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.
That's the problem, though: it
is essentially a simplistic guessing game that relies on a formula with no relation to the overall effectiveness of the film in question and its characters as a whole.
Think about Darth Vader, for example. Most of what makes Vader an arresting, iconic figure in the first film can't really be conveyed in terms of verbally-described personality traits, because he really doesn't have that many to begin with. He starts off as little more the Emperor's angry personal enforcer, the intrigue of the character carried more by his intimidating size and black armor, the mechanical hiss of his assisted breathing, David Prowse's physicality and James Earl Jone's voice than any large amount of descriptive character traits.
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.
No, it's about scoring cheap points in negatively comparing the PT to the OT, but the "test" doesn't even do that particularly well, since Stoklasa has to oversell the clumsy sophistry with his brain-dead "Plinkett" voice sounding even more befuddled than usual and clips of his collaborators pretending (badly) that they can't think of any attributes to apply to the Qui-Gon Jinn character.
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.
And again, you could say that the same of Han and Luke and their very generic Farmboy and Pirate archetypes and it would be just as fair (which is to say unfair).
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.
Flexo already tried this one too, you know.
However, since it further reinforces my case, I might as well remind you that at that point in the film, Qui-Gon has saved Jar-Jar's life twice within a matter of moments from the encroaching Trade Federation army, and as Obi-Wan points out, there are a lot more battle droids, tanks, armed aerial recon platforms and so forth heading in their direction, causing Jar-Jar to agree that going to the "hidden city" that he originally recommended that the Jedi take refuge in is definitely the lesser of two evils. When they get there and wrangle transportation from Boss Nass, Obi-Wan wants to leave Jar-Jar behind (arguing rather weakly that they're short of time, as though taking Jar-Jar along as a passenger in their commandeered submersible will slow them down), but Qui-Gon insists on bringing Jar-Jar along, ostensibly because the Jedi need a navigator, but since Jar-Jar is seen doing nothing really helpful while they travel together in the Bongo submarine, and Qui-Gon allows him to tag along for much of the rest of the adventure until they return to Naboo and Jar-Jar is promoted to the rank of "Bombad General" in the Gungan Army, it's evident that this is merely a pretext for keeping him safe from Boss Nass.
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.
This is a pretty great example of you sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming "LA-LA-LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" at the screen while Obi-Wan's personality is unpacked.
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.
As I mentioned a page or two ago, the American novelist/literature professor John Gardner is credited with saying that you can boil down the plot of every story to one of two different premises- either 1: A Boy Leaves Home; or 2: A Stranger Comes to Town. At the most simplistic, technical level, there may be some truth to this, but it's not really a helpful metric in most forms of analyses because it requires that you omit all of the distinguishing information that otherwise separate different premises to arrive at this conclusion, as you're now doing with all of the distinguishing traits that separate Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon to arrive at the erroneous conclusion that they have "one word" 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.
You absolutely can say that about the Prequels, just as you can, if you really want to, nitpick Han's (for example) personality just to make a nuisance of yourself. He's not, after all, a terribly complicated character. From the text of the film, we can guess that he is, at heart, a decent sort, but this has been suppressed by the underworld milieu that he inhabits, until contact with the more idealistic Luke and Leia reawaken his core of goodness. That's hardly the most profound character evolution, but the relatively simple, straightforward nature of it doesn't make for a bad character, either.
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.
On the contrary, the PT characters' traits have to be
uninvented via wild interpretations and inventions in order to keep them all in this nice, neat (but entirely specious) box that you've built for them. I mean, look at you: you're so bereft of decent counter-arguments that you're left with little more than trying to strawman the most simple and straightforward
observations on the PT's characters personalities into insane leaps of logic featuring death-sticks and animal porn.
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.
A script-regurgitating member of Mike Stoklasa's troupe of weekend mummers does not equal "a casual viewer of the PT."
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.
LOL
This is simple goal-post shifting. The original "gotcha" was supposed to be that you allegedly can't describe PT characters in more than a word or two. Lo and behold, that turns out to be a somewhat less realistic expectation than amateur hour at the Casa Stoklasa would have you believe. So, naturally, the next step is to try and delegitimize "long-winded" descriptions of the Prequels'
dramatis personae while hoping that nobody remembers that the anti-PT side has been saying things like
"the more words and descriptions that you can use, the stronger the character." Trying to then write off a longer description than you were expecting as "generic traits of...the [insert here] archetype" merely compromises your position further, because that's just as true of the OT's cast and their list of character attributes.
Which leads me to my next point:
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".
Like a lot of your attempts at counter-arguments, this one is reliant upon forcing a misreading of the scene in question by pretending that much of the relevant information presented within does not exist. In this case, you're omitting the fact that the scene is setting up a conflict between the orthodox teachings of the Jedi Order's leadership and the "quotes" that Obi-Wan is getting directly from his
actual teacher, Qui-Gon Jinn, with Obi-Wan showing a tendency to fall back on the former, rather than giving credence to the man who has actually been tasked with personally overseeing his education. This element of conflict also helps to establish the fact that Qui-Gon is a bit of a renegade in comparison with the rest of the Jedi Order, although not to the extent of being considered
persona non grata, which will be important later.
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.
And here we have a bunch of inane strawman fallacies propping up the crux of your argument, which comes down to little more than appeal to coincidence.
Presented with examples of consistent behavior throughout the story (in this case, Obi-Wan referencing the Jedi Council/Yoda in opposition to Qui-Gon's teachings or plans at various points throughout the film), the reasonable viewer sees one or more elements of that character's personality on display. You, on the other hand, purport to only see random happenstance that merely
looks as though it represents a pattern. For you, it's all shapeless, formless, meaningless chaos and not possibly representative of any thoughtful attempt to tell a story or illuminate aspects of character.
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).
To put it flatly, there's no difference. To condense any of those down to a single sentence is to do a disservice to their characters and essence. You're simply privileging the OT's cast with a blatant and artificial double standard.
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.
The appeal to coincidence again.
"why not both" as they say
