DarthDementous

If you ever needed proof that Russel T Davies 'gets it', look no further than this absolutely bonkers recent 'Letter From the Showrunner'. I do not envy this poor man being this insanely aware of how his work is perceived, but my god that knowledge does absolute wonders:

I love the attention to the music and the reference to Season 10's soundtrack not being released in particular, but there's a lot here that gives an insight to how across he is with all aspects of the franchise

If you ever needed proof that Russel T Davies 'gets it', look no further than this absolutely bonkers recent 'Letter From the Showrunner'. I do not envy this poor man being this insanely aware of how his work is perceived, but my god that knowledge does absolute wonders:

I love the attention to the music and the reference to Season 10's soundtrack not being released in particular, but there's a lot here that gives an insight to how across he is with all aspects of the franchise

If you ever needed proof that Russel T Davies 'gets it', look no further than this absolutely bonkers recent 'Letter From the Showrunner'. I do not envy this poor man being this insanely aware of how his work is perceived, but my god that knowledge does absolute wonders:

I love the attention to the music and the reference to Season 10's soundtrack not being released in particular, but there's a lot here that gives an insight to how across he is with all aspects of the franchise

That's the point. He's trying to convey with writing what it's like trying to watch something with the mind of a producer and all the potential fan reactions to the episode

If you ever needed proof that Russel T Davies 'gets it', look no further than this absolutely bonkers recent 'Letter From the Showrunner'. I do not envy this poor man being this insanely aware of how his work is perceived, but my god that knowledge does absolute wonders:

I love the attention to the music and the reference to Season 10's soundtrack not being released in particular, but there's a lot here that gives an insight to how across he is with all aspects of the franchise

If you ever needed proof that Russel T Davies 'gets it', look no further than this absolutely bonkers recent 'Letter From the Showrunner'. I do not envy this poor man being this insanely aware of how his work is perceived, but my god that knowledge does absolute wonders:

I love the attention to the music and the reference to Season 10's soundtrack not being released in particular, but there's a lot here that gives an insight to how across he is with all aspects of the franchise

Ok so, am I the only one extremely disappointed in the Sith Anakin Vs Ahsoka duel music? Like the first duel with Jedi Anakin sounded fine, but the second one just sucked. Usually Kiner & Co. do some wicked cool things with their big (dare I say, emotional?) duel sequences as far as I can tell. So I’m bummed out there was the shift from big and bombastic music in past duels, to bland and, almost, generic music here.

You're derailing the discussion without giving any reason for why the kind of things we're talking about are invalid

No one was even talking about the idea of non-attachment or making the claim that Star Wars' spiritual foundations are completely coherent. I'm well aware of the issues of trying to combine Western and Eastern mysticism together especially when some concepts are fundamentally opposed, but I am still of the belief that he did so more thoughtfully than Filoni and that the idea of time travel really goes against those foundations

I keep finding that the closest it sounds to Star Wars it's probably David

I decided a while ago (maybe after Rogue One came out?) that I'm not invested as a Star Wars Saga fan. I'm not a Jedi Knights fan. I'm a Galactic Civil War fan. You give me that time period, those struggles, that aesthetic? I'm happy. Obvs. Andor was a home run for me. But it also explains why Rebels is my favorite SW thing other than Star Wars and Empire.
 
Mando and now Ahsoka are dancing around the edges of that. You still get that "looks and acts like Star Wars only mostly without stormtroopers". But the worst part of this era is that it's preamble for the silliness that the ST is. The only way that we can buy the state of the galaxy at the start of TFA is that Our Heroes were almost immediately morons.
 
Well, the Filoni TV shows are showing us that that is EXACTLY what happened.  Mando started with just being a "dangerous man in a dangerous world" show which was awesome. But now it and Ahsoka have moved further into "and this is where it's all going to go wrong" territory.
 
I'm sure I'm not the first one to notice, but it's starting to feel a little Harry Potter. There was a reign of terror that was defeated. Now the Evil is returning and it will be allowed to because nobody believes it.

Well, that's how Star Wars fans have been increasingly conditioned to look at the films, thanks to their increasing propensity to throw curveballs at the audience. There's effectivelly one attempt at a surprising twist in every movie following The Empire Strikes Back and its truly great twists. Unsurprisingly, none of the subsequent twists have been anywhere near as succesfull, although a couple are somewhat effective.
 
So, in Return of the Jedi we have the "Sister!" reveal, which I'm personally convinced had nothing to do with a sequel trilogy or anything except trying to do the Vader thing over again. Terrible.
 
In The Phantom Menace, we had the body double reveal. Pretty effective, actually.
 
In Attack of the Clones, I think Anakin's massacre of the sand people was meant to be the surprise twist - if you look for copies of the script, you'll often find those pages turn out. Its way premature for Anakin's character.
 
In Revenge of the Sith, I think the Palpatine reveal was meant to do that, and in earlier drafts Lucas thought of other avenues like making Palpatine tell Anakin that he's his father. I'm glad he did away with that, but it left him with the most obvious "twist" of all time.
 
In The Force Awakens, its that Kylo Ren is Han Solo's son and his willingness to murder him later on. Works reasonably well.
 
And then The Last Jedi just tried to take this propensity for surprising plot twists and multiply it by a hundred. But probably, the main twist it was going for was that Luke contemplated murdering Kylo. Its good, but the film throws so many of these curveballs, it becomes an exercise in diminishing returns.

What in the ever-living fuck does race have to do with liking film music?

As someone on the receiving end of quite a few of his insults, yeah no

I agree. Its more context than a "key" to reading the actual films.
 
But, by the same token, its easy to let our impressions of some of the films (particularly the original) be coloured by elements introduced in later, and to be effected by Lucas' post-hoc affectations, both of which are equally flawed ways to "read" the films.

Is this here  some dark ritual to conjure up Mattris?

I think it can be useful to mine drafts and interviews for context, but I’m wary of using them at the exclusion of, or alternative to, what came out at the end of the creative process.

I agree. Sorta.
 
The idea of the Force as an exclusive, innate power really only comes to the fore in Return of the Jedi: and even there, in the story conferences Lucas insisted to a disbelieving Lawrence Kasdan that anyone could use the Force, although that clearly changed before the finished film.
 
That's very much the world of the original film. For one thing, The Force is less of an overt superpower in that film, so not only is it not presented as an exclusive power, but also the process of mastering it isn't presented as some lifelong, Shaolin-like practice.
 
The line in question doesn't appear in the finished film, but Ben's voice was supposed to tell Luke at the end that "you have stepped into your father's shoes", so as to say that Luke had indeed mastered the use of the Force by the end of the film.
 
Really, the Force is presented in that film more than anything else as the power of belief in one's own self, and in one's own feelings. As such, its really not an exclusive power, although obviously the impressionable Luke makes a better candidate for exercising the power of belief, than does the cynic of Han Solo.
 
I will say, however, that this more "egalitarian" view of the Force is never made explicit in either the original or in The Empire Strikes Back, and since both The Last Jedi and Ahsoka acknowledge the prequel trilogy, they can't really throw away the exclusivist view of the Force presented in those films.
 
 
This is another important point, sort of tangentially related to what I was talking about. Yes, Luke in the original film is the unwitting son of a great Jedi and pilot, but he's still not the ordained, prophecised, messianic figure he would gradually turn into in the sequels and prequels. 
 
No, he's an everyman closer to Bilbo Baggins, and its why people liked him and continue to do so. The whole Paul Atreidis-like "Chosen One" turn came in later entries, and very much transformed the role of the character.

I think looking at the Original Trilogy and the Prequel Trilogy you can see how George changed as a person and what aspects about him and what he believed stayed the same. There's a core throughline there that you don't get into the Sequel Trilogy where he had no involvement, and now these live action shows where he also has no involvement.

I think both the OT and the PT are consistent with the idea that not everyone can be a Jedi, that you do need to be special, but that it also takes discipline and focus to make something of that innate talent. The ST horrifically contradicts that, and TLJ/Ahsoka's egalitarian approach doesn't square very well with that idea. Luke was an everyman but that doesn't mean any one could've done what he did, he's exceptional because he followed that destiny but destinies are not interchangeable: "Your destiny lies along a different path."

The central struggle of Star Wars is the conflict between forces larger than ourselves and our own ability for self-determination. The idea that we are only the choices we make is somewhat at odds with the social and economic factors of the world we inhabit. The same is true of the GFFA.
 
George seems to say that no matter the world we inhabit, we are still capable of making decisions for good or bad, even in morally compromised situations.
 
Anakin’s entire story is that at almost every turn, he is given the opportunity to choose the greater good over selfish gain, and chooses the latter. Until the very end, when he chooses self-sacrifice as an act of compassion (not attachment) for his son, thus fulfilling the prophecy. A choice rendered moot by reborn Sith Lords, force healing, and WbW time travel.

That episode was absolutely hilarious

Which is why I said “potentially hereditary.” It’s not clear based on the Lucas sources exactly how it manifests itself, because, ultimately, it isn’t really that important. It is, however, shown to be in-born, which is why I use innate. It’s more accurate.
 
Also, “ it’s possible he was conceived by the midi-chlorians.” Is the line. It’s never definite, and it’s heavily implied that this might have been manipulated by Palpatine and Plagueis, playing into your point about Shmi, she maybe isn’t the best example for my point.

So I decided to watch the video, and this is exactly why I prioritise what is contained in the art over what the artist says about it.

What he says here is outright contradicted by the episode which implies he doesn't have a very good grasp of what it is he's even done. 'I question whether it's even real or how tangible that is and I want to leave that open' means absolutely nothing when Ezra interfering with Ahsoka literally saves her life. That's reinforced by what Filoni says when he says she can't leave with Ezra, because what he's doing is upsetting the natural balance and the rules of causality already, but that would truly break things even further. That doesn't get around it being time travel, in fact that's one of the most standard forms of time travel which is the idea of a bootstrap paradox or closed loop where there was never a linear beginning, which is what he's saying the World Between Worlds is as a place with echoes from all time where everything happens at once.

There's appealing to the inherent mysticism of Star Wars and then there's convoluted bullshit, and this firmly sits in the latter

So I decided to watch the video, and this is exactly why I prioritise what is contained in the art over what the artist says about it.

What he says here is outright contradicted by the episode which implies he doesn't have a very good grasp of what it is he's even done. 'I question whether it's even real or how tangible that is and I want to leave that open' means absolutely nothing when Ezra interfering with Ahsoka literally saves her life. That's reinforced by what Filoni says when he says she can't leave with Ezra, because what he's doing is upsetting the natural balance and the rules of causality already, but that would truly break things even further. That doesn't get around it being time travel, in fact that's one of the most standard forms of time travel which is the idea of a bootstrap paradox or closed loop where there was never a linear beginning, which is what he's saying the World Between Worlds is as a place with echoes from all time where everything happens at once.

There's appealing to the inherent mysticism of Star Wars and then there's convoluted bullshit, and this firmly sits in the latter

Really, no joke. When I saw episode 9 for the first time I was so confused by force ghosts, holograms, force projections, Zombie Palpatine Clone, Han Solo appearing as some kind of memory ghost and Chewbacca coming back from the dead after expoding in that spaceship, dead Carrie Fisher walking around etc., that when Lando suddenly showed up at the resistance base talking to Poe I was totally confused and thought, what kind of ghost is he now? In the last scene we saw him before, he was on another planet. So is he now also some kind of ghost/projection/dontknowwhat? After some time I understood, ok, somehow he got there and met up with them. Don't know how.

The creator can say outside of the show how his idea is not stupid but actually very smart and cool but that doesn't change the facts of the episode. An artefact was established that let you travel to points in history to alter them, whether it's a closed loop or bootstrap paradox or whatever time travel trope, it's still time travel, and irreversibly changes the status quo. And for what? To bring a character back to life that should've died in the previous series? Yikes.