What did it conflict with? As far as I can remember, nothing in the movies conflicted with this idea. I know the books were quite expansive and they let author's play with the lore from time to time. Did they say "RGB only?"

The issue is lunges are slower and cover more distance allowing another force sensitive opponent ample time to react

no offense but you need to work on your reading comprehesion, I'm not OP.

Shut up removed

Ah, I see you too have been sucked into the hema YouTube rabbit hole.

There’s a lot going on invisibly in those fights

this is one of the funnier interactions I've seen on lemmy. 'you can't see it, but there's a whole bloop blorp whiz patang freeowww goin on that justifies the goofy interaction of plasma beams that should just pass right through each other'

I grew up reading xwing books other fantasy, and sw as fantasy works better. No disrespect, just found the distinctions hilarious.

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.

It's about a fundamental difference between offense and defense.

When you go on the offense, defeating the opponent is the primary goal.

If you're defending yourself, survival is the primary goal.

Sorry but that's simply wrong. I have done two years or sabre fencing in my youth - it's all about reaction time and correct execution of a parry. If you always knew exactly which angle to parry at, and had the reaction speed to execute this in time, then you could fence for a long time without anyone getting hit. You'd have to outsmart your opponent by slowly leading them into a trap where they have to execute a movement that throws them off-balance, so that you then can execute an attack that they can't regain their balance to parry.

Fun fact: Boc did purple lightsabers before Mace Windu.

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.

Let's get some gun blaster katas up in here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4weEXyoXZKs&t=1m2s

Was it just a switch? I thought I remember that they used the force to raise/lower the "blade" which was part of reason the light saber is a weapon only a force user can weild.

Just sayin. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

why can't we get a jedi academy series, where it explains blue green purple sabers, or jedi battle meditation, or all the other cool shit, no we have to 'somehow palpatine came back and there's another planet kablooie lazar!' bah. feh I say. FEH!.

Blame Disney, and JJ Abrams.

Grievous puts two of his arms back whenever he uses the other two to block.

The whole thing is just idiotic nonsense that looks flashy and has no substance.

But Disney is the epitomy of soulless evil and George Lucas could do no wrong according to the fandom.

Word of advice, just dont bother.

Are you familiar with the reputation of sabreurs being the crazy people among fencers? 😂

Wait, why do people actually believe that you need to be Force sensitive to activate a lightsaber?

You're telling me Luke, who would not even begin asking questions about what the Force was for several more scenes, was handed a lightsaber from Ben Kenobi - a device he has never seen in person before, and activated it?

When Han solo cut open the belly of Luke's tauntaun, was he using the Force to activate his lightsaber? Or was a delirious Luke on the brink of death helping him so that they both didn't freeze to death?

The on/off switch is the only thing that actually makes any sense.

It feels like authors fighting over sections of lore and finding justification for minor decisions.

The true answer should have been:

Mace: "In my travels I found a cave with Purple Khyber crystals, and they really look awesome."

My current (possibly wrong) understanding is that jedi keep the planet with the crystals secret, so that not just anyone can go make a saber. On top of that, the Force allows a user to kinda “extend” their perception, which allows for things like reflecting blaster shots, as well as being hyper aware of their personal space during saber duels. So a trained jedi can “see” things like how far a blade is from hitting them, even if they can’t actually see, and that determines how they move.

So it’s more that taking one would be like robbing a special forces soldier, and playing with one would most likely kill or dismember you.

I was thinking more along the lines of the wielder acting like a battery. No midichlorians, no saber.

Other examples include:

General Grievous stealing lightsabers from Jedi he kills, and being able to wield them despite having zero force powers and being a full body cyborg.

Cad Bane stealing... I think Obi Wan Kenobi's lightsaber, and using it to fight both him and Quinlan Vos off.

Ahsoka Tano's lightsaber getting stolen by a thief and igniting it in a crowded train to try and fight her off.

Shape shifter (Zam Wessel or someone like her) stealing the librarian's lightsaber and using it to defend herself from Ahsoka.

Multiple Mandalorians making effective use of the Darksaber without force powers, with John Deathwatch being able to go toe to toe with Jedi.

The original intent was for lightsabers to be stronger the more you could use the force. There was even going to be a training scene between Luke and Yoda explaining that.

It was kind of shown in the prequels when Qui Gonn Jinn was burning through a blast door in the beginning of Phantom Menace.

Yeah, that's more or less how it works.

It conflicted with George Lucas.

In his original idea for Lightsabers, the blue ones were the good guys and the red ones were the bad guys.

When Return of the Jedi came out he had to make the decision to give Luke a green lightsaber to make it visible against Tatooine's sky. So he amended his original idea to also include green for the good guys.

Thos stayed that way, despite so many comics and other materials adding different colours, until Samuel L. Jackson begged him for a purple lightsaber. Essentially, to Lucas, the expanded universe was never canon until he made parts of it canon through movie or animated media.

You can see George Lucas literally say "that's just the way it works" right up to when purple was suggested.

Right. Didn't realize (or forgot) only epee is like this. I don't really follow olympic fencing closely.

OP might even not meant olympic fencing originally, that's just where my mind went and I've found it funny.

Yep. Also, ignoring sports, the more this ws the case the more the weapons developed to be lighter with point of ballance closer to the hilt.

If lightsabre blade doesn't weigh anything, it's the ultimate weapon for this sort of style of fencing (bonus points for any contact with the blade being harmful).

Your thinking made perfect sense, it's just my mind immediately went to the suicidal attacks in sport fencing and I've found it funny.

In the expansion the PC also had a purple saber. I forgot what her name was though.

If you always knew exactly which angle to parry at, and had the reaction speed to execute this in time, then you could fence for a long time without anyone getting hit

Only if all your knowledge and reaction speed was defensive rather than offensive. If you gained an equal amount of offensive reaction speed and knowledge you could adjust strikes as you saw the opponent begin to parry.

I'd watch that. Sounds like Andor.

Mara Jade!

I haven't seen anything about light sabers on HEMA, but I have watched a little bit of it. But, even before that, I thought light saber fights looked stupid after having watched olympic fencing.

So it begs the question, what does a fight look like with that kind of meta?

Whatever the director decides the audience will like best. Yeah, you can handwave away anything if you just use some mysterious force stuff. Maybe you only have ultra-quick reactions if you are in mortal danger, so if you're beyond the range of the other guy's light saber you can't act/react as quickly.

Still, I just prefer it when a sci-fi / fantasy author fully thinks through a weapon, its implications, etc. and something interesting falls out of that analysis, rather than "rule of cool" stuff that then has to be retconned with something ridiculous.

I also assumed it was like that

I just think they're neat!

Imagine play fighting in slow motion. You can do it pretty much forever without getting hit by blocking or dodging everything. Unless you get tired or your body cannot physically react to something

If you gained an equal amount of offensive reaction speed and knowledge you could adjust strikes as you saw the opponent begin to parry.

Play that out in your mind in slow motion and you'll realise why your logic is flawed.

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 figured they were talking in metaphors

Ayo fuck West side. East side is the best

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)_/¯

This is an insightful comment, but I don't think you can just ignore the sci-fi part of things when talking about the realism of fighting with "light" blades.

Like, when you talk about ending a fight via thrusting. With a thrusting-only sword, or even a sword with a point and an edge, the amount of damage you can do with a thrust is pretty limited. You can poke a hole in someone, or open a cut, but you can't easily remove a limb. But, with a light saber it's different. If the tip wiggles around a bit as part of the thrust, it could easily take off a limb because every surface of the "blade" is a cutting surface.

With a real sword, your slash needs to be aligned with the cutting edge of the blade, and needs to have a bit of force behind it. What they've shown us with light sabers is that the merest touch will cut almost anything in half. If it's something super solid like a massive steel wall / bulkhead, it can require a little bit of pressure.

To me, that says that in a battle against a light saber, if any part of the blade touches any part of your body, you're probably dead. IMO that massively changes how these weapons would be used.

As for a light-spear, even if a spear isn't the best one-on-one weapon in the real world, if the point of the spear is this thing that cuts through anything it touches without resistance that might be different, especially if the spear tip is the length of a sword. I've never done any spear training, but I did some work with a staff a long while ago. There are a lot of slashing type attacks with a staff, but there are also a lot of poking type attacks. Those don't leave you very open, and they let you probe at someone while staying well outside their range (unless they're doing the same thing). With a staff they don't do much damage, but if the last meter of the staff were this magical cutting surface, that would be different.

I don't know what exactly a fight would look like with a real light saber, but I strongly suspect that the fighters would spend as little time as possible with any part of their body within the range of the other person's blade. I also suspect that dramatic big movements would be suicidal. Any second you spend without your sword pointing directly at the other person and keeping them from closing the distance allows them to close in and lop off your arm with the slightest flick of a wrist.

I learned when play fighting as a kid that the goal wasn't to win the fight, but to prolong the fight. Whenever I adjusted my attack in slow-mo to avoid my opponent's block, they got annoyed that I wasn't doing it right.

My point is that slow motion wouldn't change anything. In fast motion the attacker doesn't have time to adjust their attack, and the defender doesn't have time to adjust their defence. In slow motion nothing changes. The defender can adjust their defense, but the attacker can also adjust their attack. Slow motion doesn't somehow make defending work better and attacking worse.

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.

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.

Slow motion doesn’t somehow make defending work better and attacking worse.

I disagree. As an attack comes closer to hitting, the weapon is by the very definition of "closer", closer to the defender than to the attacker - meaning the attacker is increasingly extended, while the defender will pull their defence closer to their own centre of mass. At this point, reactions by the defender require smaller movements, and less acceleration, while the attacker has more momentum in their extended attack, and requires more energy, and more time to change direction.

Akshually, there is armor in the lore.
(Probably) Bolted on after the fact but there is.

I was imagining something more like, "Okay, I know they're going to make this move, so I'll counter it with this move. But they know I'll do that, so they'll be countering my counter, so now I have to do something even more unexpected!"

And also bearing that prescience element in mind, is an ostensibly more dangerous maneuver the riskier one, if your forethought knows the safer play is guaranteed to go badly?

Or like another analogy - if you watch chess content, you know there's a lot that revolves around ai systems now days. In some cases these systems have been shown to make moves that appear to border on blunders, but in fact turn out to be crucial for crushing the competition.

Also if you watch Star Wars lore dump videos, they talk a lot about how that invisible stuff is depicted more in the books. Each of the lightsaber forms comes with their own philosophy and some kind of trance-like state they go into. Force users basically all get spiritually high while they're fighting, so maybe that's the explanation - they're just a bunch of adrenaline junkies.

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.

The West side has Sharks and Jets, what's the East side got, Snark and Jest?