sade1212

The above post is severely Poe’s Law-ing me.

rik said:
nobody think that Rey and Kylo were in love

Have you never been on Twitter? People have been stanning Reylo since 2015 and TLJ really brought it to the forefront in the movies.

Ben having zero lines after his change of heart does make it feel kind of odd in TROS though, considering how much of their interaction in TLJ consisted of talking, but the kiss is supposed to be an emotionally triumphant moment.

Domino Squad Nitpicks:

• I assume the intro music transition is temporary, because there’s no fade, it just suddenly cuts in at 00:24.
• I feel like the music could linger a little longer after the end of the cold open (3:32), or have the intro music come in sooner and harder. The gap feels odd and empty to me.
• I’m not 100% sure the cold open is necessary; I think it’d work just as well to stick it after the intro text.
• The “Echo” insertion works well. I wouldn’t suspect it if I hadn’t read the above discussion.
• Is the music at 8:36 added? It overwhelms the dialogue.
• The transition at 12:00 feels like it has the opposite problem to the one at 3:32, in that there’s no gap or pause whatsoever. We very rapidly leave the scene with Hevy and 99. I’d have been tempted to stick “TWO WEEKS LATER” on a black screen and linger for a moment, maybe even with a Majora’s Mask-esque musical queue, before fading back in.
• In general, I’m not 100% sure about the idea of keeping two attempts. Maybe it’s just because I’m familiar with the original episode, but it feels like there’s a lot of unfinished business when we’re suddenly thrown ahead to Rookies. I think it’d be clearer if they just failed once, really hard, and then got sent to the listening station, because it gives less time for the audience to invest in the idea of them succeeding at that one specific test to prove Bric wrong. Fanediting is a complicated profession, though. (It’d also get us to Anakin/Obi-Wan’s plot sooner).
• It is odd that Clone Cadets retconned half the clones in Rookies to be part of the same squad, because in Rookies they’re introduced with more “colleagues who have only recently met” vibes. Nothing you can do to fix this though, I don’t think.
• Rookies plays out just fine, so if you did anything major to the content of this episode, it’s seamless and nothing is missed.
• The lighting quality leap going into ARC Troopers is noticeable, but other than that, the transition is very cleanly executed. (Clearly to solve this, you should personally recreate the entire of TCW Season 1.) Echo and Fives painting their armour in 501st colours despite not being in the 501st yet is a little strange, but I agree that cutting the scene of them joining was the right choice, so it is what it is.
• “Feels like yesterday we were here.” and the associated reminiscence is a little odd since it’s only been two weeks. Then again, it’s kind of a joke in the original episode as well, since they were just there in the previous release-order episode.
• I’m not sure if you’ve done much to ARC Troopers, but I didn’t notice any issues.
• The ending, with “in the 501st”, and the new music transition, works really well. The work that’s been put in on that, with McFibb and all, is paying off for sure.

All in all, your tweaks to the overall story work well, in my opinion. I think a little tweaking to the Clone Cadets segment might be worthwhile, and obviously Echo and Fives donning 501st armour prior to actually joining the 501st is a little odd, but it’s a smart edit that I think is stronger than the original episodes are by themselves.

If I had to complain, 50 minutes feels a little long to me - but that might just be because I’ve never cared that much for endless action scenes of clones and droids blasting one another (I’m more into the Jedi and Sith stuff), whereas I know some people who can’t get enough of the clone side of TCW.

Did 99 try to get those kids shot?

TLJ has a few unnecessary jokes but I don’t think that’s sufficient to claim it’s trying to be a Star Wars parody. It’s sincere enough when it needs to be - Kylo asking Rey to join him; Luke and Leia’s final scene; Luke’s death etc. In many ways moments like the BB-8 coin gag and the porg jokes feel like The Phantom Menace-style (or Special Edition Mos Eisley-style) humour to me, which I also don’t particularly enjoy in those movies, but is certainly a part of the franchise’s identity at this point. It’s also fairly straightforward to trim out, and I confess I am somewhat more sympathetic to movies which lend themselves to being easily tweaked via fanedit.

Yes, Luke on the island is not acting as the rebel we remember him as. This is because of his emotional trauma. The movie spends a lot of time on this, and I suppose if you just don’t buy in to it, you just don’t buy in to it. While TFA does say he went to the first Jedi Temple, it also very explicitly lays out that he “walked away from it all” - had TLJ failed to acknowledge or develop that, it certainly would have been guilty of ignoring TFA’s plot threads.

Having to deal with two sets of main characters, the new and the old, is one of the burdens the sequel trilogy always had to bear by virtue of being sequels to the OT - it would’ve been a shame if Luke hadn’t gotten some substantial chunk of screen time. I feel TLJ does a good job of finding a way for our new protagonist and our old protagonist to share a lot of that screen time and move each other’s arcs forward to make the most of it (and the force bond to allow Rey to also interact with Kylo is an excellent trick). Rey still gets plenty of development, and takes meaningful action to move the story forward when she decides to go try to turn Kylo, when she rejects his offer, and when she saves the Resistance. And Rey isn’t still in search of a father figure at the end of TLJ - like Leia says to her: “we have everything we need”.

Leaving so much of Ben’s backstory to out-of-movie material is admittedly one of the weaker aspects of the sequel trilogy IMO, since the audience is supposed to sympathise with his redemption in TROS. TFA alludes to it with the conversation between Han and Leia (“I just never should have sent him away.”) but we don’t get much of Ben’s perspective on his childhood or his life prior to collapsing the hut on Luke. Then again, the same is true of Vader in the OT - the audience didn’t have the full picture of why he turned to the dark side until ~20 years after ROTJ came out, right? He never even mentions Padme in the OT, and instead seems to wax on mostly about how much he loves “the power of the dark side”. Kylo Ren will never get his own prequel trilogy, but The Rise of Kylo Ren comic, the Age of Resistance: Kylo Ren comic, and bits and pieces in Aftermath, Last Shot and Bloodline sketch out the broad strokes. He is supposed to seem, to some extent, like a victim of Snoke’s manipulations, someone who’s currently on a bad path but isn’t fundamentally evil - but a lot of this is just conveyed in the movies by Adam Driver’s performance rather than anything explicit so I can see why some do write him off as a “mentally-ill punk”.

Yes, the TLJ marketing capitalised on the shock value of “it’s time for the Jedi to end”, and then in the movie itself Luke starts out espousing that rhetoric but stops doing so by the end of the movie. This is just the plot of Luke’s arc, right? Like how ROTJ’s marketing plays with the idea Luke might turn to the dark side, and then he doesn’t. It’s the story. The movie itself isn’t trying to convey to the audience that the Jedi actually need to end. That’s just what Luke tells himself to justify his exile. And once he emotionally tackles the real underlying reasons for that exile, he stops with the lie he has been telling himself, too. If anything, the intended “message” of the movie is the one delivered by Yoda, that we should learn from what’s good about the past (our “masters”) while seeking to progress beyond it. No point throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I disagree firmly with any ideas about grey Jedi, or using both the light side and the dark side, because Lucas was pretty explicit in the point that the dark side is inherently corrupting and a very slippery slope. Its whole purpose in the wider allegory of Star Wars is to represent difficult to escape cycles of negativity, like drug addiction, abuse, violence etc. It’s the temptation to do bad and selfish things. Lucas is a big proponent of people acting selflessly, since he believes that’s the way to real happiness. It’s a straightforward moral message, but that keeps it easy for kids to understand. While it’s tempting to see using the light side and dark side as some kind of integrating the shadow, best of both worlds, enlightened centrism thing, that’s not what Lucas meant by balance, because it just inevitably leads to more and more dark side usage. The dark side is the imbalance: if you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. That crack is really moreish.

I’ve been really impressed by your persistence at working on this. I’ve occasionally had ideas for editing TCW in the past, but I tend to lose interest in a day or two, whereas you’ve been at this for months, but are still having fresh ideas and have been editing with gusto. This might actually get finished!

I’ll try to watch Domino Squad tomorrow.

Which Topaz model are you using in the newer versions? I still find Gaia-HQ generally beats the rest, even the newer Theia models, but it does vary depending on the source shot.

I’m still down to help redo the Episode 1 video track when you’ve got a final or at least mostly final cut locked in for it.

NFB is right in everything he says so this is completely unnecessary, but I thought I’d nitpick some of your points, Wanderer.

Wanderer_ said:

You have your relationship between the Emperor/Snoke and their puppet Kylo/Vader… except Kylo rebels against his master (subverted expectations)

Vader also does this. I think it would’ve subverted my expectations more if Kylo had actually beheaded Rey.

Wanderer_ said:

You have Luke skywalker, a proven hero from the OT, passed around like this fake Legend whose heroic acts never happened. This point comes across in that line where he says “do you expect me to face the entire First Order feel with a laser sword?” … yes dude, we do. Because thats what you did before! (subverted expectations)

Where’s the suggestions Luke’s heroic acts never happened? The point is he is that legend - and the movie ends with him renewing it - but more than that he’s fundamentally a human being. Rey wants just Luke the legend, but she gets Luke the human. That’s because it’s Luke the human who creates Luke the legend; the two can’t be separated.

Wanderer_ said:

Again, Luke, probably the most generous and kind hearted character in the OT. Becomes this bitter old man who left his friends to die after considering to murder his nephew in his sleep. (subverted expectations)

If, after Han told the audience in TFA that “Luke felt responsible. He just walked away from everything.”, you were still expecting Luke to be a cheerful chap who had just isolated himself on an island for a quick vacation, then I don’t know what to tell you. It’s certainly tough to see Luke struggling mentally like that, but it’s extremely human, and I think it’s very inspiring how he overcomes it by the end of the movie.

Wanderer_ said:

Lukes over the shoulders saber throw like a cheap comedy movie, instead of realizing how important the passage of that Saber is (subverted expectations)

I’ll concede that TLJ plays a lot of things for comedy at odd times (see also: Rose kisses Finn; base immediately gets shot) but the idea that that saber is important was one that was only really created by TFA in the first place. No one cared much about it when it’d just fallen into Bespin, never to be seen again, right? Luke just made his own new saber and carried on with his life.

Wanderer_ said:

Rey, whose past is unknown but she clearly has had training in the force before since she can do everything. No, she’s a nobody and her powers and skill are of unknown origin (Potential in the force without training is a blunt knife) (subverted expectations)

Yes, potential in the force without training is imprecise - a blunt instrument. Luke makes this exact point about how dangerous her raw strength is, and the movie demonstrates it visually when Rey accidentally chops the rock in half because she’s not controlled or disciplined in her usage of a lightsaber. Star Wars has, for better or worse, pretty solidly established at this point that some people are just randomly born with a whole load of midichlorians. The origin of her powers is that she’s very force sensitive.

Wanderer_ said:

Rey, this beacon of light. Unwavering and pure hearted starts falling in love with a man who murdered the closest thing to a father figure she ever had in front of her own eyes (subverted expectations)

Yes, she finds a connection with Ben. That’s the plot of the movie. Rey isn’t ‘unwavering and pure hearted’ - she’s a good person, but like all of us she craves human connection, a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose. Ben gives her that when Luke doesn’t. Calling this one “subverted expectations” is a bit of a stretch; because you’d need to have extremely rigid and cliched expectations to begin with - did you think she’d just kill him, because she’s a goodie and he’s a baddie? That’s not even what happens between Luke and Vader in the OT!

Wanderer_ said:

Continuity from The Force Awakens. No continuity, entire potential plot threads thrown out of the window. (subverted expectations)

There’s something of a thematic/tonal discontinuity, sure. You can tell they’re movies by different directors and writers. But the only ‘plot thread’ that’s explicitly thrown away is the Knights of Ren, and RJ confessed he just couldn’t work out what to do with them - TROS demonstrates that, actually, neither could JJ; they were just there to look cool. Kylo Ren ‘completing his training’ is not really explicitly followed up on, only sort-of alluded to, but again, like the KoR, there was no substance to that to really build upon to begin with.

Wanderer_ said:

Theres a lot more, but yeah, TLJ definitely does try too hard to subvert everyone’s expectations. In fact it sacrifices narrative and character development in order to do so.

I think most of your points are pretty questionable, and just writing “(subverted expectations)” after them doesn’t really explain what expectations you had or how they were subverted.

Here’s two times TLJ does subvert expectations that I would agree with though:

• Snoke is set up in TFA as a scheming, big-bad, final boss Palpatine knockoff (this is mostly just implied by him saying mysterious things and having a big hologram, though). TLJ kills him one movie earlier than Palpatine died in the OT, having had him come across as an angry and overconfident fool.
• TFA very loosely alludes to Rey being some kind of Chosen One or divinely-picked successor - not because of her force-sensitivity, but because 1) the lightsaber calls out to her in particular, 2) Obi-Wan speaks to her, and 3) Star Wars has a history with mInDbLoWiNg LiNeAgE tWiStS - but TLJ then reveals there really is no hidden secret to her backstory, and she is just an abandoned orphan.

In these cases, I think TLJ makes the more compelling calls, though. Getting rid of Snoke broke free from the OT template and opened up the playing field for Rey and Kylo’s story. TROS does ultimately make it somewhat pointless by bringing in a new big bad, but at least Palpatine is actually Palpatine and not discount Palpatine. A cheap lineage reveal for Rey would’ve been tired and overplayed, imo - having her be a random orphan makes her more of a wildcard since there’s no real expectation for her. As soon as TROS reveals her to be Palpatine’s descendant, her arc in the rest of the movie autocompletes in the viewers’ mind.

I love the way Yub Nub leads into the credits music, and I appreciate how it’s much more believable diegetic music for the Ewoks to be playing and for everyone to be dancing to.

Anakin’s never been the most sensible guy. FACPOV suggests it’s quite painful for force ghosts to separate themselves from the Force, so maybe they can only manage to do it a limited amount, and perhaps every time Anakin manifests he gets distracted talking about that time he fought the Zillo Beast, or that time Obi-Wan faked his death to Face/Off a criminal, or that time he beat up Rush Clovis for hitting on Luke’s mum… Or maybe ghost Anakin just finds it difficult to talk about the twenty years he spent as a Sith. (I’m not seriously suggesting any of this is an actual justification for the plot hole.)

Sorry, I interpreted “never any sort of character arc” as meaning static characters.

Hmm, I guess I can see that Snoke has no arc at all, but I don’t think he was ever supposed to be more than just a prop for Kylo Ren, an actual main character. He has no more or less of an arc than Yoda or Obi-Wan in the OT, who exist to serve Luke’s character, or Dooku and Grievous in the PT, who similarly are static character who serve plot purposes and at best foreshadow elements of Anakin’s future. There’s only so much you can do in seven or so hours. Luke on the other hand has a pretty major arc, all about forgiving himself and re-embracing the Jedi - if he was already that way at the start of TLJ, I don’t think it’d be so divisive. I certainly agree there’s a perceptible change in direction between movies, but I feel like that’s a different complaint to static characters.

That’s one criticism I’ve never quite grasped. What does it mean to treat a fictional character “shamefully”?

I was thinking about general SW gaming today, and realised that whole Republic Commando thing came and went. I think they got one blink and you’ll miss it appearance in TCW. Were they ever a thing anywhere else?

Republic/Clone Commandos are a playable reinforcement unit in EA/DICE’s Star Wars: Battlefront 2 (2017), added in September 2019. As you say, they also show up twice in TCW, first being a cameo from Delta Squad (from the game originally; now their only canon appearance) and the second time being Gregor in everyone’s favourite arc.

Yeah, I agree with doubleofive here; I’m pretty sure this is how it is already. Hence “Legends” rather than “NON-CANON”, and lots of elements already being adapted into canon from it. It’s much like the relationship between Marvel Comics and the MCU in a way, except Legends is no longer having official content produced for it outside of SWTOR.

You talk about headcanon becoming more important, but headcanon is already the most important canon. This is, after all, a website for the preservation of the theatrical cuts of the Original Trilogy: I’m sure most of our headcanons exclude Han meeting Jabba on Tatooine in ANH and stepping on his tail; or Joh Yowza performing “Jedi Rocks” at Jabba’s Palace in ROTJ. Beyond that, it’s a fanediting website even; a community of people who significantly alter the movies themselves - beyond the extent of just despecialisation - to better fit their headcanon.

It’s all fictional anyway so you can choose whatever you want to consider canon when consuming Star Wars media (or, more extreme, do what some fanfiction writers do, and come up with your own version of what you think should happen, entirely divorced from any official material!). Official canon is just for Lucasfilm to worry about when they’re making new stuff. We’ve seen they’re not afraid to bring in plenty of stuff from Legends; or even outright copy Legends reference book material into canon with minor adjustments.

Part of me wishes the canon separation had occurred earlier, because TCW Seasons 1-6 being Legends canon was quite disruptive to the previously existing ~2003-2007 Clone Wars stories that had been told, and characters like Ahsoka just awkwardly never show up again in the Legends timeline. Consequently, when I’m consuming older Legends material (like the ROTS novelisation) I just ignore that TCW is Legends canon entirely. At least modern Lucasfilm cares more about franchise-wide timeline consistency than Lucas himself ever did.

The idea that Luke, Leia, Han, Lando and the Rebel Alliance generation achieved nothing because of the ST is ludicrous. They achieved nearly thirty years of peace and freedom. The First Order then only takes control of the galaxy for about a year before they and the Sith Eternal are defeated. For all of real human history there have been periods of war followed by periods of peace, ultimately followed by periods of war, and so on. Just because the OT generation don’t succeed in ending all war in the Star Wars universe for all time doesn’t mean what they did was pointless. TLJ is quite explicit in its theme of “we are what they grow beyond” - one generation can’t fix everything, but so long as each subsequent generation can learn from some of the mistakes of their ancestors and move forwards, we ultimately achieve progress. Just like real human civilisation.

The book From A Certain Point of View (the ANH one) implies that Force Ghosts exist outside linear time and can literally perceive the future.

They just don’t care.

On an unrelated note - I’m sure you’re all as interested in minutia about the reused footage from the previous two movies in the visions in TROS as I am, so here’s some colour grading comparisons:

• this shot from TLJ has been heavily greened and really pushes the magenta saturation up, making Kylo look like he’s been experimenting with pink lipstick.
• TROS’ love for blues is apparent in how this shot from TLJ has been altered.
• Even footage from TFA isn’t safe from acquiring a heavy green cast.
• Han getting stabbed, on the other hand, is much more orange in TROS compared to how magenta it was in TFA.
• I grabbed the wrong frame here but the pit demonstrates the same green cast as the earlier shot of Luke.
• This shot of Luke is not only flipped horizontally, but also from an alternate take vs. TFA.
• This shot of Kylo might seem like reused footage from literally minutes prior, but it’s actually unique to the vision and doesn’t appear in the real Mustafar Minute.

33,(366700033)…, which is not a Real number

Doesn’t look complex to me 😉

I believe 23.976 is achieved by an extremely slight slowdown but it’s really insignificant. It’s grandfathered in from a time when it did matter, and now it’s just standard. You can adjust a 23.976 rip to play back at 24, if you really want, but you’ll have to slightly adjust the audio also or it’ll slowly drift out of sync.

After Luke blows up Rey’s hut, I’m 85% sure it’s still intact in the wide shots of their fight.

Hmm, it’s executed well, but as eyerollingly on-the-nose as the original writing is, saying she’s all the Jedi ties it in more closely to the voices she’s heard and, in this edit, the ghosts. She’s pointing out to Palpatine that he’s not just facing a “scavenger girl”, but rather someone who is channeling all the previous Jedi - she’s been a Jedi all movie, but it’s only towards the end there where she really tunes in to that wider legacy. (Mace Windu was a Jedi and it didn’t help him much against the lightning.)

Ah, so that’s the deleted scene they’ve been holding out on releasing. Does all Star Wars time travel induce a Swedish accent? I hope Mando season 3 explores this crucial question.

Adding Rey to Episode I would be a brave move indeed.

The thing is, if you put the Maul scene anywhere other than at the very start, that implies it’s chronologically located between whatever two episodes are before and after it. Where it is, the “months earlier” makes it very apparent that it’s a flash forward - a “you’re probably wondering how we got here”-type device - whereas if you put it at the end of Death Watch or similar you’d have to have a “months later” before and a “months earlier” afterwards or something… and then presumably we’re going to see that footage again when it naturally comes up in the series anyway. I think the idea of using it as a pre-show framing device is fun but not entirely necessary, but pulling it only part of the way forward would just be really confusing. Bringing some order to the disorientating, unchronological order of the original show is one of the appeals of this restructuring for me.

Redub Kylo Ren.

15.ai

Edit:
Another fantastic idea - have Kylo Ren break the fourth wall and complain about TROS.

I would be strongly opposed to cuts to the scene of Anakin and Ahsoka sitting together after the battle. I think it’s probably the most valuable part of the episode for the show as a whole.

I don’t think there’s much point in trying to drag out the mystery of whether Anakin will take Ahsoka as a padawan because… of course he will. Even if you sit someone down who’s never heard of the show before, they’d probably gather that you don’t introduce a character in the pilot and then have them spend an entire episode bonding with one of the other main characters just for them to then get rejected and leave the show.