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ZzaphodD
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Joined: 28 Nov 2009
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 Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2011 4:23 am Post subject: |
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| Whill wrote: | QUI-GON: They have Podracing on Malastare. Very fast, very dangerous.
ANAKIN: I' m the only human who can do it.
| Bren wrote: | | Interesting. I never assumed the Han, Leia, Luke, and company were necessarily the same species as us here and now on earth. |
OK, so they just look like humans and are called humans in the films, but they aren't really humans. That's one way to look at it. One might feel the same way about ducks (or rather, the duck-like animals that are called ducks).  |
I assume they are humans, but I dont feel a need to explain how they are connected to us or how they got there. Just accept that there are humans a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
Sometimes the proverbial beard is just groving to long, and people look for 'real' answers where there are none. Probably Lukas just wanted to make his film more detatched from our 'real' future.
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Bren
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| Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2011 7:47 am Post subject: |
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| ZzaphodD wrote: | I assume they are humans, but I dont feel a need to explain how they are connected to us or how they got there. Just accept that there are humans a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
Sometimes the proverbial beard is just groving to long, and people look for 'real' answers where there are none. Probably Lukas just wanted to make his film more detatched from our 'real' future. |
ZzaphodD I think you are right about Lucas wanting to separate Star Wars from reality. I look at "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" as the storytelling equivalent of "once upoon a time." Which is a device to separate the time and place of the story from the here and now.
But as I don't need actual humans in a story to make the story interesting to me and since Lucas didn't make a direct connection I don't feel a need to connect the Star Wars galaxy or timeperiod to earth in any way. I don't necessarily think connecting them is wrong, just superfluous.
Regarding the use of verbs and nouns such as duck and human: | Whill wrote: | | I view those animal adjectives to usually be out-of-universe description intended to be meaningful to us Earthlings. |
And human could be the same. But this is mostly just word games. As Z said, there is no clear answer here. As I said above, I don't feel any need, nor does it seem from the films that Lucas felt a need, to make any direct connection between the time and place of Star Wars and that of here and now earth. |
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Fallon Kell
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| Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2011 4:17 pm Post subject: |
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Well, if it is said in universe, I suppose then you can make the case that it's not a metaphor intended for us viewers.
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Whill
Dark Lord of the Jedi (Owner/Admin)
Joined: 14 Apr 2008
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Location: Columbus, Ohio, USA, Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way Galaxy
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| Posted: Tue Apr 05, 2011 1:27 am Post subject: |
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| Whill wrote: | | I view those animal adjectives to usually be out-of-universe description intended to be meaningful to us Earthlings. |
| Bren wrote: | | And human could be the same. But this is mostly just word games. |
Bren, for clarification, that quote of mine was in response to the original post, not yours or my post about yours.
This is not word games and it is not a complex question. Humans in Star Wars are not described as "human-like" in Wookieepedia entries. They are described as humans, including even in the films themselves. There is an obvious basic difference there.
The OP if this thread was about how descriptions of creatures existing in the Star Wars universe are sometimes described by using Earth animal adjective, such as dog-like or cat-like. Is it possible the animals from the adjectives themselves exist in the Star Wars universe? Yes. Is it likely that these descriptions are out-of-universe descriptions written by real-world authors intentionally using real-world animal adjectives to describe them to real-world Star Wars fans to take advantage of our real-world frame of references to more easily convey the type of creature they are describing? I think that so.
Humans were first brought into this thread by me in reply to you indicating that ducks existing in Star Wars was an anachronism...
| Bren wrote: | | ZzaphodD I think you are right about Lucas wanting to separate Star Wars from reality. I look at "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away" as the storytelling equivalent of "once upoon a time." Which is a device to separate the time and place of the story from the here and now. |
Very true, and Lucas himself has admitted as much. For Lucas, Star Wars is fantasy and fairy tales dressed up as space opera. Middle-Earth is not Earth, but it has humans anyway. Yes, "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." is just a sci-fi-esque way of saying "once upon a time..."
| Bren wrote: | | since Lucas didn't make a direct connection I don't feel a need to connect the Star Wars galaxy or timeperiod to earth in any way. I don't necessarily think connecting them is wrong, just superfluous... As Z said, there is no clear answer here. As I said above, I don't feel any need, nor does it seem from the films that Lucas felt a need, to make any direct connection between the time and place of Star Wars and that of here and now earth. |
I completely agree with you and ZzaphodD 100% on all of this. Which is why I don't think that the word "anachronism" actually applies. Dogs, cats, ducks, humans can't really be considered "out of place" in Star Wars if Lucas didn't have any intention of logically connecting Star Wars to the real world. Star Wars is not really in the past or the future. It's not really even in another galaxy. It is in another universe, so chronology in Star Wars has no meaning in relation to our world. So how can something be considered an "anachronism" in a fairy tale reality?
Anachronisms are chronological discontinuities, which means that they are comparing things that exist in two different times in our single real-world. Like a Harry Potter book mentioning a character playing a video game system that hadn't yet been released in the year that the book is supposed to take place in, or Kelso's modern haircut he has in later season episodes of That 70's Show. Fictions set on Earth. Humans and ducks don't need a logical reason to exist in Star Wars. Because of the completely accurate ways Z and you described Star Wars, the word "anachronism" seems to be an unfair and inapplicable logical criticism of something obviously portrayed to be incredibly fantastic with no intended connection to any real world time or place. Don't you agree?
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Bren
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| Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2011 3:55 pm Post subject: |
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| Whill wrote: | | Because of the completely accurate ways Z and you described Star Wars, the word "anachronism" seems to be an unfair and inapplicable logical criticism of something obviously portrayed to be incredibly fantastic with no intended connection to any real world time or place. Don't you agree? |
Well I do and I don't.
I agree on the definition of anachronism. Anachronisms are strictly speaking chronological discontinuities (though sci fi creates some caveats see the long wiki article on anachronism). Anatompisms are strictly speaking geographical discontinuities.
If I literally interpret the opening crawl "long ago in a galaxy far, far away" I don't get humans, dogs, ducks, or anything arising on earth as part of the Star Wars galaxy and time period. I don't know a word to exactly cover what the discontinuity is (time, place, both), but to me it is discontinuous in some fashion.
The reasons I describe it as word games is
(1) I don't know what the proper descriptor for the discontinuity is and I am not even certain that one exists yet.
(2) I think Lucas intended Star Wars to be space opera fantasy without any connection to earth. Most of the protagonists are "human" in the sense that they are supposed to seem like the audience as opposed to the "alien" species like Chewie or most of the denizens of the Mos Eisley cantina. This is in contrast to other types of Space Opera like E.E. Doc Smith's the Lensman series which has a fictitious earth history for humans as well as an imagined human future. The humans in Star Wars are human in the same sense that Ming the Merciless and his daughter are human in Flash Gordon, i.e. they aren't human, but they look and act as if they were. And the audience is intended and expected to treat them as human. |
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Fallon Kell
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| Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2011 8:06 pm Post subject: |
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| Bren wrote: | | I don't know a word to exactly cover what the discontinuity is (time, place, both), but to me it is discontinuous in some fashion. |
Anontism, maybe? As in ontology?
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Bren
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| Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2011 2:23 pm Post subject: |
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| Fallon Kell wrote: | | Bren wrote: | | I don't know a word to exactly cover what the discontinuity is (time, place, both), but to me it is discontinuous in some fashion. |
Anontism, maybe? As in ontology? |
While I am familiar with ontology, anontism stumps me and I can't find a definition for anontism. Can you post a link with a definition? |
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Fallon Kell
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| Posted: Sat Apr 09, 2011 2:02 am Post subject: |
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I was kind of building words from spare parts... Ontology being the study of what exists, and anachronism being of the wrong time, I just put them together to make a word that meant "of the wrong existence".
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Bren
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| Posted: Sat Apr 09, 2011 6:14 am Post subject: |
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| Fallon Kell wrote: | | I was kind of building words from spare parts... Ontology being the study of what exists, and anachronism being of the wrong time, I just put them together to make a word that meant "of the wrong existence". |
Ah, thanks for the explanation.  I can't vouch for the Latin construction, but something like that is what I'm looking for. |
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