Skallagrim's ramblings

People can be very bad with numbers, and especially so when they want to be. This is often the case when discussions about numbers are tangled together with some other topic: where the cold, factual conclusions are perceived to have a bearing on more subjective matters. This is invariably the case in politics, but it's also the case in less highly-charged fields. Right now, I'm thinking about the Walt Disney Company. More specifically: about its purchase of LucasFilm in 2010. And most specifically: about the financial results that this purchase has yielded them thus far, over the past eight fiscal years. This has been prompted by a discussion about that topic, in which it became startlingly clear to me that there are people who don't have any idea what the difference between gross revenue and net profit is. Their lack of understanding leads them to proclaim, quite incorrectly, that the Star Wars franchise has made Disney billions of dollars in profits. They can hardly be

In my opinion, it's a bad idea to make villain factions "less evil" in all sorts of tiny little ways. This tendency is perhaps supposed to add nuance, but remarkably often misfires and instead just gives fodder to a certain type of fan; the type that wants to be able to say " See, the fascist dictatorship isn't so bad after all! " Naturally, there are settings in which various factions and sides exist, on a scale of grey-tones, and all or most are neither wholly good nor wholly evil. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about conscious attempt to "humanise" otherwise unambiguously evil factions. This is technically a general argument, but those who know me won't be at all surprised that I'll be using Star Wars as my main point of reference here. In the old Expanded Universe, before Disney purchased LucasFilm and shunted all of that off into a separate continuity, the Galactic Empire was as evil as anything can possibly be. We

In the context of Star Wars , the term infinity is used to refer to a non-canonical tale. The most famous use of the term is in describing a 'might-have-been': a story about a parallel version of the Star Wars universe, where things somehow went differently. I have already written a bit about what I consider the Star Wars 'metaverse'. In this post, I will explore two  'might-have-beens' of the Star Wars universe , based on one simple question: "What if the line of the Banite Sith had been extinguished at some premature point?" ------------------------------------------------- The Galactic Republic isn't in good shape when we see it at the start of the prequels. On the contrary: things have gotten very bad indeed. There is some reason to believe that even if Palpatine were to die on the eve of being made Supreme Chancellor, the Republic would still collapse into civil war before too long. The rot is already too deep. At the very least,

Much has been made of the Jedi doctrine forbidding attachment, as introduced in the prequel trilogy. Some believe it to be a sign that the Jedi Order was hopelessly dogmatic and already caught in a terminal decline before Palpatine was even born. Others contend that the doctrine's meaning is typically misunderstood, and that the critical representation of the prequel-era Jedi aspiring to be (let us say) "Vulcan-like" in their attitude doesn't correspond to the actual Jedi beliefs and aspirations. I would like to argue that both these views are correct. The Jedi doctrine regarding attachments isn't what some critics make it out to be... but the actual doctrine also isn't the sensible ideal that its defenders would like it to be. More importantly, and often overlooked: the doctrine that we see in the prequels is not the historical norm for what the Jedi believe. First of all, let's define the Order's actual doctrine during the prequel era. The Je

Of late, I've seen multiple discussions about the notion of a 'multiverse' in Star Wars. This is no doubt sparked by the almost certainly spurious rumours regarding the supposed impending creation of one. I've written about that notion here , and I personally think you could do some fun things with it. But putting those rumours completely aside, let's talk about the notion of a multiverse in general. I know some people don't like the idea, and they may well have solid arguments to support that position. I'd like to argue, however, that Star Wars actually already is a multiverse. Or, to put it more accurately, I think it's a metaverse . After all, the term "multiverse" can be understood in two general ways, in fiction. In one meaning, you have points of divergence, resulting in different parallel universes where "things went otherwise". (In the context of Star Wars , a comic like Star Wars Infinities: A New Hope is an example