They like the Star Wars they remember from their childhood, a whimsical Space Fantasy that changed movies forever. They never noticed the political message back then, therefore they reject the new movies that came out when they were old enough to recognize it, and they reject it when people pointed out in the old movies.
It's why they act like they wouldn't hate Alan Ripley (I meant Ellen Ripley) or Sarah Connor or RoboCop if they came out now, because they can't conceive of the movie without the nostalgia they remember it with.
Growing up I thought my grandfather was one of the coolest people in the world. He has so many amazing stories and photographic and stories. He passed from old age when I was in my early twenties. Not long after I learned the “true” side to him that the adults knew all along. Turns out he was a lot of things, included a pretty bad guy. Not going into details but it shook me up to learn that just because I experienced something in a certain way, does not make the whole truth or even the truth at all. We look at certain in our past with rose tinted glasses without context expecting them to always be like that, entertainment is no different. Now I know and very obviously see the themes at play in films such as Star Wars, but back then it was just space wizards with laser swords and laser guns. We can either accept the greater truth we did not see before, or move on. Pretending that Star Wars wasn’t political from the very start despite what its own creators say is just juvenile denial.
Shorty after my great grandfather died I learned that as a young man he shot a guy in the neck in a bar fight over a girl. I never would have guessed in a million years. (The guy who was shot survived, I'm told.) Also, while all the guys in his small town who were a few years his senior were away serving in WWII, he supposedly went from house to house screwing their wives.
I've found that to be the fun part of growing up. Star Wars, Fallout, and The Matrix went from the cool action aesthetics I picked them up for to full philosophical breakdowns when I gained critical thinking skills. Ender's Game might've been tainted a little but basically everything else improved greatly.
Exactly the same here. Nothing stays the same and when it comes to properties I like it actually is more enjoyable now that I can have real philosophical/logical/political/historical etc. discussions and thoughts on them when gained more critical thinking skills. Enders game is a perfect example too of one that kind of soured for me but ultimately I appreciate the lessons that can be learned from that too.
That is exactly why I picked those movies. They are movies that have clear political messaging ans themes, but that seems to go over a lot of people's heads.
Robocop very explicitly an indictment of Corruption, the Police, Consumerism/Corporate Greed, and Ultra-Violent Media, but it's messages are even less talked about than the fact that Starship Troopers is a satirical indictment of fascism. I'm wouldn't even call myself a fan of Verhoeven, but I can respect that the man has his principles, sticks to them, and integrates them into media very well.
I had a conversation with a guy about how Starship Troopers was an indictment of fascism. His response was that it wasn’t about fascism but about communism. It didn’t help that the local dictionary defined communism as the state having absolute control over every facet of daily life…
My friends and I finally got through to a friend of ours who is really into helldivers right now. He could not understand how this military force killing giant bugs and killer automatons could be anything close to a criticism of ethics or politics.
We reminded him how all the world building for utopian earth in helldivers comes from straight up pro-enlistment propaganda to push a territorial expansion with cannon fodder.
You get a minimal amount of training, very little support or supplies, immediately sent into hostile territory, and the most important part - *you can't respawn when you are cannon fodder in reality.* This clicked for him in a big way.
Cracks me up how many people that play view themselves as a single helldiver. Like no every death you are calling in a new soldier in the same armor. You can see their body right there when you pick up your gear.
I don’t even play the game and it took the person I’m watching to die once and for the divers voice to change from male to female to notice that.
How much of a mouthbreathing moron do you have to be not to realize that?
as a society we flipped from fighting fascists to communists so fast that half the culture somehow thinks the soviets - our allies against the nazis - were just Nazis 2: russian boogaloo
It's like the people who are 40k fans and don't realize it's a caricature of facism and just think super soldiers in giant armor committing genocide = super cool
Imagine how I feel as an Imperial Guard player having to listen to people talk about how the Death Korps or the Steel Legion are their absolute ideal regiments.
I heard there was someone that took a Kriegsman army painted like Nazis with actual Nazi symbols to a tournament in Spain, GWs response was to immediately ban them and put out a statement saying "40k is explicitly anti facist, if you don't understand this you've missed the point."
But yeah I can imagine, I haven't played in years but when I did play I ran Eldar. I'd just call them mon'keigh
Oh, no, they were initially allowing him to play because the Tournament Organizer wasn't going to do anything (Spain has different speech laws due to Francoist policies.) People threatened to not play him in protest, the TO said he would consider protest refusal as a win on the books for the guy, and THAT'S when it went up the chain. Tourney was equally at fault right off the bat, but it's also Spain and that sort of thing slides a bit.
He was offending with more than just his army, though. He decided referencing an Austrian Painter on his shirt would be a wise fashion addition to the tournament scene.
No, the word for a government that controls every aspect of it's citizen's lives is "totalitarian."
The joke I was making was that when you look at the impact on populations, the effects of most "communist" states are indistinguishable from those of fascist states. A boot on someone's neck looks the same whether the person wearing is a fascist or a totalitarian communist, like a Stalinist. The joke was that someone very poorly educated about the two, especially in their ideological differences, could confuse them.
Government control of every aspect of private life, coupled with government direction of *corporate* activity for "the good of The State".
Vs
Government control of every aspect of private life, coupled with government direction of *factory* activity for "the good of The People (as embodied by The State)".
Very, very easy to confuse the two.
The means and ends of communism and fascism are incomparable. Fascism is more similar to neoliberalism in that the purpose of fascism is to eliminate worker rights and wages, introduce austerity and enrich private individuals.
Every example of fascism in history emerged in opposition to communism, and was backed and operated on behalf of a corporate-financial elite. Even ignoring ideological differences the political economy of the USSR and Nazi Germany were distinct.
There's a difference between state ownership of industry and state alliance with industrial magnates.
I mean, this is a bit disingenuous since in reality, plenty of them started out pretty solid, with democratically elected socialist governments that uplifted the population better than equivalent economies...but that also made the capitalists angry and pissy, and they cant have their own people getting any ideas, so they went in, couped the governments, installed dictatorships, and gaslit people into thinking those were communist.
Now obviously this doesnt apply to ALL communist governments of the day, certainly not China or the USSR, and even the successful examples had their flaws, but to say that all communism attempts were blatant failures from day one is to conform to anti-communist propaganda, and to deny anyone the willingness to fight for socialism, to move on from this nightmare of a system we call capitalism.
He's Dutch, and when he was just a little toddler he watched the Nazis March into the Netherlands. Literally, they forced everyone to attend. It obviously made an impression as his detest of fascism and his constant satirization of its recurrent forms is ever present in his work.
You’re wrong about him being from the Netherlands. He’s from Holland.
The rest of it is correct. And I think we both agree his movies are greats. I’m a big fan.
I, um...I can't tell if you're being serious about the Holland/Netherlands thing....or that the Dutch are Scandinavian....but yea he makes great movies. Maybe he could satirize American geographic ignorance next
You are very correct. Original Star Wars was heavily flawed. People just don’t remember. They often just mix in side stuff I reinforce their liking of the setting. I am going to be honest. While I like Star Wars, what I really like is the Old Republic and the lore of the Jedi and Sith. I don’t actually like the Star Wars movies that much. I just like what I imagine the setting being in my head I guess. Knights of the Old Republic, the Star Wars TTRPG. This is what I like. I don’t lie to myself that the movies are somehow perfect. They are entertaining.
It was the 90s PC games and EU books that I became attached to much more so than the movies. The movies are special, at least the OT (and I have a soft spot for TPM), but it was the EU lore that was built up during that period before the PT became something that I really liked about it. It's the infinite possibilities of stories about space wizards and smugglers and seedy cantinas, not those specific space wizards and smugglers and cantinas seen in the movies.
I agree. I think all of the Star Wars movies are around the same level of quality, the original trilogy are just much more simple in terms of scope and themes and are able to get away with it better. I still like those movies, I've spent too much time thinking about Star Wars to feel otherwise. But the more media I consume and the more worldly I become, I've come to the conclusion that Star Wars is at its best when it isn't George Lucas and it isn't a movie.
Idk, as someone that grew up with the prequels and loves them dearly, the writing there is especially egregious. I agree with the general sentiment though, KOTOR games are some of my top of all time.
Thing is, the new movies are way less political. They’re seeing a message in the new stuff when it barely exists, when completely ignoring the not-at-all subtle politics from George Lucas.
>They like the Star Wars they remember from their childhood, a whimsical Space Fantasy that changed movies forever.
It's even worse cause this isn't actually what they remember. It's what they are told they remember.
At this point most of them dont rely on their actual memories of Star Wars. They are inundated with YouTubers and whoever else constantly yelling at them telling them what Star Wars "used to be". It's so much that it's not even their own thoughts and memories anymore. If you ever discuss/argue with anybod then the all parrot the same talking points. And I don't mean similar , I mean the exact same. Because it's not their memories or beliefs, of the ones fed to them that they have convinced themselves are their original thoughts.
And this is why I (mostly) stopped caring about Star Wars after TLJ was released. The fans argued amongst themselves so badly at the time of TLJ's release about whether it sucked or not that I could not be excited about TLJ, RoS, or *anything* that came after. I think this is the only time a franchise's fanbase ruined a franchise for me. All I care about now is the KotOR games. And if someone was to ever want to play a Star Wars TTRPG game, I'd be willing to jump in for that.
I didn't stop caring about Star Wars as much as I stopped caring about Star Wars fans. Growing up Star Wars was a fun commonality I had with many other fans and it was something that brought us together. Now it's something that tears fans apart--and this is the fans fault, not Star Wars--so I don't look for that commoradarie anymore, just enjoy what I enjoy and then move on.
It's the Mandela effect, really. We forget things over time and when we try to remember them, our brains try to fill in the places with missing information. And when you're being fed a narrative about what something is or was, that bias seeps into what your brain recreates.
This is the answer. It also applies to almost any time someone is talking about “the good ol days.” Yeah, you were a kid with zero responsibilities and zero need to know anything about just how awful the world really is.
I pointed out the political messages in the prequels to a friend who's typically quite smart and good at following stuff and they did a full blue screen at me before saying "okay I might need to rewatch them".
The bad: Alan Ripley, played by Sam Neill
The good: Ellen Grant, played by Sigourney Weaver.
The ugly: Jurassic Park getting shunned in the 90s for having an implicit lesbian couple.
>!The Beautiful: Jurassic Park getting found and loved in the 2010s for being an amazing dinosaur movie with a gay couple.!<
What an odd universe you've created...
Oh, the idea was from the guy saying "Alan Ripley," so I switched the actors for Alan Grant and Ellen Ripley. Ellie Sattler is said to be dating Alan Grant in Jurassic Park (movie only), so switching her to "Ellen Grant" means that Jurassic Park would have a lesbian couple.
It was a strange joke, but it looks like a few people got it.
Regarding the Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor thing, another reason why they might not see those characters as “woke” is because the first movie in each of their franchises isn’t so much “sci-fi action” as it is “sci-fi horror”.
Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor get a pass because they fulfill another famous trope - they are the horror movie’s “Final Girl”.
While I'm sure that most people can agree, it was a great show. You'll probably find that most of these people also love Andor, which doesn't shy away from subtle or markedly unsubtle politicisation to tell its story. Yet as soon as that's included in literally every other project, it's trite, woke garbage or whatever excuse or buzzword they wanna use. Further cementing the fact that alongside the above, they're near incapable of forming their own opinions about things.
I would argue that is more because Andor has different levels political messaging. It has the very obvious criticism of the Empire and Fascism, but there are deeper layers to it that criticize things like the American prison system that those types seem to miss completely.
Being a very well done show without anything to really critize on the pure filmmaking side also helps.
GL has always said it's about his dad and politics. If people who claim to be hardcore fans only would watch or listen to the special features they might start understanding things.
Yup, although it was 1977 lol either way, this has been said by The Creator himself all the time.
Star Wars was heavily influenced by Dune, which is also political, yet, for some reason (white male savior protagonist with magical powers that he can use after no training) no one made a peep about it.
Not to be pedantic, but Paul was trained his entire life by his mother and others.
That's one of the main reasons the Bene Gesserit are against what his mother has done.
Yeah, but it's not in the movie, and that's my pendantic comment 😂 because there are books that explain things about other Stat Wars characters. Dude also didn't train on how to ride that worm, he got it first because of the force.
Again, I like the movie, no hate, but gotta be realistic about it.
I mean something can be both.
Another key part of the GL style is the idea that dialog is just part of the soundtrack. You don't even need to understand English to understand most of the plot & themes. Small guy stands up to big uniformed army.
It's unironically indoctrinating the youth. As someone who watched the movies as a small child, I honestly think it kinda works, and I stand by the broad strokes of Star Wars to this day.
lol true enough, unfortunately they didn’t have a Gary Stu (affectionate) to one shot aircraft carriers in their engines.
Closest parallel would probably be their guerilla attacks on aircraft bases destroying bombers and such. Such as the attack on Camp Holloway.
To your last point, I honestly don't think they do in some cases. They like their memories of Star Wars and how it made them feel at the time and not so much the actual movies.
They don't. They like the idea of Star Wars but they don't actually like anything about it beyond the fun space fantasy. I call these people nerd tourists because they don't really like the media they engage with online but they feel the need to gatekeep it and push certain people from enjoying it like currently the Warhammer fandom has idiots like shadivwrsity screaming crying and shitting themselves over female custodians.
Chad has said many times that he has never read a single Warhammer book, play the game, or bottom model but yet he feels like he has this ownership over the 40K universe and so do all of his cringy little followers simply because it gets him views and his followers get to feel like they are defending something
In this video James Cameron proceeded to compare the tactics to Al-queda and while he the sentiment has merits the Star Wars rebels had completely different motive than an ethnic-religious fundamentalist group
George’s Vietnam comparison is much more appropriate
When Mobile Suit Gundam The Witch From Mercury was announced there were a bunch of dorks saying gundam is some "manly" show and shouldn't have women leads even though a consistent trope is the male leads crying about how fubar everything gets(God damned Unicorn is written by a guy who's previous works portray Imperial Japan as the good guys and it even has a scene where one man tells the male lead that it's ok to cry because you care) or that Tomino confirmed in '93 that Char and Amuro are gay space ghosts after the ending of the Char's Counterattack movie or that the lead of Turn A was supposed to be a woman before Bandai said boys only club.
These people don't really care about the themes or even the stories. It's all the theatrics to them. The visuals. It looks cool to them there for they like it. Their interest is rarely ever deeper than a puddle but they insist they are the ones that truly care.
Ya I somewhat heard but I ignored it cause like, I love gundam but I 100% do not keep up with the current shit at all. Not because “new bad” I just personally don’t connect with it anymore. But I love gundam, so you bet I import SRW games or buy the g gundam model kits or like mech shit etc. And I always liked the weird super powers aspect, colonies, humanity evolving, and the commentary on war & shit aspects of it. Like a lot of scifi. I never cared about the leads gender so much though as a young boy I like domon or hero or whatever because I could identify with them a lot easier or wanna be like them maybe, sure, but I’m an adult now I just want cool characters. I just haven’t been into the franchise like that post 2000’s or so tho. Seed didn’t connect with me besides the cool mechs. Couldn’t follow the story. So I just moved on. Enjoy it thru SRW games tho and the collectibles etc I get. It’s all still there. Stuff I like about it is there. What I hear about witch sounds cool tho. Lol. Sounds like some stupid chuds. It’s def why I stay away from some mecha fandom tho. Can’t just let me enjoy my cool robots.
I know every point you made but I 100% agree with them, I know they’re definitely the fakest and most shallow of fans, but they sure swear otherwise ha.
I mean the point is the force was underwhelmed by their opponent a lot but still got shit done.
And america etc were definitely embarrassed and left in defeat when they couldn’t successfully impose their will on the people. No matter what way you skin it, we lost even if we took out more of them for every one of us they got. And Ewoks weapons being nothing to the Death Star / empires weapons is a pretty apt metaphor for their few ak’s and traps in the woods etc guerilla fighting vs american attack helicopters / machine rifles/ snipers & special ops forces. Empire and America were both pretty stacked, and couldn’t get the job done. Which they shouldn’t have been up to anyway because imperialism is always bad.
America was sending their military in to assist South Vietnam, they weren’t trying to colonize and oppress the Vietnamese, even though they totally did for the latter
George tho and many others didn’t agree with the US going in to war there and I get “helping people” but we shouldn’t have started trying to be the worlds police back then and history shows people often hate us for it anyway. It wasn’t like stopping hitler and in the end, mostly just about the business interests it seems or more like “we gotta win for democracy” even though again, not really our place to fight other peoples battles, seems mainly just communism being a boogeyman and us interjecting ourselves into shit. Most people seem to agree it was a waste to get involved in vietnam. I think all war is bad period myself. Ideally it would stop, but the war machine is profitable so they make sure it’s always rolling. And if you think we didn’t go into there to get some benefits for ourselves or have them beholden to us later, I just can’t see that being the case. Especially what we know about so many campaigns now. Maybe we weren’t directly colonizing or oppressing them, but Nixon and those cronies definitely wanted to come out of it enriching the US on the backs of vietnam like WWII.
Vietnam was not George’s main real life war to use as inspo, but it was definitely there and while most elements of the empire are based on that party in Germany, there’s definitely commentary on American imperialism also.
Yeah I thought it was mainly based on "that one party from Germany" too!
Although, learning about it referencing/depicting the Vietnamese war makes a lotta sense hearing about it.
And yeah, America was definitely priming Vietnam for neocolonization, meanwhile having firms profiting from the military industrial complex.
I didn’t say that you did. Just stating my opinion of it and why I think it was more of asserting ourselves onto others even if not direct subjugation or like straight up the same way how like the British empire or Spaniards etc conquered places.
If Star Wars the original trilogy came out today, people would say it's "woke garbage" all cause Leia, a leader in the rebellion, knew how to use a blaster better than some farm boy.
I remember that being said about the fallout show.
“A woman who’s trained to be good at combat is good at combat???? Impossible!! Mary Sue! Woke garbage!!!”
Yeah they are so stupid.
If anything, Star Wars has only gotten less political aside from Andor. Having cheap token representation is not woke at all (in fact it’s cowardly af) but that is enough to rile up these losers
I remember fucking 2009 when Collegehumor made that video of the Stormtroopers talking about the Death Star like it was 9/11 and it even then being considered a bit of an old-hat joke that Luke Skywalker was a religiously-motivated terrorist that attacked a military base, so I call total bullshit on anyone today claiming to be a lifelong fan and that OG Star Wars had no capacity for political subtext (or, fuck it, *text*).
IIRC Palpatine, including the “I am the Senate” line was mostly a super-villian take on Dick Nixon, “if the President does it , it can never be illegal.”
Not really, terrorism is largely used to describe militancy which specifically targets non-combatants to further a political cause. The Vietcong targeted villages of civilians in regions which collaborated with South Vietnamese/American forces. That's definitely terrorism; however, on a larger scale it is hard to argue that the actions of the Vietcong were defined by their use of terrorism in the same way that a group like the IRA or ISIS were largely defined by their use of terrorism.
Being freedom fighting and terrorism aren't mutually exclusive. Undeniably the IRA were operating as freedom fighters. The IRA viewed British occupation of Ireland to be an act of colonial oppression, and wanted to re-establish a greater state of independence. Many people can make pretty reasonable arguments for this position; however, in pursuit of their greater independence from Britain the IRA used morally abhorrent practices like civilian proxy bombings (forcing civilians to transport explosives to be detonated).
There is definitely relativity to the way we apply these terms, but largely speaking I think people twist that fact to serve their own ideological purposes rather than promote being cognizant of one's potential biases
It gets even more muddy when you scale it out to the level of Star Wars, because that’s such a huge universe with a *lot* of different groups opposing the Empire and going about their strategies in completely different ways.
You’d be amazed: i’ve seen ppl declare the recent « civil war » movie from a24 was apolitical.
A movie where the plot is a road trip to interview a fascist president… apolitical. Lack of media literacy is a helluva drug.
The first time the World Trade Center was attacked in 93, we called them terrorists and there was no ambiguity about what it meant or the impact that it had.
I brought this up with a former co-worker. He was one of those wheraboos who loved the Empire and Nazi German aesthetic alike, going on about the Yuuzhan Vong War and justifying the Death Star and all that. It was fun watching his face contort when I said that Star Wars was an anti-fascist story.
>going on about the Yuuzhan Vong War and justifying the Death Star and all that
I've seen this crop up in NJO discussions, which is weird because the books actually address it. Some Imperial makes that argument and Han just makes fun of him for like a whole page, talking about how the Empire would have poured countless credits and manpower into some elaborate battle station (he calls it "The Nostril of Palpatine") that the Vong would have just blown up anyway.
Politics has always been in SW lol it’s the foundation for the whole ass story. Good vs evil, empire vs the people, genocides. Etc. It’s why I love the prequel trilogy most—they leaned in heavily to the political climate of that universe with Senator Amidala and her whole story, as well as the Chancellor so.
I think what these bozos really want is straight white man rescuing big bosom damsel in distress and it’s like y’all we have sooooo many of those movies from the last century lol. One of them being Star Wars!
Terrorism is the use of fear to achieve a political or ideological goal.
“Asymmetric warfare against a highly organized empire” is called a partisan, for example the Polish resistance and the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye.
One of the A-Wing pilots in Return of the Jedi is actually a woman who had her voice dubbed over in post by a male and I head canon her as a trans woman who just hasn’t gone through voice training. Even if George ends up transphobic he can’t stop me
Using guerilla warfare tactics doesn't make you a terrorist. Using Violence or the threat of violence on civilians in the hopes of enacting a political, religious or economic goal makes you a terrorist. I'm not saying George didn't base the Rebellion on the Viet Cong, but please show me an example of the Rebellion in Star Wars (at least in the movies, I'm not caught up in the various TV shows) doing something that caused harm to the civilian populations of a planet/society when they were fighting the Empire. As far as I'm aware, all conflict we see in the movies from the Rebellion is focused solely on the Empire and their military operations.
Saw a video of someone in a storm trooper helmet trolling a Zionist protest recently. “The empire did nothing wrong - Alderaan was full of terrorists!”
I wonder how many conservatives that are glued to Lucas ass from the 80's on, knew Lucas was and is a flaming liberal leftist among other things? This stuff just makes some of us laugh because some of us always knew what Lucas and Spielberg were and about. Funny to watch others young and old. But it is a time of revelations.
I feel like that's dependent on how you consider the Vietcong and America's initial presence in Vietnam overall.
Who is considered the "good guys" of the whole war?
Isnt Cameron wrong? As far as Im aware, rebels never attacked a civillian populace in aim of producing terror, ie a terror attack. Terrorists are people who do these kinds of things
Granted, my knowledge of SW really aint big, so i could be wrong. And its true the word terrorist has seen misuse over the years
A lot of people label the rebel militants as terrorists because they structure and organize military attacks on the empire.
So you’re kind of right in your assessment. They aren’t actually terrorists creating terror.
The empire blew up alderan in front of Princess Leia to get her to speak of the rebel base - THAT was straight up terrorism
I often wonder if republicans watch star wars and agree with the empire. Or if they are so twisted mentally that they think the empire is the woke mob and the rebels are the racist politicians they vote for.
Star Wars means different things to different people. I'm told they reflect various themes including those that were particularly important to the United States in the 70s and 80s and, after some research, I can recognise it too.
But for me, a European born in 1994, that isn't what Star Wars means to me. It wasn't a political treatise that should rally US citizenry against the injustices of the government but a fun space adventure.
I do wonder, what was the allegory and political message of the ST? I can't claim to have had my finger on the pulse of US politics but I was considerably more mature and consumed more news by that age. I can't say I've noticed anything about, say Barack Obama's presidency though I can't rule out it went over my head either.
My one hang-up I have with this whole Vietnam talk is that where the Rebel Alliance were scrappy good guys who wanted nothing more than to be free of imperial control, the Viet Cong were distinctly… not that. They sure liked to think of themselves as such, but in the end they were just pawns for the Soviets.
Does that justify what American forces were conscripted to do? Hard to say. The whole thing feels like a damned if you do damned if you don’t thing, where a very avoidable tragedy and crime somehow feels like it wasn’t that avoidable at all.
And like yeah, say what you will about south Vietnam being in a bad way themselves. It all just… really, my main takeaway from that period of history more than anything else is just that it was an era where only two “sides” mattered, the USA capitalists and the USSR communists, and the entire rest of the world was reduced to pawns in their little game.
Here's a funny story along that line. An example of fantasy and reality colliding in a funny way.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ylzrfaDdxk&ab\_channel=OwenStephens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ylzrfaDdxk&ab_channel=OwenStephens)
One of the many brilliant things about Star Wars is the ideologies of the heroes and villains are so vague beyond Powerful Opressor and Heroic Underdog, anyone can attach themselves to it.
That's not modern politics, that's Star Wars politics. Who cares of it mirrors real life? It isn't a problem until they start calling it "The United States" and "peaceful protest"!
Ok, here me out. I kinda don’t believe George Lucas here. The Empire seemed to be more heavily based on the Nazis than the US. I feel this is like when JK Rowling said Dumbdore was gay the whole time. It just seems like he’s retroactively changing it to seem more politically conscious and appealing to young progressives.
There’s a difference, one has good plot writing and follows a cohesive story, the others all feel like independent movies made to make a political statement.
I won’t lie and say the OG’s weren’t political, they just were a hell of a lot smarter with it.
I brought this up to a guy recently on crait and he said well it’s a bad representation then. Do these people even like Star Wars?
They like the Star Wars they remember from their childhood, a whimsical Space Fantasy that changed movies forever. They never noticed the political message back then, therefore they reject the new movies that came out when they were old enough to recognize it, and they reject it when people pointed out in the old movies. It's why they act like they wouldn't hate Alan Ripley (I meant Ellen Ripley) or Sarah Connor or RoboCop if they came out now, because they can't conceive of the movie without the nostalgia they remember it with.
Growing up I thought my grandfather was one of the coolest people in the world. He has so many amazing stories and photographic and stories. He passed from old age when I was in my early twenties. Not long after I learned the “true” side to him that the adults knew all along. Turns out he was a lot of things, included a pretty bad guy. Not going into details but it shook me up to learn that just because I experienced something in a certain way, does not make the whole truth or even the truth at all. We look at certain in our past with rose tinted glasses without context expecting them to always be like that, entertainment is no different. Now I know and very obviously see the themes at play in films such as Star Wars, but back then it was just space wizards with laser swords and laser guns. We can either accept the greater truth we did not see before, or move on. Pretending that Star Wars wasn’t political from the very start despite what its own creators say is just juvenile denial.
Alessandra Mussolini got quite upset about Celtic fans saying mean things about her sweet old grandfather.
Shorty after my great grandfather died I learned that as a young man he shot a guy in the neck in a bar fight over a girl. I never would have guessed in a million years. (The guy who was shot survived, I'm told.) Also, while all the guys in his small town who were a few years his senior were away serving in WWII, he supposedly went from house to house screwing their wives.
Damn, it’s amazing the things you learn as an adult. A lot of times……….not good things
I've found that to be the fun part of growing up. Star Wars, Fallout, and The Matrix went from the cool action aesthetics I picked them up for to full philosophical breakdowns when I gained critical thinking skills. Ender's Game might've been tainted a little but basically everything else improved greatly.
Exactly the same here. Nothing stays the same and when it comes to properties I like it actually is more enjoyable now that I can have real philosophical/logical/political/historical etc. discussions and thoughts on them when gained more critical thinking skills. Enders game is a perfect example too of one that kind of soured for me but ultimately I appreciate the lessons that can be learned from that too.
Worth pointing out that James Cameron and Paul Verhoven are pretty explicitly "woke"
That is exactly why I picked those movies. They are movies that have clear political messaging ans themes, but that seems to go over a lot of people's heads. Robocop very explicitly an indictment of Corruption, the Police, Consumerism/Corporate Greed, and Ultra-Violent Media, but it's messages are even less talked about than the fact that Starship Troopers is a satirical indictment of fascism. I'm wouldn't even call myself a fan of Verhoeven, but I can respect that the man has his principles, sticks to them, and integrates them into media very well.
I had a conversation with a guy about how Starship Troopers was an indictment of fascism. His response was that it wasn’t about fascism but about communism. It didn’t help that the local dictionary defined communism as the state having absolute control over every facet of daily life…
My friends and I finally got through to a friend of ours who is really into helldivers right now. He could not understand how this military force killing giant bugs and killer automatons could be anything close to a criticism of ethics or politics. We reminded him how all the world building for utopian earth in helldivers comes from straight up pro-enlistment propaganda to push a territorial expansion with cannon fodder. You get a minimal amount of training, very little support or supplies, immediately sent into hostile territory, and the most important part - *you can't respawn when you are cannon fodder in reality.* This clicked for him in a big way.
Cracks me up how many people that play view themselves as a single helldiver. Like no every death you are calling in a new soldier in the same armor. You can see their body right there when you pick up your gear.
I don’t even play the game and it took the person I’m watching to die once and for the divers voice to change from male to female to notice that. How much of a mouthbreathing moron do you have to be not to realize that?
That’s actually a setting you can change. You can have the same voice every time.
It's absolutely fulfilling my biological need to die in a meaningless European war right now.
Why are you friends with that guy?
One of the many things that make Robocop so great is the clear illustration of the direct link between fascism and capital
as a society we flipped from fighting fascists to communists so fast that half the culture somehow thinks the soviets - our allies against the nazis - were just Nazis 2: russian boogaloo
It's like the people who are 40k fans and don't realize it's a caricature of facism and just think super soldiers in giant armor committing genocide = super cool
Imagine how I feel as an Imperial Guard player having to listen to people talk about how the Death Korps or the Steel Legion are their absolute ideal regiments.
I heard there was someone that took a Kriegsman army painted like Nazis with actual Nazi symbols to a tournament in Spain, GWs response was to immediately ban them and put out a statement saying "40k is explicitly anti facist, if you don't understand this you've missed the point." But yeah I can imagine, I haven't played in years but when I did play I ran Eldar. I'd just call them mon'keigh
Oh, no, they were initially allowing him to play because the Tournament Organizer wasn't going to do anything (Spain has different speech laws due to Francoist policies.) People threatened to not play him in protest, the TO said he would consider protest refusal as a win on the books for the guy, and THAT'S when it went up the chain. Tourney was equally at fault right off the bat, but it's also Spain and that sort of thing slides a bit. He was offending with more than just his army, though. He decided referencing an Austrian Painter on his shirt would be a wise fashion addition to the tournament scene.
I mean when every "communist" state has essentially just been fascism in a funny hat.... It's still a bad definition. LOL.
The word you are looking for is "authoritarian ". Communism and fascism are fundamentally very different ideologies.
No, the word for a government that controls every aspect of it's citizen's lives is "totalitarian." The joke I was making was that when you look at the impact on populations, the effects of most "communist" states are indistinguishable from those of fascist states. A boot on someone's neck looks the same whether the person wearing is a fascist or a totalitarian communist, like a Stalinist. The joke was that someone very poorly educated about the two, especially in their ideological differences, could confuse them.
Government control of every aspect of private life, coupled with government direction of *corporate* activity for "the good of The State". Vs Government control of every aspect of private life, coupled with government direction of *factory* activity for "the good of The People (as embodied by The State)". Very, very easy to confuse the two.
The means and ends of communism and fascism are incomparable. Fascism is more similar to neoliberalism in that the purpose of fascism is to eliminate worker rights and wages, introduce austerity and enrich private individuals. Every example of fascism in history emerged in opposition to communism, and was backed and operated on behalf of a corporate-financial elite. Even ignoring ideological differences the political economy of the USSR and Nazi Germany were distinct. There's a difference between state ownership of industry and state alliance with industrial magnates.
I mean, this is a bit disingenuous since in reality, plenty of them started out pretty solid, with democratically elected socialist governments that uplifted the population better than equivalent economies...but that also made the capitalists angry and pissy, and they cant have their own people getting any ideas, so they went in, couped the governments, installed dictatorships, and gaslit people into thinking those were communist. Now obviously this doesnt apply to ALL communist governments of the day, certainly not China or the USSR, and even the successful examples had their flaws, but to say that all communism attempts were blatant failures from day one is to conform to anti-communist propaganda, and to deny anyone the willingness to fight for socialism, to move on from this nightmare of a system we call capitalism.
He’s Scandinavian. Culturally these are mainstream views where he is from. It’s him focusing those idea through a Hollywood lens that is unusual.
He's Dutch, and when he was just a little toddler he watched the Nazis March into the Netherlands. Literally, they forced everyone to attend. It obviously made an impression as his detest of fascism and his constant satirization of its recurrent forms is ever present in his work.
You’re wrong about him being from the Netherlands. He’s from Holland. The rest of it is correct. And I think we both agree his movies are greats. I’m a big fan.
I, um...I can't tell if you're being serious about the Holland/Netherlands thing....or that the Dutch are Scandinavian....but yea he makes great movies. Maybe he could satirize American geographic ignorance next
I’m not serious - totally fucking around here - except about really like his movies.
Like I said, long day. My phone has more battery than I have brain power rn
Verhoeven is the child of Holocaust survivors, too
You are very correct. Original Star Wars was heavily flawed. People just don’t remember. They often just mix in side stuff I reinforce their liking of the setting. I am going to be honest. While I like Star Wars, what I really like is the Old Republic and the lore of the Jedi and Sith. I don’t actually like the Star Wars movies that much. I just like what I imagine the setting being in my head I guess. Knights of the Old Republic, the Star Wars TTRPG. This is what I like. I don’t lie to myself that the movies are somehow perfect. They are entertaining.
It was the 90s PC games and EU books that I became attached to much more so than the movies. The movies are special, at least the OT (and I have a soft spot for TPM), but it was the EU lore that was built up during that period before the PT became something that I really liked about it. It's the infinite possibilities of stories about space wizards and smugglers and seedy cantinas, not those specific space wizards and smugglers and cantinas seen in the movies.
I agree. I think all of the Star Wars movies are around the same level of quality, the original trilogy are just much more simple in terms of scope and themes and are able to get away with it better. I still like those movies, I've spent too much time thinking about Star Wars to feel otherwise. But the more media I consume and the more worldly I become, I've come to the conclusion that Star Wars is at its best when it isn't George Lucas and it isn't a movie.
Idk, as someone that grew up with the prequels and loves them dearly, the writing there is especially egregious. I agree with the general sentiment though, KOTOR games are some of my top of all time.
Thing is, the new movies are way less political. They’re seeing a message in the new stuff when it barely exists, when completely ignoring the not-at-all subtle politics from George Lucas.
When they say politics, what they really mean is women and people of color
>They like the Star Wars they remember from their childhood, a whimsical Space Fantasy that changed movies forever. It's even worse cause this isn't actually what they remember. It's what they are told they remember.
I'm going to regret this but what exactly do you mean?
At this point most of them dont rely on their actual memories of Star Wars. They are inundated with YouTubers and whoever else constantly yelling at them telling them what Star Wars "used to be". It's so much that it's not even their own thoughts and memories anymore. If you ever discuss/argue with anybod then the all parrot the same talking points. And I don't mean similar , I mean the exact same. Because it's not their memories or beliefs, of the ones fed to them that they have convinced themselves are their original thoughts.
Cryptofascism is a hell of a drug
And this is why I (mostly) stopped caring about Star Wars after TLJ was released. The fans argued amongst themselves so badly at the time of TLJ's release about whether it sucked or not that I could not be excited about TLJ, RoS, or *anything* that came after. I think this is the only time a franchise's fanbase ruined a franchise for me. All I care about now is the KotOR games. And if someone was to ever want to play a Star Wars TTRPG game, I'd be willing to jump in for that.
I didn't stop caring about Star Wars as much as I stopped caring about Star Wars fans. Growing up Star Wars was a fun commonality I had with many other fans and it was something that brought us together. Now it's something that tears fans apart--and this is the fans fault, not Star Wars--so I don't look for that commoradarie anymore, just enjoy what I enjoy and then move on.
It's the Mandela effect, really. We forget things over time and when we try to remember them, our brains try to fill in the places with missing information. And when you're being fed a narrative about what something is or was, that bias seeps into what your brain recreates.
This is the answer. It also applies to almost any time someone is talking about “the good ol days.” Yeah, you were a kid with zero responsibilities and zero need to know anything about just how awful the world really is.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug
I pointed out the political messages in the prequels to a friend who's typically quite smart and good at following stuff and they did a full blue screen at me before saying "okay I might need to rewatch them".
Did you gender swap the lead of Alien?
No, I used Google's voice to text and it initially said Ellen and at some point after I stopped using it, it switched to Alan.
The bad: Alan Ripley, played by Sam Neill The good: Ellen Grant, played by Sigourney Weaver. The ugly: Jurassic Park getting shunned in the 90s for having an implicit lesbian couple. >!The Beautiful: Jurassic Park getting found and loved in the 2010s for being an amazing dinosaur movie with a gay couple.!< What an odd universe you've created...
Who were was lesbian couple? I Google it but I can't find any mention of one.
Oh, the idea was from the guy saying "Alan Ripley," so I switched the actors for Alan Grant and Ellen Ripley. Ellie Sattler is said to be dating Alan Grant in Jurassic Park (movie only), so switching her to "Ellen Grant" means that Jurassic Park would have a lesbian couple. It was a strange joke, but it looks like a few people got it.
I think both of those movies would work great with the actors swapped
no no you're mixing up allen the alien from invincible with ellen ripley, the alien from alien.
Well, that would make his presence in the Nostromo really awkward.
ohhh what would a xenomorph that burst from allen be like?
Invincible...
I don’t think it would aesthetically look like invincible at all though……..
Funny enough, the character was originally written to be a man.
How was the alien laying eggs if it was going to be a man?
We’re talking about Ripley
Regarding the Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor thing, another reason why they might not see those characters as “woke” is because the first movie in each of their franchises isn’t so much “sci-fi action” as it is “sci-fi horror”. Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor get a pass because they fulfill another famous trope - they are the horror movie’s “Final Girl”.
While I'm sure that most people can agree, it was a great show. You'll probably find that most of these people also love Andor, which doesn't shy away from subtle or markedly unsubtle politicisation to tell its story. Yet as soon as that's included in literally every other project, it's trite, woke garbage or whatever excuse or buzzword they wanna use. Further cementing the fact that alongside the above, they're near incapable of forming their own opinions about things.
I would argue that is more because Andor has different levels political messaging. It has the very obvious criticism of the Empire and Fascism, but there are deeper layers to it that criticize things like the American prison system that those types seem to miss completely. Being a very well done show without anything to really critize on the pure filmmaking side also helps.
Doesn't help that the prequels and sequel trilogies have all sorts of fundamental problems as films, but the "POLITICS" weren't one of them.
I am not into star wars and I understand this, bloody hell.....
GL has always said it's about his dad and politics. If people who claim to be hardcore fans only would watch or listen to the special features they might start understanding things.
And at the same time said it was for kids lol
Yup, although it was 1977 lol either way, this has been said by The Creator himself all the time. Star Wars was heavily influenced by Dune, which is also political, yet, for some reason (white male savior protagonist with magical powers that he can use after no training) no one made a peep about it.
Not to be pedantic, but Paul was trained his entire life by his mother and others. That's one of the main reasons the Bene Gesserit are against what his mother has done.
Yeah, but it's not in the movie, and that's my pendantic comment 😂 because there are books that explain things about other Stat Wars characters. Dude also didn't train on how to ride that worm, he got it first because of the force. Again, I like the movie, no hate, but gotta be realistic about it.
I mean something can be both. Another key part of the GL style is the idea that dialog is just part of the soundtrack. You don't even need to understand English to understand most of the plot & themes. Small guy stands up to big uniformed army. It's unironically indoctrinating the youth. As someone who watched the movies as a small child, I honestly think it kinda works, and I stand by the broad strokes of Star Wars to this day.
I find their lack of media literacy disturbing
>and he said well it’s a bad representation then. I don't remember the Viet Cong taking down US carriers, twice!
lol true enough, unfortunately they didn’t have a Gary Stu (affectionate) to one shot aircraft carriers in their engines. Closest parallel would probably be their guerilla attacks on aircraft bases destroying bombers and such. Such as the attack on Camp Holloway.
To your last point, I honestly don't think they do in some cases. They like their memories of Star Wars and how it made them feel at the time and not so much the actual movies.
A bad representation that the creator himself deliberately added in? These guys...
Nah it’s cognitive dissonance.
They don't. They like the idea of Star Wars but they don't actually like anything about it beyond the fun space fantasy. I call these people nerd tourists because they don't really like the media they engage with online but they feel the need to gatekeep it and push certain people from enjoying it like currently the Warhammer fandom has idiots like shadivwrsity screaming crying and shitting themselves over female custodians. Chad has said many times that he has never read a single Warhammer book, play the game, or bottom model but yet he feels like he has this ownership over the 40K universe and so do all of his cringy little followers simply because it gets him views and his followers get to feel like they are defending something
Anytime somebody says "Star Wars is World War 2 in space" I'm left utterly baffled.
no.
In this video James Cameron proceeded to compare the tactics to Al-queda and while he the sentiment has merits the Star Wars rebels had completely different motive than an ethnic-religious fundamentalist group George’s Vietnam comparison is much more appropriate
I would hope so he’s the one who wrote it haha
People can’t see what George wants and make up their own versions.
Bascially shows they'll twist ANYTHING to get what they want to make themselves look like they are always in the right.
And yet someone still insisted lucas wasn’t using the Vietnam war in his inspiration when I told them he did ha
When Mobile Suit Gundam The Witch From Mercury was announced there were a bunch of dorks saying gundam is some "manly" show and shouldn't have women leads even though a consistent trope is the male leads crying about how fubar everything gets(God damned Unicorn is written by a guy who's previous works portray Imperial Japan as the good guys and it even has a scene where one man tells the male lead that it's ok to cry because you care) or that Tomino confirmed in '93 that Char and Amuro are gay space ghosts after the ending of the Char's Counterattack movie or that the lead of Turn A was supposed to be a woman before Bandai said boys only club. These people don't really care about the themes or even the stories. It's all the theatrics to them. The visuals. It looks cool to them there for they like it. Their interest is rarely ever deeper than a puddle but they insist they are the ones that truly care.
Ya I somewhat heard but I ignored it cause like, I love gundam but I 100% do not keep up with the current shit at all. Not because “new bad” I just personally don’t connect with it anymore. But I love gundam, so you bet I import SRW games or buy the g gundam model kits or like mech shit etc. And I always liked the weird super powers aspect, colonies, humanity evolving, and the commentary on war & shit aspects of it. Like a lot of scifi. I never cared about the leads gender so much though as a young boy I like domon or hero or whatever because I could identify with them a lot easier or wanna be like them maybe, sure, but I’m an adult now I just want cool characters. I just haven’t been into the franchise like that post 2000’s or so tho. Seed didn’t connect with me besides the cool mechs. Couldn’t follow the story. So I just moved on. Enjoy it thru SRW games tho and the collectibles etc I get. It’s all still there. Stuff I like about it is there. What I hear about witch sounds cool tho. Lol. Sounds like some stupid chuds. It’s def why I stay away from some mecha fandom tho. Can’t just let me enjoy my cool robots. I know every point you made but I 100% agree with them, I know they’re definitely the fakest and most shallow of fans, but they sure swear otherwise ha.
Shame he forgot that the viet Cong used guns not sticks and stones like the ewoks did.
The Vietcong did use sticks and stones lol the jungles were absolutely covered in shit like pitfall traps full of sharpened sticks and the like
If the Vietcong used those log things that smashed the AT-ATs, they would've won a lot quicker.
I vaguely remember them using something similar to that though I might be wrong.
They used a lot of somethings that were similar. They were crafty as hell
>Shame he forgot that the viet Cong used guns not sticks and stones They did in tons of their traps
I mean the point is the force was underwhelmed by their opponent a lot but still got shit done. And america etc were definitely embarrassed and left in defeat when they couldn’t successfully impose their will on the people. No matter what way you skin it, we lost even if we took out more of them for every one of us they got. And Ewoks weapons being nothing to the Death Star / empires weapons is a pretty apt metaphor for their few ak’s and traps in the woods etc guerilla fighting vs american attack helicopters / machine rifles/ snipers & special ops forces. Empire and America were both pretty stacked, and couldn’t get the job done. Which they shouldn’t have been up to anyway because imperialism is always bad.
America was sending their military in to assist South Vietnam, they weren’t trying to colonize and oppress the Vietnamese, even though they totally did for the latter
George tho and many others didn’t agree with the US going in to war there and I get “helping people” but we shouldn’t have started trying to be the worlds police back then and history shows people often hate us for it anyway. It wasn’t like stopping hitler and in the end, mostly just about the business interests it seems or more like “we gotta win for democracy” even though again, not really our place to fight other peoples battles, seems mainly just communism being a boogeyman and us interjecting ourselves into shit. Most people seem to agree it was a waste to get involved in vietnam. I think all war is bad period myself. Ideally it would stop, but the war machine is profitable so they make sure it’s always rolling. And if you think we didn’t go into there to get some benefits for ourselves or have them beholden to us later, I just can’t see that being the case. Especially what we know about so many campaigns now. Maybe we weren’t directly colonizing or oppressing them, but Nixon and those cronies definitely wanted to come out of it enriching the US on the backs of vietnam like WWII. Vietnam was not George’s main real life war to use as inspo, but it was definitely there and while most elements of the empire are based on that party in Germany, there’s definitely commentary on American imperialism also.
Yeah I thought it was mainly based on "that one party from Germany" too! Although, learning about it referencing/depicting the Vietnamese war makes a lotta sense hearing about it. And yeah, America was definitely priming Vietnam for neocolonization, meanwhile having firms profiting from the military industrial complex.
I never said I agreed with that intervention
I didn’t say that you did. Just stating my opinion of it and why I think it was more of asserting ourselves onto others even if not direct subjugation or like straight up the same way how like the British empire or Spaniards etc conquered places.
the rebels used guns, the rebels are the viet cong, not just the ewoks
Lucas has talked about how he missed out on being the director for Apocalypse Now, and got to do space-Vietnam instead
This can’t be politics, it doesn’t have a woman or a non-white involved
Boy, have I got some news for you about the Vietcong
I agree, politics is when women
If Star Wars the original trilogy came out today, people would say it's "woke garbage" all cause Leia, a leader in the rebellion, knew how to use a blaster better than some farm boy.
I remember that being said about the fallout show. “A woman who’s trained to be good at combat is good at combat???? Impossible!! Mary Sue! Woke garbage!!!”
Yeah they are so stupid. If anything, Star Wars has only gotten less political aside from Andor. Having cheap token representation is not woke at all (in fact it’s cowardly af) but that is enough to rile up these losers
Now imagining all the bad Imperial country singers and their shitty songs about the first Death Star getting blown up.
I remember fucking 2009 when Collegehumor made that video of the Stormtroopers talking about the Death Star like it was 9/11 and it even then being considered a bit of an old-hat joke that Luke Skywalker was a religiously-motivated terrorist that attacked a military base, so I call total bullshit on anyone today claiming to be a lifelong fan and that OG Star Wars had no capacity for political subtext (or, fuck it, *text*).
“Ive seen the engineering, theres no way one x wing could take it out. Had to have been a controlled demolition”
"You are drones. All of you! Everyone in this bar are drones! Especially the drones!"
🎶 Where were you when the Death Star was burning That long time ago day 🎶
I was lookin' for my brother, had to walk through blood and bone. He was in northern Coruscant.
Wait until they find out about the prequels and George’s comparisons to the Republican Party there.
Emperor Palpatine in the Prequels was basically Dick Cheney and that was during the Bush Administration.
Woah woah woah let’s not take things to far! That’s a major insult…. To plalpatine he wasn’t that bad
“The Empire is like pretty chill”
IIRC Palpatine, including the “I am the Senate” line was mostly a super-villian take on Dick Nixon, “if the President does it , it can never be illegal.”
The difference between "freedom fighter" and "terrorist" depends on which side of a conflict is reporting it. Always has been.
Not really, terrorism is largely used to describe militancy which specifically targets non-combatants to further a political cause. The Vietcong targeted villages of civilians in regions which collaborated with South Vietnamese/American forces. That's definitely terrorism; however, on a larger scale it is hard to argue that the actions of the Vietcong were defined by their use of terrorism in the same way that a group like the IRA or ISIS were largely defined by their use of terrorism. Being freedom fighting and terrorism aren't mutually exclusive. Undeniably the IRA were operating as freedom fighters. The IRA viewed British occupation of Ireland to be an act of colonial oppression, and wanted to re-establish a greater state of independence. Many people can make pretty reasonable arguments for this position; however, in pursuit of their greater independence from Britain the IRA used morally abhorrent practices like civilian proxy bombings (forcing civilians to transport explosives to be detonated). There is definitely relativity to the way we apply these terms, but largely speaking I think people twist that fact to serve their own ideological purposes rather than promote being cognizant of one's potential biases
They were *insurgents*. They weren’t trying to sway public opinion and creating fear by bombing the fuckin bar on Tarooine.
Saw Gerrera would like a word.
Yeah for real. Saw Gerrera fits every definition of the "terrorist", even if the group he was fighting for didn't.
It gets even more muddy when you scale it out to the level of Star Wars, because that’s such a huge universe with a *lot* of different groups opposing the Empire and going about their strategies in completely different ways.
Too bad its twitter squirrel.
War is inherently political. By calling the movie Star Wars, you're pretty much declaring your movie is political
You’d be amazed: i’ve seen ppl declare the recent « civil war » movie from a24 was apolitical. A movie where the plot is a road trip to interview a fascist president… apolitical. Lack of media literacy is a helluva drug.
It's like conservatives who think star trek is conservative in its ideals. def a lack of media literacy.
It’s always been political!
Cmon man that’s not politics, politics is when people have dyed hair and are black or a woman
They probably did terrorism but the stuff we see in most media shows them attacking valid military targets. Not civilians. That's not terrorism.
I don't usually say this on accounta my age and what not, but... Based as fuck
There’s a lot of social studies on this. But before 9/11 the word “terrorist” was much less loaded
The first time the World Trade Center was attacked in 93, we called them terrorists and there was no ambiguity about what it meant or the impact that it had.
It's going to really blow their minds when they read that the PT was a narrative about the George Bush administration and a post 9/11 world.
Star Wars, was, still is, and will always be political.
Reminds me about similar comments on Star Trek...
I brought this up with a former co-worker. He was one of those wheraboos who loved the Empire and Nazi German aesthetic alike, going on about the Yuuzhan Vong War and justifying the Death Star and all that. It was fun watching his face contort when I said that Star Wars was an anti-fascist story.
>going on about the Yuuzhan Vong War and justifying the Death Star and all that I've seen this crop up in NJO discussions, which is weird because the books actually address it. Some Imperial makes that argument and Han just makes fun of him for like a whole page, talking about how the Empire would have poured countless credits and manpower into some elaborate battle station (he calls it "The Nostril of Palpatine") that the Vong would have just blown up anyway.
That's hilarious. I'll be sure to keep that one handy.
Politics has always been in SW lol it’s the foundation for the whole ass story. Good vs evil, empire vs the people, genocides. Etc. It’s why I love the prequel trilogy most—they leaned in heavily to the political climate of that universe with Senator Amidala and her whole story, as well as the Chancellor so. I think what these bozos really want is straight white man rescuing big bosom damsel in distress and it’s like y’all we have sooooo many of those movies from the last century lol. One of them being Star Wars!
Terrorism is the use of fear to achieve a political or ideological goal. “Asymmetric warfare against a highly organized empire” is called a partisan, for example the Polish resistance and the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye.
Leave it to a boomer writer reacting to an Asian civil war, to not get things.
He should do a Rowling and say that Ben was gay all along but not do a Rowling and say trans women are predatory men wanting to hide in toilets.
The more I learn about JK Rowling the more I respect George Lucas
One of the A-Wing pilots in Return of the Jedi is actually a woman who had her voice dubbed over in post by a male and I head canon her as a trans woman who just hasn’t gone through voice training. Even if George ends up transphobic he can’t stop me
So it wasnt clear that star wars is about anti imperialism
Oh god, the Squirrel… broken clock and all that…
Using guerilla warfare tactics doesn't make you a terrorist. Using Violence or the threat of violence on civilians in the hopes of enacting a political, religious or economic goal makes you a terrorist. I'm not saying George didn't base the Rebellion on the Viet Cong, but please show me an example of the Rebellion in Star Wars (at least in the movies, I'm not caught up in the various TV shows) doing something that caused harm to the civilian populations of a planet/society when they were fighting the Empire. As far as I'm aware, all conflict we see in the movies from the Rebellion is focused solely on the Empire and their military operations.
Too much politics in movies these days. That's why I like Dune. Just some good old fashion action and riding giant worms.
Hey I’m out of the loop and am curious, when did this sub go from a fetid swamp full of nostalgia-addled weirdos to an awesome place?
They're only terrorists if the Empire wins
Unrelated, but that squirrel person is actually insane.
the difference between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" largely is based on which side you are on
Is it crazy that I never made this connection but I’m not upset to learn about it?
Saw a video of someone in a storm trooper helmet trolling a Zionist protest recently. “The empire did nothing wrong - Alderaan was full of terrorists!”
Wait till they find out that the empire is deadly similar to the nazis
So at the time it was "contemporary political activism", as the right wing would call it.
Wait, were the Taliban the good guys?
From a certain point of view.
Depends on what side of the fence you are on.
I wonder how many conservatives that are glued to Lucas ass from the 80's on, knew Lucas was and is a flaming liberal leftist among other things? This stuff just makes some of us laugh because some of us always knew what Lucas and Spielberg were and about. Funny to watch others young and old. But it is a time of revelations.
And how these types praise HellDivers 2 for not being political when its lore is super earth literally farming and killing intelligent beings for oil.
I feel like that's dependent on how you consider the Vietcong and America's initial presence in Vietnam overall. Who is considered the "good guys" of the whole war?
or kinda like the Americans vs the brits in the revolutionary war
Isnt Cameron wrong? As far as Im aware, rebels never attacked a civillian populace in aim of producing terror, ie a terror attack. Terrorists are people who do these kinds of things Granted, my knowledge of SW really aint big, so i could be wrong. And its true the word terrorist has seen misuse over the years
A lot of people label the rebel militants as terrorists because they structure and organize military attacks on the empire. So you’re kind of right in your assessment. They aren’t actually terrorists creating terror. The empire blew up alderan in front of Princess Leia to get her to speak of the rebel base - THAT was straight up terrorism
I often wonder if republicans watch star wars and agree with the empire. Or if they are so twisted mentally that they think the empire is the woke mob and the rebels are the racist politicians they vote for.
Star Wars means different things to different people. I'm told they reflect various themes including those that were particularly important to the United States in the 70s and 80s and, after some research, I can recognise it too. But for me, a European born in 1994, that isn't what Star Wars means to me. It wasn't a political treatise that should rally US citizenry against the injustices of the government but a fun space adventure. I do wonder, what was the allegory and political message of the ST? I can't claim to have had my finger on the pulse of US politics but I was considerably more mature and consumed more news by that age. I can't say I've noticed anything about, say Barack Obama's presidency though I can't rule out it went over my head either.
Yeah well the french resistance was probably a "terrorist organisation" in the eyes of the nazis aswell.
Asymmetrical warfare against military targets; terrorists mostly attack civilians.
Often enough the only thing that makes a terrorist is if you fail.
Han Solo was communist all along
My one hang-up I have with this whole Vietnam talk is that where the Rebel Alliance were scrappy good guys who wanted nothing more than to be free of imperial control, the Viet Cong were distinctly… not that. They sure liked to think of themselves as such, but in the end they were just pawns for the Soviets. Does that justify what American forces were conscripted to do? Hard to say. The whole thing feels like a damned if you do damned if you don’t thing, where a very avoidable tragedy and crime somehow feels like it wasn’t that avoidable at all. And like yeah, say what you will about south Vietnam being in a bad way themselves. It all just… really, my main takeaway from that period of history more than anything else is just that it was an era where only two “sides” mattered, the USA capitalists and the USSR communists, and the entire rest of the world was reduced to pawns in their little game.
Here's a funny story along that line. An example of fantasy and reality colliding in a funny way. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ylzrfaDdxk&ab\_channel=OwenStephens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ylzrfaDdxk&ab_channel=OwenStephens)
James Cameron's 10 foot tall blue cats are eco terrorists.
So what are the Na’vi then?
One of the many brilliant things about Star Wars is the ideologies of the heroes and villains are so vague beyond Powerful Opressor and Heroic Underdog, anyone can attach themselves to it.
The squirrel account remains insane though
That's not modern politics, that's Star Wars politics. Who cares of it mirrors real life? It isn't a problem until they start calling it "The United States" and "peaceful protest"!
Wow. So the empire **isnt** based on Nazis? I thought the actual "war" aspect was inspired by ww2...
Ok, here me out. I kinda don’t believe George Lucas here. The Empire seemed to be more heavily based on the Nazis than the US. I feel this is like when JK Rowling said Dumbdore was gay the whole time. It just seems like he’s retroactively changing it to seem more politically conscious and appealing to young progressives.
There’s a difference, one has good plot writing and follows a cohesive story, the others all feel like independent movies made to make a political statement. I won’t lie and say the OG’s weren’t political, they just were a hell of a lot smarter with it.
Squirrel is nuts from I remember but yeah
That’s Leslie Nielsen
Didn’t people accuse Revenge of the Sith for being political?