Star Wars: Ahsoka

[Khev]

But Khev, that probe was one of many that were deployed, as seen on screen. And a reasonable inference can be made that even the ones we saw were just a small fraction of the total number deployed by the Empire in the years between ANH and ESB. It was one of *many* being lucky enough to interact with the secret Rebel hideout.

I think the two examples are apples to oranges.

Fair enough, but I was speaking to the one probe that the camera followed from the Star Destroyer all the way to its landing on Hoth. Apple to apples *that* probe was even "luckier" than Sabine. At least she had guides.

 

[ajp4mgs]

Fair enough, but I was speaking to the one probe that the camera followed from the Star Destroyer all the way to its landing on Hoth. Apple to apples *that* probe was even "luckier" than Sabine. At least she had guides.

Well... if you blindly throw a dart and hit a bullseye, that's lucky. But if you blindly throw 300 darts at a board and *one* hits a bullseye, that's a lot more reasonable. If we assume that the probe droid we followed on screen was one of many (for months or years), then it's not as astronomically lucky, IMO. And we followed it because it was the one that would interact with our story. Following the countless other probes that didn't hit pay dirt would've been boring to watch.

But hey, I don't want to keep on the same point. My main issue is with the common complaint about Luke "conveniently" crashing near where Yoda would be.

 

[Khev]

Well... if you blindly throw a dart and hit a bullseye, that's lucky. But if you blindly throw 300 darts at a board and *one* hits a bullseye, that's a lot more reasonable. If we assume that the probe droid we followed on screen was one of many (for months or years), then it's not as astronomically lucky, IMO. And we followed it because it was the one that would interact with our story. Following the countless other probes that didn't hit pay dirt would've been boring to watch.

They didn't throw 300 probes at Hoth though. It was just one. And out of all the thousands upon thousands of miles across the planet it could have touched down it conveniently landed next to Echo Base.

Compared to IMO it not being entirely illogical that Ezra would remain within striking distance of the Night Sister Temple for any number of reasons, one being to keep tabs should an escape vessel ever appear. So Sabine's starting point would have already been working much more in her favor. Then for all we know those crab critters could have been dotting the countryside in all directions with any one of them capable of guiding her to Ezra.

But hey, I don't want to keep on the same point. My main issue is with the common complaint about Luke "conveniently" crashing near where Yoda would be.

Luke finding Yoda via the Force still is an assumption though and one that theoretically could be applied to two other Jedi trainees (Ezra and Sabine.)

 

[The Buffinator]

Why is everyone talking about Sabine finding Ezra? She didn't find Ezra. Her howler mount picked up the scent of that small group of Noti and took her to them. Then, after they saw the Rebel symbol on her armor, they brought her to Ezra. And her Force abilities (or lack thereof) weren't a factor.

 

[Bravomite]

When AJP and Khev debate Star Wars, it reminds me of the Stone Giants battle in the hobbit. We all watching fron the sidelines like the company of Thorin Oakenshield

 

[ajp4mgs]

Luke finding Yoda via the Force still is an assumption though and one that theoretically could be applied to two other Jedi trainees (Ezra and Sabine.)

My view of the Luke situation has less to do with finding Yoda via the Force and more to do with the Kenobi ghost wanting to get Luke trained by Yoda. I think it'd be silly to assume that Kenobi would just name a planet to go to and then offer no other guidance or assistance in making sure Luke isn't wandering around an entire planet for days/weeks/months/years looking for some "Yoda" guy.

The Zahn novels said that Yoda used the Force to pull down the X-Wing at a close proximity, but even that is something I find unnecessary when the previous movies already showed that Kenobi can speak into Luke's mind.

There's setup and context that can be used to understand that Luke isn't going to be made to search blindly.

As for the ease of finding Ezra, we can just agree to disagree and it's fine. What I hate about it is what it implies about Thrawn. Even if you excuse it as Jedi trainee Sabine and Ezra using the Force to make that needle-in-a-haystack reunion happen so quickly, Thrawn still would've failed to employ the witches (who - again - can sense Ahsoka coming from another galaxy) or his own profound deductive reasoning skills to have found and eliminated his only threat there.

I might not have been as annoyed without the Thrawn implication, but there's been so many other lazy plot devices and contrived setups that it's approaching TROS levels for me and would've made me roll my eyes at this point, regardless.

 

[chrisstbh]

Why is everyone talking about Sabine finding Ezra? She didn't find Ezra. Her howler mount picked up the scent of that small group of Noti and took her to them. Then, after they saw the Rebel symbol on her armor, they brought her to Ezra. And her Force abilities (or lack thereof) weren't a factor.

Plus Ezra states that they’re constantly on the move, and Thrawn states that he doesn’t really have the resources to spare to man a full scale hunt for Ezra.

He only sends Baylan and Shin because he doesn’t care for them at all and sees them as a means to an end. He has no love for mercenaries, he values loyalty; like the people who have stuck with him for 10 years for no financial gain.

 

[Raleig.h]

Its very convenient that those crab people were apart of Ezras group, and all had republic necklaces at that lol.

 

[Khev]

When AJP and Khev debate Star Wars, it reminds me of the Stone Giants battle in the hobbit. We all watching fron the sidelines like the company of Thorin Oakenshield

That's all it is though, friendly debate. His knowledge of and love for George's Saga is second to none.

 

[chrisstbh]

 

[Dave_W]

It's convenient how R2 and 3PO crash on Tatooine in the correct region of the planet, both go their separate ways but both get picked up by the same group of Jawas, the night before going to the Lars Homestead at the time where Lars is looking to buy droids. Holy rose tinted glasses Batman!

 

[Ramatuelle]

View attachment 664681

*incipient nausea*

 

[Lordscum]

Thrawn looks like a cross between a blue Elon Musk and Data from Star Trek.

 

[xipotec]

I find Star Wars best when you don't think too much into it.

Andor is the big exception to that.

That's not vindicating ****** writing or a lack of structured focus. That's not excusing ignorance of continuity or poorly building on it. That's not saying to mindlessly consume.

But when you think TOO hard about things in Star Wars, all of it just crumbles. You can pick it to pieces from OT to now. Star Wars is truly a sum of it's parts, and when you put it together, it's really pretty wonderful.

Ahsoka feels like that to me. Sure that's some wacky stuff, but hey, that's Star Wars. Space whales? Eh why not. Why make a big deal out of that if I'm going to ignore Kangaroo-Llamas on an ice planet. They can jump to light speed? There's a lot of stuff nature does which we seek to emulate in real life, checks out. Silly crab people? Ewoks are on line one.

There's so much we're just supposed to accept all the way from the start of the OT, there's no reason why it can't still do that. Every story is going to have plot contrivances. Didn't they go as far as to retcon that R2 told R5 to off himself so Owen would pick him instead? That at one point was just a convenience to move the plot where it needs to be.

People have always been filling every gap Star Wars has to offer narratively since day one - every Glub Shitto practically has a thesis and biography. That's what allows us to connect to the medium.

Ahsoka, of all the post Disney things, seems to do this the best, just simply be absurd and let you go into it.

The issue is age, it always has been.

When you are a kid spaces whales are fine...as is a flipping acrobat yoda, and 115 lb woman strangling a giant slug (or a space slug for that matter......

You accepted those things because the cynic had not yet arisen and the wonder was still alive.

Now. crazy stuff its only an issue for older basement bound adults. the rest of us enjoy the fun.

And BTW, just about every classic story can be ripped apart by jaded views, including the LOTR and Star Trek.....

 

[xipotec]

It's convenient how R2 and 3PO crash on Tatooine in the correct region of the planet, both go their separate ways but both get picked up by the same group of Jawas, the night before going to the Lars Homestead at the time where Lars is looking to buy droids. Holy rose tinted glasses Batman!

Yeah that was the "force".....thats the excuse for all that OT stupidity......

Now is KK fault.

 

[ajp4mgs]

That's all it is though, friendly debate. His knowledge of and love for George's Saga is second to none.

Friendly debate indeed. It's always a treat to be able to have these silly escapist discussions with someone who knows SW backwards and forwards yet doesn't automatically default to arrogantly dismissing an opposing point of view. A real credit to you, my friend.

SW debates used to be part of the joy of being a fan. Different perspectives provided an opportunity to explore new angles on something that we all loved. Now it seems that opposing perspectives are treated as a sign of either a "blind hater" or a "blind loyalist." And the response to an opposing view is more often now just a reflexive bit of drive-by, derisive "smartassery" than actual engagement in discourse. WTF happened!?

 

[ajp4mgs]

It's convenient how R2 and 3PO crash on Tatooine in the correct region of the planet, both go their separate ways but both get picked up by the same group of Jawas, the night before going to the Lars Homestead at the time where Lars is looking to buy droids. Holy rose tinted glasses Batman!

Yes, that *is* convenient. ANH is constructed on a series of convenient coincidences. That's the conceit inherent to the type of story it is. It's a buy-in that the audience is asked to make with the understanding that the story unfolding in a more labored or methodical way would undermine its purpose. The screenplay wasn't pretending that coincidences weren't there by design - to have this farmboy pulled into his destined adventure.

When we get to ESB, however, there's a different approach to the storytelling mechanics. From this point on, SW adopts more traditional plot momentum where the buy-in from the audience isn't asked to go much beyond accepting the fantasy nature of the world/rules. This is evident in the discussions Lucas had with his co-writers and directors, which have been chronicled (thankfully!) in the making-of books. There was more emphasis on sequencing plot with proper foundations because a fuller story was now being told.

But if you want an example of contrived plotting in ESB that can fairly be labeled as resulting in plot convenience, there's the fact that Luke navigates to Bespin despite seeing nothing more than "a city in the clouds" during his vision. Lucas and Kasdan just lazily wave their magic plot wand to get the story to the next point. There's really no excuse for it because of how easily it could've been given a logical foundation, especially considering how so many of the other plot drivers didn't get the magic-wand treatment.

Even the greatest stories will have examples of contrived elements; no viewer/reader would demand every bit of plot minutia have proper foundation. It only becomes a problem if contrived plotting feels unnecessarily lazy and thereby pulls a viewer out of the story. That's a subjective standard, to be sure, but when it becomes a common takeaway, maybe... just maybe... there might be something to it.

 

[MeatHookGekko]

I find Star Wars best when you don't think too much into it.

Spark of Rebellion (Parts 1 & 2) (S01E01 & S01E02)
Fire Across the Galaxy (S01E15)
The Siege of Lothal (Parts 1 & 2) (S02E01 & S02E02)
Shroud of Darkness (S02E18)
Twilight of the Apprentice (Parts 1 & 2) (S02E21 & S02E22)
Steps into Shadow (Parts 1 & 2) (S03E01 & S03E02)
Hera's Heroes (S03E05)
Through Imperial Eyes (S03E17)
A World Between Worlds (S04E13)
Family Reunion and Farewell (Parts 1 & 2) (S04E15 & S04E16)


^
A fair argument and consideration to make is that the "casual viewer" ( which is the majority going into Ashoka) has no background on Clone Wars and Rebels. Without the benefit of long form storytelling, Ashoka needs to be extremely economical.

When do you lose the audience?

1) When you violate fundamental storytelling (Everything must have a purpose, there can't be any bloat, you can't have scenes and characters that can be removed and have no impact on the overall storyline)

2) When you break immersion.

3) When you keeping violating the self imposed "rules" of your world building

Alien 1, Predator 1, Terminator 1, Die Hard, etc, there are a short list of films that have stood the test of time. They are all extremely compact. They are all based in fundamental storytelling convention. There's no bloat. They aren't breaking their own rules.

Try to litmus test. Go through any of the modern Star Wars films and shows. What can you remove completely, be it a character, or a subplot, or some other glitch, that can be totally removed, and have absolutely zero impact on the overall story period. If you try to remove Parker and Brett being leveraged into the "rescue mission" over possibly losing their shares, and Ash is the one who leaves that out there with quiet clinical menace, you lose a ton of the space trucker theme of Alien 1 and keeping the characters from breaking immersion.

Greedo doesn't need to shoot first. You don't need to remove Sebastian Shaw's "ghost" and replace him with Hayden Christensen. Djarin doesn't need to hand over the Dark Saber in S3 when the end of Mando S2 says he can't do that. You might call it overthinking. I call it self sabotage.

IMHO, Star Wars is "best" when it is fundamental, stays in it's own lane, and has no bloat. Now I believe Filoni is a doing a decent job here making Ashoka ( though the show isn't really about Ashoka is it...) but it's clearly despite what usually is being pumped out from the "modern" SW assembly line. Simple plots/Complex characters > Complex plots/Simple characters

 

[jye4ever]

Ok I had to stop at the liquor store first.

Now let me go read those posts from agp/Khev.

 

[jye4ever]

They didn't throw 300 probes at Hoth though. It was just one. And out of all the thousands upon thousands of miles across the planet it could have touched down it conveniently landed next to Echo Base.

Compared to IMO it not being entirely illogical that Ezra would remain within striking distance of the Night Sister Temple for any number of reasons, one being to keep tabs should an escape vessel ever appear. So Sabine's starting point would have already been working much more in her favor. Then for all we know those crab critters could have been dotting the countryside in all directions with any one of them capable of guiding her to Ezra.


Luke finding Yoda via the Force still is an assumption though and one that theoretically could be applied to two other Jedi trainees (Ezra and Sabine.)

It is the old hiding in plain sight trick!

I mean giving Luke a last name of Skywalker, what could possibly go wrong lol

I bet “banned” Victor is right here posting right along us!