Nice but I meant in the reality I live in, not the one Lucas created.
That’s the interesting thing about all these epic fantasies and fandoms; at the their heart, most are nothing more than glossy, idealized projections and reinterpretations of the existence we already inhabit.
The casino scene, for instance; I was stuck by how many of the guests were still symmetrical bipedal humanoids, no matter what extraterrestrial species they were supposed to have been.
Farther, even:
Oooooook?
beats chest once
Ook.
Space road movie would have been another title Lucas wanted to go for, but which was not chosen because people would have confused it with American graffiti. Which should have been named Highschool Hopes and Grease Hair…
I would posit that they are the same reality, and the only difference is that we experience one directly and the other indirectly. They are both recapitulations of the Hero’s Journey.
right on. Great apes ook alike.
Sorry, there are no “Heroes” with a capital H in the reality I live in; no ‘one great hope’ that’s going to be the salvation of us all. That’s just a fairytale we tell ourselves in order to try to feel better.
Instead, it’s just lots of ordinary “nobodies” who rise to the occasion in times of need who are temporary heroes, with a lowercase h… and sadly, such folks seem farther and fewer between these days.
I know, right? He’s the gaslighter in chief!
And that’s why we like them, why we identify with them and embrace them, because they can be great ways to tell us about ourselves.
You are entitled to that opinion; I just don’t share it.
Fuckin’ A; personally, I’d have slashed the other side his face to make it match, when he started in with that “you’re nothing without me” nonsense.
A man tried to run that game on me once, IRL; it ‘didn’t go the way he thought it would.’
Thanks for that unsolicited permission.
I didn’t ask you to. I repeatedly said “my reality,” as in life as I personally perceive it.
Agreed.
On a slightly serious note: I suppose we do agree that nobody is a nobody, and everybody is a somebody. (Even though Hux is the most cliché Il Douche, he still gave Benny that look several times, and thus may be a somebody, or something something.) And that kid in the end sequence? Didn’t look particularly called by the force. Didn’t yet resonate, the force. But nice sweeping. And is definitely somebody.
So, coming back to the original thought: while I don’t think anyone is a nobody, it would be quite nice if that particular somebody doesn’t need a inheritage, with or without midichlorians.
If they are going to take this away from us, I’ll set up a petition at changedotorg!
No, seriously, please, I’ll take any amount of ridiculous aliens with or without secondary sex characteristics.
To hell with it, you are completely right, of course.
But I would really relish it if it turns out he told the truth, fair and square.
You’re on to something there, maybe.
Do we actually know anything about how his parents did the parenting thing? I wouldn’t bet Alice Miller would be to pleased with a Resistance General and a scruffy Nerf herder raising a child in dark, cold places like… space. His anger issues are a hint that there is something profoundly wrong with him. And I don’t think it’s just the weevil overloard he cut in half using remote laserswording.
However, it could be interesting for once in a Space Opera to have a character who does evil things without external “motivating”, or ex-post explainisms. Let Benny be just the kid who just spiralled out of control to become a real Somebody, identifying with his Dark Uberfather figure. A kid in a mask can be still deadly.
This could indeed become the most interesting villain in all Star Wars.
Rey made the right choice, though. She realized before it was too late that he was manipulating her, though it’s clear he does care about her.
I agree with you and everyone else who’s sick of the special DNA trope which has been done to death, but I also think it was shoddy storytelling to place so much emphasis on Rey’s supposed parentage for so long only to pull a ‘gotcha!’ on the audience.
And maybe he was telling the truth, anything is possible; but I’m not wrong to distrust the mere word of a character like Kylo Ren.
Being evil just for the sake of being evil not only doesn’t ring true with most human behavior that I’ve observed, but it’s just lazy writing, in my opinion.
I’ve stated it on this forum before; monsters are not born - they’re made.
I dunno about all that; I think that whatever the actual reason may be, Kylo is utterly miserable… and you know what they say about misery and company.
Good point. Maybe it’s better to say that he thinks he cares about her, but he’s just incapable of that.
Agreed.
Maybe he even wants to care, but his immense immaturity, hubris and mental instability render him unable to.
Hence my allusion to Alice Miller. However, the idea of spiralling out of control shouldn’t be off the table even then. I’m not a proponent of a broken windows hypothesis for the human abyss, nor of the idea of an inherent (pun not intended) evil in some humans. But some of us are sometimes doing things which are terrible, because they did one thing at one point and either kept on doing other stuff as well, were told to continue to do so, or were unable to stop themselves.
What I want to say is there must be many monsters among men who were mice, once. What made them doesn’t need to be a terrible childhood.
It’s not off the table,’ at all; but from my point of view, there’s usually an impetus, some point of origin for the downward spiral.
And it doesn’t necessarily need to happen early in one’s development. I merely brought up Ren’s because all his pent up rage and malcontent seems really disproportionate to his experiences that we’ve seen thus far.
Thinking that his master was going to kill him in cold blood is pretty weak sauce as a reason, IMHO.
I don’t think that matters with elective monarchies. We don’t know much about Padme’s family background.
By the way, a lot of people I know have cited the film’s low Rotten Tomatoes user score (right now around 50%, it keeps changing) as evidence of how awful and divisive it is, despite its critical score in the 90s. Turns out that a self-declared alt-right group using bots was responsible for lowering its RT score.
