A very good thing about a new star Wars project means that you will always get a minimum of Funny Little Guys. Your swallow shityou new marketable droidsyou bell boysyou Blursthings of that nature. star Wars The world-building is built on the backs not of its heroes and villains, but of a galaxy of weirdos who are on screen for about five years. seconds and that’s it.
PLD Space: Miura 1 ignition test
Which brings me to The acolytethe last star Wars project, which of course, is only full with Funny Little Guys. There’s little Mae who pays to find out where Indara is in the opening scenes. of the premiere. He then threatens the waiter, leading to Indara’s death during their duel. There are the Neimodians that Mae’s sister Osha works for, and her oversized Hats (and slightly less questionable accents!). There are all the prisoners aboard the Republic transport. Osha is taken away when the Jedi accuse her of Indara’s death. And then there are the droids: so many fun little droids!
We have Pip, Osha’s multi-tool companion, who, in addition to being able to weld, offers firefighting and does a lot of things. Other than that, he appears to be as sentient a being as any humanoid-scale droid we see. In episode two, the Jedi outpost on Olega has a version of the gate droid we saw in Return of the Jedi at Jabba’s door. And then there’s the aforementioned public transportation, which not only has a droid security guard as apparently the only officer on board, but then the really interesting little fun of this whole effort so far: the Chair Droids.
The Silla Droids are incredible pieces of design. They are literally chair droids: they are the pilot seats of the Republic ship, presumably an autopilot system, but personified and given form. The shape is Chair. Equally fascinating is that they have two modes, one more Humanoid Chair Hybrid when in operation flying the ship, but they can also be disabled for, presumably, the organic pilots to take over (or even the security droid; as we said, the ship appears be completely operated by a droid between the guard and the chair droids). His arms and hands fold back into his body to become literal armrests. Their heads change from a forward-facing alignment to a horizontal position. with the seats and locking into place, becoming literal headrests. It’s like, what if a Transformer was already 90% chair, but then their change from robot mode to alternative mode made them 100% chair. In a story of sister reflections, there is Osha and Mae, Light Side and the Dark Side, heroes and villains, but there is also Droid and Silla.
But what pushes Chair Droids beyond cool design into that kind of perfect piece? star Wars World-building are all questions they raise, especially when it comes to the ups and downs of the franchise. Fighting the droid personality So far. How much “droid” is there in a chair droid? They have the intelligence to pilot a ship, but they are also humanized enough that their design has given them nods towards personality, if they were just a ship computer that could automatically pilot the ship, there would be no need to give them approximations of a head, arms and hands to manipulate the controls, lights that act as “eyes”. And if the ship is powered entirely by droid work, who personifies the Silla Droids in the first place? Does the security droid care that the seat looks like a person, like they do? With that personality In its physical form, how expansive its programming is compared to droids in more traditional forms that blur the line between tool and real. Be sentient? This is a question. The acolyte has already responded with Pip: Pip is a pocket tool, but Pip also speaks with beeps and boops that Osha understands and responds to while conversing with him. Osha treats Pip like a person as much as he treats him like a welder or a scanner, or a lockpick or a fire extinguisher, even though Pip’s form is something he can keep in the pockets of his mechanic’s overalls. .
So what’s up with the Silla Droids? They also beep and beep, even if we never get to see them actually communicate with another being. How aware are they of their existence as individual people, rather than just fancy pieces of furniture with rudimentary programming? the first episode of The acolyte It has been established that the Republic has prohibited additional ship repair work for organic workers; Such work is too dangerous for what he considers sensitive. beings, so by law it now has to be performed by astromech droids, as we see R2 and others of his ilk do in The Phantom Menace. But star Wars audience, R2 is very much a person, a being, an individual, like C-3PO, or a battle droid, or BB-8, or Chewbacca, or Anakin, or anyone. If chair droids are lookalike replacements, aren’t they still people? Servant class, sufficiently aware of her existence, but by her own body, unable to exist outside of her job as a pilot and Also, chairs? What happens to a chair droid when his ship is decommissioned? How did the chair droids feel in The acolytewhen the ship is almost destroyed in its forced landing in Carlac? Can A chair droid feel?
None of these questions really need answering (as much as I’d like to star Wars be a little more declarative about treating droids as people rather than a quasi-sentient labor subclass). After about 10 seconds of airtime is the kind of thing that does star Wars such an incredible and enduring world to explore in the first place. It’s a galaxy full of this strange and wonderful texture, a marriage. of strange ideas, cool designs and, through layers and layers of generations of storytelling, a path that leads you to an existential experience. crisis over the sustenance of a chair. The funny little ones are the ones who do star Wars‘The galaxy continues to spin and the chair droid is simply the latest in a long line of them.
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