New Star Wars Movie in 2015

[Aotrs Commander]

When I said -4 to rolls, that's a mechanical effect. I could just as easily said, say, that a glitch in the targeting software suddenly scrags the missile boat IFF recognition, such that they start shooting at their own side rather than just at the rebels. Or one of the commanders suddenly decides that NOW is the time to make his bid for supreme power. Or something nasty got slipped into the ship galleys and the TIE Defender pilots are not only fighting the rebels, but also fighting a losing battle not to throw up all over the cockpit.

You see a squadron of missile boats and a squadron of tie defenders. *I* see a bunch of complex machines with thousands of moving parts, dozens of software programs, and human pilots with fallible brains and fallible bodies, *all* of which has to be working exactly right in order for them to be combat-effective. There are thousands, possibly millions of ways for a malevolent Force to throw a monkey wrench into the works and turn this proud force into a shambling, useless wreck.

The same for Thrawn himself. Thrawn is the most brilliant military leader in the Star Wars universe. But he can only act on the information he receives from ship's sensors/communications et al, and absent those same communications he is not an admiral but a passenger, a meaningless spectator to the battle before him.

If the Force has decided the battle will be won, there are a million ways to neutralize an effective military leader. Perhaps someone in the engine room stumbles against the wrong control and , in a million-to-one chance, the Chimaera is sent on a hyperjump across the galaxy. By the time the crew is able to correct the problem, the Chimaera is somewhere in the Deep Core with fried hyperdrive engines.

Or perhaps today is the day that the malware attached to some crewer's downloaded porn subverts the entire computer network, with the result that instead of battle reports Thrawn and company are treated to a nonstop holo-show of passionate Twi'leks with their Hutt masters. By the time they get it fixed, the battle is over.

Or perhaps today is the day that a medical condition suddenly manifests itself and Thrawn spends the entire battle in sickbay.

No, not buying that even remotely, sorry. The Force is not the Infinite Improbability Drive. With an agenda. I don't even buy the Force being sentient in any meaningful sense, like at all. It's not a deity.

It's certainly not capable of spontaneously affecting non-living objects for no rhyme or reason, that directly contradicts everything I've ever read about the Force.

Furthermore, such a Force-centric narrative renders every single non-Jedi character as utterly meaningless and empty as if they were Imperial citizens in 40k; they don't MATTER, because they don't have free will to act; because the Force will just step in and say "nuh-uh, that's not what I want to happen", and I just won't accept that. It means that the entire Rebellion, all the lives lost - on both sides - were completely and totally wasted, because Luke was the only character whose actions and choices actually had any meaning; everyone else would have been at the mercy of the Force's caprious whim and they only could have succeeded if the Force deigns to let them.

That actually comes across as rather darker and more depressing than 40K itself, really - with the knowledge that you can do everything right, but still lose because some incomprehensible, omnipotent Force has decided to railroad you in a fashion that would get any tabletop DM rightly pummeled into unconsciousness with his own DMG, because some dude did something somewhere. That's well beyond what even the crapper parts of EU has tried to claim.

It would also, if that were the case, prove Palpatine absolutely 100% correct in his opinion that everyone who is not a Force-user is inherently inferior.

If you throw away the fairy tale and try to treat the Star Wars universe as a mechanistic, rational universe, I think much of Star Wars becomes incomprehensible.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

On the other hand if you don't, I think it renders everything and everyone who is not a Jedi or a Sith completely irrevelevant and pointless, nothing more than window dressing for the rather-too-full-of-themselves-samurai and their frequently-badly-executed philosphical mumbo-jumbo. I'll stick by rational every single day of the week, thanks.



Star Wars would have worked (and does, in fact) fine without the Jedi or the Force, in my opinion, but the Jedi without the Star Wars backdrop would be indistinguishable from many a generic fantasy/fairy-tale (or many an anime). The Jedi made Star Wars memorable; they alone did not make it great.



Incidently, the sort of strategic and tactical blunders made at Endor by Vader and Palpatine are sadly not even unrealistic, as a passing glance at the more cretinous of historical commanders will show. Sometimes military leaders just ARE that stupid and/or arrogant - and the price was always paid in the blood of the troops they command.