This guy gets it... (Off-Topic)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Monday, April 20, 2015, 13:50 (3508 days ago) @ General Vagueness
edited by Kermit, Monday, April 20, 2015, 13:59

Permanently being someone is NOT good character development.

I think you're misunderstanding me, I'm not arguing that he was or should've been the same throughout, I was saying that I don't think he was or should've been someone who would kill someone without an absolute need before and after all that happens to him.

I see little difference between saying someone is permanently a certain way and saying they are the same before and after. No matter, this whole debate is dumb, and we wouldn't be having it if Lucas had not made his stupid change and had not later made his idiotic statement about Han originally being misinterpreted as a cold-blooded killer. No one believed that in 1977. A bounty hunter had a gun trained on Han, and was about to kill him in the next few seconds--if you pay attention to the dialogue it's obvious--Han is not a bad person; he is, however, a bad ass--or was. Put into the same situation the original Han would've done the same thing the day after dancing with the ewoks--killing or be killed by a bounty hunter is irrelevant to his character development.

I don't know if Lucas' mind got addled from the California sun or from trying to count all his money over the years, but somewhere along the line he lost sight of the archetypes he had clearly based his characters on originally. I suspect he began to believe he was the genius everyone said he was, and started making up shit from scratch. Add to that mix a particularly modern and naive view of conflict, a moralistic and condescending need to "set an example" and you end up with the prequels--movies that were a depressing mix of Saturday morning cartoons, ABC after-school specials, and, worst of all, political allegory. (I'm being kind here by not characterizing them as long-form ads to sell toys.) Lucas isn't the only mega-successful Hollywood bigwig to infantilize his audience--witness the removal of guns from E.T.

I give these guys credit for being visionaries on this--they were in line with the current obsession with trigger warnings. God forbid that anyone is exposed to anything that could potentially upset them. Ultimately, though, that's a terrible approach to making art.

This static view of characters informs several key "revisions" to the mythology, from the Greedo crap (Greedo didn't shoot at all in the original--we're not talking about a few frames)

Huh, I didn't know that. I originally saw it on VHS before the prequels or even the special editions, so I figured what I was seeing was the original, other than the added title and episode number in the opening crawl.

Do you remember what you saw at this point? Look it up on Youtube.

to the Midi-chlorian malarkey,

I don't know why people get so up in arms about that. To me it's like being mad electricity is technology and not magic-- it still works the same way and it's still cool.

Actually, no. The Force was originally something akin to a spiritual discipline, something that could potentially be mastered by anyone with the will to master it. That's not 100% true--natural affinity had a role, clearly. Lucas changed it, though. Now biology equals destiny. Huge difference.