Ohhhhhhh nooooooooo!
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All the vomz GRAN’PA ITCHY LOCK THE DOOR.
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Same here.
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Hm, I don’t quite buy it. The prequels, terrible as they are, were supposed to be about Anakin. Shmi is a turning point for Anakin to go dark, but there wasn’t even any father (which was crap, too). You could argue that Palpatine is a father figure, but that doesn’t prove the point either. Everything Anakin does is BAD, so that’s hardly an endorsement.
Going to the original trilogy, Vader/Luke is of course the big thing. In this case, I can get it, a mother is never mentioned.
In TFA, Solo gets the big send-off, but I don’t think that Leia was underrepresented.
So in summary, it’s a typically male-centered franchise (though TFA and Rogue work their damndest to change that), but I wouldn’t call it out for that especially.
I thought we’d already established that there is apparently no effective obstetric medicine in the SW universe? Ergo, nearly all the Mums died in childbirth.
Sure, it’s stupid, but hey, it’s Star Wars…
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They’re just being accurate about guys’ chances without their mums:
A popular idea called the “grandmother hypothesis”, proposed in the 1960s, says that older women play a vital role in helping to feed, raise, and teach their children and grandchildren. In doing so, they’re still ensuring the success of their genetic legacy. There’s some evidence for this in humans: one study of Finns and Canadians found that women who live longest after menopause end up with more grandchildren, because their daughters are better at having and raising kids.
The same is true for killer whales. We know this because scientists led by Ken Balcomb have spent the last 40 years monitoring the lives, family ties, and deaths of the Pacific Northwest orcas—Granny included. In 2012, Croft, Balcomb, and student Emma Foster used that census to show that mothers clearly help their children to survive—and their sons in particular. If a male orca’s mother dies, his odds of joining her in the following year go up by three times if he’s younger than thirty, by eight times if he’s older than 30, and by a whopping 14 times if the mother was post-menopausal.
So mother orcas, especially older ones, are somehow helping to keep their sons alive (and older sons in particular). Croft’s colleague Lauren Brent worked out how in 2015. Using hundreds of hours of video footage, she showed that older females guide their pods—especially males—to hotspots of salmon, which make up the vast majority of their diet. “These whales live on a knife edge and this knowledge about when and where to find food is vital for keeping the group alive,” says Croft. That’s partly why Granny’s death was so sad. “She had a very important role to play, and her pod is in a really difficult place.”
(“Granny” was the nickname of the oldest matriarch in a particular pod that has been studied for 40 years)
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Well, if you want to go there then you have to blame the entire Western (and a good bit of Eastern, Southern and Americas) history of story-telling dating back to the beginnings of recorded language. Women have been damsels/love interests (Penelope in The Odyssey, Ruth of the Bible, millions of others), shrewish goads behind the throne (Eve, Beowulf’s mom, MacBeth’s wife), the ruin of men (see the goads, add in Lot’s wife), evil (Hera, Macbeth witches [yeah, I like the play]), absent (Jesus’ mom after his birth) or companions/helpers (Mary Magdelene), etc. There were some lead characters (a few pantheon goddesses [but even they often played the other roles], Cleopatra [though she was also the hot love interest who brought a man down]), but for the most part out literature has treated women like objects rather than subjects since we started it.
Which would mean that blaming a company that started 80 years ago for a storytelling trend that is 5,000 or more years old is a distraction, a feint, an effort to distract from the real issue.
You know … a red herring.
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You know, I was thinking. I think the lack of parents is needed because otherwise these stories would be like 15 min long in some cases.
Two parents to watch over the kids? That means one of them scoops them up before they can go on their adventures. Ariel fighting with her dad ends in her mom consoling her and everyone goes out for ocean ice cream. Cinderella never has a step mom. Etc. Maybe it makes them more empathetic characters, even subconsciously, because they went through a loss.
Right?? This was a prime-time TV special; the copy I have has all the original toy commercials. It was made for Star Wars kiddies who were eager to see more Wookiees. And it’s impossible to interpret that scene any other way than grandpa is jerking it to VR porn in the living room.
That said, at least the Holiday Special had a loving mom! She’s one of the main characters, even.
Oh, and props for the Lamby Dipper icon.
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Um…yeah. Beat me to it.
Somebody wants to start a new film series called “Star Nurturings”, by all means, have a go.
I understand your opinion but “red herring” again does not mean what you are saying. Disney may be irrelevant to Star Wars but this is not a distraction, handwave away or intentionally misleading for some fallacious reason.
Star Wars is a franchise about war in the same way that Hunger Games is a franchise about hunger. Yes, a great deal of it is about a scrappy rebellion outwitting the evil empire, etc etc, but that’s a backdrop to all of the gangsters, space wizards, love stories, smugglers, and flying around on spacecrafts that goes on. It gets dubbed a ‘space opera’ a lot, but it’s more of a space western than anything, really.
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Don’t even have to click: I know which movie they’re reviewing!
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We’ll have to disagree, because I do think it is a distraction from the real reasons for mothers being largely absent in the Star Wars Universe.
Red herrings, at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary, do not have to be intentional. They just have to distract from the solution.
What else would you suggest he do with his day? Too old to go to battle. No Wookie life debt hanging over his head. At least the creators were progressive in the fact that he was open to other species.
barfs in mouth a little
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It seems a bit forced to bring up the lack of parental figures in a saga that rotates entirely around the search for such figures. Which is not an uncommon type of story: if you want to write a “rite of passage” or “search for meaning” arc, at some point you will have to examine where the hero is actually coming from, and it’s easier to deal with that if actual parents are not involved. After all, we don’t really care about their wants and reasons, what matters is the hero. If they’re mysteriously absent, better: it leaves space for spin-offs and it allows writers to send off the goddamn screenplay I was supposed to complete two months ago.
Yup. Because women did not need to be inspired and hence goaded into stupid wars. For 2000 years, most stories were concocted to create “moral” imperatives to justify conflict. Someone steals your woman? You better raze his city. Someone is “corrupted” by a woman? Hey-ho, razing ahead. The only good woman is the one who helps you when you’re busy razing… And so on and so forth.
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You do realize that women and children don’t magically evaporate in the case of war, right?
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They actually often do, but the process isn’t one I’d call “magical.” 
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Sure. But also, some women participate in war, some women are brutalized during it, many die, and some manage to get to safety.
My point was that war has never been this all male theater where women just don’t exist, especially wars that spill over into civilian environments. Especially wars that include asymmetrical warfare elements (including Star Wars).
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Could it be that they want to tell the story of the adventure and choices of the child, without having to deal with restrictions like bedtime, and adding stress that comes from having to make their own decisions, and provide for themselves? Parents would burden the story with extra characters, and the non-orphan child on an extended adventure might add the element of “gee, her Mom must be absolutely worried sick!”
