I explicitly criticized the "Plinkett" test in my previous post for relying solely on spoken description in defiance of the fact that cinema is a mixed medium
In this regard, I disagree with Flexo, since the test isn't holding back on using the visual aspects of a character since it's a (supposedly) speech-based test. As I said, it is a means to see if you can describe a character in vague terms and still make it understandable who they are.
You mean it does, don't you?
There seems to be a misunderstanding on your part.
The test doesn't forbid the use of names and professions cause the test says they are irrelevant. The test forbids them to
act as a test to see how well-written a character is, by not relying on references to the character directly.
Think of it as a guessing game, where the challenge is to not use certain key words.
"Guess which character I am talking about: He's named Han Solo and he's flying the Falcon..." doesn't really make much sense now, does it?
By only describing the personality, you can tell how much of them is a personality and how much is just them doing stuff (aka: are they a character or mere plot device).
I know that you're talking about Luke and Han, respectively, because this discussion is implicitly-to-explicitly concerned with Star Wars. However, the naive, dreamy hero and the selfish rogue with a heart of gold are pretty widely-distributed archetypes in fiction and as such not hugely useful in describing specific characters without additional detail or context.
So what? This isn't about how unique these characters are in the entire corpus of human fiction throughout times eternal. It is about whether these characters have defined and established personalities and how "deep" their personalities are. The more you can say about a character, the easier it is to identify him and the more aspects of his personality come out on screen.
By the same token, there's no real need to omit the character's occupation. It's not going to add or detract anything if you say "this character is a soldier who (blah-blah-blah)."
And these one-word descriptions would leave out many aspects about these characters and their growth - especially Han and Luke.
Meanwhile we have the prequel characters who are pretty generic and thus boring. Qui Gon and Obi Wan have a very generic Master-Apprentice relationship that mostly forms their personalities.
In your longer descriptions, you have a wild mix of stuff that's easily seen in the movies (mostly very generic stuff that is covered by the Master-Apprentice setup of two characters), but the vast majority are interpretations and extrapolations based on very vague and shakey grounds. Flexo has adressed these, so I see no need to go into too much detail, but I want to adress a few things. You say Qui Gon goes out of his way to help down-trodden and weak beings... but in the movie he forces Jar Jar to take him to the Gungan City, even though he was just told that a severe punishment awaits Jar Jar if he goes there, still he presses him into doing it.
About Obi Wan you have this to say: "he finds the prospect of thinking for himself extremely intimidating, and when faced with a problem usually reverts to parroting auhority figures". That is a pretty great example of you just pulling this stuff out of your ass. Obi Wan quoted Yoda once, therefore he must be afraid of thinking for himself? This is ridiculous.
If anything, that serves as just another aspect of the Master-Apprentice setup of Qui Gon and Obi Wan - and you can see, I can boil down two characters' personality almost in its entirety to this very basic notion of dichotomy. The implicit behaviour of a Master, who by definition is experiences and by extension should be calm, paired up with an apprentice, that by definition is inexperienced and thus lacks the perspective of the Master. So yeah. I can sum up both these guys with one word each and lose barely anything of their personalities. Can I do the same with Luke? He starts out as naive, but matures over the first movie. Han has the biggest scope of changes, from a smuggler that's only out for himself to someone who fights for the greater good and cares about others. Can you sum that up with one word? Sure, but you'll lose many of their additional traits - and I simply can't say that about the prequels.
The OT characters aren't reiniventing the wheel, but they have a nice and sufficient level of depth to them.
The PT characters aren't automatons devoid of personality, but they are significantly more shallow and unless one starts to dig deep into the movies, most of these traits are pretty much nonexistent or have to be invented and loosely based on wild interpretations and inventions.
A casual viewer will be able to describe Han Solo in much detail and make him stand out. A casual viewer of the PT will not be able to do the same. Hence the Plinkett Test.
You can come up with longwinded descriptions for PT characters, too, if you simply repeat generic traits of, say, the Master-archetype and use different terms with similar meaning. And you can increase wordcount by coming up with stuff that -frankly- just isn't in the movies at all, it's just you filling in the blanks of bland characterization. It's the "why no one ever used the 'Holdo Maneuver' before" debate in a different suit. Which leads me to my next point:
Qui-Gon: Don’t center on your anxieties, Obi-Wan. Keep your concentration here and now, where it belongs.
Obi-Wan: But Master Yoda said I should be mindful of the future.
Qui-Gon: But not at the expense of the moment.
We've seen how you read this. Now here's my take:
Obi Wan lacks experience and perspective, therefore he has to use quotes from his "teacher", since he has nothing else to rely on. This can be summed up neatly as "rookie" or "apprentice".
The problem with your personal interpretation and extrapolation of character traits based on singular lines of dialogues or badly written comedy means that anyone else can take the very same scene and come to a completely different conclusion
and it will be just as valid, even if it's the polar opposite.
Here's another, equally valid point: Obi Wan is a punk who dislikes immediate authority and who glorifies Jedi Masters like they were Rock stars. He is forced to play nice to his immediate superior (ie: Qui Gon), cause he needs to play nice to join the Jedi high council as quickly as possible and that means he has to suck up to his masters. Secretly, he can't await becoming a Jedi Master. When Qui Gon dies, Obi Wan screams in anguish, cause he thinks it severely reduces his chance of a quick promotion. And every scene where he doesn't immediatly agrees with Qui Gon is prove of the correctness of this theory.
Hey, how about this one: Obi Wan is a masterful accountant, thus he can analyze numbers very neatly and quickly. In his youth, he was also into biology, that's why he could analyze the blood sample of Anakin within seconds, even though this would usually take much longer.
Did I mention this is not in lieu of, but rather on top of "Obi Wan the Punk" in the paragraph above? He's the punky accountant of Jedi Masters and this contrast between the two aspects just highlights the subtle and rich nature of the prequels' character writing.
Let's add something else: Obi Wan is a dweebish nerd who does everything by the book, who is socially awkward and he is also a shut-in misanthrope, who only wants to play video games and who overcame a deathstik addiction in his youth. He's into bestiality too. As nerd, he's very knowledgable and wise, wiser than even his master Qui Gon, easily outshining him with his brilliant use of quotes from great thinkers and philosophers of the Jedi. But since he's socially awkward, he's not going to correct his superior.
If any of this can't be proven with footage from the movie, I'll call the writing of the prequels "subtle". If anything of this is contradicted by another claim, I'll call the writing of the prequels "complex". The first paragraph is easily proven by stuff in the movie. The second one is a lot more shakey and requires a lot of bending stuff to fit my narrative (but hey, that just means the writing is "subtle and complex", remember?). The third is unmitigated horseshit, but as long as I can point at one sylable of dialogue that I can claim is Obi Wan being a dweeb, it means it must be correct.
This is the weakness in your argument, you declare something beyond questioning and come up with an armlentgh of text that you compiled out of your wishes for what you want to see in the characterization. I can do the same and come to an equally valid conclusion that is nothing like what you came up with.
To put it flatly: You might be able to condense Han Solo down to "Rogue with a heart of gold" (and lose much of his essence in the process), but at least that's "rogue with special qualifier", whereas I can sum up Qui Gon and Obi Wan AND their relationship with three words: "Master and Apprentice" (without losing much of their characters or essence).
Have you never heard the expression "it's lonely at the top"?
Have you ever heard the expression: "You just pulled that isolation aspect straight from your ass and there is nothing in the movie to back up this claim"?
I think it was pointed out a few times by now, so the answer is yes.
I don't agree with Rich Evans here. Star Wars is not "very limited." I believe you could take literally every film and TV show ever made, from Buster Keaton's The General to Casablanca to Apollo 13 and tell the same story in a Star Wars film, like how Classic Star Trek invented Romulans to lift the plot of Enemy Below. There is no reason short of basic inability to make good films keeping them from pumping out these side stories until the heat death of the known universe.
I think he doesn't mean that Star Wars is a limited world, but rather that stories within Star Wars are severly limited cause they need to have the force, TIE Fighters, X-Wings and so on. It's not so much that you can't come up with a show or movie that's free of that stuff, but it is very unlikely that such a show would carry the appeal of Star Wars very well and thus no one would want to make it.
To use the appeal of Star Wars, you need a few iconic things from Star Wars and that limits the potential stuff that is made...
For instance, have a story set on a random planet, featuring purely non-jedi characters, completely devoid of Force shenanigans, without iconic spaceships and so on . . . why make this show Star Wars? It would be like making a Star Trek show and turning Picard into a loser and Starfleet into
white human supremacists.
hosted by @GeneralFriendliness and declaring it canon. Disney seems to not get that these are the type of things that don't necessarily have to be, nor should be, part of the fandom's canon. "Everything is canon" has only made more of a mess of the franchise than the original EU ever did.
