What confounded me is it that the rebel forces in Star Wars always seem worse off after accomplishing their objectives. Destroy the Death Star--then they must flee to a miseable ice planet from which they barely escape. Destroy the second Death Star, and the Emperor, then the First Order arises with a super-Death Star. Destroy the Super Death Star, and then they're reduced to a handful of ships in a slow-motion chase to salt Hoth. Perhaps this is what Luke was supposed to be warned about on Dagobah? But I don't think the series is coherent enough for that.
Yeah, though imagine that had been a coherent thought. The Last Jedi tried to kind of go in that direction via the whole "the people financing war have been making a lot of profits ever since the Clone Wars", which was a clever thought but a bit too late in the game. That's also one of the many places where rethinking the Jedi could have happened--if the whole arc of the nine films was not "the Skywalker Saga" but "the Jedi are supposed to be a spiritual order but they lost their way and became soldiers", with that being "bringing balance to the Force", that could have been great too. (And have had some interesting resonance with a lot of wuxia films that go back to the same theme with regard to the mythography of Shaolin Temple and its entanglement with dynastic politics and military affairs.)
Even the continual obsession with bigger and bigger death weapons makes some kind of sense--it's always been one of the oddities of pulp and superhero narratives that evil villains never just go back and improve the almost-successful scheme for conquest they worked on the last time. But if that had been intentional, they might also have been able to intentionally work further on Princess Leia's speech aboard the Death Star about the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers--that an empire that depends entirely on its ability to threaten people with annihilation has almost no ability to govern what it controls. (A theme I'll take up tomorrow in a real world context.)
What confounded me is it that the rebel forces in Star Wars always seem worse off after accomplishing their objectives. Destroy the Death Star--then they must flee to a miseable ice planet from which they barely escape. Destroy the second Death Star, and the Emperor, then the First Order arises with a super-Death Star. Destroy the Super Death Star, and then they're reduced to a handful of ships in a slow-motion chase to salt Hoth. Perhaps this is what Luke was supposed to be warned about on Dagobah? But I don't think the series is coherent enough for that.
Yeah, though imagine that had been a coherent thought. The Last Jedi tried to kind of go in that direction via the whole "the people financing war have been making a lot of profits ever since the Clone Wars", which was a clever thought but a bit too late in the game. That's also one of the many places where rethinking the Jedi could have happened--if the whole arc of the nine films was not "the Skywalker Saga" but "the Jedi are supposed to be a spiritual order but they lost their way and became soldiers", with that being "bringing balance to the Force", that could have been great too. (And have had some interesting resonance with a lot of wuxia films that go back to the same theme with regard to the mythography of Shaolin Temple and its entanglement with dynastic politics and military affairs.)
Even the continual obsession with bigger and bigger death weapons makes some kind of sense--it's always been one of the oddities of pulp and superhero narratives that evil villains never just go back and improve the almost-successful scheme for conquest they worked on the last time. But if that had been intentional, they might also have been able to intentionally work further on Princess Leia's speech aboard the Death Star about the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers--that an empire that depends entirely on its ability to threaten people with annihilation has almost no ability to govern what it controls. (A theme I'll take up tomorrow in a real world context.)