Stargate and the state of the four races

Discussion

The Asgards were the only ones left in the end who cared about the alliance.

You'll find in the linked discussion board a suggestion that the four races represent exploration, warriors, teachers, and builders.  And yet of these the warriors, Asgard, are the only ones with the fire to pass on the knowledge they have gained.  Unfortunately, they also embrace oblivion.

But anyway you look at it, the alliance for the four races failed to persist as its constituent parts turned to isolationism or other forms of abandoning the Milky Way.  The Asgard, alone, defended the freedom of lesser civilizations before finally succumbing to their own demise.

So what do we know about the four partners in the defunct endeavor?

We know that the Ancients fled disease and then their mortal bodies.
The Asgard withered away into less ideal bodies as they forwent
procreation in a bid for immortality.  To the best of our knowledge
the Nox possess mortal immortality as they are shown able to
resurrect one another, but have placed themselves in seclusion
and only seen aiding the Tollan (a society they regard as
equal to their own and therefore avoid contamination).

The Furlings are a giant question mark who are either
extinct or living in deeper seclusion than the Nox.

That the Ancients should need to flee their plague and not receive assistance from the Asgard or Nox (their equals with known technological prowess) suggests to me mutual abandonment all around.
After all, the Asgard could have done with their own assistance, too.  And whatever befell the Furlings if they did perish lies at the feet of their supposed allies as well.

The Asgard appear to be the only ones going to great pains to even make a show of mutual defense when they are severely hampered by what they can do while combating the Replicators.  They at least extend themselves to the defense of others, which either means there was factually nothing the Asgard could have done for the Ancients or else there was a falling out between all of them.

The fact that the Asgard even desire to declare humanity the fifth race colors whether or not the alliance was seen favorably.  The Asgard alone were in a position to declare there being a fifth race.  The Nox were not polled.  The Furlings are an unknown quantity, still.

What does it mean to be a lone fifth member of an organization?

Stargate is careful to have humanity originally stem from Earth and while the representatives of Earth were declared the fifth race, all of humanity is hardly united.

The Lucian Alliance is rising in the Milky Way, but that organization represents a power vacuum that need not be filled.  We can see that some people have a working knowledge of the captured Goa'uld technology so that advanced technology doesn't have to be hoarded like we're in a galactic Mad Max.  The Lucian Alliance can be outpaced by making new technology an industry.

The real barrier to freedom is
the ethno-state the Jaffa Nation.

If the Jaffa can be made to realize their own humanity then the racial lines can be weakened and people can move freely by ship and stargate and need not organize into a large enough collective to form an army.

The state of the four races alliance is that it is hopelessly defunct for reasons that have not been fully revealed to the Stargate audience.  But the title of the alliance passing to humanity revitalizes it into not being so much an alliance, but a thousand-headed bickering factions with long severed ties to Earth that few would even seek to reclaim and those that do would come up against the pathological desire for secrecy by those in control on Earth.

The Asgard passed their banner to a faction which operates in secret.  The fifth race is unlikely to succeed in the light of day by the current state of things, but it will be a hopeless failure if continued to be concealed in the shadows.

I assert the only move from here is to reveal the Stargate program.
Let the Earth people flood across the Milky Way; because they already have.




Footnote: It just occured to me that the Asgard had to study the knowledge of the Ancients received from Jack O'Neill and therefore had even less knowledge of them than I realized.

In Answer To A New Era For Star Wars

https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1180213937285496832 If I understand you correctly, it sounds like you're breaking from the cultural idea that movies are for people to experience adventure in safety.  Some people do treat movies like a substitute for life to the pencil pushers of the world (a really dark outlook).  And I may be guilty of having fallen into this very trap at one time.

However, I spent much of my youth trying to build my ideas of the world based on the stories I knew and spent no less than the last four years questioning all of that.  I want to do fiction (for some reason) but I find it harder to write when I sit down for it because I can't just let the muse in.  I am self-conscious about every previously held underlying assumption and trying to be aware of the assumptions of others that I might account for wildly different perspectives without the goal of pleasing everyone, but the desire to be understood clearly.

At the risk of self-promotion, I made Hindsight MMXX because I believed Disney had presented the materials for another story appropriate to Star Wars that went untold.  I would characterize it that the Disney trilogy has good visuals with a bad story whereas my content is the reverse (including ransom-note-style dialogue, because there were places they didn’t come close enough to where I wanted to go).

Apologists in favor of the Disney trilogy tend to assert that their story is the mature one and that we can’t expect Luke to be the hero we used to see.  

The argument for Luke's transformation goes something like this: people change, there are no heroes, the world is going to wear you down into entropy so get used to it.  And they pre-suppose entropy is the truth whereas Yoda said, "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter."

So the people who presume to impose the truth of the world onto Star Wars are in direct opposition to Star Wars' ethos on what reality is.

I appreciated this poster's reference to the psychological aspect.  Barring spiritual faith, equating the symbolism of the mind with the powers of the Force squares Star Wars with our mundane reality where you and I cannot jump 50 feet in the air under our own power. 

Disney has a very strange relationship to the Force.  The Last Jedi “deconstructs” without accurately defining what came before.  We each have an internal self.  Rey does not explore herself and in the last movie is even afraid to do so.  And she doesn’t learn about herself from others.  In Rise of Skywalker, she stabs Ren, Leia enters her mind and so Rey stops more for Leia’s sake than seeing herself in Ren.

Luke’s revelation both on Dagobah and in taking Vader’s hand is that he and Vader were one and the same.  I challenge anyone who enjoys the Disney trilogy to point to a similarly powerful revelation, which transcends what most people take as the real world in favor of a spiritual reality where even the original Jedi feared to tread, because it is an exacting responsibility.  That was one point of the prequels, that there was a reality revealed by the Force that even the Jedi won’t explore.

So Luke spurred his drive in wanting to save Vader, which he was initiated on the journey by the family connection, but he founded the faith in a more profound reality where it is as though he is saving himself so he strived to save his father at all costs (dramatized in Luke nearly dying and pleading for Vader to save him.)  By that point in the Return of the Jedi, symbolically, it's not about how likely Vader is to save Luke but by Luke's sacrifice he learns the same lesson that Luke did, steps out of the moment and looks between his son and the Emperor and accepts the free choice to not be Vader anymore.  

This is the stuff that most people don’t articulate why Luke’s portrayal betrayed his character so badly, but people say simply this; you don't stake out on the theological view that I am not any more worth saving than Darth freaking Vader and then try to kill your nephew in his sleep.  We're not talking about the same person by that point.

Instead, Luke could be or become too ready to sacrifice himself. 

So my story's answer was to maintain Luke's position in that radical ethos of self-sacrifice which was in large part foreign to the Jedi before Luke.  They had an inkling of it throughout canon, but if we're being honest with ourselves that comes from the authors working backwards from what Luke did and a more accurate view of the Jedi is to kill all Sith combatively wherever you find them before ever thinking about converting them.  This is the unspoken alteration Luke made to the very identity of the Jedi that is betrayed when you go outside George Lucas' movies.

I didn’t think the myth was done, because self-sacrifice can be abused.  So how do you keep it without teaching young girls to believe in the Beauty and the Beast story “I can change him.”  Answer, if there is change to be had it is to realize yourself.  This too can be abused if twisted.

I watch Stefan Molyneux videos.  Not understanding where or why our families go wrong can destroy us.  Luke was trying to save himself and his means was to inform his father he still had a choice.  Symbolically, to restore responsibility to his father already saved Luke from the responsibility of all the actions he didn’t do, but his father did.  In this light, Vader stepping in should not be understood as a literal reconciliation in the family between abused and abuser, but the abused to understand the abuser freely did evil so that you do not overshadow yourself with hiding that fact.  If you act like your life is fated then you don’t have to confront what really happened to you.  But the lesson of Vader is easily taken wrong and so the story is not finished.

The Return of the Jedi plays out that Vader changed, but notice that he did not live.  I know how unlikely family is to change.  But I learn the wrong lesson if I expect to change my family with self-sacrifice.  For good and bad I need to see themselves in me so that I can go forward unencumbered by ignorance.

I therefore conclude that the Last Jedi critiques its misunderstanding of the meaning behind the end of the Return of the Jedi rather than the true lesson that should be taken from it.  

If Luke were to develop a flaw, in my view, it might be to lean too heavily on self-sacrifice and become one with the Force as soon as possible because he got himself killed (instead of hiding out on the island in the Disney version).  And then that could prove mal-adaptive to defending the next generation against the legacy of what he faced.  

But with all that said, yes, I believe Disney wildly missed the mark.  But then I don’t know too many people who articulate what I have said.  There were malicious actors in the making of these movies, but then also a general ignorance regarding the symbols they are in custody over.