22 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

Do we have any reason to believe it's possible for a Force Ghost to possess people?

In the EU Palpatine returned by possessing clones... seven times, I think. Then he tried to possess Luke and Mara's son Ben Anakin Solo, but was killed for good.

11 hours ago, JJ48 said:

Do we have any reason to believe it's possible for a Force Ghost to possess people?

Did we have any reason to believe that force ghost can summon lightning, or that Jedi can create a projection of themselves half way across the galaxy, or that there is time travel in Star Wars?

No, yet all of those are canon because the Force is a magical Blackbox that can explain literally anything.

But beyond all that we actually have precedent for force "ghosts" possessing people. In the canon comic Star Wars: Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith in the Fortress Vader arc (chapter 19 - 25) there is a helmet of an ancient Sith Momin that still has his spirit attached to it and any time some puts the helmet on Momin gains direct control of their body.

Spoilers for the ending of the Comic but relevant for this discussion:

Posession is not actually necessary for Palpatine. In said comic a portal to the dark side of the the force directly is opened through wich Momin retrieve his original body. So either good old Palpatine does the same (or something better) or he is definitively not the greatest Sith Lord in the Canon history.

14 hours ago, JJ48 said:

What back-up plan?

Who knows? Could be a force ghost.... A clone... or better yet, the one that died in RotJ was the clone while the real deal was in long sleep stasis or something.

I think even cooler than that would be some form of Sith essence transfer.

But ultimately, we won't know until the movie.

1 hour ago, LordCola said:

Did we have any reason to believe that force ghost can summon lightning, or that Jedi can create a projection of themselves half way across the galaxy, or that there is time travel in Star Wars?

No, yet all of those are canon because the Force is a magical Blackbox that can explain literally anything.

But beyond all that we actually have precedent for force "ghosts" possessing people. In the canon comic Star Wars: Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith in the Fortress Vader arc (chapter 19 - 25) there is a helmet of an ancient Sith Momin that still has his spirit attached to it and any time some puts the helmet on Momin gains direct control of their body.

Spoilers for the ending of the Comic but relevant for this discussion:

Posession is not actually necessary for Palpatine. In said comic a portal to the dark side of the the force directly is opened through wich Momin retrieve his original body. So either good old Palpatine does the same (or something better) or he is definitively not the greatest Sith Lord in the Canon history.

This just made me realize we're all missing a hella valid explanation....

Palpatine managed to enter the world between worlds...

2 hours ago, LordCola said:

No, yet all of those are canon because the Force is a magical Blackbox that can explain literally anything. writers are lazy and unimaginative, and decided on going with the first thing that popped into their heads rather than anything resembling consistency.

Fixed.

Seriously, what is the point of limiting the canon if there's no consistency? I don't want idiotic plot contrivances being used as a substitute for good storytelling just because "it's been done before"!

2 hours ago, JJ48 said:

I don't want idiotic plot contrivances being used as a substitute for good storytelling just because "it's been done before"!

Well I mean you asked for precedent. Don't be mad at the answer.

I agree with you. I too want good storytelling.

2 hours ago, JJ48 said:

Seriously, what is the point of limiting the canon if there's no consistency?

Again I agree that we need to be consistent with what has been established. (not doing this is one of the biggest reasons why people dislike TLJ) But you can't be consistent in matters of the force because the boundaries of its power have never been established. I mean in the OT alone you go from choking people to having visions of the future to literally beating death (force ghosts). And if you magic power is already at "defeating death" levels of power I don't think anything the force enables can be considered contrived to be honest.

You always have to ask you self: "Is X more contrived than literal immortality?" And I think you might be hard pressed to find something for X where the answer to that question is "no".

Do I like this? No! But that is what the OT has set us up with.

4 minutes ago, LordCola said:

But you can't be consistent in matters of the force because the boundaries of its power have never been established. I mean in the OT alone you go from choking people to having visions of the future to literally beating death (force ghosts). And if you magic power is already at "defeating death" levels of power I don't think anything the force enables can be considered contrived to be honest.

I disagree. You refer to it simply as "defeating death," but in what sense? I don't see this as an RPG, with just a bunch of powers to choose from, but a broader philosophical issue. To me, the Force Ghosts in the OT never seemed much like, "Woo-hoo! We overcame death, and now we're immortal!" Rather, it seemed like the fact that Obi-wan, Yoda, and Anakin all peacefully surrendered themselves to the Force allowed them to appear to Luke, at least for a time (I'm assuming that at some point, they still "passed on", whatever that might mean in the Star Wars universe).

I'm not saying that writers always need to work out all the mechanics of how everything operates, but there should at least be a general sense of why it works. It's not simply the powers, but the underlying philosophies as well.

I always find it funny when people get worked up over something that hasn’t even come out as they’re really just getting upset over their own bad ideas.

2 hours ago, JJ48 said:

(I'm assuming that at some point, they still "passed on", whatever that might mean in the Star Wars universe)

But (for the general canon) it does not matter what you assume. The movies didn't even hint at the fact that they needed to "pass on" (and in TLJ we see that Yoda apparently still hasn't "passed on" 30 years later). All the movie showed is that they are not dead, they can still perceive the real world and they can (at least in a limited way) interact with the real world by appearing to people (TLJ has expanded the confirmed force ghost skillset now to even include relatively direct interaction with the real world)

2 hours ago, JJ48 said:

"Woo-hoo! We overcame death, and now we're immortal!"

Well, I mean Obi Wan literally says: "You can't win, Vader. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

2 hours ago, JJ48 said:

You refer to it simply as "defeating death," but in what sense?

In the sense that they are still conscious agents that can in some limited sense perceive and interact with the real world. To me that ticks all the boxes of being alive. So they died but are still alive. That is what I mean by "defeating death". And it is not clear whether this type of existence ever has to end.

At the and of the day anyone can interpret anything as anything. I am just not sure whether the facts warrant your interpretation. Though I don't think we should build our expectations of consistency on vage interpretation and instead on demonstrable facts.

28 minutes ago, LordCola said:

The movies didn't even hint at the fact that they needed to "pass on" (and in TLJ we see that Yoda apparently still hasn't "passed on" 30 years later).

1. People in the galaxy are believe that those who have died are gone. This does not mean that they are automatically correct, but the lack of alternative explanations indicates it's a good place to start.

2. Only Force-users (and not all of those) appear as Force Ghosts. Whether everyone else's spirits merge with the Force and lose their individuality, or go to some afterlife, something must happen to those who don't become Force Ghosts.

3. Force Ghosts only seem to appear to those who have a strong connection to both the Force and the Ghost. Once they're gone, what happens to the Ghost? Was Obi-wan the first to discover this technique? Where are all the Force Ghosts from previous generations? The fact that Luke isn't knee-deep in sages offering advice to help the last Jedi against the Sith suggests that they don't stick around indefinitely.

44 minutes ago, LordCola said:

All the movie showed is that they are not dead,

Except for, you know, being ghosts; implying they've died.

45 minutes ago, LordCola said:

they can still perceive the real world and they can (at least in a limited way) interact with the real world by appearing to people (TLJ has expanded the confirmed force ghost skillset now to even include relatively direct interaction with the real world)

To an extent, but the fact that they're still connected to the Force, and likely connected to the Force-user they're appearing to in some way, means this isn't as "life-like" as we may think.

47 minutes ago, LordCola said:

Well, I mean Obi Wan literally says: "You can't win, Vader. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

Except that nothing we see of Obi-wan's Force Ghost suggests that he has , in fact, become more powerful than Darth Vader in a literal sense. Either he was wrong, or he was speaking metaphorically of Luke.

56 minutes ago, LordCola said:

In the sense that they are still conscious agents that can in some limited sense perceive and interact with the real world. To me that ticks all the boxes of being alive. So they died but are still alive. That is what I mean by "defeating death". And it is not clear whether this type of existence ever has to end.

I guess this is where we agree to disagree. The limitations Force Ghosts seem to have marks it as something rather less than life, to me. Furthermore, as stated earlier, the lack of more Force Ghosts suggests pretty strongly that there may be a limit to duration.

58 minutes ago, LordCola said:

Though I don't think we should build our expectations of constancy on vage interpretation and instead on demonstrable facts.

This simply doesn't work, in practice. Facts are a good starting point, but they need to be interpreted. Even your claim that they have "defeated death" is not a fact, but an interpretation of the facts.

33 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

is not a fact, but an interpretation of the facts.

@JJ48 It was one of the only gifs I could find of "Nietzsche" wiggling his 'stache. What I quoted from you is very similar to one of Nietzsche's famous quotes.


"Against that positivism which stops before phenomena saying, 'there are only facts' I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations".

2 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

Was Obi-wan the first to discover this technique?

No, that was (if I remember correctly) in fact Qui-gon. So:

3 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

Where are all the Force Ghosts from previous generations?

By the time Obi-wan becomes a force ghost there are only two of them as far as we know.

4 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

The fact that Luke isn't knee-deep in sages offering advice to help the last Jedi against the Sith suggests that they don't stick around indefinitely.

No it does not, refer to my last point.

5 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

2. Only Force-users (and not all of those) appear as Force Ghosts. Whether everyone else's spirits merge with the Force and lose their individuality, or go to some afterlife, something must happen to those who don't become Force Ghosts.

I agree with the first part of the statement. Only very few Force user ever achieve this type of existence. I do not see why something must happen to any one else after they die. Maybe they are just, you know, dead. This seams to be the most reasonable assumption.

9 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

1. People in the galaxy are believe that those who have died are gone. This does not mean that they are automatically correct, but the lack of alternative explanations indicates it's a good place to start.

Yes they believe that and they could not have believed in force ghosts because they weren't a thing until recently (as seen from the OT). Again Qui-Gon Jinn was the first force ghost.

12 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

Except for, you know, being ghosts; implying they've died.

Well apparently in this case it doesn't. Also this is a really bad argument:

Imagine a Szenario:

We have named something that we didn't fully understand. After closer examination it turns out that the lable we gave it isn't entirely appropriate.

Your argument is saying:

But it can't be something else because we have given it a name and it has to be the thing because it is named as such.

Or more concrete, your argument is like saying Red Pandas must be Pandas because that is what the name implies. Well Red Pandas are in fact not pandas. Panda is a term that means one thing and Red Panda is its own term that describes something different all together. The same could apply to Force Ghost.

23 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

means this isn't as "life-like" as we may think.

Never claimed it is. My personal bar to count something as being alive is very low. I think as long as something has consciousness it has cleared that hurdle in my book. Do you want to argue that Obi-Wan and the bunch are not conscious? And force ghosts clearly are more than just conscious. They also have (limited) abilities to perceive the world and interact with it.

29 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

Either he was wrong, or he was speaking metaphorically of Luke.

Or we haven't seen the full potential of his power. (Maybe we have a stargate alteran situation on our hands 😁 )

35 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

The limitations Force Ghosts seem to have marks it as something rather less than life, to me.

Yes, it appears that you have quite a lot of restrictions as a force ghost. But it also seams to me that you have abilities that go beyond what humans can do. Obi-wan seemingly always knew what Luke was up to. So he can either freely move around the galaxy wherever he wants or he is somehow omnipresent and can perceive the whole galaxy at once. So I would agree that normal life and being a force ghost are different however not directly comparable in which is more or less alive.

41 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

Furthermore, as stated earlier, the lack of more Force Ghosts suggests pretty strongly that there may be a limit to duration.

No it does not, refer to my first point.

42 minutes ago, JJ48 said:

This simply doesn't work, in practice. Facts are a good starting point, but they need to be interpreted. Even your claim that they have "defeated death" is not a fact, but an interpretation of the facts.

Yes, I will give you that. Any data is worthless without interpretation. So allow me to rephrase my point: I think you should go with the interpretation that requires the least assumptions and don't think that is yous.

2 hours ago, Forresto said:

I always find it funny when people get worked up over something that hasn’t even come out as they’re really just getting upset over their own bad ideas.

3 hours ago, LordCola said:

No, that was (if I remember correctly) in fact Qui-gon. So:

By the time Obi-wan becomes a force ghost there are only two of them as far as we know.

Do we know that Qui-gon was the first Force Ghost? How do we know this?

3 hours ago, LordCola said:

I agree with the first part of the statement. Only very few Force user ever achieve this type of existence. I do not see why something must happen to any one else after they die. Maybe they are just, you know, dead. This seams to be the most reasonable assumption.

Ok, so we're back to "What does it mean to be 'dead'?" If it simply means the body stops working, then Force Ghosts are dead, too. If it means no longer having consciousness, then how do we define that? Force Ghosts have no bodies, and yet are conscious, so a person's body stopping clearly does not automatically lead to eradication of consciousness. I honestly don't see why that is even a reasonable assumption, much less the most reasonable assumption.

Furthermore, we have Yoda's advice, "Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force." Not only does this tell us that something happens to those who die, but it also raises the question of whether immortality (in one sense) is even something a Jedi such as Obi-wan or Yoda would aspire to in the first place.

3 hours ago, LordCola said:

Yes they believe that and they could not have believed in force ghosts because they weren't a thing until recently (as seen from the OT). Again Qui-Gon Jinn was the first force ghost.

Again, simply being the first one mentioned in the movies does not mean he was the first one ever.

3 hours ago, LordCola said:

Well apparently in this case it doesn't. Also this is a really bad argument:

Imagine a Szenario:

We have named something that we didn't fully understand. After closer examination it turns out that the lable we gave it isn't entirely appropriate.

Your argument is saying:

But it can't be something else because we have given it a name and it has to be the thing because it is named as such.

Or more concrete, your argument is like saying Red Pandas must be Pandas because that is what the name implies. Well Red Pandas are in fact not pandas. Panda is a term that means one thing and Red Panda is its own term that describes something different all together. The same could apply to Force Ghost.

You completely misunderstand the argument. It's not, "We call them ghosts, and therefore they must be what we call ghosts," rather, it's, "We call them ghosts because they resemble what we call ghosts, in that everyone who has become one has first died." And before someone raises the objection that maybe they didn't actually die because the bodies disappeared, I would point to the exchange Yoda has with Luke.
Luke: Master Yoda, you can't die.
Yoda: Strong am I with the Force, but not that strong.

Yoda clearly indicates here that he will, in some manner, die. Either Yoda was lying to Luke, or becoming a Force Ghost can occur without the person realizing it's going to happen, or else it's some form of post-death state.

3 hours ago, LordCola said:

Or we haven't seen the full potential of his power. (Maybe we have a stargate alteran situation on our hands 😁 )

No clue what that means, but I'm guessing this wasn't a serious objection anyway.

3 hours ago, LordCola said:

Yes, it appears that you have quite a lot of restrictions as a force ghost. But it also seams to me that you have abilities that go beyond what humans can do. Obi-wan seemingly always knew what Luke was up to. So he can either freely move around the galaxy wherever he wants or he is somehow omnipresent and can perceive the whole galaxy at once. So I would agree that normal life and being a force ghost are different however not directly comparable in which is more or less alive.

Or there could be other options. Obi-wan only ever seems to show up around Luke or Yoda, so it could be that he is somehow bound to Luke through the Force, until he transfers to Yoda later.

Incidentally, this ties in with what I was saying about interpretation. You draw the conclusion that Force Ghosts have more freedom than living folk, while I, watching the same scenes, draw the conclusion that they have less freedom.

3 hours ago, LordCola said:

I think you should go with the interpretation that requires the least assumptions

Justify this statement, please. For one thing, every organized system of knowledge will have assumptions (indeed, modern science and math could not exist without assumptions). Trying to quantify the number of assumptions made becomes problematic though, especially in a case like this where neither system is terribly organized.

Suppose I were basing an argument on the assumption that, though not canon, The Essential Guide to Vehicle and Vessels was still accurate. Would that be one assumption? A separate assumption for each vehicle or vessel? A separate assumption for each fact about a vehicle or vessel? If I expand that to other books in the series, does the entire series fall under one assumption, or is it vastly multiplied?

Perhaps a better approach would be to go with the interpretation that requires the most reasonable assumptions, then. However, as we've seen in this very discussion, what you consider the most reasonable assumption is an assumption that I don't find at all reasonable. Who gets to decide which assumptions are most reasonable? You? Me? A third party who has their own interpretations?

Personally, I find it preferable to simply recognize that we do make assumptions, and try to understand which assumptions we're making, ourselves. We're unlikely to convince each other, anyway, so better to at least understand why we disagree.

2 hours ago, JJ48 said:

Do we know that Qui-gon was the first Force Ghost? How do we know this?

So I looked this up real quick because I could not remember but it is the episode "Destiny" from The Clone Wars where it is stated that Qui-Gon is the first Jedi to learn how to become a force ghost.

2 hours ago, JJ48 said:

Ok, so we're back to "What does it mean to be 'dead'?" If it simply means the body stops working, then Force Ghosts are dead, too. If it means no longer having consciousness, then how do we define that? Force Ghosts have no bodies, and yet are conscious, so a person's body stopping clearly does not automatically lead to eradication of consciousness. I honestly don't see why that is even a reasonable assumption, much less the most reasonable assumption.

Furthermore, we have Yoda's advice, "Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force." Not only does this tell us that something happens to those who die,

You bring up some good points here. Lets talk about them:

First of all good call, lets define some terms before we use them. As stated above, to me being alive means there must be an existent consciousness. If you are conscious you are alive. Death is the negation of to be alive. So it follows that being dead means that your consciousness does not exist anymore. I do not know how the transformation from being a living human to becoming a force ghost works but the details aren't actually important. The key aspect is that something happens to a Jedi that would cause their consciousness to permanently end but some particular Jedi have a way of preventing that from happening. They find their consciousness to exist afterwards and thus they have "beat" death.

2 hours ago, JJ48 said:

If it means no longer having consciousness, then how do we define that?

So if I understand that question correctly it could be reduces to the question "how do we define consciousness?", because once we have that answer we can define the absence of consciousness and I can't answer this question. There is no answer to this question. Nobody on this planet has a consistent definition for this term. (personally I don't think consciousness is actually a thing but instead just an emergent property of some complex systems but this is way to much of a philosophical debate to be had on an internet message board in my non native language) So I will continue to use the cop out answer of "humans have a natural/intuitive understanding of what a consciousness is and can somehow identify one", which is alway the default meaning of the tearm consciousness when used without further clarification. Though maybe let me get a little bit of clarification on the term consciousness. To me (and I think this is also always included in the default usage of the word) consciousness requires at least the ability to have free thought. Being conscious might entail much more than that, but at least that.

2 hours ago, JJ48 said:

I honestly don't see why that is even a reasonable assumption, much less the most reasonable assumption.

I assume you are talking about my statement " Maybe they are just, you know, dead. This seams to be the most reasonable assumption. "

And I have to agree with you an this one. You see I made the assumption that, since the Star Wars univers is so heavily constructed around the real world, anything that is not stated can be filled by how the real world works. En example: It is never stated that humans in the Star Wars galaxy have exactly one heart, but since the Star Wars world is so strongly constructed around our world I thing this is a very reasonable assumption.

But you have raised a very good fact. Yoda, who is a trustable source on matters of the force has actually given us some information that I was not aware of when writing my statement. Now we can create a new hypothesis of how things work that fits the data perfectly and that require one fewer assumption (the assumption that dying would work the same way as in the real world, where according to every data we have your existence just ends with death.) So I agree with you here. Acording to Yoda something happens to you after death. What ever that may exactly be.

3 hours ago, JJ48 said:

but it also raises the question of whether immortality (in one sense) is even something a Jedi such as Obi-wan or Yoda would aspire to in the first place.

Well they do aspire to become Force Ghosts as Qui-gon and Yoda actively seek to learn the techniques of how to become Force Ghosts. If one (as myself) would define becoming a Force Ghost as becoming imortal, than the conclusion is very simple: Yoda wanting to learn how to become a Force Ghoste -> Yoda wanting to learn how to become imortal.

3 hours ago, JJ48 said:

You completely misunderstand the argument. It's not, "We call them ghosts, and therefore they must be what we call ghosts," rather, it's, "We call them ghosts because they resemble what we call ghosts, in that everyone who has become one has first died."

We called Red Pands, Red Pandas because the we thought they were Pandas. Turns out they aren't Pandas.

3 hours ago, JJ48 said:

No clue what that means, but I'm guessing this wasn't a serious objection anyway.

Oh it absolutely was. You where making an exhaustive statement. Obi wan was either this or that. I was merely pointing out that there are other options. The example I provided was that he might actually have vast amounts of power but hasn't shown them for whatever reason. Then I made a Stargate referenze. In Stargate the were a people that managed to reach an such an evolutionary advanced stage that they ascended to becoming omniscient and all power full beings but they have a policy of not interfering with non ascended beings to allow them their own evolution.

3 hours ago, JJ48 said:

Or there could be other options. Obi-wan only ever seems to show up around Luke or Yoda, so it could be that he is somehow bound to Luke through the Force, until he transfers to Yoda later.

yep

3 hours ago, JJ48 said:

You draw the conclusion that Force Ghosts have more freedom than living folk, while I, watching the same scenes, draw the conclusion that they have less freedom.

Nope. I did not conclude that Force Ghosts have more freedoms than living people. My conclusion was that they have different freedoms. They have a subset of non overlapping abilities. There are (presumably) some things that humans can do that Force Ghosts can do and there a some things that Force Ghosts can do that humans can't do. So I arrived at the conclusion that there is no one axis on which you could compare the quantity of "freedoms". Or in other words they are incomparable. No one of them has more freedoms than the other, but they have different freedoms.

3 hours ago, JJ48 said:

Justify this statement, please.

Again, I did not express myself quite correctly, so let me rephrase. If you have multiple models that fit the data than the likelihood for each one of the to be true is dependant on the likelihood of the assumptions to be true. That is often impossible to determine. Now you have multiple models that can explain your data and you have no further way of determining which is true. One useful approach is to choose the least complex model (where complexity of the assumption is a function of number and likelihood of truthfulness of your assumption) because it has the least amount of points of failure.

3 hours ago, JJ48 said:

Personally, I find it preferable to simply recognize that we do make assumptions

We absolutely do make assumptions. I never questioned that. I simply suggest that when we try to construct our interpretations of what is happening we should choose interpretations that require the least complex assumptions (again complex defined as above).

I want the real Sith capital ship.

Calling it now. Using an old Sith temple or artifact or deus ex machina palps will return utilizing w/e method plaugeis developed.

22 hours ago, Forresto said:

I always find it funny when people get worked up over something that hasn’t even come out as they’re really just getting upset over their own bad ideas.

Meh, I mean they have plenty to go on with regards to the film's aesthetics, things, and even storyline:

-precedence of fillm-maker and team
-built-world story thus far
-trailers, posters, visual guides, cast/crew interviews, Vanity Fair expose,LEGO sets, etc
-"lead up" materials (comics, novels, etc.)

Not to mention that the whole plot has been "spoiled" for awhile for those curious... now how faithful those spoilers turn out to be is an open question, of course, but they've been pretty spot-on in the past...


But it's really disingenuous of you to act like people are just randomly pulling nothings out of their *** in regards to this.

1 hour ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

Meh, I mean they have plenty to go on with regards to the film's aesthetics, things, and even storyline:

-precedence of fillm-maker and team
-built-world story thus far
-trailers, posters, visual guides, cast/crew interviews, Vanity Fair expose,LEGO sets, etc
-"lead up" materials (comics, novels, etc.)

Not to mention that the whole plot has been "spoiled" for awhile for those curious... now how faithful those spoilers turn out to be is an open question, of course, but they've been pretty spot-on in the past...


But it's really disingenuous of you to act like people are just randomly pulling nothings out of their *** in regards to this.

Not really.

Everyone is free to express whatever feelings they have.

However if you’re saying it’s logical or rational or fair to critique, to judge something that hasn’t even come out yet, then you’ve lost me.

Those are ridiculous people.

I have a certain baseline respect for the critics of The Last Jedi because their arguments are at least based on something they actually watched.

Don’t get me started on plot leaks. Film is a visual medium. What works well on screen doesn’t necessarily work well on paper and vice versa. And that’s ignoring the reliability of the leaks.

I get being wary, apprehensive even, based on past experiences. Again I’m not silencing or trying to silence anyone.

But to me it’s the height of absurdity, perhaps even bullheadedness, to have a definite opinion on something that we know almost nothing about.

On 10/9/2019 at 12:52 PM, Forresto said:

Everyone is free to express whatever feelings they have.

I'm lost. What does this have to do with anything ? It's like freedom of speech for emotional states... okay, great, no one disagrees with you there. Heck, no one on these threads on any side of the issue is trying to tell anyone they cannot express their views.

On 10/9/2019 at 12:52 PM, Forresto said:

But to me it’s the height of absurdity, perhaps even bullheadedness, to have a definite opinion on something that we know almost nothing about.

Here I think you're straw-manning pretty hard:

Is anyone in this thread or elsewhere making the claim that Episode 9 is a bad film? What I am seeing is reactions to things we do know about it (e.g. "ugh, I hate the look of that new alien" or "yikes, the physics of Rey jumping on that TIE Fighter looks like it belongs in a superhero movie" or "****, that new TIE FO Interceptor looks slick, love it!") OR speculations about how things (again that we already know) might ultimately play out. Saying that "ugh, I hope Palp isn't in the movie as some weird clone of himself because X, Y, or Z" is very different from saying "The manner in which Palpatine was included and handled in Episode 9 was bad." You are seeming to critique people doing the latter, but I haven't seen anyone doing the latter, because you're right, it'd be ridiculous. But that's not what is going on in the general speculations, wishes/desires, etc. sort of discussions around the upcoming film.