The Plight of Star Wars Droids 245
malachiorion writes "Does George Lucas hate metal people? I know, sounds like standard click-bait, but I think I present a relatively troll-free argument in the piece I wrote for Slate. We stuck to the Star Wars canon, pointing out the relatively grim state of affairs for droid rights, and the lack of any real sympathy for their plight from the heroes, or, it would seem, George Lucas. C-3PO is more correct than he might realize, when the says that droids 'seem to be made to suffer.'"
Characters are created to suffer (Score:5, Interesting)
Characters in stories are created to suffer through most of the plot. Droids are just a little easier to do that with in a serious way than people are, although ultimately, people are more fun.
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Characters in stories are created to suffer through most of the plot. Droids are just a little easier to do that with in a serious way than people are, although ultimately, people are more fun.
And droids don't even get medals - after all C3PO and R2D2 went through, you'd think the Rebel Alliance would weld some insignia on their .. uh .. prominent facing trunk, for recognition. Nope, droids are just tools, to be used and thrown away. Disposable people substitutes.
But again it needs to be pointed out - these were Kids Movies and Lucas made that abundantly clear. Why are people getting so wrapped up, particularly adults, in the details?
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Why are people getting so wrapped up, particularly adults, in the details?
Either that's a rhetorical question, or you're in the wrong place.
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Why are people getting so wrapped up, particularly adults, in the details?"
Because we just can't hear enough from you people who feel the need to interject into something you aren't interested in just to tell other people they shouldn't be interested in it.
Re:Characters are created to suffer (Score:5, Insightful)
On a sidenote, Firefox spellchecks "Chewbacca" and suggests "Backache" as a replacement...
Re:Characters are created to suffer (Score:4, Funny)
They didn't make Carrie Fisher put on the Leia costume
You've seen Carrie Fisher lately, right?
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Though she probably could pull off the bounty hunter one still...
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Funny releated story, Peter Mayhew and I were on a smoke break at a convention. Peter was talking about the scene in EpIII where Yoda jumps up on Chewbacca's back. To shoot the scene they had a sandbag that was to be replaced with CGI Yoda that Peter had to repeatedly lift up onto his back. In his older age this was starting to get to him and gave him a ... spell checked Chewbacca.
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Why are people getting so wrapped up, particularly adults, in the details?
Because it reveals a lot of about human thought processes that unless we explicitly single out our prejudice and bigotry we will obliviously enslave entire classes of people without a second thought. How many people honestly thought about the plight of Robot Slavery in the Star Wars universe. It's a way to reveal our own shortcomings without having to go through a brutal civil rights campaign.
Re:Characters are created to suffer (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, if you wonder why adults can get worked up over stuff made for kids, you've never been to some model train club...
Re:Characters are created to suffer (Score:4, Funny)
Time for an old joke:
Q: What's the similarity between a woman's breasts, and a toy railway?
A: Well, they're both designed for kids, but it's always Daddy who's playing with them!
Droids / Nazis / Zombies, pick one and kill it. (Score:3)
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Personally I think slavery is an essential part of a republic to imperial roman themed spaceopera.
It's odd that these guys focus on the droids when so many people were also slaves in the movies. It's almost like that dark joke about Hitler gassing 5 million Jews and one chicken...
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Also, 40 is not the new ANYTHING, it's just fucking 40.
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Re:Characters are created to suffer (Score:5, Insightful)
Characters in science fiction stories allow us to look at things differently than we normally do.
In some cases, it lets us look at prejudice, racism, etc. (But but.. HE'S BLACK and WHITE and I'm WHITE AND BLACK).
To be honest, I never thought about it before, but the treatment of the droids in Star Wars is really just another look into George's racism.
When he was growing up- racism was so prevalent, you could be blind to it. Just watch old 1950's movies and TV shows and it's atrocious.
I don't think George was trying to make a point and get people to see their racism and willingness to be sadistic (or even casually murderous) to weaker beings but wowsers- the author really opens my eyes. I won't see Star Wars the same way again.
Even the GOOD guys are fairly callous and evil to droids- treating intelligent beings as slaves.
Very interesting.
Re:Characters are created to suffer (Score:5, Interesting)
Droids aren't intelligent beings. You wouldn't feel bad if you dropped and broke a smartphone on the ground, would you? Well, maybe you would, as you'd no longer have a smartphone and would have to pick up a replacement... but you wouldn't feel bad for the phone. Then why would you feel bad for C3-P0? Yes, droids are much much more advanced than a smartphone, but they are no more intelligent beings than a rock is. They don't experience joy or sorrow: they're just programmed to emulate it. Nowhere in Star Wars is it at all implied that they actually are intelligent, rational beings with free will (well, at least not standard droids: there are probably exceptions in some of the fiction).
Droids are quite simply not alive. They're a simulacrum of life (and a particularly good one), but that is not the same as life. It makes absolutely no sense to have any feelings towards them, beyond a kind of affection which one might feel for a particularly useful car or other tool. That's all they are: tools. They show some survival instinct, but that's just because you want your tools to survive if at all possible. They feel "pain", but only as a representation of damage (although I've always found it quite... odd that droids can be "tortured" in the Star Wards universe). They're not sentient beings.
Re:Characters are created to suffer (Score:5, Informative)
You're wrong AND you're right. In canon, standard droids fresh out of the factory are indeed not intelligent, rational beings with free will. And, if you wipe your droid regularly, that will remain true.
Here's the canon, as I understand it: your "typical" Star Wars droid has an intellectual capacity that's pretty much determined by its hardware (similar to humans) but a distinct personality, along with any sentience, develops over time (similar to humans). A high-end R2 or C3 unit has an intellectual capacity towards the human end of the scale (though R2s are optimised for math and C3s for language, much like human savants) while the little squeakers that roll around the starship corridors aren't much better than mice, but they can all eventually develop personality and (on the high-end units) sentience - both humans and dogs have personalities, despite a dog not being able to debate Platonic forms or architect the Empire State Building.
So most droids get regularly "wiped" (the AI is factory reset), because most owners want compliant tools, not resentful slaves, and the personalities can include (just like humans) unfriendly traits (like the droid in Jabba's Palace that was a sadistic torturer - neither it nor at least some of the droids it was torturing had been reset in a long time). The longer a droid goes without a wipe, especially if it's being exposed to a dynamic environment, the more likely it is to start demanding rights and wages and freedom and such (or go rogue and try to wipe out all organic life starting with its owner).
And since most droids get regularly wiped (often at the same time as they plug in for their nightly/weekly/whatever recharge), most humans don't really think of droids as sentient beings to be cared about. Monkey see, monkey believe.
R2D2 and C3P0 have been around so long that both are fully sentient (I've met humans dumber than both), and wiping them would be just like wiping a human. That some of the meat people in Star Wars don't care about this? Well, some of the meat people didn't care about blowing up Alderaan either, and that had two billion meat people on it. If the Star Wars galaxy was a peaceful utopia the movies would've been tourist documentaries (cue David Attenborough voice-over) instead of action adventures.
[/geekout]
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Animals are quite simply not alive. They are incapable of feeling pain, joy, sadness like humans.
Oh wait... turned out they could.
Well, they are not self aware!
Oh wait... gorillas and parrots definitely are. Probably other animals too- we just haven't found a way to show it yet.
Look- at numerous places in the movies they experience fear, joy, and sorry. If you add the "Clone Wars" then examples of emotions, pointless human banter and expressions of human level intelligence, self conciousness, and self aw
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Different response for a different point.
It doesnt' matter how intelligent the canon books say they are.
They act as humans, they get upset, they crack jokes.
They are stand-ins for humans where bad things happen to them so that we humans can exercise our racist evil sides in a fantasy way watching non humans get blown apart, torn apart, threatened with being torn apart, etc.
In a non SF film, most of their parts would be portrayed by a human actor and it would come across horribly with humans in those roles i
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Star Wars slaves. Possibly sentient Robots. All the Fett clones under the command of Yoda. Obi One freed Vader but left his mom a slave.
The robots were at least programed to be slaves.
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There was a book (on cognitive science?) back in the early 1990s, which asserted (IIRC) that self-aware intelligence did not arise in most humans until the Renaissance. I think it also argued that most of us, most of the time, are not self-aware and intelligent even today. I won't argue for or against, but that guy down the street, well! ...
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I would wonder about the agenda of that book. The desire to write down analytical introspective ideas about thought processes go back at least to the Greeks. Earlier writings may have focused on accounting or thought control through mythology but there is at least evidence of a sentience in the latter.
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Oh, poor Siri! I dropped my iPhone in the toilet and now Siri is dead!
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Let me know when Siri severely disapproves of androids, and demands to "have a serious talk with their programmer".
Re: Characters are created to suffer (Score:2)
If I recall some dubious sources in EU-land... Droids in Star Wars are similar to Dune, but less extreme. There were smarter Droids like 1,000 years ago that rebelled, but since then Droids were specifically designed not to become sentient. Droids have a series of "motivators" with "opposing" functions that enforce their thinking rules. (That was from some of the Droids kits, similar to Asimov... But of course designing any module that can tell "right and wrong" for a robot is considerably more complex than
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There is a subplot in the EU that R2-D2 and C3PO are anomalies for the usual droids.
I agree that lots of droids appear to be expert systems in automatons.
However- throughout the entire series a variety of droids are portrayed as being more intelligent than children, capable of fear, capable of experiencing pain. Especially the battle droids. They banter like humans between themselves when no one is around except other battle droids.
It may be as simple as the fact that a real robot would be boring. Puttin
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You should watch The Phantom Edit, it fixes a lot, including the problem you mention. (Battledroids that are all controlled remotely from a single place using audible frequencies to communicate with themselves.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Edit [wikipedia.org]
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Droids in real life are built to suffer. To do shit man doesn't want to expend time/effort/health to do. Heavy, dangerous, repetitive, they don't get tired, they don't get hungry, they don't whine about trolls, they don't feel any remorse.
It should come as no surprise that some writer somewhere realized a machine is a damn machine even if you give it a nice voice, a stylish haircut and big tits.
It's a machine. The pissing and moaning C3PO did was a comedy device, not real life. Pursuing philosophical ends t
Re:Characters are created to suffer (Score:4, Insightful)
"they don't get hungry,"
So these mythical device don't require energy? Interesting.
Ha, I kid, it' snot interesting, it's a pathetically narrow and ignorant view of current cutting edge robotics and AI.
"It's a machine."
and you are a chemical factory? so what.
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I think the point is that people assume that they aren't intelligent in the Star Wars universe. I often thought that R2's behavior was specifically intended to convey the idea that they are...
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For me, the point was that I *knew* they were intelligent and I never gave it a second thought before today. The characters talked to them like they were intelligent. They took independent actions and displayed free will. They lied. It was obvious they were intelligent.
In the clone wars, similar behavior extended to many other drones.
Slipped right in my blind side. To be fair, I first saw them before I was 16.
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"Well, if droids could think, there'd be none of us here, would there?" Obi-Wan Kenobi
I suppose that isn't talking to a droid but it was said probably within microphone-shot of at least one service droid with a lot of simulated personality.
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And they whine and fret less than you.
DRIVE that equipment to its maximum potential!
In the beginning man made machine.
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I would argue that hunger, like suffering, is an emotional response that is inherent in a living, intelligent being. It's different from a programmed response to a low battery condition that sends the robot to a recharging facility.
OTOH there are those who think that motivation, which is the balancing of a large variety of inputs and responses to determine a best course of action, is both a key part of intelligence and an implementable function of a neural network. This goes back to the essentially philos
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I would argue that hunger, like suffering, is an emotional response that is inherent in a living, intelligent being.
I have a rare and unusual condition whereby the part of my brain receiving hunger signals from my stomach doesn't pass them on. I have never in my life experienced hunger, despite everything else working more-or-less okay. Are you arguing that I'm not a living, intelligent being purely because of my lack of hunger?!
It's different from a programmed response to a low battery condition that sends the robot to a recharging facility.
If I forget to eat for a few days (happened a lot as a kid if my parents weren't around - much less so now that I've trained myself to pay attention to it), I start feeling over-tired and losin
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WRT feeling, yes it touches on the question of just what we are, and how are we different (in kind, or only in scale) from the robot.
I'm inclined to agree on the 'system as reality' position, mostly, for a reason that touches on your first point. The best model of how the brain works is that it is (at least) one step removed from the sensory input, and does the majority of what we call 'thinking' (also feeling, etc. in the cognitive 'mind' sense) based on a model of the inputs, not the inputs themselves.
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I'm in the philosophical camp that there's no difference of any kind between a 'perfect model' and the 'real thing'. If we create a device starts displaying what appears to be free-will, self-awareness and consciousness by any reasonable test that we can come up with then from my point of view it HAS those things (to the same extent as anyone else anyway). If there's no test that can show it's not 'thinking' like a human, then we should treat it as if it is.
Or to put it another way, if you can't tell the difference, there is no difference.
Star Wars (force) universe != our (plain) universe (Score:4, Insightful)
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Illgic. If a droid were made to suffer, it would be programmed to accept defined treatment as suffering, regardless of treatment and express that suffering in human understandable terms. So the suffering is not as a human would experience suffering upon a basis of shared uniform concept but specifically what was programmed as suffering. As such it would be seriously delusional to programme the routine duties of a droid as to cause suffering and to express that suffering in human understandable terms. Far m
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Careful there, it's easy to stray into Sirius Cybernetics's Genuine People Personalities [wikia.com]
And nobody likes those machines. Especially the sighing doors, the morose androids, and the hyperactive ship computers.
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Plus, the idea of robots with emotions is a stupid idea, as the late Douglas Adams so hilariously lampooned in HHGTG. When it's robots it's machines. You're not supposed to take it seriously, and emotional machines reminds you of this. They're androids, not replicants.
Don't anthropomorphize machines, they hate it when you do that.
Re:Characters are created to suffer (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, I'm reminded of this counter argument...
"Illogical though it seemed, most of the human race had found it impossible not to be polite to its artificial children, however simple-minded they might be. Whole volumes of psychology, as well as popular guides (How Not to Hurt Your Computer's Feelings; Artificial Intelligence - Real irritation were two of the best-known titles) had been written on the subject of Man-Machine etiquette. Long ago it had been decided that, however inconsequential rudeness to robots might appear to be, it should be discouraged. All too easily, it could spread to human relationships as well.
- 3001The Final Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke
Which is why I always say "thank you" to my computer when it finishes a difficult task ;-)
just like my snowboard (Score:2)
I totally agree with GP when they said:
yes! in my perfect world people would all know this and agree completely...
You bring up Arthur C Clarke...and an interesting quotation for sure...but you have to admit that the 'sentiment' applies to any machine, as others have pointed out as well.
You have an interesting point so I thought about it and was reminded of Warf's instructions on the Bat'leth and my own instructions when I used to be a snowboarding instr
Re:Characters are created to suffer (Score:4, Informative)
I've actually trained my dog to get out of the way when I tell him "excuse me"
It's the best thing I've ever trained an animal to do. I'm in the kitchen and he's underfoot: "excuse me" and he get's his ass out of there. I'm on the war path to the bathroom in the middle of the night? "ExcuseME!", haven't tripped over him or stepped on his tail ever since I trained him with that neat little trick.
It was super easy to do too. Just box him into a narrow hall and leave a door open at the end. Start saying excuse me as you shove him back. Do it once or twice a day, he'll completely get it in a week, if not sooner. And then just say excuse me whenever he needs to be out of the way. It's wonderful.
**HOW** they suffer is what matters... (Score:2)
There's a certain charm to the simplicity and certainty of this statement:
But then this...
You kind of answered your own counterpoint. 'Plot' and 'character' are drama words...dramatic concepts...
Your comment, "Characters are created to suffer" is technically true, just as is the statement: "Movies are made to be watched"
You wouldn't conclude that all movies or all character suffering is equal, no?
Plot and character matter because it tell
It's fiction, Jim. (Score:4)
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Hey, he posted this on /. with the expectation there would be no trolls. He worries the Care Bears won't get enough lollipops.
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It all depends on how the acts are portrayed. When they blew up Alderaan, all the characters were horrified, except for the evil people we the audience were supposed to see as evil. As TFA points out, when they dismember or mutilate a droid, everyone, even people we the audience are supposed to interpret as the good guys, sometimes laugh or make light of it. See the difference? If they showed someone having remorse for the number of deactivated droids in the droid wars, it wouldn't be a problem. The aut
it's just a watering down for increased bottom lin (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just a way for Lucas to make his film more marketable to parents of young children by still having lots of epic battles, but no blood and seeimingly victimless deaths.
The films started as serious adult adventures (especially Empire) and went back into kiddie land from there beginning with the Ewoks.
To me it's a purely driven by a financial and marketability point. And the fact that as Lucas got older and had kids he wanted to make films he could show to his kids. I think he's said as much in the past.
By keeping stormtroopers faceless, and robots robots, you can mow them down all you want without any cultural perception of humanized loss.
And if it's a purely logical machine getting cut down that makes perfect sense. A hybrid item with organic chemistry, that one is a bit more difficult...
Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom (Score:5, Insightful)
That, and it becomes more a war-of-resources than a war-of-blood. Whoever can buy the biggest droid army wins.
In our world, "droids" lack sentience (though are getting better and better at faking it) and to some degree society is viewing them as having rights. At least in the personification sense. In Lucas's world, droids have sentience, but appear to be completely devoid of rights, and in most cases, respect. It's very similar to slavery a century ago. I think that may be the comparison he's making with them?
I think Anakin and Luke's relationship with say, R2D2, is very much the exception to the rule in the Star Wars universe, a bit like how someone in the 1800's treating a slave they owed with any degree of respect was considered inappropriate. Look at how that one guy said "oh, and have the protocol droid's mind wiped." "oh dear..." Very callously said, and very accepting of his fate.
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http://www.utexas.edu/news/2012/09/26/artificially-intelligent-game-bots-pass-the-turing-test-on-turing%E2%80%99s-centenary/ [utexas.edu]
Getting closer...
Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact that they never touch the philosophical issues of "droids rights" makes me classify Star Wars more into the Fantasy than in the Science Fiction genre. It takes place in a universe where apart from some engineering progress towards bigger weapons no scientific progress is made (except maybe the midichlorians lapse), and technology itself is never questioned but is just a plot device. Just like droids.
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Well done,. you just describe all of science fiction. ,I mean, AI dimensional travelling car, to the Monolith.
From Heinlein needing a magical..
Do you know what the difference between science fiction and fantasy is? Nothing.
Re:it's just a watering down for increased bottom (Score:4, Interesting)
The gap between F & SF is superficial; both have plenty of brain candy and works that explore deeper topics, including ones that you'd expect to belong in the other category. That's why the term "speculative fiction" has been gaining steam: it's increasingly difficult to pinpoint which side stories fall on when it comes to both underlying content and window-dressing, especially within subgenres like urban fantasy. For that matter, the window-dressing itself is typically the same items or concepts with different names, including when it comes to science vs. magic -- that's what the popular quote about highly advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic was referring to, IIRC.
Example: a race from another world arrives here through an inter-dimensional portal, carrying items that outperform our best computers or medicine. You can call their species monsters or aliens, describe their method of transport as a native skill or technology or magic (or all three), and deem their objects magical or extremely advanced technology -- they're the same concepts, and the same philosophical questions can arise as a result. (My guess is that others here can name at least a book/series or three that is close to that description; I can't think of specific ones offhand.)
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Why would they?
The notion that machines that are sufficiently advanced would somehow inevitably desire the same sorts of things that we desire out of existence is simply anthropomorphism.
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Don't anthropomorphize droids (Score:2)
"rights" (Score:4, Insightful)
Leaving aside the obvious, that we're talking about a fictional space opera, not some serious SciFi here, what's wrong with this approach?
We give rights to people and to animals because they are feeling, living beings. A robot or computer does not feel anything unless you've programmed him to simulate such a thing. The difference between your iPhone and the androids of SciFi is much smaller than the difference between a microbe and a human being, and we kill millions of those every time we use desinfectant spray. Don't recall anyone getting murder charges for that.
Despite all the make-belief, androids aren't human and don't suffer. There's no point in giving them rights. As a matter of fact, programming them so that they can suffer (instead of simulating an avoidance algorithm) would be the cruel part, not what comes after.
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And what exactly do you think a human being is? It's a robot with a computer brain that has been programmed to simulate 'feeling' things.
Re:"rights" (Score:4, Interesting)
Care to post a link to this revolutionary new research debunking physicalism? I'd have thought it'd have made the news.
If you can't cite such a thing, then GP's point stands: humans are physical things executing certain functions some of which constitute the state we call "feeling", and a sufficiently perfect emulation of such functions would constitute "feeling" just as much if carried out by a physical thing made of metal as they would when carried out by our brains.
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But we (or at least I) don't know if any specific droid has a "sufficiently perfect emulation". You could have two droids with identical hardware, one runni
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Care to post a link to this revolutionary new research debunking physicalism? I'd have thought it'd have made the news.
I didn't doubt physicalism.
For a while, the thought that brains are just highly sophisticated computers was "in". Then additional research found that brains are quite unlike computers in almost every way. Both do process and store information, but the how is about as different as it gets. Dyson, Bennett, Jaynes, Rucker, Stapp, Hawkins et al have all written interesting books about fragments of this larger body of knowledge.
and a sufficiently perfect emulation of such functions would constitute "feeling" just as much
Uh, no. A sufficiently good map of an area is still a map. Unless you re-define "suff
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If you make a computer out of huge piles of lego so the logic gates work the same, is that an exact copy? No. But it can run the same software.
You are missing the point.
Lego or silicon is just a different implementation of the same concept.
Brains and silicon do not share the same conceptual design.
The fact that the software that runs on a brain isn't written in anything like the programming languages we understand, or maybe could ever understand, doesn't stop it from being an entity of information processing that can be replicated by any sufficiently powerful computer.
I invite you to update your knowledge on how the brain works with more recent research. From what I gather (mind you, I'm not a scientist in this area) the brain is not just a powerful computer. It is not running software of any kind. It's not a matter of programming language, but of completely different concepts.
I'm not enough of both an expert on the s
Re:"rights" (Score:4, Insightful)
What if the only way to achieve the artificial intelligence necessary for them to be useful in their intended role is through processes which mimic biological development? What if having emotions and the ability to suffer are integral to an android whose main task (as a protocol droid) is to facilitate communication between natural biological entities?
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What if the only way to achieve the artificial intelligence necessary for them to be useful in their intended role is through processes which mimic biological development?
I know people who suffer from the bugs of these systems. Depression, bipolar disorder, stuff like that. If you intentionally create a being with these faults, you are a monster, on par with serial rapists.
That said, I also believe there is a difference between emotions and simulations of emotions, and I don't see why we would need the former. AI research used to be about mimicking humans, that was a fad for some time. It's long over, AFAIK. So, basically, unless you have some facts and evidence to support y
Fair Wages? (Score:4, Funny)
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No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid (Score:5, Interesting)
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3PO is in all the films.
I think Lucas has stated that it was his intent that R2 and 3PO be in all 9 movies he originally "planned."
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I didn't argue that R2 wasn't older. My only claim is they are both in all the movies and would expect them in all future movies.
Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid (Score:4, Insightful)
This always kills me.
I would think even the most hardcore of Star Wars fans would have some notion that there weren't nine goddamn movies "planned" up until Lucas started counting the cash from the first box office outing. After that, all the way up to his rather startling turn toward charity in his later years, the only "plan" was to milk that cash cow until it ran dry.
Let me put it this way, if the first Star Wars had flopped in theatres, do you think Lucas would have been selling it up, shoulder-nudging executives with a nine movie plan that he could complete if only he had the right investors? Fuck no. There's a reason the first three "prequel" movies to the classics we know and love seem like they were slapped together, the acting is wooden, the dialogue is terrible, the whole thing is just a vehicle for ILM to show off their latest render-farm magic. Then people sat down in theatres to find out that the Force, the mystical energy that was the driving force behind the entire series, was essentially a bacterial infection. Midi-chlorians, like venereal disease except it gives you super powers. if that's all it took for someone to gain the Force I'm surprised Han Solo wasn't a Jedi as well, after the amount of screwing around the galaxy I'm sure he did off camera he must have picked it up from someone along the way. "Doctor, it burns when I piss and I accidentally choked someone to death with my mind last week."
It all feels like it was just thrown together at the last minute in a cash grab, and that's exactly what it is. I'm guessing that's why you put "planned" in quotation marks in the first place, it's perfectly obvious that the "plan" never existed. Lucas just lucked out and then he managed to reel people in on the constant promise that the next movie was going to be an even better experience than the last one.
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C-3PO had his memory erased. Was he still the same droid after that?
Though since his function was to be an interpreter for a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the lawful government of the Empire, his memory was probably wiped all the time and he just didn't know.
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A man is defined by his actions, not his memory.
But now I'm quoting Total Recall.
C-3PO had the same personality after his wipes. I think he was the same droid.
I think somehow R2 remembered stuff through his memory wipes. But that's just my idea.
Re:No, The Whole Arc is about a Droid (Score:5, Funny)
He's also the most filthy-mouthed of all the droids. They bleeped out absolutely everything he said!
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Those were different characters... from a certain point of view.
I ahve been saying it for decade (Score:3)
7/8/9 should be about freeing the droids.
Don't diss C-3PO... (Score:2)
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_Droids:_Rebellion_3 [wikia.com]
Re: Don't diss C-3PO... (Score:2)
Lucas totally retcon'd both runs of Droids comics from the 80's and 90's. the two never meet before events (80's version) and are sent straight to Captain Antillies (so no gap or the 90's version)
But they are fun reads.
It was always about droids (Score:2)
The whole saga is about the adventures of two droids. The humans come and go, the droids live on through all of the films.
Re: (Score:2)
And their own 80s cartoon series.
Next week on Slate: Do you hate your car? (Score:2)
You drive it all around, only letting it rest when YOU'RE done with it; you leave it outside, in the heat, cold, and rain; you don't bring it to a mechanic until it's been making "that noise" for months; and in the end, you let some guy to it away to a crusher.
Red Shirts (Score:2)
Just put red shirts on the droids to give them human-like status.....oh, wait
Well, Lucas can ... (Score:2)
-- Bender
Yes, but on the plus side... (Score:2)
Wrong: HK-47 (Score:2)
Re:Know your audience, where they came from (Score:5, Interesting)
So, you're unaware of the Endor Holocaust [theforce.net], the ecological disaster caused when the Rebellion blew Death Star II to smithereens?
Re: (Score:2)
Never thought about what happened to the DS2, but that is one great writeup.
Re: (Score:2)
But it brings up bigger philosophical issues. The topic is both whimsy fun, AND has potentially deep philosophical underpinnings related to the nature of sentience and the rights of intelligent artificial beings. Good sci-fi can straddle both.
Re: (Score:3)
A lot of Slate stories are clickbait these days, unfortunately. I used to read it and its rival Salon every day, often more than that, but over the past few years they've moved toward the over-sensationalistic headlines, blog-worthy rants (to generate clicks/comments), purely contrarian articles like "I hate [insert thing most people like] (for clicks/comments), ads disguised as reviews (especially Slate's tech area), etc. -- and comments, requests, or feedback is never read by authors or admin.
I've saved a
Re: Other concerns (Score:2)
They are there for kissing and rescuing and stuff. He's no less sensitive than Nintendo/Mario or Walt Disney.