tries to Validate why the NR wouldn't know the FO is as big as it is 'IE the FO rarely uses it own troops for anything using Mercs and Pirate groups like a modern age Carthage...

Like Aftermath makes it clear No one buys the Imperial's GRAND and Ultimate defeat at Jakku and know a Mass amount of them fled into the Unknown Regions.

so Yeah the NR thinking the Big threat is Thrawn and his forces would merit a sigh with the Last Grand Admiral defeated and the biggest Imperial force defeated most likely Thrawn will get rid of the other Warlords due to making sure all forces are under his control.

would warrant a what else is there...

It leaves the Question of Snoke and how he hijacked the FO from Sloane but The NR thinking the FO is just Leia trying to make a boogeyman would make more logical sense

Regarding the Confederacy, I always wanted to see an ex-Separatist character for whom the Confederacy was one massive Broken Pedestal. They started off fully believing in the cause, but after seeing all the atrocities and crimes committed by the Separatists over the course of the war, they came to the conclusion that the Confederacy's ideals were a total sham and it was actually worse than the Republic. Then the Confederacy lost and the Republic became the Empire, making the whole war All for Nothing.

Edited by Trooper924 on Jun 2nd 2023 at 4:26:42 AM

They'd be the best customer at the local cantina.. limped into a bottle and never crawled out

A rather dark way of pointing it out is the Empire would have a reason for slavery simply because of the nature of the machine. They are going to have millions of prisoners and oppressed aliens anyway, so why not put them to use?

The domination of the system is just making use of resources you'd otherwise just kill.

IIRC this is actually canon. Some species like Wookiees were treated especially harshly just because they're known to be both strong-willed individually and influential in galactic affairs, so the Empire wanted them broken ASAP.

Yeah, old Legends even gave a policy to the Empire to make it both human-supremacist and chauvinistic: The Non Hu Man policy. Aliens were only fit to serve the Empire in labor, were poorly treated and had reduced rights, along with not being allowed to join the Imperial military.

Then again we're sort of already seeing that with what the Empire did to that one species in Andor.

Edited by theLibrarian on Jun 2nd 2023 at 10:50:53 AM

I do wish we had more stories that were about alien races and how things like the Empire affected them in canon.

With guys like the Wookies, it's usually "the human hero swoops into a situation involving Wookies, and learns a bit about how Wookies are oppressed," but we don't have a lot of Wookie main characters. Wookies specifically might not be the best example of a potential protag, admittedly, because of the language barrier, but I'd still like more stories about or following alien characters.

Like those episodes of Bad Batch starring Cham and Hera Syndulla, where the Batch were largely supporting characters. More like that, y'know?

Edited by KnownUnknown on Jun 2nd 2023 at 10:38:41 AM

True, it is weird how most protagonists are human in there era where “aliens” are generaly opressed (granted Star Wars as a whole has that feature).

For Wookie hero they could have their speech translated for us, like how ewoks cartoon did for titular species.

Edited by EmperorGeode on Jun 2nd 2023 at 10:44:41 AM

In legends, there was a Wookie Jedi (Chewbacca's nephew) who was always accompanied by a droid to translate his speech.

do we know how SW humans came to be in the current EU?

While not confrimed it is generaly accepted In-Universe that their homeworld was Coruscant and that they are simply one of earliest surviving space farring species.

I assume its a special effects budget thing

Like how Andor despite focusing on rebellion and the Empire's oppression, it featured no aliens due to being entirely human focused

Edited by slimcoder on Jun 2nd 2023 at 11:58:04 AM

Yeah and Star Wars rarely has Human Aliens.

Isn't the Empire "pro"-human mostly cause of those budget issues too? I imagine stuff like this is easier to deal with in animation at least. Though even there they probably only get like 2-3 episodes tops.