Star Wars Griefing Thread (SPOILERS) - Safety off

[Judge Holden]

If the Hutts were real IRL would they have a subforum or just a megathread here? Because they're all fucking fat, of course.

Lets be real here, we are the fucking Hutts in this equation. And i'm talking the really freaky fucking Hutts you find in those kinds of slave leia/slave padme/slave sheev fics. Our whole schtick is hanging out on the sidelines comfortably enjoying our proverbial dancing skanks (lolcows) get torn apart by our proverbial rancor (reality)

Nah, realistic isn't Star Wars. It isn't Star Trek either. No, not Warhammer 40k. No not even Mass Effect.

None of them are realistic at all, blind fanboyism is just that, coupled with Jesus autism and well, plain autism.

The most realistic sci-fi that I can think of and isn't hyper niche is surprisingly Aliens. The original 4.

Giant dystopian mega corpos? Check.
Shady MIT doing idiotic experiments for wunderwaffen: Check.
Wagies being used as disposable: Check.

A straight up purely realistic sci-fi would almost certainly suck ass to watch, and "realistic flavoured" sci-fi is not inherently better or worse than space opera or grimdark or utopian schtick. What matters is how realistic the characters and polities within the setting act within the setting and react to whatever shit is driving the story.

To use 40k as an example, the setting works well when the characters/factions act logically and reasonably given the situations they find themselves in while also remaining true to their basic characterisations, even if the end result is batshit goofy shenanigans like an elderly priest setting his hat on fire, revving up a chainsaw bigger than himself, and charging into combat with a mob of rape demons due to how tangibly extreme faith operates in-universe against said demons.

However it works extremely fucking poorly if characters/factions act purely like one dimensional caricatures of their characterisation in any and all situations regardless of how fucking stupid this is in-universe, for example an elderly priest setting his hat on fire, revving up a chainsaw bigger than himself, and charging into combat with a random preschooler for being half a second late in attending one of the thrice daily rituals of glorifying the emperor's bathrobe. All that shit does is turn the setting into a joke that very quickly becomes tedious as characters and factions only act in a predictable one-note manner no matter the situation or story.

Frankly with the Alien franchise, I think that its high time that the whole "Weyland-Yutani are the big evil corporate bugbear behind everything bad because the execs are happy to exterminate humanity so long as they get tree fiddy extra on their final paycheque" thing was put to rest. It worked ok the first few times but at some point it just became fucking retarded and a cheap way of justifying stories without decent writing. The Xenomorphs should not need to have all the legwork done by fucking United Fruits in Space to make them a threat.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Frankly with the Alien franchise, I think that its high time that the whole "Weyland-Yutani are the big evil corporate bugbear behind everything bad because the execs are happy to exterminate humanity so long as they get tree fiddy extra on their final paycheque" thing was put to rest. It worked ok the first few times but at some point it just became fucking retarded and a cheap way of justifying stories without decent writing. The Xenomorphs should not need to have all the legwork done by fucking United Fruits in Space to make them a threat.

If it was realistic, you'd have several evil corporations running around like in the Confederacy of Independent Systems. The Trade Federation would be Star Wars' Weyland-Yutani, but they're hardly the only evil corpo running around.

However it works extremely fucking poorly if characters/factions act purely like one dimensional caricatures of their characterisation in any and all situations regardless of how fucking stupid this is in-universe, for example an elderly priest setting his hat on fire, revving up a chainsaw bigger than himself, and charging into combat with a random preschooler for being half a second late in attending one of the thrice daily rituals of glorifying the emperor's bathrobe. All that shit does is turn the setting into a joke that very quickly becomes tedious as characters and factions only act in a predictable one-note manner no matter the situation or story.

That's why I identified with Star Wars a lot. Sure, some Sith and Jedi are caricatures of their orders, but some are not. Some Sith see working with innocent people and providing for them as better than just throwing them all in a mine to work half-naked for 18 hours a day. Same thing with Mandalorians and Imperials; some are caricatures of who they are, some are more practical and are less stereotypically warrior or fascist and can be reasonable.

 

[Lance 45]

I think George Lucas didn’t really understand the EU. Sure the 6 movies he made were for kids, but the EU with stories like the Yuzhan Vong war and KOTOR went beyond that for teens and adults. Even the Clone Wars was pretty brutal pre-filoniwars.

 

[Lance 45]

Especially considering the fact that Disney SW has convinced most people that Stormtroopers are useless buffoons.

They were always portrayed that way even in the EU. They were generally inferior to Jango Fett Clones and when the imperial military moved entirely over to conscripts and recruits from the general imperial population, the fearsome reputation the imperial clone troopers had built up was diminished significantly after the rebels started immediately kicking their ass. Because the clones generally didn't panic when shot back at like chickenshit reddit tyrants and were made for the sole purpose of military fighting. They also had no family back home or politics to worry about. Beyond fragging when jedi or a CO decided to use them as expendable cannon fodder with no real purpose beyond wasting lives.

Though the droid army was absolutely set to steamroll them anyway through sheer attrition had palpatine not been playing both sides. Despite the ending of the clone wars being inconsistent in its depictions. With George depicting them as the republic well on the way towards routing them via the outer rim sieges, having pushed them out of the core worlds entirely, and the battle of coruscant being the separatist's desperate final gamble that failed. Then some fans (especially EAW mods) and Filoni acting like the droids had an infinite omnipotent death stack that was set to crush them everywhere all at once. That made Revan's Star Forge army look like a joke. I think everyone forgot that the battle of coruscant was the CIS mustering everything they could afford to as one final gamble to end the war on their terms before losing due to the republic having superior military tactics and jedi on their side.

Frankly with the Alien franchise, I think that its high time that the whole "Weyland-Yutani are the big evil corporate bugbear behind everything bad because the execs are happy to exterminate humanity so long as they get tree fiddy extra on their final paycheque" thing was put to rest. It worked ok the first few times but at some point it just became fucking retarded and a cheap way of justifying stories without decent writing. The Xenomorphs should not need to have all the legwork done by fucking United Fruits in Space to make them a threat.

Yeah it is pretty dumb how they basically breed them in research facilities using unsuspecting colonists. You'd think that the Earth Government would have classified them as a terrorist outfit by now. if not for these idiots intentionally mass producing them, they would just lie dormant and not really be a threat to anyone. See some eggs lying around, torch em from a distance and move on. That place is just not safe to colonize. It made sense for the first alien movie to have created one by accident, but after a certain point with colony after colony falling prey to these things, it would be common knowledge that aliens are real in that universe and they are certainly hostile.

With no writers really acknowledging that the colonial marines somehow have intel about both aliens and predators that the general population doesnt have any equivalent to for some reason.

At least the predators would be known to sometimes attack human colonies unprovoked on their hunts. Like was the case with AVP2's story where the leader of the Iron Bears had to have a synthetic spine replacement due to them kicking his ass and sending him falling off a cliff.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

They were always portrayed that way even in the EU. They were generally inferior to Jango Fett Clones and when the imperial military moved entirely over to conscripts and recruits from the general imperial population, the fearsome reputation the imperial clone troopers had built up was diminished significantly after the rebels started immediately kicking their ass.

Not quite. The Stormtroopers in the SWEU were usually the top dogs, and some rebel factions never joined the Alliance proper because of all the ass-whoopings that the Empire handed the Alliance.

 

[Male Idiot]

Western, with little law or supervision

It does bear some resemblance to an already lost age of the US. Are you a Q-boomer by any chance?

SW was based on early to mid 20th century US. 40k was based on middle ages to industrial revolution UK.

Both are modelled after a real life period, but with a fantasy universe around them.

You could made Star Wars plot into a real life movie, when Han was a coke smuggler with a Cesna and Chewbacxa was his mexican copilot. He is brown, hairy and speaks gibberish after all, and they fought against Nixon the Hitler etc.

If you want to analyze it further, even the guns are periodic, in the movies pistols shoot at a rate similar to a six shooter, and trooper blasters are more akin to single chambered rifles than machine guns, and at best WW1 style tripods.
Star Destroyers are based on WW2 battleships, shooting like they do. Only later games and EU material added stuff like pistols that shoot fast like an uzi.

This was likely an influence of Westerns. If Lucas turned out to be a big fan of Western, I wouldn't be surprised. It was action he watched as a child and could write better.

A hyperspace trip takes around the same time as a plane flight or as long as a horse ride to the next town.
A warp jump takes the same time as a trans atlantic voyage in a sailboat.
Of course neither is how space works in real life, isn't realistic.

SW is based on Lucas's era of the US when he was a young man with fantasy magic and spaceships added.

Fiction is often a period piece that makes most sense if you look at it as what era is it based on.

Just as Star Trek was based on what a liberal gated community saw and felt was true. Write what you know.

This does not make them bad or impossible, they should work in the fantasy universe they are set in.

You could write a story about a space boomer pulling himself up by the bootstraps too, but that isn't really realism, that is just mirroring a real historical period.

The Xenomorphs should not need to have all the legwork done by fucking United Fruits in Space to make them a threat.

Banana Republics comes from corpo fuckery. But in EP4, it was the military not the corpos.

The alien is just a dangerous guffin unleashed by greed or lust for power.

Poking the cursed thing is a common horror trope.

Corpos doing horrible shit for three fiddy and intelligence agencies and blackbook projects doing the same is very topical.

Just look at Elon Musk. Imagine if the alien was brown and loved poo.

Star Wars's corporations can be evil, but not even the Confederacy was as callous as Yutani.

The priest lighting his head (helmet, with a flamethrower built in) on fire is an in-universe extremist, he isn't old and he charges underhivers and mutants.

Farscape was a strange one, where it is half SW half ST, but as a comedy. There are space empires but their grip is way looser than in space fantasy. Most planets are self contained cultures with a wacky alien Yoda that pisses/shits napalm. Realistic? Maybe not. But I highly recommend it.

And yes, realistic sci-fi or hard sci-fi is often boring and has a constrained scale. Alien is just the closest to it that isn't extremely niche. I didn't use any of the more niche ones because it would take ages to google them up.

Edit: Well call me a retard, the Expanse starts off as mostly hard sci-fi. These usually work better when you reduce the scale to a single solar system.
Gattaca and The Martian about the astronaut is another example that slipped my mind and so is 2001 Space Odyssey. Apparently Blade Runner too.

 

[Lance 45]

Not quite. The Stormtroopers in the SWEU were usually the top dogs, and some rebel factions never joined the Alliance proper because of all the ass-whoopings that the Empire handed the Alliance.

I miss when the Alliance would send more than just a squad of DEI dangerhair cosplay retards to a fight. Yes the Alliance could rarely win in a stand up fight against the Empire, but they at least gave them a black eye instead of just turning tail when they did it.

With actual concepts like air support via X-wings and Y-wings and later on A-wings. Rebel tanks were also a rare sight added by the Force Commander game that no one played yet the EU got a lot of mileage out of. Since EAW copied the T4-B and T2-B tanks from it. Somehow spared by disneywars along with the AAC-2 from battlefront 2. Also didn't return in EAfront somehow cause DICE hates science fiction. They even half assed their dead space collab.

I'm just so fucking sick of every rebel story being about ground infantry. When the Rebellion was comprised primarily of the former remnants of the Galactic Republic. Where's other units like Rogue squadron or crix madine's commandos or rebel specforce? Did these DEI retards have their drivers and pilot licenses revoked cause they were too high on spice and death sticks to fly or drive?

Im going to have to play through Rogue Squadron again.

 

[Blamo2000]

Star Wars's corporations can be evil, but not even the Confederacy was as callous as Yutani.

Maybe the Czerka Corporation?

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

40k was based on middle to industrial revolution UK

I see the resemblance, but industrial UK had the king breathing down Parliament's neck and eventually made life better for the plebs. In much the same way, fringe worlds like Tatooine were slowly losing their Wild West drip as the Empire was slowly choking it with their oppressive hold. Biggs even talks about it to Luke in a deleted scene, where he told Luke that one day, his uncle will become a tenant in his own farm. Which is quite similar as to how the real Wild West died as the government established more control.

It's just that SW has more things that's identifiable in the real world than Trek or 40K. Especially since the Inquisition in 40K operated wildly different from the real-world Inquisition, but the SW Inquisition bears more than a few similarities with its real-world counterpart by prioritizing religious conversion over race. A fucking alien, a Miraluka, was allowed to be an Imperial Inquisitor in SW, whereas that'd never happen in 40K.

 

[Rick The Stick]

Maybe the Czerka Corporation?

Assuming we're counting the comics, Weyland-Yutani is so over the top they make a huge chunk of SW corpos look like cute little mom & pop shops.

 

[Blamo2000]

Assuming we're counting the comics, Weyland-Yutani is so over the top they make a huge chunk of SW corpos look like cute little mom & pop shops.

Sounds like I should buy their stocks.

 

[Male Idiot]

It's just that SW has more things that's identifiable in the real world

They are closer to current living memory, yes. But that isn't a requirement for a good story.
Or adding trannies would have improved Star Wars, where we all know current year is franchise poison.

SW, ST, 40k, ME etc all have to adhere to their own universe, not real life.

And the Inquisitorius of SW also had a big reference on the spy agencies like Gestapo or Stasi, not just the middle ages.

A more closer religious example would be the Witch Hunters of the US, something 40k also used. That's where the Inquisition pimphat comes from.

In pop culture they get mixed up with the Spanish Inquisition almost always.

Assuming we're counting the comics, Weyland-Yutani is so over the top they make a huge chunk of SW corpos look like cute little mom & pop shops.

Alien expanded universe can get wacky, I only meant the 4 films as expanded material is different, and got Disneyd with the new films, which do make Weyland's cyborg the originator of the xenomorphs. Instead of them being aliens, they are now human made.

Force Commander

I recall it, with Tie Fighter and Supremacy.

The rebels used to have their own tanks, ships, etc with lore on how they got them.

Disney doesn't get air support at all, but Rebel Moon: The autism of Fire didn't even get tanks.

 

[Rick The Stick]

I'm surprised we never got a KOTOR style game set in the prequel era.

 

[Judge Holden]

Banana Republics comes from corpo fuckery. But in EP4, it was the military not the corpos.

I will be in the cold hard ground before I acknowledge anything touched by Joss Whedon, and that includes his stepdaughter

The alien is just a dangerous guffin unleashed by greed or lust for power.

Poking the cursed thing is a common horror trope.

Corpos doing horrible shit for three fiddy and intelligence agencies and blackbook projects doing the same is very topical.

Thing is, eventually it starts stretching even generous credibility that the same corpo would keep hitting its head against the wall in such an expensively retarded manner after the first two or three fuckups, and that said fuckups would not have serious ramifications for said corpo when its rivals and overseers smell its blood in the water. Sure Alien 4 technically went with this but I refer you to my prior comment on the matter. I do not take issue with the trope in and of itself, merely when it becomes so one note or ridiculously exaggerated past the point of parody.

To use a random-ass derivative example, Doom 3 is hardly a masterpiece of writing or story, but it is refreshingly unique in that the soulless megacorp reacts fairly realistically to the whole "we accidentally built a wormhole to hell lol" situation, in that they initially greenlight some limited exploration and for professor badguy to run some experiments, but when it starts racking up a bodycount they immediately realise shit is going expensively wrong and send someone to shut the whole thing down for an investigation because of how much its already jeopardising their operations, and when professor badguy goes rogue and causes a full demonic invasion they are right there trying to fight them back to hell with offbrand doomguy.

Basically, soulless megacorps work in fiction when they act like soulless megacorps, and not a nebulous group of cackling bad guys who will do the most unprofitably stupid shit imaginable just because they love being evil. Same with fictional glowies. With Alien this worked out in one and two, with one being their attempt to acquire an insanely valuable specimen at the possible cost of one or more random schlubs and at worst a decrepit cargo hauler, and two being an implicitly unsanctioned Burke led and planned attempt to resurrect a near century old failed operation which was essentially independent of the company. Three marked the shift to them becoming monomaniacally obsessed with xenomorphs above everything else, though it was only with the EU that shit went completely bananas and they became effectively a secular cult built around worshipping xenomorphs and being ever more pettily evil.

 

[Lance 45]

I'm surprised we never got a KOTOR style game set in the prequel era.

Funnily enough KOTOR was supposed to be set during the clone wars until George encouraged bioware not to do that because it would spoil Episode 2.

Despite being the worst movie out of the Prequels and not really covering the clone wars at all besides an origin story for both sides in the third act and a little bit of the battle of geonosis at the end. Could have cut out all of the politics bullshit in the senate and it would have made a far better movie.

Im sure a KOTOR game set during the clone wars era now would be received very well. Though they'd probably throw in filoniwars crap and make everything about his OC's instead of some nobody like Revan whose story would have an epilogue going into the dark times and GCW depending on your choices.

 

[Adamska]

Frankly with the Alien franchise, I think that its high time that the whole "Weyland-Yutani are the big evil corporate bugbear behind everything bad because the execs are happy to exterminate humanity so long as they get tree fiddy extra on their final paycheque" thing was put to rest.

It's due to a similar issue that Star Wars went through and was highlighted by the film Multiplicity. Essentially it works the first few times due to thought being put into how and why these scenarios occur. Other works then copy the idea either due to liking it, or finding it simpler to work from, without understanding how businesses work, mainly since these writers are artists, not people geared in the economy. The thought put in becomes less and less, especially when fans only care for the spectacle and will eat literal human shit in terms of media quality.

It culminates in comics and games where billions of dollars worth of assets are blown up for a potential profit, and these writers forgetting that Wey-Yu, like the other companies in the setting (depending on what one you use since holy shit canon is a suggestion) is a megacorporation with so many departments and businesses that it'd not be smart to burn that shit. Compare them recycling blowing up a space port or colony, the latter being literal billions and their biggest moneymaker for monster bugs to weaponize to "uncertain biotic and signal, send a subsidiary towing team we own to assess potential value. Based on initial warnings it may have value in bioweapons field" like the first Alien film.

I could go on since there's other factors due to how fucked and mutable the lore is, since Megacorps are stronger than or basically equal to the main governments in the setting (barring the UPP, the Soviet/PRC analogue), but this isn't the Alien Thread.

I'll merely state I always believed the reason Alien3 had the company that desperate because it specifically was feeling the effects of losing Acheron and an entire USCM team, which is a lot of talking to the United Americas, PR firm blitzes, and packages sent to any relatives for bereavement purposes. They were desperate to get something out of that pit, and it always felt like it was them realizing their stocks are about to eat shit. It's also about then that the Alien knowledge does seep out since AvP is its own fucked universe, since the sole survivor writes about it and it leaked from there. It's also when Wey-Yu declined and folded... in the more simple lore.

 

[The Nothingness]

The OT should have shown the stormtroopers were an elite force separate from the main infantry, like they were depicted in EU material, and have the conventional army be the one that got trounced by rebel cells. The Solo movie had something like that when the Imperials kicked Han out of flight school and had him be a grunt that would die on the battlefield.

 

[Screamer_2]

Didn't they establish in Rogue One the more elite version of Storm Troopers? The old concept art design. Then there's the whole Dark Troopers from Dark Forces and in Mando 2 but I don't really remember wtf went on in that show. I think it's just endlessly adding shit. You like Tie Fighter, here's elite Tie Fighter.

 

[Sleazy Car Salesman]

Didn't they establish in Rogue One the more elite version of Storm Troopers? The old concept art design. Then there's the whole Dark Troopers from Dark Forces and in Mando 2 but I don't really remember wtf went on in that show. I think it's just endlessly adding shit. You like Tie Fighter, here's elite Tie Fighter.

At this point anything added to Star Wars just feels like they hit a big red button that just says "x10" on it.

 

[Ghostse]

A straight up purely realistic sci-fi would almost certainly suck ass to watch, and "realistic flavoured" sci-fi is not inherently better or worse than space opera or grimdark or utopian schtick. What matters is how realistic the characters and polities within the setting act within the setting and react to whatever shit is driving the story.

The term people want isn't "Realistic" its "Verisimilitude". They want people and world to believe in consistent and believable fashion, even if those do not reflect reality.

Frankly with the Alien franchise, I think that its high time that the whole "Weyland-Yutani are the big evil corporate bugbear behind everything bad because the execs are happy to exterminate humanity so long as they get tree fiddy extra on their final paycheque" thing was put to rest. It worked ok the first few times but at some point it just became fucking retarded and a cheap way of justifying stories without decent writing. The Xenomorphs should not need to have all the legwork done by fucking United Fruits in Space to make them a threat.

Agreed. Or if they are going to be the bugbear it should be like a "W-Y abandoned skunkworks facility they happen to stumble on to" where its something the company abandoned long ago. Eventually "It keeps happening" would sink in. I mean look at all the companies abandoning DEI.

It culminates in comics and games where billions of dollars worth of assets are blown up for a potential profit, and these writers forgetting that Wey-Yu, like the other companies in the setting (depending on what one you use since holy shit canon is a suggestion) is a megacorporation with so many departments and businesses that it'd not be smart to burn that shit. Compare them recycling blowing up a space port or colony, the latter being literal billions and their biggest moneymaker for monster bugs to weaponize to "uncertain biotic and signal, send a subsidiary towing team we own to assess potential value. Based on initial warnings it may have value in bioweapons field" like the first Alien film.

Exactly.

The first film makes perfect sense as you said. Risk a single ship, cargo, and crew for potential yuge profit.
The second one also makes a lot of sense, where a single 80s corporate raider hopes a colony would be able to make contact and collect samples.
The third film, the company just shows up after getting reports. They didn't even intend for the events to happen.
and 4th film which has its own fucking problems, but the fact the military would ignore previous bad results to try to develop a new weapon makes sense.