Hello there. Somehow, Star Wars memes have returned. It's not a trap, this is where the fun begins.
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The thing that's always bothered me most about lightsabers is the hilts. Why are they always so uncomfortable-looking? Why do almost none of them have any kind of cross-guards or something? And I don't mean like the one Kylo Ren has - that thing looks even worse. how about just a bit of lightsaber-resistant metal on the end?
That has always bothered me too. Then I wondered: what if lightsabers can't slide down when they're touching like metal sword can? Maybe they're "stuck" in place. Do we ever see that happen?
I think I remember hearing explanations like that, that there's a kind of attractive force to them or something. Still makes me nervous.
I'd be decked out in a full knights armour of lightsaber-resistant metal. Come at me jedi wimps!
Nah the books had all sorts of colored sabers and even different types like Corran Horn's dual phase saber which when he twisted the grip would change color and get like two and a half times longer with an even narrower beam. I think it was silver and purple? Mara Jade had a purple saber. But the crystals weren't all force sensitive nonsense like they are in disney canon, none of that bleeding nonsense for red sabers, they were just different focusing crystals for different colors.
Red crystals were also usually synthetic, which was how the Sith were able to source them so consistently.
I was so disappointed when I found out that lightsabers just had an on switch. I learned about the crystals (and Star Wars in general) through cultural osmosis, and I was like “Oh, so you pass force energy through the crystal, and it becomes the visible blade.” Made perfect sense.
But no. You forget your saber in a spaceport toilet, and a six year old shuts the place down.
Well before Disney bought it I had heard the reason only Jedi used them was that the blade created some sort of gyroscopic torque that made them hard to swing if you didn’t have the force. Also finding a crystal required a force guided quest.
Lightsabers now should be all over the place. Swords to knives and bayonets that can cut anything and are super concealable? No force required and they have mines for the stuff? What’s holding you back from walking into a cantina fight with wolverine claws?
Well, they're absurdly easy to accidentally maim yourself with and unless you're precognitive the blaster deflection feature is virtually useless, so just packing a gun is usually a better move. Kyber mines also didn't exist until the Empire, and they were heavily restricted with only the Emperor himself, Vader, and the Inquisitors getting any at all that weren't being sent to the Death Star. Jedi still go on a bit of a quest to find a crystal in the new continuity. And if you and the crystal don't get along for whatever reason the blade will be heavy and unwieldy. Most of the kyber crystals don't care much, but the older ones have personalities, like the one in the Darksaber.
It would be cool if it was like that.
But I think the reason was more or less if you didn't have help from the force you'd end up cutting yourself trying to do acrobatics, which is a much funnier explanation.
Fun fact: Boc did purple lightsabers before Mace Windu.
In the expansion the PC also had a purple saber. I forgot what her name was though.
Mara Jade!
Light Sabers are the core of Star Wars, and they're some of the stupidist BS imaginable.
You have this device where the blade is made out of "light" so has no weight to it, and that can cut through virtually anything, and you're swinging it around like a maniac instead of just doing foil-style fencing moves to poke holes in your opponent from a safe range? In a world where there's no armour and the merest touch of the blade cuts instantly, duels should be over in seconds of intense action like an olympic fencing duel instead of involving lots of big dramatic parries.
Fighters should do virtually everything possible to stay outside the range of their opponent's blade. Any part of that blade touches you and you lose a limb or have a hole straight through you. There isn't even a safe part of the sword, like the flat of a real sword's blade, and there are no handguards or protective hilts, so parrying is even more dangerous.
But, no. Big swings of lightey-uppey things look "cool" so there are these extremely long fight scenes with glowy things hitting other glowy things and actors striking dramatic poses, plus guys with twirly double-sided weapons and other bullshit.
Compare that to the fighting in Dune, where a personal shield can only be penetrated by something moving slowly. There's a good concept that leads to an interesting style of fighting.
Akshually, there is armor in the lore.
(Probably) Bolted on after the fact but there is.
There may be armour, but does it matter if nobody uses it?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fun fact: the OG Darth Vader vs Kenobi duel is legit. You can even name certain fencing moves. They engage, flip, flip, poke, and disengage before some lines of dialogue. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It's kind of like how knife fights are portrayed as some intense dance where two fighters circle each other swiping and parrying, dancing around and scoring pretty slashes on arms and shoulders.
In reality it's usually just one guy gets inside the others striking radius and stabs the other guy in the gut/throat until he is too weak to fight back.
Doesn't make for good theater. West Side Story would have been, like, 20 minutes long if you got rid of the fight choreography and useless expository singing.
What a misleading documentary.
I like how you call out West Side Story where it is one of the rare pieces of media that highlights how dangerous a knife is. The whole lead up to the gang fight they're saying no weapons as knives are a big deal. In the fight, I think only one or two people pull out a knife. And from recollection, once a knife comes out, it moves pretty quickly to someone getting stabbed once/dies/gang fight disperses cause "wholly shit someone's got a knife and killed someone".
Like I understand that yeah there is a lot of dancing in the movie, but once the knife comes out things turn pretty serious. Unlike something like Crocodile Dundee where they're comparing knife sizes.
The difference is that I don't think anybody is supposed to believe that the knife fights in West Side Story are anything other than dance.
Also, I'd bet that the reality for knife fights isn't that one guy gets inside the other's radius and wins, it's probably that both take extremely serious knife wounds but one guy is fully dead and the other is just bleeding out.
Ayo fuck West side. East side is the best
Fun fact, the working title was East Side Story 😂
The West side has Sharks and Jets, what's the East side got, Snark and Jest?
Honestly, that's why I think the original fight of Obi-Wan vs Vader was so good. They kind of fought like that.
doing foil-style fencing moves
Fighters should do virtually everything possible to stay outside the range of their opponent's blade
So I know what you are saying and you have a point.
But I find it funny as the modern olympic fencing boils down to "I stabbed you a split second before you stabbed me! I win!"
Force users have precognition with it roughly scaling with power and experience which tends to prolong fights on the more powerful end of things since they are basically fucking with each other to try to squeeze out an advantage. Given that the movies generally follow people towards the top of the skill and power spectrum we tend to only see those high end fights in action, on the lower ends or when power imbalance comes into play it basically devolves into what you described, but that mostly only appears in comics and books.
Also there are materials that can resist, block, or even disable lightsabers which I'll list in no particular order with their affects.
Songsteel: Lightsaber resistant.
Cortosis: As an allow it's resistant, in a pure form it shorts out lightsabers but is brittle.
Phrik: Lightsaber resistant.
Plasteel: Resistant to short glancing blows or in sufficient thickness.
Mandalorian Iron/Beskar: Highly resistant to lightsabers.
Certain Force abilities: There is a force ability called energy absobtion that can be used to just grab a lightsaber and drain it. Vader used a lesser form of it on cloud city to block Hans blaster bolts. Presumably there are other abilities that can do similar.
Fun fact the Jedi and Sith both once used armor that was lightsaber resistant and some lightsaber fighting styles formed specifically to deal with that. Also Anakin wore armor that was lightsaber resistant, I presume he stole it from somewhere.
So in defense of all this. I think the in-universe lore is that only Jedi and Sith can use lightsabers in this fashion, because the force prevents them from self injuring with a lightsaber.
So they end up with access to a more dangerous move set offensively than someone with a standard sword in our reality. Which also lends itself to different defensive capabilities and thus you get all this saber-fu shit.
Hell maybe there is an “aura” like component of the force and Jedi vs Sith battles have another layer of complextion. Basically these otherwise useless poses actually have an effect via the force itself.
Enabling the use of double light saber bullshit, and etc
I’m not saying it’s any less bullshit.
That’s a lot of pages to say a motherfucker wanted a purple motherfucking lightsaber.
Isn't SW all just retcon now anyway?
It's not like Lucas started with a complete world like Tolkien, just some ideas.