Star Wars Star Wars Discussion Thread - LET THE PAST D-! Oh, wait, nevermind

Bear Ribs

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ShadowArxxy

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Comrade
Except there's *tons* of fans wearing Stormtrooper helmets and the eye holes do in fact line up for the vast majority of people as long as the helmet is properly fitted. And that's even with the "501st Legion" fan group being ridiculous anal about requiring pure "screen accurate" helmets that conform exactly to the dimensions of the original props and may not be custom altered in any way for a better fit.
 

Agent23

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Except there's *tons* of fans wearing Stormtrooper helmets and the eye holes do in fact line up for the vast majority of people as long as the helmet is properly fitted. And that's even with the "501st Legion" fan group being ridiculous anal about requiring pure "screen accurate" helmets that conform exactly to the dimensions of the original props and may not be custom altered in any way for a better fit.
The simplest solution is often the easiest, IMHO.
Those helmets are probably very sweaty, so that might cause the lenses to get fogged up.
 

Bear Ribs

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Except there's *tons* of fans wearing Stormtrooper helmets and the eye holes do in fact line up for the vast majority of people as long as the helmet is properly fitted. And that's even with the "501st Legion" fan group being ridiculous anal about requiring pure "screen accurate" helmets that conform exactly to the dimensions of the original props and may not be custom altered in any way for a better fit.

1. Learn to relax and laugh at memes.
2. The actual movie helmets are hard enough to see in the actors frequently hit their heads on stuff. The 501st doesn't generally use things that are identical to the originals, that's called Prop Accurate and they distinguish it from Screen Accurate which is "looks about right on the street" such as their instructions in the link above to use darker colors than were in the movie so it looks right on a brightly lit street.

 

ShadowArxxy

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Comrade
Screen accurate helmets have a very poor field of view due to the small size of the vision lenses; the point is that they don't actually have that "totally blind" misalign between the lenses and the wearer's eyes.
 

ShadowArxxy

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Comrade
This may be controversial but I have come to think that the Old Republic, The Empire and the New Republic were all failures. The Galaxy would have been way better off with Regional Nation States.

I don't think that should be a controversial idea at all. The Old Republic was canonically corrupt to the extreme, which even spilled over to the Jedi; we see in Phantom Menace that the Jedi literally don't actually care about slavery or justice. Palatine rose to power on a reform platform but it was never sincere, just a cover for taking power for himself; on a larger scale, the Empire was even more corrupt and openly tyrannical, although it did do a better job of imposing law and order in the Outer Rim. The New Republic pretty much just brought back Old Republic corruption and never seemed to actually get on top of it.
 

Agent23

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This may be controversial but I have come to think that the Old Republic, The Empire and the New Republic were all failures. The Galaxy would have been way better off with Regional Nation States.
Nope, not really, although the Thrawn and post-Thrawn Imperial Remnant did pretty well, as did IIRC the Fell Empire it grew into.
 

ShadowArxxy

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Comrade
That said, I feel the GFFA really did swing to both sides of that pendulum. Remember that the Old Republic's corruption was in no small part rooted in the fact that in its final days, it had swung much closer to being that loose coalition of regional nation-states, with no central military and very little central authority. This was exactly the reason that both the Republic and the Jedi could justify turning a blind eye to slavery, declaring that, "This is horrific and absolutely illegal, but it's not my job to enforce the law out here, too bad for you." It's exactly the reason that the Trade Federation continued to be in power despite the events of TPM.


Obviously, Palpatine pushed the pendulum to the side of central authority. It doesn't mean he was *totally wrong* about the galaxy needing a stronger hand, just that he wasn't ever sincere about reforming it.
 

Skallagrim

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The Old Republic lasted for 25 millennia, of which -- at most -- 2000 years can be qualified as "a seriously bad time" for the galaxy.

Naturally, anything as big as a galaxy is always going to have some regional issues, but that's basically like saying that if there's a local brawl in some random county of the USA, that "proves" that the USA is a failed state on par with, say, Somalia. Obviously, that's bullshit. Bottom line: for the vast majority of the Old Republic's long, long existence, things were Pretty Damn Great™.

The only real bad times were Pius Dea period (1000 years), the Old Sith Wars (50 years) and the New Sith Wars / Draggulch Period (1000 years). The latter was more of an interspersed period with very dark times, but also some pretty mellow periods. (Or, for another comparison: trying to depict the period as a millennium of darkness is like describing the 20th century as if Hitler had been active for all of it.)

So. 2000 really shity years, tops. Out of 25.000 years. If you can keep existing for 25 millennia, and do a pretty good job of it for over 82% of the time... you're pretty much the best government that's ever existed. Which, in the SW universe, the Old Repulic most assuredly is.

People bitching about the Old Republic completely lack any and all perspective. They paste the most outlying bad times and the exesses of the Republic's literal dying days onto all of its history, and dumbly pretend as if that's fair accounting.



The most retarded take on galactic governance that can possibly be entertained, of course, is the absolute turd-brain notion that the Republic failed in being too much of a loose confederation. The opposite is true: that's why it succeeded. Because every single "bad" period in galactic history was demonstrably caused by attempts at centralising power. Without exception, it was a bunch of centralising tyrants who threw the galaxy into bloodshed and chaos, whereupon peace and prosperity were restored by overthrowing them and restoring decentralised, confederal governance.

As I've argued before: this is because decentralised governance is the only way a galaxy can be ruled in a half-way decent manner. Is there going to be corruption here and there? For sure. Is there going to be bad stuff happening locally, because (essentially) "Planets' Rights"? Yup. Is it better than the alternative? Absolutely.

Because on a galactic scale, with hundreds (if not thousands) of species with wildly different cultures and societies, you can either say "local autonomy!" or you can stomp on them all with a ruthless jackboot, for ever and ever. Those are literally the only options. There are no workable in-betweens, because if you try to limit local autonomy, many will just choose to secede. And then the Republic fails. (So then you watch it fail, or... the jackboots again.)

The only way to keep a galactic government that is not a genocidal tyranny is to make it so decentralised, so localist, so utterly unassuming that nobody really objects to it. That's the Old Republic. That's the best you're going to get, but if you should be that lucky, you can actually have the least bad government there is --- which is the smallest government there is.

Long live the Old Republic, and fuck all centralists. (In the ass, with a hot poker.)
 
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The Old Republic lasted for 25 millennia, of which -- at most -- 2000 years can be qualified as "a seriously bad time" for the galaxy.

Naturally, anything as big as a galaxy is always going to have some regional issues, but that's basically like saying that if there's a local brawl in some random county of the USA, that "proves" that the USA is a failed state on par with, say, Somalia. Obviously, that's bullshit. Bottom line: for the vast majority of the Old Republic's long, long existence, things were Pretty Damn Great™.

The only real bad times were Pius Dea period (1000 years), the Old Sith Wars (50 years) and the New Sith Wars / Draggulch Period (1000 years). The latter was more of an interspersed period with very dark times, but also some pretty mellow periods. (Or, for another comparison: trying to depict the period as a millennium of darkness is like describing the 20th century as if Hitler had been active for all of it.)

So. 2000 really shity years, tops. Out of 25.000 years. If you can keep existing for 25 millennia, and do a pretty good job of it for over 82% of the time... you're pretty much the best government that's ever existed. Which, in the SW universe, the Old Repulic most assuredly is.

People bitching about the Old Republic completely lack any and all perspective. They paste the most outlying bad times and the exesses of the Republic's literal dying days onto all of its history, and dumbly pretend as if that's fair accounting.



The most retarded take on galactic governance that can possibly be entertained, of course, is the absolute turd-brain notion that the Republic failed in being too much of a loose confederation. The opposite is true: that's why it succeeded. Because every single "bad" period in galactic history was demonstrably caused by attempts at centralising power. Without exception, it was a bunh of centralising tyrants who threw the galaxy into chaos, whereupon peace and prosperty was restored by overthrowing them and restoring decentralised, confederal governance.

As I've argued before: this is because decentralised governance is the only way a galaxy can be ruled in a half-way decent manner. Is there going to be corruption here and there? For sure. Is there going to be bad stuff happening locally, because (essentially) "Planets' Rights"? Yup. Is it better than the alternative? Absolutely.

Because on a galactic scale, with hundreds (if not thousands) of species with wildly different cultures and societies, you can either say "local autonomy!" or you can stomp on them all with a ruthless jackboot, for ever and ever. Those are literally the only options. There are no workable in-betweens, because if you try to limit local autonomy, many will just choose to secede. And then the Republic fails. (So then you watch it fail, or... the jackboots again.)

The only way to keep a galactic government that is not a genocidal tyranny is to make it so decentralised, so localist, so utterly unassuming that nobody really objects to it. That's the Old Republic. That's the best you're going to get, but if you should be that lucky, you can actually have the least bad government there is --- which is the smallest government there is.

Long live the Old Republic, and fuck all centralists. (In the ass, with a hot poker.)

The biggest issue with the republic at least by the end was the fact that the Republic Didn't have a military and all attempts for systems to create their own local armies was squashed by Corporations. In the days where the Old Republic had an army, (men and women so tough the clones would have been proud to fight along side them) and/or when the Jedi allowed their masters to rule over planets as Lords, (Had he not turned Dooku probably would have felt much more at home with the likes of Lord Hoth and The Army of Light) criminal and corrupt organizations like the Hutts and Czertek were still around but they didn't have the Republic over a barrel as we see in the Twilight of The Republic.

Part of what makes Anakin so tragic is that had he been taken in by the Jedi at just about any other time period, he would have flourished and could have easily become a legendary hero that could have founded a powerful and renowned nobility dynasty that could have had influence over the Republic for thousands of years (and to be fair House Skywalker was a very powerful and influential House in the Post-Imperial era) Anakin was sadly just born at the wrong time.
 
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