• noctumsolis

    When I think about American attitudes to parenting there's something that always comes to mind, but I don't know whether it's a real thing. All my life in American films and TV I've heard child characters addressing their dads as "sir" or being told off for not doing so.

    Is that really a commonplace thing in American families, or is it just a shorthand way of showing that the character is a shitty dad?

    calling dads sir, in the US

    It's real and I've seen it first hand

    I it's how I was raised

    shitty-dad shorthand

    it's real outside the US

    Vanilla extract

  • noctumsolis

    There's still time to increase the sample size!

  • inquisitor-apologist

    The thing about the Gray Jedi that doesn’t work is that you can’t be 50/50, that’s not how the Force works.

    The Force is an incredibly simple magic system, honestly. Good people (Jedi) gain Good People Powers through working on themselves and helping people, and bad people (Sith) gain Bad People Powers by making themselves miserable and hurting everyone around them.

    You cannot be a good person and have Bad People Powers like Force Lightning or whatever because those powers literally come from causing and exploiting people’s suffering. The Gray Jedi just don’t work because the Force is a dichotomy. There is the the Dark Side and the Light Side. You cannot be both, and if you could, well, being 50% evil is not a good thing, actually.

    At best, you get something like the Bendu from Rebels where he’s just like, the worst kind of bystander. He has a ton of power and strength and he refuses to use it for anything, he lets everyone else be miserable, he lets the world get worse because he refuses to pick a side in a world that demands he have one. And at worst, you get Anakin Skywalker in RotS who is flip-flopping between light and dark, killing an unarmed prisoner one moment and risking his life and the Chancellor’s to save Obi-Wan the next. You get someone desperately unstable and uncontrollable who lashes out randomly and extremely destructively, pulling himself deeper into the Dark because he refused to choose a damn side.

    Being 50% evil is either a step towards being 100% evil or it’s just… nothing. Utter passivity, refusal to do anything because it disrupts the ‘balance’ that never actually existed because good and evil are not equal. There’s no real nuance there, it’s a simple magic system, but that’s because it was made for kids! Look it up, GL has said all this before.

    Anyway, yeah, being half evil kind of inherently precludes you from being a good person.

  • coldgoldlazarus

    Lucas himself commented that the force isn't directly about "good" vs "evil" but that they tend to naturally arise from the actual key dichotomy: Selflessness vs Selfishness.

    So not to be a Grey Jedi apologist, because they are kinda eh and overhyped, but conceptually they do make sense to me. If the Sith are selfishness taken to an outwardly destructive, miserable extreme, and on the flipside the Jedi are incredibly selfless, even to a self-destructive fault, (and I prefer this, honestly, since it makes the measure of morality more about what you do and relate to others, than some abstract inherent quality) then yeah, it does make sense to me that you could have people who act with a mixture of both, without being at Anakin's level of instability. The dichotomy exists, but it still strikes me as more of a gradient than pure black and white; just that the extreme ends of the spectrum tend to be overrepresented in Star Wars.

    Sure, a Grey Jedi may still not be an especially amazing person, but it's not 50% evil, it's ~50% selfish. Which, at least in my opinion, can be an okay thing (Self-love and all that, I don't care for Puritan Work Ethic or Catholic Guilt BS.) so long as it's in moderation. The Sith don't care for that sort of moderation, they don't care about other people at all, but a Grey Jedi would still be willing to help others and do good, even if self-actualization or self-interest is also a big goal for them in contrast to the Jedi. Again, I'm not a huge fan of them because it does still attract edgy people who also misunderstand the concept like you but like it that way, but they don't strike me as such a far-fetched, awful idea as you seem to be making them out to be.

  • inquisitor-apologist

    Ok, one, I had never actually seen that clip before, so thanks, that does clarify the situation. (I am being genuine here)

    However, in that video, Lucas never said it was selflessness vs. selfishness, but that it was compassion vs. selfishness, and you can’t really take compassion to destructive extremes. You can be self-sacrificial about it, but at that point I’d argue that it’s probably not actually compassion motivating it.

    And, well, the Jedi do pursue self-actualización and practice self-love. That is, at least in my opinion, completely in line with being compassionate. Not just to others, but to yourself as well. Like I said above, the Light Side is about becoming a better person yourself and making the world better.

    So I think it’s fair to say that my point still stands. I still think being 50% selfish versus compassion will either drag you down into worse selfishness or bring you to the passive does-nothing-helps-no-one mindset of the Bendu, and even if the dichotomy is different, you do still get Sith powers solely by hurting people, so I don’t think anyone who uses them can be a good person.

    I still don’t think the gray Jedi work in the framework of Star Wars, but I do see more of the nuance now.

  • coldgoldlazarus

    Those are fair points, yeah. I forgot that the phrasing he used was compassionate, since I saw the clip a while ago originally ^^;

  • byz-was-here

    In the chronicler’s company au, every time Toa Tamaru activates her great rau it automatically translates her treespeak into regular matoric.

    And every time the rest of the company hears it, they instinctively go, "Mmm... don't like that."

    All Le-Matoran refuse to answer whether Tamaru's Great Rau translates her treespeak for them, too.

  • ecrivainsolitaire

    The Lego Movie is something that only happens once in life because you cannot recreate the experience of being dragged to “stupid marketing ploy to sell plastic bricks to 5 year olds” and 90 minutes later come out of “surreal cosmic horror comedy about the existential dread of artistic expression and the meaning of free will with commentary on capitalist oligarchy. To sell plastic bricks to 5 year olds.”

  • demitsorou

    Demi decided to suffer and draw a quick shitty comic.

    After seeing Nuju’s success with Nokama during their Voyage of Fear, Matau decided to ask for some advice.

    Based on Team Fortress 2 animated short “Expiration Date”.

  • changelingsandothernonsense

    New Ea-nāṣir lore just dropped and I don't know how to feel about that. I hate the meme but the guy having thugs coming after him for bad copper sales is perfect.

  • teal-deer

    Wait wait WAIT

    As someone who hard agrees with all your tags re: tired of the meem

    BUT who is also invested in antiquities

    Is it possible for you to drop the new lore

  • changelingsandothernonsense

    So the building in Ur where the infamous tablet was found (1 “Old Street” Ur Excavations VII) was actually full of similar tablets, all detailing how badly this guy's deals went. All of these tablets were collected and put into storage at the British Museum. Typically this kind of thing gets forgotten about, many of these tablets have been sitting there for a century, untranslated or partially translated.

    The Nu Tabletum

    This was recently partially translated and it's incredibly fragmentary, but it's a letter from the man himself reassuring a customer in Larsa about a bad shipment (a lot of goods were missing). He is upset that the customer sent thugs to collect (which is located in a different tablet). In turn, he sends his own to the customer's home. They are to make offerings at the temple of Šamaš together to symbolically "smooth things over". They are taking an oath.

    He later goes on to blame the customer for the missing ingots. He (Ea-nāṣir) decided to employ a third party to deliver said ingots to the customer (all the way in the next city-state in the Sumerian cultural sphere). It seems like the third party either stole or got into a fight with the customer over the goods.

    Ea-nāṣir now has to haul his ass to Larsa to deal with this personally. There's a lot of "Why don't you believe me?" "They don't listen to me!" "Please don't send-" going on in the tablet. But from what I can gather it looks like this peace offering (making an oath at the temple of Šamaš) broke down too. Everyone is blaming each other for the missing copper ingots and now the man himself has to take the three-day journey to sort out this issue.

    We have a name for one of the thugs: Mr. Shorty (kurûm). He seems to be a bit scary.

    The man from Dilmun got kicked out of the Merchant's Guild for a reason, he's had this problem before with copper shipments from Elam. Either he's the world's worst judge of character or he's embezzling, and badly. This is his side hustle stage where he's selling everything from used clothing to speculating (badly) on real estate. He may have dabbled in money lending too. He's your classic failed finance bro.