Star Wars 9 : The Rise of Skywalker

[Riggswolfe]

Star destroyers are fucking MASSIVE.  I also don't care how advanced your automation capabilities are, you are not crewing hundreds of these things with the children of a cult, unless your "ultra secret sith cult" has an adult population the size of a fucking metropolis......in which case your chances of remaining secret usually fly out the window.

The crew thing doesn't bother me. The Star Wars universe has thousands, maybe tens of thousands of populated worlds. Assuming each of them has at least the same population as Earth finding crews isn't a big deal. Hell, they could've just stolen children all over the galaxy and it'd barely make a blip.

[Goumindong]

Star destroyers are fucking MASSIVE.  I also don't care how advanced your automation capabilities are, you are not crewing hundreds of these things with the children of a cult, unless your "ultra secret sith cult" has an adult population the size of a fucking metropolis......in which case your chances of remaining secret usually fly out the window.

The crew thing doesn't bother me. The Star Wars universe has thousands, maybe tens of thousands of populated worlds. Assuming each of them has at least the same population as Earth finding crews isn't a big deal. Hell, they could've just stolen children all over the galaxy and it'd barely make a blip.

It would atill make it impossible to hide. Either way my assumption is that the ships were unmanned.

Though the FO does step up kidnapping in order to field them so like... add it onto the list of things they do in 24 hours that make no sense.

[Cyrrex]

Unknown Regions.  If all those peoples came from there, nobody in the rest of the galaxy would be the wiser. 

[Velorath]

The Sith Eternal is made up of some very influential people in the galaxy, including people who served on the boards of Sienar-Jaemus and Kuat-Entralla shipyards. These titans of galactic industry were able to smuggle the parts needed for the fleet out of those facilities and onto Exegol, providing the raw material necessary to build the fleet's might.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18cW_yHo3PY

[eldaec]

It's like these people are worse than JJA at this. Watching the film I thought thought it wouldn't be at all hard to tweak this story to make sense. But no, new Republic corporations were smuggling 'parts' out to Palpatine.

Writing alternative stories on the Internet always makes me feel bad....

But you would think the correct answer is that the imperial guard and an imperial remnant faction snuck out to the unknown region, or maybe had already set up a reserve clone army out there during the imperial era.

[Phildo]

Smuggling enough parts to make a fleet capable of overwhelming the entire might of the galaxy, meanwhile where exactly were the Republic's fleets this entire time?  Was there ever a proper explanation for why the Resistance was a small, guerrilla force and the Republic essentially faded away?

[Khaldun]

Don't forget that JJA has firmly established now that you can essentially travel instantaneously to all parts of the Star Wars galaxy without real limits in terms of fuel or time. So why the "Unknown Regions" are unknown is a ? Why anything is "remote" in Star Wars is a ? Tatooine isn't the equivalent of a small town in the Central African Republic from the perspective of New York City, it's Hoboken. Everything in Star Wars is now right next to everything else, there is no real distance or vastness. The only reason anything in JJAverse Star Wars is "unknown" is that people in Star Wars are too fucking lazy to explore or travel, or the unknown places are just so fucking ugly or dull that no one goes there. The entire story of ROS takes place in 24 hours--the characters travel to 5-6 planets. from the Resistance base to the planet of the tentacle Burning Man festival (where they spend at least 2 hours looking for fetch quest clue #1) to the planet of the Poe-girlfriend and future toy droid guy (at least 2 hours dealing with fetch quest #2) to the Endor system (where they're prepared to wait until morning but Rey moves to the quest sequence more quickly--let's say 2 hours) to the Resistance planet and/or Sithworld. Chewy and Lando then go off and raise a giant fleet from all parts of the galaxy in maybe an hour or two?

There is no time for any of that to have taken transit time. If it's more than 20 minutes between any of those locations, it doesn't work. So goodbye to remoteness and vastness and distance and mystery. Way to add to the world-building.

[IainC]

Yeah, that's been a huge failure of all of the sequel trilogy films. In ANH, they are on the way from Tattooine to Dantooine until they get intercepted by the Death Star. There's a sense of time passing. How much time? Doesn't matter, there's time for Ben to run Luke through Jedi 101, for everyone else to get sick of playing games with Chewie. We get the idea that time has passed. Even the prequels managed to show journeys as being significant. All of the films in the sequel trilogy though have tried to show us a whole bunch of different Star Wars scenes and make the galaxy look big through diversity. That has the opposite effect though because we can see that they travel to all of those locations in a negligible amount of time, the Star Wars galaxy just looks parochial instead.

[MahrinSkel]

"Light speed skipping" was basically a big "fuck you" to the very concept of distance.

--Dave

[eldaec]

Smuggling enough parts to make a fleet capable of overwhelming the entire might of the galaxy, meanwhile where exactly were the Republic's fleets this entire time?  Was there ever a proper explanation for why the Resistance was a small, guerrilla force and the Republic essentially faded away?

I think it is generally accepted that the resistance was the denialable force in FO territory, distinct from the Republic itself.

[Khaldun]

ANH depends crucially at several points on the distance between places being meaningful. The Rebellion's secrecy and ability to hit the Empire meaningfully depends, for one, on this being a vast galaxy that takes time to traverse (something that continues into ESB). The distance from Tatooine to Alderaan is important--it allows the characters a chance to interact, for Luke to have his brief training in the Force, etc.--there's even a sense that maybe the time in transit is longer than just the interactions we see (though not long enough that people need to sleep, so probably between 2-8 hours). Scouts take a while to go from the Death Star to Dantooine and to communicate--again, maybe half a day? The Death Star famously can't just warp right on top of Yavin's moon, but in fact has to take its time getting to the relevant moon (implying that you have to enter systems at particular locations and that there are hyperspace routes or lanes). The time it takes Luke to get from Dagobah to Bespin matters a lot to ESB. Hell, if you could warp from one end of the galaxy to the other instantly without lanes or constraints, you wouldn't need to keep a fleet massed ever (and thus have no vulnerability to an attack you're not seeking or welcoming--you could always keep your fleet completely dispersed and assemble it for massed action in a matter of minutes.

The prequels depend on distance too--the remoteness of Kamino is what lets the clone armies be built there out of sight of the Senate and the Jedi, the distance of Naboo from Coruscant is why they have to send just two Jedi to deal with whatever the situation is, etc. Again, if every point in the entire galaxy was within minutes of every other point without constraint, you could always easily bring maximum force to bear on any location within twenty to thirty minutes without ever having to centralize it, and the Republic would have had no issues with its scale or size--a civilization that could resurface most of a planet (Coruscant) could afford to build a billion remote observational droids (a capability we know the Empire and thus presumably the Republic had) to gain onsite intelligence in every system in the galaxy.

But ROS can't work if distance simply doesn't exist. There's no fleet already assembled before Palpatine speaks to the galaxy--we're told that directly. There doesn't really seem to be one even before Chewbacca and Lando go to try and call a fleet of free societies/ex-Republic naval resources/whatever to Exegol. The fleet that appears has ships that look to have come from all over, pretty much from the other side of the galaxy. It would have been one thing if there had been a big fleet waiting to go but just not knowing where to go, but the film specifically says that's not the case precisely so that we can get the fake dumb tension of Poe thinking it's all over and telling his forces he's sorry.

So any future SW that needs to build story up through locations being remote is going to either have to just plain old forget that ROS (and TFA and TLJ) happened, which is probably the right thing to do, or they're going to do something more tortured that tries to actually explain it (almost certainly worse). But it's just fucking bad world-building in a series that took hold of viewers in part because it did really interesting world-building. Think of how consistent and controlled the way stuff *looked* in ANH and what that said about the galaxy; think of how much mileage ANH got out of Luke feeling like he was living in a remote, back-of-the-beyond place; think of how important it was that things felt far away from each other; think of how much stuff there seemed to be in terms of background rules and ideas--ANH and ESB felt like the first installments of a big, complicated universe with a very distinctive feeling to it. Even the prequels tried a bit to built that up (and the Clone Wars and Rebels cartoons actually took that and ran with it). ROS takes a big smelly shit all over the *idea* of world-building.

[eldaec]

ANH depends crucially at several points on the distance between places being meaningful.

Not really, and nor does Empire. But they do use it to slow the fuck down from time to time. Which as everyone has discussed, JJA is incapable of.

If another writer, especially in the GCW era, wants to go back to distances being real, they can, easily, and probably will.

I can't imagine anyone is going to be writing in the first order era any time soon, precisely because the world building has been nonexistent, so of all the things that were bad about the JJA scripts, this is the least important for future stuff.

[taolurker]

Yeah, that's been a huge failure of all of the sequel trilogy films. In ANH, they are on the way from Tattooine to Dantooine until they get intercepted by the Death Star. There's a sense of time passing. How much time? Doesn't matter, there's time for Ben to run Luke through Jedi 101, for everyone else to get sick of playing games with Chewie. We get the idea that time has passed.

SW FAIL

Tattooine to Alderaan
(Dantooine only mentioned by Leia in captivity, Yavin was where eventual destruction of DS happened).

Also, I saw this.. Rise of Skywalker fell down, but maybe rose it back from TLJ, MAYBE. Essentially when the text scroll retconned Palpatine anything after that was immediately scrutinized and seen for the masturbatory Star Wars BS I expected, with MOR PALPATINE. After TLJ and Leia stupidity, this was disappointing, and a forgettable popcorn action movie that tarnishes (IMO) the franchise, killing trying to get young fandom (to connect with Boomer/Xers parents?) like other films (again IMO).

Still waiting on Mandalorian, and Rogue One is only movie from SW in years I'd watch multiple times without eyerolling or exasperateingly sighing.

[Jeff Kelly]

If you go with the official Star Wars reference/bible - the West End Games Star Wars RPG (I’m not even kidding) - the trip from Tattooine to Alderaan would take about a week or at least several days on the Falcon, twice or three times as long with a capital ship. You actually get an idea from how ANH tells the story that the trip has taken days even if it’s never explicitly stated.

It also fits with Lucas’ vision of Star Wars being more like WW2 in space.

West End games invented so much lore for Star Wars (including a lot of the names) and they collected and organised so much information and material from Lucasfilm that Lucasfilm actually gave out the Star Wars RPG books as reference material to writers and creative people working on Star Wars content from 1987 onwards.

[Goumindong]

ANH depends crucially at several points on the distance between places being meaningful.

Not really, and nor does Empire. But they do use it to slow the fuck down from time to time. Which as everyone has discussed, JJA is incapable of.

If another writer, especially in the GCW era, wants to go back to distances being real, they can, easily, and probably will.

I can't imagine anyone is going to be writing in the first order era any time soon, precisely because the world building has been nonexistent, so of all the things that were bad about the JJA scripts, this is the least important for future stuff.

The durations of travel in the OT are pretty clearly “hilariously short”. But because the movies have pacing you have to really think about it to realize it. And not in the sense that you realize it later but in the sense that you have to watch the movies with an eye to determining it (as an example Alderaan is destroyed minutes before the falcon gets there. There is no cut between obi-wan feeling it and them coming out of hyperspace into the meteor swarm.)

Smuggling enough parts to make a fleet capable of overwhelming the entire might of the galaxy, meanwhile where exactly were the Republic's fleets this entire time?  Was there ever a proper explanation for why the Resistance was a small, guerrilla force and the Republic essentially faded away?

The republics fleets were destroyed by starkiller base (as mentioned during TFA they were at the planets that were destroyed andwere destroyed with them)

[Cyrrex]

Yeah, the movies don't have to literally state the times and distances, they just have to cut things together in a way that makes us aware of it, or at the very least, not break logical rules.  The OT did it just fine, and in some cases we know how remote places like Tat, Hoth, Dant and Yavin are.  It is either strongly hinted at in the way things are cut together, or you get Tarkin talking about how remote Dantooine is from the core, etc.  It is mostly handled well in the prequels, except for the whole Mustafar debacle at the very end.

JJA is probably good at a lot of things in terms of filmmaking, but he shits all over the concepts of time, space and distance.  To a ridiculous degree.  

[lamaros]

Hey look, it's the discussion we had after TFA all over again.

[Jeff Kelly]

There’s pushing things a bit for dramatic effect (Obi Wan arrives at Alderaan minutes after it was destroyed) and there’s total disregard for time, space, distance and internal logical consistency (everything in 7, 8 and 9).

[Cyrrex]

This now has me wondering if Alderaan didn't literally just blow up a few minutes prior.  I mean, the Death Star was still in the area, so maybe?  And the asteroid configuration was still tight.  Which is a total bullshit point, but I wrote it anyway.

Alternative explanation:  a million voices cyring out in terror only travel at sublight speeds.

[Cyrrex]

Hey look, it's the discussion we had after TFA all over again.

Dude, do you even know where you are?  F13.  30% politics, 20% useless conversation and funny pics, 50% Star Wars threads.  0.5% usefully cynical commentary.

[Jeff Kelly]

Alternative explanation:  a million voices cyring out in terror only travel at sublight speeds.

Even the force has to adhere to special relativity.

[eldaec]

At least in this film, nobody teleports from Earth to Qonos. Just saying.

[eldaec]

Alternative explanation:  a million voices cyring out in terror only travel at sublight speeds.

Even the force has to adhere to special relativity.

Though Rey/Kylo comms are much faster, possibly quantum entanglement is involved.

[Phildo]

The republics fleets were destroyed by starkiller base (as mentioned during TFA they were at the planets that were destroyed andwere destroyed with them)

Did they?  So the entire republic fleet was in that one system that's definitely not Coruscant, and there were not fleets anywhere else in the galaxy with combat capabilities?  That's pretty dumb.

Also, I've decided that the worst sin of Rise of the Skywalker is that is uses the same acronym as Revenge of the Sith.  My hatred of acronyms is well documented, but the Star Wars acronyms are pretty well documented at this point and now I guess we're doing ROS and ROTS?

[eldaec]

The Republic collapsing entirely off screen is bad but not even in the top 3 problems with the second half of TFA.

And I struggle to believe many people participating in this sort of thread did not understand that this is what happened.

I don't remember anyone complaining about how the empire collapsed in the immediate aftermath of the endorian holocaust. Despite not every star destroyer being lost.

[Khaldun]

Well, for one, in Return of the Jedi, we don't even know that the Empire has collapsed entirely, just that the fleet at Endor retreats and that world governments on a bunch of planets proclaim the end of Imperial authority on their own planet--something that often happens when a dictator is defeated in battle, even if the ultimate aftermath is a lot messier.

The Republic's collapse basically happens in between TFA and TLJ, which is almost as bad as Palpatine speaking from the dead entirely off-screen in the opening text crawl. I mean, shit, ANH and ESB didn't give you a point-by-point civics lesson on the Empire but there was enough exposition tucked into dialogue to get the following picture:

a) there are many planets outside the Empire's control but even there you have to worry a bit about messing with the Empire (Tatooine, Bespin)
b) the Emperor and the Empire's military have been working to get rid of the Republic's governors so that they can have direct martial rule and the Death Star is seen as the key to that.
c) the Empire is actually worried about the Rebellion, enough that finding its main hidden base is a major obsession for Tarkin and Vader in ANH
d) the Empire has some sort of limitations on their ability to build a fleet: there's only one (well, two) Death Stars, and only one Superstar Destroyer; the fleet at Tatooine is small enough that the Millennium Falcon can get through their blockade, and the fleet at Hoth is similarly small enough that it's possible for the Rebellion to evacuate most of its ships.

And even if it doesn't seem to take days or weeks to travel to Alderaan from Tatooine, the point is that it *could*--the OT and even the prequels except for the Emperor showing up at Mustafar do some work to give a sense of time passing between scenes, of distance being at least something of a constraint.

TFA and ROS literally do not give a fuck about scale or time; they don't even have the fueling or resource constraints that TLJ has. Starkiller Base apparently blows up all the planets in Hosnian Prime and all the ships and you can see that happening from star systems that are many light-years away, apparently. The New Republic is so uninteresting to JJA that there isn't even any direct commentary on its existence or the end of its existence--nothing even as much as Obi-Wan talking about the thousands of years that the Jedi were the guardians of peace or Leia saying 'years ago you fought in the Clone Wars' or whatever. What the First Order is, where it is, what it actually has authority over, none of that matters. It's all a giant context-less soup of dinner-theater reheatings of the original trilogy. JJA doesn't give a fuck about world-building or narrative coherence. He handles actors moderately well and visuals moderately well, that's it. What a waste.

[BobtheSomething]

Only one super star destroyer?  "There are a lot of command ships."  So, probably more than three...

[Khaldun]

Well, they only bother to have one of them at Endor, maybe because the Emperor is overconfident, but it sort of reinforces that they have limits to their resources and that distance is a constraint of some kind.

[Draegan]

I have some bullet point fan fiction of how I would do a sequel trilogy using some of the same characters, because why not.

[BobtheSomething]

Well, they only bother to have one of them at Endor, maybe because the Emperor is overconfident, but it sort of reinforces that they have limits to their resources and that distance is a constraint of some kind.

I wasn't disagreeing with your conclusion, just one of the specifics.  I also had the impression that we never saw the entire Rebel or Imperial fleet present at Endor on screen in any one shot.  Consider how many cruisers we see at the beginning of the fight, how many blow up, and how many we still see later in the fight.

My assumption was that a combination of manpower shortages, secrecy, and a need to keep the Core Worlds heavily patrolled dictated the small forces we see throughout the OT.  If they have the industrial capacity to build the much-larger DS2 in a handful of years, then something other than raw capacity prevented the Empire from flooding the Galaxy with star destroyers.

[Khaldun]

I like Draegan's outline. I like anything that looks like an actual plan, really.

I mean, shit, this movie should have been the Star Wars equivalent of Endgame, with lots of great character bits, some actual narrative and character arcs brought to closure, some genuine tension, and a couple of amazing set-pieces that you'd remember as much as you remember some of the big sequences in the OT or even a few of the best ones in the prequels. Instead it was the Star Wars equivalent of Terminator: Genisys or the last few episodes of Game of Thrones, only worse in some ways. 

[BobtheSomething]

Some reviewer commented on that, saying that the final part of the Skywalker saga, the last film in a trilogy of trilogies, has hit the theaters, and what are the three Star Wars things everyone is talking about?
1. This is the way.
2.  I have spoken.
3.  Baby Yoda.

[Riggswolfe]

Alternative explanation:  a million voices cyring out in terror only travel at sublight speeds.

Even the force has to adhere to special relativity.

Though Rey/Kylo comms are much faster, possibly quantum entanglement is involved.

Well they are a Force Dyad...so yeah, they're entangled!

[Velorath]

I mean, shit, this movie should have been the Star Wars equivalent of Endgame, with lots of great character bits, some actual narrative and character arcs brought to closure, some genuine tension, and a couple of amazing set-pieces that you'd remember as much as you remember some of the big sequences in the OT or even a few of the best ones in the prequels.

This was never going to be Endgame. That's just buying into the Skywalker Saga marketing nonsense. RotJ concluded the story and this is some add-on stuff decades after the fact that the previous movies didn't set-up at all.

[Phildo]

I don't remember anyone complaining about how the empire collapsed in the immediate aftermath of the endorian holocaust. Despite not every star destroyer being lost.

Is there anything in canon that actually covers that time period?  As far as I know, we just have Return of the Jedi and then Force Awakens set many years in the future.  Plenty of time for stuff to happen, but it's not addressed, well, anywhere.