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In last week's episode, we talked
about why it might be that Stormtroopers
and other mooks in general are terrible at missing
their targets.
Let's see what you had to say.
The first thing we gotta talk about
is how Stormtroopers are not all clones, which
is a thing that I said.
So as far as I understand it, at the point
where Han and Leia and Luke are trying to escape the Death
Star, those Stormtroopers are mostly conscripts and recruits,
humans, and are not part of the former Clone Army.
Just dudes.
At that point, the only clones, I think,
that are still part of the Stormtrooper ranks
are the 501st, which are sort of like Vader's bad boys.
And as far as I can tell, you can
argue, at least a little bit, that some
of those 501st Stormtroopers are on the Death
Star at that point.
But it's a sort of tenuous argument,
and that doesn't change the fact that not all
Stormtroopers our clones.
So, ha-ha.
Settled.
There's a really great post on the subreddit by Macecurb
about some of this, and there's a really great conversation
that follows it.
And actually the conversation on the subreddit this week,
in general, was really great, super helpful,
really interesting.
So yeah, I highly recommend checking that out.
As a side note, I've also been saying "Palpa-tyne"
for so long, and no one has corrected me that
it's "Palpa-teen," that I'm starting to wonder about
the people I hang out with and feel at least a little bit like
Homer Simpson.
So I'm just going to call him Emperor Crandall from now on.
Bart's teacher's is named Krabappel?
I've been calling her Crandall!
But seriously, we do have to talk
about MrZeroInterviewer's comment that provides dialogue
between Tarkin and Darth Vader, as well
as between Han and Leia, where Leia says,
oh, they let us escape.
And Han is like, you think that that was an easy [INAUDIBLE]?
It was not easy.
And also, RaidenUzamaki's comment that basically states
this shouldn't be a fan theory but is
rather just some piece of the story
that people forgot or didn't put together.
So one of the things that I find really interesting about "Star
Wars" and talking about it is the layers
upon layers of canon.
There's the G canon, which is the George Lucas
canon, the television canon, the extended universe canon,
and they all have a shifting and complicated relationship
with one another.
And I think some of the most interesting discussions
that I saw happen on YouTube and on the subreddit
were revolving around trying to figure out
which portion of the canon you were
referencing in your defense of some idea or of some theory.
This is brilliant, I think, from a storytelling perspective,
from an economic perspective, and it
makes interacting with the canon and discussing it
such an undertaking and such an event.
But it also can have some side effects,
which is that, you know, the guy who
hosts the YouTube show ends up not having any clue
what he's talking about.
This is not a joke.
While writing this episode, I actually sent a Slack message
to Morgan where I said, "Oh my god,
I know so much about Stormtroopers."
Whoops.
So I mean, in a way, this fan theory video did kind
of exactly the thing that we were trying to figure out
whether or not the fan theory videos could do,
which is inspire a conversation where one of your friends,
you're sitting around the table, and they say, like, "All right,
I have this thought about 'Star Wars.'" And then they lay out
the thought, but it's based on some bizarre premise that
doesn't make any sense or isn't true,
and so someone else gets to say, "I don't know if you muh,"
and then the conversation just goes from there.
But obviously that falls flat in this situation, where
I can't respond, accept, and then move
the conversation forward, because it's, you know,
a video.
I'm static.
As much as I'd like to pretend we're having a conversation,
you know, it's complicated.
This fan theory series is a big experiment
in us trying to figure out if there
are other kinds of questions that we can ask that are
different from the kinds of questions
"Idea Channel" normally asks, and to try to figure out
how to ask them in a way that aligns
with how "Idea Channel" works.
And we learned a lot of lessons from this episode.
Frankly, we were attracted to the idea of doing fan theories
because a lot of the research has already been done,
and we were excited about being able to bring things to you,
to sort of set up all of these ideas next to one another
and then open it up for discussion.
But I think one of the things that I
learned is that it's really easy to get comfortable
in the mindset of, this research is done, and it's right,
and I just have to present it, and I don't end up
interrogating the assumptions that I already have
or that other people seem to be operating on.
I just take them as reinforcing, and so present everything
at face value-- which is boring and also not what
"Idea Channel" does.
It's not, you know, that's not-- that's not our steez.
But what's amazing and kind of the best part about all of this
is that doesn't stop you guys from having
these great and incredible and deep conversations about how
all of this canon relates to one another, how all of these ideas
work, in light of the fact that we kind of stumbled
through the premise and, you know,
missed how important it is to dig through all
of those layers of canon.
Or just the one layer of canon that confirms that this is, you
know, just a thing people forgot.
Or, as Sea Dawg pointed out on Twitter,
double-confirmed as canon because it's also
referenced in the NPR "Star Wars" radio play.
Anyway, I guess this has been a little bit more of a peek
into the "Idea Channel" process, cross-pollinated
with a little bit of a mea culpa instead of a true comment
response.
So to leave you with one additional thought,
littletoyboat, on the subreddit, said
that they think of Stormtrooper aim
as being a sub-trope of the law of conservation of ninjutsu,
which I love.
And what this states is that there is only
a certain amount of ninjutsu available to each side
of a battle, so it gets spread very thin
when there is a large number of ninja,
whereas one ninja will have the most ninjutsu.
And so dozens or hundreds of mooks
will just become cannon fodder because their ninjutsu
is spread so low.
So maybe Stormtrooper aim works the same way.
I love it.
I-- I am gonna-- yes.
Yes.
Of course, if we could do it all again,
we might talk about whether or not
it's possible to claim that Jar Jar Binks was really a Sith
Lord and knowing collaborator of Emperor Crandall the whole time
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