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.
Honestly, that’s why I think the original fight of Obi-Wan vs Vader was so good. They kind of fought like that.
The audience also cared for the characters and their motives. That’s what made it good.
Yeah, it was a lot more probing at long distance. They basically established a style, but it wasn’t flashy enough, so with each new movie it becomes even more bullshit.
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.
because the force prevents them from self injuring with a lightsaber
That’s fine, but they keep putting themselves in the range of their opponents’ light sabers. If they’d made the lore that a Jedi / Sith can exude a force field that allows them to take a hit with a light saber and that only a certain, powerful type of hit can do damage, then maybe they can be justified in getting within the other’s striking range. But, really it’s just that they want these extended slash and parry sequences with these light-up devices so they end up with these silly, unrealistic fights that are badly filmed to show the action and instead just show twirling glowy things.
Both Sith and Jedi do use the force to sense their opponents moves so they kinda got to get close to slow down reaction time.
If they didn’t get close they would just have to stand 6 feet apart and talk about their issues instead
I’d watch that. Sounds like Andor.
but they keep putting themselves in the range of their opponents’ light sabers.
They have precognition.
So do their opponents.
Yes, and they’re also diving in without getting hit.
I just think they’re neat!
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!”
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Think of the force like Jedis being able to anticipate movements and react ultra fast and it becomes less bullshit. If those fights played in slow-motion for normal humans, it would make sense that they could go on for longer without injury. Then a win happens with sensory overload or distractions - when a fighter misleads the other to believe an attack will be coming from where it won’t actually come, they get a killing blow.
Yeah force users all got like low grade Spidey Sense.
Think of the force like Jedis being able to anticipate movements and react ultra fast and it becomes less bullshit
Not really because eventually you’re still going to take a hit if you’re inside the other guy’s striking range. If you stay outside and lunge in like a fencer you don’t risk that eventual injury / death.
Sorry but that’s simply wrong. I have done two years or sabre fencing in my youth - it’s all about reaction time and correct execution of a parry. If you always knew exactly which angle to parry at, and had the reaction speed to execute this in time, then you could fence for a long time without anyone getting hit. You’d have to outsmart your opponent by slowly leading them into a trap where they have to execute a movement that throws them off-balance, so that you then can execute an attack that they can’t regain their balance to parry.
Whe he was watching Star Wars you were studying the blade?
Unironically, yes. I guess. I mean I don’t know when they were watching Star Wars ^^
If you always knew exactly which angle to parry at, and had the reaction speed to execute this in time, then you could fence for a long time without anyone getting hit
Only if all your knowledge and reaction speed was defensive rather than offensive. If you gained an equal amount of offensive reaction speed and knowledge you could adjust strikes as you saw the opponent begin to parry.
If you gained an equal amount of offensive reaction speed and knowledge you could adjust strikes as you saw the opponent begin to parry.
Play that out in your mind in slow motion and you’ll realise why your logic is flawed.
My point is that slow motion wouldn’t change anything. In fast motion the attacker doesn’t have time to adjust their attack, and the defender doesn’t have time to adjust their defence. In slow motion nothing changes. The defender can adjust their defense, but the attacker can also adjust their attack. Slow motion doesn’t somehow make defending work better and attacking worse.
Slow motion doesn’t somehow make defending work better and attacking worse.
I disagree. As an attack comes closer to hitting, the weapon is by the very definition of “closer”, closer to the defender than to the attacker - meaning the attacker is increasingly extended, while the defender will pull their defence closer to their own centre of mass. At this point, reactions by the defender require smaller movements, and less acceleration, while the attacker has more momentum in their extended attack, and requires more energy, and more time to change direction.
The issue is lunges are slower and cover more distance allowing another force sensitive opponent ample time to react
A lunge sounds like just the thing that you would try to get your opponent to do so you can counter it if you have precog and ultra fast reaction speeds. Animation locks the opponent.
Imagine play fighting in slow motion. You can do it pretty much forever without getting hit by blocking or dodging everything. Unless you get tired or your body cannot physically react to something
I learned when play fighting as a kid that the goal wasn’t to win the fight, but to prolong the fight. Whenever I adjusted my attack in slow-mo to avoid my opponent’s block, they got annoyed that I wasn’t doing it right.
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.
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?
Ah, I see you too have been sucked into the hema YouTube rabbit hole.
There’s a lot going on invisibly in those fights
this is one of the funnier interactions I’ve seen on lemmy. ‘you can’t see it, but there’s a whole bloop blorp whiz patang freeowww goin on that justifies the goofy interaction of plasma beams that should just pass right through each other’
I grew up reading xwing books other fantasy, and sw as fantasy works better. No disrespect, just found the distinctions hilarious.
Just sayin. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
why can’t we get a jedi academy series, where it explains blue green purple sabers, or jedi battle meditation, or all the other cool shit, no we have to ‘somehow palpatine came back and there’s another planet kablooie lazar!’ bah. feh I say. FEH!.
Blame Disney, and JJ Abrams.
I haven’t seen anything about light sabers on HEMA, but I have watched a little bit of it. But, even before that, I thought light saber fights looked stupid after having watched olympic fencing.
So it begs the question, what does a fight look like with that kind of meta?
Whatever the director decides the audience will like best. Yeah, you can handwave away anything if you just use some mysterious force stuff. Maybe you only have ultra-quick reactions if you are in mortal danger, so if you’re beyond the range of the other guy’s light saber you can’t act/react as quickly.
Still, I just prefer it when a sci-fi / fantasy author fully thinks through a weapon, its implications, etc. and something interesting falls out of that analysis, rather than “rule of cool” stuff that then has to be retconned with something ridiculous.
I was imagining something more like, “Okay, I know they’re going to make this move, so I’ll counter it with this move. But they know I’ll do that, so they’ll be countering my counter, so now I have to do something even more unexpected!”
And also bearing that prescience element in mind, is an ostensibly more dangerous maneuver the riskier one, if your forethought knows the safer play is guaranteed to go badly?
Or like another analogy - if you watch chess content, you know there’s a lot that revolves around ai systems now days. In some cases these systems have been shown to make moves that appear to border on blunders, but in fact turn out to be crucial for crushing the competition.
Also if you watch Star Wars lore dump videos, they talk a lot about how that invisible stuff is depicted more in the books. Each of the lightsaber forms comes with their own philosophy and some kind of trance-like state they go into. Force users basically all get spiritually high while they’re fighting, so maybe that’s the explanation - they’re just a bunch of adrenaline junkies.
Yeah, but:
steven segal motions
The Force.
Haha, I made a huge comment to say basically this and then that made me laugh so hard reading this.
You guys didn’t even mention the midichlorians!
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.
The problem is they called them light sabres, so, naturally, they must be wielded maniacally.
Except a saber is basically a cavalry sword, and they’re not cavalry (or even dragoons).
Are you familiar with the reputation of sabreurs being the crazy people among fencers? 😂
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.
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.
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.
Typically, the loser of the knife fight dies in the gutter, while the winner dies in the ambulance.
Ayo fuck West side. East side is the best
The West side has Sharks and Jets, what’s the East side got, Snark and Jest?
Fun fact, the working title was East Side Story 😂
That’s a lot of pages to say a motherfucker wanted a purple motherfucking lightsaber.
IIRC it says something about how his saber is motherfucking electric rather than crystalic.
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.
Well before Disney bought it I had heard the reason only Jedi used them was that the blade created some sort of gyroscopic torque that made them hard to swing if you didn’t have the force. Also finding a crystal required a force guided quest.
Lightsabers now should be all over the place. Swords to knives and bayonets that can cut anything and are super concealable? No force required and they have mines for the stuff? What’s holding you back from walking into a cantina fight with wolverine claws?
Well, they’re absurdly easy to accidentally maim yourself with and unless you’re precognitive the blaster deflection feature is virtually useless, so just packing a gun is usually a better move. Kyber mines also didn’t exist until the Empire, and they were heavily restricted with only the Emperor himself, Vader, and the Inquisitors getting any at all that weren’t being sent to the Death Star. Jedi still go on a bit of a quest to find a crystal in the new continuity. And if you and the crystal don’t get along for whatever reason the blade will be heavy and unwieldy. Most of the kyber crystals don’t care much, but the older ones have personalities, like the one in the Darksaber.
I also assumed it was like that
It would be cool if it was like that.
But I think the reason was more or less if you didn’t have help from the force you’d end up cutting yourself trying to do acrobatics, which is a much funnier explanation.
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.
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.
Fun fact: Boc did purple lightsabers before Mace Windu.
In the expansion the PC also had a purple saber. I forgot what her name was though.
Mara Jade!
Y’all, this is a perfect example of how religion retconning works.
Christian Afterlife Lore with pergatory.
vs.
Catholic Afterlife Lore without.
Purgatory is actually much newer. It didn’t become dogma in the Catholic Church until 1274. Over 1200 years after Christ.
hence the retcon
Ah I thought you were saying it was the other way around.
no offense but you need to work on your reading comprehesion, I’m not OP.
Shut up removed
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Speaking of cool stuff Mace Windu had or did, was Vaapad a thing before his character came along?
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Thank you for your service, Mr. Jackson.
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?”
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
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.
It feels like authors fighting over sections of lore and finding justification for minor decisions.
The true answer should have been:
Mace: “In my travels I found a cave with Purple Khyber crystals, and they really look awesome.”
The thing that’s always bothered me most about lightsabers is the hilts. Why are they always so uncomfortable-looking? Why do almost none of them have any kind of cross-guards or something? And I don’t mean like the one Kylo Ren has - that thing looks even worse. how about just a bit of lightsaber-resistant metal on the end?
I’d be decked out in a full knights armour of lightsaber-resistant metal. Come at me jedi wimps!
That has always bothered me too. Then I wondered: what if lightsabers can’t slide down when they’re touching like metal sword can? Maybe they’re “stuck” in place. Do we ever see that happen?
I think I remember hearing explanations like that, that there’s a kind of attractive force to them or something. Still makes me nervous.
Nah the books had all sorts of colored sabers and even different types like Corran Horn’s dual phase saber which when he twisted the grip would change color and get like two and a half times longer with an even narrower beam. I think it was silver and purple? Mara Jade had a purple saber. But the crystals weren’t all force sensitive nonsense like they are in disney canon, none of that bleeding nonsense for red sabers, they were just different focusing crystals for different colors.
Red crystals were also usually synthetic, which was how the Sith were able to source them so consistently.
