Unpopular Opinion Thread — Page 31

Superweapon VII said:

JadedSkywalker said:

I hate Star Wars becoming the Saga of Darth Vader rather than the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, I hate Luke being supplanted and replaced by Vader becoming the lead character. We are supposed to root for a wife killer and child murderer is that it?

Lucas totally lost his sense on the prequel, virgin birth, chosen one prophecy, rules on attachment, midichlorians, Whills, how can people take any of that at face value.

He destroyed Star Wars there was nothing left for Disney to destroy.

While I agree with your points overall, I wouldn’t want Star Wars to JUST be the Adventures of Luke Skywalker. The SW Universe is bigger than any Skywalker, Luke or Anakin.

Well I meant about the Saga as in the movies, sure the expanded universe and tv can go on tangents. For me nowadays I’m either just a Star Wars guy, or maybe an Empire guy and Jedi is subpar. The prequel is unnecessary backstory muddled and screwed over in the details. The Disney movies are almost like the Kelvin timeline of Star Trek for me, I can sort of enjoy them but they aren’t worthy of respect or time. They didn’t take the lore seriously because George didn’t in the prequel, so they were like what the hell, we will do what we want.

Maybe it’s for the best the canon is destroyed the very notion of canon might be stupid, if you thought about it too much.

When is Leia whiny?

Leia is sassy and has a bit of an attitude, but it’s not like she’s complaining all the time. She snaps at Han over how bungled the whole rescue mission is, but you’ll notice she never snaps at Luke like that. She’s nice to him, and comforts him after Obi-Wan’s death. She’s not just being difficult for the sake of it. She’s fighting a rebellion against an empire, and she doesn’t have time for cocky, blundering mercenaries.

I only wish I knew how much of Leia’s sudden personality shift midway through A New Hope was by design, and how much was just weird George Lucas writing quirkiness or a symptom of multiple rewrites by George’s 1970s friends.

The accent shift doesn’t seem intentional, but maybe I’m wrong. Leia speaks with her “Act I accent” when talking to Vader and Tarkin, but also when talking to allies like Obi Wan (via the recording stored in R2). She drops the accent when she meets Luke. So maybe the accent is some kind of “formal speech” used when speaking with dignitaries? But then at the end of the movie, when she arrives at Yavin IV, she does not resume speaking with her “Act I accent” when she’s talking with the Rebel elite like Dodonna (at least I don’t think she does… might have to double check.)

Also, people always say Leia has a British accent during the first half of A New Hope, but to me it actually sounds closer to an old 1930s/40s Trans-Atlantic accent used by the American upper class.

It’s also funny to observe that the destruction of Alderaan seems to be the event that triggers her accent change.

NFBisms said:

She even has a different accent at the start. Leia is an all-timer

Didn’t she have a British accent like Padme did in Episode 1 which was dropped,lol. Well a fake one anyway.

All men in the Skywalker family have been a bunch of whiners in the movies. starting with Luke, continuing with Anakin, and then Kylo/Ben and Luke again. You can’t just single out Hayden version of Anakin.

Yeah she has an Imperial Senate accent, it works well.

Spartacus01 said:

I’m aware of the fact that this is a very unpopular opinion on this forum, so I hope I will not get crucified.
I don’t like the idea of explaining Leia’s memories in Return of the Jedi in a literal way, that is by making Padmé survive to the events of Revenge of the Sith. Force visions are the best way to explain Leia’s memories, especially when you consider that her descriptions in Return of the Jedi are very vague. In fact, Leia herself said that she only remembered vague images, so I don’t get why they couldn’t just be the product of Force visions. After all, in The Empire Strikes Back it was Yoda himself who said that the Force allows you to see “the future, the past, old friends long gone”, so there is no contradiction really. Also, Padmé being alive at the end of Revenge of the Sith and not appearing in A New Hope is super-jarring, especially if you watch the movies in chronological order, and having her death occur between the two trilogies without actually showing it is not a good idea in my opinion.

I won’t crucify you - but… I think it’s obvious that a “Force vision” wasn’t the original intent of the person who wrote Leia’s dialogue in Return of the Jedi. Clearly, they meant to communicate to the audience that Leia/Luke’s mother was alive when Leia was a young child. The Prequels changed this for no real narrative benefit. They didn’t even use Padme’s death for some compelling narrative purpose - like for example, having Padme’s death push Anakin over the edge and fall to the Dark Side. Instead, it was only the fear of Padme potentially dying that pushed Anakin over the edge. Padme didn’t even need to actually die, yet for some reason Lucas made her die anyway, despite the cost of violating continuity with ROTJ.

Overall, it’s not such a big deal. Attempting to explain the discrepancy with a “Force vision” is fine - and certainly not the worst attempt at damage control from fans - but it’s still just fan damage control after an obvious (and pointless) retcon.

Spartacus01 said:

I always viewed Padmé’s death as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anakin acted upon his fear of losing her, and this is what caused her death in the first place. In this sense, I always thought it was a compelling death. Also, I am of the opinion that Leia’s mother being alive when she was still a little child was never a good idea to begin with, so I’m more than happy that the Prequels retconned it.

Sure - I imagine Lucas probably wanted Padme’s death to be an ironic self-fulling prophecy, like something out of a Greek tragedy, where a character tries to stop something from happening but then inadvertently causes that very thing to happen, because you can never escape Fate, etc. It’s like the pre-modern version of a time-loop paradox.

But I think Padme’s death doesn’t quite work as an ironic self-fulfilling prophecy, because Padme doesn’t actually die from anything Anakin does to her directly, but rather she dies mysteriously of a broken heart later on. Maybe it would have worked better if Padme actually died from complications during childbirth brought on by injuries she sustained when Anakin force-choked her.

There have only been 3 bad/awful Star Wars movies or shows, The Clone Wars 2008 movie, Rise of Skywalker, and Book of Bobba Fett. Obi Wan, Mandalorain Season 3, Ahsoka, and The Acolyte are all very middling shows but I wouldn’t label any of them as being bad. All 4 of these shows have enough legitimately great things about them that I consider myself glad to have watched them, but they all have huge problems that stop them from actually being good as a whole.

Superweapon VII said:

Darth Vader is not a good villain. The closest he came to becoming one was in TESB. But ROTJ and the PT showed that at heart, he’s just a capricious, selfish punk.

This is a truly awful opinion

SparkySywer said:

Vladius said:

I addressed that already. Obi Wan is saying that Luke has to be willing to kill Vader, but he’s not sending him to kill Vader, as that would be pointless. The word they use is confront. I already posted this somewhere else but there’s a quote from one of the Timothy Zahn books where Luke talks about this, he says that he assumed that when they told him to confront Vader that that meant he would have to kill him, but that was wrong and that wasn’t necessarily what they meant. Not that that is Disney canon or G canon, but it shows that before the prequels that was the normal interpretation.

Do you remember which book?

In the conversation they’re having right before this exchange, they’re disagreeing on whether or not Vader has any good left in him. I feel like the post-prequel interpretation makes more sense to me than Obi-Wan just wanting him to be prepared to kill Vader.

Why is sending Luke to kill Vader pointless? What’s the difference in sending him to “confront” Vader if he has to be willing to kill him, anyway?

It’s one of the Hand of Thrawn books so either Specter of the Past or Vision of the Future.

It would be pointless because destroying the Empire is already the job of the Rebel Alliance. The Emperor and Vader are going to get blown up. Luke alludes to this. “Soon I’ll be dead, and you with me.” If their only objective was to have Luke kill them then he would have suited up in his X Wing to blow up the Death Star a second time, or they would have wished him good luck on the Endor mission. He had a higher purpose.

He needs to confront Vader to face his fear and resist the dark side in a final spiritual confrontation. It’s a continuation of the events of Empire Strikes Back. He failed in the cave specifically because he brought his weapons with him and he was full of fear. He failed at fighting Vader both because he was unprepared physically, but also spiritually. Now that he has his training, he’s prepared, so he needs to do it. As Yoda tells him, it’s his final trial to become a Jedi. He has to meet Vader again face-to-face, and gain the victory by resisting temptation. That includes the temptation to join Vader because he’s his father.

We should definitely give Luke credit for seeing the good in his father where Obi Wan had given up, but that’s not the same thing as them sending Luke on a military assassination mission.

Channel72 said:

Vladius said:

The second death star is fine and the insanely good space battle and throne room scenes (both still never topped after 40 years of trying) wouldn’t be the same without it.

Agreed. The battle of Endor still hasn’t really been topped.

ROTJ has some amazing stuff in it, especially the throne room and Endor space battle. I don’t mind the Death Star 2 either.

Still I think ROTJ has more flaws than the other OT movies. I don’t like how the Jabba sequence is disconnected from the rest of the film, in the sense that nothing in Act I directly causes or leads into the events of Act II (apart from the very broad fact that Han is now around). This is a subjective complaint; most people probably don’t mind. For most of my life I didn’t mind either. But after I started to appreciate how tightly written both ANH and ESB are in terms of Event A leading to Event B, the script for ROTJ seems structurally flawed to me.

The middle act in the Endor forest also really stalls the film, particularly after they meet the Ewoks. For me, the scenes in ANH where C3PO and R2D2 slowly wander across the desert are actually very interesting because Tatooine seems like this mysterious, alien place, and the Jawas as alien tech scavengers are an interesting and creative concept. But Endor is just so mundane - the California redwood forest, while theoretically beautiful, comes off as aggressively bland and often feels like a fan-fiction location. Way too much time is devoted to the Ewoks capturing our heroes, the gimmick with C3PO as their deity, etc. I think the whole Endor sequence really needed to be streamlined and made a bit more visually interesting - perhaps a better cinematographer would have helped. And yeah, the Rebel commandos really needed more screen-time and involvement in the battle.

There’s no particular reason Act 1 has to be directly connected to everything else, given that it’s really the first part of Act 3 of the trilogy as a whole. Which is beside the point, because it is connected. It introduces Luke as a trained Jedi who is maybe a little overconfident, but still powerful and ready to take on the challenges ahead. We haven’t seen that before, and we need that context going into the scenes on Dagobah and on the Death Star. It resolves the Han Solo and Lando story from ESB at the same time, which I would argue is efficient, not inefficient.

Vladius said:

He needs to confront Vader to face his fear and resist the dark side in a final spiritual confrontation. It’s a continuation of the events of Empire Strikes Back. He failed in the cave specifically because he brought his weapons with him and he was full of fear. He failed at fighting Vader both because he was unprepared physically, but also spiritually. Now that he has his training, he’s prepared, so he needs to do it. As Yoda tells him, it’s his final trial to become a Jedi. He has to meet Vader again face-to-face, and gain the victory by resisting temptation. That includes the temptation to join Vader because he’s his father.

I did not consider this. Thank you for the interesting read!