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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1U4SrRl:
millicentthecat:
bomberqueen17:
galadhir reblogged your photoset and added:
Interesting! The First Order’s new policy of training Stormtroopers through simulations feels to me like a similar thing. You know? They’re not going to risk these guys anywhere near live fire until they’re ready to deploy.
There probably weren’t all that many of the FO, to start off with, so they can’t afford to be careless with their personnel the way the Empire was - their people are just not infinitely replaceable the way they used to be.
Exactly! Isn’t that fascinating to consider.
It’s more in line of the (I think sort of ill-considered) canon assertion that Captain Phasma knows the designations of all her Stormtroopers. Clearly, while they invoke the aesthetic and mind-boggling size of the Empire, they are, as someone pointed out, based on a culture of much more scarcity, and so while they have this pretension to ruthlessness, they’re just not– not on the same scale.
They practice ruthlessness, they simulate ruthlessness– and then they do exercise ruthlessness, with the Starkiller, but I wonder how much that is in line with actual past practices, and how much that is a sudden dramatic escalation in real actual stakes. Because the FO can’t have been wandering around committing atrocities this whole time.
And they make a point of explaining that Finn had never been in a live-fire scenario before. Like, all of the events of the movie were a kind of sudden escalation from theoretical to real violence, a putting into practice of the things the FO had been teaching itself but not really doing?
(I am super terrible at reading the surrounding canon materials so I have no idea if there were any major incidents before; I know there were minor ones, but they were all plausibly deniable, right? That was the issue, and why the Resistance was so, kinda, fringey?)
I was just telling @senator-benamidala how I think the First Order MUST have an enormous Human Resources Problem. In one of the Poe Dameron comics, Phasma is pretty explicit to show disdain for any kind of slavery…and there was another canon source (Aftermath, maybe it was? or BFA. I will look it up) that made me think the new guard of the FO really frowns on certain kinds of abuses of their labor force. We know they’re not using clones, not super enthusiastic about slavery, and that they’re treating their pilots as precious. The forced conscription process (by which they drafted kids like Finn, presumably) can’t be yielding all that many bodies? I mean, how many draft-eligible kids were living on those unexplored planets in “Unknown Regions”?
Where are all the Stormtroopers all coming from???
Because it’s not just Finalizer. There’s all this evidence that the Order must have a ton of ships somewhere. When the Empire fizzled out, they left a military industrial complex behind, all specifically dedicated to mining ores and building weapons. So the empire disappears…and those economies collapse…but then in Bloodline, Casterfo says something about all the old factories starting up again. The infrastructure to build weapons exists and is being used. And something happened to the entire Imperial fleet of ships, that already existed. Are they floating around, unmanned?
Who is driving this bus???
It’s SO INTERESTING. It all kind of adds up to this weird aesthetic conflict of– I mean, Stormtroopers, identical white armor, the whole Empire look and feel and interchangeable/identical people etc, and yet, also, each one of these numerically-designated identical people is precious. WTF. It is so weird and I love it.
I mean. It also holds water that the New Republic wasn’t powerful enough or organized enough to even start to attempt any kind of meaningful public works support of the Outer Rim etc., and so there were a lot of people who had basically no choice but to turn to the First Order or other weird self-governing things, gangs etc., to try to sustain any kind of life out there.
I have a lot of feelings about the Outer Rim gangs– based on research I did about the Irish gangs in NYC from like 1750-1930, where the gangs basically took the place of any kind of public works infrastructure, in the total absence of meaningful social services. I feel like the FO kind of fits in there. It’s just that they’re… like… a normal gang where they’re mostly interested in the usual gang things, which are protecting your people and advancing your interests and squashing your competition and consolidating your control, only on top of that they have this decayed infrastructure they’ve taken over, and then this wholesale and utterly sincere adoption of this Imperial aesthetic that has, like, nothing in common with their actual ideals, but is what they think of themselves as being.
I’m really invested in this.
#snoke has a ghost army probably
OH PROBABLY. Well, it would explain some things, maybe.
millicentthecat:
bomberqueen17:
galadhir reblogged your photoset and added:
Interesting! The First Order’s new policy of training Stormtroopers through simulations feels to me like a similar thing. You know? They’re not going to risk these guys anywhere near live fire until they’re ready to deploy.
There probably weren’t all that many of the FO, to start off with, so they can’t afford to be careless with their personnel the way the Empire was - their people are just not infinitely replaceable the way they used to be.
Exactly! Isn’t that fascinating to consider.
It’s more in line of the (I think sort of ill-considered) canon assertion that Captain Phasma knows the designations of all her Stormtroopers. Clearly, while they invoke the aesthetic and mind-boggling size of the Empire, they are, as someone pointed out, based on a culture of much more scarcity, and so while they have this pretension to ruthlessness, they’re just not– not on the same scale.
They practice ruthlessness, they simulate ruthlessness– and then they do exercise ruthlessness, with the Starkiller, but I wonder how much that is in line with actual past practices, and how much that is a sudden dramatic escalation in real actual stakes. Because the FO can’t have been wandering around committing atrocities this whole time.
And they make a point of explaining that Finn had never been in a live-fire scenario before. Like, all of the events of the movie were a kind of sudden escalation from theoretical to real violence, a putting into practice of the things the FO had been teaching itself but not really doing?
(I am super terrible at reading the surrounding canon materials so I have no idea if there were any major incidents before; I know there were minor ones, but they were all plausibly deniable, right? That was the issue, and why the Resistance was so, kinda, fringey?)
I was just telling @senator-benamidala how I think the First Order MUST have an enormous Human Resources Problem. In one of the Poe Dameron comics, Phasma is pretty explicit to show disdain for any kind of slavery…and there was another canon source (Aftermath, maybe it was? or BFA. I will look it up) that made me think the new guard of the FO really frowns on certain kinds of abuses of their labor force. We know they’re not using clones, not super enthusiastic about slavery, and that they’re treating their pilots as precious. The forced conscription process (by which they drafted kids like Finn, presumably) can’t be yielding all that many bodies? I mean, how many draft-eligible kids were living on those unexplored planets in “Unknown Regions”?
Where are all the Stormtroopers all coming from???
Because it’s not just Finalizer. There’s all this evidence that the Order must have a ton of ships somewhere. When the Empire fizzled out, they left a military industrial complex behind, all specifically dedicated to mining ores and building weapons. So the empire disappears…and those economies collapse…but then in Bloodline, Casterfo says something about all the old factories starting up again. The infrastructure to build weapons exists and is being used. And something happened to the entire Imperial fleet of ships, that already existed. Are they floating around, unmanned?
Who is driving this bus???
It’s SO INTERESTING. It all kind of adds up to this weird aesthetic conflict of– I mean, Stormtroopers, identical white armor, the whole Empire look and feel and interchangeable/identical people etc, and yet, also, each one of these numerically-designated identical people is precious. WTF. It is so weird and I love it.
I mean. It also holds water that the New Republic wasn’t powerful enough or organized enough to even start to attempt any kind of meaningful public works support of the Outer Rim etc., and so there were a lot of people who had basically no choice but to turn to the First Order or other weird self-governing things, gangs etc., to try to sustain any kind of life out there.
I have a lot of feelings about the Outer Rim gangs– based on research I did about the Irish gangs in NYC from like 1750-1930, where the gangs basically took the place of any kind of public works infrastructure, in the total absence of meaningful social services. I feel like the FO kind of fits in there. It’s just that they’re… like… a normal gang where they’re mostly interested in the usual gang things, which are protecting your people and advancing your interests and squashing your competition and consolidating your control, only on top of that they have this decayed infrastructure they’ve taken over, and then this wholesale and utterly sincere adoption of this Imperial aesthetic that has, like, nothing in common with their actual ideals, but is what they think of themselves as being.
I’m really invested in this.
#snoke has a ghost army probably
OH PROBABLY. Well, it would explain some things, maybe.
