The Book Of Boba Fett (live action series) - a general discussion thread - * SPOILERS * — Page 27

Buzz Lightyear said:

Also, speaking of Tuskens, does anyone else really enjoy how these Disney+ shows have been developing and humanizing various mook aliens from the older movies?

Yeah, I love this trend. It was very well done in The Mandalorian chapter 9, and done even better in The Book of Boba Fett chapter 2. Just made me more annoyed when the entire tribe was slaughtered offscreen in the next episode, with no payoff.

I would have liked if the plot of TBOBF was Boba eventually bringing about a new era of peaceful co-existence between the Tatooine settlers and the native Tuskens.

Buzz Lightyear said:

Also, speaking of Tuskens, does anyone else really enjoy how these Disney+ shows have been developing and humanizing various mook aliens from the older movies? What aliens do you suppose could be next? Will we see some Hutts who aren’t crime lords at some point? Will we get to see some Ortolans who aren’t just playing drums all day? Maybe an Ewok who pulls a Star-Lord and leaves behind his terrestrial bound brethren to go have a bunch of adventures in space?

This is actually something that I personally hope they don’t overdo or start to rely on. As I explained in my pseudo-essay from last year, the OT treated most aliens as archetypes and I don’t want them to deviate too much from this. I don’t mind them doing this with the Tusken’s since there was always some nuance with them in Lucas’ films and they were always meant to be the natives on a planet with human colonists, so what BOBF did sense narrative-wise and stays true to the archetypes that they were. However, making the Rancor into a an emotionally complex pet instead of simply a ferocious monster was IMO not necessary, but it was handled well in that it helped tell Fett’s story so I don’t mind it in this case.

I will say this, I do not want to see good Hutts. That seems to go against what the Hutts were meant to be in the SW universe. I much prefer what Favreau did with the he Klatooinian raiders in the Mando episode “Sanctuary” or the Quarren pirates in “The Heiress.” SW is not Star Trek so I can do without arbitrary depth and nuance added to creatures that were originally made to serve as simple monsters or caricatures of life and history.

ZkinandBonez said:

SW is not Star Trek so I can do without arbitrary depth and nuance added to creatures that were originally made to serve as simple monsters or caricatures of life and history.

I think it’s a very fundamentally bad idea to vilify an entire species, no matter what universe you’re writing for.

jedi_bendu said:

ZkinandBonez said:

SW is not Star Trek so I can do without arbitrary depth and nuance added to creatures that were originally made to serve as simple monsters or caricatures of life and history.

I think it’s a very fundamentally bad idea to vilify an entire species, no matter what universe you’re writing for.

Considering we’re talking about fictional fantasy creatures I don’t see the problem. None of them a real individuals, there’s no history, culture, etc. Most of the “scary” creatures we’ve seen in live-action SW don’t represent any real people who can be misrepresented.

F.ex. Bossk was simply a monstrous-looking lizard bounty hunter. His purpose was to be a villain in a scene of villains. That’s it. Other Trandoshans in SW have stayed true to the original idea and are all hunters of some kind that are always (at least in movies and TV series) depicted as cold-blooded. There’s no real Trandoshans to be demonized, they’re just cruel lizard-monsters that serve a narrative purpose.

The Tusken Raiders on the other hand have real-life parallels, and therefore it made sense to give them more depth in BOBF and treat them as if they were a real people. Though primarily this also served a narrative function. There’s obviously nothing wrong with some character depth in SW, but doing it for the sake of doing it, or to emulate the more naturalistic narratives of more hard Sci-Fi is simply missing the point.

Star Wars is a fairy tale, a “myth for the space age” as Lucas once put it, and therefore we get many archetypal monsters in the guise as “aliens” (an SF concept). A dragon who hordes gold in a cave is simply a mythic symbol for greed, it follows no evolutionary pattern, it has no real psychology to speak of, it’s a symbol, a universal abstraction. These are the ideas that Lucas was going for when making SW, and overanalyzing the Trandoshans, the Klatooinians, or the Hutts, I feel is doing disservice to both Lucas and their function within the SW universe.

Knight of Kalee said:

I’m on the team that favors nuanced takes on the classic Star Wars elements. IG-11 in The Mandalorian should by all accounts just been a cold, ruthless and effective bounty droid based on what we know about IG-88, but they took the time to deconstruct the archetype and deliver an engaging arc for him tale while delving into topics such as the nature vs nurture debate.

I’m not saying SW can’t have nuance to it, I’m just saying that if every creature gets deconstructed there won’t be much SW left.

F.ex. Most people don’t complain about a lack of depth in the orcs in LOTR, and the ones who do are usually given a quick rundown of what they represent and why a mythic fantasy doesn’t need this kind of overanalysis. SW on the other hand, presumavly due to it’s Sci-Fi aesthetic rarely seens to get the same response.

You can give depth to hobbits, dwarves, elfs, heck even the talking trees gets a little bit of nuance, but Sauron, like Palpatine in SW, is a symbol of pure evil, and should never be treated as anything else. Saruman and Vader were both corrupted by evil, they were written to represent this relatable and nuanced human behaviour, that’s their purpose in their respective stories, while their masters represents that corruptible power, i.e. something abstract.

So nuance and depth in SW is great if it serves a narrative purpose and when it is written by somone who understands the mythic structure that holds it all together.

The philosophy of deconstructionism underminds the very nature of SW, as it does all myths and fairytales. All fiction, even fantasy, should, and usually do have nuance to it, but deconstruction tends to unravel it through overanalysis. I understand the purpose of deconstructionism in the real world and even for fiction about the real world, but I think it’s a poor match for fantasy.

The question is: Are the ways we interact with and view people influenced by the ways we think about our imaginary worlds?

timdiggerm said:

The question is: Are the ways we interact with and view people influenced by the ways we think about our imaginary worlds?

If someone watches SW and/or LOTR and decides to treat someone badly because they see them as orcs or trandoshans, then I’d say the issue is with them and not the fiction. Orcs represent the cruelty inherent within everybody, not some generic “other”, hence why they were once elves, showing that even the most virtuous and civilised people are corruptible. If someone look at orcs and see a real-life group of people then that’s a reflection on them, not Tolkien or Peter Jackson. The same goes for SW.

That’s not to say that fiction hasn’t been used like this before, of course it has, and that’s obviously a bad thing, but that’s hardly what we are talking about here.

If anything I think deconstruction has only made these things worse, since so many people nowadays always look for these types of negative real-life parallels, and more often than not, make them up or project their own biases into fiction when they can’t find any or they miss the point.

Here’s a quote from my Star Wars is Surrealism essay from last year:

ZkinandBonez said:

PART 4B: EXTERNALISING YOUR INNER SLIMY PIECE OF WORM-RIDDEN FILTH

Now let’s move on to aliens that have more personality, like Jabba the Hutt. Like all beings in the Star Wars universe, if you look up the Hutts on Wookieepedia you’ll get an extensive explanation of their society, their biology, how they reproduce (they’re hermaphroditic by the way), etc. But, if we see Jabba through the lens of abstract film making, what is he really? Well, Lucas wanted a fat and slimy gangster, like Marlon Brando in The Godfather or Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, but of course, in the form of a monster, or rather an “alien” in this case. Monsters have always been representations of real life concepts; like how European dragons have always been representations of greed; hording gold in their caves for no practical purpose other than mythological symbolism. Jabba is no different. He is greed and gluttony brought to life in the form of a big, fat, slimy slug; the abstract made literal. It is a type of storytelling that has made sense to every single child watching the film, but that unfortunately doesn’t always click with us critical-thinking adults.

Jabba’s henchmen are no different. They are meant to be vile criminals working for a mob boss, so their ugliness has been brought to the surface by making them literal monsters; fangs, claws, scales, snouts and all.

This was a great comedy show. I loved Boba Fett starring as Darth Scrotum.

theprequelsrule said:

This was a great comedy show. I loved Boba Fett starring as Darth Scrotum.

Hey, don’t make fun of people’s looks, okay? There are a ton of valid complaints about the show, but “Temuera Morrison is ugly” isn’t one of them.

They should have done a show about the best bounty hunter in the galaxy tracking down its most dangerous criminals. A no brainer IMO.

Instead we got this atrocity.

theprequelsrule said:

They should have done a show about the best bounty hunter in the galaxy tracking down its most dangerous criminals. A no brainer IMO.

I see very little story in this concept, let alone a Star Wars story.

Granted, I wasn’t exactly thrilled by what we did end up with, but the core idea did at the very least follow the philosophy of the franchise. The real issue, IMO, was that Fett was always a background or side character, and giving him his own movie or TV show was always going to be difficult within the established SW framework.

Sirius said:

I think that even the worst concept could be transformed into a good story. Just contract the right people to do the job. To say that Boba was born to be a side character just won’t work for me.

I didn’t mean to say that he has to always be a side character, I just think they chose a character that doesn’t easily fit into the role of a SW lead.

As I wrote earlier, I think they had the right idea plot-wise, but the execution was clunky.

StarkillerAG said:

theprequelsrule said:

This was a great comedy show. I loved Boba Fett starring as Darth Scrotum.

Hey, don’t make fun of people’s looks, okay? There are a ton of valid complaints about the show, but “Temuera Morrison is ugly” isn’t one of them.

I think he was referring to his heavy makeup during the flashback sequences to depict Sarlacc damage.

Hal 9000 said:

StarkillerAG said:

theprequelsrule said:

This was a great comedy show. I loved Boba Fett starring as Darth Scrotum.

Hey, don’t make fun of people’s looks, okay? There are a ton of valid complaints about the show, but “Temuera Morrison is ugly” isn’t one of them.

I think he was referring to his heavy makeup during the flashback sequences to depict Sarlacc damage.

Oh yeah, that was kind of scrotum-looking. Still not as scrotum-looking as Palpatine in the second half of ROTS though.

RicOlie_2 said:

ZkinandBonez said:

The philosophy of deconstructionism underminds the very nature of SW, as it does all myths and fairytales. All fiction, even fantasy, should, and usually do have nuance to it, but deconstruction tends to unravel it through overanalysis. I understand the purpose of deconstructionism in the real world and even for fiction about the real world, but I think it’s a poor match for fantasy.

I’m a bit late to the party, but thank you for this. It’s a refreshing viewpoint to see. I think the original spirit of Star Wars is unfortunately less and less possible in our current culture, because of a cultural shift that tends to deconstruct the old archetypes as it creates new ones that are largely incomptable with traditional narratives.

You are correct. The traditional hero is dead (and there are many who are happy about it). Lucas and many of his generation are from a much more traditional cultural background. John Milius especially. Luke Skywalker is a hero not an anti-hero.

Look at the culture of modern Gen-X and Millennial filmmakers compared to the filmmakers they admire. Does JJ Abrams love Kurosawa and old time comics and pulp serials like George did? No way.

Anchorhead said:

Abrams has mentioned in interviews that Seven Samurai is one of his favorite films. He’s also mentioned that John Ford and Terrence Malick were big influences.

Well, I stand corrected. I guess he just is sort of a mediocre talent.

Off topic: not a fan of Malick myself anyway. I don’t think I have made it more than 30 minutes into any of his films before losing interest.