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Post #1439890

Author
TestingOutTheTest
Parent topic
I abhor the "X undoes Y's accomplishments" criticism so much.
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1439890/action/topic#1439890
Date created
15-Jul-2021, 10:16 AM

Servii said:

HAN: There was too much Vader in him.
LEIA: That’s why I had him train with Luke.

The problem with this dialogue is that it implies that there was some inherent darkness in Ben from the beginning, while also implying that that same darkness was inherent in Anakin. It never was inherent. Anakin was an innocent who was corrupted, first by the trauma of his early life, then by Palpatine. It’s implied that Ben was maybe being telepathically corrupted by Snoke or Palpatine, but again, the movies are frustratingly vague about that, and that’s not what Han is saying here, anyway.

That’s the point. They didn’t understand Anakin/Vader. It’s only during TFA do they realize it was SNOKE.

And they overcame their mistakes. Luke even apologizes to Ben on Crait.

Luke then spends the rest of the scene taunting and trolling him. “Every word of what you just was wrong.” and “See ya around, kid,” while messing with Kylo’s head. Luke was going out of his way to get a rise out of Kylo. He wasn’t acting at all like he was genuinely sorry about Ben, or trying to reach out to him emotionally.

What was Luke supposed to do? Let Ben enter the base and destroy the Resistance there?

He has no other choice. He’s focusing Ben’s hatred towards himself so he wouldn’t even think of going into the base. It’s the thing about the dark side. Replace Luke and Ben with ROTJ Luke and ROTJ Vader and it would STILL be the same situation.

No. Ben proves Rey is valuable by showing up to save her, and his sacrifice accomplishes what Anakin could not - saving a loved one from death.

Except the whole point of RotS is that you shouldn’t cling onto loved ones after their time in the world is done. You should let go of your temporal attachments once they leave your life, and allow those you love to return to the Force. Ben resurrecting Rey through the Light Side betrays a complete misunderstanding of the themes of the saga. Cheating death and resurrection of others was established as Dark Side knowledge.

By that logic, Anakin was selfish towards Luke. He should’ve just let Palpatine killed him.

And yet Vader’s redemption spread across the galaxy anyways.

The Rebellion was much, much larger than the Resistance by the end of TLJ. Also, the ST’s handling of the legacy of the old characters is very inconsistent. Rey knows Han Solo as a famous smuggler, yet thinks that Luke Skywalker (who defeated Vader and the Emperor only 30 years ago) is a myth. Yet she somehow also knows about what happened aboard the Death Star and Anakin’s redemption. It’s sloppy writing.

Imagine growing up in a hellscape where even if someone was inclined to give her a history lesson it is doubtful as to whether or not it was backed up with historical records. And we have people on our planet who legitimately believe that, for example, the Earth is flat.

Rey refers to Luke Skywalker as a myth because that is what he is to her… a figure from legend.

And that is not even considering that Rey believed the Jedi weren’t real, not everything else that happened in the original trilogy; in fact, she never treats Han Solo as a myth when she realizes she is already meeting him in-person at that point.

yet thinks that Luke Skywalker (who defeated Vader and the Emperor only 30 years ago) is a myth. Yet she somehow also knows about what happened aboard the Death Star and Anakin’s redemption.

Do you not realize the discussion about Vader’s redemption is in an entire movie AFTER that part in TFA about “Luke being a myth”?

Also, how are Luke’s odd actions on Crait somehow more inspiring than redeeming Vader and defeating the Emperor?

Because the FO shot him down and he “survived”. Then he undermined their leader in public.

“The First Order will become a true Empire.” Kylo wants to hog Palpatine’s fleet for himself. They’re shown to be smaller than in TLJ.

That’s nothing. That’s not evidence. That’s just rhetoric.

They’re context clues for inference.

And nowhere are we shown that the First Order is smaller than it was before. You thought it was, and you’re reading that into the movie in order to make sense of it.

Compare the TROS FO with the TLJ FO fleet. Rewatch both movies.

Because the galaxy was hopeless until Luke showed up on Crait. Even Leia lost hope at that point.

Don’t give me that. The entire galaxy just gave up after Hosnian? The whole galaxy was perfectly willing to just lay down and submit to First Order rule?

First off, they had a literal gun to their heads - Starkiller. Secondly, they NEVER helped, throughout the ENTIRE saga. That was the point of the fleet scene in TROS.

Then the whole galaxy changed its mind because of some vague story from a handful of people of Luke’s actions on Crait? You hear how ridiculous this story sounds, right? It turns the entire galaxy, outside of the FO and Resistance, into some homogenous, cowardly hivemind that abandoned all hope because it needed to be taught to “believe in itself.” It’s childish storytelling.

Handful of people who are literally the ones FIGHTING the FO. The same Luke Skywalker who is “infalliable” and did the impossible (redeeming Vader). We also don’t know how long it took for it to become common knowledge, se we can INFER that it took that amount of time.

EDIT: Imagine if the Sun was right about to go supernova. We’d lose hope instantly. Suddenly some aliens show up and rescue us so our species wouldn’t die off.

He literally felt ashamed for Ben’s fall. That’s the point. He didn’t want to be reminded of that. His smuggling days were to cope with that guilt. And he overcomes it anyways.

And for years, instead of doing anything to help the woman he loved during this extremely difficult time in her life, he left her to fend for herself, just like Luke did. The idea that he spent years as an incompetent, petty criminal, feeling sad about losing the son he neglected, is pathetic for Han. It would be one thing if he had experienced a brief relapse into crime after his son’s fall, but he stayed in that lifestyle for years.

Even SEEING Leia would remind him of his failure with Ben.

Meanwhile, Leia powered through that shame and continued to be a responsible leader against the First Order. Leia acted like a responsible adult. Han did not. That’s the problem.

You do realize they’re not the same person, right? And that’s the point. Han was acting irrationally. He needed to overcome that in order to face Ben on the bridge.

Kylo killing Han was literally the thing that caused Chewie to shoot him and ignite the bombs. Had it not been for his injury, Rey would’ve lost and certainly wouldn’t have defeated Palpatine.

Ah yes, that oh-so-important gut injury that Kylo sustained. If you rewatch that fight scene, you’ll notice that Kylo’s movement in combat shows no sign of that injury hampering him whatsoever. In fact, he was winning the fight until Rey just closed her eyes and believed hard enough. The injury never plays any noticeable role in how the fight progresses.

REWATCH THE FIGHT. Kylo Ren is literally not only BLEEDING TO DEATH, but is also moving awkwardly. Pay attention to his movement. Give it a couple of replays. He’s stumbling. He also clearly lacks focus because Han’s death, the blood loss and the pain is too much for him.

Furthermore, Kylo wanted to train Rey and was literally told by Snoke to bring her to him alive. He didn’t want her DEAD.

Of course, given what the bowcaster did in previous scenes, it should have just killed Kylo outright, but I guess consistency isn’t cool.

Kylo is Force-sensitive. Those stormtroopers were not and couldn’t be.

It’s fucking INFERENCE. I’m looking at surrounding facts, putting two and two together and drawing a conclusion to them.

What you call “Inference,” I call “making things up to cover for the filmmaker’s mistakes.” There is 0 evidence that the fleet was there because of Luke. None.

Only AFTER Luke shows up in TLJ is the galaxy inspired.

That’s not the point. The point is that an army made the Republic become the Empire.

Holy oversimplification. You understand that a military existing doesn’t automatically transform a Republic into an Empire. It was a convergence of many different factors and crises engineered by Palpatine. The political message of the Prequels isn’t just “Having military bad.”

The Republic didn’t know how big of a threat the FO was. It’s the equivalent of a fly. To them, the FO is an annoyance. They were never attacked, and that’s the point.

If that was the case, Palpatine would’ve possessed Snoke or contacted the Kaminoans to create a new healthy clone specifically for this.

You would think so, wouldn’t you? That would be a common sense approach for Palpatine. But TRoS is a film that doesn’t operate based on pesky concepts like “logic” or “common sense.” By suggesting those ideas, you’re already thinking more deeply than the writers did.

I’m implying the Sith essence transfer ritual can’t work with Kaminoan clones or Snoke. That it’d only work with actual people such as Rey.

How do you know he DOES? And he was overconfident.

Palpatine sure seemed overconfident aboard the Death Star in RotJ. Yet TRoS makes clear that he had a contingency plan the whole time. Why couldn’t that also apply now? What gives TRoS’s ending any more finality than RotJ’s ending?

Palpatine is not that great of a planner. In fact, he had no plan set in stone. He wanted to possess Rey from childhood, but her parents abandoned her and he had to target Ben. Then Ben redeems himself, and now he has to focus on Rey again. And when the dyad unites, he realizes it’s screwing up his plans and he has to kill them. But when realizing he can suck up their life force, he does so, and there’s no longer any need for the ritual.

Even in ROTJ, he decides to kill Luke when he refuses to turn to the dark side.

Except it DOESN’T undermine Anakin and Luke’s arcs.

Anakin isn’t the Chosen One destined to destroy the Sith anymore. Rey is.

He IS the Chosen One. The movie keeps bashing you in the head that Palpatine literally died before and Anakin did bring balance. It’s just that he’s letting Rey finish the job.

Luke isn’t the restorer of the Jedi anymore. Rey is. The entire purpose of those two characters now is just to pave the way for Rey, the true savior of the Jedi and the galaxy. The entire overarching story of the saga has been reshaped to really be about Rey. She succeeded where all her predecessors failed, and you can very well bet that Rey will never be supplanted or undermined in the same way that Luke and Anakin were. I guarantee you that.

And? What’s wrong with that?

Dude, Palpatine is reinforcing that Anakin needs to do his bidding. Replace it with “We need to take a shit on my cousin’s car” and it would still retain the meaning.

What?

It’s abundantly clear through basic interpretation of the text that Palpatine is referring to Plagueis as “the one with the power to cheat death.” Do you think Palpatine is referring to himself as the cheater of death? Then why does he say “but if we work together, we can discover the secret”? Notice the use of “We” in that sentence. And the word “but” implies that Palpatine is not the Death Cheater he was referring to, and that it’s something they will seek together.

I never said Palpatine DID know how to keep himself alive by the time of ROTS, just that he wants to know how to keep himself alive. And again, he CAN’T be referring to saving Padme. Notice how Anakin DOESN’T get upset with him for “revealing the truth”. This implies Palpatine is referring to keeping himself and Vader alive.