I played a light side sith assassin in the Kotor MMO and I liked the way that played out. You were still all about power and overthrowing your master, you just were less of an asshole about it. It kinda played like you were a haughty sort of arrogant person that killed anyone that was a threat to you straight up and spared all the useless pawns with full knowledge that they’re beneath you. Cocky. Overwhelming. But not pointlessly cruel, which is what a lot of the “dark side” choices were. Maybe part of that is just that the game went full blown cartoonishly stupidly evil for dark side options. You shouldn’t have to murder the younglings and pointlessly torture everyone to prove you’re the bad guy.
Obviously. We all know the Dark Side is stronger.
A force user is really just a martial artist. It just so happens that these martial arts also include an actual magical component. Dark and light side are different the same way kung fu and jiu jitsu are different. Just like in real life, their practitioners often argue about which one is more powerful. There are many techniques that are shared. Seeing the future, telekinesis, light saber fighting, etc. Just like most martial arts have punching and/or kicking in common. There are also unshared techniques, like shooting people with fucking lightning.
The idea that morality is somehow tied to the dark or light side is a complete fabrication. Like martial arts in the real world, each school has a philosophy that goes along with its martial techniques. While there are often ties between the two, there’s nothing stopping you from taking one without the other. While most people tend to join a school and go all in on it, you can definitely learn how to punch like a shaolin monk without believing what monks believe.
It is clear that force magic does have ties to emotions. If you want to shoot lightning you have to be angry. Using those sorts of techniques more often is probably going to lead you down a path of being a mean/bad person, but there is nothing that says it has to be that way.
Calling someone a grey jedi is simply acknowledging the false dichotomy created by the existence of two opposed religions/schools by labeling someone who is not a member of either.
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I think part of the issue is that “Jedi” and “Warrior-Monk” are used interchangeably when Jedi refers to a specific tradition. However the Jedi did exist for 25,000 years and was the officially endorsed tradition by the Galactic Republic.
There were a lot of other Force Traditions in the Legends era, but most of them kept to their specific Homeworlds. It’s easy to suspect the Jedi trying to keep their monopoly on the force, but it was more likely the Republic that want to confine non-Jedi force traditions to their home planets. After two or three Sith-Jedi conflicts the last thing the Republic wants is additional religious wars between empowered beings.
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I thought I had mentioned a few at some point, so I scrolled back up and checked - I listed a bunch of them, way up above.
As I said up there:
We know(or at least, until it gets pulled into the new canon, knew) about other force users who were not Sith, but also not Jedi, and were still good. The White Current/Fallanassi, the Potentium(who, I might add, despite being literally entirely dedicated to what the Jedi would call the “Light side”, they regarded as a sith plot because it wasn’t their teachings, something something absolutes), Aing-Tii, the Bendu(whose symbol, inverted, became the symbol of the empire), the Force Warriors(who, interestingly enough, for the basis for Chirrut Imwe and the Guardians of the Whills in Rogue One), The Grey Jedi, Grey Paladins(who used to be part of the Jedi order, until the order kicked them out for suggesting they use blasters as well as lightsabers - man, the Order were kinda dickbags), Keepers of the Breath, the Jal Shey(basically, Force Scientists), the Matukai, the list goes on.
I also wrote an incredible treatise on what truly caused the fall of The Republic:
The Republic fell because a bunch of cranky old virgins were like “Nah son entering the bone zone is shithouse and you shouldn’t do it or else.”
And I object to Scott calling the force magic, because it’s clearly made of ghosts.
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Necromancy is a subset of magic.
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The most metal variant of magic, one might even say.
I think Last Jedi is ok, not great. My beef is that they spent so long (2h 35m runtime!) on things that didn’t matter and characters acting dumb.
Length: the casino mission was a complete waste of time, and it accomplished exactly zero. It felt like it took ages. And they were supposed to be hurrying to help their friends!
Dumbness (related to length):
- Everyone thinks hyperspace tracking is impossible*. But Finn says it’s not, and this is how they do it, and here is how we shut it down. Fine. They need to get this one particular guy to help, and NOBODY ELSE can do it. Fine. Then they go waste a ton of time on Space Monte Carlo. Well, we couldn’t get the one guy in the galaxy that can help us, but there’s this weird guy in our jail cell who claims he can do it. Let’s take him. And then it turns out to not matter, because they get caught!
- Poe is dumb for losing the bomber fleet. Especially when we find out there’s only like 100 people left in the
RepublicResistance. - Poe is dumb for thinking the mean admiral doesn’t have a plan.
- Wait a minute, there’s like 100 people left in the resistance! Maybe the mean admiral should actually tell her best pilot the plan**.
- Why doesn’t the mean admiral move the cruiser between the star destroyers and the transports? She has a shield, doesn’t she?
It felt like the hyperspace tracking drama should have ended in the first act. I still enjoyed it. The Jump was phenomenal. Basically all of Kylo Ren’s scenes. Luke. The red salt.
But man, it could have been like 40 minutes shorter.
* In real time, I assumed they were either tracking Finn somehow, or he was relaying their position. Loading up an escape pod doesn’t help his case.
** Why isn’t this person just Admiral Ackbar?
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It isn’t Admiral Ackbar because we’re killing off the entire old guard. Han’s dead, Luke’s dead, Leia’s going to be dead because Carrie Fisher passed but I’m sure they were going to write her out too anyway. All the secondary characters who haven’t been killed, like C3-PO, R2-D2, and Chewie, are now tertiary characters who make cameos cos Star Wars.
What happened to the mean admiral? She died.
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Wasn’t the Dreadnaught targeting the main Resistance cruiser? Had not the last bomber blew up the Dreadnaught it would have been over for Admiral Leia and her crew. Or am I misremembering?
They could have escaped into hyperspace sooner had the bombers returned. At the time they didn’t know they could be tracked through hyperspace. If the dreadnought had followed them through hyperspace, who knows what the result would have been.
Not just that, but I think the fact that Ackbar’s voice actor died factors in.
I think they miss one important point - you’re sacrificing a ship.
Consider what you need for the Holdo maneuver - You need one ship of roughly equivalent size of your target. What the film shows, it’s massive damage, but it’s not that amount of weight smashing into another thing of similar weight at relativistic speeds kind of damage.
We simply don’t know the history beyond a certain point, so let’s ignore that for now.
But, from what we do know, we have three periods - The Clone Wars era, The Empire Era, and the New Republic era.
In the first, you have two armies of equivalent size, who are unlikely to see the need of such a maneuver - They had a lot of big ships, but in both cases, they were served better by having combat-ready capital ships, than sacrificing one ship to gain very little. And both forces had such huge numbers that the loss of one ship on either side was a relatively minor problem - so sacrificing your own ships to kill an exactly equal number of enemy ships didn’t really gain you anything, until you’d sacrificed such a large amount of ships that it just crippled both forces.
(The other factor - there were hundreds of thousands of battles in the clone wars, and we only know a handful. So it might have still happened.)
The Empire era, the Rebels couldn’t afford it. They had few enough ships as it was, they couldn’t sacrifice one of their few ships to potentially take out just one of the empire’s enormous amount of ships. The Empire likely wouldn’t see the point in bothering - why sacrifice one large, very expensive capital ship to take out just one Rebel ship, when you could just send two or three ships to destroy the Rebel ships without taking measures that were so cost-inefficient for the result - The junk ship idea doesn’t work out, because they’re already using every ship they can get their hands on already.
And in the New Republic era, it’s pretty similar. While the first order seems big and impressive on film, according to the books, they’re a much smaller force, with whatever ships they can salvage from the fallen Empire, or build in secret in the outer rim. Even Starkiller base represented 30 years worth of almost all the resources they could gather being poured, constantly, into the weapon. The Republic, they don’t take direct action against the first order generally, but if the did, they could use the same strategy as the empire - send two ships, instead of losing one. The Resistance, largely similar to the rebels, they simply can’t afford the loss, compared to the gain - except on the rare occasion that the gains are high enough and the situation desperate enough to justify it.
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You don’t need to sacrifice ships. You can just have large chunks of steel with hyperdrives attached to them. You can launch them from anywhere, even a planet’s surface. You can also lift them in space and then launch them. If you can aim precisely enough you can even smash them through an enemy planet.
I assume if you smashed them into a shield, like the shield around Death Star 2, it wouldn’t get you anywhere.
Except, the problem is, you need mass to make a kill. They don’t have to be the same size, but they have to be real fucking big - Holdo’s ship, according to Wookiepedia, was about 3.5k long, 700 meters wide, and 450 deep, and it still only managed to break Snoke’s ship in half, not completely destroy it. As I said, we’re not seeing damage as expected by a relativistic impact, we’re just seeing very large objects hitting each other very quick. Too small, you don’t make a kill. So, capital ship, or capital ship equivalent mass of materiel with a hyperdrive, realspace engines(gotta aim it before the jump, after all), reactor, basic sensors and navigation systems, either way, it’s a lot of work, expense and resources that they either can’t afford, or are better served spending elsewhere. Take your pick.
Nope. Chances were, if you tried to take off in a mass shadow, you’d either blow up, or simply disintegrate in hyperspace trying to make the jump.
Lifting into space would be further resources you’d need to spend. Every time we’ve seen something of that scale being built, it’s built in space - so we can assume the cost of lifting it is going to be big enough that even for ships with a lifespan, it’s better to build them in space, let alone a disposable missile.
That’s the one use I can actually see. Ships are one thing, but the amount of damage you could do to a planet? No installation would be safe, so a big enough facility, or city, or an important enough war would justify the use of such a high-cost tactic.
Fuck knows, really, but I assume so too. But I don’t imagine they’re that common as to provide much of an impediment - In canon, we’ve only seen them four times - Deathstars, plus Scarif and Starkiller base.
In legends, we’ve seen them maybe a dozen times, fifteen at most - so I don’t think they’re that common, or at least common enough to be an issue.
That said, it also might not be an issue - remember, TFA, Han jumps the falcon basically right through the Starkiller base shield. It was explicitly made out to be a nearly impossible maneuver, because you’d mash into the planet and die. But don’t need to worry about dying or crashing, if there’s nobody on board to die, and the whole point is to crash.
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Even with the value of a ship argument, it still comes down to the idea that this maneuver is on the table. If it is on the table, then every ship’s goal when they’re in a dire situation should be to ram. The A-wing in Return of the Jedi that struck the shield generators on the Executor should have also hit his hyperspace jump if he had the time. Every capital ship should be setting up so that if they’re going to lose a fight you’re going to take damage equally. Then you end up in a weird ramming cold war. Think you’re going to lose? Ram them while you still can.
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Yeah. Obviously if you can blow someone up with guns, then that is the way to go. They lose 1, you lose 0. But if it looks like you are going to lose 1 and your hyperdrive still works, may as well make turn a loss of 1 into a net loss of 0.
The thing is, what will the galaxy/universe be like with so many objects flying around in hyperspace? Will it reach a critical point like the space junk around Earth? Faster than light objects just randomly appearing and smashing into shit.
He was already spinning out of control and crashing, I think we can safely assume not.
I mean, you can also still just run. Running is an option. And if your hyperdrive is functional enough to make a jump, then it would make more sense to run away than not. Take a zero loss instead of a one loss. And if you can make a jump, and a jump precise enough to pull off the maneuver, then chances are you can escape, even if it’s in a random direction. Remember, the hyperspace tracking was a brand spanking new tech in the latest film, so not a factor before that.
Funnily enough, that did come up - well, not quite like that, but close - in legends. There were ships that vanished into hyperspace for various reasons, and occasionally would re-appear, like the Katana Fleet, or the Queen of Ranroon. There were also cases where parts were damaged, and ships came out in completely the wrong places, or even times - like the chappy who accidentally ended up 200 years in the future(From 200-ish BBY, to the same time Palpatine held the vote to create the clone army officially, by a malfunction causing a jump through space AND time), or the Jedi master who accidentally went from 5000-ish BBY to 45 ABY(Different failure - the device that prefented hyperspace time and real time getting out of sync failed, so good old fashioned frame-of-reference time travel.)
(Someone call Jason, I’ve been preparing for half my life for the star wars question of the week.)
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