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[–] 24 points 20 hours ago (10 children)

I was so disappointed when I found out that lightsabers just had an on switch. I learned about the crystals (and Star Wars in general) through cultural osmosis, and I was like “Oh, so you pass force energy through the crystal, and it becomes the visible blade.” Made perfect sense.

But no. You forget your saber in a spaceport toilet, and a six year old shuts the place down.

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  • [–] 5 points 18 hours ago (8 children)

    Was it just a switch? I thought I remember that they used the force to raise/lower the "blade" which was part of reason the light saber is a weapon only a force user can weild.

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  • [–] 35 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

    Wait, why do people actually believe that you need to be Force sensitive to activate a lightsaber?

    You're telling me Luke, who would not even begin asking questions about what the Force was for several more scenes, was handed a lightsaber from Ben Kenobi - a device he has never seen in person before, and activated it?

    When Han solo cut open the belly of Luke's tauntaun, was he using the Force to activate his lightsaber? Or was a delirious Luke on the brink of death helping him so that they both didn't freeze to death?

    The on/off switch is the only thing that actually makes any sense.

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  • [–] 17 points 17 hours ago

    Other examples include:

    General Grievous stealing lightsabers from Jedi he kills, and being able to wield them despite having zero force powers and being a full body cyborg.

    Cad Bane stealing... I think Obi Wan Kenobi's lightsaber, and using it to fight both him and Quinlan Vos off.

    Ahsoka Tano's lightsaber getting stolen by a thief and igniting it in a crowded train to try and fight her off.

    Shape shifter (Zam Wessel or someone like her) stealing the librarian's lightsaber and using it to defend herself from Ahsoka.

    Multiple Mandalorians making effective use of the Darksaber without force powers, with John Deathwatch being able to go toe to toe with Jedi.

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  • [–] 3 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

    I was thinking more along the lines of the wielder acting like a battery. No midichlorians, no saber.

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  • [–] 4 points 17 hours ago (1 child)

    The original intent was for lightsabers to be stronger the more you could use the force. There was even going to be a training scene between Luke and Yoda explaining that.

    It was kind of shown in the prequels when Qui Gonn Jinn was burning through a blast door in the beginning of Phantom Menace.

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  • [–] 7 points 17 hours ago (1 child)

    My current (possibly wrong) understanding is that jedi keep the planet with the crystals secret, so that not just anyone can go make a saber. On top of that, the Force allows a user to kinda “extend” their perception, which allows for things like reflecting blaster shots, as well as being hyper aware of their personal space during saber duels. So a trained jedi can “see” things like how far a blade is from hitting them, even if they can’t actually see, and that determines how they move.

    So it’s more that taking one would be like robbing a special forces soldier, and playing with one would most likely kill or dismember you.

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  • [–] 19 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

    Fun fact: Boc did purple lightsabers before Mace Windu.

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  • [–] 99 points 1 day ago (53 children)

    Light Sabers are the core of Star Wars, and they're some of the stupidist BS imaginable.

    You have this device where the blade is made out of "light" so has no weight to it, and that can cut through virtually anything, and you're swinging it around like a maniac instead of just doing foil-style fencing moves to poke holes in your opponent from a safe range? In a world where there's no armour and the merest touch of the blade cuts instantly, duels should be over in seconds of intense action like an olympic fencing duel instead of involving lots of big dramatic parries.

    Fighters should do virtually everything possible to stay outside the range of their opponent's blade. Any part of that blade touches you and you lose a limb or have a hole straight through you. There isn't even a safe part of the sword, like the flat of a real sword's blade, and there are no handguards or protective hilts, so parrying is even more dangerous.

    But, no. Big swings of lightey-uppey things look "cool" so there are these extremely long fight scenes with glowy things hitting other glowy things and actors striking dramatic poses, plus guys with twirly double-sided weapons and other bullshit.

    Compare that to the fighting in Dune, where a personal shield can only be penetrated by something moving slowly. There's a good concept that leads to an interesting style of fighting.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

    It's kind of like how knife fights are portrayed as some intense dance where two fighters circle each other swiping and parrying, dancing around and scoring pretty slashes on arms and shoulders.

    In reality it's usually just one guy gets inside the others striking radius and stabs the other guy in the gut/throat until he is too weak to fight back.

    Doesn't make for good theater. West Side Story would have been, like, 20 minutes long if you got rid of the fight choreography and useless expository singing.

    What a misleading documentary.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 hours ago

    I like how you call out West Side Story where it is one of the rare pieces of media that highlights how dangerous a knife is. The whole lead up to the gang fight they're saying no weapons as knives are a big deal. In the fight, I think only one or two people pull out a knife. And from recollection, once a knife comes out, it moves pretty quickly to someone getting stabbed once/dies/gang fight disperses cause "wholly shit someone's got a knife and killed someone".

    Like I understand that yeah there is a lot of dancing in the movie, but once the knife comes out things turn pretty serious. Unlike something like Crocodile Dundee where they're comparing knife sizes.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 hours ago

    The difference is that I don't think anybody is supposed to believe that the knife fights in West Side Story are anything other than dance.

    Also, I'd bet that the reality for knife fights isn't that one guy gets inside the other's radius and wins, it's probably that both take extremely serious knife wounds but one guy is fully dead and the other is just bleeding out.

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  • [–] 14 points 21 hours ago*

    Force users have precognition with it roughly scaling with power and experience which tends to prolong fights on the more powerful end of things since they are basically fucking with each other to try to squeeze out an advantage. Given that the movies generally follow people towards the top of the skill and power spectrum we tend to only see those high end fights in action, on the lower ends or when power imbalance comes into play it basically devolves into what you described, but that mostly only appears in comics and books.

    Also there are materials that can resist, block, or even disable lightsabers which I'll list in no particular order with their affects.

    Songsteel: Lightsaber resistant.

    Cortosis: As an allow it's resistant, in a pure form it shorts out lightsabers but is brittle.

    Phrik: Lightsaber resistant.

    Plasteel: Resistant to short glancing blows or in sufficient thickness.

    Mandalorian Iron/Beskar: Highly resistant to lightsabers.

    Certain Force abilities: There is a force ability called energy absobtion that can be used to just grab a lightsaber and drain it. Vader used a lesser form of it on cloud city to block Hans blaster bolts. Presumably there are other abilities that can do similar.

    Fun fact the Jedi and Sith both once used armor that was lightsaber resistant and some lightsaber fighting styles formed specifically to deal with that. Also Anakin wore armor that was lightsaber resistant, I presume he stole it from somewhere.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 day ago (6 children)

    doing foil-style fencing moves

    Fighters should do virtually everything possible to stay outside the range of their opponent's blade

    So I know what you are saying and you have a point.

    But I find it funny as the modern olympic fencing boils down to "I stabbed you a split second before you stabbed me! I win!"

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  • [–] 21 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Depends on the particular fencing style. Sabre and Foil have right-of-way and Epee does not. So in Epee, it's whoever strikes first. In the others, the person who initiates the attack gets the point if they both touch during the attack regardless of who touched first.

    It sounds silly, but part of the idea with foil and sabre is that they were initially training for actual self-defense, where it didn't matter if you stabbed your attacker if you got killed in the process. So the rule was you had to first keep yourself from getting touched before you could try and score a point of your own.

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  • [–] 5 points 16 hours ago

    Right. Didn't realize (or forgot) only epee is like this. I don't really follow olympic fencing closely.

    OP might even not meant olympic fencing originally, that's just where my mind went and I've found it funny.

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  • [–] 9 points 23 hours ago* (1 child)

    So the rule was you had to first keep yourself from getting touched before you could try and score a point of your own.

    That doesn't sound like it leads logically to "you get the point if you were the aggressor, even if you also get touched" but sports rules are often many layers of arcane nonsense with too much deference given to the past. (I'd treat it more like a serve fault in tennis. Reckless attack is a do-over, twice in a row is a point for the other person.)

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  • [–] 8 points 21 hours ago

    It's about a fundamental difference between offense and defense.

    When you go on the offense, defeating the opponent is the primary goal.

    If you're defending yourself, survival is the primary goal.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Yeah, good point. People make essentially suicidal attacks in modern sport fencing because as long as they touch their opponent first the fact they were run through a tenth of a second later doesn't matter. But, a lot of fencing is staying at least one blade's length away from the opponent and probing and poking, so up until that final suicidal attack they're giving the opponent's weapon plenty of respect.

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  • [–] 3 points 16 hours ago

    Yep. Also, ignoring sports, the more this ws the case the more the weapons developed to be lighter with point of ballance closer to the hilt.

    If lightsabre blade doesn't weigh anything, it's the ultimate weapon for this sort of style of fencing (bonus points for any contact with the blade being harmful).

    Your thinking made perfect sense, it's just my mind immediately went to the suicidal attacks in sport fencing and I've found it funny.

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  • [–] 5 points 18 hours ago

    Grievous puts two of his arms back whenever he uses the other two to block.

    The whole thing is just idiotic nonsense that looks flashy and has no substance.

    But Disney is the epitomy of soulless evil and George Lucas could do no wrong according to the fandom.

    Word of advice, just dont bother.

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  • [–] 48 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    Honestly, that's why I think the original fight of Obi-Wan vs Vader was so good. They kind of fought like that.

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  • [–] 13 points 23 hours ago (5 children)

    Ah, I see you too have been sucked into the hema YouTube rabbit hole. I would take self-described medieval martial arts experts opining on science fantasy with a grain of salt.

    Like your reasoning is fine and the fights probably should be more fencing-like, but we also have to consider that Jedi are not normal beings. There's a lot going on invisibly in those fights, like how they're channeling the force into all their actions as well as experiencing a kind of prescience. So it begs the question, what does a fight look like with that kind of meta?

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  • [–] 35 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    So in defense of all this. I think the in-universe lore is that only Jedi and Sith can use lightsabers in this fashion, because the force prevents them from self injuring with a lightsaber.

    So they end up with access to a more dangerous move set offensively than someone with a standard sword in our reality. Which also lends itself to different defensive capabilities and thus you get all this saber-fu shit.

    Hell maybe there is an “aura” like component of the force and Jedi vs Sith battles have another layer of complextion. Basically these otherwise useless poses actually have an effect via the force itself.

    Enabling the use of double light saber bullshit, and etc

    I’m not saying it’s any less bullshit.

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    [–] 103 points 1 day ago* (1 child)

    That’s a lot of pages to say a motherfucker wanted a purple motherfucking lightsaber.

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    [–] 31 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    My headcanon is that Mace once got a little carried away during a duel in his younger years, his emotions getting the better of him and this began to “bleed” his then-blue lightsaber. But he began to see the error of his ways and carries this lightsaber as a reminder of the fragile balance between light and dark.

    Then of course they had to give other Jedi purple lightsabers and mess this up.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 day ago

    He studied a style that is a bit closer to the dark side so that he can channel the emotions of a dark side user against them. This was why he was able to defeat Palpatine pretty easily while his support were finished quickly and even Yoda was only able to fight him to a draw. Windu was a hard counter for Palpatine.

    So your headcanon wasn't completely off vs what was in the EU.

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  • [–] 8 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (3 children)

    What did it conflict with? As far as I can remember, nothing in the movies conflicted with this idea. I know the books were quite expansive and they let author's play with the lore from time to time. Did they say "RGB only?"

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  • [–] 5 points 17 hours ago

    It conflicted with George Lucas.

    In his original idea for Lightsabers, the blue ones were the good guys and the red ones were the bad guys.

    When Return of the Jedi came out he had to make the decision to give Luke a green lightsaber to make it visible against Tatooine's sky. So he amended his original idea to also include green for the good guys.

    Thos stayed that way, despite so many comics and other materials adding different colours, until Samuel L. Jackson begged him for a purple lightsaber. Essentially, to Lucas, the expanded universe was never canon until he made parts of it canon through movie or animated media.

    You can see George Lucas literally say "that's just the way it works" right up to when purple was suggested.

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  • [–] 18 points 22 hours ago

    I think it's more that by asking there were more questions that writers wanted to answer, no?

    It's like d&d once you ask for the merchant's name they suddenly have a whole life behind them

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