what are draw points but liquid crystal dispensers?
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THE CRYSTAL TYRANNY HAS GONE ON LONG ENOUGH
no this rules i hope its just more of final fantasy 14ās Well The Trouble With Aether Actuallyā¦ except its CRYSTALS.
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Yeah Iāve been thinking about this a lot in the context of how it relates to heroic adventure stories.
As shnoz pointed out upthread, adventure stories are inherently conservative, right? They inevitably feature a small group of plucky heroes who through whatever means have special powers that they use to visit violence upon the bad guy and win the day.
This is a required feature of an adventure story even if you want to tell a story about the oppressed righteously throwing off their oppressors because of the nature of this kind of storytelling. If you write about groundswells of support and the sweeps of broad social movements, you are writing a history book, at best a history book of a fictional place. In order to produce an adventure you need characters, so that you can humanize their drama. You need to allegorize each of these movements into a single person and invest that person with 1. the responsibility to act as representative to their entire faction and 2. the literal physical power to personally act to overthrow an entire system of oppressive violence. These are exactly the 2 things that literally cannot happen in reality.
So youāre left in a situation where adventure stories are completely barred from accurately representing even the feel of what social revolution looks like, and in fact compelled to represent their opposite. This goes like quadruple in videogames, where you control these characters yourself in regular, almost tediously common feats of violence that almost always contribute to a linearly hierarchical power climb (leveling up and what have you). If youāre smart enough, or ideologically inclined, you can work backwards and understand the allegory as an attempt at leftist art. But the bare structure of the story itself always leaves available a very cheap and obvious rightwing interpretation as well. It doesnāt matter how much Star Wars tells you that the Empire is homogenous and the Alliance is racially diverse and how the light side is about altruism and compassion and the dark side is about rage and dominanceā¦ at the end of the day, Luke Skywalker is the most individually powerful person in the galaxy and boy, isnāt he cool?
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I donāt think conservatives have a claim on individual power
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Luke literally is overpowered at the end and redeems vader through his self sacrifice which ultimately makes darth vader choose to accept death instead of let others suffer allowing two separate groups of people collaborating together as a group (three if you include the ewoks) to stop the empire.
Luke being the most powerful jedi ever isnāt a thing in the original movies, thatās a thing that got put it by disney and novels before disney.
Like star wars really tries to not just be the good guys being more raw and individually powerful. Thereās flaws in it, yeah, but itāsā¦not Luke being a badass.
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Tell that to all the people who hated TLJ 
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FF loves a chosen one narrative but i think 7 mostly dodges it? the gang is one extremely unlucky woman + random weirdos and the protagonist is an insecure deeply traumatized nobody who just wants everyone to think heās capable. itās the dirtbag FF
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imo the conservative aspect of most stories is that virtually all of them are about preventing change and resetting the status quo
e.g. ābalance must be restoredā etc
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Lukeās both, right? Star Wars works really hard to get the '70s Zen buddhism/pacifism blend to make sense with Campbellian heroic stories ā from Ben choosing to die to Yoda passing away. He chooses to stop fighting, but only after heās proven that heās the physical strongest.
I think itās continually misinterpreted because the story doesnāt naturally fit. Change through example and quiet leadership is a story for old people, not young people in a story where their action is the prime mover. Itās hard to understand why violence would put Luke under the power of Palpatine in that scene; what they mean is that right action canāt occur through violence, in the scale of history, but theyāre literalizing it in a confusing way when Palpatine doesnāt seem to care about his personal safety.
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Iāve been noticing more and more that a lot of American pop culture keeps circling themes about particularly the Napoleonic Wars, without consciously realizing it anymore I think. The knowledge that new ideas and values can and did near-instantly sweep aside the entire established order was a shock that changed everyoneās dreams and fears forever.
For todayās Americans itās very distant though, it takes too much context to feel the emotional stakes of this history. We consciously understand much better Napoleonās 20th-century successors in disruption. At the same time the guild and royal elements of Star Wars arenāt references to WW2, so why are they there? My theory is that the Napoleonic history has gradually been transmuted into new fictional contexts that are more familiar/resonant to audiences, and these ideas became free-floating, no longer recognized as metaphors for anything in particular.
My starting point in this line of thought was that Gene Roddenberry mentioned the Captain Hornblower books were a strong influence on Star Trek. These books from the 1920s and 1930s seem to be the last gasp of 19th century historical fiction being a true mainstream hit. I read two of them and I found that aside from the British Empire/Federation analogy I was initially curious about, Napoleon is demonized in these books in the same way that modern movie villains are (conceals his dark agenda behind valid criticisms of the old system, has cruel henchmen, the best among the French quietly oppose him while the mob goes along with him, etc).
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Yeah but thatās the point right? The game does all this narrative work to put forth the thesis you just laid out but in the end you still win by omnislashing Sephiroth in the face. More importantly if you canāt physically destroy each enemy in your way you die and the story is over. It canāt help but be this way.
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