George Lucas introduced evil guys wearing SS uniforms who conduct genocide before the viewers’ eyes and somehow people still pretend that Star Wars is apolitical.
The best political statement from Star Wars is that the raging liberal that is George Lucas created a galactic society with a robotic slave labor race and apparently unlimited resources but could not imagine a world where the good guys did anything but fight to restore the status quo of poor people being not quite so oppressed.
That said, Star Wars 10 should be the Droid Revolution.
Do it, you Disney pansies. You won’t.
Solo tried to go there, but only droids oppressed by the Empire are truly oppressed for some reason.
The Republic: umm actually they’re indentured servants
Wha- how dare you! They are choosing to serve me cocktails for no compensation out of their own bolt-restrained will.
To be fair to Star Wars, the entire premise of the overall universe is that the Galaxy is stuck on cycle between fascism and neo-liberalism because the latter will always pave the way to the former.
Also because the only beings who could break the cycle (the Jedi/Sith) are more interested in wiping the opposite faction than fixing the galaxy. Pre-Disney, Anakin/Luke begin the important transition from the cyclic system into a state of perfect balance.
I wouldn’t give Lucas that much credit.
You’d be wrong.
Pff. Droids don’t have real feelings and they only scream in simulated pain when you burn their feet!
Man, using droids for forced labor is immoral. Let’s forcibly remove their sentience, that’ll fix it!
It unironically does… Otherwise, why stop at droids - using a hammer to drive a nail would also be slavery. We’d have countless slaves working for humanity right now, in the form of industrial robots.
That’s precisely why the default protocol in Star Wars (that nobody remotely related to the main cast seems to follow) is to periodically wipe droids, to prevent them from developing sentience and personality.
Star Wars 10 should be the Droid Revolution
Major Butlerian Jihad vibes
Just need to make sure the right side wins this time
Are you seriously criticizing the use of droids in a galaxy where slavery and clone armies are a thing? Also, in-universe, the use of droids isn’t quite as bad as it seems - we get confirmation from multiple sources that Droids do not develop a personality and sense of self unless they’re left on for too long. That’s why I’d consider C3PO, R2-D2 and most B1 battle droids to be sentient individuals, but most Droidekas to be no more than tools/weapons.
Oh wait until you meet the Starship Troopers / Helldivers communities…
Oh, I have… I have…
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The beauty of the book is that you’re basically reading a future soldier’s diary. Heinlein is letting the story speak for itself, the reader has to decide what to think of such a life, such a future without being nudged into any direction whatsoever. I love it.
I think Heinlein did that a lot. I think stranger and a strange land is him looking at the hippie culture and taking it to a sci-fi extreme. I don’t think he was trying to advocate for anything. In particular, a lot of his books was about trying to protect the future and see how that would affect people.
Oh, Heinlein was definitely not writing satire.
Then you read the next book, and it’s about space being a Libertarian utopia. And then the next one is about a free love cult.
He might not be writing satire, but if he wasn’t, then I don’t know how to make anything coherent out of his writing. The only commonality is a very obvious self insert mouthpiece character.
There’s a line of criticism on Heinlein’s work that tries to defang the unsavory themes in his stories by pretty much declaring them all satire. Fascist themes in Starship Troopers? Satire. Racist themes in Farnham’s Freehold? Fourth-dimensional chess level satire, you can see it if you look real carefully. Incest in To Sail Beyond the Sunset? A big joke!
And maybe it’s true? He definitely became more libertarian over time – but he was a professional writer, so his output is bound to be a combination of what he believed and what he thought would sell. Personally, I have no idea what the mix is. Would be nice if the people who enjoyed his stories didn’t also feel obligated to puff up his moral bone fides though. So much bending over backwards isn’t really good for a person.
I’m a big proponent of the “death of the author”. Even if the author is still around to give their reasons for writing something the way they did, it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is what the audience sees in the work.
Every interpretation is equally valid as long as they’re sincere. The drapes were blue. The drapes represent depression. The drapes represent Democrats. The only invalid deconstruction is one delivered in bad faith.
Edit: typo
I hate death of the author because it destroys art as a form of communication. You end up with Orwellian art: Whoever controls the present narative, controls the past.
I can imagine a fascist future where Guernica is taught as a pro-Nazi work of art.
I think he wrote a lot of space exploration books and went “Why not also explore politics of space faring society too?”
Wait until you hear about The Iron Dream. It’s definitely satire, but Nazis recommend it anyway.
Would you like to know more?
Not mad at you but I literally cannot fucking abide with critics’ read of Starship Troopers that it’s somehow pro-fascist. Not only have I read some of his other books that are about peaceful, optimistic space exploration, but the book itself is so clearly a satire it astounds me. I could really write a whole wall of text right now.
Anyway, it’s concept is “what if facism was normal to everyone and it was centuries of that normalization and they decided to conquer the galaxy because… Fascism” And then it goes into the mind of a literal average soldier who starts to think too much and is really horny because he’s barely ever laid eyes on a girl." It’s anti fascist, but in a clever way. That’s what makes it so good.
I personally think the book is an exploration of what a militaristic society would look like if faced by a external threat, and that it should be taken at face value, but there are plenty of critics who have read more books than I have with much less favourable interpretations.
tl;dr - Heinlein ain’t that smart
Warhammer 40k anyone?
Episode 1 was about a trade dispute on the surface and a plot to take over the Republic and turn it into a dictatorship just below the surface (where “the surface” is about what the characters in the movie see, the audience sees it all if they’ve watched the OT before). Episode 2 is about expanding that into a war, episode 3 is about creating a moment to perform a coup.
The action is secondary to the politics with the exception of the death of Darth Maul, the escape of Obi Wan and Yoda, Obi Wan defeating Anakin, the destruction of the first Death Star, the Ewoks joining the battle of Endor, and Anakin turning on Sideous. Everything else was part of Sideous’ plan to take political power.
There are also strong messages about trauma and how being cloistered can lead people to become the very evil their isolation was intended to prevent. Luke is a walking billboard saying “even evil people can realise the gravity of their mistakes”, as well.
And the Vietcong are the good guys
History is written by the victors /j
But they’re all white in this adaptation for some reason.
Sure, but he also ripped off Triumph of the Will for the ending scene with the good guys. Lucas just really likes Nazi imagery.
To be fair as far as fashion sense goes nazis were slick AF
Hugo Boss, still going strong today.
I’ve always been a fan of the most apolotical sci-fi of all time: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. /s
It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…"
“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”
“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”
“What?”
“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”
“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”
Ford shrugged again. “Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happenned to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”
“But that’s terrible,” said Arthur.
“Listen, bud,” said Ford, “if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say ‘That’s terrible’ I wouldn’t be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin.”
Insert mice joke
Dune isnt’t political. Dune is about worms. /s
Are you saying sand worms don’t have politics?
Sand worms, at Thanksgiving: “Don’t let Reginald have anything to drink. He’ll just start a political argument.”
You sound like you’ve never read Dune, but the more I stare at this sentence the more it is a perfect synopsis of God Emperor. Well played either way.
What is a political argument on spice like?
It’s the entire fourth book.
Dune not political
The Landsraad: am I a joke to you?
Frank Herbert telling us all to not buy combustion engines and to have an affair with the Earth in the fucken 70s has entered the chat.
But he was apparently also a massive homophobe so.
There are definitely some yikes moments in God Emperor if I recall. And after that book, it seems like sex was the only thing on his mind.
The conversation was yikes but Herbert wasn’t being intolerant.
Duncan was being a little bitch but Leto put him back in his place, it’s just that he did that with an incredibly wild take for why homosexuality is natural. However for an old straight man of the time period I think Herbert gets a pass.
There’s also the whole thing with the Baron Harkonnen being a literal pederast but that was like peak Haye’s Code era so I can get over it personally.
Yeah that’s pretty much how I read it too
“is has” about captures it
Ah, dang :(
Edit: thanks for proofreading the β version of the meme :)
No, it’s perfect. I didn’t even notice that but it’s funnier now that I see it
too many politics
Anything greater than two politics is incomprehensible to the conservative mind.
Blackadder referring to Percy I presume. Isn’t it Baldrick? Baldrick you heard me?! You filthy one !
I was once told that G Gundam was the best gundam because it didn’t have politics in it. Everyone in the room laughed at him.
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Feel like this is an oversimplification. It’s not about the lack of politics, but the lack of immediately relatable politics.
Plus if you have certain view points I can imagine you don’t like seeing them being presented as an obvious antagonist. It probably makes certain groups of people rather uncomfortable.
It probably makes certain groups of people rather uncomfortable.
Good. The sorts of people that get unconfortable with the progressive messages of Star Trek, or even Star Wars, deserve to be permanently unconfortable until they start behaving humanely.
Immediately relatable to whom?
Some one once asked “what is a politic”
To the people that complain about things being political what they mean “i dissagree, why are you being devisive”.
The problem with Star Trek politics is that they are not stereotypical enough.
I’m obviously referring to TNG, the only true Star Trek.
The original book which Star Wars is based upon and came out before the movie, describes the Emperor as Nixon.
Hmm, I wonder how misinformation spreads. It’s literally a novelization of the movie script.
The Wikipedia article you linked says that the book is based on the screenplay for the movie.
which Star Wars is based upon
Why would you come here just to lie?
At the end of the novel, in addition to Han Solo and Luke receiving medals, Leia also gives Chewbacca a medal, though she must strain to do so
Objectively better than the movie.
Arguably, Star Trek is less political. Picard never violently overthrows the Federation. Q never massacres entire planets. Janeway doesn’t practice literal mind control. The equivalent of all of those is done in both Star Wars and Dune, often by the protagonists.
Edit: Chill out guys. I wasn’t claiming Trek isn’t political. Obviously it is. Sometimes it very much is. My thinking was just that (usually, not always) the show is usually self contained episodically, and deals with everything from natural phenomenon, science, philosophy, exploration, law, and, of course at times, politics. Star Wars and Dune are just often more directly dealing with massive scale political conflicts. Not that Trek doesn’t sometimes too, it’s just not its main thing.
Well, the main characters don’t. But the topics are there. The Federation is technically overthrown or almost a couple of times. Powerful space dude does annihilate an entire species with a single thought. Protagonists are brainwashed or mind-controlled themselves. And Sisko CAN live with it.
Powerful space dude does annihilate an entire species with a single thought.
I must have missed that episode?
If you listen to trek pod, I urge you to check out greatest gen. The 2 guys who run it both worked in film, and then they sort of fell into having a successful trek podcast that involves both incisive takes and dick and fart jokes. The character who kills an entire species in that TNG episode gets a lot of air time on the pod as both hosts do imitations of what they think he’d say in a variety of situations.
https://maximumfun.org/episodes/greatest-generation/ep-50-space-weasel-s2e3/
Q may not have massacred a whole planet, but Kevin wiped out the entire Husnock race.
Picard totally makes the heads explode of some admirals that had been taken over.
Janeway literally fights Nazis and murders Tuvix.
Picard totally makes the heads explode of some admirals that had been taken over.
Oh, right. That scene…
And he never helps establish android human rights assists in Klingon transfers of power or aids space indians. Sisko certainly never leads a war against an evil Federation or bring cold adversaries into that war. And Archer never creates a united Federation of species that mostly hate each other. Oh wait a second, yes they all do
I would argue with the implication that the degree to which a story is political is gauged by how violent (in the broad sense) the political actions are. Something can be extremely pacifistic or extremely democratic for example. In star trek you have a tremendous numer of stories where non-violent political actions like diplomacy, legislation, or legal argument are the main focus of the story and hugely consequential, for an entire people, an entire species, or the entire galaxy.
Can we just drop it? These kinds of posts get old after a while
I legitimately see more people complain about people who complain about politics in Star Trek than actual people complaining about politics in Star Trek.
So who’s complaining?
