Star Wars

[Thad]

"Rancors are basically pit bulls" is my new favorite piece of Star Wars lore.

[Büge]

[Caithness]

His buffoonish simpleton accent in Japanese is just to use English pronouns

[Mothra]

I laughed so fucking hard when Boba Fett, upon recovering the Slave 1 in a daring raid, immediately flew it directly into the mouth the same sarlacc pit he crawled out of, being eaten a second time.

[beatbandito]

legitimately can't decide how true that is

[Grath]

I laughed so fucking hard when Boba Fett, upon recovering the Slave 1 in a daring raid, immediately flew it directly into the mouth the same sarlacc pit he crawled out of, being eaten a second time.

You mean his conspicuously unnamed Firespray Gunship.

[KingRoyal]

Is Boba Fett bad or good? I've seen a few clips and it mostly looks like latter era Steven Seagal movies, where a clearly out of weight actor stands still and effortlessly defeats enemies who are incapable of shooting a stationary target. Is that... standard for the show?

[Mothra]

Is Boba Fett bad or good? I've seen a few clips and it mostly looks like latter era Steven Seagal movies, where a clearly out of weight actor stands still and effortlessly defeats enemies who are incapable of shooting a stationary target. Is that... standard for the show?

It's pretty terrible, but I do like the guy who plays Boba Fett, and he has a fun protocol droid.

Its big problem is that it isn't about anything, and they just dick around aimlessly. Like there's this whole backstory about Fett being enslaved by the sand people, and it goes on for three eps, seeming like it's building to some thematic payoff, but then it just ends.

Similarly, he just like gains and loses villains at random, with little fanfare. He also has this really strange assassin companion character with no discernable personality or backstory or motivations, etc. She's just there for some reason.

Pretty weird show. Super duper doesn't need to exist.

[Mothra]

I'd say the action in this show sucks ass pretty heavily. It's not hard to have a stunt actor in full helmet do some dope bounty hunter stunts, all shooting a grappling hook at a guy and such. They just aren't able to do that like the Mandalorian could, for god knows what reason.

I honestly like that Boba Fett is an Old now, I like the idea that he's always just been older than you'd assume, throughout the movies. I know that doesn't line up with the timeline in like, Ep 2, but whatever. Having this high-level bounty hunter be as skilled as he is due to age and experience makes sense to me. And I dunno, we see Temuera Morrison with his shirt off all the time in this and he's in good shape for his age. Definitely doesn't seem out of place in the 70's Star Wars verse.

Hard not to compare this to Mandalorian, which had each episode contain a story of some significance and closure, and had the main character doing fun bounty hunter stuff all the time. Don't really get why this show can't do the same.

[Thad]

It's pretty terrible, but I do like the guy who plays Boba Fett, and he has a fun protocol droid.

The protocol droid is voiced by Matt Berry, of IT Crowd, Toast of London, and What We Do in the Shadows.

[Brantly B.]

It's weird to me how obsessed writers are with delving into Boba Fett's background and motivations. Thematically he's a guy in a face-concealing mask who barely ever speaks and has no firm allegiances or moral boundaries. The whole point ought to be that you never really know what's going on with him, but the only thing that ever even tried to dip its toes into that pool is... the Star Wars Holiday Special. Uhhh...

It's really telling though that at the end of the day all Boba Fett is is a name, an occupation and a suit of armor, and by taking away one of those things you still manage to end up with a character who has more going on than he does.

[Büge]

technically the Special Edition scenes, but who's counting

[Thad]

It's weird to me how obsessed writers are with delving into Boba Fett's background and motivations. Thematically he's a guy in a face-concealing mask who barely ever speaks and has no firm allegiances or moral boundaries. The whole point ought to be that you never really know what's going on with him

I'd say that a lot of writers, and writers on sprawling shared-universe mythologies in particular, are terrible at letting compelling mysteries stay compelling and mysterious. That's the Star Wars prequels in a nutshell -- and I don't just mean the PT, I'm including Clone Wars, Solo, Rogue One, Rebels, anything that fills in the backstory before the retroactively-numbered Episode 4.

What we've wound up with isn't just an increasingly elaborate backstory for Boba Fett and ongoing tales of how he survived the Sarlacc Pit after all and what he did next, but really every piece of Star Wars lore involving the word "Mandalorian" is a retcon somebody introduced to explain what the deal is with Boba Fett and his outfit.

but the only thing that ever even tried to dip its toes into that pool is... the Star Wars Holiday Special. Uhhh...

I'll go to bat for the cartoon as the only good part of the Holiday Special. The cartoon is cool.

(And I love the story that Mark Hamill was the only actor who was really engaged, who wanted to do multiple takes and put in the best performance he could. I think that guy has the makings of a good voice actor; somebody should look into that.)

It's really telling though that at the end of the day all Boba Fett is is a name, an occupation and a suit of armor, and by taking away one of those things you still manage to end up with a character who has more going on than he does.

Yeah, for all that there are good arguments to make that Boba Fett didn't need all this backstory, we've certainly gotten some good characters and stories out of it. Clone Wars doesn't just develop Boba himself, it's also largely the story of an army of surprisingly complex characters cloned from the same DNA he is. And I agree with Mothra that, while The Book of Boba Fett is kind of a mess, the character of Old Man Fett it depicts is pretty interesting. (Even if, as always, the Star Wars timeline makes no goddamn sense; Fett should be about 40 at this point, but he's played by a 60-year-old actor. I guess that Sarlacc acid really did a number on him.)

And again, absolutely everything about Mandalorian history and culture, ad-hoc and contradictory though it may be, is a result of later writers trying to build on that cool-looking bounty hunter who had like two lines in Empire.

I didn't need to know the details of how Han met Chewie or won the Millennium Falcon from Lando and then made the Kessel Run in it. That's the kind of obsessive backfilling every last detail that's hinted at in the OT that just seems to completely fucking miss the point. But the lore is richer for having things like Mandalorians in it. Sometimes filling in backstory works out nicely.

[Friday]

I remember Tolkien talking about in an interview how for decades people wrote him demanding explanations for Bombadil. Who he was, exactly, if he was a Maiar, or a direct incarnation/spirit of the earth, or whatever the fuck. And Tolkien refused to nail it down.

He actually put it rather nicely. I'm paraphrasing here, but basically what he said was "any good story should have a few things that are left unexplained or mysteries. Mysteries get people interested, they make people think."

Naturally people want to solve mysteries. That's fine. That's how people get "headcanons" to find reasons for things. The same urge to tell yourself that Bombadil is a Maiar or whatever is the same urge people had to invent Thor when they couldn't explain lightning and thunder.

The problem is, of course, when "official" writers decide to fill in every little detail until there's nothing interesting left. Especially when the original author is long dead (or has sold his control away) and you just have whatever rando decides to make up whatever they want. That's fine when it's per person in their own little headcanon, but as soon as someone writes down "No, Tom Bombadil is a Maiar. He's Manwe's brother-in-law and also here are 300,000 words about his backstory and what his favorite food is" he instantly becomes 10,000 times less interesting and cool.

[Mongrel]

The funniest thing about the Book of Fett for me is a very old friend of mine who... well... you know that "expert viewer" problem where, say, a doctors can't watch a show about TV medicine because they simply can't suspend their disbelief when the writers clearly didn't even to learn the most basic facts about medicine? The complaint I heard was "They have literally no idea how crime works!" (emphasis mine)

Also, 1000x yes @Friday. And then you get fun stuff like Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil

[Büge]

The funniest thing about the Book of Fett for me is a very old friend of mine who... well... you know that "expert viewer" problem where, say, a doctors can't watch a show about TV medicine because they simply can't suspend their disbelief when the writers clearly didn't even to learn the most basic facts about medicine? The complaint I heard was "They have literally no idea how crime works!" (emphasis mine)

Mmm. Kylie refuses to watch any film or television having to do with court proceedings.

Except for My Cousin Vinny. That one actually got things right.

[Thad]

The funniest thing about the Book of Fett for me is a very old friend of mine who... well... you know that "expert viewer" problem where, say, a doctors can't watch a show about TV medicine because they simply can't suspend their disbelief when the writers clearly didn't even to learn the most basic facts about medicine? The complaint I heard was "They have literally no idea how crime works!" (emphasis mine)

There's a good reason that some of the best workplace comedies (The Dick Van Dyke Show, 30 Rock) are about TV writers.

[Mongrel]

Except for My Cousin Vinny. That one actually got things right.

Yeah! There's always a few that do. Goodfellas is probably the best example of this for gangsters.

[KingRoyal]

I wouldn't really consider the mystery of Boba Fett's backstory to be equivalent to the mystery of Tom Bombadil. Boba Fett's purpose in the story is as a plot device, to help explain how the Empire tracked the Falcon to Bespin. Old Tom Bombadil, though, he's a merry fellow and his role in the story is contained in his chapters.

The thing that always annoyed me about Boba Fett was that he represented the worst impulse of Star Wars fandom, where anything about the actual story or characters is secondary to the cool of it. Boba Fett in the story basically tracks the Falcon, has Darth Vader do all the work then dies to a blind Han Solo. He became a cool badass because fans really loved his sweet armor and hella sweet ship. It's the same impulse that would lead a lot of expanded universe fiction to focus on lightsabers, even as this fixation made them less special and unique.

[Mongrel]

I remember when, in the latter days of the old Expanded universe, the fetishization of Boba Fett had reached absolutely ridiculous heights, because most of the writers were basically fanfic authors who'd sleazed their way into making actual "canon" books.

The most absurd instance I can recall, is that one "writer" (Abel G Peña, IIRC) basically started stalking some girl with IIRC a goth fashion site (might have been a burlesque dancer, I can't recall exactly) and then wrote skeezy sories about her as "Boba Fett's Daughter" as actual fanfic. Meanwhile, separately, Peña convinced another writer to insert his idea for Boba Fett's daughter in that writer's story in a published novel, so that he could write his creepy-as-fuck stalker stories as actual canon when his own next book came up.

Later SW:EU was basically the worst aspects of any fanfic culture, only finely distilled to the highest potency, and aged in casks normally used for manbaby sweat.