When I suggested that R2-D2 has a Shit List and a long list of meticulous petty-to-terrible offenses for each person on it, some people have suggested that this Shit List (which obviously stars the Skywalkers) somehow excludes Leia.
Like, on one hand, I could see R2 telling others (Luke, Han) that Leia “has never done anything wrong in her life (how dare you)” to mess with them. But, on the other hand, I am deeply and sincerely offended by the notion that Leia’s Shit List isn’t just as long as any other Skywalker, if not twice as long as Luke or Han.
(I will give you that Anakin and Obi-Wan’s lists are probably incomparably hideous, where some of the many, many entries (especially Anakin’s) are just one to three words and a lot of offended exclamation points. Like: “SHIT LIST -> Category: Jedi -> My Boy -> New Entry -> CRASH!!!!!!! >:(!”An example which surely matches at least a dozen entries.)
Like, for one thing, Leia’s Shit List would obviously have an entire section dedicated to “Illegal Things Leia Needed To Hide So She Dumped Them In Me Like I’m A Fucking Trash Can Or Her Purse”, with items ranging from “a secret blaster she couldn’t hide up her skirt” to “proof of Senator X’s corruption and/or drug dealing” to “stolen Death Star plans”.
Imagine being an uber driver and while giving some teen and his uncle a ride you end up getting pulled into a hostage situation/anti government rebellion forces
Han Solo did not sign up for this
To be fair, in this metaphor, the uber driver is in trouble with the local mob boss because he was ferrying cocaine and dumped it out the window when it looked like he might get pulled over, so…
So the uber driver hooks up with the sister of the guy who first hires him, and it turns out that their dad is the Deputy Sheriff, and things go downhill even faster than previously imagined when they hit up a local truckstop for a bite to eat, fuel drop and impromptu family reunion.
Truckstop’s run by an old friend who he won his car off that one time, and the dude’s hitting on the chick he’s hooking up with and it’s like come on man, don’t do this to me but then the girl’s dad is there and he gets hit over the head and shoved into the trunk of the cop car and it’s like oh, shit. Fuck. Chewie man, don’t let them take my car!
And then the kid, who had never been off the farm before he hired you, comes back with Green Beret-level skills to bust you out of jail and his sister, who was honestly kinda preppy, straight up MURDERS the mob boss. And then you get the plans to the DOD’s biggest single piece of equipment so you go to the middle of nowhere where it’s being built and you have some trouble with the locals, but somehow the annoying nerd speaks their language and manages to impress them, so you work together to infiltrate the military base. Oh, and the kid lets himself get captured so he can talk to his dad, and after a knock-down drag-out fight, the dad realizes that he’s been played his entire adult life by the corrupt politician overseeing everything, so he chucks the politician down the maintenance shaft of said politician’s high-rise just before it gets destroyed by the rebels, led by your friend in your truck that he borrowed with the promise that he wouldn’t put a scratch on it, but he knocks off your side mirror getting out of there.
Nwûl tash. Peace is a lie. Dzwol shâsotkun. there is only passion. Tyûkjontû châtsatul nu midwan. Through passion, I gain strength
Shâsotjontû châtsatul nu tyûk. Through strength, I gain power. Midwanjontû châtsatul nu asha. Through power, I gain victory. Ashajontû kotswinot itsu nuyak. Through victory, my chains are broken. Wonoksh Qyâsik nun. The Force shall free me.
This is some NEXT LEVEL nerd-ing and I nearly cried reading it.
I don’t get it
Please explain ;_;
There is a star trek TNG episode where Picard encounters a race that doesn’t speak in actual structured sentences but conveys ideas through story parralels. The ones referenced here are “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” – cooperation, “Shaka, when the walls fell” – failure and Temba, his arms wide/open" – signifying a gift.
OK, but here’s what’s awesome/hilarious about this.
The whole point about why communicating with the Tamarians was so frustrating was because all of their communication was contextual. The problem wasn’t that Picard couldn’t understand what words they were saying (the universal translator worked fine) the problem was that he didn’t understand what THOSE WORDS TOGETHER HAD TO DO WITH ANYTHING.
Why is this hilarious/fascinating to me? Because this is essentially what people are doing today with memes. They are posting pictures and writing sentences THAT MAKE NO SENSE WITHOUT PRIOR CONTEXT.
If Picard beamed down right now, and you told him that Data is a cinnamon roll… you are a Tamarian.
Reblogging because A) YES! and B) That commentary. It’s so true, it’s scary.
I also just want more. ^_^
Actually, this isn’t something just present in memes but it seems to be a foundation of human language and partly why a universal translator could never work (or if it somehow did, it should be programmable to handle Tamarian). It’s just that most metaphors in language are so accepted or necessary to fluency that we don’t really notice them (or they seem to be a common human perspective… which aliens don’t necessarily have to share).
It is why when speaking German I have to remember it is, “How much Clock is it?” and not “What time is it?”. The metaphor in English seems to be that moments are separate entities/temporal locations that we visit through the day so we need to determine what one we are visiting now. Whereas in German, leaving aside the fact the “clock” can clearly be a stand-in metaphor for “time” the overall metaphor there seems to be that moments in time are accumulative entities that we collect through the day and we need to determine how much we’ve collected.
And speaking of time, human languages tend towards two metaphors, either favouring one or the other or happily indulging in both… either time is a stationary path which the focus moves along (”… as we’re traveling into the month February…”) or time is a river the flows past a stationary focus (”his birthday is rapidly approaching”). Technically those are metaphors to handle an abstract concept, time could just as easily be metaphorically an object that “appears” rather than “approaches” or a location you “turn towards” instead of “move into”… and I don’t know if any human language allows you to metaphorically be a man in a boat traveling up a river (or what that would look like/imply) but it is a possibility (especially if you are considering an alien perspective on time).
Leaving behind time, some emotions are metaphorically a direction. Happy is up, sometimes way up ‘til you’re “on Cloud 9″ (and there’s no obvious reason for it to be the 9th cloud but you accept it) and on the opposite end of that spectrum sadness is down (in the dumps) when it isn’t busy being a colour (blue). And naturally you yourself are a container for your emotions, or more specifically your heart is (at least in English, in Indonesian it’s your liver) and the container can be put under pressure until it is “bursting with joy” or it “explodes in anger”.
And then there are true idioms which actually do reference historic events (which is what I assume is happening in Tamarian’s “Shaka, when the walls fell”) like “Read The Riot Act” or if you “heard it through the grapevine” your people had a mess of telegraph wires at some point and grapevines to compare them to. And “apple of one’s eye” is weird for being a double metaphor… the pupil was once believed to be a solid object metaphorically called an “apple” but then, after Shakespeare popularized the phrase in reference to a person in terms of affection, and science let us know the pupil is not apple-like at all, it came to exclusively mean “this person is very dear to me” and we all forgot why apples were involved in the first place.
Of course, I am far from a linguistic expert so you should take this all “with a grain of salt” 😉
Yes, and there’s even an Official Academic name for this: intertextuality! Aka “texts referring to other texts” – whether those texts are song lyrics, proverbs, historical references, movie quotes, clichés, memes, metaphors, in-jokes, parody, fanfic, and so on.
It doesn’t even have to be as explicit as an idiom or metaphor: even a turn of phrase will do. For example, saying something “is a truth universally acknowledged” invokes Pride and Prejudice, or “a thing of beauty and a joy forever” invokes Keats (although for me it invokes Mary Poppins, because obviously as a kid I watched that movie long before I’d ever heard of Keats), or “Strange women lying in rivers distributing words” invokes Monty Python. Intertexuality is one of the reasons people study literary works within the context of what other literary works were important at that place and time, so as to catch the intertextual references that the author may be making.
obi-wan never meaningfully cooperated with a skywalker on tatooine tho
i feel like obi-wan was constantly giving cody heart attacks because as the war went on and got more and more dangerous, obi-wan kept deciding “oh, i kinda feel like wearing less aRMOR TODAY”
like honestly, look at this:
early in the clone wars he had chest armor that looks like it probably covers his heart from both the front and the back and also has plating all the way up his arms as well as on his shins. it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely something, especially considering how the majority of the time, the enemy used blasters
after the time skip, apparently obi decided all that plastoid was cramping his style so he got rid of basically all of it except for his forearms. i would love to see his clones’ reaction to finding out their reckless general had now made himself even more of a target.
by ROTS obi-wan decided to basically fuck armor entirely, opting for fabric and leather alone, content in the assumption that the power of the force and pure concentrated sass will save him. he doesn’t even have gloves anymore lol. cody has long given up hope.
and it only gets funnier when you go back even earlier in the war, because he used to wear FULL ARMOR
boy even wore a helmet
no other Jedi did this, Obi-Wan just went full trooper and wore their armor, rode their speeders, wielded their weapons, “Jedi propriety” be damned (and other Jedi did comment on this). Qui-Gon would be so proud.
and then he just starts….stripping as the war goes on
What with his track record with robes, it was only a matter of time before he misplaced all his armor too.
actual photo of Obi-Wan Kenobi making himself a new home on Tatooine, post Episode III.
Steel Phoenix Studios 