SWTOR Upcoming Items from Patch 5.0 V2

Oh don’t get me wrong I have no issue with Rey because she’s a female lead (point of fact, I’m in the middle of tweaking the first draft of a book I’ve just finished writing in which the lead character is female) but because of how stupidly her character was portrayed.

She literally excels at everything she does. Flies the Falcon with enough skill to out-perform TIE pilots (trained members of the navy), repeatedly rejects Finn’s helping hand in some petty feminist protest that was so blatant it wwas pathetic, manages to reverse Ren’s attempt at mind reading and read his mind (which led to a line that was so forced it made me cringe) instead.

Then she uses a mind trick without any reason to think she could do that whatsoever before heading out onto the (inexplicably snow-covered) Death Star 3 to hand Crylo Ren his arse in a lightsaber duel. Wounded or not, he’s had training for years and should have dealt with her pretty swiftly (same with Finn, who also makes Crylo look like a joke before the plot demands he gets knocked out). Keep in mind that earlier on in the film Ren captured her with ease.

I’m sure there’s more (there’s a good list somewhere, comparing her to Luke but also explaining why what Luke does in ANH is actually justified by his upbringing rather than militant feminism) but right now that’s all I can remember.

I love the old Star Wars. Grew up with it so it’s hard to see it all dismissed as meaningless by Disney, but I still went into the cinema with an open mind and ended up so bored that I was checking my phone to try and guess how much longer I’d have to wait. I’ve read a lot of fan fiction with more deserving plots than TFA, and it’s really put my off seeing the next film.

That said, Rogue One looks more like what TFA should have been like, so I’m looking forward to that.

Fine, but I could name plenty of other examples of things taken from the EU that were warped into some new bullshit used by the new canon. And for fuck’s sake, am I tired of this design change argument. Why in the name of god would a crippled Empire decide to completely throw away every single piece of technology, every suit of armor, every starship, and redesign their entire army and navy? Did the Germans change uniforms, weapons, tanks, and aircraft halfway through World War 2? No, they developed experimental prototypes to supplement their existing forces as a last ditch effort to reinforce their crumbling lines. The King Tiger tank, the Ju-390 transatlantic bomber, the Me-262 jet fighter, etc. In the Expanded Universe, the Empire did something very similar, developing experimental ships, weapons, even WMDs like the Sun Crusher. They absolutely did not throw their entire army and navy into one battle above one planet, lose it all, redesign it, and build it back up in thirty years. That’s what they did in the new canon, because some people in charge of plot and backstory for this new canon wouldn’t know their ass from a hot rock, and they put zero thought into any of it.

The US military doesn’t use the M16 as it was in Vietnam. We use the M16A4, or the M4 carbine, weapons that are almost the same in appearance, but have been upgraded internally and externally to have better function without changing form. You know why? Because the form wasn’t something that needed to change. Why would the Empire (yes, it’s still what remains of the Empire, even if it’s under a new name) scrap everything they have and make entirely new designs instead of building on what they have and upgrading existing tech? In the post Galactic Civil War galaxy, that would have been much more effective. They wouldn’t have the resources they used to, research and development would have to be conducted on a much smaller scale, and they wouldn’t have a lot of time to do it. The Rebel Alliance was winning, so the Empire needed to fall back and build itself up again. Hell, some didn’t even do that, they became warlords over their own little kingdoms, separate from the remains of the Empire. That made sense, that was a logical series of events following Return of the Jedi. The entire Empire gathering above one planet to take on the entire Rebellion? The entire combined power of a galaxy’s worth of the Imperial fleet losing to the Rebellion? No, the new canon is complete and utter bullshit, and no matter what you think about that, I know I’m right, and I’m done trying to explain it to people who won’t think about it for more than five seconds. You can go watch the new movies and enjoy them, because the producers didn’t think for that long either.